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