Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomi podcast. Each episode offers a
Speaker 1: gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
Speaker 1: unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
Speaker 1: of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
Speaker 1: slumber under the night sky.
Speaker 2: So, if you want to put human beings on Mars,
Speaker 2: your absolute biggest enemy isn't the radiation, right, and it
Speaker 2: isn't the freezing temperatures either. It is weight. I mean
Speaker 2: launching just the rocket fuel needed for a return trip
Speaker 2: back to Earth. Well, that would require a launch vehicle
Speaker 2: so impossibly massive that it basically bankruptcy entire mission before
Speaker 2: it even leaves the launch pad.
Speaker 3: Oh absolutely, it's just a non start financially and physically exact.
Speaker 2: So space agencies have had to come up with a
Speaker 2: radically different plan, which is, do not bring the return
Speaker 2: fuel at all, make it there. But to make fuel
Speaker 2: on Mars, you need to find massive, accessible deposits of
Speaker 2: subsurface water ice, and you need to find them.
Speaker 3: Fast, very fast. The clock is ticking on those twenty
Speaker 3: thirties deadlines.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which brings us to this frankly staggering announcement from
Speaker 2: the March twenty twenty six Ignition event, a mission called Skyfall.
Speaker 2: I mean, just the name sounds like a movie.
Speaker 3: It really does. It as a very cinematic ring to it.
Speaker 2: It does, and the plan is wild. They want to
Speaker 2: launch a nuclear powered spacecraft, fly it to Mars, and
Speaker 2: instead of you know, carefully lowering a rover to the ground,
Speaker 2: this ship will plunge into the Martian atmosphere and violently
Speaker 2: eject a squadron of six autonomous helicopters mid air.
Speaker 3: Just drop them right out of the sky right.
Speaker 2: They will free fall at supersonic speeds, deploy their rotors,
Speaker 2: catch themselves before hitting the dirt, and scatter across the
Speaker 2: planet to hunt for ice. I mean, it sounds totally
Speaker 2: reckless when you describe it like that.
Speaker 3: Oh, I know, dropping a multi billion dollar fleet out
Speaker 3: of the sky mid entry seems to violate well basically
Speaker 3: every safety protocol we've spent the last sixty years developing
Speaker 3: for planetary landings.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I was thinking.
Speaker 3: But when you look at the brutal mathematics of the
Speaker 3: twenty thirties human landing deadlines. The conventional methods of exploration,
Speaker 3: like slowly rolling a single car sized rover across the dunes,
Speaker 3: are statistically guaranteed to.
Speaker 2: Fail because they're just too slow.
Speaker 3: Exactly, we do not have the time to survey an
Speaker 3: entire planet on wheels. Skyfalls the forcing function here. It
Speaker 3: is a necessary, albeit incredibly aggressive architectural shift from crawling
Speaker 3: to swarming.
Speaker 2: Wow. Okay, I am still trying to wrap my head
Speaker 2: around the visual of mid air deployment at mock speeds.
Speaker 2: But before we get into the aerodynamics of a falling swarm,
Speaker 2: I want to trace how we got here.
Speaker 3: Sure, because this didn't happen in a vacuum.
Speaker 2: Right, NASA didn't just wake up in twenty twenty six
Speaker 2: and decide to build nuclear paratrooper drones. This entire mission
Speaker 2: architecture rests on the shoulders of what I used to
Speaker 2: think of as a neat little science project, the Ingenuity
Speaker 2: Mars helicopter.
Speaker 3: Oh. Calling Ingenuity a science project severely understates the aerodynamic
Speaker 3: nightmare of its creation.
Speaker 2: Really a nightmare?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah. To understand why skyfall is possible, you really
Speaker 3: have to understand why Ingenuity shouldn't have been I mean,
Speaker 3: The atmosphere on Mars is mostly carbon dioxide, and it
Speaker 3: is thin.
Speaker 2: Now thin are we talking?
Speaker 3: It's ad about one percent of the density of verse
Speaker 3: atmosphere at sea level.
Speaker 2: Okay, So if I'm an engineer tasked with flying an
Speaker 2: air that thin, my immediate instinct is to just, you know,
Speaker 2: scale up, like make the rotor blades vastly longer and
Speaker 2: wider to catch more of whatever sparse air is actually there.
Speaker 2: It seems like a simple geometry problem to me.
Speaker 3: You think, so, right, that's the logical first step. But
Speaker 3: increasing the blade length runs you face first into a
Speaker 3: physical wall, which is the speed of sound.
Speaker 2: Wait, the speed of sound is different on Mars.
Speaker 3: Yes, Mars is incredibly cold, and sound travels through that
Speaker 3: thin CO two atmosphere much slower than it does on Earth.
Speaker 3: It's about two hundred and forty meters per second compared
Speaker 3: our three forty.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, I had no idea.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So if you build massive rotor blades and spin
Speaker 3: them fast enough to generate lyft, the tips of those
Speaker 3: long blades will easily exceed the Martian speed of sound,
Speaker 3: and the moment that happens, you generate destructive.
Speaker 2: Shockwaves like a sonic boom hitting the blade itself.
Speaker 3: Essentially, Yes, the air basically turns into a brick wall
Speaker 3: of drag, the blade loses its lifting capability, and the
Speaker 3: helicopter just tears itself apart.
Speaker 2: Yikes. So you literally cannot just build huge blades exactly.
Speaker 3: Instead, the team at JPL had to keep the blades
Speaker 3: relatively short, about one point two meters across, and spin
Speaker 3: them at an agonizingly precise speed. We're talking around twenty
Speaker 3: four hundred to twenty five hundred revolutions per minute.
Speaker 2: That sounds incredibly fast.
Speaker 3: It is. That is roughly five times faster than a
Speaker 3: standard passenger helicopter on Earth. So they had to engineer
Speaker 3: these blades out of carbon fiber foam cores just to
Speaker 3: be stiff enough not to bend under those extreme rotational.
Speaker 2: Forces while keeping the weight down.
Speaker 3: I s right, giving the entire vehicle under two kilograms.
Speaker 2: Man, that makes the reality of what Ingenuity accomplished terrifying
Speaker 2: in retrospect. I mean, it was designed to fly maybe
Speaker 2: five times over thirty days. It was just a tech
Speaker 2: demo to prove powered flight was even.
Speaker 3: Possible, just a proof of concept.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Instead, it survived the freezing Martian winter, which, by
Speaker 2: the way, I completely lacked the heaters for and it
Speaker 2: flew seventy two times over three years. It absolutely smashed
Speaker 2: its targets, outperforming its flight target by more than fourteen
Speaker 2: times and its longevity target by thirty two times.
Speaker 3: It's an unprecedented engineering triumph.
Speaker 2: It is, But I still see a massive leap in
Speaker 2: logic here. I understand Ingenuity was a triumph. It's the
Speaker 2: right flyer of Mars, but it was still a tiny
Speaker 2: scout that relied entirely on the Perseverance rover acting as
Speaker 2: its communication base station.
Speaker 3: That's true, it couldn't talk to Earth directly.
Speaker 2: Right, So bounding from that localized success to betting the
Speaker 2: entire site selection process for human habitation on an unproven
Speaker 2: fleet of autonomous heavy helicopters, that seems incredibly precarious. I mean,
Speaker 2: we know how to build rovers, we have decades of
Speaker 2: experience with wheels. Why not just send six rovers?
Speaker 3: Well, because wheels are an illusion of safety. If you
Speaker 3: look at the actual operational history of our Martian rovers,
Speaker 3: they are agonizingly slow and they are highly vulnerable to
Speaker 3: the terrain.
Speaker 2: I mean, they do look pretty slow in the videos.
Speaker 3: It's worse than it looks. Because of the light time
Speaker 3: delay in communicating with Earth, which ranges from four to
Speaker 3: twenty four minutes depending on orbital alignments, you cannot drive
Speaker 3: a rover manually.
Speaker 2: So no one is sitting there with a joystick.
Speaker 3: No, definitely not. A human cannot use a joystick to
Speaker 3: steer around a rock because by the time the video
Speaker 3: feed of the rock reaches Earth, well, the rover has
Speaker 3: already crashed into it twenty minutes ago.
Speaker 2: That makes sense, it's already in the past.
Speaker 3: Right, So every single movement of a rover is plotted
Speaker 3: in advance. The rover takes photos, beams them to Earth.
Speaker 3: Engineers spend hours building a three D terrain mesh simulating
Speaker 3: a path, and then they beam up a command that
Speaker 3: says drive forward three meters and.
Speaker 2: Stop three meters. That's it.
Speaker 3: A fantastic day of driving for a rover is perhaps one.
Speaker 2: Hundred meters, and the terrain isn't exactly a paved highway either.
Speaker 2: I remember the Spirit rover breaking through a crust of
Speaker 2: soil in two thousand and nine. It just sank into
Speaker 2: a hidden sand trap and became permanently bogged down.
Speaker 3: We lost the whole vehicle right there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and curiosities aluminum wheels look like they had been
Speaker 2: chewed through by metal shears after just a few years
Speaker 2: of driving over those sharp wind carved rocks.
Speaker 3: And that is the core issue. Rovers are crawling blind
Speaker 3: through a minefield of geological hazards. If your objective is
Speaker 3: to map thousands of square kilometers of terrain to find
Speaker 3: a massive, pure subsurface ice.
Speaker 2: Sheet, right because we need the ice exactly.
Speaker 3: An ice sheet that is also situated near flat ground
Speaker 3: suitable for a human landing craft. A rover will take
Speaker 3: half a century to.
Speaker 2: Do that half a century, and we want to land
Speaker 2: humans in the twenty thirties. So the math just doesn't work.
Speaker 3: It doesn'ttors completely bypass the terrain problem. They fly over
Speaker 3: the sandtraps that killed Spirit, They soar over the jagged
Speaker 3: rocks that shredded curiosities wheels. They could drop into a
Speaker 3: massive crater, map the stratigraphy of the steep walls, and
Speaker 3: fly back out in an afternoon.
Speaker 2: So they're just on another level entirely in terms of speed.
Speaker 3: What takes a rover six months to navigate an aerial
Speaker 3: asset surveys in four hours. So NASA didn't abandon rovers
Speaker 3: because they wanted a flashier technology. They abandoned them because
Speaker 3: the mathematics of the twenty thirty's human arrival deadline dictate
Speaker 3: that aerial swarms are the only physical way to survey
Speaker 3: enough ground in time.
Speaker 2: Okay, that reframes the entire timeline for me. It is
Speaker 2: an issue of scale and speed. But scaling up brings
Speaker 2: us to a brutal logistical bottleneck. If we are moving
Speaker 2: from a single two kilogram drone to a fleet of
Speaker 2: six advanced heavy payload helicopters, the mass we need to
Speaker 2: send to Mars increases exponentially drastically, and we need them
Speaker 2: there incredibly fast to do the prospecting before astronauts start
Speaker 2: prepping for launch. So traditional chemical rockets, you know, burning
Speaker 2: liquid fuel and oxidizer, they have hard limits.
Speaker 3: Very hard limits when it comes to mass. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I'm looking at the architecture for the Skyfall carrier spacecraft
Speaker 2: and NASA isn't using chemical propulsion for the main transit.
Speaker 2: They're using the sr IE Freedom, a spacecraft powered by
Speaker 2: a twenty kilowatt nuclear electric propulsion system.
Speaker 3: Yes, this is where Skyfall graduates from a clever robotic
Speaker 3: mission to a foundational shift in interplanetary infrastructure. The sr
Speaker 3: IE freedom represents the death of the traditional rocket equation
Speaker 3: for deep space transit.
Speaker 2: The rocket equation break that down for me.
Speaker 3: So for decades, every probe we are sent to Mars
Speaker 3: has relied on the same fundamental mechanism. You burn a
Speaker 3: massive amount of chemical propellant for a few minutes to
Speaker 3: break Earth's orbit, and then you just coast through the
Speaker 3: vacuum of space for seven to nine months until you
Speaker 3: hit Mars.
Speaker 2: It's like pedaling a bicycle as hard as humanly possible
Speaker 2: for the first ten seconds of a race, getting up
Speaker 2: to your maximum speed, and then entirely taking your feet
Speaker 2: off the pedals and just coasting for the next six months.
Speaker 3: That's a perfect way to think about it.
Speaker 2: Hoping you calculated the trajectory perfectly to cross the finish line,
Speaker 2: all the energy is basically dumped at the very beginning.
Speaker 3: That is a highly accurate way to visualize it. And
Speaker 3: the problem with chemical propulsion is that fuel is incredibly heavy.
Speaker 3: Right if you want to push a heavier payload like
Speaker 3: six advanced helicopters, you need more fuel to push it,
Speaker 3: But now your rocket is heavier because of that extra fuel,
Speaker 3: which means you need to add more fuel to push
Speaker 3: the fuel you just added. It's a trap, it is.
Speaker 3: This exponential punishment is known as the Sidulkovsky rocket equation.
Speaker 3: It is a vicious cycle of diminishing returns that makes
Speaker 3: chemical rockets horribly inefficient for massive payloads.
Speaker 2: So how does nuclear electric propulsion or any p bypass this?
Speaker 3: It breaks that cycle entirely. The sr IE freedom uses
Speaker 3: a small nuclear fission reactor. The reactor itself does not
Speaker 3: generate thrust. Instead, the controlled splitting of uranium atoms generates
Speaker 3: a massive amount of heat, which is converted into a
Speaker 3: constant twenty kilowot supply of electrical power.
Speaker 2: Okay, so it's a flying power plant exactly.
Speaker 3: And that electricity is fed into an ion thruster. The
Speaker 3: thruster takes an inert gas, usually xenon, and uses the
Speaker 3: electricity to bombard the xenon atoms, stripping away electrons to
Speaker 3: create positively charged ions I say. Then using an intense
Speaker 3: magnetic field, the thruster accelerates those ions out the back
Speaker 3: of the spacecraft at velocities approaching ninety thousand miles per hour.
Speaker 2: Ninety thousand miles per oh wow, so instead of a
Speaker 2: violent explosion of chemical fire, and ion drive is essentially
Speaker 2: shooting an invisible beam of charged particles out the back.
Speaker 3: That's exactly what it's doing.
Speaker 2: But I know that the actual physical force of that
Speaker 2: thrust is incredibly weak. I've read it compared to the
Speaker 2: weight of a piece of paper resting on your hand.
Speaker 2: How does a force that week move a massive spacecraft
Speaker 2: carrying six heavy helicopters all the way to Mars?
Speaker 3: The secret is time and efficiency. You are correct that
Speaker 3: the instantaneous thrust is minuscule, But going back to your
Speaker 3: bicycle analogy, and ion drive is like having a small
Speaker 3: electric motor that never ever stops pushing.
Speaker 2: So it's constant acceleration.
Speaker 3: Yes, Because the xenon ions are expelled at such extreme velocities,
Speaker 3: the engine is vastly more fuel efficient than a chemical rocket.
Speaker 3: In aerospace terminology, it has an incredibly high specific impulse.
Speaker 2: Specific impulse got it.
Speaker 3: In the vacuum of space, there is no friction, so
Speaker 3: that tiny continuous push from the ion engine accumulates day
Speaker 3: after day, week after week. The spacecraft slowly but relentlessly accelerates,
Speaker 3: eventually achieving transit speeds that completely dwarf what a coast
Speaker 3: in chemical rocket can manage.
Speaker 2: Okay, if the physics of specific impulse make any P
Speaker 2: vastly superior for heavy payloads, I have to ask the
Speaker 2: obvious question. We have known about nuclear fission since the
Speaker 2: nineteen thirties. We have known about ion propulsion for decades.
Speaker 2: Why is this just now flying on the sr IE Freedom.
Speaker 2: Why didn't we build this in the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 3: Well, it comes down to the intersection of political risk
Speaker 3: and technological necessity. Politics always decades. ANYP was relegated to
Speaker 3: theoretical paper studies. Why because chemical rockets were good enough
Speaker 3: to send tiny, lightweight robotic probes to.
Speaker 2: Mars, And no one wants to launch a reactor if
Speaker 2: they don't have to.
Speaker 3: Precisely when a chemical rocket is good enough, No space
Speaker 3: agency wants to tackle the regulatory nightmare of launching a
Speaker 3: live nuclear reactor into Earth orbit. The safety reviews are monumental.
Speaker 2: But something changed.
Speaker 3: The payload changed. As NASA administrator Jared Isaagman recently outlined,
Speaker 3: we have hit the physical limits of good enough. You
Speaker 3: simply cannot lay the infrastructure for a multiplanetary economy using
Speaker 3: chemical rockets.
Speaker 2: Because you can't lift the habitats and.
Speaker 3: The fleets exactly. The mass penalties are simply too high
Speaker 3: to move human rated landers, habitats, and heavy reconnaissance fleets
Speaker 3: like Skyfall. Skyfall is the forcing function. The national space
Speaker 3: policy objectives have finally demanded a payload mass that chemical
Speaker 3: rockets cannot efficiently deliver. The need for the fleet necessitated
Speaker 3: the reactor.
Speaker 2: Okay, so the zer one freedom solves the transit bottleneck.
Speaker 2: We break the tyranny of the rocket equation using fission
Speaker 2: and magnetic fields, and we arrive at Mars with our
Speaker 2: heavy payload. But this is where my anxiety about this
Speaker 2: mission architecture spikes.
Speaker 3: I think, I know where you're going with this.
Speaker 2: The transit is solved, sure, but the landing method, the
Speaker 2: Skyfall maneuver, seems fundamentally unhinged. I mean, let's contrast this
Speaker 2: with how we landed Perseverance, the skycrane right. The skycrane right.
Speaker 2: That was a system where the spacecraft entered the atmosphere,
Speaker 2: a massive supersonic parachute deployed to slow it down, then
Speaker 2: the heat shield dropped off. Then the rover essentially dropped
Speaker 2: out of the backshell attached to.
Speaker 3: A jetpack it is brilliant engineering.
Speaker 2: It was. The jetpack fired its thrusters to halt their descent,
Speaker 2: and while hovering in mid air, it gently lowered the
Speaker 2: rover down to the dirt on nylon cords. Yes, once
Speaker 2: the wheels touched down, the cords were severed and the
Speaker 2: jetpack flew away to crash at a safe distance. It
Speaker 2: was an incredibly complex, delicate ballet on a tightrope, like
Speaker 2: lowering a car on a It really was a marvel
Speaker 2: but skyfall abandons all of that. You have the aeroshell
Speaker 2: hitting the atmosphere, taking the thermal load of thousands of
Speaker 2: degrees of plasma, and then miles above the surface, traveling
Speaker 2: at mock speeds, the shell just pops open and ejects
Speaker 2: six helicopters into free fall, like paratroopers jumping out of
Speaker 2: a C one thirty. It is a very dramatic shift
Speaker 2: if you are dropping these things from a skyscraper equivalent
Speaker 2: altitude at supersonic speeds into unpredictable Martian winds without a
Speaker 2: parachute stabilizing them all the way to the ground. I mean,
Speaker 2: how is that not a recipe for total catastrophic failure.
Speaker 2: If the atmosphere is so thin. How do they even
Speaker 2: catch themselves before hitting the ground? What if half of
Speaker 2: them crash on day one?
Speaker 3: You are looking at the Skyfall maneuver through the lens
Speaker 3: of traditional risk management, which prioritizes the preservation of a single,
Speaker 3: highly controlled asset.
Speaker 2: I guess I am. I don't want the billion dollar
Speaker 2: drone to crash.
Speaker 3: Understandable, But let's analyze the skycrane you just described. It
Speaker 3: is a brilliant piece of veneering, but it is the
Speaker 3: ultimate single point of failure architecture.
Speaker 2: Meaning if one thing breaks, it's over.
Speaker 3: Exactly. If the supersonic parachute tears upon deployment, the mission
Speaker 3: is over. If the radar altimeter on the jet pack
Speaker 3: glitches and miscalculates the distance to the ground, the mission
Speaker 3: is over. If one explosive bolt fails to sever the
Speaker 3: nylon cord, the mission is over.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, Yeah, that's a lot of things that have
Speaker 2: to go perfectly right.
Speaker 3: Every single step must execute flawlessly or you are left
Speaker 3: with a multi billion dollar crater. The midair deployment of
Speaker 3: Skyfall introduces a fundamentally different risk model, statistical survivability through
Speaker 3: distributed architecture.
Speaker 2: So you're saying they expect some of them to crash.
Speaker 3: They are mathematically prepared for it. Let's walk through the
Speaker 3: physics of the drop. The SR one carrier vehicle hits
Speaker 3: the atmosphere, the heat shield absorbs the kinetic energy, turning
Speaker 3: it into plasma and slows the vehicle down significantly, though
Speaker 3: it is still traveling very fast at a calculated altitude.
Speaker 3: The aeroshell opens. The six helicopters are deployed. Now they
Speaker 3: are not entirely at the mercy of the wind immediately.
Speaker 3: Their chassis are aerodynamically designed to passively orient themselves as
Speaker 3: they fall, ensuring their center of mass points downward.
Speaker 2: Like a shuttlecock.
Speaker 3: Exactly like a shuttlecock. As they enter free fall, the
Speaker 3: onboard flight computers boot up in milliseconds, and they do
Speaker 3: not just blindly turn on their engines. They initiate a
Speaker 3: state of auto rotation.
Speaker 2: Auto rotation is that.
Speaker 3: The upward rush of air through the unpowered blades causes
Speaker 3: them to spin, which stabilizes the craft aerodynamically. Once stable
Speaker 3: and oriented, the motors engage, applying massive torque to the
Speaker 3: blaze to violently arrest their vertical velocity.
Speaker 2: That sounds like dropping a drone from a skyscraper, expecting
Speaker 2: it to power on, orient its cameras and hit the
Speaker 2: brakes ten feet before the pavement, but doing it in
Speaker 2: a near vacuum.
Speaker 3: It is intensely violent. There will be massive aerodynamic loads
Speaker 3: on the rotors. But consider the math of the distributed swarm.
Speaker 3: If you send one rover on a sky crane and
Speaker 3: a sensor veils, your mission is a one hundred percent failure.
Speaker 3: You have zero assets.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you've lost everything.
Speaker 3: But if you eject six helicopters mid air and the
Speaker 3: crosswinds are worse than modeled, or a deployment mechanism jams
Speaker 3: and two of those helicopters crash into the Martian.
Speaker 2: Surface, you still have four left.
Speaker 3: Exactly, you still have a sixty six percent mission survival rate.
Speaker 3: You have four fully operational advanced aerial assets spreading out
Speaker 3: across parallel geographic zones.
Speaker 2: So the goal isn't necessarily landing safely in one spot.
Speaker 2: The goal is landing widely, because if you safely lowered
Speaker 2: a platform with six helicopters on it, they would all
Speaker 2: have to launch on the exact same starting point, basically
Speaker 2: wasting fuel just to get away from each other.
Speaker 3: Exactly, the midair deployment acts as a multiplier for their
Speaker 3: operational range. You scatter them across a five hundred kilometer zone,
Speaker 3: instantly mitigating the single point of failure risk and simultaneously
Speaker 3: initiating reconnaissance in six distinct geological regions.
Speaker 2: That is wild, but it makes so much sense. Okay,
Speaker 2: let's follow the timeline forward. The drop occurs. Let's assume
Speaker 2: the statistics hold up and at least four or five
Speaker 2: of these mechanical paratroopers successfully auto rootate, fire their motors
Speaker 2: and touched down safely in the dust.
Speaker 3: Fingers crossed right.
Speaker 2: They're sitting on the Martian's surface, their hybrid solar power systems.
Speaker 2: Booed up, What exactly is the hardware capable of? Because
Speaker 2: I know JPL and IR environment didn't just build six
Speaker 2: clones of Ingenuity, definitely not. Ingenuity had a couple of
Speaker 2: commercial cameras and a smartphone processor. These Skyfall units have
Speaker 2: a very specific job find the ice so we can
Speaker 2: make the fuel. They are basically autonomous flying geologists with
Speaker 2: X ray vision.
Speaker 3: That's a great way to put it. The hardware evolution
Speaker 3: is staggering. You have to remember the Martian environment is
Speaker 3: actively hostile to moving parts. The dust is not like
Speaker 3: beach sand. It is incredibly fine, highly abrasive, and statically charged.
Speaker 2: It just sticks to everything.
Speaker 3: It glings to everything, works his way into bearings and
Speaker 3: severely degrade solar panel efficiency. So the skyfall units are
Speaker 3: heavily ruggedized, completely sealing their articulation joints. But their true
Speaker 3: power lies in their scientific payloads.
Speaker 2: Tell me about the payloads.
Speaker 3: They carry high resolution optical and thermal imaging to map
Speaker 3: surface hazards like jagged rocks or treacherous slopes that could
Speaker 3: tip over a future human habitat module. But the absolute
Speaker 3: crown jewel of the fleet is the ground penetrating radar.
Speaker 2: Let's dig into that radar, because looking at surface pictures
Speaker 2: only tells you where not to land, doesn't tell you
Speaker 2: where the resources are exactly. Mars looks bone dry on
Speaker 2: the surface because the atmospheric pressure is so low that
Speaker 2: liquid water would boil away instantly, and exposed ice supplimates
Speaker 2: directly into gas.
Speaker 3: Yes, it gives the liquid phase entirely right.
Speaker 2: We know the ice is trapped underground, but how does
Speaker 2: a flying drone actually see it.
Speaker 3: Ground penetrating radar or GPR exploits the way different materials
Speaker 3: interact with electromagnetic waves. As the helicopter flies low over
Speaker 3: the surface, the GPR payload pulses radio waves down in
Speaker 3: to the dirt. Okay, when those radio waves travel through
Speaker 3: homogeneous Martian regolith, which is just dry dirt and rock,
Speaker 3: they move at a relatively constant speed.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But when those waves hit a boundary between different materials,
Speaker 3: like a layer of rock sitting on top of a
Speaker 3: massive sheet of water.
Speaker 2: Ice, something changes.
Speaker 3: Yes, the change in the materials dielectric primitivity causes a
Speaker 3: portion of that radio energy to bounce back up to
Speaker 3: the helicopter's receiver like an echo. Precisely, by measuring the
Speaker 3: exact time it takes for the echo to return and
Speaker 3: the strength of that echo, the flight computer can build
Speaker 3: a highly precise three dimensional topological map of what exists
Speaker 3: beneath the surface.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: It can determine exactly how deep the ice is buried,
Speaker 3: how thick the vein is, and even infer its purity.
Speaker 2: And this data is the literal foundation of insitue resource
Speaker 2: utilization or ISRU. We throw that acronym around a lot,
Speaker 2: but the chemistry of it is fascinating.
Speaker 3: It really is.
Speaker 2: If these helicopters find a massive sheet of subsurface ice.
Speaker 2: The twenty thirties human mission will land a robotic chemical
Speaker 2: plant on top of it. That plant will drill down,
Speaker 2: melt the ice, and pump up liquid water.
Speaker 3: That's step one from there.
Speaker 2: It is basic chemistry. You run an electrical current through
Speaker 2: the H two a process called electrolysis, which splits the
Speaker 2: water into hydrogen gas and oxygen gas. The oxygen is
Speaker 2: compressed and stored both for astronauts to breathe and to
Speaker 2: act as the oxidizer for the rocket engine.
Speaker 3: Perfect, but we're still missing half of the rocket propellant, right.
Speaker 2: You still need fuel, and this is where the Martian
Speaker 2: atmosphere actually hips us. It is ninety five percent carbon dioxide.
Speaker 2: If you take that CO two from the air and
Speaker 2: combine it with the hydrogen you just split from the water,
Speaker 2: you can run them through a sabateer reactor at high temperatures.
Speaker 3: The sabateer react yes.
Speaker 2: And that reaction produces water, which you cycle back into
Speaker 2: the system and methane. Liquid. Methane is the exact rocket
Speaker 2: fuel that many next generation engines use.
Speaker 3: The chemistry is well understood and highly reliable. The entire isru.
Speaker 3: Concept is sound, but it all hinges on one one
Speaker 3: absolute prerequisite, which is that you must build the chemical
Speaker 3: plant directly on top of the ice.
Speaker 2: You can't just drive over to it later.
Speaker 3: No, you cannot land a heavy drilling rig, realize the
Speaker 3: ice is actually five kilometers away and just drive the
Speaker 3: rig over. The mass is too great. Skyfall's radar grid
Speaker 3: searches are the only way to gain the absolute certainty
Speaker 3: required to lock in those coordinates before we send the plant.
Speaker 2: Which brings us back to the most mind bending logistical
Speaker 2: aspect of this entire operation. With the communication delay between
Speaker 2: Earth and Mars, there is no one flying these things
Speaker 2: with a joystick.
Speaker 3: Don't want at all.
Speaker 2: We established earlier that rovers are paralyzed by the light
Speaker 2: time delay. If a Skyfall helicopter is blasting over a
Speaker 2: canyon at fifty miles an hour, scanning for ice, and
Speaker 2: a massive rock wall suddenly looms in its path, it
Speaker 2: cannot radio Earth for instructions.
Speaker 3: It would be a bug on a windshield before the
Speaker 3: signal even left Mars.
Speaker 2: Exactly by the time the video feed reaches Earth, twenty
Speaker 2: minutes have passed and the drone is already shattered against
Speaker 2: the cliff. Furthermore, we do not have a con installation
Speaker 2: of GPS satellites orbiting Mars.
Speaker 3: That's a huge factor people forget.
Speaker 2: Right on Earth, drones know their precise altitude, velocity, and
Speaker 2: location because they are constantly pinging atomic clocks on satellites.
Speaker 2: On Mars, they are flying totally blind regarding external positioning.
Speaker 2: How do six independent helicopters coordinate, avoid hazards, and relay
Speaker 2: data without constant babysitting from mission control.
Speaker 3: The solution is the deployment of advanced swarm, artificial intelligence
Speaker 3: and a technology called terrain relative navigation. It heavily utilizes
Speaker 3: SLAM algorithms simultaneous localization and mapping SLAM.
Speaker 2: Okay, how does that work?
Speaker 3: Because they have no GPS, the helicopters must rely entirely
Speaker 3: on their own internal sensors and cameras to understand their
Speaker 3: position in space. As the helicopter flies, a downward facing
Speaker 3: navigation camera takes dozens of high resolution photos per.
Speaker 2: Second, just constantly snapping pictures of the ground right, and.
Speaker 3: The onboard AI instantly analyzes these photos identifying specific visual
Speaker 3: features like the edge of a crater, a uniquely shaped boulder,
Speaker 3: or a ripple in a sand dune. By comparing how
Speaker 3: far and in what direction those specific features move from
Speaker 3: one frame to the next, the AI calculates its own
Speaker 3: exact velocity and direction of travel. This is optical navigation.
Speaker 2: Oh, that's brilliant. It's using the ground as its own tracking.
Speaker 3: Pad exactly, and at the same time, forward facing lightar
Speaker 3: and stereoscopic cameras are building a real time three D
Speaker 3: metch of the environment ahead. If the AI detects that
Speaker 3: a cliff wall intersects its projected flight path, it doesn't
Speaker 3: need to ask Earth for permission to turn.
Speaker 2: It just does it.
Speaker 3: Yes, the hazard avoidance algorithms autonomously calculate a nutrajectory, bank
Speaker 3: the rotors, and steer the craft around the obstacle, all
Speaker 3: in fractions of a second.
Speaker 2: That is incredible. They are essentially building the map of
Speaker 2: the world, and they're placed within it frame by frame
Speaker 2: as they fly. But they aren't just flying around randomly
Speaker 2: right to cover maximum ground. They have to coordinate precisely.
Speaker 3: They do not operate in a vacuum. They communicate via
Speaker 3: high freequency radio links to the various Mars orbiters passing overhead.
Speaker 3: When an orbiter is in line of sight. A helicopter
Speaker 3: blasts its accumulated radar data, visual maps, and positional coordinates
Speaker 3: up to the satellite, which relates it to Earth.
Speaker 2: Near real time data relay.
Speaker 3: Yes, but they also share broad positional data with each other.
Speaker 3: This creates a parallel exploration model. Let's say Helicopter one
Speaker 3: might be mapping the northern edge of a promising basin
Speaker 3: and it registers a high density ice deposit. Okay, Helicopter two,
Speaker 3: operating ten kilometers away, receives an update priority directive based
Speaker 3: on that find and autonomously adjusts its flight path to
Speaker 3: map the southern boundary of that same basin. This way,
Speaker 3: they work together to determine the total volume of the ice.
Speaker 2: Sheet without humans telling them to do that exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Mission control on Earth is not flying these vehicles.
Speaker 3: They are simply uploading high levels strategic objectives. They beam
Speaker 3: a command saying grid search sector four for high primitivity
Speaker 3: radar returns, and the swarm AI breaks that command down
Speaker 3: into tactical flight paths, delegates the terrain among the surviving units,
Speaker 3: and executes the search autonomously.
Speaker 2: Wow, So we have a mission architecture that breaks the
Speaker 2: rocket equation with a nuclear ion drive fundamentally changes landing
Speaker 2: risk modeling with supersonic mid air deployment and solves the
Speaker 2: communication delay with autonomous optical navigating AI swarms. On a
Speaker 2: technical level, it is a masterpiece of logic.
Speaker 3: He truly is.
Speaker 2: But and I hate to do this. Let's initiate a
Speaker 2: reality check.
Speaker 3: Okay, lay it on me.
Speaker 2: We have to look at the timeline NASA is proposing
Speaker 2: for this, and the massive risks involved and actually getting
Speaker 2: it off the launch pad. AeroVironment publicly unveiled the mature
Speaker 2: Skyfall concept in July twenty twenty five. NASA formally announced
Speaker 2: adoption in March twenty twenty six. The target launch window
Speaker 2: is December twenty twenty eight.
Speaker 3: That is a very tight turnaround, very tight, And.
Speaker 2: For context, launching to Mars is not like launching to
Speaker 2: the Moon. You cannot go whenever you want. Earth and
Speaker 2: Mars orbit the Sun at different speeds. To send us
Speaker 2: spacecraft efficiently, you have to use a home and transfer orbit,
Speaker 2: which requires Earth and Mars to align perfectly.
Speaker 3: Right, and that alignment only happens roughly every twenty six
Speaker 3: months exactly.
Speaker 2: If Skyfall misses that December twenty twenty eight launch window,
Speaker 2: the spacecraft is grounded until early twenty thirty one. If
Speaker 2: it launches in twenty thirty one, it doesn't arrive until
Speaker 2: late twenty thirty one or twenty thirty two. That completely
Speaker 2: destroys the timeline for analyzing the radar data, selecting the site,
Speaker 2: and building the ISRU plant before the first human cruis
Speaker 2: are scheduled to depart in the late twenty thirties.
Speaker 3: It creates a domino effective delays.
Speaker 2: So going from mission adoption in twenty twenty six to
Speaker 2: launching a nuclear reactor and six autonomous helicopters in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty eight is practically light speed in aerospace terms. Historically,
Speaker 2: flagship missions like the Perseverance Rover took nearly a decade
Speaker 2: to develop a twenty twenty six announcement for a twenty
Speaker 2: twenty eight launch utilizing space reactors and midair drops. That
Speaker 2: timeline is aggressively fast. Is this growing model of public
Speaker 2: private partnerships like the one with aero environment the Secret Sauce,
Speaker 2: making this even theoretically possible.
Speaker 3: Yes, the acceleration is entirely dependent on a paradigm shift
Speaker 3: and how NASA procures and integrates technology for the past
Speaker 3: fifty years, the agency relied almost exclusively on bespoke.
Speaker 2: Engineering, building everything from scratch.
Speaker 3: Right if they needed a flight computer, they designed a
Speaker 3: custom radiation hardened microchip from scratch, built in a clean room,
Speaker 3: and tested it for five years. That process ensures reliability,
Speaker 3: but it guarantees slow development and astronomical costs.
Speaker 2: Which they just don't have time for now.
Speaker 3: Exactly what the public private partnership with companies like AeroVironment
Speaker 3: proofs is the viability of commercial off the shelf or
Speaker 3: cotess components. Ingenuity was the ultimate proof of concept for this.
Speaker 3: How So, its primary processor was not a billion dollar
Speaker 3: bespoke JPL chip. It was a Qualcom Snapdragon processor, fundamentally
Speaker 3: similar to the brain of a high end consumer smartphone.
Speaker 2: Wait, really a smartphone ship flew on ours?
Speaker 3: Yes. Because AeroVironment had already spent years maturing the swarm
Speaker 3: logic and rotor mechanics using commercially adapted technologies by twenty
Speaker 3: twenty five, NASA did not have to start from zero.
Speaker 2: It makes a huge difference.
Speaker 3: It does. NASA's role shifted from inventing everything to integrating
Speaker 3: and funding. NASA provides the sr I freedom carrier vehicle
Speaker 3: handles the interplanetary trajectory and manages the deep space communication network.
Speaker 3: Air of Varment delivers the finished helicopter fleet. This division
Speaker 3: of labor is the only mathematical way they hit the
Speaker 3: twenty twenty eight window.
Speaker 2: Okay, I see how that speeds things up, But relying
Speaker 2: on commercial tech and rushing a timeline introduces terrifying risks.
Speaker 2: Let's look critically at the failure points of this mission,
Speaker 2: because any one of them could derail the twenty thirties
Speaker 2: human exploration mandate entirely.
Speaker 3: The hurdles are indeed severe, and I'd say the absolute
Speaker 3: highest hurdle is nuclear launch certification.
Speaker 2: Yeah, putting a reactor on a rocket over Florida exactly.
Speaker 3: We have launch nuclear material into space before. The Perseverance
Speaker 3: and Curiosity rovers both utilize multimission radio isotope thermoelectric generators
Speaker 3: or MMRTGs.
Speaker 2: Right, But those aren't full reactors.
Speaker 3: No, and RTG is entirely passive. It is simply a
Speaker 3: chunk of decaying plutonium two thirty eight that gets naturally hot,
Speaker 3: and thermo couples turn that heat into a tiny trickle
Speaker 3: of electricity. About one hundred and ten.
Speaker 2: Watts, barely enough to power a light bult exactly.
Speaker 3: The SR I freedom is completely different. It is an
Speaker 3: active nuclear fission reactor generating twenty thousand watts.
Speaker 2: That's a whole different ballgame.
Speaker 3: Placing an active reactor on top of a chemical rocket
Speaker 3: and launching it from the Florida coast requires navigating the
Speaker 3: most stringent, unforgiving safety reviews in the history of the
Speaker 3: federal government.
Speaker 2: I can't even imagine the paperwork.
Speaker 3: It's staggering. The engineering required to guarantee that the reactor
Speaker 3: core cannot shatter and scatter radioactive material over the ocean
Speaker 3: in the event of a launch pad explosion is immensely difficult.
Speaker 3: Proving that to the regulatory agencies by twenty twenty eight
Speaker 3: is a monumental bureaucratic and engineering challenge.
Speaker 2: And even if they get the launch certification and the
Speaker 2: SR one successfully uses its ion drive to reach Mars, well,
Speaker 2: we are back to the midair dropt ah.
Speaker 3: Yes, the draw.
Speaker 2: You explain the logic of distributed risk earlier, and it
Speaker 2: makes sense statistically, But aerodynamic theory in a computer simulation
Speaker 2: is very different from actually plunging through the Martian atmosphere.
Speaker 2: Very true, the atmospheric density on Mars fluctuates wildly based
Speaker 2: on the season and the amount of dust in the air.
Speaker 2: If the carrier vehicle hits an unexpected low density pocket
Speaker 2: of air during entry, the aeroshell might open at the
Speaker 2: wrong altitude.
Speaker 3: That's a very real concern.
Speaker 2: If they are dropped too high, they run out of
Speaker 2: battery before reaching the ground. If they are dropped too low,
Speaker 2: the auto rotation fails to arrest their momentum in time
Speaker 2: and all six hit the ground at terminal velocity.
Speaker 3: The aero dynamic uncertainty during the dissent vector is absolutely
Speaker 3: the highest probability failure point for the physical hardware. There's
Speaker 3: just no way around that risk.
Speaker 2: And if they survive the landing, we face the third
Speaker 2: major risk, which is environmental degradation. Mars is a brutally
Speaker 2: hostile environment. The dust storms are not just localized events.
Speaker 2: Mars frequently experiences global dust storms that can obscure the
Speaker 2: sun for months.
Speaker 3: We saw what that did to the Opportunity rover.
Speaker 2: Exactly. This abrasive dust coat solar panels, choking off their
Speaker 2: power supply. It works its way into the carbon fiber
Speaker 2: rotor bearings. Even with ruggedized joints and hybrid power management.
Speaker 2: The environment is actively degrading the hardware every single second.
Speaker 3: It's a race against the elements from the moment they
Speaker 3: touch down.
Speaker 2: And yet, despite the regulatory nightmare of the nuclear launch,
Speaker 2: the terrifying ballistics of a midair mock speed deployment, and
Speaker 2: the relentless assault of Martian dust, space agencies are pushing
Speaker 2: all their chips to the center of the table on
Speaker 2: this specific architecture.
Speaker 3: They have to.
Speaker 2: It tells you everything you need to know about how
Speaker 2: desperate the need for subsurface ice is. The risk of
Speaker 2: the mission failing is massively outweighed by the absolute necessity
Speaker 2: of the data it provides. We cannot guess where to
Speaker 2: land humans. We cannot send an expeditionary crew millions of miles,
Speaker 2: land them in a dusty basin and just hope their drills.
Speaker 3: Hit water exactly. The margin for error on a human
Speaker 3: mission is zero. Skyfall is the mechanism that removes the
Speaker 3: multi billion dollar guesswork from planetary colonization. The commercialization of
Speaker 3: ingenuities avionics makes it affordable, while the mission as a
Speaker 3: whole answers the most critical question in space exploration right now,
Speaker 3: where exactly is the safest, most resource rich place for
Speaker 3: humanity's first Martian outpost. But beyond the immediate utility of
Speaker 3: finding ice, we must recognize what Skyfall represents on a
Speaker 3: macro level. If this mission succeeds, it validates the infrastructure
Speaker 3: required for a permanent spacefaring civilization.
Speaker 2: It proves the whole system works.
Speaker 3: It proves that we can safely launch and utilize high
Speaker 3: power fission reactors for deep space transit, drastically cutting travel times.
Speaker 3: It proves we can utilize autonomous AI swarms to rapidly
Speaker 3: prospect alien environments without micromanagement from Earth. It graduates humanity
Speaker 3: from sending delicate, isolated science experiments to deploying robust, industrial
Speaker 3: scale exploration fleets.
Speaker 2: We are quite literally watching the foundational infrastructure of a
Speaker 2: multiplanetary economy being engineered and tested in real time. To
Speaker 2: bring the scope of this altogether. It is incredible to
Speaker 2: trace the lineage.
Speaker 3: It's breathtaking.
Speaker 2: We went from ingenuity, a tiny two kilogram drone built
Speaker 2: to answer the simple question of whether air could support
Speaker 2: flight on another world, to the sr I freedom, a
Speaker 2: nuclear powered ion ship crossing the void poised to violently
Speaker 2: tear away the safety nets of parachutes and skycranes.
Speaker 3: A huge leap.
Speaker 2: It will scatter a swarm of heavily armoured, autonomous radar
Speaker 2: equipped AI scouts into the freezing winds of the red
Speaker 2: planet to hunt for the chemical components of rocket fuel.
Speaker 2: It is a paradigm shift of the highest order.
Speaker 3: It is the definitive bridge the transition from the era
Speaker 3: of robotic curiosity to the era of human habitation.
Speaker 2: I want to leave you with a visual to hold
Speaker 2: on to as we track the progress of this massive
Speaker 2: engineering endeavor over the next few years. Fast forward a decade,
Speaker 2: imagine twenty thirties. The first human astronauts have made.
Speaker 3: The transit, the culmination of all this work right.
Speaker 2: Their landing craft descends flawlessly, touching down on a flat,
Speaker 2: geologically stable plane that was scouted and verified years prior.
Speaker 2: They step out of the airlock, their boots crunching into
Speaker 2: the red, iron rich dirt, baking stry, the water they
Speaker 2: drink inside their habitat, the oxygen they breathe, and the
Speaker 2: tens of thousands of pounds of liquid methane fuel sitting
Speaker 2: in their ascent vehicle waiting to take them home. All
Speaker 2: of it was manufactured by a robotic chemical plant built
Speaker 2: exactly on the coordinates mapped by the ground penetrating radar
Speaker 2: of a machine that fell from the sky.
Speaker 3: It gives you chills.
Speaker 2: Imagine those future explorers perhaps taking a rover out for
Speaker 2: a surface survey, cresting a massive red doom, and there,
Speaker 2: sitting silently in the sand, its carbon fiber blades coated
Speaker 2: in a thin layer of dust. Is one of the
Speaker 2: skyfall helicopters, Its battery long dead, its mission perfectly executed
Speaker 2: a small historic monument to the mechanical swarm that survived
Speaker 2: the supersonic drop map the underworld and pave the precise
Speaker 2: way for humanity to finally arrive.
Speaker 3: What a site that would be.
Speaker 2: It really makes you wonder centuries from now, when we
Speaker 2: finally build the first great museum on Mars, which of
Speaker 2: those six machines while they put in the center hall,