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at patreon dot dot NetRocks dot com. Hey, welcome back to dot net
rocks. It's another geek out. It's that time of year. Yeah,
happy times. I'm Carl Franklin. That's Richard Campbell. He's got some goodness
for you. Ah. You know. The funny part is these are hard
to write right up until you're really pushing the deadline, and then they get
really fun to write. Like I stayed up late last night, yeah,
double checking a bunch of numbers and really working on some aspects of this.
So it's like when you get into it, when you're deeply into it,
like it's all in your head. It's really quite fun. But they are
a lot of writing. It reminds me of when I used to stay up
all night on Sunday nights editing Mondays to publish on Monday morning, crying right,
just absolutely peeing myself laughing. Yeah, yeah, Hey, just a
weird story. I just got a tweet from a friend of mine which was
a link to a TikTok video where he said, and the title was,
I've changed my mind. I'm embracing chat GPT. He had a friend from
New York who has a bagel shop who wanted chat GPT to generate, you
know, with dally a delicious bagel. So it came up with something that
looked fake and plastic and had cold cuts and some sort of spread on the
bottom and lettuce and tomato, and then he said, make it more delicious,
and it basically doubled the size of everything means more delicious. And then
he kept going, make it more delicious. And he did this four or
five times until it was like four feet tall with a little big at the
top and bottom. It's just terrible. You want any more proof of shat
GPTs is us centric. More is better, More is better. There you
go and make it more delicious. That's so funny. I love it.
So uh, I do have a better no framework, so roll the crazy
music, well, and we should do that. What do you got?
I went looking for the most expensive coolest, highest rated electronic computer driven telescope
that I could find on Amazon, because you can spend a lot of money
on telescopes if you want. Yeah, this is not by far not the
most expensive, but I think in the consumer category it's right up there,
and it's got eighteen hundred and seventy three ratings. Most of them are at
an average of four point four stars, so most of our five stars Celestron
Nextstar one thirty SLT computerized telescope, compact and portable Newtonian reflector optical design.
Rich's going to explain all this sky aline technology, computerized hand control, one
hundred and thirty milimeter aperture. The only thing that I recognize there is computerized,
Yeah, which is the important part because aiming a telescope well is very
challenging, and so using the fact that we have ultra precise GPS these days
and great maps of the sky make it a lot easier to allow a machine
to point very precisely for you. And honestly, I'm looking at this thing.
It's less than six hundred dollars, like this is a bargain for all
the time Knowles, you're talking about It looks really, really good. It
also has this feature called sky Online where it can align itself to three or
more celestial objects, like it just knows based on the date and time and
where you are, where things are in the sky right right, and then
it actually to get even more precise, will do some pointing to try and
get some alignments done so that it knows what it's doing. You know,
there's a thing one of the things you find if you get into astronomy.
It's one of the reasons I've stayed away from it. What I'm hung around
with folks that are serious about their hobby is that setting your You know,
you can't leave your telescope all the time. You don't have an observatory,
you know, yet, so you've got to set it up, and then
you've got to realign it both internally and externally. So you've got it figuring
out has it twisted, is it too warm to cold? All those sorts
of things to actually get the telescope itself happy and then figure out where it
is, how it's pointing. You know, all of these physical things about
motors that turn your telescope, they're a little analog, they've got a little
slack at them and so precision is really really tough. It takes a lot
to get great results when you're going to go looking at things that are very
far away. I wish these things were around when I was a kid.
My father used to take us out and you know, show us, you
know, the constellations that we could see a Ryan's Belt and yeah, which
is great fun too, right, and the sky app apps on your phone
are awesome for that for just totally them go yeah, yeah, that really
is Jupiter and you know that kind of thing, because again he leads on
GPS. But now, you know, my girls were kind of too young
and not really interested. But I do remember the I don't remember what year
it was, but we had just an amazing meteor shower here. It was
a Leonid meteor shower. I think it was, and I mean my oldest
daughter was probably six, so it was two thousand and one, maybe two
thousand and two, I can't remember, but it was they come around every
year. Well, this one was supposed to be like the last one that
was going to be this spectacular, and as soon as you could see anything
in the sky, it was like a meteor every two seconds, right,
So you don't have to maintain long attention span because it's just bombing. It's
everywhere, right, So I figured, I mean, and I went up
to my mother's house and she has a big open field and there's no light
pollution and stuff. And I got her up at three in the morning when
the moon was going to be down. So it was literally we walked out
three o'clock in the morning and sat out there and just in amazement. Awesome,
and it was. It was the best media shower I've ever seen in
my life. Here's the question when it comes to telescopes. Is I keep
talking about you know here being here on the ocean. Yeah, the haze
is a bit of an issue, but we don't have a lot of light
pollution because people are pretty far apart up here. Right When actually goes to
looking into the telescope, you go, you got to kind of walk outside
and get your eye down on that epiece after it's aimed and sort of stare
at it for a while. It's like one person at a time. Is
it is compelling? If I put a CCD in it and then put it
out on screen so everybody can see it, well, the resolution is going
to be lower on the screen to a degree, But then again, the
telescope can zoom in on what it's looking at. Sure the CCD, you
know, you go for like a four K resolution CCD to a four K
screen, Like you could try and optimize this to a degree. But I'm
just thinking a night of skywatching, you know, in the winter, when
it's cold and clear out on the deck and being able to stay inside where
it's war I'm going to look on the screen at what we're pointing at.
It's kind of compelling. I just I don't know that that's as magical.
It could just be TV then, right, as opposed to there's something about
putting your eye over the eyepiece and seeing the thing. I remember being on
Grand Manan Island and going outside and looking up the most stars I've ever seen
because there's like zero light pollution in the northeast there, and being able to
see the Andromeda gally see with binoculars. Unbelieve it's big. It's big,
big in the sky, no two ways about it. Yeah, But I
you know, I fear you know this about me. I fear new hobbies.
Yeah, because you know how I go, you know it's going to
happen. Yeah, I mean did I Did I do some math for where
I could put a little observatory in for an eight inch Yeah? Yeah,
I did. How many hours and how many dollars will this hobby cost?
Yes? Yes, this is five figures? Now time vampires. Am I
going to be able to teat a marriage through this hobby? These are the
prop by problems. Absolutely, But if you know, if grandkids come around
and they're interested in it, yeah I might get something like this. But
you know, you pulled up the perfect example of the middle ground. Something
you you know, under one thousand dollars you could put in a closet.
You don't feel too bad about it when you pull it out. You can
make an evening with it. Yeah, yeah, awesome, Yeah, that's
it. Good choice. Are you going to pull up a comment? Sure,
Bobby, we do. I got one from last year's Space Geek Out.
Great, that's eighteen twenty six, and this comments from Dave who said
you brought up uranus at the end of the show no jokes please, which
brought to mind this podcast episode I listened to a few months ago where it
sounds like they're actually going to get a mission to uranus. And yeah,
the National Academies has proposed to NASA that we should be sending an orbiter out
to the outer planets. So we've put probes in orbited around Jupiter and Saturn,
but we certainly have done Uranus or Neptune. They're very far away.
Go two ways about that, but they are unusual. Uranus, especially so
with an with a looks like an orbital inclination of almost ninety degrees, like
the planet's laying on its side, like how did that happen? Not only
that, but it looks like one of those shakes that you get in March
at McDonald's the blue marble. Yeah, a shamrock shake. You know,
it looks like I think that there's more green. Urinus is very blue.
But yes, yes, yes, I mean some of the other proposals in
that was that it probably makes most sense to use nuclear propulsion for that spacecraft,
and that would be the first mission where you're really like, hey,
we really need this like this not just RTGs, but something more advanced to
provide more energy, more speed, Like if you wanted to start testing more
advanced rocketry, this is a good mission for that. I would if I
was designing such a rocket, I wouldn't fire up that nuclear reactor until I
was outside, well outside the airs atmosphere. Yeah, yeah, it's not
going to work otherwise, Right, they heat problems and so forth. Right,
nuclear powered space is complicated, but you need a ton of energy.
You're way too far away from the Sun for solar RTGs. I mean,
the big problem here is we've I managed to get probes out to your A.
It's like voyager, but we did them by slingshotting, so that by
the time they got out there, they were moving and there was no way
to stop them. So to actually go into orbit around your ANAS is to
be able to break and that's a You need fuel. You need resources to
be able to slow down enough to be able to stay there and really spend
some time exploring. And that means I'm either a much larger vehicle or some
more advanced technology. And so these robotic missions are the kinds of things that
would open the door to advancing technology for all space flight going forward, and
I think it would be a great opportunity. I hope they execute on it.
But you are talking about a multi decatal effort ten plus years to build
and develop a ten year flight time. It's a long way away, so
you know, someone would literally put their entire career into a mission, you
know, realistically, Dave, thank you so much for your comment and a
copy of music go by. It's on its way to you. If you'd
like a copy of music go buy, I write a comment on the website
at Donetrocks dot com or on the facebooks. We publish every show there,
and if you comment there and I read on the show, we'll send you
a copy of music. Oh and you can follow us on Twitter if you
want. That's cool. We've been there a long time. But the cool
kids are hanging out on mastadon. I'm Carl Franklin at tech Hub dot social
and I'm Rich Campbell at masadon dot social. Send us a two yes,
and we learn any comments about uranus we won't, or the probe that's going
in the Yeah, okay, wow, we're not still that low yeah,
full grade nine experience. There you go, speaking of Mondays, where's Mark
Miller Yaks? I mean, you know what's fun about these is I go
read my notes from previous years and then laugh just about you know, wow,
that we're gonna this will happen in twenty twenty three, dope didn't happen.
Now it's push twenty twenty four, that kind of thing. But also
I'm sure things that you thought were going to happen in the next five years
have already happened, right, Yeah, some have, some haven't, you
know, but let's talk about it. I mean, our larger story to
my mind for space flight twenty three is SpaceX. So Elon's goal for twenty
twenty three was to have one hundred flights in a year, which is astonishing
right when you think not that long ago there were not one hundred flights of
anybody in the whole world an a year, And even now we're around two
hundred and nine flights for twenty twenty three, So we're talking half of all
flights came from SpaceX. Although they didn't get to one hundred at the moment,
and we're recording this towards the end of December, there might be a
couple more squeezed in before it's over. They're at ninety four flights. Wow,
so eighty eight Falcon nines with every single booster landed successfully. Four Falcon
heavies flew with side boosters recovered. They've never recovered a center and they're not
even bothering these days. It's just too energetic and the two starship flights.
Yeah, so even if they did one a day from now until the end
of the year, they still you know, with weekends, they still probably
wouldn't reach the goal. Yeah, it's pretty unlikely. And part of the
problem is that December weather was very problematic. They went ten They've been at
a cadence of every three or four days, they have a flight a couple
of week at least. That's how you get to one hundred, and they
went ten days on a flight in December. Partly weather, but also they
have a Falcon Heavy flight that's supposed to go We're supposed to leave a while
ago, back at the beginning of December, and it's carrying the X thirty
seven B. So that is the Space Force Experimental Mini Shuttle, which is
first time it's ever flown on a Falcon Heavy, and in fact, there's
a lot of debate. It's to why is it flying on a Falcon Heavy
because it can fly in a regular Falcon Falcon nine and it has flown on
the Atlas five and so forth, So they're doing something unusual and flying in
on the heavy They're obviously going to give it a lot more energy, maybe
a much higher orbit or a much heavier payload. Nobody really knows. It's
all very secret, but we get into one of the current if you're going
to brun it this cadence of a flight every couple of days. Yeah,
the way that spaceflight works right now is somewhat inefficient. The big thing is
that pads have to be configured for a flight. So yeah, yeah,
the pad that they've got set up for this fulcon heavy flight can't fly anything
else. It's really set up for that flight. And so when they had
a weather delay that pad obviously no, nothing was going to fly anyway.
But then now they've had other problems with it to the point where they've actually
taken it off the pad and back into the building to do some work on
it. And in the meantime that pad is hung essentially like do you reconfigure
that pad back to fly something else or do you just wait for the heavy
flight to finish and so on. I remember when we were down in Orlando
for dev Intersection just a couple weeks ago, there was a Starlink launch.
Yeah, and you know, we were busy with stuff, we couldn't have
seen it. But you know, the cape is only an hour a way.
Yeah, you know, theoretically we could have gone to see it,
but actually we could have just looked up. Yeah. No, I that
night I did go outside. It was like a one in the morning.
Yeah, and you saw it in this You saw a light. It's it's
pretty brief. It's like less than a minute, minute and a half and
it's gone. Yeah. I think I was seeing the inside of my eyelids
at that point. It just seemed very reason. It was very late at
night, and we were late in the conference too. We're always yeah,
so yeah, I mean. Elon said that his goal for twenty twenty four
is one hundred and forty four flights, and that they're going to have to
continue to optimize their strategies for how you reconfigure pads, how you can put
if a vehicle has a problem, they'd use the pad for something else,
like those kinds of things to maintain this kind of cadence. What's the benefit
to Elon to do so many flights in a year. Well, you know,
you bring up a great point, which is a obviously he can the
more efficient he gets the more you reduce the price, right, the faster
you run the machine, the more you can tune it. He gets paid
for a lot of those flights, although of those eighty eight Falcon nine flights,
fifty six of them were Starlink flights. So he's still populating out the
satellite, the satellite network for Starlink. They're now over five thousand Starlink satellites,
which means it's more than half of all of the satellites at orbit are
Starlink. Does he want to disrupt the land based internet cable modem market kind
of thing? I think that's possible. It's the reality is that starlink is
about the same speed as a cable modem more or less. But it works
out almost anywhere I have one. I've been in the early data. But
it's expensive, although again they're trying to get the price down. They've certainly
made less expensive equipment for you to buy. Used to be I think almost
eight hundred dollars now it's a couple hundred dollars. But they're also saying they
now have enough customers that starlink actually profitable. That's cool, And one of
his missions around Starlink was to fund the trips to Mars off of the back
of building this massive network. So I mean they're so far ahead now they
have a working network, they have this huge number of satellites. And the
other thing that's happened by flying these starling flights is it continues to mature the
Falcon nine. So all of the most used flights, like they're up to
one of the boosters has flown seventeen times. They think they can fly it
twenty times. Now those limit flights are always Starling flights, so they're only
risking their own hardware. Plus those starling flights are maximum weight. They're flying
as heavy as they can fly, so they really are constantly testing the vehicle
to its limits every time they make a Starling flight, and it makes their
rocket better. So you said they have reused those rockets the first stages.
Yes, the first stages, and that's something that was supposed to be a
feature of the Shuttle, wasn't it. Well, the shuttle did get use,
but not the and the boosters were refilled and the external tank was thrown
away. The problem is that to get the Shuttle ready for a second flight,
there was such an extensive teardown it was almost a rebuild and so just
became prohibitively expensive. And one of the problems you have with the Shuttle is
that it really only had one technological update from the original design in the nineteen
seventies. In the nineties they did a digital upgrade internally, but for the
most part, they never improved shuttle. So over the thirty plus years that
it was flying, the technology was kind of frozen in place and it was
just old and it got older, and so as the vehicle got the vehicles
got older, their inspections became more and more extensive. So in contrast,
you said, this was the Falcon nine that they reused. Yeah, so
they reused the first stage. Yeah, so they reused the first stage.
How much of teardown and rebuild did they have to do to that? And
we don't really know, because not a public company, they don't have to
tell us, right, it's all typically held. But we do know that
they're able to turn the same booster round in relatively short orders, so we
don't think it's very much that they and again there pressingly gets their own edges.
We're not really seeing failures, like we haven't had an engine fail at
a really long time on a climbout. So it feels more and more appears
after hundreds of successful landings and reuses, that they really understand the vehicle.
Well, I remember the couple of years of epic landing failures. Yes,
those are over, are they. Yeah, there hasn't been a failed landing
in ages. They all land, they're all successful. Some of them land
back on land, some land on barges, which is then other point about
if they're going to increase the numbers or they want to get to one forty
four, they need at least one more barge. Yeah, they just it
takes Typically those barges are far enough out that it takes several days to get
back. And so considering your flying going to fly every other day or you
know, every third day, you're gonna know the barge or two. I
remember during those years, you and I were sitting in a in a pub
or a restaurant or bar at a conference and I can't remember where it was,
but it was somewhere in Europe, and we were looking on the internet
to watch the re entry and it just blew up. You know. It
was one of those times where the landing just failed. Yeah, and it's
you know, it's the problem with it being so routine now is we forget
just how insane it is. It is pretty insane, you know, it's
crazy. I went reached out on the twitters or whatever the heck it's called
now thes I formerly note about Twitter, had said like, what would you
like, you know, any questions for me as I'm writing these geek outs,
And Stuart Quinn asked me about the environmental impact of so many launches.
Yeah, you know that launch canes has never been higher. SpaceX alone,
with almost one hundred flights this year had lifted over a million tons into low
Worth orbit, Like, it's just so much bigger, and we're starting to
head towards this idea of more space tourism, so the flights may go up
even more, of course they're expected to. And the simple answer to this
is, I mean, compared to air travel, space flight is just a
tiny drop in the bucket. But there have been carbon footprint measurements for keeping
humans in orbits, specifically the astronauts in the space station, and yeah,
that number is thousands of times larger than a human on Earth. And then
again which there's only a few of them, so and again, there's a
volcano in Iceland right now that's spewing out tons and tons and tons of toxic
gas. Yeah, it just happens sometimes, not that much. It's not
that's a good volcano. It's not that pyroclastic. But those are also normal
cycles of the planet, and the planet recovers pretty quickly from this. Yeah.
Yeah, The actual emit rockets are such short duration. I mean,
they burn a lot of fuel fairly quickly, but typical flight to orbits like
eight minutes. So compare that to a trans atlantic flight, like the environmental
impact per person because there's so many more people on a Translantic flight, are
more efficient, but it also depends a lot on the fuel. The most
polluting rocket engines are the solid rocket motors, so look at you Artimis and
Shuttle. Those are use and aluminum ammonia compound and it's fairly toxic stuff.
Again, doesn't those only burn for a couple of minutes, but still it's
a lot, you know, Speaking of that comment that you read from Scott,
I know this isn't an air travel geek out, but are there any
are there any updates in terms of more eco friendly flight fuels? Slash methods
that actually are interesting to you. Yeah, not really, but understand interesting
is not a good idea anyway. They certainly continue to push on what on
zero carbon fuels, but those are fuels grown biology and considered zero carbon because
you're not getting new carbon out of the out of the environment and adding it
in. This is taking carbon it's already there. You know, you grow
algae by it consuming carbon dioxide, and then you're putting it back into the
environment again as you turn it into jet fuel and burn it. It's just
much more expensive than traditional aviation fuel. So I saw this past year on
Facebook and I don't know how and I have since, uh, you know,
hidden these posts were gotten rid of the messages. But it was some
sort of new science kind of you know, stuff that people crap science basically,
and yeah, it was snake oil science. So it was about this
gigantic plane that is, you know, not built yet but supposedly nuclear powered
and can fly continuously around the Earth. And basically you take a little plane
and connect to it and then get on it and you can like live in
it and there's swimming pools and communities. It was just over the top.
Well and the US military looks seriously at making a nuclear powered bomber, yeah,
to drop nukes, because that it could fly continuously. It's just that
to build a reactor with enough energy to keep flying like that, it's very
heavy and it has and it's very dangerous. So yeah, especially if you
if you blanket the Earth through nuclear bombs, what are you flying over or
too or where are you gonna fly? But where are you gonna land?
Kind of slow things down there here? Yeah, And I'm not I don't
particularly want to do a nuclear weapons geek out. We're not in a great
time with nuclear safety. No, But yeah, the the emissions around rocketry,
they're an issue. I mean, you would think that the hydrogen engines,
the hydro lockx engines like they used on the Shuttle, the ARES twenty
fives, would be low emission, except that they're so energetic. They don't
just make water when they combine like with auction liqui hydrogen together with that energy
level they also make they rip nitrogen out of the atmosphere in the process and
make nitroxies. They make hydroxyls. Like it's just a very energetic reaction.
What about blimps, But it's small compared to the other emission source. What
about blimp technology? Has it gotten any better? I know you're not going
to get there much faster, but no, no, you're gonna get much
slower. And yeah, I know the biggest blimp in the world ever is
currently being test flown. It's been called the Walrus. But then again,
you could make a hotel in the sky with a blimp. Yeah you know
that, you would actually want to spend time. But now you're having a
long emissions while you're up there for ages, right, and yeah, you
got to feed those people, so now you're running supplies up to them.
Like this, math gets difficult. It's better to travel in less time.
And would they do it? Dave Matthews train bridge thing to get rid of
the waste. I don't want to think about what drops out of that thing.
Yeah, all right, enough of that, I'm gonna I want to
wrap up on SpaceX by stalking and talking about Starship, because in twenty twenty
three we had the first flights of something that starship shape. Yes, there
was hoppers and things before that, but the real stack, the largest rocket
in the world, flew twice last year on test flight. The first one
was in April on April twentieth. Yeah, yeah, for twenty. In
fact, I'm debating why. I still wonder why Elon did this flight.
It made no sense. It was an obsolete rocket designed. They would never
fly that configuration again. It was an obsolete engine setup. And you probably
sell this on the news. It did tremendous damage to the pad. Like
they had lots of rockets, but they only had one pad. Yeah,
and so when they rocket, when the heavy booster ignited, three of the
engines failed on ignition, and so the thrust aweight ratio was almost into one
and so he climbed out really slowly, and that just blasted the pad.
It dug a twenty foot hole foot deep hole underneath the pad. It blew
concrete for miles around. It blew dust even further. There's great video of
a camera, an empty camera van. Nobody's in it, but there's all
these cameras on it just getting spiked by a chunk of concrete. Thankes,
it was I'm and it was a bit of an environmental disaster. That is
a remember sensitive wetlands. So honestly it set the starship program back because it
took time to fix it. They put a water to lose system in to
help suppress that, which, by the way, they already had under construction,
like the parts were arriving even before the flight. She gets back to
why why would he do this flight? It damaged the pad and create all
these problems. Yeah, and it was really studying, you know, a
stumper for me, the best idea I've had. There's two thoughts. What
is he does have investors and they wanted to see something fly, and so
they were basically ready, let's go. How bad could it be, not
anticipating that he would shred the pad. And the second was a recruiting problem,
that this flight would be the flight that got new engineers on board,
because by all accounts, Elon burns smart people out and so they were always
looking for new talent and somebody flying a rocket is compelling to those who want
to make rock. Sure and in the end of flight did not go over
it, they still learned from it without without a doubt. But yeah,
they had multiple engine failures on climb out, their separation from the furt between
the stages failed, their self destruct failed too, so the self destructions went
off. But because the tanks were made a stainless steel. They held together
for a couple of minutes before they finally ripped themselves apart, so it destructed
in the sky and jumped into the ocean and fell into the ocean. That's
right, ye, which you know the second flight did too, and many
flights will as they learn. Yeah, So I mean I'm not pleased with
the first flight. It seemed like a really dumb thing to do. Yes,
somebody should have done the math about the pad. I mean I think
they had, but they didn't care. They didn't think it would be that
bad. What's funny is, going back over my notes for the twenty twenty
two geek out, I mentioned the fact that when they were doing static fires
of Starship, they were talking about the amount of pad damage that occurred.
So, I mean they'd already done tasks that we talked about that showed how
much damage was going on. But they fixed the pad. It took them
a few months. It took longer to get FAA qualification, and fish and
Wildlife had to say as well, but they got through all of that.
They added this massive water delucism, so a huge amount of water sprays up
towards the rocket as the engines were light to decrease the acoustic shock and to
sort of strengthen the whole system. All right, So then by this November
we're ready for the second Starship flight. Now they've upgraded the pad obviously with
the water to lose system, and repaired all the damage. They've also upgraded
the rocket extensively to better engines. They're now using electric gimbling instead of hydraulic
like the earlier flight, which they said they were gonna use electric all along.
They also changed the staging system, so you know, traditionally in American
spacecraft, the staging system is a shut down ullage system. So they the
lower stage will shut down and then there'll be a little ulage booster to stabilize
things in the two rockets. The two pieces will separate and in the upper
stage will light. What does uledge mean. Pullage is literally little thrusters just
enough to settle the fuel to be able to fire the next engine up.
But they do it as a cold stage. The two pieces separate with all
the engines off, and then the upper engine fires up and off the coast.
But that's not the only way to go about things, and Elon switched
over to a hot stage now the Russians used hot staging for the so used
rockets. This is where literally you light the engine of the upper stage while
still attached to the lower stage. Although rapidly they push each other apart.
Now this sounds bad, right, yeah. So the way you do this
is that you have an interstage layer between the two parts that has VENs in
it, someplace for the gas to go, and you armor the top of
the fuel tank on the lower stage so that you can take the blast.
And that's what they did. The upside to that approach is that it's energetically
efficient. You're able to fire the upper stage very quickly, you don't have
to wait for separation and stuff, so you ultimately are going to get more
delta V into orbit. And so for this second flight in November, it
went pretty well. A all thirty three engines lit. In fact, they
were gorgeous. You know, when these really high performance engines run, they
create this thing called a mock diamond, basically a shock wave coming out of
the bell and this is thirty three of them, so there was literally a
mock diamond of mock diamonds. So the engines combined into their own additional shockwave,
which was. It's just extraordinary to look at. And the first stage
burnt its duration perfectly, and then they had to do separation, which is
that hot staging. And so what they did was they shut down most of
the engines on the first stage, not all of them, because the intent
was to not attempt a landing, but at least attempt to fly the first
stage away. When this is fully operational, they do want to recover both
stages ultimately, right, so they were going to attempt this, So they
they throttle down the engines, but they have thirty three engines still shut down,
so they didn't shut them all off at once because the shock would be
too much. They shut them down in groups. It was really quite beautiful
to see the outer ring of engines shut off, then an inner ring,
and then the next ring, until it was just down to the three that
were burning sort of minimum power. And then the upper stage lit and the
gases blew out through the vents and the upper stage fired away, and then
the lower stage started to maneuver. Uh and then shortly after that had a
rapid unscheduled disassembly. Yeah, I loved that. Yeah, rapid unscheduled disassembly.
So did this happen while it was still inside the Earth's atmosphere or outside
it's getting high, so you know, atmosphere, there's not like there's a
clear end to appen. No, no, no, yeah, but yeah
they were, they were pretty high up by the time they stage you.
But again only a two and a half three minute burn before the separation occurred.
So it brings me to a curious question, which is, and forgive
my ignorance, but I feel like I'm I'm not alone in this ignorance.
Here. When you're when you're swimming, you're pushing against water, right,
and it's very dense, and you can you can move fast. Right when
you're in the Earth's atmosphere, you have gravity pulling you down, but you
also have air to push against. Right when you black those thrusters. If
you're around in space right and you're not is bound to the Earth by gravity
and there's no atmosphere to push against when you fire thrusters, is there,
is it less effective because there's nothing to push against, or well, one
would argue it's more effective because there's nothing holding you back. Either. In
the end, what a rocket engine does is throws mass out its bell and
that's what's That's what's pushing your rocket forward. Right, You're literally tossing that
mass, that combusted fuel at velocity out the back. You don't have to
combust it. You could literally just pressurize a nitrogen container and leed that out
and we'll give you thrust as well. But it comes down to the mass
that you throw out the belt, right, So I imagine that's where the
math comes in. It's like what the cost benefit analysis of fuel expenditure to
resist the I mean, I guess you have that with every vehicle, right.
Well, the important part here is can you throw enough mass at high
enough velocity. The more velocity you have, the more net thrust you're going
to get. And so that's why we talk about these very high performance engines.
Three thousand bar pressure inside that combustion chamber accelerates that burnt fuel and an
extraordinary rate, and that it turns into more effective thrust. Okay, and
the atmosphere has very little to do with it. In fact, it's an
impediment. The nose of that rocket was heating up as it was accelerating through
the atmosphere because it was moving so quickly. And I suppose you know in
getting back to the water things. Swimming through water takes more energy because you
have more resistance. Yes, right, and we do all these hydrogenamic effects
to try and reduce that resistance as much as possible. Yeah, okay,
so successful separation. It was beautiful. It looks like what went wrong with
the first stages They throttled down a little too much and so the fuel stopped
sitting at the bottom of the tanks and actually bounced upward in the tank.
And then as they throttled back up, its slammed back down to the bottom
of the tank and it broke things. And so if you watch the footage
of the first stage maneuvering away, you start seeing gas emitting from different directions,
the kind of directions it said, that's not right. And then shortly
after that there was the RUD and it was not a commanded RUD. So
I mean, there is a self destruct system and the software does make sure
that the rocket is flying down it's lane the safe air can flying and if
it goes out of that land in any way, it'll destroy it. That
that didn't happen. Did Elon come up with that term rapid unscheduled disassembly on
schedule, unplanned disassembly. No, it's it's an industry term. But he
does love it is he uses it a lot. Well, yeah, I
mean, and you kind of have it tongue in cheek now right, it's
yeah, it's everybody knows what you're talking about. In wink wink, you
know. Yeah, And again the news often talks about, you know,
Elon flies another rocket and it fails. But it's like, listen, this
is what testing, dynamic testing looks like. Now I get it. Spending
years planning and planning and planning to have one perfect flight. It's like,
you fly it, you blew it up, you learn. And clearly there
was progress between flight one and flight two. The upper stage, by the
way, went on almost to orbit. It burned very well, but it
did seem to have some There was a point towards the end the of the
flight when it would have gone into orbit where the oxygen tank rate consumption went
up, so it's likely that the tank ruptured and started losing fuel. And
once that had happened, now they did destroy it because they knew it wasn't
going to get where it was they wanted it to get to, and so
it was safer to wreck it it at its highest altitude, so the parts
broke up as much as possible. That being said an amateur astronomer in Puerto
Rico who wanted to try and get pictures of it going overhead managed to get
footage of the a portion of the nose of Starship after destruction tumbling. Wow.
Wow, it was just an extraordinary fine to get that video, and
it's amazing. But it's like, yeah, that was that's the header tank
looks like it was still intact and still leaking fuel and this silvery thing is
tumbling end over end as it falls into the sea. So an extraordinary second
flight. The most important thing is they did not wreck the pad. The
footage afterwards showed that the lift off did strip all the paint off of everything,
and because it's right by the ocean, within hours russ started appearing,
so they do have to quickly repaint it and so forth. There is some
damage that the pad that quick disconnect systems were damaged. The launch mounts,
the things that actually hold the rocket down until it's time for to lift off,
all had to be replaced. Do you have a link to that video
of the amateurs, Yeah, I'll included in the show note, but yeah,
i'd love to see that that. Both the second flight's amazing and the
video of the tumbling piece is amazing. It's all great. So obviously more
upgrades to be done to the pad. They're changing the tank system around,
but for the most part, a very successful step forward and again largest rocket
ever flown both by height and by mass fully fueled. That whole rocket was
seventy five hundred metric tons. Wow, that's like the weight of a destroyer
and you made it fly. So yeah, it's they're planning another flight for
first quarter to twenty twenty four. Five is an intempt to fly four starships
next year in their learning because this is the vehicle that's supposed to become the
Lunar Lander. In other rocket news, not a lot happened in twenty twenty
three. We've been talking about Blue Origins New Glen, which is a seven
meter rocket. This is Bezos's company. They did fire their CEO this year,
and Bezos obviously a stepped down a CEO of Amazon, but he's still
on the chair. He's got a new guy into Blue Origin. New Glenn
is years late. They've been moving some hardware around at the Cape so it
looks like they've actually built something, and he's swearing that new Glen's going to
fly in the first quarter of twenty four and then it's going to have a
working payload. So their first Chess flight is actually going to be a working
payload, which is a little bit crazy to me. But okay, you
do you when you say working payload, you're not talking about people, no
spacecraft? Okay, Yeah, like they often to with first flights. They
literally put a billet of concrete in for the first flight of fulk and heavy.
Elon put his Tesla roadster in right right. What a great shot that
was. Yeah, profound moment. We talked about it. We made a
whole show around that. Yeah, that whole moment. But normal for first
flights you just use a dummy payload because the risk is high. He's pretty
confident and so they're going to actually take a payload in their first flight.
The United Launch Alliance these are the guys who used to run the Shuttle then
and have been running the Atlas five in Delta four rockets, both of which
are being retired. No more are being built. They're using up the last
of them. Have a new rocket. They've been developing four years called Vulcan,
also a methylox rocket like Starship, much smaller, a much more reasonable
sized rocket. They promised that they would fly in twenty two than they promised
in twenty three. They still in flood. There is a rocket on the
pad that they're doing testing with and they swear it'll fly in twenty four.
I'd also note that there are rumors flying around that United Launch Alliance is on
the market. It's going to get sold and it might even complete early in
twenty four. One of the possible buyers being bluored. What about Virgin Galactic.
So Virgin Galactic had their first paid tourist flight. So this is the
Spaceship two, the thing developed originally by Bert Rutan, that gets lifted by
the White Night by this carrier aircraft up to about sixty thousand feet and they
drop it and it fires a very odd Nitrox rocket engine. It gets up
to about three hundred thousand feet above the carbon line. You get about a
minute or two of free fall and then it reorients. The vehicle turns its
tailplanes in this particular angle called the shuttlecock mode, so they can re enter
under control, and then it comes in for a landing and you know you
can get your two minutes of zero G for a quarter million dollars something like
that. So, yeah, they had their first flight and then they didn't
fly again. They swear they're going to fly again in twenty four where New
Shepherd had a bunch of flights and then they were doing it. They had
an unmanned flight with some experiments on board and the booster failed. The separation
system worked perfectly. If people have been aboard, I think they would have
been fined if separation system fired. The capsule landed on parachute. They rocket
was a total loss, and they have made some improvements. They say,
what's not gonna happen again, and they're going back to flight next year as
well. Huh. All right, should we take a break. Yeah,
let's take a break and then we'll talk about the space station. All right.
We'll be right back with more geeking out after these very important messages,
and we're back att net Rocks geek Out Edition, the Space geek Out Show
of twenty twenty three. I'm Carl Franklin. That's Richard Campbell, the brain's
behind this show. And if you've never heard of geek out before. There's
a lot of them. If you just search for the tag geek out or
search for geek you'll find them all. And Richard likes to do research on
a particular topic and then tell us what he's found. Yeah, a lot
of these are notes I took throughout the year as I saw interesting things.
But you still have this push at the end of the year to sit down
and organize it, figure out what I missed, you know, go back
and check some things, double checks some facts, you know, try and
you got to prioritize these. The show is long, but it could be
way longer. Yeah. International Space Station not a lot of news. You
know why it's busy. You know, it's the twenty fifth anniversary of the
first components going up. The first operational mode was in nineteen ninety eight and
here we are in twenty twenty three and it's at capacity. This has you
know, six astronauts on it all of the time with other visitors. On
top of that, they are running the most number of experiments ever run in
the year was twenty twenty three. So they are at work as a laboratory.
Was there some rumblings about shutting it down, Yes, and for a
few reON. One is it has a lifespan. Yeah, right, parts
wear out, no two ways about it. Original plan was to run it
till twenty twenty five. Now they're talking about trying to keep it going to
twenty thirty. The oldest components are also some of the most vital components,
and there are Russian and they're having more problems than the others now, you
know, you can blame that on Russian hardware. The Russians have built a
lot of space stations. They kind of know what they're doing, but they're
all kind of broke also, you know, Wars notwithstanding, and they are
still working together. You know, for as much as there's a conflict between
the Western Russia, the space station still depends on those two getting along.
The Russians have made noises about wanting to take their parts and separate from the
rest of the station in twenty five. Screw you guys, I'm going out
well. And there's a case to be made for some of the Science Lab
parts on the US side that are younger, that were flown in the aughts,
that still have another few years in it. In facts, Axiom Space,
which is a group of former NASA folks are starting to build their own
space station, and they've been flying missions to the space station on Falcon nine
crew dragons for money, and so they want to actually build out a free
flying space station by building it again connected to the International Space Station. And
now there's a conversation going on about maybe they will take the science module with
them when they separate off as the International Space Station is ending, so there's
lots of debate about how to end it. One of the biggest issues being
the International Space Station is the largest thing ever flown in space. It was
assembled up there, it took a long time. It is very heavy,
it's four hundred and fifty metric tons, and so de orbiting it in a
controlled way is a important because that is going to a lot of that mass
will make it to the ground and b complicated and expensive. They need to
build. They need to build a high power tug to actually decelerate enough so
they can aim it for what they call Point Nemo, which is in the
southern the Pacific Ocean. That's where they generally drop old spacecraft because there's nothing
there. It's a safe place to drop things off. What I know about
the ISS is that it's modular, yes, So that in the international part
means that Canada built the module, the United States built the module, and
the you know European countries, yes, et cetera, a Russia. So
I guess it's is it Is it crazy to think that you could decouple the
modules and replace them if they're wearing out. I mean, that's one of
the thoughts. And if I think if conditions were better with the Russians,
there's a conversation to be had about replacing the what they call the FGP or
the main control module. But the conditions aren't better. There's also never it's
never been done. One of the weird things that happens in space is that
metals tend to fuse together. Really, so there is a question as to
whether or not those components that have been that have been docked together now for
twenty years, whether they would come apart. We just don't know. Is
it because the extreme temperature changes and things? Yeah, and yeah, this
is weird effect that happens up there with metal welding. You have these very
flat surfaces and they meet up and over time they literally fuse together. They
won't come apart. Wow, And so you know, now you get into
the economics of it, is it cheaper to try and spend time dismantling this
thing versus just fly a new one now. And NASA has an initiative initiative
now for commercial space stations. So what they're saying is we're not going to
build another space station, but we will rent time on space stations. Here's
what we expect from the space stations that we rent time on. Their goal
is to have multiple companies flying smaller stations with that you can rent time on.
These will probably be man tended the way they built International Space Station.
With the limits of the technology at the time, there needs to be somebody
on it all the time to maintain it or you'll lose control of it.
But technology is advanced enough now that we could be man tended so that you
could operate it remotely and then set it up for people to go visit it,
spend a month up there, and then come back down. There's also
different kinds of experiments you want to do. The ISS is strictly a microgravity
lab, so there's exactly for example, there is no experiments for centrifuge is
on there because those vibrations affect other microgravity experiments. So there's a taste to
be made for building centrifugees in a separate space station. We need to learn
to simulate gravity for humans to have extended stays in space. We generally limit
space station astronauts to six months on the station, and it takes them over
a year to recover. So could we put them in artificial gravity? Could
we spin the space station so that they could have enough gravity to stay healthy
and be able to stay up for longer? And we've never built anything that
big. Yeah, weird things happened to your Weird things happened to your bones.
Muscles atrophy like you. Yeah, you lose a calcim at a fairly
alarming rate. You need to do two and a half hours of exercise a
day even to slow that process down. There are lots of problems, and
one of the solutions would be to create a centrifuge, a rotating ring so
that you had enough gravitational effect to keep your body functioning normally. But we've
never done it. Is that what they had in two thousand and one,
Yes, a space honesty, a centrifuge. Yeah, and Kubrick, being
the crazy director that he is, actually built one on a sound stage that
rotated. It's crazy because he was awesome. Yeah, you know, the
whole idea that we you never actually flew the moon, that it was actually
Kubrick for him was like that might be true, except that knowing Kubrick,
he would have demanded to do it on set. So they yes, I'll
only do this, but only if we shoot it on the moon. Yeah.
Oh man. Anyway, I mean that's the space station is at its
peak right now. It is doing the most work it's ever done. It
is an extraordinary achievement by mankind. It is a point of peace, you
know, that's one place where they're not fighting, and it is coming to
the to an end. I'm also excited that NASA is commercializing this the same
way they've commercialized resupply of both crew and cargo. Now they're going to commercialize
it for the actual station itself. Well, there's a good way to get
money out of the one percent something like that. Yeah. The speaking of
the resupply part of the space station, there are two resupply offerings, right
There's the one from SpaceX with their cargo Dragon, and then there's also the
one from Orbital Sciences, which is the sickness. It's now owned by North
of Rumant, Okay, but they both resupply space station. And then on
the crew side there's Crew Dragon. There was supposed to be star Liner,
which still isn't working. Whose genius idea is that Boeing Boeing, Yeah,
was going to build an alternative to Crew Dragon. They didn't want to have
redundancy, right, but it's gone so badly. They did their one test
flight to the station successfully after on their second try and then they found so
many problems they've now delayed the next attempt, the next test flight to twenty
twenty five. But one of the competitors for the cargo resupply missions was the
Dream Chaser. This is a little lifting body based on the NASA's AHL twenty
that looks like a mini shuttle, basically made up of two components. You
have the spacecraft that can re enter, and there's a cargo module that bolts
on the back with solar panels and stuff on it that you leave behind lifted
on a rocket. So it typically was supposed to fly on Atlas five now
with fly on a vulcan wings fold up to fit in the payload fair but
it lost but they kept working on it anyway, and with all of the
problems around star Liner, NASA is now supporting dream Chaser, and Dream Chaser
is ready for a test flight. Will actually be able to do resupply to
the station. No crew yet, but who knows in the future. What's
interesting is that it has a return payload capability, so the sickness craft the
oneworl Sciences lifts more to the station than Cargo Dragon can, but it has
no return, so it just burns up the atmosphere on the way down.
Cargo Dragon does have a return. They have a heat shield, so they're
able to recover payloads, so you can do experiments in space and bring them
back. The problem is that it's a capsule, so a it re enters
under high gravitational stress, so that can damage your experiments and it lands in
the ocean, which is an environmental problem, and then it has to be
recovered, which means if you've got a delicate experiment and say something that has
to stay refrigerated, that kind of thing, it's at risk. If Dream
Chaser starts working, it can return payload back to Earth, but it can
also land on a runway, so a lot less gravitational stress and be you
know, quick back into under controlled environments so you can recover an experiment quickly.
So there is a case for Dream Chaser, and they are pretty far
along. They're supposed to fly. They're supposed to be the second flight of
the Vulcan. So the Vulcan's been delayed a lot. The first flight for
Vulcans supposed to carry a payload to the moon. Brave but okay. For
the second flight is supposed to be in April of twenty four and it's supposed
to be the dream Chaser test flight to the station. No payloads, just
a test flight. But exciting new vehicle. Yeah, that is ex and
one that could be turned into a Mann vehicle at some point. Wow,
do you personally want to take a flight when it becomes feasible into space?
You know that might be too late for me. Yeah, I just you
know, we were just a dev intersection and I went to you know,
we rented out part of Universal Studios for the party. I went on a
couple of those hogwart rides and I was damaged with or without Scotch. Yeah.
It was pretty sober to the part where I'm like, this is not
smart and so yeah, I don't know. My head really was to go.
My body's like you're an idiot, So yeah, I don't know.
It's a great question. Fifty six. Yeah, so you know, who
knows. We'll see. So let's talk a little bit about the moon,
because we yeah, going on the moon. There were a bunch of landers
that went to the Moon in twenty three. One of them was the Russia
Luna twenty five. The previous Luna twenty four was in the nineteen seventies,
but apparently they dusted off the old design and tried to fly to the Moon
ahead of the Indian lander. Also China, right, China has already been
on the moon. They landed on the far side of the Moon a few
years ago, Yeah, which was astonishing. It was the first and that
lander I think and rover is still functioning. But India had a flight and
then Russia jumped in out of no where. They did get to the Moon
before the Indians. They just landed with bigger, big with anybody. You
could see if you go search online for the Luna twenty five landing, you
can see the blast mark where it hit the Moon at several kilometers percent.
Oh, it wasn't a manned moonflight then no, no, there's no there's
been no new man moon flights so far. Okay, these are all remote
control landers and some in some case we're over. So the Russian flight was
more like a missile, yeah, something like that. They were attempting to
land, they were in their their landing burn, uh, and there was
some kind of malfunction and they lost control it and it hit the moon with
figure now the same thing. We've had a bunch of landers go that way,
including an Indian one. Yeah, that that impacted hard, and an
Israeli lander a couple of years ago. Also hard. Landing on the Moon
is hard. That being said, Uh, the Indian space program is serious
business and they continue to work on this problem. And in August this year,
Chander and three soft land a lander and a rover on the south pole
of the Moon first time ever. That's so cool. There are only the
fourth country to soft land on the Moon America, Russia, China, India.
The Japanese have a lander on the way to the Moon as we're recording.
This supposed to be sometime in twenty twenty four. And we wish them,
you know, all the best. Yeah, that's great. The artemist
missions. There was no artimist mission in twenty three. There was an artist
mission. It was an unmanned artimist mission. This is NASA's Moon rocket,
derived from Space Shuttle parts. Yeah, right, And understand this rocket is
a political rocket. NASA, I near as I can tell, NASA doesn't
want this rocket. But understanding that NASA is funded by Congress, and that
over the evolution of the Space Shuttle program, every single state in the Union
participated in the Space Shuttle program, and so that's a lot of jobs.
And so when the space Shuttle program ended in twenty eleven, Congress refused to
stop funding it, and so what what they were funding them was re implementing
Space Shuttle related parts into a rocket. Now there's a case to be made
here. The Space Shuttle itself weighed almost one hundred tons. So if you
get rid of the Shuttle and just use the engines and the tanks on a
ton left to orbit is a lot. That's Saturn five class moon rocket technology.
And so there have been several versions of this over the year. Believe
me, this idea of repurposing Shuttle technology into a rocket was an awesome idea
in the nineteen nineties. Yeah, okay, now it's obsolete, but it
has continued. It costs billions and billions of dollars. The current estimate for
the Artemis one flight was four billion bucks. And it's really because of constituencies
that don't want their jobs taken away. That's right. They don't want to
have to say to their constituents, Yeah, we've shut that program down,
find a new job. Is it really that simple? I mean, is
that the only reason? No, it's not. I mean, it's easy
to say that, Carl. But the other side of this is these are
skilled people. They're not replaceable. Yeah, there isn't new ones, right,
you do have to train people up in this, and so losing that
skill set is an issue without a doubt. That being said, this is
a primitive rocket relatively speaking. It's insanely powerful, but it's still using hydrolock
sensions on its first stage, which is kind of insane, right, because
the fuel density is so low. That's why that tank is massive. Because
the hydrogen tank is eight times the size of the oxygen tank. If they
were using methane, the tanks to be about the same size. And they've
extended the booster stage and the Orion capsule is an extraordinarant capsule. The upper
stage still needs to be improved. They did announce the Artemis two flight in
twenty three. This is a manned flight to go around the Moon, you
know, sort of like the Apollo eight mission in nineteen fifty five. Yeah,
they're just going to go around the Moon. The Artimist one flight was
unmanned. They sent the Orion capsule around the Moon and they did some really
interesting maneuvers with that Orion capsule. They know more about gravitation they've ever known
before. They did some interesting gravity tricks. But the second flight is going
to be a straight up free return send humans around the Moon for the first
time in fifty plus years. They probably won't make the twenty four date.
They're behind schedule. They have selected the four astronauts, three Americans, two
men and a woman, and one male Canadian. So there's going to be
a Canadian going around the Moon, which sounds cool until you realize we're trading.
We know we're able to fly a Canadian into space because we con attribute
to the program and we're using up our flight around the Moon flight rather than
a land or flight because Artimists three is supposed to be actually landing on the
Moon. So okay, it's a trade off. You know, when you
mentioned the Artist program, I can't help think of the tension between you know,
the private sector i e. SpaceX etal. And the government and NASA.
And isn't there any kind of creative way that these two things can benefit
each other? Well, and one would argue they have because NASA put out
to bid the Lunar Lander and SpaceX won it. Right, So the lander
part of the Artemis three mission is this commercial vehicle, And to be clear,
it's a commercial company that's building Artemis. It's United Launch Alliance. Okay,
right, the guys who built the Shuttle. But they're being funded by
the Congress though. Yeah, but then again, so is the lunar Lander
missions, right right, But SpaceX isn't no space SpaceX absolutely is but getting
contracts from the US government to resupply the space station to ship the fly crew
up there. Okay, I see. Now you can argue about the type
of contract, which is a legitimate argument. Yeah, right, that Artemis
missions are very much based on a cost plus contracting model. So it's like
these are deliverables. You know, make an estimate of the budget, but
if it runs over whatever, if you make if you stay in budget on
time, you make a bonus as opposed to the commercial resupplies missions, which
is, we will pay this much ton to orbit, this much ton for
return. How you do it up to you, here's the cadence we want
and how much money move right, And so there's an incentive in those commercial
contracts to be cost efficient, and there's a disincentive in the cost plus missions
to be cost evoctive. Yeah, right, so they structure the contract matters
a lot that you know. The argument in favor of cost plush contracting is
you're doing new research, you're doing something nobody's ever done before see James web
right, Want of a Kind vehicle, And so we don't know how much
it's going to cost. Really here's our guess. But as we develop it,
we're going to run into problems so that it'll cost more. But building
the same rocket over and over again is not an experiment. Yeah, that's
right, so you should probably do it. And it's also ann chunk of
science now, right, So it does make sense to get this out of
the way. And given that starship starts to function eventually, or it's going
to be silly and having United Launch Alliance sold to another entity, you know,
is that going to make a more lobby centric or less lobby centric?
Like, all of this is very interesting for how it's going to evolve.
Well, and then there's just the idea that you know, these people,
if they don't like their government jobs, could go apply at SpaceX, you
know, or or other places. Possibly. Yeah, it's just a question
of are they willing to work the new way too right? You know,
are arguably SpaceX was founded on the back of a group of frustrated rocket engineers
that really wanted to fly stuff and didn't want to you know, Congress may
have funded the project, but they funded it minimally, not enough to actually
build any hardware for a really long with that literary for decades. Shuttle stopped
flying in twenty eleven and the first flight of Artemis is twenty twenty two.
That's a long time mm hm. So you know, the the gave them
enough money, barely enough money to actually build anything. Like, if you
really wanted to move this, you would have spent more or shut it down.
That being said, at this moment, Artemis is the only thing to
carry people beyond Earth orbit. You know, maybe Starship will someday, but
Starship is only flown twice and went boom. Both sides like, we're a
long way away from it being a working vehicle. And so they had and
they have commitments for Artemis. They have They had sixteen engines left over from
the Shuttle program. That's what they were used to use four per flights.
So the first four flights of Artemis have engines. They're now cranking up the
production to make new versions of these engines, very expensively, to to do
another, to plan out another for Artemis flights. But these are flights to
the Moon. And one of the questions I got on Twitter was from Bob
Archerus, is are we going to have a base on the Moon before we
go to Mars. It's like that seems to be the plan, but we're
not that far along on that plan. But first off, there are no
real plans to send people to Mars, not really. Elon talks about it
right just to desire, but it's not real. There are no missions,
there's no permission, nothing set up. Nothing is real. Yet do we
have real plans to put humans on the Moon. Well, yes, build
a base, not so much. But you remember in twenty seventeen, I
did that Moon Base geek out, and I encourage you to listen to it,
and that was based on reading papers by both the European Space Agency and
NASA about building bases on the South Pole, very much like Antarctica, man
tended bases that you'll probably stay at for a month a month and a half
at a time to do original science on the Moon. There's a lot of
things to learn up there, if I remember correctly, there was some influence
that you had on NASA itself, you Richard Campbell. Well after we did
that podcast together, you and I in early twenty seventeen. Later in twenty
seventeen, NASA call now, which is crazy when you think about it,
but you also know that's not the first time. Right when we did the
Space Telescope speak out, NASA called and said, hey, would you like
to come and meet a space telescope out over here, And we're like,
oh, yes, yes we would. And we also interviewed Greg Tooley about
the Plasmo Dynamics mission he was working on, and a bunch of other stuff,
and then we went and remember we went into that back in the back
warehouse and saw the test kit for fixing a hubble and like just his storage,
this giant tube of epoxy with a wooden spatula. No, he wasn't
kidding anyway. Uh. Yeah. So when I got reached out to by
the NASA Ames group about that Moon based podcast, they asked me if I
would do a talk on it, which, by the way, I'm still
doing. Yeah, but you did it to NASA. I did it to
NASA themselves, yes, And what you know, Richard is very kind and
not braggadocious, but he connected the research from several different departments in NASA that
weren't really talking to each other and presented it to all of them at the
same time. So yeah, that's that's what ended up happening, and it
was good. I think you had some influence there, I hope. So
I get some nice I get message from some of those folks routinely as the
work is ongoing. The work is ongoing. Uh, the getting to the
moon is really hard. Then the lander is the heart is one of the
hardest parts. We don't have a good lander. The lander we had the
old Lamb was a very dangerous machine, and we wouldn't use that today.
We need a better lander. We need to be a usable lander, and
that means something more than a commoard. Well, it's not just a compute
power. It's do you is it? It has to be big enough to
be fully reusable. The old Lamb had a descent stage that you left behind.
If you're going to build a base, you can't keep leaving bits behind
each time you visit it, right like that, because eventually you run out
of a room. So we need a fully reusable lunar lander. And for
better or worse, the only props for a fully reusable vehicle is Starship is
Elon's giant rocket. Once it works, now it has problems. It's very
once it works, it's very tall, it's very large, and there's a
huge payload, which is awesome, but the people are at the top part.
So you a, you got to land this thing on something pretty flat
because you don't want to tip over. That would be bad. And then
once you have landed, you're still like one hundred and fifty feet in the
air, so you're gonna need an elevator. You're gonna have to get this
stuff down like I wish we could come up with a better design, but
this is what we've got Jeffries tubes. Okay, that being said, because
that is obviously in process. You know, there's a discussion about building a
better lunar lander. I ran across a capability study by DARPA. Remember DARPA,
of course I remember DARPA, So this is the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Group. I find DARPA to be very serious individuals. These are the ones
in the early oughts that started on automated driving. That's led us to a
lot of what you're seeing now with welling smarter and smarter cars. Go back
even further, that was the origins of the internet. Yep, the internet
comes from there, so when when dark and they're also tackling problems with neural
nets, just you know, understandable AI. I take DARPA's research stuff seriously.
They're also the ones to say there is no good solution here and end
it. Like often my problem with a lot of science papers is these scientists
want to stay employed, so they'll always write a paper that ends with give
or more money and I will do more right where DARPA will say, ah,
this has gone as far as you can go. We're done because they're
funded regardless, they're funded by the military incentives. That's what it's all about.
Yeah, So DARPA has started what they call the Luna ten Capability Studies.
So this is literally about commercial Moon technology. Okay by twenty thirty five,
so in the next decade, can we emerge sure power mining, in
situ, resource utilization, communications and navigations, logistics systems, constructions and robotics,
all the things to create a commercial space on the Moon. Now it's
a capability study, So what they're really doing is setting a bar is this
feasible? You know what it's going to end up being, buddy freaking Walmart.
You know, Walmart goes with the customers on I don't think there's there
yet for better or worse. I'm afraid this is going to be space force
kidding, this is going to be. But at the same time, like
ex maturing the ability to distract water ice from the Moon to be used as
fuel for interplanetary travel. So rather than keeping on bringing the fuel from Earth
and that heavy gravity, will you can take it from the Moon. Couldn't
be cost effective. We've talked about my original moon based talk going all the
way back to twenty seventeen is what could you do on the Moon. It's
cost effective and generating electricity, interesting part of it building solar panels, resource
extraction construction. The gravity well of the Moon is much much lighter, and
so if you're going to do stuff in space, it makes sense to work
from there more than work from here. As difficult as are there any resources
available deep in the Moon or is it all pretty much one just big chunk
of the same kind of rock. No, it's interesting you ask that because
it doesn't have it has some geological activity. It does seem to have some
core, and there was volcanic activity on there really, but there's also mass
concentrations that represent large asteroid strike, so they are surface mineral concentration. Okay,
so they represent potentially valuable resources as well. But in the end,
the Moon is mostly made of aluminum, you know, and at silicon,
like pretty normal substrate materials that are useful, no two ways about it.
Like you can you should be able to do some useful mining there and to
get resources put together. Yeah, we just got to mature the technologies.
We don't know enough yet. We just got to start small, and you
need the energy to run all of these extraction machines and all that stuff.
Yep, and that means maturing forms of power generation on the Moon, which
is right on that list. Now you know, you think it would be
solar except for that whole Hey it's dark for fourteen days thing, that's problematic.
So now we get into some of the sterling engine based nuclear like Crusty,
which are you know, ten kilowatt solid state reactors. So there's lots
of possibilities there. Anyway to back to Bob's comment, Yeah, we're definitely
working on a base on the Moon. It's a lot got of ways to
go yet, but more is happening in the past couple of years that have
happened the previous thirty pretty cool. Twenty twenty three was a great year for
asteroid exploration. Okay, the Osiris REPS mission. So this is a mission
from a decade ago that actually landed on the surface of a Cyrus Rex and
picked up some samples of that asteroid Jesu. Was it really ten years ago?
It seems like yesterday. Yeah, I know, crazy. Uh,
their capsule made it back this year intact, perfect landing. There was a
little bit of a problem with the parachutes, but it's still worked out fine.
The only problem they have now is that they picked up so much,
so many rocks that it they can't open it. It's jammed. Like you
gotta imagine. They don't want to contaminate these rocks. These are pristine rocks
from an asteroid, right in a sealed container. So they want to work
in a vacuum, you know, with remote controls essentially to minimize any exposure
of these rocks so they can test them, you know, with not Yeah,
this is the problem, right, Like they can't get the bolts out,
they're jammed, so they have to come up, how do we open
this without contaminating it? Right? Like, that's the battle is. You
know, we got these rocks from menu and now we've got to try and
and get them get access to the world cantaminating them. So, I mean,
these are so many good things have happened, they success, says the
mission. It even came back, and now they're just down to this one
teeny little problem. You can't open the can. Uh. Also this year
we launched a new mission to a new asteroid, to the Psyche asteroid,
which is believed to be a planetesimal core. So you know this idea that
there was a planet between Mars and Jupiter and that's why there's a huge asteroid
field between the two, Okay, and this is where some of the biggest
asteroids in our Solar System like series live in that particular space. Well,
Psyche is one of them. But it is a metallic asteroid. So most
asteroids are carbonaceous, mostly carbon compounds and rubbel piles. Uh, this one
looks to be solid and metal and so they are value and it's astonishing,
it's massive. So they've to the Psyche mission is going to take a good
look at it, and it's going to take a few years to get there,
but it took off in September, so it's on its way. One
more asteroid related mission and this is about Dart, which we talked about last
year because Brian Schreer asks, hey, what do we learn from Dart.
So Dart was the mission to see can we modify an asteroid's path? Right?
You know, one of the things that makes is different from the dinosaurs.
Besides, you know Candy Crush is we can see him coming. We
can see him coming, maybe we can do something about him. And so
the Dart mission was our first attempt. We found this perfect binary system for
doing the testing. A we can observe it it orbits beyond the Earth,
but we can get good images of it. It's actually a two asteroid systems,
so the big asteroid is called Didimus and Dimorphoses it is orbiting it,
and so the impactor actually hit dimorphis the smaller one thing. They can call
it diddy moon if you like. We talked again. We talked about this
last year's Space Geek Out. It hit it successfully and it reduced its orbit
by about a half an hour, so we really did do something. And
now we've continued measurements of it and we've figured out we probably blew as much
as a thousand metric tons of mass off of Dimorsos with that impactor because it
was a rubble pile. They are still tracking boulders that were blown bigger boulders
twenty thirty feet across that were blown off of it in the impact and are
now orbiting on their own, and they're not done. Next year, in
October twenty four there's a mission called HERA by the European Space Agency to go
back to Didimos and dimorphis to take more readings. So we are learning to
protect ourselves. Right, that looks like the impactors were far more effective than
expected. It opens the door to we would have a chance. Now when
you say it delayed the orbit by thirty minutes, the orbit of the little
one around the big one or the orbit of the big asteroid around us.
That's right, the little round around the big one. And so that does
what to the orbit of the big one around us? Nothing, But that's
one of the things we want to test. Is so far we can't help
me was the mass of the big one is so much bigger? Like,
believe me, we still have a long way to go, right, Like
this asteroid wouldn't have particularly dangerous in the first place, but it was I
thought there's something to test with and and you know, we learned from it
without it cool. Yeah, it's it's just you know, we talk about
science pretty abstractly, but this was pretty darn real, right, Like this
is this is our first real test. So uh just I'm just pulling up
the old notes from last year. So dimorphis is about a five hundred foot
across rock weighing about four point eight million metric tons. Orbiting about a kilometer
off the surface of Didimus and it took about twelve hours to do it.
Or yeah, that's big, and now it does it in eleven hours and
twenty three big because of us. Well, the big one is twenty five
hundred feet across, like half a mile across, and weighs five hundred and
twenty metric tons five hundred and twenty million metric tons. There's one thing that
you brought up in one of these older space geek outs, which was mining
precious metals in asteroids like gold and stuff, gold and platinum. But I
mean, just think about golds for a minute. Like if you doubled the
amount of gold immediately on the market in the world, would the price go
down catastrophically, But you wouldn't double it, you would you would increase availabily
about a hundred times, Okay, right, Like that's the real problem.
If you if you talk about Psyche, that mission that's headed up there,
it's very likely they're platinum class metals up there. Yeah, and you can
extract them and you bring back you'll just you'll crash one. I can understand
because you use it in cell phones and things like that. And that makes
everything cheaper. But gold is something that you know, people hold on to
and invest in and feel is special and precious, and people people invest in
all sorts of metals. But yes, you would absolutely crush market. And
gold has important use industrial uses too, right, Admittedly it hasn't because of
its non reactivity and ability to manipulate it. It has a special place in
a lot of people's hearts. But as shame. Yeah, it's also a
question of the just the cost. It is dumb to spend that much money
to get up there just to bring the stuff back down and reduce the values
of it worldwide. You will absolutely tangle market without a doubt. You here
that you all there, you go. Let's take a break and then we'll
talk space health. Come okay, we'll be right back after these messages.
All right, we're back break number two, The Space Geek Out twenty twenty
three. I'm Carl Franklin, that's Richard Campbell, and yeah, we're going
I know this is a long one, but there's just a lot to talk
about. Well, now we're getting to the part you asked me for,
right, which is the crisis in cosmology. But first let's we've got to
talk about Hubble first. So originally a space station, one of the great
observatories. It was lifted on the Space Shuttle. It's a modified Spy satellite.
It's been operating. It had optical problems they got corrected in the nineteen
with the squeegey smeared the lens at the stoplight. That was a little more
complicated than that. But yes, last service mission by the Shuttle was two
thousand and nine. Yeah, now there are no more shuttles. It counts
on a set of six gyros. You understand, in the orbit, it's
energy about four hundrechlometers up for it to point in an area of space as
it's whizzing around the Earth. These gyros continuously move the telescope to keep it
pointing in the same direction so you can do your observation. It's like a
camera on a gimbal. Yea, yeah, exactly. And so these gyros
fail over time. There were something they replaced every on every servicing mission.
There were several of them, and now it's been since two thousand and nine
that they've been replaced in there down to three and they're starting to fail.
And so there is a question of what to do, and it's you know,
for all of the years of Hubble, it seems a shame to just
abandon it. So it's already outlasted an predicted life, oh by miles.
But you know, it was the first of the serviceable satellites, right It
was an experiment to see can we service the satellite. They upgraded solar panels,
they upgraded, they replaced instruments many times, they fixed it, and
they certainly kept replacing the gyros. There is a proposal, there's two proposals.
One of the things they did in the two thousand and the last two
thousand and nine mission is they put a prototype of the universal adapter on the
bottom of Hubble. Hubble was set up to be able to be picked up
by the shuttle, but nothing else. But they this adapter is with the
col A Pedal adapter, which is what we use now for docking, although
the current modern one is a little bit different than the what's on Hubble right
now, but that's fine. What we have is a place that a robotic
vehicle or another vehicle could grab onto, designed to be grabbed. It's sturdy,
it's a locking, a lock on point. It's on the bottom of
Hubble. So the first off is if we lose control of the gyros and
it's low on fuel, we could have an uncontrolled d arbit from it,
although it'll take a while. An uncontrolled d orbit. Yeah, there's not
a lot of atmosphere a four hundred klometers, but it's still a little just
like the space station, which is too around that same height. You have
to keep reboosting it. So we lose control of it, we can't do
that anymore, eventually it'll re enter. It's pretty pretty, uh you know,
low thing to treat one of the most celebrated satellites. Yeah. Yeah,
And let's face it, it would fit inside of stars like if Starship
gets up and running. In theory, they could they could use Starship to
go pick up Hubble and bring it back. Like, doesn't it deserve to
be hanging in the Smithsonian? Absolutely? You know how big is Hubble?
Did you say how big it was? Yeah? Well, Hubble fit inside
the payloa bay of the Space Shuttle. Obviously, it's how it was launched.
So it's about forty feet long and about fourteen feet across. It's big,
you know, it's bust sized. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah,
and but the other question is, like, it's obviously it's still useful
as an observatory. Why not just keep maintaining it while it's still able to
work? All we got to do is replace the gyros. But really there's
still these two missions. The first is can we keep it under control so
at least decide if we're going to retrieve it, so send a mission up
there to boost it and maybe to provide guidance. So you can imagine a
little tug that would attach out of the back of Hubble. Even if we're
not going to still use it as a as a telescope, at least keep
it under control. Yeah, maybe even build a module like that that could
do its pointing for it. But I don't know if you remember this guy,
Jared Isaacman is this billionaire adventurer, and he had the first tourism flight
to orbit where he flew. He took he bought a crew dragon, raised
a bunch of money for children's hospitals while doing it, and took three people
with him up and spent three days in orbit in a crew Dragon. So
he wants to go back. He's not done. You know, flying his
MiGs isn't enough. He wants to go back into space again, and so
he's part of proposing to He has a mission currently in planning now with Elon
to do the first because commercial spacewalk. He wants to walk in space,
not as an ass astronaut, as a citizen. So they're working on a
suit. It would be tethered, but he would take a crew Dragon up
with a couple of other people. They would depressurize capsule, open it,
and then he would be able to go out and walk around, like float
around in space. He wants to have that experience, and he's a billionaire.
There you go, so there you go. But he's now been a
part of a proposal to service Hubble. Could we ad modify a crew Dragon
to get up to it, dock to it, and then work from there
to replace the gyros and do some maintenance on it and do a reboost of
it. It's not impossible, and and because of the low price of Falcon
nines, it's even reasonably cost effective. Like relatively speaking, you know,
every Shuttle flight was a multi billion dollar operation, this would be hundreds of
millions. And the issue of course is that this is this would be a
one of a kind mission. If you mess it up, you may wreck
Hubble. But and and Hubble could be going and could be operating in a
degraded state even if they lost another gyro. There's a couple of tricks they
can do with solar balancing and so forth. They would it would limit their
number of places that public could point, but they could still get science from
them for a while. Or do you take the chance on a unique servicing
mission to keep it running and perhaps to keep it running for a really long
time until and arguably until starship flies, because one starship is flying. Starship
is nine meters in diameter. You could build a space telescope into one of
those things that would be bigger than the James Webb James Webb is six and
a half meters across. And then really bringing it home and celebrating it hanging
in the Smithsonian would be awesome. Yeah, that would be wonderful. So
that's all I got to say about Hubble. Yeah, James Webb. So
let's talk about James Webb. And you specifically asked me, it's like you're
gonna talk about this right because when we did this last year, James wedd
had only just been gearing up right. It launched in December of twenty twenty
twenty one. It got to L two its location balanced between the Earth and
the Sun, in January twenty two, and it took six months or so
of checkouts to started to get it up and running. So by when we
were talking about this last year in December twenty two, it had really done
some checkout images, some initial surveys, Like the pictures were astonishing. It
it worked, was working amazing, but the big science stuff had only just
gotten started and they hadn't really looked back at the Big Bang yet or anything.
Yeah, they'll because those imaging take a while, all right, and
believe me, like James Webb, is scheduled out the Yan Yang. Now
there's a ton of experiments, but we've learned a bunch of things. So
they've set the records they expected to set. So the quick scan stuff they
did, like surveying exoplanets, they've already done some of that and got some
results back that we talked about last year. But the longer duration of stuff
with things like locating the most distant galaxies. So the current understanding and cosmology
is that the universe is about thirteen point four billion years old, maybe thirteen
thirteen point six. And so now you're peering back at light from thirteen billion
years ago. And a few things are important here. One is that the
universe continues to expand, and so light that was emitted thirteen billion years ago
in the visible spectrum isn't in the visible spectrum anymore. It's been stretched and
so it's been red shifted, which is one of the reasons that James Web
is an infrared telescope, because that's where the old light is. It's in
the infrared spectrum. And so yeah, they found these four ultradistant galaxies.
That's thirteen point four billion year old light way down in the infrared spectrum.
Crazy, so it's like, there they are, we've found them, we've
done the thing, but we've also got some problems with what we found.
And that you know, before James Web, cosmology was pretty comfortable, right,
They had this sort of sense of concordance. They'd gotten to a place
where they can call it concordance cosmology. This is our little domain here.
You know, we're all happy and comfortable and what's out there is not going
to hurt us. It's far away. Well, maybe we should we should
back up what's cosmology about? What is it? It's really the science of
understanding the origin development of the universe. So as telescopes have matured over the
past hundred couple one hundred years, we've been able to look further and further
deeper into space. We found some stuff, and we've been trying to understand
the universe around us. You know, the idea that of galaxies, of
multiple galaxies is less than one hundred years old. You know, it's taken
a while. You know, for a long time they thought Andromeda was just
a nebula, not another galaxy. But those things, you know, evolve
over time. You start to learn and get this idea of how big is
the universe and it's hard to me. It's not like you can measure it
right, it's not a measuring tape. What do you what do you do?
Like, how do you even start to calculate that? And this is
where you get into this relationship between cosmology and and nuclear science or atomic science.
We understand the behavior of atoms pretty well. We study them up close,
and we know by frequencies elements emit, what frequencies of light and understanding
that stars are Essentially, fusion engines that this huge amount of masks that they
collect together causes atoms to fuse together, starting with hydrogen, which the most
amount an element, then fuses together into helium. So we need our periodic
table to sort of understand the chain. And when that fusion takes place,
and it makes a particular kind of light, and depending on the size the
rate of fusion, you'll get different frequencies of light. And so by measuring
that light we can sort of tell what kind of fusion is taking place,
and that gives us a sense of its mass. Now you take its brightness
and relative to its brightness, you know what its distance is. It'll be
dimmer of its further away, you know, by the frequent see the kind
of fusion that's taking place. So now you can tell by determined its distance
by how bright it is, and that's you know, the first calculations you
start to get for distance. And then we find particular classes of stars.
So an astronomer by the name of Henrietta Swan leave It a woman in nineteen
oh eight identified set of stars they call the cephid variables. So cephid variables
change in brightness, that is at a standard period, so they appear to
pulse, okay, and this is separate from atmospheric effect. They have this
pulse. The current understanding today is that these are stars far enough along in
their sequence that there's enough helium in there in their atmosphere, in the corona
that surrounds them that that helium, as it blows the electrons off the helium,
they become more opaque, it blocks more light, and so it caused
it to dim. And as that dimming occurs and it loses some energy,
the electrons come back onto the helium and so it becomes more transparent again.
And so there's this throb that happens to these stars at this point in their
age, and you can measure them. But it must be at a particularly
high frequency though, I mean, it isn't something that you could probably look
at and see it pulsing. It is. No, No, it's very
visible. It's not that fast. Wow. I just think though you know
the speed at which chemical reactions happen, it would it would be very fast.
Yeah, and these are high energy plasma reactions too. But you are
talking star scale, Yeah, I get it. So, and you can
well go watch video of so big and you'll see that. Yeah, big
pulse. And this is not a pulsar. That's not the same thing as
a pulsar. No, that's a different thing. That's a that's a rapidly
spinning thing. And it's also useful but not necessarily useful distance so much as
as useful for a location. Right, Okay, but this this is before
we had all those We're still talking about optical sensors, right. Radio telescopes
haven't really started yet, Like we're not able to measure into the gamma frequencies
and at this point it's too early. We're very much in optical times.
But they utilizing SEFID variables. Knowing the frequencies and knowing the pulse rate helped
us determine more accurate distances. Okay, So and Levitt was they sort of
wrote the original paper on this, with many other people contributing. It's I'm
always tricky to mention names because there are there always other folks. We always
build on the bat shoulders of giants. So let's jump to twenty years later
with Edwin Hubble. And yes it's that Hubble. What the Hubble telescope is
named for is Edwin Hubble. So Hubble in nineteen twenty nine using telescopes measuring
with sephid variables shows that not only we've already now at this point we determined
there as multiple galaxies, but that he's also he's the one who figures out
red shift. So the further the galaxy he is away, the more red
shift that it is. Although he's only looking in the optical frequency range.
Show eventually the red shift off a visible range, but he starts to be
able to build the math around red shifting. So red shift looks red and
it looks right. So typically when you talk about ultra large stars, much
bigger than our stars, they are blue giants. They are very much in
the blue because they have so much mass, they have a very intense level
of fusion. So they're up in the nine ten thousand kelvin frequency range of
ultra blue light. But then they are they are are so old and so
far away the light has stretched and it's no longer blue. It's becoming red
and it's red to us. So if you were up close, red deep
blue like everybody else, Yeah, if you were there, I mean again,
you're looking back in time. You're talking looking back billions of years ago
get effectively. And this is also the time when Einstein's written his special relativity
theorems too, and special relativity talks about the stretching of space time, and
so what was brilliant about what Hubble was measuring by looking through telescopes is very
precise of observations lined up with what special relativity said would be the distortions too.
So we have this theoretical physicist and this cosmologist getting numbers that degree.
You know, when we're trying to do signs like this, we're looking for
multiple strategies to do measurements, because if they all consolidate out on the same
number, then we have more certainty that number is correct. So one of
the things that Edwin Humble figured out was that the further those galaxies were away,
the more red shifting they were. And so what he showed was that
the universe was expanding, and it continued to expand. It it expanded at
a particular rate, which for a long time they called Hubbles constant. These
days, we don't call it a constant anymore because there's a lot of debate
about whether it's actually a constant. We call it Hubbles parameter. And did
they figure that out because the stars that were far away were getting more and
more red over time. Yes, well in galaxies too, you know,
the galaxies were getting more and more red. But he was measuring their changes
over time and was able to show how far away they are, and that
they are it's actually expending their getting further away from us in all directions,
because universe be weird. Yeah, right, I know, it's strange,
it's crazy. Isn't anything heading toward us? All kinds of things are,
but not at the cosmological scales. So now let's fast forward into the nineteen
sixties and we're getting into radio astronomy, and as we're tempting to measure the
radiation coming off of supernovae, we keep running into this hum, right,
and they keep and I think it's like man made to look at all those
things, but it takes a while from the really realize, oh no,
that is literally the hum of the universe, the cosmic ome. Yeah,
they might this microwave background radiation, and so now they call it the cosmic
microwave background, but literally it is the buzz of the big bang of the
initial and it's not really a bang, and it may have actually been really
tiny initially, although it got a lot bigger. But it is literally the
background radiation of the initial light of the universe, and it is not even
the hum varies depending on which way you point in the sky. We now
have cosmological background radiation maps. Because the universe wasn't perfectly uniform, a lot
of that light got concentrated down. The darker, the cooler areas in the
background radiation are where the first gallance is formed. So the process of gravity
taking a hold and consolidating these galaxies cooled off that area faster, and so
from the background radiation map we can sort of see where the galaxies sort of
appeared. But it also allowed us to use a completely different strategy to measure
the age of the universe by the rate of cooling of the of the cosmic
map of the CMB. Sure, and so and up till before James Web,
the two numbers were close enough that it's like other within the rare error
rate, so they probably the same number the margin of error, that's right.
Yeah. Then James Web showed up and started doing more precise measurements of
both, and as the science has been coming in, the numbers are beginning
fur through up. And the numbers we're talking about are the red shift rate.
Okay, we're talking about the age of the universe. How long has
the universe been around. There's a few things that have messed with thirteen point
seven. One is that we're as we understand the red shift rate more and
more detail. And one of the things that's happened is that the James West
based ELSCO has been able to show find objects of red shifts in the in
the teens like thirteen point two, like literally at the beginning of the universe
kind of numbers, and they're way bigger than they should. You know.
The idea was when the universe started and it was just protons, there's not
a lot of mass concentration there, so the stars should have been very short
lived, and those galaxies should be small hule and they seem to be large
and complex. We're talking like Milky Way class galaxies from thirteen billion years ago,
from the first two or three percent of the lifespan of the universe as
we understand it. Damn you, James Webb telescope. It's yes, it's
confusing, right, but also and both methods have shown that there's something we
really don't understand. And this is the sort of dark energy dark matter part.
That the matter that we're seeing in both measurement strategies represents less than five
percent of all the matter, right, that there seems to be something more
in the neighborhood of twenty five twenty six percent dark matter matter we cannot measure
but has gravitational effects, otherwise galaxies wouldn't hold together. And that there's a
tremendous amount of energy, like sixty eight to seventy percent energy that is immeasurable
but must be there because of the behaviors that we see weird. So we
really have the sense that we don't know much, like we're only able to
observe a little bit of what's going on out there. And now as we
get into these measurement better measurement systems, they're getting further and further. But
that means that we're due for some new kind of revelation that we have not
yet even conceived. And that and here lies the crisis. Is now a
lot of folks that were maybe on the periphery, like one of the proposals
run around out there right now is that maybe the universe is twice as old
as we think it is that it's twenty six billion years old, and that's
why the galaxies are more organized as you get back to the thirteen billion year
mark, because we have these impossible early galaxies. Now those are the paper
proposed that says that has not done enough research to justify such a great a
serious statement, right, you know, great proposals require great evidence. So
we're not there yet, but you are seeing this sort of fragmentation of ideas.
Well. You know, if I apply my imagination, which Einstein say
is more important than knowledge, if you apply your imagination, I would think
that perhaps the percentage of dark matter and dark energy that we imagine should be
applied to our estimate of the age of the universe. Well, without a
doubt it is this. The thing is is we got to these estimates.
That is why we said there must be some kind of energy we can't measure.
This wouldn't work, so it's sort of been this catch all of us.
So if you let's say you say that there's sixty percent of the universe's
dark matter dark energy, well maybe we should inflate that thirteen point nine by
another sixty percent. Well, it's it's more far more than that. It's
seventy five. Okay, But there's a few things you can go after.
One is our measurements wrong. You know, the one of the ideas around
the Sephid model is that we're biased bright that because there's so many stars that
every time we track a measure of a star, there are other stars contributing
to that light, and so that might be distorting it. Again, James
well Hells has addressed that because it's even more precise, those measurements are still
ongoing, so maybe we can offset that. Also. You know, I
hinted at maybe it's not Hubbles constant. Maybe at different times in the universe
the expansion rate changed. It would be under processes is we don't understand,
right, But that's why they're starting to refer to it as a parameter,
because that parameter may have some variability. Maybe there's other states of matter.
We still don't understand that that impact other areas of the universe that change its
raptational constants, they change its behavior. All that's happened with James Webb is
we've like most new experiments, they introduced new questions and make us force us
to get uncomfortable with our current set of measurements that we have should be crisis
of cosmology is yeah, I mean, listen, we call it a crisis.
It's learning. This is a This is a bunch of science people going
huh, well that's odd. And now it's sort of you know, you
had this consensus moment before these new measurements came in. It's like, ah,
we're close enough, and now it's like, maybe we're not that close.
Uh. And it's not like this is the last telescope to fly.
More will come and our instruments will can get better. But James Webb has
done its job. It has opened our eyes to there is more to no
and new science is being done right now as we learn more from the measures
we could take from it. It's exciting. It's very cool. It sounds
like the end of the geek out. Oh no, yeah, I'm sorry
it's this long, but that's how much I had to say. All right,
well, thanks again and we'll see you next time on dot net rocks.
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