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Speaker 1: up now at Patreon dot dot NetRocks dot com. Hey,
Speaker 1: dot ed rockers, it's another geek out?
Speaker 2: Is that down again?
Speaker 1: I'm Carl and that's Richard. Hey, mostly Richard's stuff in
Speaker 1: this show, I'm gonna be asking dumb questions and agreeing
Speaker 1: with him. We're disagreeing. I doubt I'll disagree that much.
Speaker 2: You try. But you know I work pretty hard to
Speaker 2: be pretty middle of the road on a lot of
Speaker 2: this stuff.
Speaker 1: Right, Yes, you do, Yeah, and work hard you do.
Speaker 1: So this is our annual space geek out, right.
Speaker 2: Richard, Yes, it's time for the space geek out. It's
Speaker 2: been a good year.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but before we do that, let's do a little better.
Speaker 1: No framework awesome?
Speaker 2: All right? Man?
Speaker 1: What got Okay? Well, our friend Brian McKay sent me this.
Speaker 2: That guy again, I know that guy?
Speaker 1: Yeah, he sent us this. Basically it's called suno s
Speaker 1: uno dot com and you can essentially create your own
Speaker 1: song music with lyrics with the vocalist just by creating
Speaker 1: a prompt.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: And yeah, and Brian really loves this because you know,
Speaker 1: he doesn't.
Speaker 2: Have because he's not you who could make a song.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he doesn't have a recording studio. He can't lay
Speaker 1: down tracks, you know. So so I kind of see this.
Speaker 2: Or incredible experience and expertise and making music, you know,
Speaker 2: years of effort.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so at first I was At first, I was,
Speaker 1: you know, like you, I had a negative reaction, like
Speaker 1: you know. Also, it didn't help that he was saying
Speaker 1: all the recording companies are out of business.
Speaker 2: It's like, yeah, which is daft not true.
Speaker 1: Well, they're already screwed, you know, they're.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and by the way, mostly scumbacks, right like the
Speaker 2: artists are. So we're gonna have a hard time being
Speaker 2: unhappy about it when those guys are done, because they
Speaker 2: have been providing value for a long time.
Speaker 1: And I also think that, you know, when you have
Speaker 1: these things out there and people are hearing them and
Speaker 1: then learning that they're AI generated or whatever, they tend
Speaker 1: to swing back the other way. They want to go
Speaker 1: out and see live music that's done by real people,
Speaker 1: and they want to you know, engage with their favorite
Speaker 1: bands and stuff all over again. And it's kind of
Speaker 1: like what happened with Vinyl, right, you know, people come
Speaker 1: back to the stars.
Speaker 2: I think the Vinyl thing is bizarre to me because
Speaker 2: it's an it's not that good a reproduction of music,
Speaker 2: per se.
Speaker 1: No, but it's the romance of it that people like.
Speaker 1: The ritual.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the ritual. Yeah, I'm with you. And you know,
Speaker 2: I think part of it is that in contemporary music
Speaker 2: these days, with the Spotify's and so forth, music is
Speaker 2: totally background. And if there's any person who taught me
Speaker 2: about music being listened to, it was you, because.
Speaker 1: I, oh, really, and you've been a listener of music
Speaker 1: for a long long time though.
Speaker 2: Sure, sure, but I've never What I learned from you
Speaker 2: was like, you never want to be background music. If
Speaker 2: I'm playing, it's you want to listen to me? Yeah,
Speaker 2: you don't want to listen to me. I'm not going
Speaker 2: to play, right, And I realized I don't play music
Speaker 2: all the time because I tend to play music to
Speaker 2: listen to it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, And that's a dying practice. I think there
Speaker 1: are less people with really good Hi fi systems and
Speaker 1: speakers where they go into a dark room and they
Speaker 1: put on an album or something and just listen. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's very rare and imdally I don't
Speaker 2: have that kind of gear, you know. I think my
Speaker 2: best sounding system is my Bow's earbuds. Yeah yeah, because
Speaker 2: they're they're super local and they they're noise suppressing, so
Speaker 2: I just hear the music.
Speaker 1: So the way I and as I said before, my
Speaker 1: first reaction was like, you know.
Speaker 3: Blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: But the way I look at it now now that
Speaker 1: I've had some time because he first told me about this,
Speaker 1: you know, way earlier in the year, The way I
Speaker 1: look at it now is sort of like the evolution
Speaker 1: of the cassio keyboard, you know, and maybe.
Speaker 2: Right right, which was a joke and then became an instrument, yeah.
Speaker 1: And maybe garage band, you know, where people who don't
Speaker 1: really know how to play or do anything can put
Speaker 1: together music. And I just see it as sort of
Speaker 1: an evolution of that so that the people who aren't
Speaker 1: musicians can get the same sort of satisfaction, right that
Speaker 1: somebody who writes and record as a song would.
Speaker 2: Have, you know, admittedly without the work, but also a
Speaker 2: limited ability to do anything about it too. So yeah,
Speaker 2: it's a toy, but it's a toy that leads to
Speaker 2: more creativity. I think that's cool.
Speaker 1: But if you listen to some of the songs just
Speaker 1: on son dot com, you'll think, what that sounds like
Speaker 1: a professionally recorded wow song? Yeah that how can that
Speaker 1: not be a human? But so I don't know like
Speaker 1: where they're getting their samples from and how they're redoing things.
Speaker 2: That's always the question, isn't Yeah, yeah, I can't tell
Speaker 2: you how people have now sent me copies of of
Speaker 2: AI generated podcasts where the male voice sounds like me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like I haven't. I haven't received one of those yet,
Speaker 1: but you can easily make one.
Speaker 2: I mean yeah, so but I am I. Is it
Speaker 2: likely that my voice has been sampled? Yeah? Pretty likely?
Speaker 2: Probably thousand hours out there, you know, like, yeah, what
Speaker 2: are you gonna do? Right? Anyway?
Speaker 1: Right? Anyway? So that's it, thanks Brian, and we'll have
Speaker 1: more from him, I'm sure in subsequent episodes. So you
Speaker 1: got a comment, Richard, Yeah, I.
Speaker 2: Grabbed a comment off of a geek out. Actually I
Speaker 2: went back to the Interplanetary Transport System. Geekout. That's thirteen
Speaker 2: sixty four, the one we did back in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: which was when Elon started talking about the vehicle that
Speaker 2: would become Starship.
Speaker 1: Elon the next president of the United States.
Speaker 2: I thought he was a Speaker of the House. I'm sorry, oh,
Speaker 2: well whatever, whatever. But yeah, you know, he had this
Speaker 2: whole idea of the its and being on having a
Speaker 2: million pede on Mars by twenty fifty, which all of
Speaker 2: which I think is a kind of an insane idea
Speaker 2: and you know, questionably and smart, but it he focused
Speaker 2: on the real problem, which is less expensive lift the space,
Speaker 2: which is what SpaceX has been doing all along, right,
Speaker 2: like right before SpaceX it was about twenty thousand akilo
Speaker 2: to lower th arbit and then I mean today, I
Speaker 2: think a Falcon nine is maybe eighteen hundred dollars a kilo,
Speaker 2: and Starship at being fully reusable could be under one
Speaker 2: hundred dollars. Is astonishing.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: If it works, it's making progress, but it's not there
Speaker 2: without scorching the earth, blowing holes in the ground or
Speaker 2: any of those fun things. Yeah, like if they're working
Speaker 2: that stuff out, yeah, way sure, lots of comments on
Speaker 2: that show, and admittedly these are a few years ago,
Speaker 2: but the comment I grab is from James O'Sullivan who says, Hi,
Speaker 2: Richrid and Carl, longtime listener, first time caller, great show.
Speaker 2: As always, you pair have been keeping me entertained and
Speaker 2: educated on my commutes since the early hundreds.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: Okay of episodes, right, So okay, it occurred to me
Speaker 2: that there doesn't have to be any single launch missions.
Speaker 2: When a payload requires all the fuel to achieve orbit,
Speaker 2: that vehicle just be parked and then provided a sufficient
Speaker 2: fuel leftover. You know, you can park the launch vehicle
Speaker 2: away a bit and then maybe this is all science fiction,
Speaker 2: but a tanker mission could be used to refuel the
Speaker 2: vehicles and then you can do subsequent fly from there,
Speaker 2: which is exactly what's being proposed, right, even for the
Speaker 2: upcoming lunar missions or a star is that they want
Speaker 2: to build a tanker solution with starship to do these things.
Speaker 2: You know, the vast majority of fuel gets consumed trying
Speaker 2: to get into orbit and it limits missions. In fact,
Speaker 2: this will come up a few times in the geek
Speaker 2: Out today, right, And so solving the tanking problem something
Speaker 2: that's never been done. We've never transferred fuel between the
Speaker 2: vehicles before in orbit will be an interesting challenge, and
Speaker 2: certainly in the cars it's.
Speaker 1: A challenge if you think about it, because all right,
Speaker 1: you take all this fuel to get off the ground,
Speaker 1: so the tanker also has to get a lot of
Speaker 1: fuel to get off the ground, and how much of
Speaker 1: it is left by the time they get to the
Speaker 1: to the you know.
Speaker 2: The fully loaded fueled starship stack as it stands today
Speaker 2: is about five thousand metric tons and it gets about
Speaker 2: one hundred potentially one hundred metric tons to orbit, which
Speaker 2: is actually credible. So yeah, so it could do to
Speaker 2: be able to fully fuel the thing to be, the
Speaker 2: tankers will not be able to transport that much fuel
Speaker 2: when in the original the current set of proposals for
Speaker 2: the starship based moon Lander, there's between like four and
Speaker 2: sixteen refuelings of that lander once they get into orbit
Speaker 2: before it can fly to the Moon.
Speaker 1: Can we talk on a previous space geek out about
Speaker 1: having a solar powered station on the Moon that would
Speaker 1: generate fuel, so that could be like a dock to
Speaker 1: jump off to Mars or something like that.
Speaker 2: There's a few options there. I mean One of the
Speaker 2: issues here is that chemical fuel is very heavy for
Speaker 2: its total power. Like a nuclear fueled rocket or operating
Speaker 2: rocket would only have to carry propell and it wouldn't
Speaker 2: also need the oxidizer, so that gets more efficient. We've
Speaker 2: talked about electrical energy systems, so hal effect thrusters where
Speaker 2: you're only carrying a little bit of fuel and you're
Speaker 2: using electricity to accelerate that fuel turn it into a plasma.
Speaker 2: It's not a lot of thrust, but it's very efficient,
Speaker 2: and you could offload that energy generation with microwaves. So
Speaker 2: between the Earth and the Moon, you could reasonably use
Speaker 2: a microwave relay system to operate that. There's all kinds
Speaker 2: of interesting ideas in this space.
Speaker 1: Microwaves are great, just don't get in the middle of them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it depends on the frequency of the microwave. Most
Speaker 2: of the time microwaves won't affect people at all. It's
Speaker 2: just if you happen to use the microwave frequency at
Speaker 2: tuned to water, it'll burn you, but just burn Yeah.
Speaker 1: I guess I was thinking of microwaves for power, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, they have to be a pretty high whatever
Speaker 1: it is watts, volts amps in order to work over
Speaker 1: long distances, and those things would fry you if you
Speaker 1: happen to walk onto it.
Speaker 2: Or they'd pass right through you, one or the other, right, Like,
Speaker 2: it depends on the frequency, whether not they're interact with
Speaker 2: yourselves or not. Photons are funny that way. You know
Speaker 2: you have estrinos going through all the time.
Speaker 1: Well I knew that. I just thought microwaves were a
Speaker 1: particular wavelength that was very small all that been focused
Speaker 1: and therefore could be really damaging.
Speaker 2: The microwave band is larger than you think, So it depends.
Speaker 2: The answer is it depends. But yeah, in general, don't
Speaker 2: hang out with micro.
Speaker 1: This is why I like talking to you, Richard, because
Speaker 1: you know, I clear up these misnomers that.
Speaker 2: It's more complicated than you think, and so is everything,
Speaker 2: right Like, that's sort of the reality of it. So, James, Hey,
Speaker 2: thanks so much for your comment, admittedly a few years ago,
Speaker 2: but still relevant today. And a copy of music Cobey
Speaker 2: is on its way to you, And if you'd like
Speaker 2: a copy of music Code, I read a comment on
Speaker 2: the website at dot NetRocks dot com or on the facebooks.
Speaker 2: We publish every show there, and if you comment there
Speaker 2: and I read on the show, we'll send you copy
Speaker 2: music co buy.
Speaker 1: Music to code by is your friend for coding. You
Speaker 1: should not code without it. Go to music to code
Speaker 1: by dot net if you don't, in fact, win a
Speaker 1: free copy. But you can do that also by getting
Speaker 1: on the social media's where we've been on ex Twitter
Speaker 1: for a long time. Of course, we're on Blue Sky
Speaker 1: and we're I'm astaed on and I think even on threads,
Speaker 1: but I'm not really paying attention to threads, are you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I check threads that I post on threads,
Speaker 2: but yeah, and it's got a lot more users in
Speaker 2: Blue Sky, but not at the same level of engagement.
Speaker 1: And I think we're on Instagram too by nature of
Speaker 1: the fact that we have dot net rocks on.
Speaker 2: Facebook, right sort of. Yeah, I really have never paid
Speaker 2: because always some p Instagram is very picture centric and
Speaker 2: that's not what a podcast is. Yeah, all right, so
Speaker 2: do you want to do the history thing.
Speaker 1: Let's do the history thing just really briefly. So this
Speaker 1: is episode nineteen thirty, and this is when the Great
Speaker 1: Depression was really in full swing.
Speaker 2: Get going, right, Yeah, So.
Speaker 1: In twenty nine the you know, more than four million
Speaker 1: people were unemployed as a result of the crash, and
Speaker 1: notable events included the discovery of Pluto yeah by Arizona scientists,
Speaker 1: and the first US Census question regarding radio ownership, reflecting
Speaker 1: the growing interest in communication technology. Cool what else you
Speaker 1: got for nineteen thirty.
Speaker 2: The year that sliced bread was invented? Really true? Yeah? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Is that that late?
Speaker 1: Wow?
Speaker 2: I wonder why trying to get be more efficient with bread?
Speaker 2: Funny that, And you know, discovering Pluto's not a trivial problem.
Speaker 2: He kind of got lucky that he took to Tombak,
Speaker 2: took two pictures of the same area in space and
Speaker 2: saw it and saw Pluto moving through it because it's
Speaker 2: very dim and not gravitationally irrelevant and not a planet,
Speaker 2: never rt a planet, a dwarf planet.
Speaker 1: Have you ever heard Neil de grass Tyson defend his
Speaker 1: vote on because everybody blames him for killing Pluto right now,
Speaker 1: it wasn't his fault, it was it wasn't his fault
Speaker 1: at all. And he said that there's there's thousands of
Speaker 1: Pluto sized asteroids floating around the Sun that you know,
Speaker 1: we don't call planets because they're not a planet.
Speaker 2: Well, an there's Pluto. It was Sedna that was really
Speaker 2: the problem, because Sedna, as the calculations came in, was
Speaker 2: going to is larger than Pluto. And so it would
Speaker 2: have if if Pluto is a planet, then said as
Speaker 2: a planet, and at least three or four more, and
Speaker 2: then you get into the smaller ones and the ones
Speaker 2: we haven't seen yet and so forth.
Speaker 3: It gets hard.
Speaker 2: So it's not in the ecliptic plane. It transitions across
Speaker 2: some of the the across Neptune's orbit. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 2: dwarf planet. It's fairly All of these definitions are arbitrar.
Speaker 1: So I thought planet meant wanderer, and.
Speaker 2: Well that's what the That was the literal translation from
Speaker 2: the grind.
Speaker 1: And if it orbits around the sun, right, isn't it
Speaker 1: a planet?
Speaker 2: Well, that means all of the Trojan asteroids and all
Speaker 2: of the debris and the asteroid belt and so forth,
Speaker 2: Like now you get into millions of objects.
Speaker 1: Right, so I guess at some point you have to
Speaker 1: say it's the size that matters.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like it can. And so they've started to fabricate
Speaker 2: a more elaborate description of planets, like clearing your orbital
Speaker 2: playing like that kind of thing and all with degrees
Speaker 2: of issue essentially. But Pluto was absolutely an odd duck
Speaker 2: when you look at its behavior, it doesn't behave the
Speaker 2: same as the other eight planets.
Speaker 1: But man, those close up images that we came up with.
Speaker 2: Were beautiful, total miracle, right that way, more interesting than
Speaker 2: anybody ever expected. Astonishing. Really, it was supposed to be
Speaker 2: just a nice ball, totally uninteresting, and we were wrong
Speaker 2: again again. It's a great thing about exploration. You find
Speaker 2: new things, and we found new things.
Speaker 1: Okay, man, you have the floor.
Speaker 2: Well, so this is the fourth year in a row
Speaker 2: of a record number of space flights for the world,
Speaker 2: two hundred and fifty one launches, with two hundred and
Speaker 2: forty four successful, five flat out failures, and two partial failures.
Speaker 3: And we can talk a little bit about those.
Speaker 1: And that's all over the world, right.
Speaker 2: All the way around the world. But of that, to
Speaker 2: be clear, one hundred and thirty six of them are
Speaker 2: SpaceX so more than half. Right, Like, it's astonishing. Their
Speaker 2: goal was to fly one hundred and forty four times
Speaker 2: this year. Then they raise it to one hundred and
Speaker 2: forty eight. But now they looks like it's actually gonna
Speaker 2: one hundred and thirty six. Yeah, you know, he's not
Speaker 2: quite done yet. Every time I start thinking ill of Elon,
Speaker 2: I think about SpaceX and then yeah, and admittedly he's
Speaker 2: just one person in this equation and certainly a driving force. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but they're Glenn Shotwell is an extraordinary woman and really
Speaker 2: runs that company well. And there's a huge number of
Speaker 2: engineers creating miracles, you know, making a tremendous program.
Speaker 1: Fantastic.
Speaker 2: So the Falcon nines now had over four hundred flights,
Speaker 2: putting it into the league almost by itself only so
Speaker 2: used playing them.
Speaker 1: Wow. And the Falcon nine is the one that can
Speaker 1: land vertically.
Speaker 2: It lands. It's yeah, that's landed its booster now over
Speaker 2: three hundred times.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: They've also had a record this year of fastest turnaround
Speaker 2: for a booster. They reflew it two weeks later.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And that included several days transport by barge. She got
Speaker 2: it back into shape and fluid again.
Speaker 1: So take that Space Shuttle.
Speaker 2: So if you figure there were one hundred and twenty
Speaker 2: two Falcon nine flights, how many boosters do you think
Speaker 2: there are to fly one hundred and twenty two times
Speaker 2: a year?
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: Double that. Yeah, there's only eighteen in rotation. What because
Speaker 2: they because they keep reusing them, right, wow, So yeah,
Speaker 2: eighteen boosters currently. Sometimes they throw them away, sometimes they fail,
Speaker 2: but and they old. This year they set a record
Speaker 2: two boosters have set a record now of twenty four flights.
Speaker 2: That's amazing, including at one point they a few times
Speaker 2: this year they flew three times on the same day too,
Speaker 2: because they've got two pads in Florida, one pad into
Speaker 2: California and they use them all on the same day.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: So yeah, And at the point where we're recording this,
Speaker 2: which is sort of mid December because it comes out
Speaker 2: right after Christmas, there's still more six more flights planned
Speaker 2: for the end of the year to get to that
Speaker 2: one hundred and thirty six. They also flew two Falcon
Speaker 2: heavies this year, and there were five Starship flights this year. Now,
Speaker 2: one of the reasons that SpaceX flies so much compared
Speaker 2: to the rest of the world is of that one
Speaker 2: hundred and twenty two Falcon nine flights, ninety of them
Speaker 2: we're Starlink three more expected in December, So they are
Speaker 2: their own biggest customer, I mean, arguably just the starlink
Speaker 2: flights alone are more flights than the rest of the
Speaker 2: world combined just a few years ago.
Speaker 3: Wow. Right.
Speaker 1: Every once in a while, I see somebody post a
Speaker 1: picture on Facebook of the path of the starlinks going by,
Speaker 1: and they're like, anybody know what this is?
Speaker 2: It's more starlinks.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So they they used to fly as many as sixty
Speaker 2: satellites per launch, but as they've been coming making them
Speaker 2: bigger to do more, they are typically given flights only
Speaker 2: twenty two of the version two starlinks. They're also they
Speaker 2: fly the limit of Falcon nine every time with these. Right,
Speaker 2: it's a maximum PAYLOAOD about seventeen metric tons. So they've
Speaker 2: been pushing Falcons over and over again, so they know
Speaker 2: so much about There's now four million subscribers to starlink.
Speaker 2: I'm one of them. It's available in ninety countries because
Speaker 2: they limit the downlink locations, all that's gradually changing. This
Speaker 2: year's Starlink completed the first constellation of what they're calling
Speaker 2: direct to sell, So if you're a T Mobile customer,
Speaker 2: you can sign up for the beta program. This is
Speaker 2: in the US only to do text messaging via Starlink.
Speaker 1: It went to space.
Speaker 2: It went literally went to space, as.
Speaker 1: Luis k says, So I wanted to know you have starlink.
Speaker 1: What is your bandwidth like?
Speaker 2: About four hundred megabits down and two and one hundred
Speaker 2: up at twenty milliseconds.
Speaker 1: It's not bad.
Speaker 2: It's not bad. I mean that's totally more than you'll
Speaker 2: get at your average hotel. Yeah, or and anything other
Speaker 2: than fiber. Really you're not going at any more than that.
Speaker 2: So it's as good as any cable connection and things
Speaker 2: like that. I was. I was in the first ten thousand.
Speaker 2: It was one of the original beta testers because I'm
Speaker 2: so far north, so they were very interested in my
Speaker 2: location and so I was able to get in early.
Speaker 2: And I use it as a backup because I do
Speaker 2: have a gigabit fiber surection here and we have regular
Speaker 2: power outages and I can keep the star Link up.
Speaker 2: It doesn't only consumes about seventy five watts that I
Speaker 2: went operating, so it's pretty good.
Speaker 1: When we do the energy geek out, I will ask
Speaker 1: you about Wait a minute, is the energy geek out
Speaker 1: coming before this?
Speaker 2: No, it's after. Yeah.
Speaker 1: When we do that one, I will ask you again
Speaker 1: about failover from generate from electricity to generator power because
Speaker 1: I think there may be maybe some advances in.
Speaker 2: That, but yeah, I'm looking at some changes from the coastplace. Yeah,
Speaker 2: cool file things on a couple of things left on startlink.
Speaker 2: There's sixty seven hundred satellites in the network now as
Speaker 2: of twenty twenty four. That's three times more than all
Speaker 2: the other satellites combined. So SpaceX rat flies the largest
Speaker 2: fleet of satellites by miles, and their goal is to
Speaker 2: have twelve thousands, so more than to double that.
Speaker 1: Are people still complaining about them polluting the night sky,
Speaker 1: you know, astronomers and things.
Speaker 2: But they're also working hard to have less pollution, so
Speaker 2: their machines are less reflective. They're flying them in a
Speaker 2: different orientation to minimize the effect for the most part,
Speaker 2: software and correct for a lot of the problem should
Speaker 2: it fly through the field of view during a long observation,
Speaker 2: so it's not going to go away. This is you know,
Speaker 2: there are other companies and other countries wanting to build
Speaker 2: networks like this. Yeah, you know, they lowering of the
Speaker 2: price of space flight, which is what Falcone's really done,
Speaker 2: which facilitates starlink because these satellites only last for about
Speaker 2: five years at best. Oh really, Yeah, they're in such
Speaker 2: a low orbit to have that short ping time. They
Speaker 2: low latency, and they just the atmosphere's always dragging on them.
Speaker 1: Do they when they're done, do they fall out of
Speaker 1: space or do they have a they burn up? Yeah,
Speaker 1: but do they have a control burnt? Do they do?
Speaker 1: They fly them down into the water at a place
Speaker 1: where now.
Speaker 2: But they're small enough that they so they can land anywhere. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they fully burn up. Nothing makes it to the right.
Speaker 2: Oh they're small, okay, right, and they have no real
Speaker 2: strong structural members, so yeah, they fully burn up. Wow,
Speaker 2: they're just a little asteroid. Well but you get the
Speaker 2: idea that it means they have to keep continuous to
Speaker 2: launching them because they're losing them right right. But if
Speaker 2: they go, if they fly in a higher orbit, then
Speaker 2: the ping time gets longer and the network's not as good. Right.
Speaker 1: It wasn't the goal of starlink to bring Internet access
Speaker 1: to places and countries that are remote, you know, African
Speaker 1: countries and places where they just don't have the infrastructure.
Speaker 2: But so far the network because it requires immediate downlinking.
Speaker 2: You have to have permission to downlink in that country.
Speaker 2: And so there's many countries that still allcovered because they're
Speaker 2: not offering that. But part of the expansion of the
Speaker 2: network the higher shells is to start doing laser relay,
Speaker 2: which gets us closer to that whole doctor No effect. Yes,
Speaker 2: lasers in space. So the point being that you can
Speaker 2: take the connection from the satellite and then relay to
Speaker 2: another satellite far enough away that it can downlink somewhere
Speaker 2: else so that you don't have to put a lot
Speaker 2: of downlink notes.
Speaker 1: And information travels pretty fast by laser, does it? Lasers
Speaker 1: quick quick, kind of like light.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's kind of exactly like life. There's another network
Speaker 2: that's being built by SpaceX for the Department of the
Speaker 2: Defense called star Shield, and Elon sort of acknowledged he
Speaker 2: got into a situation around the Ukraine conflict where Ukraini
Speaker 2: military was counting on starlink this and you know, his
Speaker 2: relationship with Putin was a problem, and so the DoD
Speaker 2: is now paying for a separate network called Starshield that
Speaker 2: is military controlled, because he wants Starlink to stay a
Speaker 2: civilian network and stay out of that whole problem.
Speaker 1: Space Well, Elon's kind of making the budget, so he
Speaker 1: should be able to get that money.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know. I mean there's a whole argument
Speaker 2: here that this is the militarization of space because spaceflight
Speaker 2: has gotten so much cheaper. You're also seeing like the
Speaker 2: Chinese military is working on rapid iteration and recoverable spacecraft too.
Speaker 2: Like right now we only have really one spacecraft that lands.
Speaker 2: We have another one that's landed once Starship, but New
Speaker 2: Glenn is coming and supposed to be able to land,
Speaker 2: and the Chinese government is an experimented with a couple
Speaker 2: of different landings.
Speaker 1: New Glen is what.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about that in a minute, because let's wrap
Speaker 2: up with SpaceX first, because the new landing vehicle is Starship, right,
Speaker 2: So this is what I referred to in the comment
Speaker 2: with the Interplanetary Transport System. It's what evolved into what
Speaker 2: is now known as Starship. It's supposed to be a
Speaker 2: fully reusable rocket. So I already know how to land boosters,
Speaker 2: so they made a much larger booster. So where the
Speaker 2: Falcon nine is a three point seven meter diameter or
Speaker 2: roughly you know, eleven foot across rocket, this is a
Speaker 2: nine meter rocket, so thirty foot across. It's enormous. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I think Saturn five sides, except it's taller, and of
Speaker 2: course so the lower stage does it's two and a
Speaker 2: half minute burned and would turn around in land, but
Speaker 2: instead of putting legs on it, because it's so heavy,
Speaker 2: the legs would be really hard. They're going to do
Speaker 2: this crazy They've now done this crazy things where they
Speaker 2: catch the booster in flight capture of what they call chopsticks,
Speaker 2: steel arms. God, it would be ridiculous except that it works. Yeah,
Speaker 2: in October and on Ift they did it. So I
Speaker 2: mean they flew four times this year, right Once in
Speaker 2: March it was only the third flight, which it was
Speaker 2: the first time they actually got the Starship up to orbit,
Speaker 2: although it had a malfunction once it got there and
Speaker 2: broke up, probably was an explosion. Then in June was
Speaker 2: the first complete flight. So this was the booster took
Speaker 2: off and then turned around and flew back and landed
Speaker 2: so precisely in the ocean that they had put a
Speaker 2: camera on a boy and the landing was completely in
Speaker 2: that shot. Wow, and Starship did its re entry. And
Speaker 2: this has always been the question mark. You know, it's
Speaker 2: one thing to get for the booster to come back,
Speaker 2: so it's not going that fast, but once you get
Speaker 2: to orbit and you're moving twenty five thousand miles an hour,
Speaker 2: now you have to slow down again. And so they
Speaker 2: had but Starships so big. Normally, when a vehicle re enters,
Speaker 2: like even the Space Shuttle in re entry, the plasma
Speaker 2: field that's created by re entry completely blocks all communications.
Speaker 2: But Starship is so big the backside of the vehicle
Speaker 2: is not in a plasma envelope, and so they have
Speaker 2: real time video via starlink for the entire re entry,
Speaker 2: never seen before.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And on Ift four, which was a really fun one,
Speaker 2: they had a camera on one of the flaps to
Speaker 2: sort of watch because it was taking the most heat
Speaker 2: and it started to burn through. So the heat shields
Speaker 2: had blown off there and there's literally flames going through.
Speaker 2: You can see this. It's almost becoming X ray is glowing,
Speaker 2: white hot pieces flying off of it.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And we were expecting at any moment the signal was going
Speaker 2: to cut out, and then all of a sudden, it
Speaker 2: finished its re entry, went through the transonic regime and
Speaker 2: did that pivot to land on its tail in the ocean,
Speaker 2: and it worked even with it all partly burned up.
Speaker 2: It's still phrase function. We called it a little flap
Speaker 2: that could you know, it was just hanging in there somehow,
Speaker 2: and so that I sort of spoke to the resilience
Speaker 2: of the And so the October flight where they caught
Speaker 2: the booster was also the one where it didntny. The
Speaker 2: heat shield system has been vastly improved. And this last flight,
Speaker 2: just in November, they changed up the times so they
Speaker 2: were flying in the afternoon seat of the morning, so
Speaker 2: that it would be daylight when they landed the Starship
Speaker 2: so they could see it, and this time they had
Speaker 2: a very precise landing. There's a bunch of things that
Speaker 2: happened this last flight. Ay the booster did not make
Speaker 2: its landing. They canceled it the last second it was
Speaker 2: on its way. It probably could have done it, but
Speaker 2: there was damage to the launch pad it did the
Speaker 2: the antenna had been damaged, so there was signal problems,
Speaker 2: so they out of abundance of caution, they didn't land.
Speaker 2: They just dropped it in the ocean, but it probably
Speaker 2: could have landed. But Starship was the breakthrough on this
Speaker 2: last flight where they finally ReLit a raptor engine in orbit,
Speaker 2: which they'd never done before. There's no way to really
Speaker 2: test that. You just have to do it. And it
Speaker 2: did a precision landing, same trick boy with a camera
Speaker 2: and it landed right in front of the boy. We
Speaker 2: could see the landing. We also saw like the.
Speaker 1: That's booey for our American listeners, there.
Speaker 2: Are booie if you're not poying correctly.
Speaker 1: Now you pronounce it correctly for a Canadian.
Speaker 2: And right away the fact that it was daytime in
Speaker 2: that we could see a bunch of things, one of
Speaker 2: which was the whole bunch of heat shields that popped
Speaker 2: off right at the interface point between the fuel tanks
Speaker 2: and the payload bay, which arguably is the weakest part
Speaker 2: of the ship. So there was The theory now is
Speaker 2: there was enough flex in the kick turn so it's
Speaker 2: falling on its belly to slow down, it's ready to fall,
Speaker 2: and then when it goes to land it has to
Speaker 2: fire its engines and pivot to land on its tail,
Speaker 2: which is insane. Yeah, but that's what it does.
Speaker 1: It's amazing though, but.
Speaker 2: I think there was enough flex in the ship when
Speaker 2: that happened that it actually blew all the heat tiles
Speaker 2: off along that flex line.
Speaker 1: So you know, this is not only an amazing feat
Speaker 1: of engineering, but of imagination. Yeah, you know, somebody had
Speaker 1: to imagine that this could be done, and then other
Speaker 1: people had to go away and crunch the numbers and
Speaker 1: try and find a way to build it. Try to
Speaker 1: find a way to build it. Yeah, just the imagination.
Speaker 2: Is off the I mean to make a ship out
Speaker 2: of stainless steel instead of out of ultra light aluminum
Speaker 2: and so forth. Like, there's a lot of interesting decisions
Speaker 2: made here to make a more reusable spacecraft, and there's
Speaker 2: still problems that aren't solved. Right. The next lunch supposed
Speaker 2: to be in January, and it's pretty much fallen the
Speaker 2: same flight profile as the last one, so the FAA's
Speaker 2: already got permission, they'll probably go ahead. But they are
Speaker 2: actually using a larger version of Starship on this next
Speaker 2: flight because they've realized they need more space. But one
Speaker 2: of their next goals, either that flight or the one after,
Speaker 2: will be to try and catch Starship too. Wow, that
Speaker 2: would make a fully reusable system that you got both
Speaker 2: vehicles back, nothing thrown away, no disposable.
Speaker 1: So that's exciting really.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's progress, and it's you know, there was
Speaker 2: an amazing They're all amazing to watch, every one of them.
Speaker 2: But they when it finally is fully working, a lot
Speaker 2: of things change. Space flight drops by another order of magnitude.
Speaker 1: So that means that there is going to be more flights,
Speaker 1: but also flights for different purposes than we're seeing now. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe even more space travel tourism.
Speaker 2: Yeah, tourism becomes a lot more feasible. Now you're talking
Speaker 2: about a ticket to space in the one hundred thousand
Speaker 2: dollars range instead of I mean, right now, you can
Speaker 2: get a crew dragon flight for about twenty five million bucks.
Speaker 2: It's one hundred million roughly to fly, so you need
Speaker 2: four seats so you know, save up. But bab, we
Speaker 2: could get it down to around the hundred grand range.
Speaker 2: That opens it's a trip of a lifetime for a
Speaker 2: lot more people, yep, than it is just billionaires. Right. Sure,
Speaker 2: That's not the only new rocket the United Launch Alliance,
Speaker 2: the guys who were flying the Atlas five in the
Speaker 2: Delta four finally flew their Vulcan rocket, which was the
Speaker 2: replacement for both. The development for that rocket started back
Speaker 2: in twenty fourteen, and it really was intended to be
Speaker 2: a replacement for Autlas five because the Atlas five's rocket
Speaker 2: depended on the Russian RD one eighty engine, and I
Speaker 2: don't know if you noticed, but the relationship with the
Speaker 2: Russians a little it's a little cold right now, tricky,
Speaker 2: a little tricky, so they wanted to move away from that.
Speaker 2: So this is an all domestic rocket in the US.
Speaker 2: Methane engine the B E four built by Blue Origin,
Speaker 2: and it's been literally a decade of development, but their
Speaker 2: first flight was in January this year and it was perfect.
Speaker 2: The rocket worked flawlessly and no, nothing recoverable yet, so
Speaker 2: it was a fully thrown away a rocket, which is hard.
Speaker 2: They're talking about coming up with strategies to recover the
Speaker 2: booster or at least the engines, but nothing's been done
Speaker 2: there yet. It had a payload on it, the Peregrin Lander,
Speaker 2: which is supposed to go to the Moon, which is
Speaker 2: very cool for a first flight. Normally for a first
Speaker 2: flight you fly a billet, a concrete or if you're Elon,
Speaker 2: you fly a sports car. Yeah all right, that was
Speaker 2: so cool. Yeah, I like that, Elon, Can we have
Speaker 2: that back?
Speaker 1: That was the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life.
Speaker 2: And I climb my sports car.
Speaker 1: I wish my father was alive to see that. He
Speaker 1: would have got a real kick out of it.
Speaker 2: But it was you need you need a DeVault payload,
Speaker 2: and so Fallulcan actually had a working payload. It was
Speaker 2: the Peregrine Lander and it was supposed to land on
Speaker 2: the Moon, but the lander had malfunctions, had fuel leak problems,
Speaker 2: and so it didn't have enough fuel to actually make
Speaker 2: the landing. So they did go around the Moon and
Speaker 2: then let it cut fly back to Earth and reander.
Speaker 2: They had a second flight of Vulcan this year as well,
Speaker 2: in October to complete their certifications, and it had a malfunction.
Speaker 2: One of the solid rocket boosters on the side of
Speaker 2: the rocket blew its gnawsele off, which would normally be
Speaker 2: a loss of rocket like that should have been a
Speaker 2: complete failure, and it wasn't. The control systems off Vulcan
Speaker 2: are strong enough that it actually compensated for the loss
Speaker 2: of thrust from the damaged booster and it made it
Speaker 2: to its orbit anyway. Now, it was supposed to be
Speaker 2: a certifying flight for national asset flights for spice satellites,
Speaker 2: military satellites and things like that, So normally it should
Speaker 2: it had to be a perfect flight, and it wasn't.
Speaker 2: But on the other hand, it's like, this is almost
Speaker 2: better that it had this kind of a failu and
Speaker 2: still got to fit to orbit. Like it's astonishing what
Speaker 2: they pulled out there. And this is a big, big
Speaker 2: rocket there. You know, where the Falcon nine will do
Speaker 2: seventeen metro tons to lower thorbit, this is twenty seven
Speaker 2: metro tons to lower thorpe. So it's a pretty capable rocket.
Speaker 2: It's expensive, and United Launch Alliance has its own problems,
Speaker 2: like there's this there's a rumor going around that it
Speaker 2: might actually be for sale. This was the collaboration between
Speaker 2: Lockheed Martin and Boeing that was formed to operate the
Speaker 2: Space Shuttle, and then it took and it got Delta
Speaker 2: four in Atlas five, and now it's over to Vulcan.
Speaker 2: So it's a question of whether it makes sense. Another
Speaker 2: thing that Vulcan is supposed to fly but has never
Speaker 2: flown is Starliner.
Speaker 1: Okay, Spacelink, Starship, Starliner, star Live, many names all right, Starliner.
Speaker 1: Back in twenty fourteen when NASA was NASA now commercialized
Speaker 1: resopplya the Space day, right, that was crewed. That was
Speaker 1: the Cargo Dragon and the Signess vehicles. So instead of
Speaker 1: paying cost plus for every flight of supply to the
Speaker 1: space station, now they were paying by the kilogram, so
Speaker 1: fixed cost flights essentially. And then that incentivizes the company
Speaker 1: to get more and more efficient so they can keep
Speaker 1: more of that money. And so you had two companies today.
Speaker 1: The Signa spacecraft is own by Northrop Grumman and SpaceX
Speaker 1: has the Cargo Dragon. They do resupply to the space station.
Speaker 1: So in twenty fourteen they say, let's do this for
Speaker 1: cruise now, and we don't have the space Shuttle anymore.
Speaker 2: We have it for a few years. They intended to
Speaker 2: have this ready by twenty eleven when they last shuttle
Speaker 2: aanded and they didn't. But let's go a flat rate
Speaker 2: to fly cruise into space. And so they put out
Speaker 2: two companies one Boeing one and SpaceX. Now the time,
Speaker 2: SpaceX is still the new guys, right, So they got
Speaker 2: a deal for two point six billion dollars to develop
Speaker 2: and fly crew Dragon for six flights to the space station,
Speaker 2: and Boeing at the same time got same kind of deal,
Speaker 2: but it builled Starliner and fly six flies to space station.
Speaker 2: But they got four point two billion. They got almost
Speaker 2: double the money. Wow. But the point was they were
Speaker 2: the conservative choice, right, like, this was going to be
Speaker 2: the safe way to get cruise back into space halfway
Speaker 2: up the dar blew off of way worse. So there's
Speaker 2: both vehicles supposed to be operational twenty nineteen. SpaceX was
Speaker 2: a little bit late, but Starship or a star Liner
Speaker 2: far later. Their first unmanned test flight was in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 2: It was a partial failure, is the way they phrased it.
Speaker 2: You're talking about Starliner Starliner. Yes, it got to orbit,
Speaker 2: but it got to orbit so badly it couldn't make
Speaker 2: it to the space station. I mean it's really a
Speaker 2: failure because they NASA ordered the flight reflown and it
Speaker 2: was mostly software problems at the time that caused the
Speaker 2: thrusters to misfire, burn off too much fuel, and so
Speaker 2: I know it was written in JavaScript something or to
Speaker 2: the lowest bidder whenever language it was in. So then
Speaker 2: they they it took them two years to get ready
Speaker 2: for the next test flight in twenty twenty one, but
Speaker 2: that didn't work out. That was in March of twenty one,
Speaker 2: so they deleted till April, then Hey deleted August. Then
Speaker 2: they scrubbed it for the year, and it wasn't until
Speaker 2: May of twenty two they tried to fly again, and
Speaker 2: that time again unmanned. They made it to the space
Speaker 2: station with a small payload. They had about two hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty kiloads. I think we talked about this last
Speaker 2: year too. Yeah, and then they actually took the same
Speaker 2: a ount of spplies back down. So this year was
Speaker 2: the next flight. So that one was that last on
Speaker 2: Man one was in twenty two. So this year they
Speaker 2: finally flew a test crew. This is the same thing
Speaker 2: that's the crew Dragon did. But in June they flew
Speaker 2: Canita Williams and Butch Wilmore up to the space station successfully,
Speaker 2: but they had problems on the way. They had helium
Speaker 2: leaks in the pressurization system, they had more thruster issues,
Speaker 2: and so they're still there. They are still there. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Cedi and Butcher's supposed to spend eight days and they
Speaker 2: delayed departure while they were studying the problem. Now this
Speaker 2: is a legit thing. Most of the issues were in
Speaker 2: the trunk portion of Starliner, which is the part thrown away,
Speaker 2: So there was no way. The problems aren't necessarily in
Speaker 2: the star Liner itself but in the trunk, and so
Speaker 2: they wanted to actually do as much testing as can,
Speaker 2: but as they couldn't properly characterized all the problems, eventually
Speaker 2: NASA says, now you.
Speaker 3: Can't fly astronauts back on them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not worth their risk.
Speaker 1: So what's interesting about those two is that their attitude
Speaker 1: is like, this is great. We get to do more science,
Speaker 1: We get to hang out with these people.
Speaker 2: They get to hang out in the space, right, like.
Speaker 1: You get to hang out in space. This is not
Speaker 1: a problem for them.
Speaker 2: These guys had been to the space station before, right,
Speaker 2: They knew what they were doing, and they never expected
Speaker 2: to fly again. They figured these days were the last
Speaker 2: time they were ever going to go in space in
Speaker 2: their lives. They are having the time of their lives.
Speaker 2: They are astronauts are crazy.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, their bones are atrophying and everything, but
Speaker 1: that doesn't matter.
Speaker 2: But this is our last flight in space anyway, right,
Speaker 2: But this is the crazier part. So in September, when
Speaker 2: they decide, okay, we going to bring Starliner back empty.
Speaker 2: The thing is that every astronaut on the space station
Speaker 2: has to have an evacuation vehicle. They had if there
Speaker 2: was a you know, if they had lost pressure or something,
Speaker 2: they had to evacuate. How these guys are going to
Speaker 2: get off? And so the initial plan. But what they
Speaker 2: did was they modified the Crew Dragon nine mission to
Speaker 2: actually only fly with two people, so they could bring
Speaker 2: the two down, but they couldn't bring it up there
Speaker 2: while Starliner was still there. So for two weeks. The
Speaker 2: solution for their departure was to strap themselves to the
Speaker 2: cargo palette of Crew Dragon eight. The cargo palette, yes,
Speaker 2: so crew Dragons are set up to carry four, they
Speaker 2: could carry more. They have a cargo palete area under
Speaker 2: the seats that carries more than enough weight. So literally
Speaker 2: their goal if there was an emergency evacuation those two
Speaker 2: weeks is they would go into Crew Dragon eight, strap
Speaker 2: themselves to the cargo pilot, and hope for the best.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: Anyway, a couple of weeks later later in September, Crew
Speaker 2: Dragon nine comes up with only two astronauts on it,
Speaker 2: and that's the two seats for them, and they're still there.
Speaker 2: They're supposed to return in March, which will be a
Speaker 2: ten month stay for Butchercineta and obviously their last ones.
Speaker 1: And I fought Elon offered to send a rescue to that.
Speaker 2: He did, And that's effectively what they did by taking
Speaker 2: the two crew members off of Crew nine, which are
Speaker 2: supposed to fly with four. That's the solution. Here's the
Speaker 2: interesting situation for Starliner now it's twenty twenty four, presuming
Speaker 2: next year, in twenty twenty five, they actually get operational
Speaker 2: and can start flying missions, which is not true. It's
Speaker 2: probably going to be longer than that. They can't complete
Speaker 2: their contract. Their deal for four point two billion included
Speaker 2: six flights to the station, and you only get one
Speaker 2: a year, and the station only lasts till twenty thirty,
Speaker 2: so they get up a run in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2: They can't fly enough flights, So.
Speaker 1: Do they have to give some money back.
Speaker 2: They might have to give some money back or they're
Speaker 2: not going to be paid all of that money in
Speaker 2: the first place. But this has been such a debacle
Speaker 2: for Boeing. They've kicked in a couple billion of their
Speaker 2: own cash already.
Speaker 1: Well, it's not the only problem Boeing has had in
Speaker 1: the last year.
Speaker 2: It is symptomatic of the way Boeing has been for
Speaker 2: a while with a bunch of things.
Speaker 3: No tools about it all, right.
Speaker 2: Can wrap up the rocket conversation with the failures this year.
Speaker 2: You know, there was a whole lot of successful flights.
Speaker 2: Most of them are not particularly interesting. One of them,
Speaker 2: mostly me is that actually one of the Falcon nine flights,
Speaker 2: the Starling flight, failed. It had a leak in the
Speaker 2: second stage engine enough that it didn't get to full orbit.
Speaker 2: They deployed the Starlink satellites anyway, but for the most
Speaker 2: part they all burned up. They just didn't make it up.
Speaker 2: The other interesting failure was the Japanese space program has
Speaker 2: a new rocket called Kiros. I'm probably mispronouncing that name.
Speaker 2: They had their first flight in March. It exploded five
Speaker 2: seconds after launch, and then they tried again in December
Speaker 2: and it flew a little bit longer than tumble out
Speaker 2: of control and exploded as well. So just a reminder,
Speaker 2: space flight is hard, right, Yes, other crewed flights besides,
Speaker 2: you had you had Crew Dragon eight in note in March,
Speaker 2: which was the one that was going to be the
Speaker 2: temporary rescue vehicle. Crew nine. Dragon nine was in September.
Speaker 2: That's the one that's actually going to bring them back.
Speaker 2: Those are the crews for the space station. The only
Speaker 2: way to get there there was an axios mission to
Speaker 2: the ISS, which is a tourist flight to the space
Speaker 2: station in January that came back down in February. They're
Speaker 2: only up there for a couple of weeks. And then
Speaker 2: one more crew flight and that was Polaris Dawn. So
Speaker 2: this is Jared Isaacman and Jared Eisaman had the Inspiration
Speaker 2: four flight a couple of years ago, which was the
Speaker 2: first commercial tourist flight ever where he flew four of
Speaker 2: them went out. And Jared is this billionaire that's been
Speaker 2: facilitating these and he had another flight. This is Polaristan
Speaker 2: and Polaristan is where he did a spacewalk, two of them.
Speaker 2: Actually I thought that was Richard Branson. Richard Branson's got
Speaker 2: urging galactic and they only do suborbital flights.
Speaker 1: But I thought he brought some friends up into space.
Speaker 2: He did on the spaceship too, but they can only
Speaker 2: do They're only up for two minutes, right, They don't
Speaker 2: get up to orbit. They get above the carbon line,
Speaker 2: but they can't they don't have orbital capabilities. But at
Speaker 2: Jared Isaacman is a billionaire. He made his money in
Speaker 2: a company called Shift four, which is a payment processing company.
Speaker 2: His story is pretty interesting, like he was sixteen years
Speaker 2: old when he formed the company in nineteen ninety nine
Speaker 2: and twenty years later listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 2: Along the way, he formed a company called DrAk And International,
Speaker 2: where he owns a collection of fighter jets and he
Speaker 2: provides adversary training for air forces. So remarkable guy and
Speaker 2: now is currently proposed by the Trump administration to be
Speaker 2: the new NASA administrator.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: But he's also done a spacewalk right by the way,
Speaker 2: when POLARISTAM was doing that in September, we broke the
Speaker 2: record for the most number of people in orbit.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: There were the four people at Roma, there were three
Speaker 2: people in the Chinese Space station, and there were twelve
Speaker 2: on ISS, including Butch and the Insignia. Although shortly after
Speaker 2: that the next Soyuz came up and took three back down.
Speaker 2: So yeah. Jared Eisiman also proposed to do a mission
Speaker 2: to Hubble, to do a servicing mission on Hubble.
Speaker 1: Okay, now, I thought Hubble was completely out of commission.
Speaker 2: Nope, Hubble's working. It's just crippled, right. It's running out.
Speaker 2: Its pointing systems are starting to wear out. The gyroscopes
Speaker 2: are wearing out, and so he proposed to replace those
Speaker 2: gyroscopes to do a mission. They win. The last shuttle
Speaker 2: left Hubble. They put a docking mount on it. It's
Speaker 2: not quite a standard because it was before the standard
Speaker 2: was fully established, but that was fixable. And so they
Speaker 2: were playing with the idea of is there a way
Speaker 2: to send a crew dragon up there and connect up
Speaker 2: and maybe swap the gyroscopes out and NASA has NASA
Speaker 2: turned that down. They considered the risks too high. It's
Speaker 2: a completely experimental mission. And Hubble is still usable, admittedly
Speaker 2: in a reduced state, and they're running out of money
Speaker 2: to fund Hubble anyway, I could cost money to keep
Speaker 2: the crews working on it and so forth. And the
Speaker 2: Nancy Roman Space Telescope is about to go up and
Speaker 2: it will be better than Hubble in every respect. And
Speaker 2: we have JWST already.
Speaker 1: So am it? What's this new one? Nancy?
Speaker 2: Who the Nancy Roman Space Telescope? So, and it was
Speaker 2: originally called w first it's in more of as a
Speaker 2: low infrared or high infrared satellite, but it'll take opticals
Speaker 2: as well.
Speaker 1: How's it compared to JWT.
Speaker 2: JWST is a different creature. JWST is in which directions.
Speaker 2: It's in the deep infrared rather than in the optical range.
Speaker 2: And it's meant to see very very far away in
Speaker 2: a narrow field of space, where the w first or
Speaker 2: the Rancy Roman is designed to have a much wider
Speaker 2: field to see much more than Hubble can. Okay, it's
Speaker 2: a lot more advanced technology. Ruble's very old, right, I
Speaker 2: mean it's been around since the eighties for crying out Loud. Oh,
Speaker 2: arguably when they lose control of it, they'll leave it
Speaker 2: in that orbit. Like you know, starship could go pick Hubble.
Speaker 1: Up, drag it back home.
Speaker 2: Well, it would fit inside of the of the payload bay.
Speaker 2: That's nuts, Yeah, And I mean that would be the
Speaker 2: great outcome was that thing should be in the Smithsonian
Speaker 2: for Crying Out Loud.
Speaker 1: Absolutely hanging up right next to the Spirit of Saint.
Speaker 2: Louis Darren Wright. And also at that point it will
Speaker 2: have been like thirty or forty years in space. But
Speaker 2: it's in a high enough orbit it'll stay up there
Speaker 2: for a long long time, so it's it's worth retrieving.
Speaker 2: It's just not any But the interesting thing now is
Speaker 2: the guy who proposed the mission and was turned down
Speaker 2: maybe the next NaSTA administrator. So who knows what happens
Speaker 2: with that?
Speaker 1: Who knows?
Speaker 2: Right, I haven't talked about Blue Origin yet, sure, normally
Speaker 2: I don't talk about rockets that haven't flown, but they
Speaker 2: look like they're really really close. Finally, after all these years,
Speaker 2: you know, they've been talking. He's you know, Jeff Bezos
Speaker 2: has never flown anybody into He's just flown a whole
Speaker 2: bunch of New Shepherd missions, which are our suborbital flights.
Speaker 2: They get above the carbon line, but they don't stand over.
Speaker 2: They don't go fast enough. The rocket's tiny comparison, but
Speaker 2: he's been working on this six meter rocket, so not
Speaker 2: as big as Starship, but big with a landable first stage.
Speaker 2: That's the proposal at a disposable upper stage. And they
Speaker 2: kept they were very secret for many, many years, but
Speaker 2: they now today when we're recording this, have our rocket
Speaker 2: on the pad, a fully assembled new glenn Is at
Speaker 2: Kennedy Space Center, and so far they've done some tanking tests,
Speaker 2: but they haven't done a static fire yet. The FAA
Speaker 2: has not published a launch window for it yet, so
Speaker 2: we don't know if they don't have permission yet or
Speaker 2: they just don't want to publish exactly when they're going
Speaker 2: to fly. But generally by the point by the time
Speaker 2: you're doing tanking tests, you're about ready to fly. So
Speaker 2: they may fly before the end of the year, it
Speaker 2: may not. It's very close. The other vehicle it's really
Speaker 2: close to flying now is one called dream Chaser. This
Speaker 2: is Sierra Space. This was another one of the competitors
Speaker 2: for the commercial resupply of the Space station, and it's
Speaker 2: a little space plane, and they finally have a completed
Speaker 2: vehicle that's going through testing. The first flight should be
Speaker 2: in May of twenty twenty five, and they could win
Speaker 2: a contract to actually do resupply to the space station.
Speaker 2: Plus they can recover payloads better than SpaceX Camp. The
Speaker 2: cargo Dragon is a ballistic capsule, so their landing's fairly
Speaker 2: rough and it lands in the ocean, so it's there
Speaker 2: for a while before they can pull it out and
Speaker 2: do all the things where Dream Chaser actually lands like
Speaker 2: an airplane, so you could put it down on a
Speaker 2: runway much gentler, less g loads on it and get
Speaker 2: supplies out of it. So there's a case for this thing.
Speaker 2: They'd like to build a crew one, but who knows
Speaker 2: when that's ever going to happen. Right now, the testing
Speaker 2: shows that it's a cargo space plane that should last
Speaker 2: at least fifteen missions, so fairly reusable. And they've got
Speaker 2: a second one under construction. Now they're calling Reverence cool.
Speaker 2: All right, should we take a break and then we'll
Speaker 2: talk about the moon.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's take a quick break and we'll be right
Speaker 1: back with more space geeking out with Richard Campbell after
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Speaker 1: It's dot NetRocks the geek Out edition Space geek Out
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four. You know you're waiting for him, right absolutely?
Speaker 2: Second half. I did put out any asks for questions.
Speaker 2: Folks said things I should address, and Jay responded when
Speaker 2: he asked how realistic is the twenty twenty six schedule
Speaker 2: to get back to the Moon? And my answer to
Speaker 2: that is not realistic at all.
Speaker 1: I just want to know, like, of all the things
Speaker 1: to do in space, why go back to somewhere where
Speaker 1: we have been already and know a.
Speaker 2: Lot about We only know a little bit about about
Speaker 2: the Moon, But don't we know enough? Nope, there's lots
Speaker 2: more to know. The main thing is we I mean,
Speaker 2: arguably the missions in the late sixties early seventies, which
Speaker 2: were military missions, even if they wrapped them in a
Speaker 2: science wrapper, like eleven of the twelve people that landed
Speaker 2: on the Moon were test pilots, one was a geologist,
Speaker 2: Jack Schmidt, right, the only scientist to ever set foot
Speaker 2: on the Moon, and they all landed roughly all on
Speaker 2: the near side of the Moon, and all roughly equatorial.
Speaker 2: Because of the limitations of the vehicle. The vehicle was
Speaker 2: very dangerous. The Apollo system had many failure modes that
Speaker 2: were not survival, so continuing those flights after they'd accomplished
Speaker 2: their goal was questionable. So the reason to go back
Speaker 2: to the Moon now is A, we can do it
Speaker 2: much shaper. B. There's a lot of research to be done,
Speaker 2: and we've proven pretty categorically that there's water ice in
Speaker 2: shaded areas on the poles, and that sets us up
Speaker 2: for making a lot less expensive to be on the Moon.
Speaker 2: So back in twenty seventeen, I did a geek out
Speaker 2: about building a based on the Moon based on the
Speaker 2: ease of papers and so forth, which NASA liked enough
Speaker 2: that they asked me to come and speak to them
Speaker 2: about their own stuff, which is weird.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was truly mind blowing.
Speaker 2: But the point was what had been proposed and which
Speaker 2: still makes sense, is equivalent of like Antarctic style missions,
Speaker 2: but on the Moon, to put scientists on for a period.
Speaker 2: The current periods like forty two days at a time,
Speaker 2: So that's a day cycle, night cycle, day cycle on
Speaker 2: the Moon to do experiments on the surface, and there's
Speaker 2: a bunch of interesting things to do. Obviously, the water
Speaker 2: ice is number one. If you can get water ice.
Speaker 1: You said forty two days or forty two hours, forty
Speaker 1: two days a day cycle, a night cycle, in a
Speaker 1: day cycle.
Speaker 2: So if you're standing on the equator of the Moon,
Speaker 2: you will have fourteen earth days of sunlight on you
Speaker 2: and because of how it rotatescause of how it rotates, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: and so you had alloys up the end up with
Speaker 2: forty two days. So you you know, you're there long
Speaker 2: enough to really do a lot of experimentation, right, you
Speaker 2: know the long again. We only ever had one scientist
Speaker 2: on the moon, jash Smitt. He had three six hour
Speaker 2: shifts on the moon. He found more things, more important
Speaker 2: things on the Moon than the rest of them. Com mind,
Speaker 2: because he's actually a scientist. Like what would happen if
Speaker 2: you allowed scientists to actually work in an extended period?
Speaker 1: And so you certainly don't want to be on the
Speaker 1: dark side or in the dark at all, because one
Speaker 1: it's darker than dark is dark.
Speaker 2: It's pretty damn dark.
Speaker 1: And number two, it's actually freezing.
Speaker 2: It's very cold, very very cold. But the suits will
Speaker 2: protect you. The intent is you would do a full
Speaker 2: dark cycle too.
Speaker 1: Wow, I can't imagine.
Speaker 2: That would only be fourteen earth days in the darkness, right,
Speaker 2: Like you ask a guy who's up in long ear
Speaker 2: bin in this falbarred islands, they do four months of.
Speaker 1: Dark, right, But I mean there is ambient light. There
Speaker 1: is no ambient light on the space side.
Speaker 2: Oh, there's absolutely ambient light. There's still stars.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I suppose.
Speaker 2: Right, but in fact you'll get you out. And by
Speaker 2: the way, no astronaut is really ever seen them from
Speaker 2: the surface of the Moon because they were only there
Speaker 2: for three days in daylight the whole time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I imagine the stars must look amazing.
Speaker 2: There must be astonishing, without a doubt. What you won't
Speaker 2: see in the sky would be, you know, the.
Speaker 1: Moon, the moon. You might see the Earth.
Speaker 2: But you will see the Earth and it will be
Speaker 2: like and it reflects more light than the than the
Speaker 2: Moon does, so you'll probably get quite a bit of
Speaker 2: light from that. But it's certainly part of the whole experience.
Speaker 2: So twenty twenty four, there was a bunch of missions
Speaker 2: in the Moon. I mentioned one of them already, the
Speaker 2: Percan mission in January, which didn't make it to the Moon.
Speaker 2: Then the Japanese, also in January, landed the first Japanese
Speaker 2: spacecraft the Moon. Ever, it's called Slim. It didn't land well.
Speaker 2: They dropped a couple of little rovers and then as
Speaker 2: they went to land it tipped over on its side,
Speaker 2: solar panels down, so it only lasted for a few hours.
Speaker 1: Hey for efvert.
Speaker 2: Those little rovers were able to take pictures and show
Speaker 2: that one of the engine nozzles was missing, so that's
Speaker 2: probably why it tipped over. It blew an engine.
Speaker 3: Nozzle lot, which is unfortunate.
Speaker 1: Well, I fully expect that the Japanese will be doing
Speaker 1: amazing things on the Moon.
Speaker 2: I imagine, yeah, they'll keep trying. I mean again, it
Speaker 2: worked for a while, and their little rovers worked great.
Speaker 2: Twenty in February, Nova Sea landed on the South Pole,
Speaker 2: one of the first few. It was line of South Pole.
Speaker 2: The Indians got their first. It landed badly too. It
Speaker 2: had a little bit too much lateral coming down and
Speaker 2: it snapped a leg and tipped over. Although in that case,
Speaker 2: it landed on its side solar panels up, so we
Speaker 2: still have able to do a bunch of missions successful.
Speaker 2: Who had the most success on the Moon. In twenty
Speaker 2: twenty four China. China launched a pair of communication satellites
Speaker 2: to add to their existing communication satellite that covers the
Speaker 2: far side of the Moon because they have a series
Speaker 2: of additional missions on the far side of the moon,
Speaker 2: Changes six, seven, and eight. And then they flew Chang
Speaker 2: E six which landed on the Apollo basin which is
Speaker 2: on the far side of the Moon. And not only landed,
Speaker 2: this was a talk about a complicated spacecraft. So this
Speaker 2: had an orbiter, a lander with a rover, and an
Speaker 2: ascent stage four pieces wow. And within a couple of
Speaker 2: days of landing they picked up samples from the lunar
Speaker 2: surface and put it in the ascent stage, which then
Speaker 2: went back up into space, connected up with that orbiter
Speaker 2: and flew back to Earth and re entered successfully re
Speaker 2: entered a capsule successfully into the Mongolian desert, so they
Speaker 2: have the first new samples from the Moon since the seventies,
Speaker 2: God bless them. And then the arbiter they changed its
Speaker 2: orbit into a stable Orbits is going to be there
Speaker 2: for forever. So huge accomplishments on the Moon for China
Speaker 2: so far, and they're on they've got a plan to
Speaker 2: put humans on the Moon as well, which means we
Speaker 2: should probably talk about the NASA Moon missions.
Speaker 1: Let's do it.
Speaker 2: That's the Artemis missions, right arm being the sister to
Speaker 2: Apollo yep, if you catch the meeting. So there's been
Speaker 2: one Artimist flight so far, was in November twenty two.
Speaker 2: It was unmanned where they flew in Oryan capsule to
Speaker 2: the Moon and they did a bunch of gravitational tricks there,
Speaker 2: things they'd never done before. As much as it looks
Speaker 2: like a basic mission, they did advance the science. They
Speaker 2: validated a bunch of order models and so forth. The
Speaker 2: second flight, Artemist two, is supposed to be the first
Speaker 2: man flight. It's a replay of Apollo eight. They're just
Speaker 2: going to fly around the Moon and back again, lots
Speaker 2: of systems to validate. Four people supposed to be on that,
Speaker 2: including one Canadian. Was originally planned for twenty twenty three,
Speaker 2: and then they bumped out the twenty twenty four which
Speaker 2: would have been this year, and then in September twenty four,
Speaker 2: they said no sooner than September twenty twenty five, and
Speaker 2: then a month later said, as she'll be April of
Speaker 2: twenty twenty six. One of the problems they had and
Speaker 2: been reviewing for a while was that the heat shield
Speaker 2: on Artist one, which functioned and made it back on
Speaker 2: the surface, had a lot more damage on it than expected.
Speaker 2: It had big chunks blown out of it, actually, and
Speaker 2: it's taken them a long time to come to this conclusion,
Speaker 2: but they finally figured out that it was the skip effect.
Speaker 2: So this vehicle. The problem here is that when you
Speaker 2: fly back from the Earth to the Moon the Moon,
Speaker 2: the Earth grabs you and accelerates you. So you leave
Speaker 2: the Earth going towards the Moon and maybe twenty seven
Speaker 2: twenty eight thousand miles per hour just enough to get there,
Speaker 2: and you're slowing down the whole time you get there.
Speaker 2: But just before you would start falling back to Earth,
Speaker 2: the Moon grabs you and you start to accelerate towards
Speaker 2: the Moon. But when you're flying back from the Moon
Speaker 2: to the Earth, it doesn't take a lot of thrust
Speaker 2: to leave the Moon, so you're only moving about three
Speaker 2: thousand miles an hour, but as you fall towards the Earth,
Speaker 2: you start accelerating and accelerating, and by the time you
Speaker 2: get back to the Earth you're moving about forty thousand Yeah,
Speaker 2: this is the problem, right, It's like you're going. This
Speaker 2: is why we've never ever put anything back into orbit
Speaker 2: around the Earth from the Moon. All we've done is
Speaker 2: do direct re entry. But you go in so fast.
Speaker 2: If you came in too steeply, you'd just burn up.
Speaker 2: And so one of the things they did for the
Speaker 2: apoll Miisians and the experiment and they were doing, or
Speaker 2: they first rhyme mission, is that it is skip re entry.
Speaker 2: So they actually go into the atmosphere the Earth to
Speaker 2: accelerate and then come back out of the atmosphere, let
Speaker 2: the heat shield cool down, and now they've slowed down
Speaker 2: enough that they fall back in again.
Speaker 1: That makes sense, bouncing sield atmosphere before.
Speaker 2: You effect on it, but not too many. And I
Speaker 2: want to make it so vigorous as like a boying.
Speaker 2: It's not that kind of bounce. It's a skim in
Speaker 2: to slow down and then cool.
Speaker 1: It's like skipping stones on the walls.
Speaker 2: The problem here is then the heat shield on Theryon's
Speaker 2: much larger than the Apollo capsule. It's a much bigger vehicle,
Speaker 2: and it's new material, and it appears that the cooling
Speaker 2: of the material from that skip created bubbles that then
Speaker 2: when they heat it back up again, they burst and
Speaker 2: blue chunks out of the heat shield. Oh, so the
Speaker 2: heat shield needs to be revised. It's probably the pacing
Speaker 2: item now and they but they feel like it probably
Speaker 2: would have worked anyway. But yeah, they're definitely going to
Speaker 2: correct it, and that's why they pushed out to April
Speaker 2: twenty six. Okay, and then that leaves us with Artemis three,
Speaker 2: which is supposed to be the return landing on the Moon,
Speaker 2: currently scheduled for September twenty twenty six. So back to
Speaker 2: Jay's question, how realistic is twenty twenty six, Well, considering
Speaker 2: they're going to do the the two flight in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty six, there's no way they're going to land on
Speaker 2: the Moon in twenty twenty six. The lander's not ready.
Speaker 2: That's a modified version of Starship And maybe'll we run
Speaker 2: anyway twenty six, Probably not. These are all unmanned flights, right, No,
Speaker 2: these will be manned, will be manned, and Artemist three
Speaker 2: will be manned, No kidding, Yeah, an Armist three was
Speaker 2: originally going to be a Lunar Gateway mission. The original
Speaker 2: proposal was that they build a space station in arbit
Speaker 2: around the Moon. There was a bunch of reasons why
Speaker 2: that was a good idea.
Speaker 1: The Chinese missions weren't manned, though, were they.
Speaker 2: Nope, nobody else is. Nobody's falling back to the Moon yet. Okay, theory,
Speaker 2: the first time we're going to get anywhere near the
Speaker 2: Moon again will be in twenty six with Artemis two.
Speaker 2: In theory, I don't know if it's actually gonna happen.
Speaker 2: It's been delayed a bunch.
Speaker 1: So off the top of your head, what are the
Speaker 1: countries that have had manned landings on the Moon.
Speaker 2: Well, there's only one, the only the US has been.
Speaker 3: To the Moon.
Speaker 1: I thought, I thought the Russians were too.
Speaker 2: Russians wanted to, but they never got there. Their moon
Speaker 2: rocket may never guid into orbit. They only had four
Speaker 2: attempts with the end one and they all exploded. And
Speaker 2: then they stopped because the Americans already already done it.
Speaker 2: Huh okay, so yeah that's it then, And the Russians,
Speaker 2: you know, are kind of out of money right now,
Speaker 2: they've been fighting an unnecessary war of their own making
Speaker 2: that has debilitated their economy.
Speaker 1: Oh man, it's sad. It's sad. And now they're wasting,
Speaker 1: not wasting, but they are wasting North Korean troops. They're
Speaker 1: just throwing them in and busting them out bodies.
Speaker 2: Just it's horrible, totally unnecesary when you could be working
Speaker 2: on something interesting like actually going to the moon. But
Speaker 2: the Chinese are all in, They're working hard to get
Speaker 2: to the moon. The big thing about these artemist flights
Speaker 2: is it's a space launch system. Right. This is We've
Speaker 2: talked about this on many geek outs. The space launch
Speaker 2: system is basically modified Space Shuttle parts. Lately, I've been
Speaker 2: saying this would be a really cool rocketed in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety nine, but in twenty twenty four, it's really archaic.
Speaker 2: It's also catastrophically expensive.
Speaker 1: So why are they doing it?
Speaker 2: What current calculation is two and a half billion dollars
Speaker 2: of flight?
Speaker 1: Why are they doing it so seriously when you have
Speaker 1: SpaceX out there that clearly has is cost effective and tirable.
Speaker 2: Well, now we get into you know the reality of NASA,
Speaker 2: which is NASA as a government agency and Congress holds
Speaker 2: their purse strings.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it needs to exist because of all the
Speaker 1: people that work there.
Speaker 2: Right well, and yeah, the reality is even NASA didn't
Speaker 2: want SLS, but the Congress did you know, NASA cleverly
Speaker 2: to keep the Space Shuttle flying even with all the
Speaker 2: problems with special had made sure that every state in
Speaker 2: the Union did something related to Space Shuttle, which means
Speaker 2: they had all these Congress people who cared about NASA.
Speaker 2: And when the Space Shuttle had to end, and it
Speaker 2: did make sense to end it, we had serious problems
Speaker 2: that was going to kill more people, they did want
Speaker 2: to lose those jobs, and so Congress continued to fund
Speaker 2: an alternative to Shuttle using those technologies. The big requirement
Speaker 2: was you shuttle technologies so that all of those workers
Speaker 2: in all of those states would keep working. But it
Speaker 2: makes it really expensive, and they're only barely funded it efficient, right,
Speaker 2: They only funded it enough to keep the people working.
Speaker 2: It was almost an accident. They actually succeeded in building
Speaker 2: a vehicle, but it keeps going on, right, because they
Speaker 2: don't have enough funding to quickly build a mobile launcher.
Speaker 2: They've tripled the budget on the mobile launcher. That's not
Speaker 2: the procket. This is the thing that holds a rocket,
Speaker 2: which current expectation is a billion one point eight billion
Speaker 2: to build. To finish the mobile launcher, it's supposed to
Speaker 2: be a few hundred million. It's still too much, but
Speaker 2: it's just incredibly inefficient, and you're right. With Starship coming up,
Speaker 2: it's becoming sillier and sillier. But it's not that easy
Speaker 2: to cancel. Like my concern with a guy like Jared
Speaker 2: Eisenman being the administrator is he's a tech billionaire. He
Speaker 2: made his money being at the top of a company
Speaker 2: you had complete control over, and NASA is not that. Right.
Speaker 2: You have to negotiate with Congress for your budget, right,
Speaker 2: you have to work out that relationship. And NASA has
Speaker 2: never been able to cancel us the less themselves. Every
Speaker 2: time they tried, the Congress put it back in the budget.
Speaker 2: So how do you change that? That's a very difficult thing.
Speaker 2: Now you can make fun of NASA for the tactic
Speaker 2: around the Space Shuttle, but it's also how the station
Speaker 2: got built. The reason the International Space Station exists is
Speaker 2: that it had multiple countries involved. So now an administration
Speaker 2: can't just cancel it. They have agreements with other countries,
Speaker 2: and that got the station done, and we might as
Speaker 2: well talk about the station, Okay, you know, continuously inhabited
Speaker 2: since November of two thousand, so twenty four years straight.
Speaker 2: It's been about two hundred and eighty people that have
Speaker 2: visited the station over that time. It's supposed to be
Speaker 2: operated until twenty thirty, which point it'll be deorbited minus
Speaker 2: a couple of years.
Speaker 1: I have an app on my phone that every once
Speaker 1: in a while alerts me that the space station is
Speaker 1: going to be overhead, and I go outside and look,
Speaker 1: and it's just amazing to think that this thing that
Speaker 1: looks like a shooting star going across the sky is
Speaker 1: traveling at sixty thousand miles an hour and there's people
Speaker 1: on it.
Speaker 2: Okay, maybe fifty six to ten. Yeah, I found it
Speaker 2: with six of the ten people. No, it's about twenty
Speaker 2: six thousand miles an hour, but oh, okay, six to
Speaker 2: ten people on it, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it
Speaker 2: is extraordinary. But they I mean, the issue here Russia
Speaker 2: says that they're going to pull out in twenty twenty eight.
Speaker 2: But I don't know that kind of broke. I don't
Speaker 2: know what they're going to keep doing. But the reality
Speaker 2: is that the older parts on the space station are
Speaker 2: starting to wear out. There's a persistent air leak on
Speaker 2: this Vezda module, which was the second, one of the
Speaker 2: first modules up there. They have been able to fix it.
Speaker 2: They're finding microfractures many of the older parts, especially the
Speaker 2: docking ports space chunk.
Speaker 1: Yeah, little particles hit the space station can ripple in it.
Speaker 2: That's an issue, but it hasn't been a big issue
Speaker 2: lately for whatever reason. But just wear and tear. Space
Speaker 2: is hard on parts. Those parts have been up there
Speaker 2: for a long time. They weren't ready to be up
Speaker 2: there much longer. Right, twenty thirty is kind of the
Speaker 2: outer edge of as long as it's going to be.
Speaker 1: I think it was last year you told me they
Speaker 1: were working on a new station to replace the.
Speaker 2: ISS more than one. Let's get there, all right. Cool.
Speaker 2: This year they did issue the contract for deorbiting the
Speaker 2: space station. Because it takes a few years to build
Speaker 2: a deorbit it's not surprisingly SpaceX won that contract. Current
Speaker 2: estimates about eight hundred and fifty million to deorbit the station.
Speaker 2: The reason is it weighs four hundred metric tons. It
Speaker 2: is really really big. That's nearly a million pounds. The
Speaker 2: original plan back in the nineties when they were planting
Speaker 2: to doing this, is that they would use three of
Speaker 2: the Russian Progress spacecraft working together to diorbit it. That
Speaker 2: plan would never work. Actually there's not enough ports, it's
Speaker 2: not lined up correctly, and the Russians.
Speaker 1: Aren't and it's kind of Russia. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So SpaceX is propose is this thing they called
Speaker 2: the USD orbit Vehicle. It's a modified Dragon. Are you surprised?
Speaker 2: I don't think you're. Still it would be launched on
Speaker 2: a fulcon heavy because it's really quite bulky. Thirty metric
Speaker 2: tons of fuel onboard, so six times what a normal
Speaker 2: crew Dragon or cargo Dragon would carry. So it's a
Speaker 2: normal command module, be still a cargo Dragon, but the
Speaker 2: trunk is much bigger and full of fuel and thrusters
Speaker 2: forty six Draco thrusters on instead of sixteen, and so
Speaker 2: it would just have this huge, powerful burn that would
Speaker 2: last for quite a while. To deorbit it safely, it's
Speaker 2: such a big thing that it would be very dangerous
Speaker 2: not to deorbit it under control, and the space station
Speaker 2: cannot be unmanned, right, it needs continuous tending. That's just
Speaker 2: the way it was built. And so it's lots of
Speaker 2: folks are saying, like, why would you throw this away?
Speaker 2: Why not put it up in a parking orbit. Well,
Speaker 2: you put them in a parking orbit. It's very expensive
Speaker 2: to do that, and then you want not ever going
Speaker 2: to be really able to use it because you're going to
Speaker 2: quickly lose control of it. Risk of explosion is high.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of pressure vessels and things like. It's
Speaker 2: dangerous to have it up there.
Speaker 1: And also if it just eventually falls to Earth, there's
Speaker 1: no telling where it will fall where we turn up
Speaker 1: and four hundred what is it, four hundred metric tons
Speaker 1: metric tons? Yeah, four hundred metric tons hitting the Earth
Speaker 1: would be a bad thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a bunch of it burn up, but a bunch
Speaker 2: of it wouldn't. When they diorbited mirror. You know, many
Speaker 2: parts made it into Point Nemo, that a spotless in
Speaker 2: the Pacific where they drop this stuff. There's also a
Speaker 2: question of why not take it apart. It's like, well,
Speaker 2: you know, the space station was designed to be assembled,
Speaker 2: but it was not designed to be disassembled, right, so
Speaker 2: many many one of the things is that one of
Speaker 2: the effects when you have very tight seals of metal
Speaker 2: in space is they weld together, so they're very likely
Speaker 2: not to come apart, even if you wanted it to.
Speaker 2: Much less, after they initially connect those pieces together, they
Speaker 2: add a bunch of other connections on top of that
Speaker 2: to hook everything up, so they very difficult.
Speaker 1: All right. So just one thing that's in the back
Speaker 1: of my mind that maybe you can do as an
Speaker 1: aside here is enumerate all of the different SpaceX rockets,
Speaker 1: because I'm totally confused with all these names and their sizes.
Speaker 1: So starting at the very smallest one is the Falcon Well.
Speaker 2: Really there's only two. It's really Falcon nine is really
Speaker 2: the only Falcon nine.
Speaker 1: But then there's the Falcon Heavy.
Speaker 2: Falcon Heavy's just three Falcon nine strapped together more right.
Speaker 2: And then there's Starship Starship, which is the big mother, yeah,
Speaker 2: which is his experiment to make a fully reusaal space.
Speaker 1: And that's the one that really hasn't got off the
Speaker 1: ground yet because it's been just so no, it's flown
Speaker 1: six times, but it's never Wait a minute, well, what
Speaker 1: was the one that just kind of destroyed the landing pit?
Speaker 1: That was the first flight of Starship. Oh okay, all right,
Speaker 1: and they repaired the pad and continue flying. They're up
Speaker 1: to six flights though. Okay, so there's those three.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And admittedly Heavy is just a variant of
Speaker 2: Falcon nine.
Speaker 1: Okay, but it's three times as big.
Speaker 2: But this, you know, this deorbit vehicle would be unique.
Speaker 2: It would fly on Heavy and it's just a deorbit
Speaker 2: the space station.
Speaker 1: Okay, now, yeah, thanks for comparing that up. I got confused.
Speaker 1: It's like alphabet soup. We did talk last year about
Speaker 1: Axiom Space. Now, Axioum Space has been flying tourist flights
Speaker 1: to the space station. They've had three of them as
Speaker 1: of this year. And they intended to build a intend
Speaker 1: to build a space station, a commercial space station up there,
Speaker 1: and they were going to dock it to the International
Speaker 1: Space Station as they were a stumbling it and then
Speaker 1: when it was got to a certain size, they would
Speaker 1: detach and.
Speaker 2: Fly off on their own. And this scout formalized back
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty one when NASA established the Commercial LEO
Speaker 2: Destination program. So NASA said, hey, we're getting out of
Speaker 2: the lower orbit space station business. We're going we want
Speaker 2: to rent time on space stations if commercial will build them,
Speaker 2: and they offered up some money to basically do their
Speaker 2: research to figure out what kinds of space station is.
Speaker 2: In twenty twenty three, there were eleven teams that applied
Speaker 2: and that really came down that consulted down into three plans.
Speaker 2: One of them is the one I just told you
Speaker 2: about the Axiom station. So their original plan was to
Speaker 2: this is another billionaire. Their original plan who who to
Speaker 2: dock a component? Dock the components to the space station
Speaker 2: as they're assembling them, so they didn't need their all
Speaker 2: their own propulsion. It makes the system simpler. And then
Speaker 2: once they're fully assembled takeoff. They have money problems, not
Speaker 2: surprising like most space companies do. And so while their
Speaker 2: original plan was to fly five modules space station, so
Speaker 2: that was a control module, they call the PPTM, a
Speaker 2: payload power thermal module, then a habitat, then an air lock,
Speaker 2: then a second habitat, and then a research and manufacturing
Speaker 2: module which would also have this great couple on it.
Speaker 3: So having good views.
Speaker 2: Now literally this month in December, they've said, okay, we're
Speaker 2: going to fly the PPTM to the space station in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty seven, and then in twenty twenty eight will
Speaker 2: fly the HAVE one and then we'll detach from the
Speaker 2: space station. Will be a controllable space station on them.
Speaker 2: We'll finish the rest later. And there's also a proposal
Speaker 2: they might be able to take Canada Arm to with them,
Speaker 2: which is the arm system that's on the space station,
Speaker 2: which is still perfectly functional and while it's large, it
Speaker 2: could be left in space and usable, or they go bankrupt,
Speaker 2: the l whole thing falls apart. They've been con The
Speaker 2: argument against Axiom is that they've been operating like their
Speaker 2: NASA with that guaranteed budget, so they've been spending more
Speaker 2: than they needed to. They're overstaffed, they've been contracting out
Speaker 2: their construction. They're using tails to build their space station components,
Speaker 2: which admittedly those guys know how to build spacetation components.
Speaker 2: They build a bunch of the International Space Station. But
Speaker 2: I don't think they have enough money to fund everything,
Speaker 2: and they're tourist flights don't even pay for themselves. They
Speaker 2: haven't paid SpaceX for their flights so far. They're in trouble.
Speaker 2: The other proposal is Orbital REEF. This is the partnership
Speaker 2: between Blue Origin, Sierra Space, Boeing and a few others.
Speaker 2: This is the space station dependent on New Glen, so
Speaker 2: the component, the core component would be six meters because
Speaker 2: that's how big New Glen is. Their design would come
Speaker 2: out almost the same size as the International Space Station,
Speaker 2: but in much fewer pieces. Their crew transport would be
Speaker 2: dream Chaser and star Liner. Star Liner being the thing
Speaker 2: that doesn't work.
Speaker 1: It doesn't work and.
Speaker 2: Almost at the point of flying cargo, but has naturally
Speaker 2: flown into space yet.
Speaker 1: So we're not too hopeful about this one.
Speaker 2: This one, I mean, Blue Origin has deeper pockets. Uh,
Speaker 2: and if New Glenn's works, which is a big mask,
Speaker 2: it's at least more possible. They certainly have a good
Speaker 2: crew with them. There was some argument that there was
Speaker 2: a conflict between them and Sierra Space, but officially they're
Speaker 2: saying it's still all good. The third proposal, this is
Speaker 2: all of the commercial projects, is called star Lab, and
Speaker 2: that's Lockey Martin with Nanoax, also part of Voyager Space.
Speaker 2: Lockey Martin seems to have ducked out of this over
Speaker 2: the past couple of years and Airbs has taken their place,
Speaker 2: and Northrop grum And join them. So Airbus has an
Speaker 2: aerospace group which we don't. That's where are and space
Speaker 2: comes from, or are they're involved with. Northrop Rumman now
Speaker 2: owns the Sickness spacecraft which does the resupply of the station,
Speaker 2: so that's a fliable component. But they've committed to using
Speaker 2: Starship to fly star Lab. They only and this is
Speaker 2: a much smaller space station and midtedly the ISS arguably
Speaker 2: is too big. That it's about four hundred and fifty
Speaker 2: or nine hundred square meters inside, and that's big enough
Speaker 2: to eluse stuff all the time. They spend a lot
Speaker 2: of time looking for things in the space station, and
Speaker 2: so Starlab in some ways I think is the most
Speaker 2: practical in the sense that they're just talking about a
Speaker 2: two piece module. A service module has propultional in power,
Speaker 2: and then an inflatable halb module that inflates up to
Speaker 2: eight meters in diameter. So that's pretty big. It'd be
Speaker 2: about half the size of.
Speaker 1: It's like a bouncy castle in space.
Speaker 2: More or less. But there's a problem when you get
Speaker 2: that largely. Can't leave that volume empty because if you
Speaker 2: can't reach a handle to pull yourself around, you can
Speaker 2: get stranded.
Speaker 1: Stranding without a way, you can't really swim in nothing.
Speaker 2: Nope, they can't swim. You can't like blow air like,
Speaker 2: none of that works, right, and so they'd have to
Speaker 2: fill the interior in like we complain that the space
Speaker 2: that the International Space Station is a bit of a
Speaker 2: rabbit warren because all those modules had to fit inside
Speaker 2: of Shuttle. But they were a thing of three and
Speaker 2: a half meters across. But that meant that you always
Speaker 2: have a handhold. Yeah, right, and that's good. So you
Speaker 2: mean none of these guys were talking about launching earlier
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty seven or twenty twenty eight. They don't
Speaker 2: have enough money.
Speaker 1: But are they at least trying to make them expandable.
Speaker 1: I mean, one of the benefits of the ISS was
Speaker 1: it's modular, and they all yes.
Speaker 2: Well, and so and so was mirror. All of these
Speaker 2: have multiple docking points that they could add more to.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and all the other countries could get involved and
Speaker 1: put in their modules and whatever. That's the whole idea.
Speaker 2: So those are the three from the commercial pro rams
Speaker 2: so far. There's one other that just recently showed up,
Speaker 2: and it's called vast So a cryptocurrency billionaire by the
Speaker 2: name of Jed Micaleeb started the company in twenty twenty one,
Speaker 2: did not submit for the commercial project. He's basically funding
Speaker 2: this himself, but he's shooting low in that sense. His
Speaker 2: initial products called space Haven one, and they've actually bent metal.
Speaker 2: They're in qualifications for their first components small enough to
Speaker 2: fly on a Falcon nine next year, supposedly, so only
Speaker 2: about eighty square meters, so about the tenth the size
Speaker 2: of the space station. This is little, but to keep
Speaker 2: it simple, he's going to do crew transport with crew Dragon,
Speaker 2: but the crew Dragon will also be the life support
Speaker 2: and the communication systems and so forth, so sort of
Speaker 2: a man tended little orbiter that you put your crew
Speaker 2: Dragon onto and then you pressurize it and operate it
Speaker 2: and so forth, so you don't have to put all
Speaker 2: that stuff in, and then he wants to build bigger
Speaker 2: ones from there. So I mean, I'm always worried about
Speaker 2: billionaires in general with this stuff, because they're you know,
Speaker 2: kind of come and go on it. But at least
Speaker 2: his goals are pretty simple. But he's had very little time.
Speaker 2: It's only been a couple of years, so at least
Speaker 2: his goal space is small, so it's worth paying attention
Speaker 2: to ask, but again nothing flowing yet. There is another
Speaker 2: space station, right, there's the Chinese one, Tianggong. I didn't
Speaker 2: even know that, Yeah, Tiangong. The first components went up
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty one, and then crews went on there.
Speaker 2: They added more modules in twenty twenty two. It's been
Speaker 2: continuously crude since twenty twenty two. It's all Chinese, though
Speaker 2: it's all Chinese. Only Chinese have been on it. So
Speaker 2: there's three modules. There's been seven resupplies and seven crew
Speaker 2: rotations on it. It's about one hundred metric tons, so
Speaker 2: about a quarter of the sizes of the International Space Station.
Speaker 2: It's very much like Mirror was with a three module designed.
Speaker 2: There's a fourth module is supposed to be coming in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty six, which is a telescope similar to Hubble.
Speaker 2: No kidding, yeah, wow. So we don't know a lot
Speaker 2: about it because it's Chese don't publish a lot of things.
Speaker 2: They keep in the solves. But they have been talking
Speaker 2: to a few other countries about being involved, one of
Speaker 2: the not US centric countries for the most part, because
Speaker 2: of course, one of the reasons they built this is
Speaker 2: because the Chinese weren't allowed to participate with NASA, right,
Speaker 2: so they they built an alternative and they are you.
Speaker 1: Know, the countries Russia, China and North Korea, they're all
Speaker 1: kind of getting together and trying to see how they
Speaker 1: can support each other against the great evil West.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, they don't necessarily get along all that. Well,
Speaker 2: they're other than disagreeing with the West, they're not the same. Right.
Speaker 2: You know, there's this idea of bricks that doesn't almost
Speaker 2: make sense. Anyway, let's move past the space station's definite.
Speaker 2: We'll get into the other exploration of the Solar System.
Speaker 2: And it was a comment off of the interwebs from
Speaker 2: Jordan Maxwell. He said, hey, what will starship do for
Speaker 2: outer planetary exploration? Can we do direct emissions? And when
Speaker 2: he's talking, Jordan hits on a point with a mission
Speaker 2: that flew this year called Europa Clipper. So Europa Clipper
Speaker 2: is a spacecraft flying to Jupiter specifically to explore Europa.
Speaker 2: It's not going to orbit Europa. The radiation is too
Speaker 2: strong there, so it's just going to fly in and
Speaker 2: out around Jupiter, get itself out of the radiation belt, parodrectally,
Speaker 2: but make a series of close passes on Europa.
Speaker 1: And Europa is one of Jupiter's moons. That's, yeah, probably
Speaker 1: the most interesting body in the Solar System other than Earth.
Speaker 2: Don't you think I'm you know when you think I
Speaker 2: would also put in Settleists in that list around Saturn,
Speaker 2: the one that our friend Rob Connery wrote about.
Speaker 1: I haven't read that book, by the way, but I
Speaker 1: would love to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a great book because it's also an ice
Speaker 2: it's in. What we're finding is that there is a
Speaker 2: few of these planetoids or moons that have liquid water
Speaker 2: under an ice cap, under an icy surface, and so
Speaker 2: the radiation regime is very severe, but the moons are
Speaker 2: being kept warm by tidal flexing. So because they're so
Speaker 2: close to a gas giant, either Jupiter or our Saturn,
Speaker 2: that stress keeps them warm. It's like the same way
Speaker 2: when you keep bending a piece of metal back and forth,
Speaker 2: it warms up.
Speaker 1: When you move water it warms up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you're flexing the whole core of the planet.
Speaker 2: And so Europa is one of these. It's also one
Speaker 2: that Arthur C. Clark wrote about for in his book
Speaker 2: twenty ten, where he said attempt no landing here.
Speaker 1: Ye.
Speaker 2: So the other interesting moon would be Titan, which is different. Again,
Speaker 2: it's also around Saturn. Saturn Europa's up there. You know,
Speaker 2: you've got Calisto, Ande Gandamat as well in the Jupiter system.
Speaker 1: But some of these, a lot of these have liquid
Speaker 1: methane atmospheres, right, so they're liquid, but they're not water.
Speaker 2: Titan does. Europa is an ice ball, so doesn't look
Speaker 2: like as much atmosphere at all. That the action should
Speaker 2: be under the ice. And so the proposal is we
Speaker 2: can learn enough about it and get good pictures to
Speaker 2: figure out what to land that we'd land something there
Speaker 2: and melt through the ice and put a submarine down.
Speaker 1: Last pictures of fish within a machine gun.
Speaker 2: You something like that. I would think, I think we're
Speaker 2: shooting for bacteria, but you know, anything to find life
Speaker 2: somewhere else. So originally this is one of the most
Speaker 2: expensive missions ever. It's huge. Outer planet exploratory spacecraft are small.
Speaker 2: This one's five and a half metric tons. It's big,
Speaker 2: so big, and so it was supposed to fly. They
Speaker 2: spent five billion on this thing, or four billion to
Speaker 2: build it, plus a budget of over a billion for operations.
Speaker 1: Now, who's they, Who's doing this?
Speaker 2: Is NASA okay, although it has with involvement from Issa
Speaker 2: and Jackson a few others as well. But this is
Speaker 2: one of the largest missions ever built to the Outer
Speaker 2: Solar System, and originally it was planned to fly on SLS,
Speaker 2: the same rocket to fly it is supposed to fly
Speaker 2: the ARTEMISS missions because it was so heavy and it
Speaker 2: would be a direct flight. So SLS at the time
Speaker 2: was expected to have enough power to fly Europa Clipper
Speaker 2: directly to Jupiter in about three years.
Speaker 1: To stop at Mars, for example, we.
Speaker 2: Didn't have to do any slingshots right and launch in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four, arrive in twenty twenty seven. But at
Speaker 2: two and a half billion dollars a lunch plus, you're
Speaker 2: going to be late. Because they build them slow slowly.
Speaker 2: They switched to a Falcon Heavy, so instead of two
Speaker 2: and a half billion dollars, they spent one hundred and
Speaker 2: eighty million dollars, so less than percent of the cost.
Speaker 2: But and this was a Falcon Heavy doing full push,
Speaker 2: no reusable, no recoverable cores. They burnt up every bit
Speaker 2: of fuel to get Europa Clipper on its way. But
Speaker 2: it doesn't have enough thrust and so now it's going
Speaker 2: to take six years to get to Jupiter, including a
Speaker 2: fly by of Mars and twenty twenty five and a
Speaker 2: fly by of Earth in twenty twenty six to get
Speaker 2: additional boost to get it out to Jupiter by twenty thirty.
Speaker 2: So would Starship make a difference. Yes, Remember this is
Speaker 2: a vehicle. It only weighs five point seven metric tons
Speaker 2: and Starship is supposed to lift one hundred metric tons.
Speaker 2: So you could put a big old kickstage plus that
Speaker 2: thing in there and get it directly to Jupiter. Although
Speaker 2: all of this conversation about refueling might open the door
Speaker 2: to like right now, they're only talking about taking those
Speaker 2: tankers flying like the Lunar Lander into orbit, which is
Speaker 2: a kind of starship, and then flying tankers up to
Speaker 2: it and refueling it till there's enough fuel in it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but why not actually builds a refueling depot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what we were talking about the very beginning.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a refueling depot where the tanker would go there
Speaker 2: and well, now you could have all kinds of spacefts
Speaker 2: go up, take up fuel from the from the refueling depot,
Speaker 2: and then go out.
Speaker 3: Where they want.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of like a queue in software. Right.
Speaker 1: It's a place where you could have asynchronously flights bringing
Speaker 1: fuel up and then flights filling up from it.
Speaker 2: Right. Yeah, Well, and you could get to a place
Speaker 2: where that's another commercial product in space.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Hey, we want methane and liquid oxygen, and at this
Speaker 2: depot you can fly them from the Earth, which will
Speaker 2: cost you a certain amount from low with orbit. But
Speaker 2: if you could say, extract those resources from the Moon
Speaker 2: and bring it back yeah, same, you.
Speaker 1: Well, that's what I was talking about before. When we
Speaker 1: have some sort of solar power, solar powered factory on
Speaker 1: the Moon that produces fuel somehow.
Speaker 2: It's one of the possibilities, and then we just need
Speaker 2: to build a refueling depots. The other problem is when
Speaker 2: you're trying to transfer fuel, which again we've never done. Yeah,
Speaker 2: is that in free fall the liquid's not sitting by
Speaker 2: the drain port. Yeah, right, you have to accelerate the vehicle.
Speaker 1: That's to be pumped.
Speaker 2: Well you can't. That can't even be pumped. It has
Speaker 2: to actually be settled. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't know enough about that kind of fuel.
Speaker 2: If the liquid's floating around in the tank, how is
Speaker 2: the pump even going to pull on it, right, you're right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: So your solution then is to accelerate the tank. Just
Speaker 2: give it a little thrust, right, Okay, you'll always see
Speaker 2: when a rocket does a relight on an engine, little
Speaker 2: vern air thrushs will kick in first, and it's to get
Speaker 2: all the fuel to settle to the bottom of the tank, right,
Speaker 2: so they can start the engine. The problem is it
Speaker 2: changes arbit when you do that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Fortunately, space is a big place and you have some
Speaker 1: room to wiggle around.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you can wiggle around, but also you got
Speaker 2: to find things right, that's true.
Speaker 1: Now, where did I put that?
Speaker 2: So one of the proposals is here somewhere. So one
Speaker 2: of the proposals would be to build a rotating fuel depot.
Speaker 2: So you dock to a ring and then you spin
Speaker 2: it up enough to settle the fuel. Then you pump
Speaker 2: it and then you spin it down and you can
Speaker 2: undock again.
Speaker 1: Physics, it's not just a good idea, it's the law.
Speaker 2: Kind of the law, all right. So that's the Europa
Speaker 2: Clipper mission. Another mission, another mission that launched this year
Speaker 2: was the Hera mission. This is the follow on to
Speaker 2: the Dart mission, which was the asteroid redirect mission, so
Speaker 2: Hara another Greek another, although it's an acronym. Okay, So
Speaker 2: if you remember back in twenty two, I was actually
Speaker 2: twenty one when it launched, but twenty two when they
Speaker 2: actually impact. There was this binary asteroid system, Dimorphose and
Speaker 2: Dittymouse or diddy Moon, where the DART mission hit the
Speaker 2: smaller moon that was in orbit of the bigger moon
Speaker 2: or the bigger asteroid. The orbital period before they started
Speaker 2: was eleven point nine hours and their goal was to
Speaker 2: try and change it by a minute. They were hoping
Speaker 2: for seventy three seconds, and the actual result was thirty
Speaker 2: two minutes. So they really moved thematic change. They moved
Speaker 2: it far more than expected.
Speaker 1: Well that's good news because you know, if we find
Speaker 1: a satellite.
Speaker 2: It open some possibility. But we're still trying to find
Speaker 2: out why. So there's been a lot of observery. One
Speaker 2: of the reasons they'd picked Dimorphos is that it passes
Speaker 2: close enough to the Earth that the telescope is going
Speaker 2: to look at it. Yeah, so they've been collecting as
Speaker 2: much information as they can and there's a huge tale
Speaker 2: of debris. One of the things we've come to realize
Speaker 2: is that Ditimos was a rubble pile. It was not
Speaker 2: a solid asteroid. It was a conglomerate of little pieces,
Speaker 2: and so when they hit it, those little pieces sprayed
Speaker 2: out for tens of thousands of kilometers.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And so Hara is the emission that should get there
Speaker 2: in twenty six to go take a look at it.
Speaker 2: And by the way, the Hara mission is a typical
Speaker 2: outer outer planet's spacecraft. It's about one metric ton like
Speaker 2: Europea clippers, almost six metric tons like this is that's
Speaker 2: really really big. Yeah, this is the normal size. So
Speaker 2: it's got a couple of cubes, thatt and so forth.
Speaker 2: But it's going to go back there and get additional information, image,
Speaker 2: more detail the state after the impact, and we're going
Speaker 2: to learn more about protecting our planet from asteroid impacts. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, if there's anything that should unite the countries
Speaker 1: of the world, it's that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know that thing that way, you know, why
Speaker 2: did the dinosaurs die out? Didn't have a space program?
Speaker 2: That's right, you know, this makes the difference. Don't be
Speaker 2: like the dinosaurs. The Parker Solar Probe is going to
Speaker 2: make its closest pass on the Sun in on the
Speaker 2: on Christmas Eve this year what solar probe the Parker
Speaker 2: Solar pro So this is okay that this is a
Speaker 2: exploratory vehicle for getting close to the Sun. It's the
Speaker 2: it's the closest approach to the Sun we've ever done.
Speaker 2: It's also the fastest moving spacecraft because you really have
Speaker 2: to change your doubt ear vector to get closer to
Speaker 2: the Sun.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you got it. It's like it's like putting your
Speaker 1: hand in a pizza oven.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's moving.
Speaker 1: Only have so long.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's uh, we'll we'll see what we learn.
Speaker 2: We're learning more about the Sun all the time. We
Speaker 2: had an interesting sun yere, right, I remember we Oh, yes,
Speaker 2: so we were at the solar maximum. And so we've
Speaker 2: had a couple of big coronal mash to charges and
Speaker 2: so people have seen aurora that never thought they'd ever
Speaker 2: see aurora.
Speaker 1: I could not believe that I went to bed early
Speaker 1: on the night that there were there was the aurora
Speaker 1: in New London, Connecticut. Like I literally could have gotten
Speaker 1: my car driven five minutes and seen it.
Speaker 2: And we saw it here. We laid on the deck
Speaker 2: looking straight up. It was over us. So jealous, but
Speaker 2: apparently we're not done, like, oh no, there's going to
Speaker 2: be more. Our events though, will be more, Yeah, without
Speaker 2: a doubt. By the way, that shortened the lifespan of
Speaker 2: a whole lot of starlink satellites.
Speaker 1: Oh interesting.
Speaker 2: So when CME show and these choral mass ejectionally show up,
Speaker 2: they energize the atmosphere, and the atmosphere expands, and so
Speaker 2: it increases the drag for low orthopities. It's also why
Speaker 2: we lost Skylab when we did. Remember the original Skylab
Speaker 2: was the original US space station, built out of an
Speaker 2: upper stage of a Saturn five back in the seventies.
Speaker 1: Seventy seven, seventy six, seventy.
Speaker 2: Seven, something like that. Yeah, And the intent had been
Speaker 2: to get back there with the Space Shuttle to save it,
Speaker 2: but it re entered in seventy nine, and the Shuttle
Speaker 2: didn't go up till eighty one.
Speaker 1: I remember.
Speaker 2: One of the reasons was there was a solar maximum
Speaker 2: that expanded the atmosphere and increased the drag on skylabs.
Speaker 3: They lost them.
Speaker 1: So we had a blizzard here in Connecticut in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy eight, the Blizzard of seventy eight. It was a
Speaker 1: big one, and I remember we had no school. There
Speaker 1: was literally five feet of snow.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: And so my brother and our friends got together and
Speaker 1: we built what we called Skylab, which was just this snow.
Speaker 1: I don't know what to compare it to. It had
Speaker 1: tunnels and they had places where snowballs could go down in.
Speaker 1: It had compartments. I just remember this as a kid,
Speaker 1: and it's great. When you said Skylab, it took me
Speaker 1: right back to being a kid because that was in
Speaker 1: the news.
Speaker 2: And that was that was in the news then because
Speaker 2: they were going to lose it. I think there was
Speaker 2: nothing they could do about it. I was a huge
Speaker 2: space station. If you go to Houston, there's a model
Speaker 2: of it that you can walk around in full scale.
Speaker 2: The test unit. Wow. One more mission to mention, and
Speaker 2: that is ingenuity. This was the little helicopter on Mars. Okay,
Speaker 2: so back at twenty one when the Perseverance land or
Speaker 2: landed me on Mars, the last thing we've sent up
Speaker 2: to Mars, and it had an experimental little guy. It's
Speaker 2: like four pounds and little rover experiment. Can we make
Speaker 2: something fly on Mars? The roaders have to move really fast,
Speaker 2: is because the atmosphere pressure is extremely low. It was
Speaker 2: only supposed to fly four test missions, but it worked
Speaker 2: perfectly solar powered, so they just landed to recharge and
Speaker 2: fly it again, and it basically could scout ahead of
Speaker 2: the rover. It lasted three years. It flew seventy two missions.
Speaker 1: Well, the rover lasted a lot longer. Whatever the opportunity,
Speaker 1: a lot longer than they thought, a lot long enough.
Speaker 1: And Perseverance will last many more years. It's radio thermal
Speaker 1: is powered like it'll be great, brilliant. But in January
Speaker 1: this year we lost Ingenuity to an accident caused by
Speaker 1: confusion in its flight computer. They were flying ahead of
Speaker 1: Perseverance over some really simple terrain and it uses an
Speaker 1: optical reader to figure out its orientation, and the train
Speaker 1: was so featureless it got confused as to where it was,
Speaker 1: and so it tried to land and it landed moving
Speaker 1: too quickly, and the rotors hit the ground, and some
Speaker 1: jobscript programmer didn't do the right lamb to expression, and.
Speaker 2: They fixed a bunch of problems in Ingenuity. Along the way,
Speaker 2: they learned more about flying on Mars. Though.
Speaker 1: Yeah, hey, by the way, I'm not disparaging JavaScript. It's
Speaker 1: just an easy target. It's the language you love to
Speaker 1: hate because we all have to use it.
Speaker 2: All right, never mind, it's not you know that. Now
Speaker 2: there's going to be more flyers on Mars withoutout a doubt.
Speaker 2: There's a mission being developed called dragon Fly, which is
Speaker 2: actually a flyer for Titan the Moon. Because the atmospheric
Speaker 2: pressure on Titan is really high and the gravity is
Speaker 2: really low, you could flap your arms with you know,
Speaker 2: plastic wings on and fly there. I mean you freeze
Speaker 2: to death because it's negative two hundred degrees there, but
Speaker 2: you could fly yourself on Titan.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: They yeah, they're going to make a flyer for Titan
Speaker 2: called Dragonfly. It's apparently going to fly in twenty twenty
Speaker 2: eight on a Falulcon heavy. Wow. That's pretty good. All right.
Speaker 2: So last last thing, Yeah, James Webb Space the same
Speaker 2: we wrapped up last time with James Web.
Speaker 1: Now, those who don't recall the history of dot Net
Speaker 1: rocks with the James web telescope, we actually went there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was launched. We met with the crew, and we
Speaker 1: met with some of the people at NASA there that
Speaker 1: and we got to see it, you know, in the
Speaker 1: clean room in person.
Speaker 2: They would have let us in the clean room, which
Speaker 2: is no fun.
Speaker 1: But no, but we got just you know, there's a
Speaker 1: room with great big windows where you can look down
Speaker 1: in the clean room and everybody's.
Speaker 2: We saw James Webb in person.
Speaker 3: It's true.
Speaker 1: And that is where Richard ingratiated himself to the people
Speaker 1: at NASA that called him back to talk to their
Speaker 1: various organizations, because Richard knew a lot about what all
Speaker 1: these different sections of NASA was doing, and they all
Speaker 1: didn't really talk to each other all that much. Right,
Speaker 1: They like the way I tell stories, So, oh, come on,
Speaker 1: you are being so modest, my friend.
Speaker 2: It was good. It was really a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: It was really great fun.
Speaker 2: So let's catch up on James web Flew Christmas Time
Speaker 2: twenty twenty one. So it's been up there a few years.
Speaker 2: In fact, they are currently taking their fourth cycle proposals, right,
Speaker 2: so if you want to use James Web you basically
Speaker 2: after there's every so often they make a propos they
Speaker 2: may open up a window for proposals. That proposals window
Speaker 2: just closed. There was a lot of proposals. A total
Speaker 2: of seventy eight thousand hours of officeration time has been
Speaker 2: requested for twenty twenty five. Considering there's only eight thousand,
Speaker 2: seven hundred and sixty hours in a year and they've
Speaker 2: asked for seventy eight thousand. That's a problem.
Speaker 1: That's a little bit of a problem, a math problem, actually.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's this is how popular this this spacecraft is, right,
Speaker 2: I mean, it's teaching us amazing things. They're also taking
Speaker 2: requests for a Hubble, but now they're starting to limit
Speaker 2: the mission the uses of Hubble based on budget that
Speaker 2: they can't afford to have as big a cro on
Speaker 2: Hobble as it's getting so old. There's not enough money
Speaker 2: to fully utilize Hubble even with its problems.
Speaker 1: So Richard, I know that you probably subscribe to JWT
Speaker 1: images that come down. What is the most fascinating picture
Speaker 1: you've seen?
Speaker 2: Well, there's so many things to talk about in that space,
Speaker 2: like it has it made better images, but if you
Speaker 2: had to pick one, I don't know, like the better
Speaker 2: images of the of the horsehead Nebulam, Yeah, that have
Speaker 2: so much depth they're unbelievable. But to me it's actually
Speaker 2: the science that it's doing. Yeah. You know, we talked
Speaker 2: about the crisis in cosmology last time, which is that
Speaker 2: we have two different strategies for measuring the age of
Speaker 2: the universe, and they're not the same and initiation, and
Speaker 2: we thought James Web would bring this together, and then
Speaker 2: for a while that it looked like it pulled it apart.
Speaker 2: There's an image that shows an ancient, ancient galaxy like
Speaker 2: in the first few hundred million years of the existence
Speaker 2: of the universe. But because James Web was so sensitive,
Speaker 2: they're actually able to get some of a spectrographic analysis
Speaker 2: of it. And the galaxy is too big and too
Speaker 2: developed for the model of our understanding of the universe. So,
Speaker 2: you know, we thought that the universe would it came
Speaker 2: into existence a particular way that as it expanded in
Speaker 2: the inner and the temperature started to decrease, it started
Speaker 2: forming up into galaxies, but those initial galaxies would be
Speaker 2: short lived, very large hot stars. But the pictures don't
Speaker 2: line up with this.
Speaker 1: So it's really challenging our assumptions of how the universe
Speaker 1: started and how it's we've actually reached, and how it's aged.
Speaker 1: And we recently discovered that it's accelerating faster than we thought, right.
Speaker 2: That it's at well a weird why is it accelerating
Speaker 2: at all, and b why is it increasing the acceleration? Right,
Speaker 2: there's a theory that's been bouncing around that's starting to
Speaker 2: get a little bit more attraction now. And it's even weirder,
Speaker 2: is it?
Speaker 1: The dark matter theory?
Speaker 2: So the dark matter theory exists because of general relativity.
Speaker 2: We've pretty much proved that general relativity is correct, right,
Speaker 2: that it explains how gravitation works, except that there's not
Speaker 2: enough measureable matter for general relativity to make sense. The
Speaker 2: galaxy should fly apart. You can't see enough matter to
Speaker 2: make it make sense, and so dark matter was created
Speaker 2: as the offset. Now it's not a little correction, it's
Speaker 2: not like a couple percentage, it's like sixty percent. Yeah,
Speaker 2: more than all that know matter? Right, And so one
Speaker 2: of the theories that's been flying around is this idea
Speaker 2: that black holes gain mass as.
Speaker 1: They age, and that the oh that makes sense because
Speaker 1: they're eating things, aren't they Well.
Speaker 2: Generally speaking, they're not. Everything gets stuck in the accretion disk.
Speaker 2: As the material starts to accelerate towards the speed of light,
Speaker 2: it can never actually get there, so it gets hung
Speaker 2: up in the accretion dish.
Speaker 1: It doesn't the mass of a black hole increase because
Speaker 1: it's I mean, something that is consuming more stuff and
Speaker 1: packing it into denser and denser spaces would tend to
Speaker 1: increase in mess.
Speaker 2: It doesn't actually consume anything. They're all trapped in the
Speaker 2: accretion disk.
Speaker 1: I don't understand, but I guess I'm going to take
Speaker 1: your word for it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's complicated, and it's losing Hawking show that there's
Speaker 2: hawking radiation, which is missions from the black hole. So
Speaker 2: it should be losing mass. But they're thinking that as
Speaker 2: you get to the older and older parts of the universe,
Speaker 2: you're looking further and further away ten eleven, twelve billion
Speaker 2: light years away. Those are some of the oldest bits
Speaker 2: of matter in the universe, and so they've gained more
Speaker 2: mass than anything else would. It's one way to address
Speaker 2: the acceleration problem, but it might also address the mass problem.
Speaker 2: See one of the issues you hear with the age
Speaker 2: of the universe.
Speaker 1: It's almost it's almost reverse of what we understand.
Speaker 2: Yes, you would think as things got older they would lose,
Speaker 2: but they don't seem to be. So that schis them
Speaker 2: that crisis in cosmology because we use two different strategies right.
Speaker 2: One is that we use local stars that we can
Speaker 2: measure precisely, because that's what our telescopes can do to
Speaker 2: calculate the age of the universe. And the other is
Speaker 2: that we use these much older structures. And so the
Speaker 2: argument now is that as the older structures are different
Speaker 2: than what we think, that they've been aging in a
Speaker 2: weird way, and so that an error creeps into general
Speaker 2: relativity as we get into the older parts of the universe. Okay,
Speaker 2: so it's helping us to change our understanding of gravitation.
Speaker 3: With these observations from James Webb.
Speaker 2: There were predictions from this, but they, you know, without
Speaker 2: any evidence, it was hard to deal with. Going back
Speaker 2: to the eighties, there were proposals for these kinds of things,
Speaker 2: but back in the eighties you only had things like Hubble,
Speaker 2: and Hubble couldn't see far enough back. Right, So we
Speaker 2: finally have an instruance seeing far enough back that we
Speaker 2: might be confirming some of these ideas.
Speaker 1: You said, eleven twelve billion years, But how old do
Speaker 1: they anticipate or how old do they believe? That the
Speaker 1: Big Bang.
Speaker 2: Is thirteen point eight all right, so it's it is
Speaker 2: jwt able to see back that far, or is twelve
Speaker 2: billion about the well closest that can get. No, we
Speaker 2: get we get closer because there's a point at which
Speaker 2: the universe existed for a while before we could actually
Speaker 2: form anything like. These numbers get complicated and you know
Speaker 2: we're in the error probability error zone here too. But yeah,
Speaker 2: we're starting to see you back that far.
Speaker 1: It's really just amazing. I mean, it's a time machine,
Speaker 1: the JWT really.
Speaker 2: That's that's its job. So there's yeah, there's an argument.
Speaker 2: The jades GS, which is the oldest galaxy we've seen,
Speaker 2: was formed two hundred and ninety million years after the
Speaker 2: Big Bang. So thirteen point four thirteen point five billion, wow,
Speaker 2: so that is way way back there. Like we have
Speaker 2: an instrument now, we have a set of eyes that
Speaker 2: is impossibly old.
Speaker 1: Here's another thing, because the universe is expanding, is it
Speaker 1: possible and we see something that old that it is
Speaker 1: closer now? And then could you focus the telescope on
Speaker 1: where you expect it to be now or after a
Speaker 1: certain amount of period and be able to track it
Speaker 1: through time.
Speaker 2: Well, you're always looking back in time when you're looking
Speaker 2: back to these things anyway.
Speaker 1: Right, But the amount of time you look back depends
Speaker 1: on how far you're looking.
Speaker 2: But you're missing a key part to this, which is
Speaker 2: that with the acceleration of the universe, it means there
Speaker 2: is light that will never reach us. So we can't
Speaker 2: see to the edge of universe because there's no edge.
Speaker 1: Okay, but let's see the one that you the galaxy
Speaker 1: that you just mentioned. Because we're looking that far back, right,
Speaker 1: is it possible to focus the telescope on another part
Speaker 1: of space where we think that galaxy may have traveled too,
Speaker 1: because it's expanding, and actually see the same galaxy, but
Speaker 1: because it's in a different time, it'll be different.
Speaker 2: Well, we can't. We only see it in one place.
Speaker 2: What will happen as time goes by is eventually we
Speaker 2: won't see it at all as it gets past the
Speaker 2: visual horizon for us.
Speaker 1: But what about things that are coming towards us?
Speaker 2: Nothing is everything's move expanding away from us. The universe
Speaker 2: is getting.
Speaker 1: Bigger, Everything is expanding away from everything else.
Speaker 2: That's correct, Yeah, right, Other than in the local system,
Speaker 2: nothing is getting closer.
Speaker 1: I'm going to pour another glass of wine.
Speaker 2: You're probably the right thing to do. Yeah. Yeah. When
Speaker 2: it comes to the vast majority of the universe. From
Speaker 2: any point in the universe looking out at the universe,
Speaker 2: it is expanding away from it.
Speaker 1: I just think of galaxies and as spirals, right, yes,
Speaker 1: and those spirals are moving within themselves, and then the
Speaker 1: entire spiral is moving away. However, and Rameda and the
Speaker 1: Milky Way are moving toward each other, well, that's and
Speaker 1: will collide. So that blows that theory that everything is
Speaker 1: moving away from each other.
Speaker 2: Well, only in the local system. Right as soon as
Speaker 2: you get a little bit further away that as soon
Speaker 2: as you get to the point where things are accelerating,
Speaker 2: they're all moving away.
Speaker 1: It's fascinating.
Speaker 2: And they're getting you know, there's an argument that they're
Speaker 2: getting faster than the speed of light that eventually the
Speaker 2: light never reaches you, these things will start to wink out.
Speaker 1: The calculations just are mind boggling. I just didn't I
Speaker 1: didn't pay enough attention in class in college for that.
Speaker 2: Well, and a lot of this is new science. It
Speaker 2: wasn't in class. You know, when we were in class,
Speaker 2: there were nine planets. Yeah, wow, there's more, but I'm
Speaker 2: not going to do it. We've been doing almost more
Speaker 2: than an hour and a half.
Speaker 1: Okay, but you know, we should pick this up somewhere
Speaker 1: on the twitters and on the Mastadons and on the
Speaker 1: Blue Skies and maybe even on the facebooks. So I'm
Speaker 1: sure people have questions, Richard, and I'm hoping that they
Speaker 1: will last them well.
Speaker 2: And if you write those comments, you write those comments,
Speaker 2: I do answer them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, very good, Thank you, Richard.
Speaker 2: There you go, dude. Talk to you next week for
Speaker 2: energy Energy.
Speaker 1: It's going to be good, all right, free, It's time
Speaker 1: for a nice whiskey for sure, and job love. Then,
Speaker 1: thank you, all right, We'll see you next time on
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