Speaker 1: Welcome to Astronomy Daily, your source for the latest space
exploration news. I'm your host, Anna, and we have a
busy episode for you today, with some truly fascinating developments
from across the Cosmos and our ongoing efforts to explore it.
We'll be taking you on board with the SpaceX fram
two astronauts as they make history orbiting Earth from pole
to pole and share their remarkable views from space. Then
we'll look at NASA's newly unveiled Artemis two mission patch
as the agency prepares to return humans to lunar orbit.
SpaceX has also achieved a significant milestone with their super
heavy booster, bringing us closer to full rocket reusability. Plus,
we'll explore how Moondust could become a power source for
future lunar settlements, and dive into Spin launches, ambitious plans
to deploy hundreds of satellites with a single launch. So
strap in for a journey through the latest and greatest
in space exploration right here on Astronomy Daily. First up,
let's get an update on a story we've been covering
this week. The SpaceX fram two mission is making headlines
as the first ever crew to orbit Earth from pole
to pole, giving us a completely new human perspective of
our planet. Now, in their third day aboard the crew
Dragon Resilience, the four person crew has been sharing breath
taking footage of their journey, including unique views of the
Arctic and Antarctica that no human has witnessed firsthand until now.
In videos posted to social media, mission commander Chun Wang
and his crewmates captured incredible moments circling the globe every
ninety minutes. One particularly striking clip shows the spacecraft flying
over Florida's space coast, where they were able to zoom
in on their own launch pad at Kennedy Space Center.
You can hear the excitement in their voices as they exclaim,
I can see our launch pad from here, followed by
Wang's enthusiastic response, it is our launch pad, Oh my god.
The historic crew consists of Malti's cryptocurrency billionaire Chun Wang,
who's funding the mission, along with three spaceflight es Jenica
Michelson of Norway, Rabia Raga of Germany, and Eric Phillips
of Australia. They launched a board Resilience on a SpaceX
Falcon nine rocket from Launch Complex thirty nine, a This
past Monday, Long shared details about their experience, describing the
Falcon nine liftoff as surprisingly smooth. The crew has been
keeping busy with various activities, including ham radio transmissions, capturing
X ray images, and even hosting a movie night where
they re watched their own launch. They've documented spectacular sites,
including massive storm systems swirling over ice covered regions and
what they identified as Norway's Svalbard Islands. During a video
call shown in their latest footage, medical officer Eric Phillips
spoke with his son in Los Angeles, mentioning they would
be splashing down tomorrow, indicating a return to Earth on Friday.
This aligns with the mission's scheduled duration of three to
five days. When Resilience does return, it will mark another
milestone as the first of SpaceX's c Crude missions to
splash down in the Pacific Ocean off California's coast, representing
a shift in the company's recovery operations away from Florida.
The world will be watching as these pioneering polar explorers
complete their historic journey and bring home unprecedented perspectives of
our planet. After five decades without a moonbound crew, insignia.
NASA has officially unveiled the Artemis two mission patch, representing
humanity's long awaited return to lunar exploration. Revealed just yesterday,
this emblem will be worn by the four astronauts scheduled
to journey around the Moon no later than April twenty
twenty six. The distinctive patch shares the same outline as
NASA's broader Artemis program emblem, featuring the letter A with
a red trajectory line forming its crossbar, symbolizing the path
between Earth and our lunar neighbor. What makes this patch
particularly meaningful is its central artwork depicting Earth Rise, the
iconic image first captured by Apollo eight astronauts in nineteen
sixty eight when he humans initially ventured to lunar orbit.
According to the crew's official description, the scene of the
Earth and the Moon represents the dual nature of human spaceflight,
both equally compelling. The Moon represents our exploration destination, focused
on discovery of the unknown. The Earth represents home, focused
on the perspective we gain when we look back at
our shared planet and learn what it is to be
uniquely human. The patch notably designates the mission as Aii,
signifying not just the second major Artemis flight, but what
the crew describes as an endeavor of discovery that seeks
to explore for all and by all. This inclusive message
reflects the historic nature of the crew itself, which consists
of NASA astronauts Read Wiseman serving as commander, Victor Glover
as pilot, Christina Coke as Mission Specialist, and Canadian Space
Agency astronaut Jeremy Hanson also as Mission specialist. Hanson's inclusion
is particularly significant as he'll become the first non American
to travel to the Moon. Already revealed his personal mission
patch featuring indigenous art honoring Canada's original explorers. Artemis two
will mark several historic firsts, the inaugural crude test flight
of NASA's Space Launch System rocket and Oriyon spacecraft, humanity's
first lunar mission since Apollo seventeen in nineteen seventy two,
and possibly the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth.
The astronauts will journey more than six hundred thousand miles
as they loop around the Moon before returning home, paving
the way for future Artemis missions that aim to establish
a sustainable human presence on the lunar surface next up.
While space X continues working through challenges with Starship's upper stage,
the company has just reached a remarkable milestone with the
rocket's massive first stage booster. Yesterday morning at their star
Base facility in South Texas, SpaceX successfully test fired a
previously flown super heavy booster for the first time ever,
with a spectacular eight second burn that sent a drman
matt plume of orange exhaust across the launch site. This
particular booster, designated Booster fourteen, first launched in January, reaching
the edge of space before returning to Earth. Now it's
poised to fly again, with SpaceX confirming it will power
the next Starship test flight. Of the booster's thirty three
methane fueled Raptor engines, twenty nine are flight proven, making
this a significant step toward what SpaceX describes as their
ultimate goal of zero touch reflight. The super heavy booster
is truly an engineering marvel, standing taller than a Boeing
seven hundred and forty seven jumbo jet. Positioned vertically, it
generates nearly seventeen million pounds of thrust, twice the power
of NASA's legendary Saturn five rocket that sent astronauts to
the Moon. It's arguably the most complex rocket booster ever constructed,
and certainly the largest. What makes this rapid turnaround particularly
impressive is the contrast with SpaceX's first Falcon nine booster
reuse back in twenty seventeen. That process required nearly a
year of thorough inspections, refurbishment, and cross country transportation between facilities.
Booster fourteen, meanwhile, is on track to fly again less
than three months after its initial launch. Unlike the Falcon nine,
which uses landing legs to touch down at a separate location,
Super Heavy is caught by mechanical arms at the launch
tower as it returns, a technique SpaceX calls the chopstick catch.
This approach eliminates the need for landing legs and potentially
allows for much faster turnaround between flights. The speedy reuse
progress is especially noteworthy given super Heavy scale and complexity.
Compared to Falcon nine. With thirty three engines instead of nine,
there are theoretically more potential failure points. Yet SpaceX has
achieved seven consecutive successful Super Heavy launches and has recovered
three boosters in four recent attempts. This rapid progress with
booster reusability is crucial for SpaceX's ambitious starship program, especially
can considering NASA's reliance on the system for future Artemis
lunar landings. When fully operational, multiple starship launches will be
required to refuel lunar landers in orbit before they can
journey to the Moon, making quick and reliable reuse absolutely essential.
Moondust is quickly becoming one of space exploration's most versatile materials.
In an exciting new breakthrough, scientists have now demonstrated that
lunar regolith, the technical term for the dust and fragmented
material covering the Moon's surface, can be transformed into functioning
solar cells. A team led by Felix Laying from the
University of Potsdam in Germany has successfully turned simulated lunar
dust into solar panels, potentially solving a critical power generation
challenge for future lunar settlements. From extracting water for fuel
to building houses with lunar bricks, scientists have been finding
ways to use moondust. Laying explained, now we can turn
it into solar cells too, possibly providing the energy of
future Moon city will need the process is surprisingly straightforward.
The researchers melted simulated lunar regolith to create what they
call moon glass, which can be accomplished on the Moon
simply by focusing natural sunlight to achieve the necessary high temperatures.
This moon glass is then combined with perovskite, a crystalline
material commonly used in solar cells that absorb sunlight and
excites electrons to generate electric current. Manufacturing solar cells on
the Moon offers significant advantages over transporting earth made panels.
Traditional solar cells incorporate glass that adds considerable weight to
launch payloads, dramatically increasing costs. By using local lunar materials,
scientists estimate they could reduce transport weight by an impressive
ninety nine per cent. The moon glass based cells have
another unexpected benefit. Standard glass tends to brown in space,
reducing efficiency as it blocks incoming sunlight. However, moon glass
already has a natural brown tint from impurities in the regolith,
which acts prevents further browning. It's also more resistant to
space radiation, a critical factor in the harsh lunar environment.
While the current efficiency of these moon glass solar cells
sits at around ten percent, considerably lower than the thirty
to forty percent efficiency of premium space based solar panels.
Lang's team believes they can improve this to twenty three
percent by removing certain impurities. Even at lower efficiency, the
ability to mass produce these cells directly on the lunar
surface makes them extremely practical. You don't need ultra efficient
thirty percent solar cells, you just make more of them
on the moon. Lang noted this approach could be particularly
valuable at the lunar South Pole, where permanent sunlight and
nearby water ice deposits make it an ideal location for
a sustainable moon base. Some challenges remain, including how low
gravity might affect the moonglass formation process and how perovskite
solvents might behave in vacuum conditions. To address these questions,
the research team proposes a small scale lunar mission to
test the solar cells in actual lunar conditions, potentially unlocking
a power source that could sustain humanity's long term presence
on our celestial neighbor. Finally, today, in the realm of
space innovation, spin Launch is turning heads with its ambitious
plans for a new broadband satellite constellation. Called Meridian Space.
What makes this project particularly revolutionary is the company's vision
for deployment. They aim to launch up to two hundred
and fifty micro satellites in a single mission, a feat
that would shatter the current record of one hundred forty
three satellites launched at once set by SpaceX's Transporter one
mission in twenty twenty one. This satellite network recently secured
twelve million dollars in funding from Kongsberg Nanoevionics to develop
and commercialize these specialized spacecraft. According to their timeline, we
could see the first on orbit demonstrator as early as
twenty twenty six. The flat stackabled design of these satellites
is key to fitting so many on a single launch vehicle,
with images showing them neatly arranged atop one another. Eric Laie,
president of Kongsberg Defense and Aerospace, has emphasized that the
Meridian Space constellation will provide significantly higher broadband capacity in
a satellite constellation compared with what is available on the
market today. Meanwhile, David Wren, spin Launch's CEO, noted that
Nanoavionic's modular satellite platforms offer a reliable foundation to scale
our constellation quickly and confidently. What truly sets spin Launch apart, however,
is their unconventional approach to reaching orbit. The company is
developing a massive one hundred eight foot long spinning arm
that works as a centrifuge, accelerating launch vehicles to tremendous
speeds before literally flinging them skyward. Once these vehicles reach
sufficient altitude, they ignite their engines, dramatically reducing the fuel
and hardware required to achieve orbit. This isn't just theoretical technology.
NASA has already partnered with spin Launch, signing an agreement
in twenty twenty two for a demonstration that successfully launched
experiments from NASA Airbus and Cornell University to suborbital space
using this centrifuge method. While it remains unclear whether spin
Launch will use their own revolutionary system to deploy the
first Meridian Space Demonstrator or opt for a traditional rocket launch,
their approach represents a fundamental rethinking of how we access space,
potentially making satellite deployment more economical and environmentally sustainable than
ever before. That wraps up today's edition of Astronomy Daily.
From the historic pol to Pole orbit of the FRAM
two mission to SpaceX's breakthrough in super heavy booster reuse.
We've covered some remarkable developments in humanity's ongoing exploration of space.
The Artemis program continues to progress toward returning humans to
the lunar surface, while innovative approaches to utilizing Moondust for
solar power could revolutionize our future presence there, and spin
Launch's ambitious satellite deployment plans show how rapidly space technology
continues to evolve. I'm Anna, and I've been your host
for this cosmic journey. Whether you're fascinated by the technical
achievements of rocket reusability, intrigued by the possibilities of lunar settlements,
or simply love gazing at our planet from space, I
hope today's stories have captured your imagination. Don't forget to
visit our website at Astronomy Daily dot io, where you
can sign up for our free daily newsletter and listen
to all our back episodes. You can also connect with
us across social media by searching for astro Daily Pod
on Facebook, x YouTube, YouTube, music, Instagram, and TikTok. Thanks
for joining me today on Astronomy Daily. Until tomorrow, keep
looking up and wondering about the vast universe that surrounds
us stories. The story is the soul Store, is the
soul m