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guess what, geeks, it's the new dot net Rocks space
geek Out for twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1: I'm Carl Franklin and I'm Richard Campbell. How many of
these have we done? Now? Like five or six? Man,
it's five or six? Yeah, of the annuals, it's more
than that, I think. No, well, it's over one hundred
geek outs to be clear. But these sort of annual summaries,
it's been a bunch. I don't know.
Speaker 2: However, this is show nineteen hundred in eighty two, and
before we talk about what happened in nineteen eighty two,
we need to mention that our editor, Brandon When was
born in nineteen eighty two. That's clearly the most important
thing that happened, absolutely the most important thing. But some
other things where the Falklands war between Argentina and the UK,
the release.
Speaker 1: Of et that Space That Space, Yeah, yeah, sorta spacey.
Speaker 2: The tragic crash of Air Florida Flight ninety into the
Potomac River which killed seventy eight people thriller by Michael Jackson.
That album was released, So G I. Joe was relaunched.
I know that you're so interested in that. Anne Rand
passed away. On March six, the Commodore sixty four was launched.
I'm sure you're going to talk about that, so I'm
passing it over to you a little bit for tech
and computing, okay, Yeah, So of course the commerce sixty
four was released. It was five ninety five wow, which
they kind of undercut the whole market when they did that.
And they way they did that is that they owned
they had vertical integration, They owned the supply line, including
the processor moss, which is a very end of the
sixty five or two called the sixty five ten, and
so they were just able to apparently the component price
was down like an one hundred and fifty dollars range,
so it's just we were able to.
Speaker 1: That's why that machine did so well. I mean, sixty
four K just a really unbelievably good price.
Speaker 2: Well I never had a Commodore sixty four, but what
I remember about it was it booted up into basic YEP,
and you had to run like all the operating system
things by writing a little basic program.
Speaker 1: Doing they were combs. Yeah, yeah, there were commands. That's right.
It was my after school job was preparing sixty fours wow,
and repairing sixty four fifteen forty one's like, they repaired
the drives they had flaws in them. They sold the
funny They're not exactly sure how many they sold, somewhere
between twelve and seventeen million units over twelve years before
the discise. That's just unbelievable. It's incredible, incredible success, just huge.
Nineteen eighty two is also the year that the Time magazine.
Remember Time magazine, I do. They used to do a
Man of the Year, and in nineteen eighty two, the
Man of the Year was the personal computer. Yeah, they
still do that because the person of the year person. Yeah,
you know, that was the idea. This is also the
year the following companies are founded. I just went with
the ones you would know immediately, like some microsystems, Yeah, Compact, Adobe, Autodesk,
geez Electronic Arts, Yeah, LucasArts, Lotus micropros semantic like clearly
the explosion, right, the expansion of all this. This is
the year that Microsoft releases their competitor, VisiCalc called multi
Plan for the Apple two and for CPM machines, which
would later become Excel and I mean might be a
separate product. Multiplan was built in this cross compiling way.
This was Charles Simons's great vision, so they could compile
the multiple platforms, which meant it ran equally slow on
all of them. Yeah, that's right, And that's why you know,
next year nineteen eighty three, when I Lotus one two
three comes out, we'll just clobber the market because it
was built for the IBM PC of fast, fast, fast fast, right.
But A two is also the relatively the year they
rebrand PC dos to MS dos because you're trying to
focus on Microsoft. Is the year that word Perfect comes
out version one of word Perfect.
Speaker 2: What I remember about word Perfect is it wasn't really perfect.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, nothing nothing ever was it was?
Speaker 2: It was it was user interface challenged, that's what I remember.
Speaker 1: It was all you had to learn the shortcut case.
That's what it was. All about was the short those
terrible for us? Also the year the aerial font is created.
Wow was that Adobe No indefinitely And the first evidence
of a computer virus called the elk Cloner, written by
a fifteen year old named rich Strinta, and it propagated
via Apple I floppy disc. Wow. Nobody knew that it
was at that time right beyond comprehension. But it wasn't
really uh, it didn't really do anything bad. It was
just a propagator. Yeah, just a propagator. Yeah, just a propagator,
as they often were back right. This is the year
the movie tron came out with all of its CGI
graphics and you know stories of hackers and oh my user. Yeah.
I mean to this day I often still say greetings
programs directly from that movie. And I'll end with a
science thing, which is Richard Feiman describes quantum computing in
nineteen eighty two. Man, he was awesome. He still is amazing. Guy. Yeah.
On the space side, this is Space Shuttle Columbia's third
and fourth flight. The third flight is in March. It's
the first time they fly with an unpainted tank, saving
several hundred pounds of weight because the spacecraft is wild
overweight and will not be able to do the missions
that it was designed to do. They'll never be able
to do a polar orbit with any of them. Actually,
and this was the heaviest one by far.
Speaker 2: How much weight did they shave off by not painting?
Speaker 1: It's a thousand pounds. The tank's really ridiculous. Yeah, wow,
I don't where the And they'll re engineer the tank
to meet it even lighter. Like they were always trying
to shed weight. The spacecraft was always too heavy and
limited a lot of its capabilities. It was the only
time they ever landed at the White Sands Air Force
Base because they were supposed to land at Edwards but
it was flooded and that's bad, so they wand over there,
and that meant that they had to send over all
of the equipment to pick the shuttle up and put
it on the seven forty seven to fly it back
to Kennedy. Wow. So they would quickly realize this was
a really expensive and difficult proposition. You should always landed Kennedy.
But on the fourth flight same year, in June, so
only a few months later, this is the final of
the test flights. They would landed Edwards Air Force Base.
So they did on total calumbated four test flights with
just two astronauts in pressure suits with ejection seats to
validate the vehicle, and that finishes in nineteen eighty two.
That last flight at Edwards, Ronald Reagan and Nancy are there.
They meet the astronauts, they make a big speech and
while at the end of the speech, the Space Shuttle
Challenger flies by overhead on the seven forty seven on
its way to Kennedy. The next Shuttle has been built.
Very cool. That wasn't timed or anything. Emily, Yeah, I
know pretty sure. Maybe just a little bit a little
bit of timing there. Over in the Soviet side, Vanera
thirteen and fourteen, their Venus Explorers land. They launched in
eighty one. They took about four months, so they land
early nineteen eighty two. You've seen the photos from these.
These are the famous panoramas with the little saw tooth
edge of the landing ring. And Vanera thirteen survived one
hundred and twenty seven minutes at four hundred and fifty
seven degrees celsius. That's eight hundred and fifty five fahrenheit.
That's crazy enough. To melt lead and eighty nine atmospheres
of pressure. Venera fourteen. You know there's a Pepe's pizza oven.
It's almost that hot, almost that hot. Yeah, I think
it's like six hundred degrees six hundred and fifty degrees.
That's a yeah, it's good, an unbelievable pizza. Yeah, but
you know, you know you're in there for very long. No.
Vanara fourteen landed a week later, did the same sort
of panoramic picture. The funniest storia. This whole thing is
one of their mission. One of their probes was to
test soil compressibility on venus. But the arm is fixed
in place. When it swings down, it has to hit
a particular point, and it turned out to the point
where it was going to swing down is exactly where
one of the lens caps had popped off. So it
measured the compressibility of the lens cap. Geez, unfortunate. Oops, Yeah,
I don't know.
Speaker 2: Was that really critical science? The compressibility of soil on venus.
Speaker 1: We changed the way they could build a lander, right,
They went with a maximum surface area lander. Dude, and
everything can we do that makes sense? Legs? Can we
can put more experiments down and stuff like that, not
that they ever did, but that was that was the
thanking last one, not least on the space side. Hallie's
comment after seventy years comes back into view. Nineteen.
Speaker 2: I remember seeing it, yeah, yeah, right off in the distance,
and I remember my father saying it's not going to
be back for seventy years or whatever it was.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, when, so when what would that be? Do
the math quite quick, it'll be twenty thirty two. We
might see it, man, maybe, Yeah, that's only what's seven
more years from now? Yeah, Wow, we'll be getting old.
That's crazy to think. Yep, to think that's only we're
old people. So we're getting old. All right, there's your
history bit. Okay, you're right, I better know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I do have a better no framework, play the
crazy music?
Speaker 1: All right? What do you got?
Speaker 2: So I'm looking on a GitHub for ISS trackers. Oh yeah,
it turns out there are twenty eight look repositories matching.
Speaker 1: Cool that people's doing experiments to write software to figure
where the ISS is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right, and their Python, JavaScript, HTML, Typescript C
plus plus one and C plus plus one in dart
one in Jupiter notebook. Most of them are Python. Yeah,
seventeen of them.
Speaker 1: Three of them JavaScript. It's cool, but there you go.
It's awesome. That's what I got. Okay.
Speaker 2: I haven't checked them out, of course, because I write
and see sharp.
Speaker 1: Well, and you can just go to a website if
you want to know where the iss is right. True.
Speaker 2: And there are apps too, specialized apps for the phones
that you can sure access as far as you want.
So you got somebody talking to us today, Richard.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I grabbed a comment off the last Space geekoutse
that was nineteen thirty round dust time last year. And
well this comment is much more recent. It's just from
a couple of months ago. This is from Tom. I said, hey,
this October, the internet is full of Alien Invader three.
I at lists, but the World News channel so surprisingly
devoid of anything about it. I would love to hear
Richard's opinion as an all around respected sensible guy.
Speaker 2: Well, wait a minute, it's December nineteenth, which is the
day that it's going to be supposedly invading the earth.
Speaker 1: This is the closest approach day.
Speaker 2: Let me just open the window and see if I
can see it, see if we're being inundated with aliens here. Yeah,
pretty I got the news on I don't see anything.
Speaker 1: Pretty sure, you'll be fine, Yeah, you'll be all right. Yeah.
So it's called three I ATLAS because it's the third
interstellar object detected. The previous two were Amuamua and Borisov.
And the second name, ATLAS is actually the name of
the detector, which was the Asteroid Terrestrial Impact Last Alert
System or ATLAS. This is based out of Chili and
its job is to find objects that might collide with
the Earth. And this is not a very big object,
maybe about a half kilometer across, but it is booking.
It is because it's not not a Solar System object.
It's an interstellar object. When it was detected, it was
moving at fifty eight kilometers per second, right, is really fast,
and of course the Sun's pulling it in, so it
accelerated it. When it made its closest plasts on the
Sun in October, it was going sixty eight kilometers per second,
so we would not have a lot of time to
respond to this. This is kind of a worst case scenario,
but the good news is it missed us. Obviously.
Speaker 2: The fly by is now is it something that we
can see in the sky like a comet.
Speaker 1: Only if you have a telescope. It is a comet,
no two ways about it. We know it's an interstellar
comet because we've had a bunch of different spacecraft studying
it now and observatories. Its composition is a little odd.
It's a little different than stuff we are used to
from our Solar system. It's full of carbon diox frozen
carbon dioxid which means it was probably formed in an
orked cloud around a different star somewhere. It's probably been
out there for billions of years, so there's no way
to know for sure. Certainly from our galaxy, it's not
going that fast. But the reason for the alien thing,
it's most likely a cosmologist, a fairly famous one, a
guy named or his name is Abram, to call him
Avi Lobe. He's a Harvard cosmologist, very well respected until
the past few years, when he's just kind of kind
of whacky on the whole aliens are coming thing. He
said pretty much the same thing about a Muamuha, that
this could be a spacecraft, although it wasn't. It was
just an asteroid.
Speaker 2: It didn't help that social media was full of pictures
that looked like it had lights and a bridge.
Speaker 1: And you know, yeah, none of this is true. Yeah,
it's not true. We can barely image the thing for
crying out loud like it's it's only barely visible. We've
had a bunch of good sensors, because we have so
many good sensors pointed out it, so we know how
close a large tacoma is, that it has a tail,
that it's acting just like every other comet acts, except
that it's moving dramatically faster, so it'll be whizzing back
out of our solar system fairly quickly. So Tom, I
hope that answers your question, and thank you so much
for your comment, and a coffee of music, Cobi. It's
on its way to you, and if you'd like a
cofee of Musicobe I read a comment on the website
at dot at Rockstock Calm or on the facebooks. We
publish every show there, and if you comment there and
in the show, we'll send you a copy of music Go.
Speaker 2: Music to Code, by of Course, is a collection of
twenty two soon to be twenty three, twenty five minute
long tracks that are designed to keep you in a
state of flow while you're writing code and they're still
going strong. Like I said, I get several orders a
day now still. So if you want to get it
yourself without writing a comment on the website, you can
go to Music Too Coode, buy dot net and purchase
the collection an MP three, flack or wave formats. And
with that, sir, I'm handing over the microphone to you,
because the geek outs are all Richard.
Speaker 1: He does a lot. It's a lot of writing. For me.
Speaker 2: You do a lot of research and a lot of writing.
And this is about space. So we're going to recap
the year in space.
Speaker 1: All right, twenty twenty five, and of course we're recording
this from the nineteenth. It is still gonna be a
couple more launches because SpaceX you make me crazy. But
this particular moment, there were This is a record year again,
three hundred and eighteen launches worldwide, of which three hundred
and seven are successful with eleven failures. And that's all.
Speaker 2: That's the whole world organizations, not just SpaceX.
Speaker 1: Yeah. China, yeah, China, India, you know there, there was
launches all over, although clearly SpaceX is dominant. Of those
three hundred and eighteen launches worldwide, one hundred and sixty
five of them so far are Falcon nines. They did
new Falcon heavies this year. They're supposed to do two
more before the end of the year. Like we have
a week left and they're going to do they're going
to hit one hundred and sixty seven.
Speaker 2: Are either of them going to be Falcon heavies.
Speaker 1: There's no Falcon heavies flew this year at all. They
didn't need them. Yeah they were. The goal originally was
one hundred and fifty. They bumped up to one hundred
and eighty. Now it's going to be about hundred and
sixty seven, which is still incredible. It is one hundred
and twenty two starlink missions, so that's the vast majority
of them. So forty three other kinds of missions, various payloads.
Two boosters recovered, two of them were thrown away, one
was lost in a drone ship failure. So the more
starlink satellites there are, does your bandwidth speed go up
because I know you have starling? Yeah, it's actually creeping
back up again because the number of users has gone up.
There are at eight million subscribers now. They doubled in
just over a year. Last year we were talking about
They got to four million in the summer of twenty
four and by November twenty five they were at eight million.
So that does impact. Although I mine, not that I
use mine all that much because we're so far north,
I really haven't had a lot of performance problems. Yeah,
but in the busier areas obviously it matters. But yeah,
the network continues to grow there. They've launched over ten
thousand satellites. Now they've got more satellites than the rest
of the world combined, like twice over. Wow, that all
of those are operational. He was about somewhere in around
seven thousand operational. To go this quickly, they have launched
three or four times a week. They have shortened the
turnaround of a pad down to fifty five hours, so
two and a half days they can launch and then
launch from that pad again. Wow, really efficient. The Falcon
nine booster, which was originally planned to be ten reuses,
they have continued to stretch that. They stretched that with starlink,
so starlink being a maximum load, launch as heavy as
and go about seventeen metric tons and still get the
booster back. Their current record now is thirty two landings
from one booster. Wow. Yeah, that's so cool and it's crazy.
Speaker 2: First, I remember the first time we watched that happen
where it didn't crash. I think we were at a
conference or something like that. Yeah, and we were watching it.
Speaker 1: And it's like, holy cow, they stuck the landing.
Speaker 2: And they stuck the landing. It was just like amazing. Yeah,
it didn't look real. I mean it literally looked like
a cartoon or something.
Speaker 1: Yeah. On the week of December fifth, there were five
launches and five landings in the same week. Wow, over
five days. Wow. It's just it's nuts. And look, this
has not been a good year for Elon Musk personally. No,
the things that he got up to this year is
upset a lot of people, including me. Like the guy
who flew his sports car into space That was pretty cool.
I liked Elon. Yeah, tearing up the US government not cool.
Arguably buying an election not cool. But the impact of
SpaceX is hard to ignore. Rumor is that they're going
to IPO next year, which is interesting, and I got
some questions online for folcusing what you know, if they IPO,
how is this going to change the company? I suspect
it's going to be an IPO the same way that
Facebook's a IPO, which is they're going to have a
small amount of ownership available. So it's not really going
to be a publicly owned company per se. They just
want to raise some more money. I suspect Elon's going
to maintain control of the company for better or worse. Yeah,
I want to move on from Saceing as quickly as possible.
But it can't not talk about Starship. They did six
launches or five launches this year. It didn't necessarily go
all that Well, mind.
Speaker 2: Us what starship is again?
Speaker 1: You know? So Starship is there the really really big rocket,
biggest rocket ever built, Bigger even than.
Speaker 2: Saturn five, bigger than the Falk and heavy.
Speaker 1: Much bigger than you know. That's three and a half
some meters in diameter. This is nine meters diameter. This
is a massive sixty five meters tall. It's huge. And
the goal is one hundred percent reuse. So not just
the booster flying doing its two and a half minute flight,
flying around and coming back, but also the upper stage
going into orbit, doing its thing, and then re entering
and landing. And so we had test flights seven through
eleven in twenty five. In twenty four where they were
all the Block one the original test articles twenty five
they were all Block two, so they only did five
flights of Block twos. The first one in January. The
booster landed successfully. And by the way, the starship Booster,
as huge as it is, does not have landing legs.
They catch it out of the sky wow, with a
pair of arms they called chopsticks, so they don't have
to carry the weight of the legs. Wow. That which
is amazing. But the first block to spacecraft had problems
and by the time it was near the top of
its apogeea that never fully goes into orbit, there were
propellant leaks and it blew to pieces of a rain
to breed out across the Caribbean. Jeez. Not good. So
then IFA eight was in March, just a couple months later,
and it was almost identical of that. It did the
same thing they did land the booster, but they starship
itself broke up in orbit and fell like to Earth.
Speaker 2: So the day after my birthday, August twelfth, I was
outside watching the lackluster Percy had met to your shower.
It was about ten thirty pm. And I saw this
very strange, blurry dog bone shaped light in the otherwise
clear sky that seemed to be rotating, and I posted
it on Facebook and somebody posted back, that's no moon.
What it was was a solid rocket booster from a
SpaceX launch that was in Florida that day, and I
could or was it a booster or was it no?
Speaker 1: Well for STARTU, SpaceX doesn't use solid rocket boosters.
Speaker 2: So it was a rocket deorbit burn. Oh yeah, so
it was the Arian six rocket getting set for a
deorbit burn. But it was really cool and other people
saw it too, and everybody's kind of freaking out on
the social media's but it was just wild.
Speaker 1: Yeah. But de orb burn's good news. That means they're
very specifically putting it down somewhere safe. Sure, right. The
modern requirements now for an upper stage after a certain size,
especially is that you save enough fuel after putting your
payload into space to deorbit yourself.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's all good news, but the fact is
is that a lot of people saw it and thought
it was a UFO and didn't understand it right, So.
Speaker 1: It pays well, it was a flying object, it just
wasn't actually unidentified.
Speaker 2: Well, it was unidentified to us, but not to everybody else, right,
So it was fun and you know, it's that's why
it pays to educate yourself about these things, so you're
not making up stuff that you don't understand when you
don't understand something, All right, slash soap box back to you, Richard.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So the rest of the Starship tests coming into
the second half of the year got better, although there
was an incident in the test flight ten. They had
Ship ten and during its testing on the ground at
the test stand, it exploded, which is not good, destroyed
the stand in the process, right, and so delayed the
flight for a month or so while they built another
ship and had to test it in a different way.
But the flight itself in August went fairly well. The
booster was deliberately splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico.
The ship actually got up to its peak orbit, desployed
these Faate Starlink satellite so the little door opened on
the side of the ship. They popped out these They
were all going to re enter, but they just showed
that they could displease them, and then it actually landed
it on its intended target in the Indie ocean within
a few meters enough that they were able to put
a boy out there with a camera that was able
to film this thing re entering, although the ship itself
was fairly damaged by re entry, but it worked perfectly well.
So cool. The very last launch in October of a
Block two because now they're moving on to Block three,
worked almost flawlessly when exactly we're supposed to deployed. It
simulated satellites and then landed right on target with almost
no damage on it at all. So they clearly off
Block two wired in, so now time to move on
to Block three. And that was also the last time
they would do a flight off of Pad one. This
is in Bokachika, Texas. This was the pad that on
the very original flight they bore a hole into the
ground because it took off so slowly. And then they
upgraded and so forth. But the Block three version of
Starship is dramatic bigger again, it's longer, taller, and they've
been building a second pad Nick cleverly named get this
Pad two. And this one has a flame diverter, so
instead of being a set of legs with a water
to spercial unit to control it, they've actually had a
popper flame diverter. It also uses water as well, but
it's a better design all around, much more complex landing.
You know, Elon always had this idea that he didn't
want to have big infrastructure on the ground because he
wanted to be able to go to Mars and take
off again and so forth and not need to build infrastructure.
And it's just like it's not feasible you actually have
this infrastructure. So at this particular point, they are in
the development of Block three, including a new larger booster,
although in November, the first of the Block three boosters,
called Booster eighteen, during testing had some kind of explosion.
It wasn't a duratic one. It was just burst and
damaged the vehicle enough that it was scrapped. And so
now they're getting another booster together for IFT twelve, which
will be sometime early next year year, and they're going
to do the current plan is IFT twelve and if
T thirteen where the sort of finalizations of the design.
They expect IFT thirteen to be the first full orbit
of Starship, to put it properly to orbit, and then
to deorbit it and catch it to show that they
can do all those things, and all subsequent flights of
Starship currently outlined are focused on making the Moonlander for
the contract they've gotten with NASA. Tell me about that.
Let's a push forward. This was a couple of years
ago with the Artomis program so forth, and we're going
to talk about Moon a little later on. It's not
a lot happened Moon related stuff this year, just a
few things. There was competition to develop a moon Lander
for the Artemis missions, and the whole point was to
make a reusable Moonlander, and the only company that offered
a potential reusable lander is SpaceX And what is a
modified version of Starship, which is kind of nutty because
it's enormously tall, so you got to land at somewhere
very level or have some very adjustable leg something we've
seen any of these things. It's also huge, but it
has a massive payload and it would be fully reusable,
but you got to refuel it. Not that anybody's ever
done that before, and how many refuelings is it going
to take? But this is all stuff that needs to
be developed.
Speaker 2: Also, if you think of the previous missions, the Apollo
missions that went to the Moon, those capsules were fairly light,
and they were small, and they yeah small, did require
a lot of energy to get off the moon, but
I mean.
Speaker 1: And even then the landing platform, the descent stage was
left behind, the ascent stage was lifted off. And look,
if you're going to build a base on the Moon
that you're going to have multiple people going to, you
can't keep leaving pieces of your land or behind each
time you do it, right, yeah, right, Like, how are
you supposed to keep using the pad if you keep
leaving pieces on it? So you need a fully reusable
lander and that's what SpaceX has proposed. They're behind schedule,
but so is everything related to the Moon, right and
they so now apparently they're we're going to see developments
in twenty twenty six.
Speaker 2: So do you think they would just seems to me
that they would take us smaller craft first to build
the landing for the bigger craft.
Speaker 1: Doesn't look to make that. No, that's not what they're doing.
The way they're solving the problem of not having a
landing pad is by putting thrusters high up on the
craft so that it doesn't dig a hole in the ground.
But they do need to find a level spot to
land there's lots that needs to be figured out on
this and starting with or just as you said, adjustable fee, Yeah,
I mean just the idea of a sustainable life support
system right Like right now we have the space station
which has a life support system that is constantly refueled
every couple of months. We keep adding stuff to it.
If you're gonna have a life support system that sits
on the Moon for an nextated period of time, like
we've never done that. We don't have good long term
life support systems yet, right We've had we have them
work for a couple of weeks at a time, that's
what the old Apollo missions did, and we have the
space Station one. But they build a long term, you know,
self contained life support system we can last for months.
That will be a breakthrough when that hasn't been achieved yet.
Speaker 2: Solar energy on the Moon is kind of moot because
you're not in the sun all the time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's fourteen days of daylight fourteen days of darkness.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you need battery backup or whatever you're going
to do to store that energy.
Speaker 1: That's a big battery and it's awfully cold when you're
not in the sun. Yeah, pretty much. There's two solutions
to this, and we're jumping ahead again. Okay, sorry, going
to the South pole where the sun's always shining because
you're not because of the angles. It's one workaround or
nuclear power, and there are solutions there too. But let's
put SpaceX to bed for the most of the rest
of this conversation because there's lots of other things to
talk about. Talk about some of the other things out
there now that this is necessarily all good news. So
let's talk about United Launch Alliance. So these are the
guys who used to operate the Shuttle. This is a
combination of Boeing and Lockheed Martin working together. It's an
independentity going. When we did this last year, we talked
about how ULA had finally launched their Vulcan rocket twice actually,
and they were projecting in twenty twenty five. According to
the CEO, Tory Bruno, they're going to have twenty launches
in twenty twenty five, ten of Atlas five, which is
the old rocket, and ten of Vulcan, the new rocket.
So what actually happened in twenty twenty five. There was
one Vulcan launch. It was a military payload launch and
it had problems itself, although it was successful. And the
issue here is that Vulcan does use solid rocket boosters,
and their second launch, one of the solid rocket boosters
spit off its nozzle. The rocket was able to compensate
and continue to its flight successfully. It was very close. Thing.
Speaker 2: Now you are saying Vulcan not Falcon, right with the Vulcan.
Vulcan as in where Spock is from. That's right, that's
what they call the Vulcan. Okay, And so yeah, they're
having production problems with the Vulcan. They only flew once
that everybody's very annoyed, especially the Air Force who supported
Vulcan ahead of Falcon nine.
Speaker 1: And the rocket still doesn't work. Jul did fly five
of the ten Atlas fives they promised. One was a
Viasat satellite, which is a normal payload, and the other
four were all Kuiper satellites. These are Jeff Bezos is
alternative to Starlink. So, and if you're following along, Atlas
five is the rocket that used engines actually from Russia
or Ukraine, really the RD one eighty that are no
longer available, and so there are only ten of these
rockets left. There's supposed to only be five left, but
now there's ten. Speaking of Kuiper, this is a subsidiary
of Amazon. This is an alternative to Starlink. They started
back in twenty nineteen. This year for some reason, because
I like the name Kuyper, it's a good name. They
renamed Amazon Leo okay, and that nice. So and again
this is just a large network of satellites to provide
Internet service. So the FCC authorized into fly three thousand,
two hundred and thirty six satellites and they are allowed
to begin service after they have five hundred and seventy
eight satellites, of which, according to the terms of the FCC,
they have to have half of that two hundred and
eighty nine flown by July of twenty twenty six and
the rest by July twenty twenty nine.
Speaker 2: Do you have any idea how many any Internet satellites
there are in orbit right now? I mean, if you
had to guess.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like you said, Starlink's around seven thousand, okay, right one,
Web has twenty or thirty. This couple of Thermaia, there's
there's a handful of others, but starlink is the dominant.
Speaker 2: Some eight thousand tops maybe it's they figured the seven
thousand operational.
Speaker 1: Now they've flown ten thousand, but they're already rean to it.
Speaker 2: So I remember when Starlink first came out that a
bunch of astronoment we talked about this on the last
last year yep or the year before, maybe a bunch
of astronomers were really up in arms because yeah, they
were polluting the view.
Speaker 1: They're putting streaks in from Earth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and if you couldn't do a long term exposure
of a celestial body without getting streaks, so is that
even you don't even more of a problem.
Speaker 1: But how come you don't hear about that anymore? Well,
two things happened. The first is SpaceX worked pretty hard
to make their spacecraft no longer reflective, so you don't
have the light streak anymore, but it's still a blocking streak.
But the reality is contemporary astronomy uses software anyway, and
software can remove them.
Speaker 2: Okay, So now I have seen the Starlink sure satellites
in the sky, and they are reflective.
Speaker 1: They are reflective when first deployed. Once they are actually
in their orbits, they rotate so that they are no
longer reflective. Oh, Okay, good on them, considering a seven
thousand of them. If they were all reflective right now,
you'd see them all the time.
Speaker 2: Yes, right, right, okay, Well that's good news.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So at this point with the launches, the four
launches this year, Kuiper's up to one hundred and eighty
satellites launch. They did four on Outlas fives, has done
three on Falcon nines in twenty twenty six. They have
a bunch more planned, four more Atlas fives, an Arian
six and a Vulcan and a New Glen and we'll
talk about New Glen in a minute, but the New
Glens is the biggest rocket. So where the Atlas fives
can only lift twenty seven of them, the Eugle Internet
lift forty nine. So they're on track to meet their
FCC goals and proposed that they'll have initial functionality by
the edit twenty twenty six, so there will be a
competitor to Starlink supposedly, okay, and a heck of a
lot more satellites. Right We're going to fill up a
lot of space with satellites. The good news is there's
a lot of space up there, and the reality, of
course is that This is always going to be an
ongoing project. In order to keep latency low to make
this a usable Internet service, you have to fly them
low enough that they're constantly re entering. Typical lifespan for
these satellites is going to be five years and then
they're going to re enter. So you have to get
up those three thousand satellites and then keep replacing with
the rate that they're just that they re enter. Now
when they re enter, do they just crash in the ocean.
There's no recovery of these satellites, is there. They burn up? No,
they burn up. These things are only a few hundred kilows.
Nothing makes just the ground. Ah okay. The only time
we run into issues with things reaching the ground is
when they are in metric tons of as right, large
second stages are the only things that reach the ground.
Speaker 2: So when they burn up, are they going to look
like meteors?
Speaker 1: They do? They do? Yep, yeah, little meteor so you
could see a starlink meteor shower. You might, but you know,
you're only it's one or two at a time, and
they're not very big, so they're not you know, typically,
something that makes a nice street cross the sky is
a couple of metric tons. Okay, yeah, and these are
under a ton, so there they're not going to make
much visible at all. Okay, all right, we'll talk about
New Glen because this is the Blue Origin rocket that's
been under development for decades. While SpaceX has been doing
all the flying, there was this big rocket. Now, the
design of New Glen was a good design in the
sense that it's a big rocket. It's a seven meter rocket,
so much larger than Fulcan nine, but not as big
as Starship. And last year when we were doing this year,
they were say they were going to fly in Deceeber
twenty twenty four, which they did not. They flew in
January of twenty twenty five. After over ten years of development.
They only flew a prototype spacecraft, a carrier thing called
Blue Ring, but it flew and it was gorgeous and
again a massive rocket, like one of the largest rockets
ever flown, big proper heavy left rocket. Later they later
in the year, in November, they did their second flight,
and this time they actually took a payload, a two
space refoo to Mars called Escapade. We'll talk about that
in the Mars section. There was also a vias that payload.
But more importantly, on the very second flight of New Glen, ever,
they landed a booster no kidding, They stuck it on
the on the on the landing ship jackline about four
hundred miles out to see.
Speaker 2: So did they do that of their own accord or
did they get some help from SpaceX to figure that out?
Speaker 1: Oh no, those we're talking about Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
Those guys are not buddies. Okay, so nope, yeah, you
wouldn't know that.
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, yeah, they they they sends nights to
each other on a regular basis.
Speaker 1: But yeah, uh no. You know, the thing about it
being done before is you can do it again. It's
a bit but New Glenn had a big advantage that
Faulcon nine does not have, which is it New Glenn's engines,
the b E four's and the size of the rocket
meant that they can actually throttle to a hover. Now
you don't want to hover for very long, but it
means you have enough control over flight that you can
literally get it to a hover beforetside the ship and
then move it over and landed, which is how they
did it. Falcon nine can't do that. What made Falcon
nine so challenging the land is that at the lowest
thrust of a single engine, when they're down to the
landing weight, it's too much thrust. It'll go back up,
and so they had to do a perfect slam landing
oh right, or what they call a suicide bird. You
have to continuously accelerate so that you got zero velocity
the moment you touch the ground. It's incredibly hard to
pull off, and it's why it took so many tries
to get the calculation exactly right so that you are
at zero velocity when you reach that drone ship. Math.
That's the challenge with Falcon nine. Math is huge, huge math.
I remember that thing's moving, yeah, and your weight is changing.
You don't know how long your burns were, Like you're
timing has to be continuously adjusted to be able to
do exactly the right burn, to be able to stop
at the exact moment when you're at the surface. And
New Glenn didn't have to do that. But let's be clear,
that's the second orbital class booster to actually be landed, right.
The starship boosters have never Starship's never gone into orbit,
so it technically doesn't qualify, although they did successfully catch
the booster. More the ones and Refly one in fact,
and the next flight expected in January twenty twenty six
of New Glenn will be the reflight of that booster
that was caught. It landed in November, so they're on it. Wow.
They've also announced a heavier version of New Glen. So
the existing configuration of New Glen, which is seven meters rocket,
has seven B fours, the big engines on the bottom
and two vacuum engines on the upper stage. Did they
call it B because it's a big engine? Is that
what it stands for? Four? It's a Blue origin engine? Okay, yeah,
it's not as much fun. By the way, those B
fours that are on the New Glen are the same
engines that the Vulcan rocket uses over on for Ula.
So they've now said there's going to be a heavier
version of New Glen with nine primary engines on the
booster and four engines on the second stage, which should
be able to carry substantial payloads to the Moon and
to other heavy lifts. And we're going to talk about
new heavy lift things coming because we're now having a
collection at heavy Lift rockets. So yeah, next flights in January.
It's going and it's going to lift a the Blue
Moon mark one lander to the Moon. And at this moment,
there's only three missions scheduled in twenty twenty six for
New Glens. So they're not flying anywhere near the frequency
of Vulcan nine, but they're getting there. Oh that's good. Yeah,
So we've talked about SpaceX, we talked about ULA, We've
talked about Blue Origin. There are a bunch of other
flight platform out there, different rockets and so forth. Electron
is a light is a light platform. Left they had
seventeen flights this past year. Flyerfy Alpha had a SUCSS
flight in twenty twenty four. They had one attempt at
twenty twenty five when they failed. There's a bunch of others,
but none of them have removed a lot of mass
yet they're still at the beginning. So there's an interesting
space you know, evolution going on right now. But other
companies are trying to build recoverable rockets. They just haven't
got anywhere. And I will talk about them when they start,
you know, nail and payloads, but at this point they happened, Okay,
all right, let's take a break, all right, we'll be
right back after these very important messages. Stick around. You know.
Speaker 2: Dot net six has officially reached the end of support,
and now is the time to upgrade. Dot Net eight
is well supported on AWS. Learn more at aws dot
Amazon dot com, slash dot net. And we're back. It's
dot net Rocks the twenty twenty five Space Geek Out
with Richard Campbell. I'm Carl Franklin. That's Richard Hey, and
we were just taking a little break and then talking
about some more things in space in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So we've done all the we've done all the platforms,
all of the rocketry. For first half, let's start up
talk about the International Space Station. I love it because
this November was twenty five years of the station being
continuously occupied. That's two hundred and ninety people from twenty
six countries.
Speaker 2: Was it that supposed to be decommissioned sometime soon?
Speaker 1: Originally they talked about twenty twenty five, but they've extended
now to twenty thirty. Oh that's good. And as we
talked about last year, SpaceX has the contract to de
orbit the space station. Okay, that's very intentional and there's
you know, you say, well, why deorbit it, why not
just leave it up there, sell it off or something,
and the reality is that it's wearing out. Okays, things
are breaking down.
Speaker 2: So it's it's too expensive to repair, to bring it, it's.
Speaker 1: Kind of impossible. The biggest issue is Zavezda, which is
the main control unit, a Russian unit and one of
the oldest one that was launched in two thousand. It's
actually older than that. It was actually built originally in
the nineteen eighties as the core for the second mir
space station MIR two, which is actually derived from a
salute design. The Soviet Union flew seven or eight salute
space stations over the decades. In fact, every single space
station with the exception of Skylab, has flown with a
salute core of one form or another. Obviously, all the
salutes mirror the original that was originally a salute core,
with a bunch of add ons to that, as well
be Internet and the Tiangong space station, the Chinese one
derived from a salute design, and this Vezda module was
originally a salute modified to be a mirror, then modified
to do this, so it was already twenty year it
was almost a twenty year old hull when it was
flown in two thousand and it's leaking air. So the
first detection of leaks were in twenty nineteen. Now that
the this is Vesta modules quite large. It's made up
of three parts, and the aftmost part is where the
progress supplies the shuttles come in. They where they dock,
and there's a tunnel that connects from the central module
through to that progress booster, so you can take supplies
and so forth. And it's somewhere in that tunnel is
the leak. They've tried multiple repairs, they've not been able
to get it nailed. It loses about a kilo of
air a day. Wow geez. And so yeah, I believe
it's just the Russians say it's fatigue. It's cracks from fatigue.
It's just that old. It's taken all the shocks from docking.
It's The current procedure right now is to keep that
tunnel closed off during operation, so it just loo. It
depressurizes on its own and then they put air back
into it. It's relatively small, but when they do open it,
they close off the US section just for safety's sake.
But the fact that they have not been able to
get that control is they've now this past year, they
stopped commercial flights to the space station, so the Axium
four flight, which was tourism to the space station, which
is how Axiom was making money. They're trying to build
their own space stations separate from the International Space Station.
That whole flow has been cut off because of this issue.
So they don't they're just they're losing enough air that
they're trying to be careful. These last few years of
the station are problematic. There's also an argument of rather
than re enter it, why don't we take the newer
pieces off. One of the problems that the space station
was designed to be assembled, but it wasn't designed to
be disassembled. And what is very common in space is
when you put two metal surfaces in close contact to
each other, like you would for an airtight seal, they
actually weld together and they won't come apart. Huh yeah,
wait a minute, I thought space was cold, not hot
enough to weld metal. Well, this is cold welding, right,
This is cold welding. Absolutely, yeah. It is the cold soak.
And what it is is that they've when you have
no normally when you have metals and you're in an atmosphere.
As soon as you shave them, and they're pure metal,
they oxidize. They create a little coating on top of
the text them. Right now, when you put them together,
the oxidized layers, they're not going to meld together. But
when you're in space, when you're in a vacuum and
there's no oxidation happening, there's really almost no difference between
those two pieces of metal when they come in close
contcent he eventually they just bond. That's so weird, and
there's no way to unbond them. Yeah, it's one of
the mainy weird things that happen in space. Well, I
had no idea, Yeah, And so it's you know, I've
always thought, well, just take the newer, take the laboratories off.
They're newer, Like, why would you given you that up?
Can't can't get them apart, can't do it. It's just
no way to get them off. Yeah, sort of thing.
Speaker 2: So it's going to deorbit in twenty thirty, and it's
going to be intentionally de orbited in twenty three and
probably just crashed in the ocean after it burns up.
Speaker 1: That we're putting it down in Point Nemo, which is
an area in the South Pacific furthest away from any habitation,
at the same place they put the Mirror space Station
back in the day. It will be a sad day,
but it will have been an operation for thirty years,
like it's been through a lot. Pretty cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and are there any other plans to build a
new space station?
Speaker 1: I see you're just getting ahead of my story. Friend.
Speaker 2: Well, you know that's the natural question. Yeah, so I'll
answer that question. Well, we've got to do a couple
more space station things. We'll get there. Okay.
Speaker 1: This December, for the first time ever, all eight docking
ports on the space station were occupied. They had two
progressed cargo supply station ships up. They had two soy
used crew capsules in plus the Signus resupply vessel and
a cargo Dragon and a crew Dragon and the new
Japanese htv X. So, yeah, they put eight docking ports
on the figure. They never run out. They filled them all.
No park, Yeah, no, it was an interesting moment. Obviously,
those the sing this is probably the first to go.
It just re enters, so they typically fill it with
garbage and it's and then it burns back up, but
and the hdv X will do some things, they'll move
that out. Therefore, we talked of there will be two
crew dragons this year ten and eleven. Eleven is the
one that's currently there, and there's two soyas is up.
They're both still up, but I need to talk about
twenty eight which is the current last say years, it
launched no problem, but after the launch it was discovered
that the launch platform that it flies from in Baikanar
this is in Kazakhstan Okay had an accident. Oh that
has taken it offline. It's very serious. So the Soyus
design is from the sixties, right, it's been a long
time and they so they literally put a kind of
match up into all the rocket engines to launch them.
And to do that, there's this slide out platform. So
they bring the rocket into the pad on its side
on a train and then they stand it up over
a flame trench, this giantic lighter that somebody has to
like what well, in order to get to those engines,
there's this slide out platform that comes in underneath the
rocket and there's a bunch of work that's done there.
This is how they arm a bunch of things and
do a bunch of tests and do the ignition. Well,
during the launch of MS twenty eight, somehow that platform
forms slid out from its protected helding area, got blasted
by the rocket, blown off its rails and into the
flame trench. It's destroyed, Oh my gosh, and it has
to be rebuilt. So at this moment, there's no way
to launch a soy Use or a progress rocket capsule
to the International Space Station. That is the only pad
that can do it, and you can't go to any
of the other pads in Russia because they're not in
the right angles for actually getting to the International Space Station.
So they have to repair this one, and it begs
the question will they There's only five years left of
the station, and the Russian economy is not in good
shape right now. They got into a little mistake, i
would say, a little excursion in Qukraine. It's been going
on for years and it's destroying their economy and this
is a lot of money to repair this thing. So
there's a question of whether or not they're going to
be able to fly, and there's even a question of
whether it was an accident. You know, it's one thing
to just demandon this's nothing, to have a mysterious accent
and not be able to do anything well.
Speaker 2: Russia isn't really known for unexplained accidental terminations of things
in people.
Speaker 1: And you would presume that we can operate without the
sole use because we just use crew dragons, which is true,
that's the no question of that. But can we operate
without the Progress? Now, we can do cargo resupply with
any of the other methods like the Sickness and the
cargo dragon in htv X, but the Progress is one
thing that nothing else does, which is that it refuels
the Zevezda module for station reboosting. There's automatic connections between
Progress and that Zvezda module the pump fuel for that
exactly that process for doing reboosts.
Speaker 2: So SpaceX couldn't build something similar, I mean in the
next five years, or retrofit one of the falcons to
do that.
Speaker 1: We're gonna that's the question. Do we find a way
to fly Progress anyway like repair that, figure out how
to repair that as as strained as the relationship is
with the Russians, or do we up with other reboost
options We've experimented with reboosting with the existing cargo dragon,
but they're not really set up for it. They're not
on the right axis, they don't mount to the right point,
they're not designed. The docking ports on the Russian side
are different from the docking ports on the US side.
So it is an open question right now.
Speaker 2: Is there a deadline after which they'll run out of fuel?
Speaker 1: Yes, The big issue is how often you need to
reboot the International Space Station, and so they really only
do this once a month or so, so they're going
to have some fuel to be doing it for a while.
So they have a little bit of time, but not much.
And it's quite but you've got to communicate. The Russians
aren't being too communicative. But if they're going to come
bring progress back online versus, are we going to have
to come up with an alternative. So yeah, it's an
open question. And this only happened in November. There's no
good answers right now, and it and it genuinely jeopardizes
the International Space Station.
Speaker 2: So if they can't refuel, does that mean everybody has
to come home and we're done?
Speaker 1: Well, that's exactly it. If they that space station is
not designed to operate without people on board. If they
fully evacuate it, there's a concern that they would not
be able to reoccupy it. And you do not want
that thing re entering under out of control. That is
a four hundred ton vehicle that is the largest thing
ever flown into space. It needs to be control re entered.
And we don't actually know the situation right now. Now
there's time. We probably got a year to figure this out,
but it does need to be figured out, and we're
just you know, we're happen to be recording when nobody knows.
Speaker 2: So it's and just in case you didn't know this,
but getting an ISS tracker on your phone or download
one of those apps or something which will notify you
when it's going to go overhead. And it's a great
thing to bring your kids out on the front lawn
and look up and see this dot, you know, and
it whizzes by dot whizzing overhead, and to know that
it's going how many thousands of miles an hour?
Speaker 1: Is it?
Speaker 2: Twenty thousand, twenty five thousand, yeah, twenty five thousand miles
an hour.
Speaker 1: And there's people on it, and there's people on it.
Speaker 2: It's just it's just one of those Star Trek kind
of moments that you can share with your kids.
Speaker 1: That look, there's people on that thing. Well, and for
twenty five years now there have been humans in orbit NonStop. Yeah,
it's amazing. Speaking of other failures, remember star Liner, Yeah,
refresh my memory. Though. Starliner is the alternative to Crew Dragon.
This was supposed to be the low risk option, and
this is by who, built by Boeing Boeing, Yes, okay, yes,
and so they've spent so the NASA spent twice as
much on it as they did for Crew Dragon, and
data has just been a steady series of failures. In
twenty four and June at twenty twenty four, they finally
did a flight to the space station with Butch Wilmar
and Sunny Williams on board, right, and then the launch
itself went very well, but they the capsule it still
started having problems as soon as it got there. And
at the time when we were talking about this twenty four,
they didn't really have all the details yet, but it's
now come out as to how serious the situation was,
and the situation the issue was these control thrusters so
around the Starliners made up of a capsule with a
service module mounted on the back. The service modules dropped
before they re enter, and that service module has all
these trusters on it, and they put them in these
four little bays they call dog houses, and each one
of them has seven thrusters along with the primary boost engines,
the engines that actually put it into orbit. That might
be part of the problem because it was never tested
properly in integration. It appears to overheat when it's fully assembled.
And so as they were coming in towards the space station,
they were at v Bar, which is about two hundred
and sixty meters away or eight hundred and so feet,
they had they had two boosters to two of the
thrusters fail and at that point they're one failure away
from having to aboart according to the rules, right, and
both the failures were on the lower side of the ship,
and there were the thrusters that push aft right each
doghouse there's four of them, have two aft thrusters, two
forward thrusters, and then three radial thrusters that pushed the
side or rotate.
Speaker 2: So they could have just been floating in space right
off the bow of the space station.
Speaker 1: They were very close. Yeah, and then a third thruster failed.
At this point, according to the rules, they should have aboarded,
but they didn't. NASA, I think they had go fever
the way they waved it off. And then a fourth
thruster failed. Jeez. Right, they're now fully immanual control. And
at this point they're all aft thrusters. So there's two
on the lower and two on the port side. So
if they fire the other ones, it's going to spin
the craft. Right, so there's a debate of j we
aboard and now then question is can they even safely aboard?
Could they safely re enter? Right? They're not sure if
they can get in a proper position just to re enter,
And so the on the ground side at Houston, they
decide to reset the computer, turn it off, turn it
back on again. The universe will fix. That's it. And
then the interview with Butch Wilmore about this. He's really
not keen, like what if this thing doesn't come back?
Like I'm stranded, right, and he doesn't want to give
up control. But they do it, and in that reboot,
two of those thrusters come back, so it's like, Okay,
that's in. Now it's controllable.
Speaker 2: So it was a software glitch, not a not a
mechanical glitch.
Speaker 1: Well, this is exactly right. The thrusters were overheating and
the software was locking them out, so resetting the software
would bring them back, because once they get locked out,
they won't necessarily ever bring them back. But as soon
as Wilmore starts to do approach, another thruster fails. Good lord,
So they do another restart, and that time all but
one comes back and they're able. And at that point
even Wilmore doesn't have to do it. They now are
in the automatic dock rules, and so they turn an
automatic dock dock to the space station. That's why the
state the docking took so long.
Speaker 2: Now is that thing still up there? No, no, no,
this all got resolved in twenty four and twenty five. Okay,
but you remember they were only supposed to be there
for a week and then come back and ended up
being there for nine months. Yeah, and I know they
came home, but I didn't. I didn't pay attention enough
to know how they came home.
Speaker 1: Well, they came home on a crew Dragon. Okay, so
after months of tinkering with it, trying to figure out
what to do, they decided NASA against Boeing's best wishes.
Boeing wanted to said this, fine, bring him back. NASA
is like, nope, we're not bringing them back. And so
Crew Dragon nine is currently ten and eleven up there, right.
But Crew Dragon nine they took two of the astronauts
off so that Sonny and Butch could come back on
that and they came back in March of twenty twenty five. Yeah,
and then they were able to catch up with everything else.
Speaker 2: Some amazing television by the way.
Speaker 1: It's crazy. Yeah. Now, star Liner did come back right
in September. It landed without anybody on board, completely successfully.
So presumably it would have been fine if they had
come back, but he didn't know for sure. But they
didn't want to risk it. Yeah, wasn't worth the risk.
Nobody wants to lose astronauts. Those guys don't want to die.
They ended up nine months on the space station, which
is very happy for them. They loved being up there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember their interview and they said, we were
happy to be there. You know, the more hours on
the space station, the better for us.
Speaker 1: The better. These are astronauts, they're weird.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, that's what they live for like they should.
Speaker 1: Not normal humans. They're not normal at all. So at
that point that this year there's been no star Liner flights,
not at all, not in twenty twenty five, I wonder why.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the negotiations, This isn't the only problem going hap
in the.
Speaker 1: Last few years. No, Bowe's don't have a good time, right,
all kinds of problems, and there was other issues with
starlight or helium leaks and things like that. So the
current plan now is to fly Starliner back to the
space station as a cargo flight, okay, in April of
twenty twenty six, and if that goes well, then they'll
start crew flights. But here's the problem. The original contract
they signed more than a decade ago, was for six
flight and there's not enough time left in the space
station to do those six flights. So they I don't
know how they're going to renegotiate the terms on all.
They returned some money something like that. Good luck with that,
something like that, Yeah, good luck. Another vehicle for really
to space station is Dream Chasers. This is Sierra Nevada
Corporate now call this Elciera Space which has a little
like shuttle like vehicle called dream Chaser. So who's behind
that company? So Sierra Nevada, it's their own company, and.
Speaker 2: They write, is there any evil genius behind that that
we know?
Speaker 1: No? No, no, This is an old fashioned space company
man like Boeing, right, but a smaller one. And they've
been working out dream Chaser for decades. And they were
originally in the commercial crew development, so they were supposed
to be one of the alternative crew, but they got
caught after phase two in twenty twenty four in favor
of Starliner and Crew Dragon. Yeah, maybe they cut the
wrong one right because star Liner was such a mess.
But in twenty twenty six they got a slot in
this second commercial resupply services, so instead of flying crew,
fly cargo. And there's a case for Dreamliner because it
lands on a runway, it undergoes a lot less acceleration
than a capsule. So if you have a delicate experiment
you want to bring back to Earth, Dreamliner might be
the only way you could do it.
Speaker 2: Because it lands like the Shuttle used to land.
Speaker 1: Yeah, lands like the Shuttle exactly right, A lot gentler.
Speaker 2: And how big is it relative to the other It's
quite a bit smaller.
Speaker 1: It's bigger than the capsules. It's a little space plane, right,
It's nowhere near as large as shuttles. Enormous, right, This
thing would fit in the shuttle bay a little bit easily.
It's supposed to be launched on the top of an
Atlas five, right, or a Vulcan. But it took um
time to actually get it ready. So they were supposed
to fly to do some They they in twenty sixteen.
They win the contract to do cargo resupply, got seven
flights to the ISS starting in twenty twenty one, and
they just weren't ready. Then they delated twenty two, then
they delayed in twenty three. They only finish flight flight
testing in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: Is there any evidence that Boeing has got its act
together after all this nonsense?
Speaker 1: Things are getting better, but this is not bowing to
Sierra Nevada like Boeing has turned the corner.
Speaker 2: I know, but I but I didn't ask that when
we were talking about Boeing in the Dreamliner and all that.
Speaker 1: With Starliner. Now, I don't know if Starliner is actually
going to get any better. We'll see, Like obviously they
didn't do sufficient testing. The cut corners here and there,
and it all shows on their airliner side. They've absolutely
turned the corner and the Max has been straightened out,
like Boeing seems to be putting They've got a new CEO.
They seem to be putting things back together. That might
be profitable one day, right, but I don't know the
star Line are salvageable right Anyway, Dreamliner was supposed to
fly in twenty four, but it was supposed to be
on the first Vulcan flight and that got bumped for
a national security flight. And then the Vulcan has been
delayed so they haven't been able to fly, and so
then they bumped it out to May of twenty five,
and then it's September twenty five, and finally now NASA's
amended the contract the CRS two country to say, hey,
we're going to just do one free flight, will pay
for you to fly Dreamliner a dream Chaser once. Do
you think without resupply, do you think.
Speaker 2: Any of these delays have anything to do with just
the state of the economy and the government shutting down
agencies and things like that.
Speaker 1: I think there's certainly an impact of that. And also,
you know Sean Duffy, who is really the Cabinet Minister
for Transport, not really the NASA administrator just did a
different view in all of these things, and so that
everything's been kind of up in the air. Although as
we're recording this, Jared Isaacman is now the new Massive Administrator.
He was originally supposed to be earlier in the year,
then they walked away from him, and now they've come
back around to him again. And this is the guy
who did inspiration for he's actually flown in space. He's
the first, you know, non astronaut to do a spacewalk.
He's for civilian to do a spacewalk. Like he's a billionaire,
so he's, you know, weird, has his own air force,
but he's very much into space and so we'll see
what this does. And he's certainly playing on the angle
of the US needs to get to the Moon ahead
of the Chinese, and to try and stay ahead of
the Chinese. That's sort of his vision, all right, So
I mean dream Chaser. Hopefully they'll get a flight. It's
cool to have a new little space plane. But we'll see,
And especially when we talk about the alternatives of the
International Space Station, Chaser has a role to play. That's good.
One more thing related to the International Space Station. That's
HDV X. I mentioned it as one of the vehicles
that was currently at the space station. This was a
successor to Japan's contribution to the International Space Station, which
was the HDV supply vehicle. Their goal, and this is
such a good goal, cut the cost of the HDV
in half while supplying the same number of supplies, and
they pulled it off. Wow. They simplified the vehicle so
it actually carries as much still as a four thousand
kilogram payload, same as the HDV, but simplified. And so
that was the test flight happened this year, it's passed,
and so next year they'll fly twice two more htvx's.
Speaker 2: So that's great, it's great, all right, we could learn
a lot from the Japanese.
Speaker 1: Yeah, very practical internation. Not for the ISS. Let's talk
about the Chinese Space station, says the Tiangong Space Station
against variation on the mirror concept with the Salu base.
They flew their first components in twenty one, two more
modules in twenty two and started putting crews on this point.
Their three modules up there. It's about one hundred metric ton,
it's about a quarter the size the ISS. They've had
ten resupply missions and ten crew missions on board. There's
supposed to be another module coming next year, space telescope,
similar to Hubble. We'll see if that actually happens. They
have begun hosting international experiments. Belgium, France, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Peru, Russia,
Saudi Arabia, Spain all have experiments on the Tiangong space station. Wow. Cool.
There is a Pakistani astronaut currently in training to do
a short flight, probably only a week in between the
two recent two crews onto the space station. It's sometime
in the future.
Speaker 2: So US and Canada not invited to the party.
Speaker 1: No, there's an embargo against all Chinese space technology in
the West. That's a shame. So that's why even the
Europeans started out being interested in sending astronauts up there,
and it became a problem, so they've backed off on
that too.
Speaker 2: That's really a shame. I mean, that's that's a way
that you know, nations can get together for common goals,
and it you know, worked for a while with the
US and Russia.
Speaker 1: And yeah, you know, and it also leads to this
interesting situation now where Russia is generally a pariah in
the world community, and yet we still have to cooperate
them on the space station. So I think that's the
concern with the Chinese is clearly the goals aren't aligned.
I guess we don't know a lot about this station.
They don't talk. The only thing we do know about
is this year, a very unusual thing happened a few
hours before the Cenzo spacecress was supposed to take a
crew back down c Shenzo twenty. They found a crack
in a window. Oh, it looked like there've been a
debris impact of some kind, and they considered it unsafe
for re entry. So the crew that was supposed to
return in Shenzo twenty instead took Shenzo twenty one down.
So they returned with that, which meant that the crew
that was up there didn't have a safe vehicle of
return on since the twenty was still there. Wow, but
the Chinese be the Chinese. Instead of taking six months
to get Shenzo twenty twenty two ready, they got it
ready in three weeks and put it up there without
a crew on board. So that I now have a
safe return, and they also send up repair equipment for
the twenty all right.
Speaker 2: So when you say a crack in a window, yeah,
did that happen in space or on the ground. It's space,
so probably a piece of space debris or space junk
like you said.
Speaker 1: That's right. Don't you think they would.
Speaker 2: Make some kind of material besides glass or plexa glass
that could withstand us.
Speaker 1: Well, these things are very tough. Believe me. It's tough
enough that it only has a crack, right, It didn't depressurize,
it's just now the concern is will the stress of
re entry make it worse?
Speaker 2: You know, transparent aluminum, I think is the answer.
Speaker 1: This stuff is pretty tough. But you know these little
flex of painting thing they're moving, man like. The velocity
is tough. So the current problem now is so that
they've brought twenty two up without a crew so that
they can evacuate the space station if they needed to. Okay,
but they only have two docking ports, so twenty's on
one of them, twenty two's on the other. They can't
bring up a new crew on twenty three without getting
rid of twenty So the plan is to attempt to
repair on the damaged window on twenty they've already done
a spacewalk to evaluate this and then send it down
empty to see how that goes before twenty three goes up.
So this is going to play out in the next
six month.
Speaker 2: You know, it's one of those windshield repair places that
might be able to fly up and do that thing.
You know, they come to your house and they yeah,
apparently they come right to you. Right, it's free.
Speaker 1: It's safe lass or safe light or whatever. This space
station was only designed to last for ten years, so
it flew in twenty one, so it was supposed to
go to twenty thirty one. They might ex sended to
fifteen to twenty thirty six, so there's no certain amount. Well,
it's exciting. We don't know a lot about it. It's
exciting though. Yeah, it's good to know. An interesting point
if we don't get a new station is that community
will continue to remain in orbit after the International Space Station.
But it might be just because of the Chinese space
station up there. But in twenty twenty one NASA did
start the commercial space station program. So it's the idea
of we're not going to build a space station. You're
going to build a space station, and we're going to
rent time on it, right, And eleven teams applied and
they've now consolidated that down to three teams. And this
year they updated the partnership of proposals. They've actually dialed
back the goals. So the original plan was to have
a permanently crewed station, and now the new requirement is
a man tended station, so station that can operate with
nobody on board, which is an important feature because the
space station International Space Station can't do that and can
operate with a four person crew for at least a
month at a time, and they want a demonstration. They
planned to at least two designs. The goal is to
have more smaller stations rather than one giant station. I
really love the idea of the ISS being. You know,
every country, every nation that participated, made a module that
fits somewhere on it for a particular purpose, and that's
just a wonderful thing. You know, the nations get together
and do that. So how how are we going to
have that sort of cooperation if there're a lot of
smaller ones. Is every country going to have their own
little space station? I think you'll probably see that there's
going to be common platforms like your basic docking, fuel supply, maneuver, propulsion,
and so forth, and then you add a module to
it for various experiments. Look, the problem with building one
big station is it only can handle one class of experiments,
typically micro gravity experiments. If you want to do other
classes of experiments, if you want to do something more
in manufacturing, or you want to start simulating gravity, do rotation,
so forth, they not compattle with each other. I see.
So having more stations means you can try a larger
array of things.
Speaker 2: Right, And so you have these specialized stations that's for
particular purposes.
Speaker 1: Right, And often having people on board is a problem,
Like it's better to not have anyone board where you're
doing a bunch of these things and they'd have people
come up and evaluate it, take stuff away, do the
human stuff on it. So we have a choice. Then
that's pretty good. There's three companies currently, three groups currently
competing for one of these, and I'll talk about and
there's a fourth that's sort of an odd one. We'll
talk about that in a minute. So the original is
axiom Space is a bunch of X space station folks
that have been working for a while. These the guys
who've been flying tourists to the space station until that
was shut down this year. Right. And their original plan,
which I always thought was a good one, was to
deliver components to the International Space Station to expand it
with the intent of removing it before the space station
is re entered. Wow. So they were going to bring
up the habitat and a lab and an observatory and
so forth, and only at the end to add this
payload power thermal element that can actually do the free
flying and then separate from the International Space before was reacity.
Out of the new circumstances, they've changed the plan basically
to get directly to a free flying space station by
twenty twenty eight by flying that payload power thermal the
primary control all but first, and then adding and have
to it later. We'll see. They always struggled for enough funding.
That's why they were doing all the tourist stuff to
try and make money. They're not working on space seats again,
another attempt to get revenue streams. It's a challenge to
have enough money to do this.
Speaker 2: So space tourism is a topic that we always talk
about on the key. Yeah, is that is that a
segment that's coming up later or is there anything else
to say about it?
Speaker 1: Not really, because I mean we're the only we have
had tourism in the form of using crew dragons, right
the SpaceX capsule to send people up for a few
days at time have been an affilities, all driven by
Jared Isazingcman, by the way, the new NASA administrator. It's
all a question of if you've got one hundred million
dollars a show to spend on your with three of
your friends, right to get to a space station.
Speaker 2: Doesn't make any sense to build a separate space hotel, right,
you might as well have something up there for other
purposes that people can visit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean we might get to that point, but
you're still talking billions. It's just too much money. There's
only so many people that willing to do that, all right.
So we talked about Active Space. Let's talk about Blue Origin.
So another competitor in the space station area. Their concepts
called Orbital Reef. So they partner with Sierra Space. That's
the dream Chaser guys, as well as Boeing.
Speaker 2: And there's there a crazy billionaire behind Blue Origin.
Speaker 1: This is Jeff bezos is long term project. Apparently he's
been selling a billion dollars worth of Amazon stock every
year to fund Blue Origin. Although now they're starting to
make money, right, The got New glenwork and you're taking payloads.
That's something and it's important that it's funded because the
current estimate by Bezos himself is to spend one hundred
billion dollars building out orbital REEF, which is what they
call the cost of the space the International Space Station.
Although that expenditure started back and that's a lot of
Amazon on Prime movies. Yeah, but you figure he's worth
two hundred and fifty billion, so he could fund the
whole thing himself, and he doesn't need to. But he
wants to be flying by twenty twenty seven. And he's
got New Glenn because his design is using these is
using that width of New Glenn, the seven meters, and
then using inflatable habitats. They figure one of their modules
will be almost like a quarter of the size of
International Space Station, although so big you're going to have
to fill it up with stuff, which is something they
actually have tested. So this year they completed what they
call the human in the Loop testing where they've actually
built out mockups of the interiors of orbital reef to
show all of the common workflows for doing science and
where to sleep and where to eat and all of
that sort of stuff. So they finished that qualification now,
so they're pretty close to actually starting to build hardware
and to fly in the next couple of years. Wow,
that's cool, it's exciting. Yeah, they've really come a long way.
And the fact that new ends flying is the important
part because he couldn't lift it anyhow. Next is Starlab Space.
So this is originally a partnership between Lockheed Martin and
Voyager Space. Lockheed Martin has mysteriously disappeared from this today
it's now Voyager Space. They call themselves Voyager Technology and
air Bus of all folks. They've signed the agreement. They
have Grumman on board. North Grumman owns the Signus cargo ship.
So because northro Grumman had originally made their own proposal
did not get selected. Starlab's intent is to use Starship
to do the launch and also to have an inflatable
habitat and to be man tended. And they are only
the beginning of doing their human loop testing, so they're
just building mock ups now, so they're fairly far behind
Ortal Reef. Again, these are all a few years away,
so we'll see the most interesting story on the space
station side. I lasted the end which is Vast is
the name of the company Vast. This started in two
thousand and one by a tech crypto bil millionaire named
Jed Mcallib. Did you say crypto or crypto crypto crypto billionaire. Yes,
made his money on bitcoin and has decided to sucked
it out of everybody else's wallet something like that, and
decided he wanted to build a space station. He wants
to get to artificial gravity, so rotating space stations. But
he started with this goal called Haven One's company's not small,
eight hundred employees, a whole lot of X SpaceX people
apparently there wow. But their initial vehicle, Haven one is
supposed to be a single launch space station that you
could launch on a Falcon nine. So fourteen metric tons
is in the realm of what the what Falcon nine
could lift, but short life man like it should be
able to function for about three years but only be
inhabited for the way they did the math was one
hundred and sixty astronaut days. Yeah, so that would be
four astronauts ten days at a time, four times kind
of thing. But it fits within Sean Duffy's requirements of
thirty days of usability. And they actually have built a
hull and it's painted and prepped and pressure tested, and
the life support systems have been tested. They earlier this
year in November, flew a test article a five hundred
kilo on the Falcon nine a testing power, propulsion and
communication systems for the station. So they believed to be
able to launch next year. No earlier than May, but
possibly next year this initial product, and it's guy far
enough alone that NASA has now gotten involved and they
are signing on to the round two of the Commercial
Space Station program.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Their intent the next design, what they're calling Haven two,
would be more like a mirror design, need to be
lifted by the Falcon nine, heavy, bigger platform, but also
multimodular to be more persistent. So granted they came out
of nowhere, they've got no heritage, but they have just
simply gotten to work building a manned, tendable station in
short amount of time. That's pretty cool, pretty amazing. Yeah,
should we take another break, and then we'll do the
last bit of this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sounds good, and we'll take another break for these
even more important messages, and we're back. It's the twenty
twenty five Space Geek Out. We're Richard Campbell, I'm Carl Franklin,
the guy asking the dumb questions. And Richard, as always,
has done lots of research and got his notes together,
and he's talking about the year in space.
Speaker 1: All right, we're done with stay stations, Thank goodness, thank you.
Let's talk about the moon stuff. Okay, yeah, all right,
So not much happened with Artemis. That's the you know,
the big Space Shuttle derived rocket that can take the
Orion capsule to the Moon. They flew an unmanned one
around the moon. Artemis two is the next mission. It's
not going to fly until twenty twenty six, and that's
actually going to do a recreation, especially with Apollo eight mission.
They're going to do a free or Richard return around
the Moon with four passengers on Orion. So not much
to say on there. But what did happen on the
Moon in twenty twenty five is three different landers. Well,
the first one is called Blue Ghosts. This is built
by Firefly Aerospace. They also make the Alpha rocket, which
they have flown successfully once and also failed on, but
it's not big enough vehicle to actually send anything to
the Moon. So this flew on a Falcon nine with
another moonlander called how Kudo R. This was in January
twenty twenty five. The Blue Ghosts did twenty five, got
them into low Earth orbit, spent twenty five days doing
their checkout. We did a translunar burn, took them four
days to get to the Moon, did an orbital insertion.
They spent sixteen days in lunar orbit to time their
landing perfectly, so they landed the beginning of a lunar
day because they don't have the ability to survive at night.
So you're gonna get fourteen days out of this thing.
That's all they can get if they landed right. And
they did a march second. They put it down a
mere Chrisium in a that's a three hundred miles wide
basin on the edge of the visible disc of the Moon,
and they timed it so that they would have a
full fourteen days to do operations. They had ten signs
payloads on totally about two hundred pounds worth of stuff
and it operated flawlessly until March sixteen when this lunar
sunset happened and it went cold. And that's the end
of that. That's it. That's the best news story we
got out of all the lunar landers. Was Blue Ghosts
Firefly's first attempt and they nailed it. So Hakudo R,
which flew on that same Falcon nine, was actually Mission II.
There had been a previous attempt, Mission one in twenty
twenty three, which had crashed onto the Moon having run
out of propellant on its way down. Unfortunate, So this
was their second attempt. This is a company called I Space,
is a Japanese commercial space company, and they used a
totally different approach, so they took them longer to get
to the Moon. They did a flyby on February fifteenth,
finally got to lunar orbit in May and circularized by
the end of May. They attempted their landing in June
and crashed agains. This time it was a laser range finders.
They got further down. They did not run on a fuel,
but they did lose control of the vehicle and so it
impacted hard and nothing was functional. Unfortunate second try. I
hope they go again. Third lander, Intuitive Machines. This was
their second attempt. Also, they had flown in the first
one and in one on landing when the legs had
broken and it tipped over. This time they flew on
a Falcon nine in February, did their lunar did their
lunar insertion on in March, and got straight to a
landing attempt, lost contact, possibly due to lunar dust the
terminal dessense phase, and when they got communications back, it
was once again laying on its side, just like I
am one.
Speaker 2: The Falcon nine is the one that can land vertically.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, the Falcon nine booster returns after flying, all right,
but it's not going to do that on the Moon. No,
it doesn't go to the Moon. Its job is to
get that vehicle up in the lower Earth orbit, where
it then flies itself to the lower Moon orbit. Okay,
well they started, Yeah, they can put it in a
lunar orbiti'tion ne really, No lunar orbits are funny, all right. Anyway,
Intuitive Machines is kind of tall and gangly, and it
bloody thing tipped over again. Something went wrong on the
landing once again, they hid some solar power, so it
actually functioned for about thirteen hours and they ran as
much experiments as they could. It had a couple of
rovers on board that weren't able to be deployed. Two failures.
Speaker 2: For like you kid, you know, you don't have the
luxury like Elon does of landing the falcons on Earth.
You can't really do that on the Moon because you
get one shot.
Speaker 1: You get one shot, and you only you know, these
are small vehicles. They are a few hundred pounds, they
only have so much fuel. It's all remote control, right,
you have your it's automated. You have to land yourself.
And they're just learning. It's hard. That being said, take
a look at Blue Ghosts what Firefly did, and it's like,
guys nailed it is possible. That was the first you know,
what Blue Ghosts did. What Firefly did was the very
first successful landing by a commercial company on the Moon.
And finally on the Moon. This is something I talked about.
We've talked about originally some of the basis on the Moon,
which is European Space Agencies moonlight missions. So this is
the moonlight lunar communications and Navigation Services Mission. What it
is is a set of orbiters around the Moon to
provide communications and basically equivalent a GPS navigation information. The
idea is so that spacecraft going to and from the
Moon don't have to carry redundant navigation and communications gear.
They'll carry some, but they'll count on this network to
do their communication, so they can carry more useful payload,
don't have to do quite as much stuff. And it
was only a proposal when we first talked about this
with twenty seventeen twenty eighteen, but this year they sent
out the contract to tails Alinia, who are actually going
to build those navigation satellites so they.
Speaker 2: Can replace all that navigation gear with what's essentially a garbin.
Speaker 1: Well, which typically right now, if you go to the Moon,
you have multiple redundant navigation systems. Most likely what you
do is you have a system that works with moonlight
and a backup one that can run without it. So
if some reason moonlight was down, so you reduce weight
on the spacecraft, you don't have to carry as much gear,
which means you can carry more working payload. That's the
whole idea. So this is the way they make this work.
They're focusing on the South Pole because that's where all
the interest is right now, is trying to get to
Shackleton Crater and see if we can extract water ice
from the Moon. And so one satellite for communications, four
for navigation, so that you can do triangulation between the four. Now,
they don't orbit the way you would think because the
lunar gravity is so irregular. In order to have stable
orbits that don't need constant fuel, use use highly elliptical
orbits they call these elliptical lunar frozen orbits. For the
navigation satellites, they'll have a period of twenty four hours.
So they go from point from start at one point
close to the North pole, then go out ten thousand
kilometers away from the Moon, mostly looking at the South Pole,
and then come back and that takes about twenty four hours.
And so those four mean that over the period where
you'd be landing, if you time it right, you'll be
able to see all four of them. To be able
to continuously triangle at your location when you're landing or
when you're moving around. The comsat would only be a
period of twelve hours, so it's not continuous communications, but
it's enough that you don't have to carry the heavy
transmitting gear to go all the way back to Earth.
You just communicate with the satellite in the windows where
you can see it, which will be ten hours a
day roughly. So they're fully funded. They'll be funded. The
East member states have committed funding through to twenty twenty eight,
which it'll be in full service construction starting now in
twenty twenty five. So there's going to be a navigation
network on the Moon. Wow, that's really cool. It's cool.
It is it's really exciting, and it speaks to building infrastructure,
not just one and done missions, but adding infrastructure to
make every other flight easier.
Speaker 2: Well, and you're probably going to talk about this next,
but you know, Elon wants to go to Mars and
wants to use the Moon as sort of a jumping
off point.
Speaker 1: But it's a good training ground.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, it's a good training ground. But it's kind
of like, you know, not that much closer to Mars
than we are, you know, But that's not the point,
is it. It's more about the fact that there's low gravity,
so launching from Mars would be less you know, energy expensive.
I guess I'll but you still have to get the
supplies there. Here's the real issue. The real issue is
right now, for every space flight, especially all the manned ones,
we bring every breath of air, every drop of water,
every scrap of food, everything with us when you launch,
all of it. And so to go to the Moon,
it's just so many supplies, right, And to go to
Mars even more so. The whole goal of what we're
doing on the Moon is to start using resources on
the Moon, starting with water. Water is a kilo for
every leader. It's a lot of weight. And so if
you could actually start to extract water on the Moon
or on Mars, you don't have to carry as much.
And this is why we were talking about earlier. The
South Pole is an optimal place because not really doesn't
have the ice cap, but it has sunlight twenty four
hours a day.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, So shackledon Crater is a massive crater, huge
city size, big city size, billions of tons of water
ice proposed to be inside this continuously shaded crater. But
the rim of the crater at certain points almost has
sun all month long. In that twenty eight lunar day,
there's always sun on the crater because it's right on
the south pole, and so it's a place where you
could have the solar power and also have access to
the ice. So it's again this is all very experimental.
We should do this mostly with robots before we send
people down there, but we should be experimenting with trying
to get ice, and there are missions coming up in
the next couple of years to actually go and extract
that ice. It's just I got to understand how cold
those shaded areas are. This is like negative two hundred degrees.
That ice is hard, and we don't know what form
it's in, right, We don't know if it's powdered, if
it's crystals, if it's block like. We just don't know
how it was created. So we don't know what shape
is in and what's going to take to actually extract it.
So there's a lot of experimentation to be done before
we go further down the path. But if you can
do it, you can start to extract resources, and then
we start talking about the other resource of the moon
is all kinds of metals, all kinds of materials that
are easy to work on if we can get them
up there. So it's the beginning of making a space
faring civilization, and the Moon is a great testing ground
for that, sure, and you can carry that to Mars.
That being said, not a lot happened in Mars in
twenty twenty five. It's an off year for easy flights.
That being said, there was a flight to Mars. It
was the New Glen launch of Escapade. This is a
space This is two spacecraft called Blue and Gold, are
relatively small that are doing atmospheric analysis on the Moon
on Mars, and they're gonna they're gonna take them a
year and a half to get there, but they launched
this year. And it's about all that happened on the
Moon on Mars except for one other thing. This is
new news, relatively speaking. Okay, So there's a set, there's
a there's a relay network, a set of spacecraft around
the Mars right now. Some of them are older, some
of them newer. There's a spacecraft called Odyssey, there's the
use vehicle called Express. It's a reconnaissance orbiter. There's Maven,
and there's a trace gas orbiter and one of the
These are all sensor sets orbiting the Mars that collect information.
They've gotten pictures of landslides and detected water and all
those sorts of things. But they also relay data from
the various landers, things like perseverance and curiosity. Instead of
having to communicate directly to Earth, they send their data
up to these various orbiters who then relay it back
to the Earth. Right again, like we're trying to do
with moonlight over on the Moon. We have infrastructure on
Mars to make things easier, and it's the Maven spacecraft
that's in trouble. So this was originally proposed in two
thousand and six, it was selecting two thousand and eight.
It flew in twenty thirteen, arrived at Mars in twenty fourteen,
so it's been operating up there for another for a decade.
It should be good for another five plus years. Its
main original job besides this communication relay, was studying the
magnetic fields of Mars, because one of the problems with
Mars is this magnetic field is largely missing. There's evidence
that there was liquid water on Mars, that it had
a useful atmosphere, a dense atmosphere, but the lack of
a magnetic field has allowed solar particles protons to strip
that atmosphere away and we're trying to figure out why
it will help us understand why the Earth hasn't had
that happen. And there's also a case fore this might
have been happening with Venus as well, and so part
of the experiments that Maven does is it flies into
the atmosphere of Mars on a regular basis, and it's
specifically designed to be able to do this. It's solar
panels point forward, so it's stable in that way, but
it has to turn to be able to send data
and to collect power and so forth. And so it
was set into a one hundred and eighty kilometer by
forty five hundred kilometer orbit, which is a dip into
the atmosphere it comes back out. And the way it
happened to be aligned when they did this back in
December is that it flew behind Mars relative the Earth,
so we couldn't see it as it went into that dip.
But when it was supposed to come back out, it
didn't reconnect and call home, so we were trying to
figure out what was going on. I didn't get telemetry,
so then we went in did the raw data analysis,
and it looked like something happened while it was doing that,
and it's now tumbling. The signal sort of came and went.
Wasn't strong enough to maintain a carrier, and so maybe
a fuel leak or an engine misfired or a reaction
wheel is defunct. But we've had problems with it before.
In twenty two and twenty three it went into safe
modes with problems with its inertial navigation, and it was
able to recover. But this is a particularly inopportune moment,
not only because it's now skimming the atmosphere. Sure every
time it does is it gets a little lower orbit
and they'll lose it, but they don't get it handled quickly.
But also we're about to go into sun conjunction, so
the Mars is moving to a point where the Sun
is between us and between the Earth and Mars, so
we're not going to be able to communicate it with it.
So we only have a few weeks to try and
figure out what's happened with Mavin and do and get
it recovered, or likely by the time we can talk
to again, it'll be gone. Wow. So and there's a
question about replacing it, getting another mission up there, and
this is a tough time to be talking about new missions.
So sure, yeah, so that's going on. Okay, a couple
more things. I got to talk about James Web. Yes,
although not a lot of excitement around James Web these days,
it's now doing the hard work it is. You know,
last year we talked about they were doing cycle four
and how they there was twenty three hundred proposals. We're
asking for seventy eight thousand hours of observation time, noting
there's only eight thousand hours in a year, so they
had to select down. They've now done the cycle five
proposals and so well, there were twenty three hundred proposals
in cycle four, there is twenty nine hundred proposals to
cycle five, so huge demand for the thing. And the
crisis in cosmology, which we talked about a lot last year.
I'm not going to go in too much detail because it's
not resolved, but it's also kind of good news. The
crisis in cob osmology is how do we figure out
the age of the universe. And there's two differential strategies,
and James Webb helps make one of them more accurate
than the other, and they are now overlapping less like
it used to be that they were both they overlapped
in time within their areas of their circular area of probability,
and now they're not overlapping. The indication here is that
we're going to have to develop new science to make
sense of any of this. All right, So I got
a question.
Speaker 2: Yeah, when we visited the James Webb Telescope as it
was being built for it was long Doddard. Yeah, at Goddard,
one of the things that we talked about was, you know,
their ultimate goal was to be able to look back
and see the Big Bang.
Speaker 1: Well they couldn't look back to be a bag with closer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, as close as they could get. And how far
back have we gotten? Pretty time far?
Speaker 1: In fact, one of the stories that came out this
year is we've identified a supernova from when the universe
was only seven hundred and thirty million years old, which
is yeah, so yeah, under a billion, like we're talking
we think it's thirteen point eight billion years old. In
twenty four they found a supernova that was one point
eight billionaere That was from one point eight billionaears in
the at the beginning of the universe. So now they've
gotten further back. Like, the problem is that you get
to a point where light didn't work the same way. Right,
there was too much energy in the universe. It was
just all white. So you can only see so far back.
But we're seeing much further back and we're finding errors
in our math. That makes sense. We have to update
our math. That's always good though, that means good things. Yeah,
this is where new science comes from. Like James Webb
is doing its job. It's challenging our assumptions about how
things work. That gravity behavior may have changed over the
duration of the universe, that mass may have changed over
the duration of universe. Like really tricky concepts.
Speaker 2: And any new anything new about dark energy and dark matter.
Speaker 1: Well that's the arguments that are going on right now,
but no, nothing being resolved. The problem here is we've
done the observations. It's question everything we know. Now you
have to work on possible solutions and do further testing
and that takes time. There's no two ways around it.
But James Webb is doing its job. It's in demand.
It's awesome. Yes, Okay, last couple of things. There's a
company recently formed called K two Space, and what they're
talking about is taking advantage of the new heavy lift
vehicles like New Glend and Starship to build big satellites.
You know, for a long time, the push has been
smaller and smaller status lights because they're cheaper and our
ministurization works so well. But they're saying, let's start big,
big one. They call them Mega class, so three meter
by three meter platforms like that would only fit in
really large spacecraft. They've already raised two hundred and fifty
million dollars. That's enough money to fly something, and they
have a contract with the Space Force for demonstration flight.
One of the key pieces of tech they have with
them is a very high powered hall of Thark thruster,
so twenty kilowatt Halifac thruster that takes a lot of electricity.
Those are big solar panels, so you would be talking
about building really big satellites. I think this is super
exciting that we're shining looking at things like New Glen
and Starship and saying what can we build that would
actually take advantage of these heavy loads, and that's what
these guys are working on. That's cool, and that leads
us to our last topic, which I wish I didn't
have to talk about a bunch of people in asking questions,
especially a fellow named Kieran Lanning who pinged me online
to say, hey, what about space based power and this
whole AI in orbit thing?
Speaker 2: All right now, I don't know how real this is,
but I did see something on Facebook. So take that
from what it's worth, because there's lots of BS.
Speaker 1: You know what it's worth.
Speaker 2: It's on face that it was either China or Japan
has successfully built a solar station in space that is
beaming energy back down to Earth.
Speaker 1: So is that BS or is that real? No, they've
done it, but that's never been hard to do. It's
a question of scale, right right, when are you going
to get to meaningful amounts of power? And this feeds
into and we'll talk about this a lot more on
the Energy Geek ount this whole issue about the stress
that artificial intelligence has put on the power grid. Yes,
and so one of the proposals and has now been
companies farmed like Starcloud to say, let's just put it
in orbit, let's put data centers in orbit and power
off of solar panels.
Speaker 2: You know, the thing that you won't have a problem
with is overheating, because it's freaking cold in space.
Speaker 1: That The problem is it is cold in space, but
there's no atmosphere, so it's very hard to get rid
of the heat. You've got. What are the heaviest parts
of the International Space Station are its radiators. When you
look at a picture of the space station, you'll see
these big white panels that are always pointed differently than
the solar panels. Pole panels pointed one way, these light.
Those are heat radiators. They're trying to dissipate the heat
of charging the batteries. Because they spend forty five minutes
in sunlight forty five minutes in darkness, they're constantly switching
between solar power and battery power, solar power, battery power.
Speaker 2: So it has its own challenges besides scale and money.
Speaker 1: Well, no huge problems. So first off, if you're going
to be the low enough orbit that you can actually
have reasonable latency for a data center, then you're always
going to be in shadow unless you put yourself in
a sun synchronous orbit. So a sun synchronous orbit means
you stain in an orbit where you are always in sunlight.
The problem that, of course is the planet is moving
under you, so you're always going to have to be
changing your connections to what you relay against you budget landing.
Speaker 2: And also you're probably gonna have to be either in
Antarctica or the Arctic, right, you're gonna have to be
at one of the poles.
Speaker 1: No, it'd you always be in sunlight, right, No? No.
A sunsynchronous orbit is basically an orbit where you are
orbiting at a rate that the Sun stays over you.
It's okay, but you might be orbiting, but don't you
also have to stay in geosynchronous orbit so that you
don't beam energy back down to Earth at the same spot.
That's only if you're doing yeah, no, if you're if
you're a geosynchronous orbit, then you're always in sunlight because
you're far enough away from the Earth. It's not a
big deal. Okay. The downside is it's six hundred milliseconds
of latency. So a data center is stupid up there,
just doesn't make sense. It's a great place for power,
it's a terrible place for a data.
Speaker 2: Center, all right, okay, right, two different things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, two totally different things. Right, So but these whole ideas,
let's use solar power for data centers, which you know, dude,
that's fine. Dude on the ground. It's just you'll need
such huge batteries that it makes no sense. Yeah, so okay,
you could go into it. There is a lower sun
synchronous orbit. It's a it's a funny inclination, so it's
limited amount of boost to get there. It's also done
stable orbits are always going to be burning fluid to
do it. And then you're going to deploy some huge
solar panels because you want a lot of electricity to
run your data center. Well, all those solar panels create
additional atmospheric drag, so you're going to need even more
fuel to try and stay in orbit. And it's hard
to move something that big without breaking it. And that's
not even the heavy part. The heavy part's going to
be the cooling of those computers. It's hard to cool
them on land, Trying to cool them in space is
hugely problem at it. So the sensible thing if you
really want to put a data center in space, would
be to actually put the power up a geostationary orbit
where you'd never have to move it and then relay
to the data centers. Are you going to do that?
Just put the data center on the ground, right, What's
the diff're because the cooling is easy. You don't have
to lift all that stuff up. Like the logical thing
to do if you really want to do this stuff
in space is to build geostationary orbit power because then
you don't care about the latency. You're just beaming electricity down.
And it'd be great if you would drive that forward.
But if when you do the math on what it's
going to cost to lift those solar panels up, this
makes no sense. This is the pets dot Com of
the AI bubble. And let's let's face it.
Speaker 2: I mean, the AI companies are facing an economic crisis
right now because they're not profitable and you know, and
they're basically subsidizing our fast responses from lllms and it's
not sustainable. So and it may may come to a
head very soon.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's what I'm saying. It's it's this is
the pets dot com, right The last stage of the
dot com boom was these really dumb websites, this really
dumb data center idea is how you know, we're out
of ideas on how to do this faster, like the
time it's going to take you to do this at
scale and space you could have built more power plans online, Like,
what are you doing right? It's just it's another way
to raise money and to keep people distracted and to
keep people excited while you're at the tail end of
and that's a crazy bubble. We'll go further into that
when we talk about the power problems and the energy I.
Speaker 2: Was just going to say, that's a really good teaser
for the next geek Out, which is the Energy geek.
Speaker 1: Out, And believe me, I'm going to do that at
the end of the Energy geek Out because in a
lot of ways, it's a distraction. I expect because of
the time it takes to build any of this, this
whole bubble will be over before any of it comes online.
I think you're right about that. And it's not just
we who think that. I mean, everybody is predicting the
AI bubble shell burst very soon, if it hasn't burst already. Yeah.
They At the beginning of twenty twenty five, it was
all about the AI powerhouse. By the end of twenty
twenty five, it's all about the AI bubble. You can
see it coming. It's pretty obvious. And this is just
the silliest part of it. So far right. I'm all
for space based power. If we want to build it,
that's great. It's expensive, right, That's why the proposal was
Actually mature technology is on the Moon because all the
ingredients to build solar panels are on the Moon, and
that reduced gravity. You'd actually make better crystals on the
Moon than you would on Earth. And then it's not
that hard to get back to geostationary orbit from the Moon.
It's really quite easy because the green gravity is so
much lower. So it would make sense to construct those
panels up there, send them back to geostationary orbit, assemble it,
and then beam the power to the surface, which is
one of the things that Bezos was talking about. Yeah,
this is all possible, but it's not. Also, it's a
decade away or more.
Speaker 2: And the beaming of power is done by microwave. Right,
that's the best idea so far. If you're going space
to space, you can do it with a lasers because
it doesn't vacuum doesn't diffuse it. But as soon as
you want to go through an atmosphere, you're much better
off using microwaves because they go through the atmosphere. And
the problem with microwaves is you want to beam that
to a place on Earth where there's nobody.
Speaker 1: That's going to get in that way of that beam,
because you may fry well, I mean that put a
fence around. Well, it's not going to be dense enough
to fry anything you play. It's not going to cook
birds in flight, like, that's not.
Speaker 2: I was worried about people, not birds, but no birds
you could actually eat.
Speaker 1: Well, it's not going to damage aircraft, like, none of
those things would happen, But you would still want to
put a fence around that, like you shouldn't be walking
around in there, but it's not likely to do any
substantial harm. Microwaves aren't dense enough to do that, not
at that scale. We you know, go back and listen
to the Space based power geek out. We talked through
all of this, although at the time, you know, starship
was just an idea. Like if it's only when we
get down to this couple one hundred dollars a kilogram
to lowerth orbit that even becomes vaguely feasible. But I
would think the more practical thing to do would be
to get mature the technology is on the Moon to
be able to do construction there because here's the fun part.
As soon as you've got space based power working at scale,
it's not just zero emission energy landing on the Earth
and that's awesome, it's also infrastructure for flying spacecraft around.
You know, every space vehicle to be able to maneuver
has to carry some kind of propellant, some kind of engine,
and some kind of power source. When we use chemical rockets,
we've combined the compower source and the compeller pealant together.
But if you think about an electrical engine, like a
Hall effect thrust or an ion engine, your power source
is typically solar panels, and then you have a high
density fuel or propellant like xenon, and the engine is electric.
It accelerates the zene on at high velocities. But solar
panels are heavy and they take up a lot of room.
So what if you could eliminate those by having the
power plant be a stationary thing. So geostationary orbit power system.
You're flying spacecraft back and forth between the Moon and
the Earth, and you could actually beam the power onto
that thing so it doesn't have to carry the weight
of its own big power plant for running those engines
at high power, so it can decelerate. It's really smart,
it's interesting, and it speaks to a more complex future
where we build out this infrastructure in space that allows
us to move vehicles around. You might be only running.
You imagine if we started putting spacecraft into Mars cycler orbits.
So this is like, once you get up to speed,
it'll fly you to Mars in about six months and
back to the Earth in about thirty months on its own.
It doesn't need any more energy after that, but you've
got to get it up to speed. Well that's the
point where you'd be close enough to that space based
power that you could actually beam the power on board
to run that engine, to get it to its speed,
and you never need to run it again. Interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these geek outs are always interesting to me, Richard.
I always learned many, many things. So thank you for
your research and your time and effort that you put
into these things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, they're some of the hardest days at
the end of the year, but they're rewarding to to
get all this together. So I'm glad to have it done.
Speaker 2: And everybody appreciates it. So thank you. All Right, that's
it and we will see you next time on Dot.
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Speaker 1: See you next time. You gotvans.
Speaker 2: And my mess home, then
Speaker 1: My taxes in line credit