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at patreon dot dot NetRocks dot com. Hey, welcome back to dot net

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rocks. It's another geek out.
It's that time of year. Yeah,

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happy times. I'm Carl Franklin.
That's Richard Campbell. He's got some goodness

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for you. Ah. You know. The funny part is these are hard

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to write right up until you're really
pushing the deadline, and then they get

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really fun to write. Like I
stayed up late last night, yeah,

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double checking a bunch of numbers and
really working on some aspects of this.

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So it's like when you get into
it, when you're deeply into it,

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like it's all in your head.
It's really quite fun. But they are

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a lot of writing. It reminds
me of when I used to stay up

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all night on Sunday nights editing Mondays
to publish on Monday morning, crying right,

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just absolutely peeing myself laughing. Yeah, yeah, Hey, just a

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weird story. I just got a
tweet from a friend of mine which was

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a link to a TikTok video where
he said, and the title was,

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I've changed my mind. I'm embracing
chat GPT. He had a friend from

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New York who has a bagel shop
who wanted chat GPT to generate, you

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know, with dally a delicious bagel. So it came up with something that

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looked fake and plastic and had cold
cuts and some sort of spread on the

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bottom and lettuce and tomato, and
then he said, make it more delicious,

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and it basically doubled the size of
everything means more delicious. And then

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he kept going, make it more
delicious. And he did this four or

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five times until it was like four
feet tall with a little big at the

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top and bottom. It's just terrible. You want any more proof of shat

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GPTs is us centric. More is
better, More is better. There you

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go and make it more delicious.
That's so funny. I love it.

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So uh, I do have a
better no framework, so roll the crazy

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music, well, and we should
do that. What do you got?

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I went looking for the most expensive
coolest, highest rated electronic computer driven telescope

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that I could find on Amazon,
because you can spend a lot of money

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on telescopes if you want. Yeah, this is not by far not the

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most expensive, but I think in
the consumer category it's right up there,

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and it's got eighteen hundred and seventy
three ratings. Most of them are at

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an average of four point four stars, so most of our five stars Celestron

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Nextstar one thirty SLT computerized telescope,
compact and portable Newtonian reflector optical design.

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Rich's going to explain all this sky
aline technology, computerized hand control, one

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hundred and thirty milimeter aperture. The
only thing that I recognize there is computerized,

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Yeah, which is the important part
because aiming a telescope well is very

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challenging, and so using the fact
that we have ultra precise GPS these days

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and great maps of the sky make
it a lot easier to allow a machine

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to point very precisely for you.
And honestly, I'm looking at this thing.

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It's less than six hundred dollars,
like this is a bargain for all

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the time Knowles, you're talking about
It looks really, really good. It

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also has this feature called sky Online
where it can align itself to three or

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more celestial objects, like it just
knows based on the date and time and

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where you are, where things are
in the sky right right, and then

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it actually to get even more precise, will do some pointing to try and

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get some alignments done so that it
knows what it's doing. You know,

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there's a thing one of the things
you find if you get into astronomy.

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It's one of the reasons I've stayed
away from it. What I'm hung around

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with folks that are serious about their
hobby is that setting your You know,

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you can't leave your telescope all the
time. You don't have an observatory,

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you know, yet, so you've
got to set it up, and then

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you've got to realign it both internally
and externally. So you've got it figuring

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out has it twisted, is it
too warm to cold? All those sorts

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of things to actually get the telescope
itself happy and then figure out where it

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is, how it's pointing. You
know, all of these physical things about

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motors that turn your telescope, they're
a little analog, they've got a little

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slack at them and so precision is
really really tough. It takes a lot

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to get great results when you're going
to go looking at things that are very

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far away. I wish these things
were around when I was a kid.

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My father used to take us out
and you know, show us, you

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know, the constellations that we could
see a Ryan's Belt and yeah, which

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is great fun too, right,
and the sky app apps on your phone

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are awesome for that for just totally
them go yeah, yeah, that really

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is Jupiter and you know that kind
of thing, because again he leads on

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GPS. But now, you know, my girls were kind of too young

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and not really interested. But I
do remember the I don't remember what year

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it was, but we had just
an amazing meteor shower here. It was

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a Leonid meteor shower. I think
it was, and I mean my oldest

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daughter was probably six, so it
was two thousand and one, maybe two

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thousand and two, I can't remember, but it was they come around every

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year. Well, this one was
supposed to be like the last one that

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was going to be this spectacular,
and as soon as you could see anything

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in the sky, it was like
a meteor every two seconds, right,

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So you don't have to maintain long
attention span because it's just bombing. It's

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everywhere, right, So I figured, I mean, and I went up

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to my mother's house and she has
a big open field and there's no light

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pollution and stuff. And I got
her up at three in the morning when

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the moon was going to be down. So it was literally we walked out

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three o'clock in the morning and sat
out there and just in amazement. Awesome,

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and it was. It was the
best media shower I've ever seen in

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my life. Here's the question when
it comes to telescopes. Is I keep

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talking about you know here being here
on the ocean. Yeah, the haze

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is a bit of an issue,
but we don't have a lot of light

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pollution because people are pretty far apart
up here. Right When actually goes to

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looking into the telescope, you go, you got to kind of walk outside

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and get your eye down on that
epiece after it's aimed and sort of stare

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at it for a while. It's
like one person at a time. Is

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it is compelling? If I put
a CCD in it and then put it

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out on screen so everybody can see
it, well, the resolution is going

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to be lower on the screen to
a degree, But then again, the

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telescope can zoom in on what it's
looking at. Sure the CCD, you

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know, you go for like a
four K resolution CCD to a four K

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screen, Like you could try and
optimize this to a degree. But I'm

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just thinking a night of skywatching,
you know, in the winter, when

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it's cold and clear out on the
deck and being able to stay inside where

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it's war I'm going to look on
the screen at what we're pointing at.

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It's kind of compelling. I just
I don't know that that's as magical.

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It could just be TV then,
right, as opposed to there's something about

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putting your eye over the eyepiece and
seeing the thing. I remember being on

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Grand Manan Island and going outside and
looking up the most stars I've ever seen

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because there's like zero light pollution in
the northeast there, and being able to

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see the Andromeda gally see with binoculars. Unbelieve it's big. It's big,

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big in the sky, no two
ways about it. Yeah, But I

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you know, I fear you know
this about me. I fear new hobbies.

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Yeah, because you know how I
go, you know it's going to

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happen. Yeah, I mean did
I Did I do some math for where

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I could put a little observatory in
for an eight inch Yeah? Yeah,

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I did. How many hours and
how many dollars will this hobby cost?

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Yes? Yes, this is five
figures? Now time vampires. Am I

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going to be able to teat a
marriage through this hobby? These are the

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prop by problems. Absolutely, But
if you know, if grandkids come around

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and they're interested in it, yeah
I might get something like this. But

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you know, you pulled up the
perfect example of the middle ground. Something

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you you know, under one thousand
dollars you could put in a closet.

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You don't feel too bad about it
when you pull it out. You can

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make an evening with it. Yeah, yeah, awesome, Yeah, that's

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it. Good choice. Are you
going to pull up a comment? Sure,

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Bobby, we do. I got
one from last year's Space Geek Out.

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Great, that's eighteen twenty six,
and this comments from Dave who said

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you brought up uranus at the end
of the show no jokes please, which

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brought to mind this podcast episode I
listened to a few months ago where it

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sounds like they're actually going to get
a mission to uranus. And yeah,

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the National Academies has proposed to NASA
that we should be sending an orbiter out

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to the outer planets. So we've
put probes in orbited around Jupiter and Saturn,

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but we certainly have done Uranus or
Neptune. They're very far away.

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Go two ways about that, but
they are unusual. Uranus, especially so

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with an with a looks like an
orbital inclination of almost ninety degrees, like

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the planet's laying on its side,
like how did that happen? Not only

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that, but it looks like one
of those shakes that you get in March

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at McDonald's the blue marble. Yeah, a shamrock shake. You know,

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it looks like I think that there's
more green. Urinus is very blue.

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But yes, yes, yes,
I mean some of the other proposals in

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that was that it probably makes most
sense to use nuclear propulsion for that spacecraft,

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and that would be the first mission
where you're really like, hey,

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we really need this like this not
just RTGs, but something more advanced to

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provide more energy, more speed,
Like if you wanted to start testing more

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advanced rocketry, this is a good
mission for that. I would if I

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was designing such a rocket, I
wouldn't fire up that nuclear reactor until I

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was outside, well outside the airs
atmosphere. Yeah, yeah, it's not

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going to work otherwise, Right,
they heat problems and so forth. Right,

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nuclear powered space is complicated, but
you need a ton of energy.

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You're way too far away from the
Sun for solar RTGs. I mean,

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the big problem here is we've I
managed to get probes out to your A.

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It's like voyager, but we did
them by slingshotting, so that by

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the time they got out there,
they were moving and there was no way

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to stop them. So to actually
go into orbit around your ANAS is to

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be able to break and that's a
You need fuel. You need resources to

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be able to slow down enough to
be able to stay there and really spend

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some time exploring. And that means
I'm either a much larger vehicle or some

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more advanced technology. And so these
robotic missions are the kinds of things that

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would open the door to advancing technology
for all space flight going forward, and

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I think it would be a great
opportunity. I hope they execute on it.

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But you are talking about a multi
decatal effort ten plus years to build

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and develop a ten year flight time. It's a long way away, so

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you know, someone would literally put
their entire career into a mission, you

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know, realistically, Dave, thank
you so much for your comment and a

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00:11:54.240 --> 00:11:56.240
copy of music go by. It's
on its way to you. If you'd

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00:11:56.240 --> 00:11:58.200
like a copy of music go buy, I write a comment on the website

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00:11:58.240 --> 00:12:01.000
at Donetrocks dot com or on the
facebooks. We publish every show there,

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00:12:01.039 --> 00:12:03.399
and if you comment there and I
read on the show, we'll send you

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00:12:03.399 --> 00:12:05.840
a copy of music. Oh and
you can follow us on Twitter if you

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want. That's cool. We've been
there a long time. But the cool

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kids are hanging out on mastadon.
I'm Carl Franklin at tech Hub dot social

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00:12:15.360 --> 00:12:20.039
and I'm Rich Campbell at masadon dot
social. Send us a two yes,

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and we learn any comments about uranus
we won't, or the probe that's going

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in the Yeah, okay, wow, we're not still that low yeah,

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full grade nine experience. There you
go, speaking of Mondays, where's Mark

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Miller Yaks? I mean, you
know what's fun about these is I go

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read my notes from previous years and
then laugh just about you know, wow,

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that we're gonna this will happen in
twenty twenty three, dope didn't happen.

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Now it's push twenty twenty four,
that kind of thing. But also

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I'm sure things that you thought were
going to happen in the next five years

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have already happened, right, Yeah, some have, some haven't, you

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know, but let's talk about it. I mean, our larger story to

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my mind for space flight twenty three
is SpaceX. So Elon's goal for twenty

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twenty three was to have one hundred
flights in a year, which is astonishing

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right when you think not that long
ago there were not one hundred flights of

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anybody in the whole world an a
year, And even now we're around two

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hundred and nine flights for twenty twenty
three, So we're talking half of all

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flights came from SpaceX. Although they
didn't get to one hundred at the moment,

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and we're recording this towards the end
of December, there might be a

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couple more squeezed in before it's over. They're at ninety four flights. Wow,

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so eighty eight Falcon nines with every
single booster landed successfully. Four Falcon

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heavies flew with side boosters recovered.
They've never recovered a center and they're not

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even bothering these days. It's just
too energetic and the two starship flights.

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Yeah, so even if they did
one a day from now until the end

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of the year, they still you
know, with weekends, they still probably

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wouldn't reach the goal. Yeah,
it's pretty unlikely. And part of the

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problem is that December weather was very
problematic. They went ten They've been at

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a cadence of every three or four
days, they have a flight a couple

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of week at least. That's how
you get to one hundred, and they

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went ten days on a flight in
December. Partly weather, but also they

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have a Falcon Heavy flight that's supposed
to go We're supposed to leave a while

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ago, back at the beginning of
December, and it's carrying the X thirty

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seven B. So that is the
Space Force Experimental Mini Shuttle, which is

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first time it's ever flown on a
Falcon Heavy, and in fact, there's

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a lot of debate. It's to
why is it flying on a Falcon Heavy

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because it can fly in a regular
Falcon Falcon nine and it has flown on

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the Atlas five and so forth,
So they're doing something unusual and flying in

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on the heavy They're obviously going to
give it a lot more energy, maybe

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a much higher orbit or a much
heavier payload. Nobody really knows. It's

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all very secret, but we get
into one of the current if you're going

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to brun it this cadence of a
flight every couple of days. Yeah,

209
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the way that spaceflight works right now
is somewhat inefficient. The big thing is

210
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that pads have to be configured for
a flight. So yeah, yeah,

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the pad that they've got set up
for this fulcon heavy flight can't fly anything

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else. It's really set up for
that flight. And so when they had

213
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a weather delay that pad obviously no, nothing was going to fly anyway.

214
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But then now they've had other problems
with it to the point where they've actually

215
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taken it off the pad and back
into the building to do some work on

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it. And in the meantime that
pad is hung essentially like do you reconfigure

217
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that pad back to fly something else
or do you just wait for the heavy

218
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flight to finish and so on.
I remember when we were down in Orlando

219
00:15:52.000 --> 00:15:56.559
for dev Intersection just a couple weeks
ago, there was a Starlink launch.

220
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Yeah, and you know, we
were busy with stuff, we couldn't have

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seen it. But you know,
the cape is only an hour a way.

222
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Yeah, you know, theoretically we
could have gone to see it,

223
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but actually we could have just looked
up. Yeah. No, I that

224
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night I did go outside. It
was like a one in the morning.

225
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Yeah, and you saw it in
this You saw a light. It's it's

226
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pretty brief. It's like less than
a minute, minute and a half and

227
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it's gone. Yeah. I think
I was seeing the inside of my eyelids

228
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at that point. It just seemed
very reason. It was very late at

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night, and we were late in
the conference too. We're always yeah,

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so yeah, I mean. Elon
said that his goal for twenty twenty four

231
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is one hundred and forty four flights, and that they're going to have to

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continue to optimize their strategies for how
you reconfigure pads, how you can put

233
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if a vehicle has a problem,
they'd use the pad for something else,

234
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like those kinds of things to maintain
this kind of cadence. What's the benefit

235
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to Elon to do so many flights
in a year. Well, you know,

236
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you bring up a great point,
which is a obviously he can the

237
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more efficient he gets the more you
reduce the price, right, the faster

238
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you run the machine, the more
you can tune it. He gets paid

239
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for a lot of those flights,
although of those eighty eight Falcon nine flights,

240
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fifty six of them were Starlink flights. So he's still populating out the

241
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satellite, the satellite network for Starlink. They're now over five thousand Starlink satellites,

242
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which means it's more than half of
all of the satellites at orbit are

243
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Starlink. Does he want to disrupt
the land based internet cable modem market kind

244
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of thing? I think that's possible. It's the reality is that starlink is

245
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about the same speed as a cable
modem more or less. But it works

246
00:17:41.480 --> 00:17:45.319
out almost anywhere I have one.
I've been in the early data. But

247
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it's expensive, although again they're trying
to get the price down. They've certainly

248
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made less expensive equipment for you to
buy. Used to be I think almost

249
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eight hundred dollars now it's a couple
hundred dollars. But they're also saying they

250
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now have enough customers that starlink actually
profitable. That's cool, And one of

251
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his missions around Starlink was to fund
the trips to Mars off of the back

252
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of building this massive network. So
I mean they're so far ahead now they

253
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have a working network, they have
this huge number of satellites. And the

254
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other thing that's happened by flying these
starling flights is it continues to mature the

255
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Falcon nine. So all of the
most used flights, like they're up to

256
00:18:25.519 --> 00:18:27.759
one of the boosters has flown seventeen
times. They think they can fly it

257
00:18:27.839 --> 00:18:33.519
twenty times. Now those limit flights
are always Starling flights, so they're only

258
00:18:33.599 --> 00:18:38.880
risking their own hardware. Plus those
starling flights are maximum weight. They're flying

259
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as heavy as they can fly,
so they really are constantly testing the vehicle

260
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to its limits every time they make
a Starling flight, and it makes their

261
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rocket better. So you said they
have reused those rockets the first stages.

262
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Yes, the first stages, and
that's something that was supposed to be a

263
00:18:56.759 --> 00:19:00.359
feature of the Shuttle, wasn't it. Well, the shuttle did get use,

264
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but not the and the boosters were
refilled and the external tank was thrown

265
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away. The problem is that to
get the Shuttle ready for a second flight,

266
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there was such an extensive teardown it
was almost a rebuild and so just

267
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became prohibitively expensive. And one of
the problems you have with the Shuttle is

268
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that it really only had one technological
update from the original design in the nineteen

269
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seventies. In the nineties they did
a digital upgrade internally, but for the

270
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most part, they never improved shuttle. So over the thirty plus years that

271
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it was flying, the technology was
kind of frozen in place and it was

272
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just old and it got older,
and so as the vehicle got the vehicles

273
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got older, their inspections became more
and more extensive. So in contrast,

274
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you said, this was the Falcon
nine that they reused. Yeah, so

275
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they reused the first stage. Yeah, so they reused the first stage.

276
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How much of teardown and rebuild did
they have to do to that? And

277
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we don't really know, because not
a public company, they don't have to

278
00:20:00.079 --> 00:20:03.200
tell us, right, it's all
typically held. But we do know that

279
00:20:03.200 --> 00:20:07.079
they're able to turn the same booster
round in relatively short orders, so we

280
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don't think it's very much that they
and again there pressingly gets their own edges.

281
00:20:11.640 --> 00:20:15.720
We're not really seeing failures, like
we haven't had an engine fail at

282
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a really long time on a climbout. So it feels more and more appears

283
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after hundreds of successful landings and reuses, that they really understand the vehicle.

284
00:20:30.680 --> 00:20:36.559
Well, I remember the couple of
years of epic landing failures. Yes,

285
00:20:36.680 --> 00:20:38.839
those are over, are they.
Yeah, there hasn't been a failed landing

286
00:20:38.880 --> 00:20:42.920
in ages. They all land,
they're all successful. Some of them land

287
00:20:42.960 --> 00:20:47.000
back on land, some land on
barges, which is then other point about

288
00:20:47.039 --> 00:20:48.279
if they're going to increase the numbers
or they want to get to one forty

289
00:20:48.279 --> 00:20:52.559
four, they need at least one
more barge. Yeah, they just it

290
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takes Typically those barges are far enough
out that it takes several days to get

291
00:20:56.279 --> 00:21:00.480
back. And so considering your flying
going to fly every other day or you

292
00:21:00.519 --> 00:21:03.759
know, every third day, you're
gonna know the barge or two. I

293
00:21:03.759 --> 00:21:07.119
remember during those years, you and
I were sitting in a in a pub

294
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or a restaurant or bar at a
conference and I can't remember where it was,

295
00:21:11.000 --> 00:21:15.400
but it was somewhere in Europe,
and we were looking on the internet

296
00:21:15.480 --> 00:21:19.400
to watch the re entry and it
just blew up. You know. It

297
00:21:19.519 --> 00:21:25.000
was one of those times where the
landing just failed. Yeah, and it's

298
00:21:25.119 --> 00:21:27.359
you know, it's the problem with
it being so routine now is we forget

299
00:21:27.400 --> 00:21:32.640
just how insane it is. It
is pretty insane, you know, it's

300
00:21:32.680 --> 00:21:37.359
crazy. I went reached out on
the twitters or whatever the heck it's called

301
00:21:37.359 --> 00:21:41.440
now thes I formerly note about Twitter, had said like, what would you

302
00:21:41.599 --> 00:21:44.200
like, you know, any questions
for me as I'm writing these geek outs,

303
00:21:45.079 --> 00:21:48.480
And Stuart Quinn asked me about the
environmental impact of so many launches.

304
00:21:49.160 --> 00:21:55.480
Yeah, you know that launch canes
has never been higher. SpaceX alone,

305
00:21:55.519 --> 00:22:00.000
with almost one hundred flights this year
had lifted over a million tons into low

306
00:22:00.119 --> 00:22:03.079
Worth orbit, Like, it's just
so much bigger, and we're starting to

307
00:22:03.119 --> 00:22:07.119
head towards this idea of more space
tourism, so the flights may go up

308
00:22:07.160 --> 00:22:12.720
even more, of course they're expected
to. And the simple answer to this

309
00:22:12.920 --> 00:22:15.960
is, I mean, compared to
air travel, space flight is just a

310
00:22:17.079 --> 00:22:22.559
tiny drop in the bucket. But
there have been carbon footprint measurements for keeping

311
00:22:22.640 --> 00:22:26.119
humans in orbits, specifically the astronauts
in the space station, and yeah,

312
00:22:26.200 --> 00:22:29.640
that number is thousands of times larger
than a human on Earth. And then

313
00:22:29.680 --> 00:22:32.440
again which there's only a few of
them, so and again, there's a

314
00:22:32.519 --> 00:22:37.799
volcano in Iceland right now that's spewing
out tons and tons and tons of toxic

315
00:22:37.920 --> 00:22:41.079
gas. Yeah, it just happens
sometimes, not that much. It's not

316
00:22:41.319 --> 00:22:45.559
that's a good volcano. It's not
that pyroclastic. But those are also normal

317
00:22:45.559 --> 00:22:48.720
cycles of the planet, and the
planet recovers pretty quickly from this. Yeah.

318
00:22:48.799 --> 00:22:52.240
Yeah, The actual emit rockets are
such short duration. I mean,

319
00:22:52.240 --> 00:22:56.519
they burn a lot of fuel fairly
quickly, but typical flight to orbits like

320
00:22:56.559 --> 00:23:02.799
eight minutes. So compare that to
a trans atlantic flight, like the environmental

321
00:23:02.799 --> 00:23:06.960
impact per person because there's so many
more people on a Translantic flight, are

322
00:23:06.960 --> 00:23:11.000
more efficient, but it also depends
a lot on the fuel. The most

323
00:23:11.039 --> 00:23:15.920
polluting rocket engines are the solid rocket
motors, so look at you Artimis and

324
00:23:15.039 --> 00:23:22.839
Shuttle. Those are use and aluminum
ammonia compound and it's fairly toxic stuff.

325
00:23:22.839 --> 00:23:26.599
Again, doesn't those only burn for
a couple of minutes, but still it's

326
00:23:26.640 --> 00:23:30.119
a lot, you know, Speaking
of that comment that you read from Scott,

327
00:23:30.680 --> 00:23:36.880
I know this isn't an air travel
geek out, but are there any

328
00:23:37.279 --> 00:23:42.839
are there any updates in terms of
more eco friendly flight fuels? Slash methods

329
00:23:44.720 --> 00:23:49.279
that actually are interesting to you.
Yeah, not really, but understand interesting

330
00:23:49.400 --> 00:23:55.599
is not a good idea anyway.
They certainly continue to push on what on

331
00:23:55.839 --> 00:24:02.000
zero carbon fuels, but those are
fuels grown biology and considered zero carbon because

332
00:24:02.000 --> 00:24:06.039
you're not getting new carbon out of
the out of the environment and adding it

333
00:24:06.119 --> 00:24:08.039
in. This is taking carbon it's
already there. You know, you grow

334
00:24:08.119 --> 00:24:11.759
algae by it consuming carbon dioxide,
and then you're putting it back into the

335
00:24:11.839 --> 00:24:15.119
environment again as you turn it into
jet fuel and burn it. It's just

336
00:24:15.799 --> 00:24:22.079
much more expensive than traditional aviation fuel. So I saw this past year on

337
00:24:22.200 --> 00:24:26.680
Facebook and I don't know how and
I have since, uh, you know,

338
00:24:26.079 --> 00:24:30.440
hidden these posts were gotten rid of
the messages. But it was some

339
00:24:30.480 --> 00:24:38.440
sort of new science kind of you
know, stuff that people crap science basically,

340
00:24:38.519 --> 00:24:42.359
and yeah, it was snake oil
science. So it was about this

341
00:24:42.599 --> 00:24:51.000
gigantic plane that is, you know, not built yet but supposedly nuclear powered

342
00:24:52.319 --> 00:24:59.440
and can fly continuously around the Earth. And basically you take a little plane

343
00:24:59.519 --> 00:25:03.000
and connect to it and then get
on it and you can like live in

344
00:25:03.000 --> 00:25:07.279
it and there's swimming pools and communities. It was just over the top.

345
00:25:07.359 --> 00:25:12.559
Well and the US military looks seriously
at making a nuclear powered bomber, yeah,

346
00:25:12.680 --> 00:25:17.519
to drop nukes, because that it
could fly continuously. It's just that

347
00:25:17.799 --> 00:25:22.359
to build a reactor with enough energy
to keep flying like that, it's very

348
00:25:22.400 --> 00:25:26.680
heavy and it has and it's very
dangerous. So yeah, especially if you

349
00:25:26.039 --> 00:25:30.240
if you blanket the Earth through nuclear
bombs, what are you flying over or

350
00:25:30.319 --> 00:25:32.400
too or where are you gonna fly? But where are you gonna land?

351
00:25:32.480 --> 00:25:36.839
Kind of slow things down there here? Yeah, And I'm not I don't

352
00:25:36.839 --> 00:25:38.720
particularly want to do a nuclear weapons
geek out. We're not in a great

353
00:25:38.880 --> 00:25:48.079
time with nuclear safety. No,
But yeah, the the emissions around rocketry,

354
00:25:48.359 --> 00:25:52.759
they're an issue. I mean,
you would think that the hydrogen engines,

355
00:25:52.039 --> 00:25:56.400
the hydro lockx engines like they used
on the Shuttle, the ARES twenty

356
00:25:56.440 --> 00:25:59.839
fives, would be low emission,
except that they're so energetic. They don't

357
00:25:59.880 --> 00:26:03.720
just make water when they combine like
with auction liqui hydrogen together with that energy

358
00:26:03.839 --> 00:26:07.359
level they also make they rip nitrogen
out of the atmosphere in the process and

359
00:26:07.440 --> 00:26:12.039
make nitroxies. They make hydroxyls.
Like it's just a very energetic reaction.

360
00:26:12.519 --> 00:26:17.960
What about blimps, But it's small
compared to the other emission source. What

361
00:26:18.000 --> 00:26:21.119
about blimp technology? Has it gotten
any better? I know you're not going

362
00:26:21.200 --> 00:26:23.000
to get there much faster, but
no, no, you're gonna get much

363
00:26:23.039 --> 00:26:26.799
slower. And yeah, I know
the biggest blimp in the world ever is

364
00:26:26.880 --> 00:26:30.559
currently being test flown. It's been
called the Walrus. But then again,

365
00:26:30.599 --> 00:26:36.160
you could make a hotel in the
sky with a blimp. Yeah you know

366
00:26:36.440 --> 00:26:38.359
that, you would actually want to
spend time. But now you're having a

367
00:26:38.400 --> 00:26:42.599
long emissions while you're up there for
ages, right, and yeah, you

368
00:26:42.640 --> 00:26:45.759
got to feed those people, so
now you're running supplies up to them.

369
00:26:45.799 --> 00:26:51.279
Like this, math gets difficult.
It's better to travel in less time.

370
00:26:51.440 --> 00:26:55.799
And would they do it? Dave
Matthews train bridge thing to get rid of

371
00:26:55.839 --> 00:26:59.839
the waste. I don't want to
think about what drops out of that thing.

372
00:27:00.160 --> 00:27:03.599
Yeah, all right, enough of
that, I'm gonna I want to

373
00:27:03.640 --> 00:27:07.480
wrap up on SpaceX by stalking and
talking about Starship, because in twenty twenty

374
00:27:07.480 --> 00:27:12.240
three we had the first flights of
something that starship shape. Yes, there

375
00:27:12.319 --> 00:27:18.359
was hoppers and things before that,
but the real stack, the largest rocket

376
00:27:18.400 --> 00:27:22.559
in the world, flew twice last
year on test flight. The first one

377
00:27:22.640 --> 00:27:26.799
was in April on April twentieth.
Yeah, yeah, for twenty. In

378
00:27:26.839 --> 00:27:30.480
fact, I'm debating why. I
still wonder why Elon did this flight.

379
00:27:30.559 --> 00:27:34.559
It made no sense. It was
an obsolete rocket designed. They would never

380
00:27:34.599 --> 00:27:41.119
fly that configuration again. It was
an obsolete engine setup. And you probably

381
00:27:41.160 --> 00:27:45.839
sell this on the news. It
did tremendous damage to the pad. Like

382
00:27:45.880 --> 00:27:48.559
they had lots of rockets, but
they only had one pad. Yeah,

383
00:27:48.599 --> 00:27:55.000
and so when they rocket, when
the heavy booster ignited, three of the

384
00:27:55.039 --> 00:28:00.680
engines failed on ignition, and so
the thrust aweight ratio was almost into one

385
00:28:00.559 --> 00:28:06.640
and so he climbed out really slowly, and that just blasted the pad.

386
00:28:06.839 --> 00:28:11.400
It dug a twenty foot hole foot
deep hole underneath the pad. It blew

387
00:28:11.960 --> 00:28:18.000
concrete for miles around. It blew
dust even further. There's great video of

388
00:28:18.079 --> 00:28:22.200
a camera, an empty camera van. Nobody's in it, but there's all

389
00:28:22.200 --> 00:28:26.039
these cameras on it just getting spiked
by a chunk of concrete. Thankes,

390
00:28:26.720 --> 00:28:29.759
it was I'm and it was a
bit of an environmental disaster. That is

391
00:28:29.799 --> 00:28:34.240
a remember sensitive wetlands. So honestly
it set the starship program back because it

392
00:28:34.279 --> 00:28:38.119
took time to fix it. They
put a water to lose system in to

393
00:28:38.240 --> 00:28:42.039
help suppress that, which, by
the way, they already had under construction,

394
00:28:42.240 --> 00:28:45.559
like the parts were arriving even before
the flight. She gets back to

395
00:28:45.799 --> 00:28:49.799
why why would he do this flight? It damaged the pad and create all

396
00:28:49.799 --> 00:28:53.359
these problems. Yeah, and it
was really studying, you know, a

397
00:28:53.400 --> 00:28:57.319
stumper for me, the best idea
I've had. There's two thoughts. What

398
00:28:57.559 --> 00:29:02.839
is he does have investors and they
wanted to see something fly, and so

399
00:29:03.480 --> 00:29:06.359
they were basically ready, let's go. How bad could it be, not

400
00:29:06.559 --> 00:29:11.440
anticipating that he would shred the pad. And the second was a recruiting problem,

401
00:29:11.480 --> 00:29:15.079
that this flight would be the flight
that got new engineers on board,

402
00:29:15.119 --> 00:29:21.640
because by all accounts, Elon burns
smart people out and so they were always

403
00:29:21.680 --> 00:29:26.039
looking for new talent and somebody flying
a rocket is compelling to those who want

404
00:29:26.119 --> 00:29:30.559
to make rock. Sure and in
the end of flight did not go over

405
00:29:30.599 --> 00:29:33.279
it, they still learned from it
without without a doubt. But yeah,

406
00:29:33.279 --> 00:29:37.799
they had multiple engine failures on climb
out, their separation from the furt between

407
00:29:37.839 --> 00:29:42.920
the stages failed, their self destruct
failed too, so the self destructions went

408
00:29:44.039 --> 00:29:47.680
off. But because the tanks were
made a stainless steel. They held together

409
00:29:47.839 --> 00:29:52.440
for a couple of minutes before they
finally ripped themselves apart, so it destructed

410
00:29:52.720 --> 00:29:57.000
in the sky and jumped into the
ocean and fell into the ocean. That's

411
00:29:57.039 --> 00:30:02.640
right, ye, which you know
the second flight did too, and many

412
00:30:02.680 --> 00:30:07.119
flights will as they learn. Yeah, So I mean I'm not pleased with

413
00:30:07.160 --> 00:30:10.160
the first flight. It seemed like
a really dumb thing to do. Yes,

414
00:30:10.240 --> 00:30:11.839
somebody should have done the math about
the pad. I mean I think

415
00:30:11.880 --> 00:30:15.240
they had, but they didn't care. They didn't think it would be that

416
00:30:15.319 --> 00:30:18.319
bad. What's funny is, going
back over my notes for the twenty twenty

417
00:30:18.319 --> 00:30:22.480
two geek out, I mentioned the
fact that when they were doing static fires

418
00:30:22.799 --> 00:30:26.559
of Starship, they were talking about
the amount of pad damage that occurred.

419
00:30:26.079 --> 00:30:30.640
So, I mean they'd already done
tasks that we talked about that showed how

420
00:30:30.720 --> 00:30:34.039
much damage was going on. But
they fixed the pad. It took them

421
00:30:34.039 --> 00:30:37.799
a few months. It took longer
to get FAA qualification, and fish and

422
00:30:37.839 --> 00:30:41.240
Wildlife had to say as well,
but they got through all of that.

423
00:30:41.480 --> 00:30:45.599
They added this massive water delucism,
so a huge amount of water sprays up

424
00:30:45.680 --> 00:30:52.759
towards the rocket as the engines were
light to decrease the acoustic shock and to

425
00:30:52.839 --> 00:30:56.519
sort of strengthen the whole system.
All right, So then by this November

426
00:30:56.599 --> 00:31:00.759
we're ready for the second Starship flight. Now they've upgraded the pad obviously with

427
00:31:00.839 --> 00:31:04.640
the water to lose system, and
repaired all the damage. They've also upgraded

428
00:31:04.640 --> 00:31:11.640
the rocket extensively to better engines.
They're now using electric gimbling instead of hydraulic

429
00:31:11.839 --> 00:31:14.880
like the earlier flight, which they
said they were gonna use electric all along.

430
00:31:15.200 --> 00:31:21.160
They also changed the staging system,
so you know, traditionally in American

431
00:31:21.240 --> 00:31:27.279
spacecraft, the staging system is a
shut down ullage system. So they the

432
00:31:27.319 --> 00:31:30.839
lower stage will shut down and then
there'll be a little ulage booster to stabilize

433
00:31:30.880 --> 00:31:33.759
things in the two rockets. The
two pieces will separate and in the upper

434
00:31:33.799 --> 00:31:38.200
stage will light. What does uledge
mean. Pullage is literally little thrusters just

435
00:31:38.319 --> 00:31:42.279
enough to settle the fuel to be
able to fire the next engine up.

436
00:31:42.319 --> 00:31:47.319
But they do it as a cold
stage. The two pieces separate with all

437
00:31:47.319 --> 00:31:49.839
the engines off, and then the
upper engine fires up and off the coast.

438
00:31:51.400 --> 00:31:53.079
But that's not the only way to
go about things, and Elon switched

439
00:31:53.079 --> 00:31:59.480
over to a hot stage now the
Russians used hot staging for the so used

440
00:31:59.559 --> 00:32:02.920
rockets. This is where literally you
light the engine of the upper stage while

441
00:32:02.960 --> 00:32:07.519
still attached to the lower stage.
Although rapidly they push each other apart.

442
00:32:08.000 --> 00:32:13.559
Now this sounds bad, right,
yeah. So the way you do this

443
00:32:13.720 --> 00:32:16.480
is that you have an interstage layer
between the two parts that has VENs in

444
00:32:16.519 --> 00:32:20.880
it, someplace for the gas to
go, and you armor the top of

445
00:32:20.960 --> 00:32:23.359
the fuel tank on the lower stage
so that you can take the blast.

446
00:32:23.799 --> 00:32:30.440
And that's what they did. The
upside to that approach is that it's energetically

447
00:32:30.440 --> 00:32:35.519
efficient. You're able to fire the
upper stage very quickly, you don't have

448
00:32:35.559 --> 00:32:37.720
to wait for separation and stuff,
so you ultimately are going to get more

449
00:32:38.640 --> 00:32:45.519
delta V into orbit. And so
for this second flight in November, it

450
00:32:45.599 --> 00:32:49.319
went pretty well. A all thirty
three engines lit. In fact, they

451
00:32:49.319 --> 00:32:52.440
were gorgeous. You know, when
these really high performance engines run, they

452
00:32:52.480 --> 00:32:57.119
create this thing called a mock diamond, basically a shock wave coming out of

453
00:32:57.160 --> 00:33:00.400
the bell and this is thirty three
of them, so there was literally a

454
00:33:00.519 --> 00:33:07.720
mock diamond of mock diamonds. So
the engines combined into their own additional shockwave,

455
00:33:07.759 --> 00:33:10.319
which was. It's just extraordinary to
look at. And the first stage

456
00:33:10.359 --> 00:33:15.359
burnt its duration perfectly, and then
they had to do separation, which is

457
00:33:15.359 --> 00:33:19.200
that hot staging. And so what
they did was they shut down most of

458
00:33:19.240 --> 00:33:22.640
the engines on the first stage,
not all of them, because the intent

459
00:33:22.799 --> 00:33:25.359
was to not attempt a landing,
but at least attempt to fly the first

460
00:33:25.359 --> 00:33:30.440
stage away. When this is fully
operational, they do want to recover both

461
00:33:30.440 --> 00:33:32.920
stages ultimately, right, so they
were going to attempt this, So they

462
00:33:34.480 --> 00:33:37.640
they throttle down the engines, but
they have thirty three engines still shut down,

463
00:33:37.680 --> 00:33:39.240
so they didn't shut them all off
at once because the shock would be

464
00:33:39.319 --> 00:33:44.920
too much. They shut them down
in groups. It was really quite beautiful

465
00:33:44.920 --> 00:33:46.960
to see the outer ring of engines
shut off, then an inner ring,

466
00:33:47.000 --> 00:33:50.079
and then the next ring, until
it was just down to the three that

467
00:33:50.119 --> 00:33:54.279
were burning sort of minimum power.
And then the upper stage lit and the

468
00:33:54.359 --> 00:33:59.319
gases blew out through the vents and
the upper stage fired away, and then

469
00:33:59.359 --> 00:34:02.319
the lower stage started to maneuver.
Uh and then shortly after that had a

470
00:34:02.480 --> 00:34:09.440
rapid unscheduled disassembly. Yeah, I
loved that. Yeah, rapid unscheduled disassembly.

471
00:34:12.320 --> 00:34:16.119
So did this happen while it was
still inside the Earth's atmosphere or outside

472
00:34:16.440 --> 00:34:20.639
it's getting high, so you know, atmosphere, there's not like there's a

473
00:34:20.679 --> 00:34:22.159
clear end to appen. No,
no, no, yeah, but yeah

474
00:34:22.159 --> 00:34:24.559
they were, they were pretty high
up by the time they stage you.

475
00:34:24.599 --> 00:34:30.440
But again only a two and a
half three minute burn before the separation occurred.

476
00:34:30.480 --> 00:34:35.880
So it brings me to a curious
question, which is, and forgive

477
00:34:35.920 --> 00:34:39.159
my ignorance, but I feel like
I'm I'm not alone in this ignorance.

478
00:34:39.159 --> 00:34:45.360
Here. When you're when you're swimming, you're pushing against water, right,

479
00:34:45.400 --> 00:34:52.840
and it's very dense, and you
can you can move fast. Right when

480
00:34:52.920 --> 00:34:57.280
you're in the Earth's atmosphere, you
have gravity pulling you down, but you

481
00:34:57.360 --> 00:35:01.199
also have air to push against.
Right when you black those thrusters. If

482
00:35:01.239 --> 00:35:08.599
you're around in space right and you're
not is bound to the Earth by gravity

483
00:35:08.719 --> 00:35:15.039
and there's no atmosphere to push against
when you fire thrusters, is there,

484
00:35:15.199 --> 00:35:20.079
is it less effective because there's nothing
to push against, or well, one

485
00:35:20.079 --> 00:35:22.119
would argue it's more effective because there's
nothing holding you back. Either. In

486
00:35:22.239 --> 00:35:29.320
the end, what a rocket engine
does is throws mass out its bell and

487
00:35:29.519 --> 00:35:35.360
that's what's That's what's pushing your rocket
forward. Right, You're literally tossing that

488
00:35:35.480 --> 00:35:39.880
mass, that combusted fuel at velocity
out the back. You don't have to

489
00:35:39.880 --> 00:35:45.360
combust it. You could literally just
pressurize a nitrogen container and leed that out

490
00:35:45.400 --> 00:35:49.360
and we'll give you thrust as well. But it comes down to the mass

491
00:35:49.360 --> 00:35:52.599
that you throw out the belt,
right, So I imagine that's where the

492
00:35:52.639 --> 00:35:58.559
math comes in. It's like what
the cost benefit analysis of fuel expenditure to

493
00:35:59.519 --> 00:36:01.800
resist the I mean, I guess
you have that with every vehicle, right.

494
00:36:01.880 --> 00:36:06.440
Well, the important part here is
can you throw enough mass at high

495
00:36:06.519 --> 00:36:09.360
enough velocity. The more velocity you
have, the more net thrust you're going

496
00:36:09.400 --> 00:36:14.239
to get. And so that's why
we talk about these very high performance engines.

497
00:36:14.599 --> 00:36:21.119
Three thousand bar pressure inside that combustion
chamber accelerates that burnt fuel and an

498
00:36:21.159 --> 00:36:25.760
extraordinary rate, and that it turns
into more effective thrust. Okay, and

499
00:36:25.800 --> 00:36:29.159
the atmosphere has very little to do
with it. In fact, it's an

500
00:36:29.159 --> 00:36:32.559
impediment. The nose of that rocket
was heating up as it was accelerating through

501
00:36:32.559 --> 00:36:37.079
the atmosphere because it was moving so
quickly. And I suppose you know in

502
00:36:37.239 --> 00:36:40.880
getting back to the water things.
Swimming through water takes more energy because you

503
00:36:40.960 --> 00:36:45.960
have more resistance. Yes, right, and we do all these hydrogenamic effects

504
00:36:46.000 --> 00:36:50.280
to try and reduce that resistance as
much as possible. Yeah, okay,

505
00:36:51.039 --> 00:36:54.320
so successful separation. It was beautiful. It looks like what went wrong with

506
00:36:54.360 --> 00:36:59.559
the first stages They throttled down a
little too much and so the fuel stopped

507
00:36:59.559 --> 00:37:02.199
sitting at the bottom of the tanks
and actually bounced upward in the tank.

508
00:37:02.559 --> 00:37:06.440
And then as they throttled back up, its slammed back down to the bottom

509
00:37:06.480 --> 00:37:09.199
of the tank and it broke things. And so if you watch the footage

510
00:37:09.239 --> 00:37:15.519
of the first stage maneuvering away,
you start seeing gas emitting from different directions,

511
00:37:15.519 --> 00:37:20.079
the kind of directions it said,
that's not right. And then shortly

512
00:37:20.119 --> 00:37:24.360
after that there was the RUD and
it was not a commanded RUD. So

513
00:37:24.639 --> 00:37:29.440
I mean, there is a self
destruct system and the software does make sure

514
00:37:29.440 --> 00:37:31.559
that the rocket is flying down it's
lane the safe air can flying and if

515
00:37:31.599 --> 00:37:35.880
it goes out of that land in
any way, it'll destroy it. That

516
00:37:35.880 --> 00:37:39.960
that didn't happen. Did Elon come
up with that term rapid unscheduled disassembly on

517
00:37:40.280 --> 00:37:44.880
schedule, unplanned disassembly. No,
it's it's an industry term. But he

518
00:37:44.920 --> 00:37:46.559
does love it is he uses it
a lot. Well, yeah, I

519
00:37:46.559 --> 00:37:50.599
mean, and you kind of have
it tongue in cheek now right, it's

520
00:37:50.679 --> 00:37:53.199
yeah, it's everybody knows what you're
talking about. In wink wink, you

521
00:37:53.239 --> 00:37:57.559
know. Yeah, And again the
news often talks about, you know,

522
00:37:58.079 --> 00:38:00.119
Elon flies another rocket and it fails. But it's like, listen, this

523
00:38:00.199 --> 00:38:04.639
is what testing, dynamic testing looks
like. Now I get it. Spending

524
00:38:04.719 --> 00:38:07.000
years planning and planning and planning to
have one perfect flight. It's like,

525
00:38:07.039 --> 00:38:10.639
you fly it, you blew it
up, you learn. And clearly there

526
00:38:10.679 --> 00:38:14.920
was progress between flight one and flight
two. The upper stage, by the

527
00:38:14.920 --> 00:38:19.960
way, went on almost to orbit. It burned very well, but it

528
00:38:20.000 --> 00:38:22.800
did seem to have some There was
a point towards the end the of the

529
00:38:22.800 --> 00:38:28.880
flight when it would have gone into
orbit where the oxygen tank rate consumption went

530
00:38:28.960 --> 00:38:35.000
up, so it's likely that the
tank ruptured and started losing fuel. And

531
00:38:35.079 --> 00:38:38.039
once that had happened, now they
did destroy it because they knew it wasn't

532
00:38:38.079 --> 00:38:40.440
going to get where it was they
wanted it to get to, and so

533
00:38:40.440 --> 00:38:45.199
it was safer to wreck it it
at its highest altitude, so the parts

534
00:38:45.239 --> 00:38:51.880
broke up as much as possible.
That being said an amateur astronomer in Puerto

535
00:38:51.960 --> 00:38:55.800
Rico who wanted to try and get
pictures of it going overhead managed to get

536
00:38:55.840 --> 00:39:04.239
footage of the a portion of the
nose of Starship after destruction tumbling. Wow.

537
00:39:04.880 --> 00:39:07.199
Wow, it was just an extraordinary
fine to get that video, and

538
00:39:07.239 --> 00:39:12.280
it's amazing. But it's like,
yeah, that was that's the header tank

539
00:39:12.360 --> 00:39:15.599
looks like it was still intact and
still leaking fuel and this silvery thing is

540
00:39:15.599 --> 00:39:21.920
tumbling end over end as it falls
into the sea. So an extraordinary second

541
00:39:22.000 --> 00:39:27.719
flight. The most important thing is
they did not wreck the pad. The

542
00:39:28.280 --> 00:39:35.119
footage afterwards showed that the lift off
did strip all the paint off of everything,

543
00:39:35.920 --> 00:39:38.400
and because it's right by the ocean, within hours russ started appearing,

544
00:39:38.519 --> 00:39:43.599
so they do have to quickly repaint
it and so forth. There is some

545
00:39:43.800 --> 00:39:46.880
damage that the pad that quick disconnect
systems were damaged. The launch mounts,

546
00:39:46.920 --> 00:39:50.920
the things that actually hold the rocket
down until it's time for to lift off,

547
00:39:51.639 --> 00:39:54.480
all had to be replaced. Do
you have a link to that video

548
00:39:54.880 --> 00:40:00.559
of the amateurs, Yeah, I'll
included in the show note, but yeah,

549
00:40:00.800 --> 00:40:04.679
i'd love to see that that.
Both the second flight's amazing and the

550
00:40:04.760 --> 00:40:09.320
video of the tumbling piece is amazing. It's all great. So obviously more

551
00:40:09.400 --> 00:40:14.119
upgrades to be done to the pad. They're changing the tank system around,

552
00:40:14.679 --> 00:40:20.320
but for the most part, a
very successful step forward and again largest rocket

553
00:40:20.440 --> 00:40:24.079
ever flown both by height and by
mass fully fueled. That whole rocket was

554
00:40:24.199 --> 00:40:30.440
seventy five hundred metric tons. Wow, that's like the weight of a destroyer

555
00:40:32.079 --> 00:40:39.840
and you made it fly. So
yeah, it's they're planning another flight for

556
00:40:40.079 --> 00:40:44.760
first quarter to twenty twenty four.
Five is an intempt to fly four starships

557
00:40:44.960 --> 00:40:50.199
next year in their learning because this
is the vehicle that's supposed to become the

558
00:40:50.280 --> 00:40:55.599
Lunar Lander. In other rocket news, not a lot happened in twenty twenty

559
00:40:55.599 --> 00:41:00.719
three. We've been talking about Blue
Origins New Glen, which is a seven

560
00:41:00.760 --> 00:41:05.840
meter rocket. This is Bezos's company. They did fire their CEO this year,

561
00:41:06.039 --> 00:41:08.719
and Bezos obviously a stepped down a
CEO of Amazon, but he's still

562
00:41:08.760 --> 00:41:14.519
on the chair. He's got a
new guy into Blue Origin. New Glenn

563
00:41:14.599 --> 00:41:20.039
is years late. They've been moving
some hardware around at the Cape so it

564
00:41:20.079 --> 00:41:24.199
looks like they've actually built something,
and he's swearing that new Glen's going to

565
00:41:24.239 --> 00:41:28.039
fly in the first quarter of twenty
four and then it's going to have a

566
00:41:28.079 --> 00:41:30.400
working payload. So their first Chess
flight is actually going to be a working

567
00:41:30.400 --> 00:41:32.840
payload, which is a little bit
crazy to me. But okay, you

568
00:41:32.840 --> 00:41:37.039
do you when you say working payload, you're not talking about people, no

569
00:41:37.159 --> 00:41:40.960
spacecraft? Okay, Yeah, like
they often to with first flights. They

570
00:41:42.000 --> 00:41:45.320
literally put a billet of concrete in
for the first flight of fulk and heavy.

571
00:41:45.639 --> 00:41:51.639
Elon put his Tesla roadster in right
right. What a great shot that

572
00:41:51.840 --> 00:41:54.760
was. Yeah, profound moment.
We talked about it. We made a

573
00:41:54.800 --> 00:42:00.599
whole show around that. Yeah,
that whole moment. But normal for first

574
00:42:00.599 --> 00:42:04.800
flights you just use a dummy payload
because the risk is high. He's pretty

575
00:42:04.800 --> 00:42:07.280
confident and so they're going to actually
take a payload in their first flight.

576
00:42:08.599 --> 00:42:13.639
The United Launch Alliance these are the
guys who used to run the Shuttle then

577
00:42:13.760 --> 00:42:17.000
and have been running the Atlas five
in Delta four rockets, both of which

578
00:42:17.039 --> 00:42:20.760
are being retired. No more are
being built. They're using up the last

579
00:42:20.760 --> 00:42:24.199
of them. Have a new rocket. They've been developing four years called Vulcan,

580
00:42:25.199 --> 00:42:30.320
also a methylox rocket like Starship,
much smaller, a much more reasonable

581
00:42:30.360 --> 00:42:35.320
sized rocket. They promised that they
would fly in twenty two than they promised

582
00:42:35.320 --> 00:42:38.239
in twenty three. They still in
flood. There is a rocket on the

583
00:42:38.320 --> 00:42:42.440
pad that they're doing testing with and
they swear it'll fly in twenty four.

584
00:42:43.639 --> 00:42:46.760
I'd also note that there are rumors
flying around that United Launch Alliance is on

585
00:42:46.840 --> 00:42:50.840
the market. It's going to get
sold and it might even complete early in

586
00:42:50.920 --> 00:42:54.880
twenty four. One of the possible
buyers being bluored. What about Virgin Galactic.

587
00:42:55.119 --> 00:43:04.440
So Virgin Galactic had their first paid
tourist flight. So this is the

588
00:43:04.480 --> 00:43:08.719
Spaceship two, the thing developed originally
by Bert Rutan, that gets lifted by

589
00:43:08.800 --> 00:43:14.119
the White Night by this carrier aircraft
up to about sixty thousand feet and they

590
00:43:14.199 --> 00:43:20.159
drop it and it fires a very
odd Nitrox rocket engine. It gets up

591
00:43:20.159 --> 00:43:22.960
to about three hundred thousand feet above
the carbon line. You get about a

592
00:43:22.000 --> 00:43:28.599
minute or two of free fall and
then it reorients. The vehicle turns its

593
00:43:29.599 --> 00:43:32.280
tailplanes in this particular angle called the
shuttlecock mode, so they can re enter

594
00:43:32.360 --> 00:43:38.559
under control, and then it comes
in for a landing and you know you

595
00:43:38.599 --> 00:43:44.079
can get your two minutes of zero
G for a quarter million dollars something like

596
00:43:44.079 --> 00:43:46.639
that. So, yeah, they
had their first flight and then they didn't

597
00:43:46.639 --> 00:43:50.719
fly again. They swear they're going
to fly again in twenty four where New

598
00:43:50.719 --> 00:43:53.800
Shepherd had a bunch of flights and
then they were doing it. They had

599
00:43:53.800 --> 00:44:00.079
an unmanned flight with some experiments on
board and the booster failed. The separation

600
00:44:00.159 --> 00:44:02.280
system worked perfectly. If people have
been aboard, I think they would have

601
00:44:02.280 --> 00:44:07.960
been fined if separation system fired.
The capsule landed on parachute. They rocket

602
00:44:08.039 --> 00:44:12.639
was a total loss, and they
have made some improvements. They say,

603
00:44:12.639 --> 00:44:15.400
what's not gonna happen again, and
they're going back to flight next year as

604
00:44:15.400 --> 00:44:17.119
well. Huh. All right,
should we take a break. Yeah,

605
00:44:17.199 --> 00:44:20.199
let's take a break and then we'll
talk about the space station. All right.

606
00:44:20.239 --> 00:44:22.760
We'll be right back with more geeking
out after these very important messages,

607
00:44:27.960 --> 00:44:31.360
and we're back att net Rocks geek
Out Edition, the Space geek Out Show

608
00:44:31.400 --> 00:44:36.079
of twenty twenty three. I'm Carl
Franklin. That's Richard Campbell, the brain's

609
00:44:36.119 --> 00:44:39.599
behind this show. And if you've
never heard of geek out before. There's

610
00:44:39.639 --> 00:44:45.199
a lot of them. If you
just search for the tag geek out or

611
00:44:45.239 --> 00:44:52.280
search for geek you'll find them all. And Richard likes to do research on

612
00:44:52.320 --> 00:44:55.239
a particular topic and then tell us
what he's found. Yeah, a lot

613
00:44:55.320 --> 00:45:00.320
of these are notes I took throughout
the year as I saw interesting things.

614
00:45:00.639 --> 00:45:04.159
But you still have this push at
the end of the year to sit down

615
00:45:04.199 --> 00:45:07.920
and organize it, figure out what
I missed, you know, go back

616
00:45:07.920 --> 00:45:09.760
and check some things, double checks
some facts, you know, try and

617
00:45:09.840 --> 00:45:14.119
you got to prioritize these. The
show is long, but it could be

618
00:45:14.199 --> 00:45:20.239
way longer. Yeah. International Space
Station not a lot of news. You

619
00:45:20.280 --> 00:45:28.320
know why it's busy. You know, it's the twenty fifth anniversary of the

620
00:45:28.320 --> 00:45:31.079
first components going up. The first
operational mode was in nineteen ninety eight and

621
00:45:31.119 --> 00:45:37.320
here we are in twenty twenty three
and it's at capacity. This has you

622
00:45:37.320 --> 00:45:40.840
know, six astronauts on it all
of the time with other visitors. On

623
00:45:40.880 --> 00:45:45.519
top of that, they are running
the most number of experiments ever run in

624
00:45:45.559 --> 00:45:50.199
the year was twenty twenty three.
So they are at work as a laboratory.

625
00:45:50.360 --> 00:45:54.280
Was there some rumblings about shutting it
down, Yes, and for a

626
00:45:54.320 --> 00:45:58.239
few reON. One is it has
a lifespan. Yeah, right, parts

627
00:45:58.280 --> 00:46:00.280
wear out, no two ways about
it. Original plan was to run it

628
00:46:00.320 --> 00:46:04.119
till twenty twenty five. Now they're
talking about trying to keep it going to

629
00:46:04.159 --> 00:46:07.559
twenty thirty. The oldest components are
also some of the most vital components,

630
00:46:07.639 --> 00:46:12.719
and there are Russian and they're having
more problems than the others now, you

631
00:46:12.840 --> 00:46:15.239
know, you can blame that on
Russian hardware. The Russians have built a

632
00:46:15.280 --> 00:46:19.400
lot of space stations. They kind
of know what they're doing, but they're

633
00:46:19.440 --> 00:46:22.679
all kind of broke also, you
know, Wars notwithstanding, and they are

634
00:46:22.719 --> 00:46:25.760
still working together. You know,
for as much as there's a conflict between

635
00:46:25.760 --> 00:46:30.800
the Western Russia, the space station
still depends on those two getting along.

636
00:46:30.480 --> 00:46:35.440
The Russians have made noises about wanting
to take their parts and separate from the

637
00:46:35.480 --> 00:46:38.440
rest of the station in twenty five. Screw you guys, I'm going out

638
00:46:40.760 --> 00:46:44.440
well. And there's a case to
be made for some of the Science Lab

639
00:46:44.480 --> 00:46:49.320
parts on the US side that are
younger, that were flown in the aughts,

640
00:46:50.000 --> 00:46:53.320
that still have another few years in
it. In facts, Axiom Space,

641
00:46:54.000 --> 00:46:59.280
which is a group of former NASA
folks are starting to build their own

642
00:46:59.320 --> 00:47:06.239
space station, and they've been flying
missions to the space station on Falcon nine

643
00:47:06.360 --> 00:47:12.599
crew dragons for money, and so
they want to actually build out a free

644
00:47:12.599 --> 00:47:16.000
flying space station by building it again
connected to the International Space Station. And

645
00:47:16.039 --> 00:47:22.280
now there's a conversation going on about
maybe they will take the science module with

646
00:47:22.320 --> 00:47:25.559
them when they separate off as the
International Space Station is ending, so there's

647
00:47:25.599 --> 00:47:30.079
lots of debate about how to end
it. One of the biggest issues being

648
00:47:30.480 --> 00:47:32.320
the International Space Station is the largest
thing ever flown in space. It was

649
00:47:32.320 --> 00:47:35.440
assembled up there, it took a
long time. It is very heavy,

650
00:47:35.480 --> 00:47:38.440
it's four hundred and fifty metric tons, and so de orbiting it in a

651
00:47:38.519 --> 00:47:45.360
controlled way is a important because that
is going to a lot of that mass

652
00:47:45.360 --> 00:47:51.039
will make it to the ground and
b complicated and expensive. They need to

653
00:47:51.039 --> 00:47:54.480
build. They need to build a
high power tug to actually decelerate enough so

654
00:47:54.599 --> 00:47:59.280
they can aim it for what they
call Point Nemo, which is in the

655
00:47:59.320 --> 00:48:04.599
southern the Pacific Ocean. That's where
they generally drop old spacecraft because there's nothing

656
00:48:04.639 --> 00:48:07.840
there. It's a safe place to
drop things off. What I know about

657
00:48:07.880 --> 00:48:13.280
the ISS is that it's modular,
yes, So that in the international part

658
00:48:13.480 --> 00:48:16.960
means that Canada built the module,
the United States built the module, and

659
00:48:17.039 --> 00:48:22.119
the you know European countries, yes, et cetera, a Russia. So

660
00:48:22.440 --> 00:48:28.639
I guess it's is it Is it
crazy to think that you could decouple the

661
00:48:28.719 --> 00:48:31.480
modules and replace them if they're wearing
out. I mean, that's one of

662
00:48:31.519 --> 00:48:36.159
the thoughts. And if I think
if conditions were better with the Russians,

663
00:48:36.199 --> 00:48:39.119
there's a conversation to be had about
replacing the what they call the FGP or

664
00:48:39.159 --> 00:48:44.400
the main control module. But the
conditions aren't better. There's also never it's

665
00:48:44.400 --> 00:48:47.519
never been done. One of the
weird things that happens in space is that

666
00:48:47.679 --> 00:48:52.679
metals tend to fuse together. Really, so there is a question as to

667
00:48:52.719 --> 00:48:58.159
whether or not those components that have
been that have been docked together now for

668
00:48:58.239 --> 00:49:01.760
twenty years, whether they would come
apart. We just don't know. Is

669
00:49:01.800 --> 00:49:07.639
it because the extreme temperature changes and
things? Yeah, and yeah, this

670
00:49:07.800 --> 00:49:10.880
is weird effect that happens up there
with metal welding. You have these very

671
00:49:10.920 --> 00:49:16.000
flat surfaces and they meet up and
over time they literally fuse together. They

672
00:49:16.000 --> 00:49:21.639
won't come apart. Wow, And
so you know, now you get into

673
00:49:21.679 --> 00:49:27.119
the economics of it, is it
cheaper to try and spend time dismantling this

674
00:49:27.239 --> 00:49:32.199
thing versus just fly a new one
now. And NASA has an initiative initiative

675
00:49:32.239 --> 00:49:36.400
now for commercial space stations. So
what they're saying is we're not going to

676
00:49:36.400 --> 00:49:39.719
build another space station, but we
will rent time on space stations. Here's

677
00:49:39.760 --> 00:49:43.599
what we expect from the space stations
that we rent time on. Their goal

678
00:49:43.679 --> 00:49:51.440
is to have multiple companies flying smaller
stations with that you can rent time on.

679
00:49:51.920 --> 00:49:54.920
These will probably be man tended the
way they built International Space Station.

680
00:49:54.960 --> 00:49:58.400
With the limits of the technology at
the time, there needs to be somebody

681
00:49:58.400 --> 00:50:00.719
on it all the time to maintain
it or you'll lose control of it.

682
00:50:01.039 --> 00:50:05.280
But technology is advanced enough now that
we could be man tended so that you

683
00:50:05.280 --> 00:50:08.400
could operate it remotely and then set
it up for people to go visit it,

684
00:50:08.400 --> 00:50:14.079
spend a month up there, and
then come back down. There's also

685
00:50:14.119 --> 00:50:17.679
different kinds of experiments you want to
do. The ISS is strictly a microgravity

686
00:50:17.760 --> 00:50:22.280
lab, so there's exactly for example, there is no experiments for centrifuge is

687
00:50:22.320 --> 00:50:28.880
on there because those vibrations affect other
microgravity experiments. So there's a taste to

688
00:50:28.920 --> 00:50:34.280
be made for building centrifugees in a
separate space station. We need to learn

689
00:50:34.400 --> 00:50:38.920
to simulate gravity for humans to have
extended stays in space. We generally limit

690
00:50:39.280 --> 00:50:44.199
space station astronauts to six months on
the station, and it takes them over

691
00:50:44.239 --> 00:50:47.559
a year to recover. So could
we put them in artificial gravity? Could

692
00:50:47.599 --> 00:50:52.639
we spin the space station so that
they could have enough gravity to stay healthy

693
00:50:52.800 --> 00:50:57.480
and be able to stay up for
longer? And we've never built anything that

694
00:50:57.480 --> 00:51:00.159
big. Yeah, weird things happened
to your Weird things happened to your bones.

695
00:51:00.400 --> 00:51:05.519
Muscles atrophy like you. Yeah,
you lose a calcim at a fairly

696
00:51:05.639 --> 00:51:07.960
alarming rate. You need to do
two and a half hours of exercise a

697
00:51:08.119 --> 00:51:12.639
day even to slow that process down. There are lots of problems, and

698
00:51:12.719 --> 00:51:16.320
one of the solutions would be to
create a centrifuge, a rotating ring so

699
00:51:16.360 --> 00:51:21.119
that you had enough gravitational effect to
keep your body functioning normally. But we've

700
00:51:21.119 --> 00:51:23.159
never done it. Is that what
they had in two thousand and one,

701
00:51:23.280 --> 00:51:27.960
Yes, a space honesty, a
centrifuge. Yeah, and Kubrick, being

702
00:51:28.000 --> 00:51:32.519
the crazy director that he is,
actually built one on a sound stage that

703
00:51:32.760 --> 00:51:37.760
rotated. It's crazy because he was
awesome. Yeah, you know, the

704
00:51:37.840 --> 00:51:39.400
whole idea that we you never actually
flew the moon, that it was actually

705
00:51:39.519 --> 00:51:43.159
Kubrick for him was like that might
be true, except that knowing Kubrick,

706
00:51:43.199 --> 00:51:46.079
he would have demanded to do it
on set. So they yes, I'll

707
00:51:46.079 --> 00:51:50.719
only do this, but only if
we shoot it on the moon. Yeah.

708
00:51:50.920 --> 00:51:53.960
Oh man. Anyway, I mean
that's the space station is at its

709
00:51:54.000 --> 00:51:58.199
peak right now. It is doing
the most work it's ever done. It

710
00:51:58.320 --> 00:52:02.639
is an extraordinary achievement by mankind.
It is a point of peace, you

711
00:52:02.679 --> 00:52:07.039
know, that's one place where they're
not fighting, and it is coming to

712
00:52:07.079 --> 00:52:10.280
the to an end. I'm also
excited that NASA is commercializing this the same

713
00:52:10.280 --> 00:52:16.800
way they've commercialized resupply of both crew
and cargo. Now they're going to commercialize

714
00:52:16.800 --> 00:52:24.760
it for the actual station itself.
Well, there's a good way to get

715
00:52:24.800 --> 00:52:30.000
money out of the one percent something
like that. Yeah. The speaking of

716
00:52:30.039 --> 00:52:37.440
the resupply part of the space station, there are two resupply offerings, right

717
00:52:37.599 --> 00:52:43.880
There's the one from SpaceX with their
cargo Dragon, and then there's also the

718
00:52:43.920 --> 00:52:47.880
one from Orbital Sciences, which is
the sickness. It's now owned by North

719
00:52:47.880 --> 00:52:52.000
of Rumant, Okay, but they
both resupply space station. And then on

720
00:52:52.079 --> 00:52:55.679
the crew side there's Crew Dragon.
There was supposed to be star Liner,

721
00:52:57.519 --> 00:53:04.320
which still isn't working. Whose genius
idea is that Boeing Boeing, Yeah,

722
00:53:04.960 --> 00:53:07.639
was going to build an alternative to
Crew Dragon. They didn't want to have

723
00:53:07.679 --> 00:53:12.199
redundancy, right, but it's gone
so badly. They did their one test

724
00:53:12.239 --> 00:53:16.840
flight to the station successfully after on
their second try and then they found so

725
00:53:16.840 --> 00:53:21.880
many problems they've now delayed the next
attempt, the next test flight to twenty

726
00:53:21.920 --> 00:53:25.639
twenty five. But one of the
competitors for the cargo resupply missions was the

727
00:53:25.760 --> 00:53:30.880
Dream Chaser. This is a little
lifting body based on the NASA's AHL twenty

728
00:53:30.239 --> 00:53:34.559
that looks like a mini shuttle,
basically made up of two components. You

729
00:53:34.559 --> 00:53:37.079
have the spacecraft that can re enter, and there's a cargo module that bolts

730
00:53:37.079 --> 00:53:42.039
on the back with solar panels and
stuff on it that you leave behind lifted

731
00:53:42.079 --> 00:53:45.559
on a rocket. So it typically
was supposed to fly on Atlas five now

732
00:53:45.559 --> 00:53:49.320
with fly on a vulcan wings fold
up to fit in the payload fair but

733
00:53:49.400 --> 00:53:52.159
it lost but they kept working on
it anyway, and with all of the

734
00:53:52.199 --> 00:53:57.239
problems around star Liner, NASA is
now supporting dream Chaser, and Dream Chaser

735
00:53:57.280 --> 00:54:04.000
is ready for a test flight.
Will actually be able to do resupply to

736
00:54:04.039 --> 00:54:07.960
the station. No crew yet,
but who knows in the future. What's

737
00:54:07.000 --> 00:54:12.920
interesting is that it has a return
payload capability, so the sickness craft the

738
00:54:12.920 --> 00:54:17.519
oneworl Sciences lifts more to the station
than Cargo Dragon can, but it has

739
00:54:17.519 --> 00:54:21.360
no return, so it just burns
up the atmosphere on the way down.

740
00:54:22.000 --> 00:54:24.639
Cargo Dragon does have a return.
They have a heat shield, so they're

741
00:54:24.639 --> 00:54:29.000
able to recover payloads, so you
can do experiments in space and bring them

742
00:54:29.039 --> 00:54:34.039
back. The problem is that it's
a capsule, so a it re enters

743
00:54:34.119 --> 00:54:37.199
under high gravitational stress, so that
can damage your experiments and it lands in

744
00:54:37.239 --> 00:54:40.320
the ocean, which is an environmental
problem, and then it has to be

745
00:54:40.360 --> 00:54:44.800
recovered, which means if you've got
a delicate experiment and say something that has

746
00:54:44.800 --> 00:54:49.639
to stay refrigerated, that kind of
thing, it's at risk. If Dream

747
00:54:49.719 --> 00:54:53.440
Chaser starts working, it can return
payload back to Earth, but it can

748
00:54:53.480 --> 00:55:01.159
also land on a runway, so
a lot less gravitational stress and be you

749
00:55:01.199 --> 00:55:06.400
know, quick back into under controlled
environments so you can recover an experiment quickly.

750
00:55:06.480 --> 00:55:09.239
So there is a case for Dream
Chaser, and they are pretty far

751
00:55:09.280 --> 00:55:12.960
along. They're supposed to fly.
They're supposed to be the second flight of

752
00:55:13.000 --> 00:55:15.440
the Vulcan. So the Vulcan's been
delayed a lot. The first flight for

753
00:55:15.480 --> 00:55:19.760
Vulcans supposed to carry a payload to
the moon. Brave but okay. For

754
00:55:19.800 --> 00:55:22.840
the second flight is supposed to be
in April of twenty four and it's supposed

755
00:55:22.840 --> 00:55:24.639
to be the dream Chaser test flight
to the station. No payloads, just

756
00:55:24.679 --> 00:55:29.079
a test flight. But exciting new
vehicle. Yeah, that is ex and

757
00:55:29.079 --> 00:55:31.280
one that could be turned into a
Mann vehicle at some point. Wow,

758
00:55:31.880 --> 00:55:37.639
do you personally want to take a
flight when it becomes feasible into space?

759
00:55:37.800 --> 00:55:43.079
You know that might be too late
for me. Yeah, I just you

760
00:55:43.079 --> 00:55:46.199
know, we were just a dev
intersection and I went to you know,

761
00:55:46.239 --> 00:55:51.599
we rented out part of Universal Studios
for the party. I went on a

762
00:55:51.599 --> 00:56:00.760
couple of those hogwart rides and I
was damaged with or without Scotch. Yeah.

763
00:56:00.800 --> 00:56:04.719
It was pretty sober to the part
where I'm like, this is not

764
00:56:04.840 --> 00:56:08.159
smart and so yeah, I don't
know. My head really was to go.

765
00:56:08.440 --> 00:56:17.199
My body's like you're an idiot,
So yeah, I don't know.

766
00:56:17.239 --> 00:56:22.639
It's a great question. Fifty six. Yeah, so you know, who

767
00:56:22.639 --> 00:56:24.599
knows. We'll see. So let's
talk a little bit about the moon,

768
00:56:24.760 --> 00:56:29.760
because we yeah, going on the
moon. There were a bunch of landers

769
00:56:29.880 --> 00:56:32.719
that went to the Moon in twenty
three. One of them was the Russia

770
00:56:32.840 --> 00:56:37.079
Luna twenty five. The previous Luna
twenty four was in the nineteen seventies,

771
00:56:37.119 --> 00:56:42.079
but apparently they dusted off the old
design and tried to fly to the Moon

772
00:56:42.159 --> 00:56:46.000
ahead of the Indian lander. Also
China, right, China has already been

773
00:56:46.039 --> 00:56:49.079
on the moon. They landed on
the far side of the Moon a few

774
00:56:49.159 --> 00:56:53.199
years ago, Yeah, which was
astonishing. It was the first and that

775
00:56:53.320 --> 00:56:58.599
lander I think and rover is still
functioning. But India had a flight and

776
00:56:58.639 --> 00:57:00.440
then Russia jumped in out of no
where. They did get to the Moon

777
00:57:00.480 --> 00:57:07.079
before the Indians. They just landed
with bigger, big with anybody. You

778
00:57:07.119 --> 00:57:09.159
could see if you go search online
for the Luna twenty five landing, you

779
00:57:09.159 --> 00:57:13.559
can see the blast mark where it
hit the Moon at several kilometers percent.

780
00:57:13.719 --> 00:57:17.239
Oh, it wasn't a manned moonflight
then no, no, there's no there's

781
00:57:17.239 --> 00:57:22.760
been no new man moon flights so
far. Okay, these are all remote

782
00:57:22.800 --> 00:57:28.039
control landers and some in some case
we're over. So the Russian flight was

783
00:57:28.079 --> 00:57:30.760
more like a missile, yeah,
something like that. They were attempting to

784
00:57:30.840 --> 00:57:34.039
land, they were in their their
landing burn, uh, and there was

785
00:57:34.039 --> 00:57:37.480
some kind of malfunction and they lost
control it and it hit the moon with

786
00:57:37.559 --> 00:57:39.719
figure now the same thing. We've
had a bunch of landers go that way,

787
00:57:39.719 --> 00:57:44.320
including an Indian one. Yeah,
that that impacted hard, and an

788
00:57:44.360 --> 00:57:47.000
Israeli lander a couple of years ago. Also hard. Landing on the Moon

789
00:57:47.039 --> 00:57:52.519
is hard. That being said,
Uh, the Indian space program is serious

790
00:57:52.519 --> 00:57:55.679
business and they continue to work on
this problem. And in August this year,

791
00:57:57.440 --> 00:58:02.079
Chander and three soft land a lander
and a rover on the south pole

792
00:58:02.119 --> 00:58:06.360
of the Moon first time ever.
That's so cool. There are only the

793
00:58:06.400 --> 00:58:09.840
fourth country to soft land on the
Moon America, Russia, China, India.

794
00:58:10.440 --> 00:58:15.400
The Japanese have a lander on the
way to the Moon as we're recording.

795
00:58:15.400 --> 00:58:16.960
This supposed to be sometime in twenty
twenty four. And we wish them,

796
00:58:17.000 --> 00:58:20.920
you know, all the best.
Yeah, that's great. The artemist

797
00:58:20.920 --> 00:58:22.960
missions. There was no artimist mission
in twenty three. There was an artist

798
00:58:23.039 --> 00:58:27.639
mission. It was an unmanned artimist
mission. This is NASA's Moon rocket,

799
00:58:28.079 --> 00:58:32.039
derived from Space Shuttle parts. Yeah, right, And understand this rocket is

800
00:58:32.039 --> 00:58:37.920
a political rocket. NASA, I
near as I can tell, NASA doesn't

801
00:58:37.960 --> 00:58:44.440
want this rocket. But understanding that
NASA is funded by Congress, and that

802
00:58:44.599 --> 00:58:49.800
over the evolution of the Space Shuttle
program, every single state in the Union

803
00:58:50.360 --> 00:58:53.000
participated in the Space Shuttle program,
and so that's a lot of jobs.

804
00:58:53.599 --> 00:58:58.840
And so when the space Shuttle program
ended in twenty eleven, Congress refused to

805
00:58:58.880 --> 00:59:04.920
stop funding it, and so what
what they were funding them was re implementing

806
00:59:05.320 --> 00:59:08.960
Space Shuttle related parts into a rocket. Now there's a case to be made

807
00:59:09.000 --> 00:59:13.119
here. The Space Shuttle itself weighed
almost one hundred tons. So if you

808
00:59:13.159 --> 00:59:16.320
get rid of the Shuttle and just
use the engines and the tanks on a

809
00:59:16.400 --> 00:59:22.119
ton left to orbit is a lot. That's Saturn five class moon rocket technology.

810
00:59:22.679 --> 00:59:24.840
And so there have been several versions
of this over the year. Believe

811
00:59:24.880 --> 00:59:31.800
me, this idea of repurposing Shuttle
technology into a rocket was an awesome idea

812
00:59:32.360 --> 00:59:38.199
in the nineteen nineties. Yeah,
okay, now it's obsolete, but it

813
00:59:38.239 --> 00:59:43.519
has continued. It costs billions and
billions of dollars. The current estimate for

814
00:59:43.559 --> 00:59:50.000
the Artemis one flight was four billion
bucks. And it's really because of constituencies

815
00:59:50.079 --> 00:59:52.639
that don't want their jobs taken away. That's right. They don't want to

816
00:59:52.679 --> 00:59:55.159
have to say to their constituents,
Yeah, we've shut that program down,

817
00:59:55.199 --> 00:59:59.000
find a new job. Is it
really that simple? I mean, is

818
00:59:59.000 --> 01:00:01.960
that the only reason? No,
it's not. I mean, it's easy

819
01:00:02.000 --> 01:00:06.400
to say that, Carl. But
the other side of this is these are

820
01:00:06.519 --> 01:00:10.679
skilled people. They're not replaceable.
Yeah, there isn't new ones, right,

821
01:00:10.760 --> 01:00:15.000
you do have to train people up
in this, and so losing that

822
01:00:15.119 --> 01:00:17.400
skill set is an issue without a
doubt. That being said, this is

823
01:00:17.639 --> 01:00:25.000
a primitive rocket relatively speaking. It's
insanely powerful, but it's still using hydrolock

824
01:00:25.119 --> 01:00:29.199
sensions on its first stage, which
is kind of insane, right, because

825
01:00:29.239 --> 01:00:32.599
the fuel density is so low.
That's why that tank is massive. Because

826
01:00:34.079 --> 01:00:37.360
the hydrogen tank is eight times the
size of the oxygen tank. If they

827
01:00:37.360 --> 01:00:39.880
were using methane, the tanks to
be about the same size. And they've

828
01:00:39.920 --> 01:00:45.280
extended the booster stage and the Orion
capsule is an extraordinarant capsule. The upper

829
01:00:45.280 --> 01:00:52.639
stage still needs to be improved.
They did announce the Artemis two flight in

830
01:00:52.719 --> 01:00:55.880
twenty three. This is a manned
flight to go around the Moon, you

831
01:00:55.880 --> 01:01:00.800
know, sort of like the Apollo
eight mission in nineteen fifty five. Yeah,

832
01:01:00.920 --> 01:01:04.440
they're just going to go around the
Moon. The Artimist one flight was

833
01:01:04.599 --> 01:01:07.159
unmanned. They sent the Orion capsule
around the Moon and they did some really

834
01:01:07.159 --> 01:01:12.199
interesting maneuvers with that Orion capsule.
They know more about gravitation they've ever known

835
01:01:12.199 --> 01:01:15.000
before. They did some interesting gravity
tricks. But the second flight is going

836
01:01:15.039 --> 01:01:19.960
to be a straight up free return
send humans around the Moon for the first

837
01:01:19.960 --> 01:01:22.960
time in fifty plus years. They
probably won't make the twenty four date.

838
01:01:23.000 --> 01:01:29.039
They're behind schedule. They have selected
the four astronauts, three Americans, two

839
01:01:29.079 --> 01:01:31.760
men and a woman, and one
male Canadian. So there's going to be

840
01:01:31.760 --> 01:01:36.440
a Canadian going around the Moon,
which sounds cool until you realize we're trading.

841
01:01:36.480 --> 01:01:39.079
We know we're able to fly a
Canadian into space because we con attribute

842
01:01:39.079 --> 01:01:46.480
to the program and we're using up
our flight around the Moon flight rather than

843
01:01:46.480 --> 01:01:50.920
a land or flight because Artimists three
is supposed to be actually landing on the

844
01:01:50.920 --> 01:01:52.960
Moon. So okay, it's a
trade off. You know, when you

845
01:01:53.000 --> 01:01:59.920
mentioned the Artist program, I can't
help think of the tension between you know,

846
01:02:00.039 --> 01:02:05.079
the private sector i e. SpaceX
etal. And the government and NASA.

847
01:02:05.920 --> 01:02:13.079
And isn't there any kind of creative
way that these two things can benefit

848
01:02:13.159 --> 01:02:16.440
each other? Well, and one
would argue they have because NASA put out

849
01:02:16.480 --> 01:02:22.960
to bid the Lunar Lander and SpaceX
won it. Right, So the lander

850
01:02:23.119 --> 01:02:29.199
part of the Artemis three mission is
this commercial vehicle, And to be clear,

851
01:02:30.079 --> 01:02:34.039
it's a commercial company that's building Artemis. It's United Launch Alliance. Okay,

852
01:02:34.159 --> 01:02:36.559
right, the guys who built the
Shuttle. But they're being funded by

853
01:02:36.639 --> 01:02:39.519
the Congress though. Yeah, but
then again, so is the lunar Lander

854
01:02:39.599 --> 01:02:45.079
missions, right right, But SpaceX
isn't no space SpaceX absolutely is but getting

855
01:02:45.119 --> 01:02:50.280
contracts from the US government to resupply
the space station to ship the fly crew

856
01:02:50.360 --> 01:02:52.599
up there. Okay, I see. Now you can argue about the type

857
01:02:52.599 --> 01:02:58.440
of contract, which is a legitimate
argument. Yeah, right, that Artemis

858
01:02:58.480 --> 01:03:01.480
missions are very much based on a
cost plus contracting model. So it's like

859
01:03:01.559 --> 01:03:05.719
these are deliverables. You know,
make an estimate of the budget, but

860
01:03:05.719 --> 01:03:07.719
if it runs over whatever, if
you make if you stay in budget on

861
01:03:07.760 --> 01:03:13.039
time, you make a bonus as
opposed to the commercial resupplies missions, which

862
01:03:13.079 --> 01:03:15.039
is, we will pay this much
ton to orbit, this much ton for

863
01:03:15.159 --> 01:03:19.119
return. How you do it up
to you, here's the cadence we want

864
01:03:19.159 --> 01:03:22.559
and how much money move right,
And so there's an incentive in those commercial

865
01:03:22.639 --> 01:03:28.719
contracts to be cost efficient, and
there's a disincentive in the cost plus missions

866
01:03:28.719 --> 01:03:32.159
to be cost evoctive. Yeah,
right, so they structure the contract matters

867
01:03:32.159 --> 01:03:37.719
a lot that you know. The
argument in favor of cost plush contracting is

868
01:03:37.920 --> 01:03:42.280
you're doing new research, you're doing
something nobody's ever done before see James web

869
01:03:42.920 --> 01:03:45.719
right, Want of a Kind vehicle, And so we don't know how much

870
01:03:45.719 --> 01:03:50.320
it's going to cost. Really here's
our guess. But as we develop it,

871
01:03:50.320 --> 01:03:52.679
we're going to run into problems so
that it'll cost more. But building

872
01:03:52.719 --> 01:03:58.840
the same rocket over and over again
is not an experiment. Yeah, that's

873
01:03:58.920 --> 01:04:01.960
right, so you should probably do
it. And it's also ann chunk of

874
01:04:02.000 --> 01:04:05.760
science now, right, So it
does make sense to get this out of

875
01:04:05.760 --> 01:04:10.800
the way. And given that starship
starts to function eventually, or it's going

876
01:04:10.840 --> 01:04:15.880
to be silly and having United Launch
Alliance sold to another entity, you know,

877
01:04:15.000 --> 01:04:17.760
is that going to make a more
lobby centric or less lobby centric?

878
01:04:17.880 --> 01:04:20.360
Like, all of this is very
interesting for how it's going to evolve.

879
01:04:20.360 --> 01:04:24.559
Well, and then there's just the
idea that you know, these people,

880
01:04:24.599 --> 01:04:29.119
if they don't like their government jobs, could go apply at SpaceX, you

881
01:04:29.119 --> 01:04:32.280
know, or or other places.
Possibly. Yeah, it's just a question

882
01:04:32.320 --> 01:04:35.400
of are they willing to work the
new way too right? You know,

883
01:04:35.519 --> 01:04:41.800
are arguably SpaceX was founded on the
back of a group of frustrated rocket engineers

884
01:04:41.800 --> 01:04:45.199
that really wanted to fly stuff and
didn't want to you know, Congress may

885
01:04:45.239 --> 01:04:48.679
have funded the project, but they
funded it minimally, not enough to actually

886
01:04:48.679 --> 01:04:54.119
build any hardware for a really long
with that literary for decades. Shuttle stopped

887
01:04:54.119 --> 01:04:58.760
flying in twenty eleven and the first
flight of Artemis is twenty twenty two.

888
01:04:58.960 --> 01:05:03.000
That's a long time mm hm.
So you know, the the gave them

889
01:05:03.159 --> 01:05:06.519
enough money, barely enough money to
actually build anything. Like, if you

890
01:05:06.599 --> 01:05:10.679
really wanted to move this, you
would have spent more or shut it down.

891
01:05:11.280 --> 01:05:13.840
That being said, at this moment, Artemis is the only thing to

892
01:05:13.880 --> 01:05:17.400
carry people beyond Earth orbit. You
know, maybe Starship will someday, but

893
01:05:17.400 --> 01:05:24.400
Starship is only flown twice and went
boom. Both sides like, we're a

894
01:05:24.440 --> 01:05:27.880
long way away from it being a
working vehicle. And so they had and

895
01:05:27.960 --> 01:05:31.599
they have commitments for Artemis. They
have They had sixteen engines left over from

896
01:05:31.599 --> 01:05:34.079
the Shuttle program. That's what they
were used to use four per flights.

897
01:05:34.079 --> 01:05:40.800
So the first four flights of Artemis
have engines. They're now cranking up the

898
01:05:40.880 --> 01:05:45.599
production to make new versions of these
engines, very expensively, to to do

899
01:05:45.719 --> 01:05:48.880
another, to plan out another for
Artemis flights. But these are flights to

900
01:05:49.079 --> 01:05:53.800
the Moon. And one of the
questions I got on Twitter was from Bob

901
01:05:53.920 --> 01:05:55.920
Archerus, is are we going to
have a base on the Moon before we

902
01:05:55.960 --> 01:05:59.760
go to Mars. It's like that
seems to be the plan, but we're

903
01:05:59.760 --> 01:06:02.920
not that far along on that plan. But first off, there are no

904
01:06:03.039 --> 01:06:06.639
real plans to send people to Mars, not really. Elon talks about it

905
01:06:08.000 --> 01:06:12.119
right just to desire, but it's
not real. There are no missions,

906
01:06:12.119 --> 01:06:15.440
there's no permission, nothing set up. Nothing is real. Yet do we

907
01:06:15.480 --> 01:06:20.800
have real plans to put humans on
the Moon. Well, yes, build

908
01:06:20.840 --> 01:06:26.119
a base, not so much.
But you remember in twenty seventeen, I

909
01:06:26.159 --> 01:06:29.840
did that Moon Base geek out,
and I encourage you to listen to it,

910
01:06:29.880 --> 01:06:33.119
and that was based on reading papers
by both the European Space Agency and

911
01:06:33.239 --> 01:06:39.760
NASA about building bases on the South
Pole, very much like Antarctica, man

912
01:06:39.920 --> 01:06:42.880
tended bases that you'll probably stay at
for a month a month and a half

913
01:06:42.920 --> 01:06:45.280
at a time to do original science
on the Moon. There's a lot of

914
01:06:45.320 --> 01:06:48.320
things to learn up there, if
I remember correctly, there was some influence

915
01:06:48.360 --> 01:06:56.039
that you had on NASA itself,
you Richard Campbell. Well after we did

916
01:06:56.079 --> 01:07:00.719
that podcast together, you and I
in early twenty seventeen. Later in twenty

917
01:07:00.719 --> 01:07:04.440
seventeen, NASA call now, which
is crazy when you think about it,

918
01:07:04.880 --> 01:07:09.159
but you also know that's not the
first time. Right when we did the

919
01:07:09.159 --> 01:07:12.639
Space Telescope speak out, NASA called
and said, hey, would you like

920
01:07:12.679 --> 01:07:15.440
to come and meet a space telescope
out over here, And we're like,

921
01:07:15.800 --> 01:07:19.639
oh, yes, yes we would. And we also interviewed Greg Tooley about

922
01:07:19.679 --> 01:07:25.199
the Plasmo Dynamics mission he was working
on, and a bunch of other stuff,

923
01:07:25.239 --> 01:07:27.719
and then we went and remember we
went into that back in the back

924
01:07:27.719 --> 01:07:32.079
warehouse and saw the test kit for
fixing a hubble and like just his storage,

925
01:07:32.280 --> 01:07:36.920
this giant tube of epoxy with a
wooden spatula. No, he wasn't

926
01:07:38.239 --> 01:07:42.239
kidding anyway. Uh. Yeah.
So when I got reached out to by

927
01:07:42.280 --> 01:07:45.400
the NASA Ames group about that Moon
based podcast, they asked me if I

928
01:07:45.400 --> 01:07:47.440
would do a talk on it,
which, by the way, I'm still

929
01:07:47.480 --> 01:07:49.840
doing. Yeah, but you did
it to NASA. I did it to

930
01:07:49.920 --> 01:07:55.000
NASA themselves, yes, And what
you know, Richard is very kind and

931
01:07:55.039 --> 01:08:00.400
not braggadocious, but he connected the
research from several different departments in NASA that

932
01:08:00.400 --> 01:08:03.920
weren't really talking to each other and
presented it to all of them at the

933
01:08:03.960 --> 01:08:08.920
same time. So yeah, that's
that's what ended up happening, and it

934
01:08:08.960 --> 01:08:11.199
was good. I think you had
some influence there, I hope. So

935
01:08:11.559 --> 01:08:15.199
I get some nice I get message
from some of those folks routinely as the

936
01:08:15.280 --> 01:08:18.760
work is ongoing. The work is
ongoing. Uh, the getting to the

937
01:08:18.800 --> 01:08:21.479
moon is really hard. Then the
lander is the heart is one of the

938
01:08:21.479 --> 01:08:26.000
hardest parts. We don't have a
good lander. The lander we had the

939
01:08:26.039 --> 01:08:30.920
old Lamb was a very dangerous machine, and we wouldn't use that today.

940
01:08:30.920 --> 01:08:32.239
We need a better lander. We
need to be a usable lander, and

941
01:08:32.279 --> 01:08:38.279
that means something more than a commoard. Well, it's not just a compute

942
01:08:38.319 --> 01:08:41.479
power. It's do you is it? It has to be big enough to

943
01:08:41.520 --> 01:08:45.760
be fully reusable. The old Lamb
had a descent stage that you left behind.

944
01:08:45.840 --> 01:08:49.159
If you're going to build a base, you can't keep leaving bits behind

945
01:08:49.199 --> 01:08:53.359
each time you visit it, right
like that, because eventually you run out

946
01:08:53.359 --> 01:08:58.119
of a room. So we need
a fully reusable lunar lander. And for

947
01:08:58.239 --> 01:09:03.479
better or worse, the only props
for a fully reusable vehicle is Starship is

948
01:09:03.600 --> 01:09:09.199
Elon's giant rocket. Once it works, now it has problems. It's very

949
01:09:09.359 --> 01:09:14.439
once it works, it's very tall, it's very large, and there's a

950
01:09:14.479 --> 01:09:16.920
huge payload, which is awesome,
but the people are at the top part.

951
01:09:17.199 --> 01:09:19.800
So you a, you got to
land this thing on something pretty flat

952
01:09:19.960 --> 01:09:24.079
because you don't want to tip over. That would be bad. And then

953
01:09:24.119 --> 01:09:27.359
once you have landed, you're still
like one hundred and fifty feet in the

954
01:09:27.359 --> 01:09:30.079
air, so you're gonna need an
elevator. You're gonna have to get this

955
01:09:30.159 --> 01:09:33.159
stuff down like I wish we could
come up with a better design, but

956
01:09:33.239 --> 01:09:44.119
this is what we've got Jeffries tubes. Okay, that being said, because

957
01:09:44.119 --> 01:09:46.439
that is obviously in process. You
know, there's a discussion about building a

958
01:09:46.439 --> 01:09:53.880
better lunar lander. I ran across
a capability study by DARPA. Remember DARPA,

959
01:09:54.000 --> 01:09:59.600
of course I remember DARPA, So
this is the Defense Advanced Research Projects

960
01:09:59.640 --> 01:10:02.000
Group. I find DARPA to be
very serious individuals. These are the ones

961
01:10:02.039 --> 01:10:05.720
in the early oughts that started on
automated driving. That's led us to a

962
01:10:05.720 --> 01:10:10.119
lot of what you're seeing now with
welling smarter and smarter cars. Go back

963
01:10:10.119 --> 01:10:13.319
even further, that was the origins
of the internet. Yep, the internet

964
01:10:13.359 --> 01:10:17.920
comes from there, so when when
dark and they're also tackling problems with neural

965
01:10:17.960 --> 01:10:24.239
nets, just you know, understandable
AI. I take DARPA's research stuff seriously.

966
01:10:24.239 --> 01:10:26.840
They're also the ones to say there
is no good solution here and end

967
01:10:26.880 --> 01:10:30.880
it. Like often my problem with
a lot of science papers is these scientists

968
01:10:30.920 --> 01:10:33.479
want to stay employed, so they'll
always write a paper that ends with give

969
01:10:33.560 --> 01:10:38.319
or more money and I will do
more right where DARPA will say, ah,

970
01:10:38.319 --> 01:10:40.279
this has gone as far as you
can go. We're done because they're

971
01:10:40.279 --> 01:10:43.800
funded regardless, they're funded by the
military incentives. That's what it's all about.

972
01:10:44.039 --> 01:10:48.840
Yeah, So DARPA has started what
they call the Luna ten Capability Studies.

973
01:10:49.399 --> 01:10:56.119
So this is literally about commercial Moon
technology. Okay by twenty thirty five,

974
01:10:57.479 --> 01:11:01.960
so in the next decade, can
we emerge sure power mining, in

975
01:11:02.199 --> 01:11:09.279
situ, resource utilization, communications and
navigations, logistics systems, constructions and robotics,

976
01:11:09.359 --> 01:11:14.560
all the things to create a commercial
space on the Moon. Now it's

977
01:11:14.600 --> 01:11:16.640
a capability study, So what they're
really doing is setting a bar is this

978
01:11:16.800 --> 01:11:20.800
feasible? You know what it's going
to end up being, buddy freaking Walmart.

979
01:11:25.159 --> 01:11:27.600
You know, Walmart goes with the
customers on I don't think there's there

980
01:11:27.720 --> 01:11:30.640
yet for better or worse. I'm
afraid this is going to be space force

981
01:11:30.199 --> 01:11:33.399
kidding, this is going to be. But at the same time, like

982
01:11:34.920 --> 01:11:40.600
ex maturing the ability to distract water
ice from the Moon to be used as

983
01:11:40.680 --> 01:11:45.159
fuel for interplanetary travel. So rather
than keeping on bringing the fuel from Earth

984
01:11:45.520 --> 01:11:49.399
and that heavy gravity, will you
can take it from the Moon. Couldn't

985
01:11:49.399 --> 01:11:54.079
be cost effective. We've talked about
my original moon based talk going all the

986
01:11:54.119 --> 01:11:56.520
way back to twenty seventeen is what
could you do on the Moon. It's

987
01:11:56.560 --> 01:12:02.359
cost effective and generating electricity, interesting
part of it building solar panels, resource

988
01:12:02.399 --> 01:12:06.119
extraction construction. The gravity well of
the Moon is much much lighter, and

989
01:12:06.159 --> 01:12:09.600
so if you're going to do stuff
in space, it makes sense to work

990
01:12:09.640 --> 01:12:14.319
from there more than work from here. As difficult as are there any resources

991
01:12:14.439 --> 01:12:18.079
available deep in the Moon or is
it all pretty much one just big chunk

992
01:12:18.119 --> 01:12:24.359
of the same kind of rock.
No, it's interesting you ask that because

993
01:12:24.399 --> 01:12:28.840
it doesn't have it has some geological
activity. It does seem to have some

994
01:12:29.000 --> 01:12:31.800
core, and there was volcanic activity
on there really, but there's also mass

995
01:12:31.840 --> 01:12:38.960
concentrations that represent large asteroid strike,
so they are surface mineral concentration. Okay,

996
01:12:39.319 --> 01:12:42.960
so they represent potentially valuable resources as
well. But in the end,

997
01:12:43.039 --> 01:12:47.960
the Moon is mostly made of aluminum, you know, and at silicon,

998
01:12:48.119 --> 01:12:51.640
like pretty normal substrate materials that are
useful, no two ways about it.

999
01:12:51.760 --> 01:12:57.439
Like you can you should be able
to do some useful mining there and to

1000
01:12:57.479 --> 01:13:00.399
get resources put together. Yeah,
we just got to mature the technologies.

1001
01:13:00.439 --> 01:13:03.960
We don't know enough yet. We
just got to start small, and you

1002
01:13:04.039 --> 01:13:09.439
need the energy to run all of
these extraction machines and all that stuff.

1003
01:13:09.960 --> 01:13:14.680
Yep, and that means maturing forms
of power generation on the Moon, which

1004
01:13:14.720 --> 01:13:17.079
is right on that list. Now
you know, you think it would be

1005
01:13:17.159 --> 01:13:23.880
solar except for that whole Hey it's
dark for fourteen days thing, that's problematic.

1006
01:13:24.000 --> 01:13:28.880
So now we get into some of
the sterling engine based nuclear like Crusty,

1007
01:13:29.760 --> 01:13:34.319
which are you know, ten kilowatt
solid state reactors. So there's lots

1008
01:13:34.319 --> 01:13:39.239
of possibilities there. Anyway to back
to Bob's comment, Yeah, we're definitely

1009
01:13:39.239 --> 01:13:41.640
working on a base on the Moon. It's a lot got of ways to

1010
01:13:41.640 --> 01:13:44.560
go yet, but more is happening
in the past couple of years that have

1011
01:13:44.640 --> 01:13:46.920
happened the previous thirty pretty cool.
Twenty twenty three was a great year for

1012
01:13:47.119 --> 01:13:53.079
asteroid exploration. Okay, the Osiris
REPS mission. So this is a mission

1013
01:13:53.079 --> 01:13:57.840
from a decade ago that actually landed
on the surface of a Cyrus Rex and

1014
01:13:57.960 --> 01:14:02.840
picked up some samples of that asteroid
Jesu. Was it really ten years ago?

1015
01:14:03.000 --> 01:14:06.439
It seems like yesterday. Yeah,
I know, crazy. Uh,

1016
01:14:06.720 --> 01:14:11.920
their capsule made it back this year
intact, perfect landing. There was a

1017
01:14:11.920 --> 01:14:14.439
little bit of a problem with the
parachutes, but it's still worked out fine.

1018
01:14:15.000 --> 01:14:17.800
The only problem they have now is
that they picked up so much,

1019
01:14:18.000 --> 01:14:25.680
so many rocks that it they can't
open it. It's jammed. Like you

1020
01:14:25.680 --> 01:14:29.199
gotta imagine. They don't want to
contaminate these rocks. These are pristine rocks

1021
01:14:29.199 --> 01:14:32.000
from an asteroid, right in a
sealed container. So they want to work

1022
01:14:32.039 --> 01:14:38.960
in a vacuum, you know,
with remote controls essentially to minimize any exposure

1023
01:14:38.960 --> 01:14:44.359
of these rocks so they can test
them, you know, with not Yeah,

1024
01:14:44.439 --> 01:14:46.119
this is the problem, right,
Like they can't get the bolts out,

1025
01:14:46.159 --> 01:14:50.920
they're jammed, so they have to
come up, how do we open

1026
01:14:50.960 --> 01:14:56.800
this without contaminating it? Right?
Like, that's the battle is. You

1027
01:14:56.840 --> 01:15:00.199
know, we got these rocks from
menu and now we've got to try and

1028
01:15:00.199 --> 01:15:01.960
and get them get access to the
world cantaminating them. So, I mean,

1029
01:15:01.960 --> 01:15:06.520
these are so many good things have
happened, they success, says the

1030
01:15:06.520 --> 01:15:10.359
mission. It even came back,
and now they're just down to this one

1031
01:15:10.640 --> 01:15:15.840
teeny little problem. You can't open
the can. Uh. Also this year

1032
01:15:15.920 --> 01:15:19.920
we launched a new mission to a
new asteroid, to the Psyche asteroid,

1033
01:15:19.920 --> 01:15:26.920
which is believed to be a planetesimal
core. So you know this idea that

1034
01:15:26.920 --> 01:15:30.960
there was a planet between Mars and
Jupiter and that's why there's a huge asteroid

1035
01:15:30.039 --> 01:15:34.119
field between the two, Okay,
and this is where some of the biggest

1036
01:15:34.119 --> 01:15:41.319
asteroids in our Solar System like series
live in that particular space. Well,

1037
01:15:41.319 --> 01:15:45.199
Psyche is one of them. But
it is a metallic asteroid. So most

1038
01:15:45.239 --> 01:15:50.640
asteroids are carbonaceous, mostly carbon compounds
and rubbel piles. Uh, this one

1039
01:15:50.640 --> 01:15:55.960
looks to be solid and metal and
so they are value and it's astonishing,

1040
01:15:56.000 --> 01:16:00.840
it's massive. So they've to the
Psyche mission is going to take a good

1041
01:16:00.840 --> 01:16:02.239
look at it, and it's going
to take a few years to get there,

1042
01:16:02.279 --> 01:16:06.600
but it took off in September,
so it's on its way. One

1043
01:16:06.600 --> 01:16:11.640
more asteroid related mission and this is
about Dart, which we talked about last

1044
01:16:11.720 --> 01:16:15.640
year because Brian Schreer asks, hey, what do we learn from Dart.

1045
01:16:15.039 --> 01:16:20.000
So Dart was the mission to see
can we modify an asteroid's path? Right?

1046
01:16:20.119 --> 01:16:23.680
You know, one of the things
that makes is different from the dinosaurs.

1047
01:16:24.000 --> 01:16:27.920
Besides, you know Candy Crush is
we can see him coming. We

1048
01:16:27.920 --> 01:16:30.159
can see him coming, maybe we
can do something about him. And so

1049
01:16:30.199 --> 01:16:34.079
the Dart mission was our first attempt. We found this perfect binary system for

1050
01:16:34.159 --> 01:16:38.560
doing the testing. A we can
observe it it orbits beyond the Earth,

1051
01:16:39.039 --> 01:16:44.079
but we can get good images of
it. It's actually a two asteroid systems,

1052
01:16:44.119 --> 01:16:49.760
so the big asteroid is called Didimus
and Dimorphoses it is orbiting it,

1053
01:16:50.039 --> 01:16:56.119
and so the impactor actually hit dimorphis
the smaller one thing. They can call

1054
01:16:56.159 --> 01:17:00.119
it diddy moon if you like.
We talked again. We talked about this

1055
01:17:00.319 --> 01:17:05.199
last year's Space Geek Out. It
hit it successfully and it reduced its orbit

1056
01:17:05.199 --> 01:17:10.199
by about a half an hour,
so we really did do something. And

1057
01:17:10.359 --> 01:17:13.880
now we've continued measurements of it and
we've figured out we probably blew as much

1058
01:17:13.880 --> 01:17:18.680
as a thousand metric tons of mass
off of Dimorsos with that impactor because it

1059
01:17:18.720 --> 01:17:24.840
was a rubble pile. They are
still tracking boulders that were blown bigger boulders

1060
01:17:25.199 --> 01:17:28.680
twenty thirty feet across that were blown
off of it in the impact and are

1061
01:17:28.680 --> 01:17:31.920
now orbiting on their own, and
they're not done. Next year, in

1062
01:17:32.880 --> 01:17:38.479
October twenty four there's a mission called
HERA by the European Space Agency to go

1063
01:17:38.680 --> 01:17:45.439
back to Didimos and dimorphis to take
more readings. So we are learning to

1064
01:17:45.560 --> 01:17:50.720
protect ourselves. Right, that looks
like the impactors were far more effective than

1065
01:17:50.760 --> 01:17:57.680
expected. It opens the door to
we would have a chance. Now when

1066
01:17:57.720 --> 01:18:00.680
you say it delayed the orbit by
thirty minutes, the orbit of the little

1067
01:18:00.680 --> 01:18:03.680
one around the big one or the
orbit of the big asteroid around us.

1068
01:18:03.840 --> 01:18:08.039
That's right, the little round around
the big one. And so that does

1069
01:18:08.119 --> 01:18:12.279
what to the orbit of the big
one around us? Nothing, But that's

1070
01:18:12.319 --> 01:18:14.239
one of the things we want to
test. Is so far we can't help

1071
01:18:14.239 --> 01:18:15.960
me was the mass of the big
one is so much bigger? Like,

1072
01:18:16.079 --> 01:18:18.560
believe me, we still have a
long way to go, right, Like

1073
01:18:19.279 --> 01:18:23.560
this asteroid wouldn't have particularly dangerous in
the first place, but it was I

1074
01:18:23.560 --> 01:18:27.279
thought there's something to test with and
and you know, we learned from it

1075
01:18:27.439 --> 01:18:32.520
without it cool. Yeah, it's
it's just you know, we talk about

1076
01:18:32.520 --> 01:18:36.800
science pretty abstractly, but this was
pretty darn real, right, Like this

1077
01:18:36.880 --> 01:18:44.119
is this is our first real test. So uh just I'm just pulling up

1078
01:18:44.119 --> 01:18:47.439
the old notes from last year.
So dimorphis is about a five hundred foot

1079
01:18:47.439 --> 01:18:55.159
across rock weighing about four point eight
million metric tons. Orbiting about a kilometer

1080
01:18:55.199 --> 01:19:00.199
off the surface of Didimus and it
took about twelve hours to do it.

1081
01:19:00.319 --> 01:19:02.520
Or yeah, that's big, and
now it does it in eleven hours and

1082
01:19:02.520 --> 01:19:09.119
twenty three big because of us.
Well, the big one is twenty five

1083
01:19:09.199 --> 01:19:11.680
hundred feet across, like half a
mile across, and weighs five hundred and

1084
01:19:11.720 --> 01:19:15.920
twenty metric tons five hundred and twenty
million metric tons. There's one thing that

1085
01:19:15.960 --> 01:19:20.720
you brought up in one of these
older space geek outs, which was mining

1086
01:19:23.079 --> 01:19:29.319
precious metals in asteroids like gold and
stuff, gold and platinum. But I

1087
01:19:29.319 --> 01:19:32.199
mean, just think about golds for
a minute. Like if you doubled the

1088
01:19:32.279 --> 01:19:39.039
amount of gold immediately on the market
in the world, would the price go

1089
01:19:39.159 --> 01:19:44.840
down catastrophically, But you wouldn't double
it, you would you would increase availabily

1090
01:19:44.840 --> 01:19:46.600
about a hundred times, Okay,
right, Like that's the real problem.

1091
01:19:46.640 --> 01:19:49.399
If you if you talk about Psyche, that mission that's headed up there,

1092
01:19:49.399 --> 01:19:53.760
it's very likely they're platinum class metals
up there. Yeah, and you can

1093
01:19:53.800 --> 01:19:57.079
extract them and you bring back you'll
just you'll crash one. I can understand

1094
01:19:57.079 --> 01:20:00.239
because you use it in cell phones
and things like that. And that makes

1095
01:20:00.279 --> 01:20:03.039
everything cheaper. But gold is something
that you know, people hold on to

1096
01:20:03.159 --> 01:20:09.720
and invest in and feel is special
and precious, and people people invest in

1097
01:20:09.720 --> 01:20:12.600
all sorts of metals. But yes, you would absolutely crush market. And

1098
01:20:12.640 --> 01:20:17.119
gold has important use industrial uses too, right, Admittedly it hasn't because of

1099
01:20:17.159 --> 01:20:21.119
its non reactivity and ability to manipulate
it. It has a special place in

1100
01:20:21.119 --> 01:20:26.840
a lot of people's hearts. But
as shame. Yeah, it's also a

1101
01:20:26.920 --> 01:20:30.640
question of the just the cost.
It is dumb to spend that much money

1102
01:20:30.039 --> 01:20:33.600
to get up there just to bring
the stuff back down and reduce the values

1103
01:20:33.760 --> 01:20:39.439
of it worldwide. You will absolutely
tangle market without a doubt. You here

1104
01:20:39.479 --> 01:20:45.079
that you all there, you go. Let's take a break and then we'll

1105
01:20:45.079 --> 01:20:46.960
talk space health. Come okay,
we'll be right back after these messages.

1106
01:20:50.960 --> 01:20:55.039
All right, we're back break number
two, The Space Geek Out twenty twenty

1107
01:20:55.039 --> 01:20:59.439
three. I'm Carl Franklin, that's
Richard Campbell, and yeah, we're going

1108
01:20:59.439 --> 01:21:01.079
I know this is a long one, but there's just a lot to talk

1109
01:21:01.119 --> 01:21:04.039
about. Well, now we're getting
to the part you asked me for,

1110
01:21:05.119 --> 01:21:09.399
right, which is the crisis in
cosmology. But first let's we've got to

1111
01:21:09.399 --> 01:21:14.920
talk about Hubble first. So originally
a space station, one of the great

1112
01:21:14.920 --> 01:21:20.479
observatories. It was lifted on the
Space Shuttle. It's a modified Spy satellite.

1113
01:21:21.000 --> 01:21:26.319
It's been operating. It had optical
problems they got corrected in the nineteen

1114
01:21:26.520 --> 01:21:30.000
with the squeegey smeared the lens at
the stoplight. That was a little more

1115
01:21:30.039 --> 01:21:34.039
complicated than that. But yes,
last service mission by the Shuttle was two

1116
01:21:34.079 --> 01:21:39.640
thousand and nine. Yeah, now
there are no more shuttles. It counts

1117
01:21:39.640 --> 01:21:42.520
on a set of six gyros.
You understand, in the orbit, it's

1118
01:21:42.600 --> 01:21:45.439
energy about four hundrechlometers up for it
to point in an area of space as

1119
01:21:45.439 --> 01:21:50.399
it's whizzing around the Earth. These
gyros continuously move the telescope to keep it

1120
01:21:50.479 --> 01:21:55.119
pointing in the same direction so you
can do your observation. It's like a

1121
01:21:55.159 --> 01:21:59.600
camera on a gimbal. Yea,
yeah, exactly. And so these gyros

1122
01:21:59.640 --> 01:22:01.960
fail over time. There were something
they replaced every on every servicing mission.

1123
01:22:02.000 --> 01:22:05.079
There were several of them, and
now it's been since two thousand and nine

1124
01:22:05.119 --> 01:22:08.920
that they've been replaced in there down
to three and they're starting to fail.

1125
01:22:10.520 --> 01:22:15.600
And so there is a question of
what to do, and it's you know,

1126
01:22:15.640 --> 01:22:17.600
for all of the years of Hubble, it seems a shame to just

1127
01:22:17.640 --> 01:22:25.600
abandon it. So it's already outlasted
an predicted life, oh by miles.

1128
01:22:26.279 --> 01:22:31.239
But you know, it was the
first of the serviceable satellites, right It

1129
01:22:31.279 --> 01:22:35.279
was an experiment to see can we
service the satellite. They upgraded solar panels,

1130
01:22:35.279 --> 01:22:40.119
they upgraded, they replaced instruments many
times, they fixed it, and

1131
01:22:40.119 --> 01:22:45.439
they certainly kept replacing the gyros.
There is a proposal, there's two proposals.

1132
01:22:45.199 --> 01:22:47.000
One of the things they did in
the two thousand and the last two

1133
01:22:47.000 --> 01:22:50.600
thousand and nine mission is they put
a prototype of the universal adapter on the

1134
01:22:50.600 --> 01:22:55.239
bottom of Hubble. Hubble was set
up to be able to be picked up

1135
01:22:55.279 --> 01:22:59.800
by the shuttle, but nothing else. But they this adapter is with the

1136
01:22:59.840 --> 01:23:04.920
col A Pedal adapter, which is
what we use now for docking, although

1137
01:23:04.960 --> 01:23:09.439
the current modern one is a little
bit different than the what's on Hubble right

1138
01:23:09.439 --> 01:23:13.359
now, but that's fine. What
we have is a place that a robotic

1139
01:23:13.479 --> 01:23:17.600
vehicle or another vehicle could grab onto, designed to be grabbed. It's sturdy,

1140
01:23:18.000 --> 01:23:20.279
it's a locking, a lock on
point. It's on the bottom of

1141
01:23:20.319 --> 01:23:26.279
Hubble. So the first off is
if we lose control of the gyros and

1142
01:23:26.319 --> 01:23:29.920
it's low on fuel, we could
have an uncontrolled d arbit from it,

1143
01:23:29.920 --> 01:23:35.840
although it'll take a while. An
uncontrolled d orbit. Yeah, there's not

1144
01:23:35.880 --> 01:23:40.000
a lot of atmosphere a four hundred
klometers, but it's still a little just

1145
01:23:40.079 --> 01:23:43.680
like the space station, which is
too around that same height. You have

1146
01:23:43.720 --> 01:23:46.680
to keep reboosting it. So we
lose control of it, we can't do

1147
01:23:46.720 --> 01:23:51.239
that anymore, eventually it'll re enter. It's pretty pretty, uh you know,

1148
01:23:53.399 --> 01:23:56.760
low thing to treat one of the
most celebrated satellites. Yeah. Yeah,

1149
01:23:56.840 --> 01:24:00.399
And let's face it, it would
fit inside of stars like if Starship

1150
01:24:00.520 --> 01:24:04.319
gets up and running. In theory, they could they could use Starship to

1151
01:24:04.319 --> 01:24:06.960
go pick up Hubble and bring it
back. Like, doesn't it deserve to

1152
01:24:06.960 --> 01:24:11.920
be hanging in the Smithsonian? Absolutely? You know how big is Hubble?

1153
01:24:12.319 --> 01:24:15.840
Did you say how big it was? Yeah? Well, Hubble fit inside

1154
01:24:15.880 --> 01:24:17.960
the payloa bay of the Space Shuttle. Obviously, it's how it was launched.

1155
01:24:18.159 --> 01:24:23.920
So it's about forty feet long and
about fourteen feet across. It's big,

1156
01:24:25.319 --> 01:24:29.840
you know, it's bust sized.
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah,

1157
01:24:30.000 --> 01:24:33.079
and but the other question is,
like, it's obviously it's still useful

1158
01:24:33.079 --> 01:24:38.039
as an observatory. Why not just
keep maintaining it while it's still able to

1159
01:24:38.079 --> 01:24:40.880
work? All we got to do
is replace the gyros. But really there's

1160
01:24:40.880 --> 01:24:44.800
still these two missions. The first
is can we keep it under control so

1161
01:24:44.840 --> 01:24:47.840
at least decide if we're going to
retrieve it, so send a mission up

1162
01:24:47.880 --> 01:24:51.319
there to boost it and maybe to
provide guidance. So you can imagine a

1163
01:24:51.319 --> 01:24:55.119
little tug that would attach out of
the back of Hubble. Even if we're

1164
01:24:55.119 --> 01:24:59.399
not going to still use it as
a as a telescope, at least keep

1165
01:24:59.399 --> 01:25:01.680
it under control. Yeah, maybe
even build a module like that that could

1166
01:25:01.680 --> 01:25:05.119
do its pointing for it. But
I don't know if you remember this guy,

1167
01:25:06.640 --> 01:25:15.520
Jared Isaacman is this billionaire adventurer,
and he had the first tourism flight

1168
01:25:15.600 --> 01:25:20.720
to orbit where he flew. He
took he bought a crew dragon, raised

1169
01:25:20.720 --> 01:25:26.239
a bunch of money for children's hospitals
while doing it, and took three people

1170
01:25:26.239 --> 01:25:29.880
with him up and spent three days
in orbit in a crew Dragon. So

1171
01:25:29.920 --> 01:25:32.319
he wants to go back. He's
not done. You know, flying his

1172
01:25:32.359 --> 01:25:34.960
MiGs isn't enough. He wants to
go back into space again, and so

1173
01:25:35.079 --> 01:25:42.880
he's part of proposing to He has
a mission currently in planning now with Elon

1174
01:25:43.159 --> 01:25:47.560
to do the first because commercial spacewalk. He wants to walk in space,

1175
01:25:48.560 --> 01:25:53.079
not as an ass astronaut, as
a citizen. So they're working on a

1176
01:25:53.119 --> 01:25:56.479
suit. It would be tethered,
but he would take a crew Dragon up

1177
01:25:56.520 --> 01:25:59.920
with a couple of other people.
They would depressurize capsule, open it,

1178
01:26:00.079 --> 01:26:01.479
and then he would be able to
go out and walk around, like float

1179
01:26:01.520 --> 01:26:04.920
around in space. He wants to
have that experience, and he's a billionaire.

1180
01:26:05.239 --> 01:26:10.039
There you go, so there you
go. But he's now been a

1181
01:26:10.039 --> 01:26:15.079
part of a proposal to service Hubble. Could we ad modify a crew Dragon

1182
01:26:15.239 --> 01:26:19.399
to get up to it, dock
to it, and then work from there

1183
01:26:19.800 --> 01:26:24.880
to replace the gyros and do some
maintenance on it and do a reboost of

1184
01:26:24.960 --> 01:26:30.520
it. It's not impossible, and
and because of the low price of Falcon

1185
01:26:30.640 --> 01:26:34.920
nines, it's even reasonably cost effective. Like relatively speaking, you know,

1186
01:26:34.920 --> 01:26:40.840
every Shuttle flight was a multi billion
dollar operation, this would be hundreds of

1187
01:26:40.880 --> 01:26:45.800
millions. And the issue of course
is that this is this would be a

1188
01:26:45.840 --> 01:26:48.159
one of a kind mission. If
you mess it up, you may wreck

1189
01:26:48.239 --> 01:26:51.840
Hubble. But and and Hubble could
be going and could be operating in a

1190
01:26:51.840 --> 01:26:56.840
degraded state even if they lost another
gyro. There's a couple of tricks they

1191
01:26:56.880 --> 01:27:00.000
can do with solar balancing and so
forth. They would it would limit their

1192
01:27:00.399 --> 01:27:02.000
number of places that public could point, but they could still get science from

1193
01:27:02.039 --> 01:27:06.359
them for a while. Or do
you take the chance on a unique servicing

1194
01:27:06.439 --> 01:27:12.640
mission to keep it running and perhaps
to keep it running for a really long

1195
01:27:12.720 --> 01:27:18.000
time until and arguably until starship flies, because one starship is flying. Starship

1196
01:27:18.039 --> 01:27:21.880
is nine meters in diameter. You
could build a space telescope into one of

1197
01:27:21.960 --> 01:27:26.920
those things that would be bigger than
the James Webb James Webb is six and

1198
01:27:26.960 --> 01:27:32.159
a half meters across. And then
really bringing it home and celebrating it hanging

1199
01:27:32.159 --> 01:27:35.159
in the Smithsonian would be awesome.
Yeah, that would be wonderful. So

1200
01:27:36.119 --> 01:27:40.520
that's all I got to say about
Hubble. Yeah, James Webb. So

1201
01:27:40.640 --> 01:27:43.279
let's talk about James Webb. And
you specifically asked me, it's like you're

1202
01:27:43.680 --> 01:27:46.159
gonna talk about this right because when
we did this last year, James wedd

1203
01:27:46.159 --> 01:27:50.600
had only just been gearing up right. It launched in December of twenty twenty

1204
01:27:50.680 --> 01:27:56.279
twenty one. It got to L
two its location balanced between the Earth and

1205
01:27:56.359 --> 01:28:00.760
the Sun, in January twenty two, and it took six months or so

1206
01:28:00.039 --> 01:28:02.880
of checkouts to started to get it
up and running. So by when we

1207
01:28:02.880 --> 01:28:06.239
were talking about this last year in
December twenty two, it had really done

1208
01:28:06.359 --> 01:28:11.800
some checkout images, some initial surveys, Like the pictures were astonishing. It

1209
01:28:11.800 --> 01:28:15.880
it worked, was working amazing,
but the big science stuff had only just

1210
01:28:15.960 --> 01:28:19.920
gotten started and they hadn't really looked
back at the Big Bang yet or anything.

1211
01:28:21.199 --> 01:28:25.840
Yeah, they'll because those imaging take
a while, all right, and

1212
01:28:25.880 --> 01:28:28.520
believe me, like James Webb,
is scheduled out the Yan Yang. Now

1213
01:28:28.520 --> 01:28:32.680
there's a ton of experiments, but
we've learned a bunch of things. So

1214
01:28:33.199 --> 01:28:39.840
they've set the records they expected to
set. So the quick scan stuff they

1215
01:28:39.840 --> 01:28:44.239
did, like surveying exoplanets, they've
already done some of that and got some

1216
01:28:44.279 --> 01:28:46.600
results back that we talked about last
year. But the longer duration of stuff

1217
01:28:46.600 --> 01:28:54.640
with things like locating the most distant
galaxies. So the current understanding and cosmology

1218
01:28:54.760 --> 01:29:00.000
is that the universe is about thirteen
point four billion years old, maybe thirteen

1219
01:29:00.239 --> 01:29:06.239
thirteen point six. And so now
you're peering back at light from thirteen billion

1220
01:29:06.279 --> 01:29:09.359
years ago. And a few things
are important here. One is that the

1221
01:29:09.439 --> 01:29:13.840
universe continues to expand, and so
light that was emitted thirteen billion years ago

1222
01:29:13.920 --> 01:29:17.640
in the visible spectrum isn't in the
visible spectrum anymore. It's been stretched and

1223
01:29:17.720 --> 01:29:21.479
so it's been red shifted, which
is one of the reasons that James Web

1224
01:29:21.600 --> 01:29:27.640
is an infrared telescope, because that's
where the old light is. It's in

1225
01:29:27.680 --> 01:29:32.039
the infrared spectrum. And so yeah, they found these four ultradistant galaxies.

1226
01:29:32.119 --> 01:29:36.840
That's thirteen point four billion year old
light way down in the infrared spectrum.

1227
01:29:36.880 --> 01:29:40.479
Crazy, so it's like, there
they are, we've found them, we've

1228
01:29:40.479 --> 01:29:44.399
done the thing, but we've also
got some problems with what we found.

1229
01:29:45.399 --> 01:29:51.520
And that you know, before James
Web, cosmology was pretty comfortable, right,

1230
01:29:51.520 --> 01:29:55.880
They had this sort of sense of
concordance. They'd gotten to a place

1231
01:29:55.920 --> 01:30:00.319
where they can call it concordance cosmology. This is our little domain here.

1232
01:30:00.520 --> 01:30:03.039
You know, we're all happy and
comfortable and what's out there is not going

1233
01:30:03.079 --> 01:30:05.880
to hurt us. It's far away. Well, maybe we should we should

1234
01:30:05.920 --> 01:30:10.960
back up what's cosmology about? What
is it? It's really the science of

1235
01:30:11.000 --> 01:30:15.439
understanding the origin development of the universe. So as telescopes have matured over the

1236
01:30:15.479 --> 01:30:19.920
past hundred couple one hundred years,
we've been able to look further and further

1237
01:30:20.039 --> 01:30:25.199
deeper into space. We found some
stuff, and we've been trying to understand

1238
01:30:25.600 --> 01:30:30.880
the universe around us. You know, the idea that of galaxies, of

1239
01:30:30.960 --> 01:30:33.840
multiple galaxies is less than one hundred
years old. You know, it's taken

1240
01:30:33.880 --> 01:30:36.399
a while. You know, for
a long time they thought Andromeda was just

1241
01:30:36.439 --> 01:30:43.760
a nebula, not another galaxy.
But those things, you know, evolve

1242
01:30:43.800 --> 01:30:46.319
over time. You start to learn
and get this idea of how big is

1243
01:30:46.319 --> 01:30:49.159
the universe and it's hard to me. It's not like you can measure it

1244
01:30:49.239 --> 01:30:53.039
right, it's not a measuring tape. What do you what do you do?

1245
01:30:53.439 --> 01:30:56.359
Like, how do you even start
to calculate that? And this is

1246
01:30:56.359 --> 01:31:02.159
where you get into this relationship between
cosmology and and nuclear science or atomic science.

1247
01:31:02.760 --> 01:31:06.880
We understand the behavior of atoms pretty
well. We study them up close,

1248
01:31:08.920 --> 01:31:15.760
and we know by frequencies elements emit, what frequencies of light and understanding

1249
01:31:15.800 --> 01:31:20.479
that stars are Essentially, fusion engines
that this huge amount of masks that they

1250
01:31:20.520 --> 01:31:26.319
collect together causes atoms to fuse together, starting with hydrogen, which the most

1251
01:31:26.399 --> 01:31:30.920
amount an element, then fuses together
into helium. So we need our periodic

1252
01:31:30.960 --> 01:31:34.560
table to sort of understand the chain. And when that fusion takes place,

1253
01:31:34.600 --> 01:31:39.840
and it makes a particular kind of
light, and depending on the size the

1254
01:31:39.960 --> 01:31:44.479
rate of fusion, you'll get different
frequencies of light. And so by measuring

1255
01:31:44.520 --> 01:31:48.720
that light we can sort of tell
what kind of fusion is taking place,

1256
01:31:48.760 --> 01:31:53.399
and that gives us a sense of
its mass. Now you take its brightness

1257
01:31:53.920 --> 01:31:57.079
and relative to its brightness, you
know what its distance is. It'll be

1258
01:31:57.119 --> 01:32:00.920
dimmer of its further away, you
know, by the frequent see the kind

1259
01:32:00.960 --> 01:32:05.279
of fusion that's taking place. So
now you can tell by determined its distance

1260
01:32:05.319 --> 01:32:09.840
by how bright it is, and
that's you know, the first calculations you

1261
01:32:09.880 --> 01:32:15.560
start to get for distance. And
then we find particular classes of stars.

1262
01:32:15.119 --> 01:32:20.720
So an astronomer by the name of
Henrietta Swan leave It a woman in nineteen

1263
01:32:20.800 --> 01:32:27.680
oh eight identified set of stars they
call the cephid variables. So cephid variables

1264
01:32:28.159 --> 01:32:32.319
change in brightness, that is at
a standard period, so they appear to

1265
01:32:32.560 --> 01:32:36.640
pulse, okay, and this is
separate from atmospheric effect. They have this

1266
01:32:36.800 --> 01:32:44.279
pulse. The current understanding today is
that these are stars far enough along in

1267
01:32:44.319 --> 01:32:50.800
their sequence that there's enough helium in
there in their atmosphere, in the corona

1268
01:32:50.800 --> 01:32:57.119
that surrounds them that that helium,
as it blows the electrons off the helium,

1269
01:32:57.159 --> 01:33:00.960
they become more opaque, it blocks
more light, and so it caused

1270
01:33:01.000 --> 01:33:04.920
it to dim. And as that
dimming occurs and it loses some energy,

1271
01:33:05.199 --> 01:33:10.279
the electrons come back onto the helium
and so it becomes more transparent again.

1272
01:33:10.600 --> 01:33:14.920
And so there's this throb that happens
to these stars at this point in their

1273
01:33:15.000 --> 01:33:17.119
age, and you can measure them. But it must be at a particularly

1274
01:33:17.199 --> 01:33:20.640
high frequency though, I mean,
it isn't something that you could probably look

1275
01:33:20.680 --> 01:33:24.199
at and see it pulsing. It
is. No, No, it's very

1276
01:33:24.279 --> 01:33:27.760
visible. It's not that fast.
Wow. I just think though you know

1277
01:33:27.800 --> 01:33:32.000
the speed at which chemical reactions happen, it would it would be very fast.

1278
01:33:32.399 --> 01:33:36.279
Yeah, and these are high energy
plasma reactions too. But you are

1279
01:33:36.319 --> 01:33:40.880
talking star scale, Yeah, I
get it. So, and you can

1280
01:33:40.920 --> 01:33:45.800
well go watch video of so big
and you'll see that. Yeah, big

1281
01:33:45.880 --> 01:33:47.920
pulse. And this is not a
pulsar. That's not the same thing as

1282
01:33:47.920 --> 01:33:50.960
a pulsar. No, that's a
different thing. That's a that's a rapidly

1283
01:33:50.960 --> 01:33:55.680
spinning thing. And it's also useful
but not necessarily useful distance so much as

1284
01:33:55.880 --> 01:34:00.600
as useful for a location. Right, Okay, but this this is before

1285
01:34:00.600 --> 01:34:03.319
we had all those We're still talking
about optical sensors, right. Radio telescopes

1286
01:34:03.319 --> 01:34:08.960
haven't really started yet, Like we're
not able to measure into the gamma frequencies

1287
01:34:09.000 --> 01:34:12.439
and at this point it's too early. We're very much in optical times.

1288
01:34:13.199 --> 01:34:18.640
But they utilizing SEFID variables. Knowing
the frequencies and knowing the pulse rate helped

1289
01:34:18.720 --> 01:34:24.600
us determine more accurate distances. Okay, So and Levitt was they sort of

1290
01:34:24.600 --> 01:34:28.920
wrote the original paper on this,
with many other people contributing. It's I'm

1291
01:34:28.960 --> 01:34:32.760
always tricky to mention names because there
are there always other folks. We always

1292
01:34:32.760 --> 01:34:38.239
build on the bat shoulders of giants. So let's jump to twenty years later

1293
01:34:38.279 --> 01:34:41.960
with Edwin Hubble. And yes it's
that Hubble. What the Hubble telescope is

1294
01:34:42.000 --> 01:34:46.680
named for is Edwin Hubble. So
Hubble in nineteen twenty nine using telescopes measuring

1295
01:34:46.880 --> 01:34:53.439
with sephid variables shows that not only
we've already now at this point we determined

1296
01:34:53.439 --> 01:34:57.279
there as multiple galaxies, but that
he's also he's the one who figures out

1297
01:34:57.359 --> 01:35:01.279
red shift. So the further the
galaxy he is away, the more red

1298
01:35:01.319 --> 01:35:04.680
shift that it is. Although he's
only looking in the optical frequency range.

1299
01:35:04.680 --> 01:35:09.640
Show eventually the red shift off a
visible range, but he starts to be

1300
01:35:09.640 --> 01:35:15.279
able to build the math around red
shifting. So red shift looks red and

1301
01:35:17.079 --> 01:35:23.960
it looks right. So typically when
you talk about ultra large stars, much

1302
01:35:24.039 --> 01:35:28.239
bigger than our stars, they are
blue giants. They are very much in

1303
01:35:28.279 --> 01:35:30.840
the blue because they have so much
mass, they have a very intense level

1304
01:35:30.840 --> 01:35:35.720
of fusion. So they're up in
the nine ten thousand kelvin frequency range of

1305
01:35:35.840 --> 01:35:43.840
ultra blue light. But then they
are they are are so old and so

1306
01:35:44.039 --> 01:35:47.479
far away the light has stretched and
it's no longer blue. It's becoming red

1307
01:35:48.439 --> 01:35:51.880
and it's red to us. So
if you were up close, red deep

1308
01:35:51.880 --> 01:35:56.880
blue like everybody else, Yeah,
if you were there, I mean again,

1309
01:35:57.000 --> 01:36:00.640
you're looking back in time. You're
talking looking back billions of years ago

1310
01:36:00.720 --> 01:36:06.279
get effectively. And this is also
the time when Einstein's written his special relativity

1311
01:36:06.319 --> 01:36:12.319
theorems too, and special relativity talks
about the stretching of space time, and

1312
01:36:12.399 --> 01:36:17.880
so what was brilliant about what Hubble
was measuring by looking through telescopes is very

1313
01:36:17.920 --> 01:36:25.159
precise of observations lined up with what
special relativity said would be the distortions too.

1314
01:36:25.600 --> 01:36:31.239
So we have this theoretical physicist and
this cosmologist getting numbers that degree.

1315
01:36:31.920 --> 01:36:34.239
You know, when we're trying to
do signs like this, we're looking for

1316
01:36:34.319 --> 01:36:39.119
multiple strategies to do measurements, because
if they all consolidate out on the same

1317
01:36:39.199 --> 01:36:45.319
number, then we have more certainty
that number is correct. So one of

1318
01:36:45.319 --> 01:36:48.239
the things that Edwin Humble figured out
was that the further those galaxies were away,

1319
01:36:48.279 --> 01:36:55.079
the more red shifting they were.
And so what he showed was that

1320
01:36:55.119 --> 01:36:58.800
the universe was expanding, and it
continued to expand. It it expanded at

1321
01:36:58.720 --> 01:37:02.399
a particular rate, which for a
long time they called Hubbles constant. These

1322
01:37:02.479 --> 01:37:04.920
days, we don't call it a
constant anymore because there's a lot of debate

1323
01:37:05.199 --> 01:37:10.319
about whether it's actually a constant.
We call it Hubbles parameter. And did

1324
01:37:10.319 --> 01:37:14.880
they figure that out because the stars
that were far away were getting more and

1325
01:37:14.920 --> 01:37:17.159
more red over time. Yes,
well in galaxies too, you know,

1326
01:37:17.159 --> 01:37:21.239
the galaxies were getting more and more
red. But he was measuring their changes

1327
01:37:21.279 --> 01:37:28.199
over time and was able to show
how far away they are, and that

1328
01:37:28.279 --> 01:37:32.279
they are it's actually expending their getting
further away from us in all directions,

1329
01:37:32.560 --> 01:37:35.600
because universe be weird. Yeah,
right, I know, it's strange,

1330
01:37:35.840 --> 01:37:43.279
it's crazy. Isn't anything heading toward
us? All kinds of things are,

1331
01:37:43.399 --> 01:37:46.920
but not at the cosmological scales.
So now let's fast forward into the nineteen

1332
01:37:47.000 --> 01:37:55.439
sixties and we're getting into radio astronomy, and as we're tempting to measure the

1333
01:37:55.560 --> 01:38:01.159
radiation coming off of supernovae, we
keep running into this hum, right,

1334
01:38:01.239 --> 01:38:04.119
and they keep and I think it's
like man made to look at all those

1335
01:38:04.159 --> 01:38:06.199
things, but it takes a while
from the really realize, oh no,

1336
01:38:06.319 --> 01:38:11.760
that is literally the hum of the
universe, the cosmic ome. Yeah,

1337
01:38:11.800 --> 01:38:16.199
they might this microwave background radiation,
and so now they call it the cosmic

1338
01:38:16.239 --> 01:38:23.399
microwave background, but literally it is
the buzz of the big bang of the

1339
01:38:23.439 --> 01:38:26.920
initial and it's not really a bang, and it may have actually been really

1340
01:38:26.960 --> 01:38:30.199
tiny initially, although it got a
lot bigger. But it is literally the

1341
01:38:30.239 --> 01:38:35.399
background radiation of the initial light of
the universe, and it is not even

1342
01:38:35.800 --> 01:38:40.680
the hum varies depending on which way
you point in the sky. We now

1343
01:38:40.800 --> 01:38:48.239
have cosmological background radiation maps. Because
the universe wasn't perfectly uniform, a lot

1344
01:38:48.239 --> 01:38:54.520
of that light got concentrated down.
The darker, the cooler areas in the

1345
01:38:54.560 --> 01:39:00.720
background radiation are where the first gallance
is formed. So the process of gravity

1346
01:39:00.760 --> 01:39:08.479
taking a hold and consolidating these galaxies
cooled off that area faster, and so

1347
01:39:08.640 --> 01:39:12.880
from the background radiation map we can
sort of see where the galaxies sort of

1348
01:39:12.880 --> 01:39:17.720
appeared. But it also allowed us
to use a completely different strategy to measure

1349
01:39:17.760 --> 01:39:23.399
the age of the universe by the
rate of cooling of the of the cosmic

1350
01:39:23.760 --> 01:39:29.399
map of the CMB. Sure,
and so and up till before James Web,

1351
01:39:30.000 --> 01:39:33.439
the two numbers were close enough that
it's like other within the rare error

1352
01:39:33.520 --> 01:39:38.840
rate, so they probably the same
number the margin of error, that's right.

1353
01:39:39.000 --> 01:39:44.199
Yeah. Then James Web showed up
and started doing more precise measurements of

1354
01:39:44.319 --> 01:39:47.960
both, and as the science has
been coming in, the numbers are beginning

1355
01:39:47.960 --> 01:39:53.239
fur through up. And the numbers
we're talking about are the red shift rate.

1356
01:39:54.039 --> 01:39:57.239
Okay, we're talking about the age
of the universe. How long has

1357
01:39:57.279 --> 01:40:00.720
the universe been around. There's a
few things that have messed with thirteen point

1358
01:40:00.800 --> 01:40:03.199
seven. One is that we're as
we understand the red shift rate more and

1359
01:40:03.239 --> 01:40:06.600
more detail. And one of the
things that's happened is that the James West

1360
01:40:06.640 --> 01:40:12.640
based ELSCO has been able to show
find objects of red shifts in the in

1361
01:40:12.680 --> 01:40:15.520
the teens like thirteen point two,
like literally at the beginning of the universe

1362
01:40:15.640 --> 01:40:23.000
kind of numbers, and they're way
bigger than they should. You know.

1363
01:40:23.239 --> 01:40:27.600
The idea was when the universe started
and it was just protons, there's not

1364
01:40:27.640 --> 01:40:30.800
a lot of mass concentration there,
so the stars should have been very short

1365
01:40:30.840 --> 01:40:35.600
lived, and those galaxies should be
small hule and they seem to be large

1366
01:40:35.600 --> 01:40:41.720
and complex. We're talking like Milky
Way class galaxies from thirteen billion years ago,

1367
01:40:42.119 --> 01:40:45.479
from the first two or three percent
of the lifespan of the universe as

1368
01:40:45.479 --> 01:40:49.000
we understand it. Damn you,
James Webb telescope. It's yes, it's

1369
01:40:49.039 --> 01:40:56.520
confusing, right, but also and
both methods have shown that there's something we

1370
01:40:56.560 --> 01:40:59.960
really don't understand. And this is
the sort of dark energy dark matter part.

1371
01:41:00.439 --> 01:41:04.560
That the matter that we're seeing in
both measurement strategies represents less than five

1372
01:41:04.600 --> 01:41:08.079
percent of all the matter, right, that there seems to be something more

1373
01:41:08.119 --> 01:41:13.560
in the neighborhood of twenty five twenty
six percent dark matter matter we cannot measure

1374
01:41:13.760 --> 01:41:17.840
but has gravitational effects, otherwise galaxies
wouldn't hold together. And that there's a

1375
01:41:17.880 --> 01:41:26.319
tremendous amount of energy, like sixty
eight to seventy percent energy that is immeasurable

1376
01:41:26.359 --> 01:41:30.079
but must be there because of the
behaviors that we see weird. So we

1377
01:41:30.199 --> 01:41:33.600
really have the sense that we don't
know much, like we're only able to

1378
01:41:33.720 --> 01:41:40.680
observe a little bit of what's going
on out there. And now as we

1379
01:41:40.720 --> 01:41:44.000
get into these measurement better measurement systems, they're getting further and further. But

1380
01:41:44.079 --> 01:41:49.159
that means that we're due for some
new kind of revelation that we have not

1381
01:41:49.359 --> 01:41:55.479
yet even conceived. And that and
here lies the crisis. Is now a

1382
01:41:55.520 --> 01:42:00.439
lot of folks that were maybe on
the periphery, like one of the proposals

1383
01:42:00.520 --> 01:42:03.159
run around out there right now is
that maybe the universe is twice as old

1384
01:42:03.199 --> 01:42:06.159
as we think it is that it's
twenty six billion years old, and that's

1385
01:42:06.199 --> 01:42:10.479
why the galaxies are more organized as
you get back to the thirteen billion year

1386
01:42:10.560 --> 01:42:19.000
mark, because we have these impossible
early galaxies. Now those are the paper

1387
01:42:19.039 --> 01:42:24.840
proposed that says that has not done
enough research to justify such a great a

1388
01:42:24.920 --> 01:42:29.760
serious statement, right, you know, great proposals require great evidence. So

1389
01:42:29.880 --> 01:42:32.880
we're not there yet, but you
are seeing this sort of fragmentation of ideas.

1390
01:42:32.880 --> 01:42:36.319
Well. You know, if I
apply my imagination, which Einstein say

1391
01:42:36.359 --> 01:42:41.880
is more important than knowledge, if
you apply your imagination, I would think

1392
01:42:41.960 --> 01:42:51.479
that perhaps the percentage of dark matter
and dark energy that we imagine should be

1393
01:42:51.560 --> 01:42:59.520
applied to our estimate of the age
of the universe. Well, without a

1394
01:42:59.520 --> 01:43:00.960
doubt it is this. The thing
is is we got to these estimates.

1395
01:43:00.960 --> 01:43:03.920
That is why we said there must
be some kind of energy we can't measure.

1396
01:43:04.000 --> 01:43:08.000
This wouldn't work, so it's sort
of been this catch all of us.

1397
01:43:09.159 --> 01:43:13.359
So if you let's say you say
that there's sixty percent of the universe's

1398
01:43:13.439 --> 01:43:16.600
dark matter dark energy, well maybe
we should inflate that thirteen point nine by

1399
01:43:16.840 --> 01:43:20.399
another sixty percent. Well, it's
it's more far more than that. It's

1400
01:43:20.760 --> 01:43:25.279
seventy five. Okay, But there's
a few things you can go after.

1401
01:43:25.399 --> 01:43:30.079
One is our measurements wrong. You
know, the one of the ideas around

1402
01:43:30.119 --> 01:43:33.680
the Sephid model is that we're biased
bright that because there's so many stars that

1403
01:43:33.720 --> 01:43:36.960
every time we track a measure of
a star, there are other stars contributing

1404
01:43:38.000 --> 01:43:41.680
to that light, and so that
might be distorting it. Again, James

1405
01:43:41.680 --> 01:43:45.600
well Hells has addressed that because it's
even more precise, those measurements are still

1406
01:43:45.640 --> 01:43:50.520
ongoing, so maybe we can offset
that. Also. You know, I

1407
01:43:50.600 --> 01:43:55.560
hinted at maybe it's not Hubbles constant. Maybe at different times in the universe

1408
01:43:55.840 --> 01:44:00.039
the expansion rate changed. It would
be under processes is we don't understand,

1409
01:44:00.159 --> 01:44:03.359
right, But that's why they're starting
to refer to it as a parameter,

1410
01:44:03.479 --> 01:44:08.720
because that parameter may have some variability. Maybe there's other states of matter.

1411
01:44:08.760 --> 01:44:14.000
We still don't understand that that impact
other areas of the universe that change its

1412
01:44:14.159 --> 01:44:18.960
raptational constants, they change its behavior. All that's happened with James Webb is

1413
01:44:18.960 --> 01:44:25.880
we've like most new experiments, they
introduced new questions and make us force us

1414
01:44:25.920 --> 01:44:30.760
to get uncomfortable with our current set
of measurements that we have should be crisis

1415
01:44:30.760 --> 01:44:35.399
of cosmology is yeah, I mean, listen, we call it a crisis.

1416
01:44:35.720 --> 01:44:40.920
It's learning. This is a This
is a bunch of science people going

1417
01:44:41.119 --> 01:44:47.000
huh, well that's odd. And
now it's sort of you know, you

1418
01:44:47.079 --> 01:44:50.600
had this consensus moment before these new
measurements came in. It's like, ah,

1419
01:44:50.600 --> 01:44:53.960
we're close enough, and now it's
like, maybe we're not that close.

1420
01:44:55.079 --> 01:44:57.319
Uh. And it's not like this
is the last telescope to fly.

1421
01:44:57.479 --> 01:45:01.520
More will come and our instruments will
can get better. But James Webb has

1422
01:45:01.560 --> 01:45:05.319
done its job. It has opened
our eyes to there is more to no

1423
01:45:06.199 --> 01:45:12.720
and new science is being done right
now as we learn more from the measures

1424
01:45:12.760 --> 01:45:15.439
we could take from it. It's
exciting. It's very cool. It sounds

1425
01:45:15.439 --> 01:45:18.960
like the end of the geek out. Oh no, yeah, I'm sorry

1426
01:45:18.960 --> 01:45:24.359
it's this long, but that's how
much I had to say. All right,

1427
01:45:24.399 --> 01:45:46.880
well, thanks again and we'll see
you next time on dot net rocks.

1428
01:45:48.199 --> 01:45:53.159
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1429
01:45:53.239 --> 01:45:58.920
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01:45:59.000 --> 01:46:04.159
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1431
01:46:04.359 --> 01:46:08.239
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1432
01:46:08.520 --> 01:46:13.680
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1433
01:46:13.800 --> 01:46:17.439
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1434
01:46:17.479 --> 01:46:21.000
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1435
01:46:21.079 --> 01:46:25.960
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1436
01:46:26.880 --> 01:46:28.359
You got jad middle Van