Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomie podcast. Each episode offers a
Speaker 1: gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
Speaker 1: unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
Speaker 1: of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
Speaker 1: slumber under the night sky.
Speaker 2: Okay, so let's unpack this because for basically the entirety
Speaker 2: of human history, looking up at the Moon has been
Speaker 2: this exercise in I don't know, romantic isolation, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the untouched wilderness exactly.
Speaker 2: You look at that silver disk and it represents this poetic,
Speaker 2: silent rock. But I really want you to just erase
Speaker 2: that image tonight, because when you look up now, you
Speaker 2: aren't looking at a silent wilderness. You are looking at
Speaker 2: a booming, highly capitalized, and incredibly active construction site.
Speaker 3: Oh. Absolutely, it's a complete paradigm shift.
Speaker 2: The physical, technological, and honestly the economic foundation for a
Speaker 2: permanent human neighborhood is being poured right now, and the
Speaker 2: sheer scale of the capital being deployed to do it
Speaker 2: is just staggering. We are fundamentally shifting from science fiction
Speaker 2: into the gritty world of well municipal planning in a vacuum.
Speaker 3: We really are the era of exploration, that whole Apollo
Speaker 3: mindset of planting a flag, leaving some footprints, and coming
Speaker 3: right back home. That is entirely over. What we're witnessing
Speaker 3: right now is the deployment of permanent infrastructure. And to
Speaker 3: really grasp the mechanics of the shift, you have to
Speaker 3: look at the structural overhaul of how we move mass
Speaker 3: off this.
Speaker 2: Planet, which has always been the bottleneck.
Speaker 3: Rest Exactly for decades, the dominant model was the monolithic
Speaker 3: government designed spacecraft. It was exquisite, custom built, slow, and
Speaker 3: just astronomically expensive. You just can't build a permanent, expanding
Speaker 3: base using these bespoke one off vehicles, right.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you're building a sky scraper in Manhattan,
Speaker 2: you don't commission a team of engineers to design and
Speaker 2: build a brand new custom delivery truck from scratch every
Speaker 2: single time you need a load of.
Speaker 3: Steel, No, of course not.
Speaker 2: You just hire a logistics company that already has a fleet,
Speaker 2: like FedEx or ups.
Speaker 3: And that is exactly the pivot NASA has made here.
Speaker 3: They have essentially decided to stop building their own delivery trucks.
Speaker 3: They are now hiring the lunar equivalent of FedEx to
Speaker 3: handle the freight.
Speaker 2: It's just wild to think about.
Speaker 3: It is, and the underlying economics of that decision are fascinating.
Speaker 3: We are looking at a nearly six hundred million dollar
Speaker 3: investment specifically targeted at four commercial moon landings, and all
Speaker 3: of these are scheduled to touch down in late twenty
Speaker 3: twenty eight.
Speaker 2: So this is part of the CLPS initiative, right the
Speaker 2: commercial nounopayload services.
Speaker 3: That's the one, and the distribution of that capital tells
Speaker 3: a very specific story about redundancy and competition. So you
Speaker 3: have Astrobotic receiving two hundred and ninety seven point nine
Speaker 3: million dollars to execute two separate surface deliveries.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And then Firefly Aerospace was awarded one hundred and
Speaker 3: forty four point two million for one delivery, and Intuitive
Speaker 3: Machines is getting one hundred and forty eight point three
Speaker 3: million for another.
Speaker 2: But you know, here is the thing that really stood
Speaker 2: out to me when looking at the architecture of these formassions.
Speaker 2: They aren't unveiling some radical, never before seen sci fi spacecraft.
Speaker 3: No, not at all.
Speaker 2: They are explicitly using upgraded versions of landers that have
Speaker 2: already flown, which I mean from a pr standpoint, maybe
Speaker 2: that sounds less exciting, but from a logistics standpoint, it
Speaker 2: feels incredibly pragmatic.
Speaker 3: Well, pragmatism is literally the only way to survive the
Speaker 3: tyranny of the rocket equation. Ryan Stefan, he's the acting
Speaker 3: director of cargo landers for the Moon base. He framed
Speaker 3: this beautifully. He characterized this entire operational phase as a
Speaker 3: proving ground. But the key metric he highlighted wasn't thrust
Speaker 3: or you know, payload capacity. It was ordering cadence.
Speaker 2: Ordering cadence meaning like the actual frequency with which they
Speaker 2: can just swipe the credit card and put a box
Speaker 2: on the Moon.
Speaker 3: Exactly that. Because the traditional spaceflight model meant waiting ten
Speaker 3: or fifteen years between missions. If a single valve stuck
Speaker 3: or a sensor degraded under radiation, the entire program would
Speaker 3: just grind to a halt for a multi year redesign.
Speaker 2: Right totally buralyzing.
Speaker 3: But the commercial competition model flips that. If an intuitive
Speaker 3: machines lander has a thruster anomaly, they don't scrap the
Speaker 3: whole architecture, they pull the telemetry, tweak the upgraded model,
Speaker 3: and they fly the next iteration a few months later.
Speaker 2: Let's run the numbers on that cadence, though, because this
Speaker 2: is where the sheer volume of traffic becomes real. To me.
Speaker 2: We are talking about seventeen lunar surface deliveries already on
Speaker 2: the books.
Speaker 3: Seventeen.
Speaker 2: It's incredible, seventeen if you map that out over the
Speaker 2: next decade. The phrase lunar highway isn't just some cute metaphor.
Speaker 2: It is a literal description of the orbital mechanics between
Speaker 2: Earth and the Moon. Right now, we are moving away
Speaker 2: from these historic world stopping events into basically a scheduled
Speaker 2: transit system.
Speaker 3: And this is a big but a The scheduled transit
Speaker 3: system built on a decentralized commercial fleet introduces a massive
Speaker 3: scientific and engineering headache. How so, well, think about the
Speaker 3: variables at play here. Astrobotic, firefly and intuitive machines are
Speaker 3: all utilizing highly proprietary delivery vehicles. They have different structural geometries,
Speaker 3: different engine thrust profiles, different propellant mixtures, and vastly different
Speaker 3: autonomous descent software.
Speaker 2: Oh right, and they aren't all landing at the same
Speaker 2: spaceport either, they are targeting entirely different regions of the
Speaker 2: lunar surface, exactly like Astrobotic might be putting down near
Speaker 2: an equatorial mare while Firefly is targeting a heavily cratered
Speaker 2: plateau near the.
Speaker 3: South Pole, which means the physical interaction between the vehicle
Speaker 3: and the lunar environment during touchdown is going to be
Speaker 3: completely unique on every single flight. So if your NASA
Speaker 3: and you are trying to gather reliable, actionable engineering data
Speaker 3: to design your future permanent habitats, how do you account
Speaker 3: for all those vehicle specific variables.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense. Like if a sensor spikes on
Speaker 2: the Firefly lander, was that caused by the unique geology
Speaker 2: of the South Pole or was it just a weird
Speaker 2: vibration resonance from Firefly's specific engine design.
Speaker 3: Precisely, you have no way of knowing unless you have
Speaker 3: a control Okay, wait, I.
Speaker 2: Have to push back on the solution to this though,
Speaker 2: because payload mass is the single most expensive commodity in
Speaker 2: the Solar System. Yeah, every gram you lift out of
Speaker 2: Earth's gravity well costs thousands of dollars. It does, so
Speaker 2: NASA's mandate. Their solution to this data problem is to
Speaker 2: force all four of these late twenty twenty eight flights
Speaker 2: to carry the exact same trio of science instruments. But
Speaker 2: if we already know the instrument works on the first flight,
Speaker 2: flying the exact same mass three more times feels like
Speaker 2: a staggering redundancy, doesn't it. Yeah, Like why burn millions
Speaker 2: of dollars in payload capacity just to replicate the cargo.
Speaker 3: Because without that replication, the data is essentially worthless for
Speaker 3: building predictive models. Joel Kerns, the Deputy Associate Administrator, likened
Speaker 3: this stratug to deploying a network of weather stations. If
Speaker 3: you build the most sophisticated weather station on Earth and
Speaker 3: put it in Chicago, you still know absolutely nothing about
Speaker 3: the global climate. You only have localized data for Chicago.
Speaker 2: Right, But you wouldn't put four weather stations in Chicago.
Speaker 3: Now, you put one in Chicago, one in the Sahara,
Speaker 3: one in the Amazon, and one in Antarctica. But and
Speaker 3: this is the critical part, you have to make sure
Speaker 3: all four stations are using the exact same brand of
Speaker 3: thermometer and the exact same animometer. Oh I say, because
Speaker 3: these landers have different thrusts, use different fuels, and are
Speaker 3: landing in different topographies. The scientific method actually demands a
Speaker 3: standardized control payload. By flying the identical instruments on all
Speaker 3: four missions, they isolate the lander as a variable. They
Speaker 3: aren't just taking isolated readings anymore. They are creating a baseline.
Speaker 2: A baseline for the new neighborhood. I love that, and
Speaker 2: that actually brings us to the first of these three
Speaker 2: mandated standardized tools, which is designed to tap the most chaotic, violent,
Speaker 2: and just immediate threat to any lunar infrastructure.
Speaker 3: The landing itself.
Speaker 2: Exactly the final descent.
Speaker 3: Right the interaction between the exhaust plume and the regolith.
Speaker 2: Here's where it gets really interesting. Let's talk about the
Speaker 2: physics of that interaction, because I think a lot of
Speaker 2: people picture a lunar landing like a helicopter touching down
Speaker 2: in a desert. The dust billows up in these big
Speaker 2: fluffy clouds, swirls around a bit, and eventually settles.
Speaker 3: That's the movie version.
Speaker 2: But the reality of a lunar landing is closer to
Speaker 2: a sustained microscopic explosion.
Speaker 3: It really is. We have to completely discard our earth
Speaker 3: bound intuition about how dust behaves on Earth. Sand and
Speaker 3: dirt are the products of millions of years of continuous weathering.
Speaker 3: They're tumbled by rivers, blown by atmospheric winds, ground down
Speaker 3: by glaciers. So there's soft Yeah, the edges of a
Speaker 3: grain of sand on Earth are generally rounded and smooth.
Speaker 2: Put on the Moon, you have a hard vacuum, no wind,
Speaker 2: no rain, no atmospheric friction none.
Speaker 3: Unar regolith was created over billions of years by micrometeorites
Speaker 3: slamming into the basaltic surface at hypervelocity. They basically shatter
Speaker 3: the bedrock into microscopic fragments, and because there is no
Speaker 3: weathering process to smooth them out, those particles remain incredibly jagged. Wow.
Speaker 3: They are essentially microscopic shards of razor sharp glass.
Speaker 2: And beyond the shape, there's the electrostatic charge. Because there's
Speaker 2: no atmosphere to shield the surface, some solar radiation. The
Speaker 2: Sun's ultraviolet light knocks electrons off the dust particles, giving
Speaker 2: them the strong positive charge. So they repel each other,
Speaker 2: but they cling desperately to literally anything they touch.
Speaker 3: Exactly. Now, introduce a chemical rocket engine into that environment.
Speaker 3: When a lander fires its descent engines to bleed off
Speaker 3: orbital velocity. It isn't blowing air. It is expelling superheated
Speaker 3: gas at thousands of meters per second into a vacuum,
Speaker 3: which is terrifying, right because on Earth, the atmosphere provides
Speaker 3: resistance which causes the exhaust to billow and swirl into
Speaker 3: those fluffy cloudsy meen. But in a vacuum, there is
Speaker 3: no atmospheric pressure to push back, so the exhaust expands
Speaker 3: outward radially, incredibly fast and completely parallel to the ground.
Speaker 2: So it picks up these electrostatically charged microscopic glass shards
Speaker 2: and accelerates them outward as supersonic speeds. It's not a
Speaker 2: dust cloud at all. It's a continuous three hundred and
Speaker 2: sixty degree shotgun blast.
Speaker 3: That is the lunar plume. And we know exactly how
Speaker 3: destructive this is because we've actually seen it.
Speaker 2: During Apollo.
Speaker 3: Right, Yes, Apolo twelve, Pete Conrad and Alan Bean executed
Speaker 3: a precision landing of the Intrepid Lunar module about one
Speaker 3: hundred and sixty meters away from the Robotic Survey three probe,
Speaker 3: which had landed there a few years prior, and when
Speaker 3: they walked over to inspect surveyor three. They found that
Speaker 3: the exhaust plume from their own landing had completely sand
Speaker 3: blasted the probe. It pitted the metal and deeply scored
Speaker 3: the optical lenses. And that was despite being over a
Speaker 3: football field away.
Speaker 2: And that was just a tiny apollo descent stage. Now
Speaker 2: we're talking about landing assive commercial cargo freighters, eventually followed
Speaker 2: by multiton habitats and extraction machinery.
Speaker 3: It scales up the danger exponentially.
Speaker 2: If you land your supply flator too close to your
Speaker 2: permanent solar array, your own engine exhaust will strip the
Speaker 2: protective coatings right off the panels and permanently blind all
Speaker 2: your optical sensors, which.
Speaker 3: Is exactly why the first standardized instrument is absolutely critical
Speaker 3: for base planning. It's called the Stereo Camera for Lunar
Speaker 3: Plume Surface Studies or six SCALPSS.
Speaker 2: I love when engineers clearly work backward to create a
Speaker 2: good acronym, says scale. PSSC is memorable at least, but
Speaker 2: the engineering inside SIPPSS is brilliant. It utilizes an array
Speaker 2: of four cameras mounted around the base of the lander,
Speaker 2: and it employs stereophotogrammetry. Okay, let's break down how stereophotogrammetry
Speaker 2: actually works in this context, because they aren't just taking
Speaker 2: a cool go pro video of the dust flying around.
Speaker 3: No. No, they are measuring the physical volume of the
Speaker 3: crater being excavated in real time by having four cameras
Speaker 3: with overlappping fields of view. SCALPSS uses parallax, which is
Speaker 3: the same principle, are two eyes used to perceive depth.
Speaker 3: So as the engine fires and the gas begins displacing
Speaker 3: the regolith, SCALPSS takes continuous, simultaneous images. The software then
Speaker 3: analyzes the slight differences in perspective between the cameras to
Speaker 3: calculate the exact distance to millions of individual points on
Speaker 3: the ground below.
Speaker 2: So it's basically mapping the erosion as it happens exactly.
Speaker 3: It creates a high fidelity, three dimensional topographical map that
Speaker 3: updates multiple times a second during the final seconds of descent.
Speaker 3: It shows exactly how deep the thrust is digging into
Speaker 3: the surface, the angle of the trench being carved, and
Speaker 3: the total mass of the material being ejected.
Speaker 2: And because NASA is forcing astrobotic firefly and intuitive machines
Speaker 2: to all carry SCALPSS. They get this three D data
Speaker 2: across a massive variety of variable right, they get to
Speaker 2: see how a continuous throttle engine excavates dust compared to
Speaker 2: like a pulse to engine. They see the difference in
Speaker 2: plume dynamics when landing on impacted equatorial regolith versus the
Speaker 2: looser colder soils at the south pole.
Speaker 3: And they are feeding all of this data into fluid
Speaker 3: dynamics supercomputers to build a universal predictive model. Because if
Speaker 3: you want to build a permanent moon base, you need
Speaker 3: zoning laws. Zoning laws, yet you need a mathematical certainty
Speaker 3: that tells you if we place our habitat here, the
Speaker 3: landing pad for the supply rockets must be exactly eight
Speaker 3: hundred meters away behind a topographical berm to ensure the
Speaker 3: habitat doesn't get shredded by supersonic glass.
Speaker 2: Okay, so scale PSS solves the landing hazard. It allows
Speaker 2: us to mathematically zone the base. The violent descend is over,
Speaker 2: the engines cut off, and the microscopic glass storm finally settles.
Speaker 2: But now you have a multimillion dollar lander sitting in
Speaker 2: the middle of a barren gray, hyper extreme environment. The
Speaker 2: next massive logistical hurdle is knowing exactly where you.
Speaker 3: Are right navigation without infrastructure on Earth, we take absolute
Speaker 3: location for granted. We have this constellation of dozens of
Speaker 3: GPS satellites constantly broadcasting highly precise timing signals that allow
Speaker 3: our phones to triangulate our position down to a few meters.
Speaker 2: But the moon has no GPS.
Speaker 3: The moon has zero GPS.
Speaker 2: And beyond that, the visual landmarks can be incredibly deceptive.
Speaker 3: Right yeah.
Speaker 2: The lack of atmospheric haze completely messes with human depth perception.
Speaker 2: A mountain that looks like it's a two hour hike
Speaker 2: away might actually be fifty miles distant.
Speaker 3: Oh absolutely.
Speaker 2: And the shadows cast by the sun in a vacuum
Speaker 2: are absolute pitch black. They completely hide craters and ravines.
Speaker 2: You can't just look out the window and draw an
Speaker 2: X on a map.
Speaker 3: Which is why the second standardized payload is so deeply elegant.
Speaker 3: It's called the laser retro reflector array, or the l array.
Speaker 2: This is perhaps my favorite piece of technology in this
Speaker 2: entire discussion, because when you read the technical specs, it
Speaker 2: sounds absurdly low tech compared to the rocket it's riding on.
Speaker 2: We are talking about a device roughly the size.
Speaker 3: Of a cookie, just a little cookie.
Speaker 2: It's a hemispherical aluminum frame, and embedded inside that dome
Speaker 2: are eight tiny quartz corner cube prisms. And that's it.
Speaker 3: Well, the brilliance of the LRA is precisely its lack
Speaker 3: of complexity. When you engineer systems for deep space, complexity
Speaker 3: is your worst enemy. Active systems require power. Batteries freeze
Speaker 3: during the fourteen day lunar night when temperatures drop to
Speaker 3: negative two hundred degrees celsius, right solar panels degrade from radiation,
Speaker 3: Electronic circuits get fried by cosmic rays. The LRA has
Speaker 3: zero moving parts. It requires absolutely zero electrical power. It
Speaker 3: is an entirely passive piece of optical geometry.
Speaker 2: So in the middle of all this billion dollar high
Speaker 2: tech rocketry, we are basically leaving behind a highly engineered,
Speaker 2: immortal bicycle reflector.
Speaker 3: That's exactly what it is. What's fascinating here is the
Speaker 3: sheer resilience of passive technology and the brutal environment of space.
Speaker 2: Wait, how does a corner cube prism actually work? Why
Speaker 2: don't just use a flat mirror?
Speaker 3: Good question, if you shine a laser at a flat mirror,
Speaker 3: the light bounces off at an angle equal to the
Speaker 3: angle it struck. So if you are orbiting the Moon
Speaker 3: in a command module and you shine a laser down
Speaker 3: at a flat mirror on the surface, unless you are
Speaker 3: perfectly perpendicularly aligned directly above it.
Speaker 2: The laser will bounce off into deep space exactly.
Speaker 3: You'll never see the return signal.
Speaker 2: But a corner cube is different, very different.
Speaker 3: A corner cube is essentially the inside corner of a
Speaker 3: perfect glass box three mutually perpendicular flat surfaces. Because of
Speaker 3: the geometry of those three angles, any light that enters
Speaker 3: the prism bounces off all three walls and is reflected
Speaker 3: back on the exact same vector it arrived on. Oh wow,
Speaker 3: it does not matter what angle the spacecraft is at
Speaker 3: when it fires a laser. The light always returns straight
Speaker 3: to the source.
Speaker 2: So a future incoming lander or an orbiting satellite can
Speaker 2: just sweep the surface with a laser altimeter. The moment
Speaker 2: the laser hits that cookie sized lra on the ground,
Speaker 2: the photon packet bounces straight back to the ship's sensor.
Speaker 3: And because we know the speed of light is a constant,
Speaker 3: the ship's computer simply measures the time of flight microscopic
Speaker 3: fraction of a second it took for the laser to
Speaker 3: travel down and back. That single measurement instantly gives the
Speaker 3: spacecraft its exact distance from that specific fixed point on
Speaker 3: the lunar surface.
Speaker 2: But there has to be an engineering catch here. If
Speaker 2: it's just quartz and aluminum, how does it survive the
Speaker 2: thermal expansion the moon swings from boiling hot in the
Speaker 2: sun to hundreds of degrees below zero in the shade.
Speaker 2: Wouldn't the aluminum frame contract in the cold and just
Speaker 2: crush the quartz prism.
Speaker 3: That is the exact thermal engineering nightmare that went into
Speaker 3: designing the housing. The quartz prisms are actually floating within
Speaker 3: the aluminum dome. Really yeah. They are held in place
Speaker 3: by highly specialized retention rings that absorb the different coefficients
Speaker 3: of thermal expansion. So the aluminum expands and contracts violently
Speaker 3: with the temperature swings, but the quartz prisms remain isolated
Speaker 3: and perfectly aligned.
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate long term unicipal investment. By forcing
Speaker 2: every single one of these commercial landings to bolt an
Speaker 2: LRA to their roof, Yessa isn't just navigating these specific missions,
Speaker 2: long after the astrobotic or firefly landers have completely dyed,
Speaker 2: their batteries, dead, their circuits fried, just sitting there as
Speaker 2: silent monuments, those quartz prisms will still be functioning perfectly.
Speaker 3: We are laying down a permanent, fail proof navigational grid.
Speaker 3: Ten twenty or fifty years from now, when the Lunar
Speaker 3: Transit Highway is crowded with autonomous cargo freighters, they won't
Speaker 3: be landing blind. They will be using the LRAY grid
Speaker 3: established by these twenty twenty eight missions to triangulate their
Speaker 3: descent profiles down to the millimeter.
Speaker 2: Okay, so we've mapped the destructive physics of the landing
Speaker 2: plume with SCALOPSS, we've laid down the immortal location grid
Speaker 2: with the LRA. We can land safely and we know
Speaker 2: our exact coordinates. But now we have to deal with
Speaker 2: the most fragile cargo.
Speaker 3: Of all biology, the human element.
Speaker 2: Yes, because the lunar surface is a profoundly toxic environment
Speaker 2: for organic chemistry. We often get caught up in the
Speaker 2: romance of space travel and forget that the universe is
Speaker 2: constantly throwing invisible, highly charged energy at you, basically trying
Speaker 2: to kill you.
Speaker 3: It is actively hostile. We take Earth's magnetic field for granted.
Speaker 3: The dynamo generated by Earth's molten iron core creates a
Speaker 3: massive magnetosphere that acts as a planetary deflector shield. It
Speaker 3: redirects the vast majority of the lethal solar and cosmic
Speaker 3: radiation safely around the planet.
Speaker 2: But the Moon has no active dynamo.
Speaker 3: Right It has no global magnetic field. It is completely
Speaker 3: naked to the cosmos.
Speaker 2: Which brings us to the third standardized instrument, the linear
Speaker 2: energy transfer spectrometer, or LS. And to understand what LS
Speaker 2: is measuring, we need to categorize the two distinct types
Speaker 2: of radiation bombarding the linar surface right correct.
Speaker 3: The first category is solar particle events or spees. These
Speaker 3: are driven directly by the Sun. During a solar flare
Speaker 3: or a coronal mass ejection, the Sun expels a massive
Speaker 3: wave of highly energized protons. These events are somewhat directional,
Speaker 3: and they can spike incredibly rapidly, so.
Speaker 2: If an astronaut is caught outside on the lunar surface
Speaker 2: during a sear vere spe without adequate physical shielding.
Speaker 3: The acute radiation poisoning can be lethal within hours.
Speaker 2: That's horrifying. So that's the localized weather of our solar system.
Speaker 2: But the second type is arguably much more terrifying because
Speaker 2: of where it comes from.
Speaker 3: Yes, galactic cosmic rays or GCRs, these do not originate
Speaker 3: from our sun. GCRs are heavy, high energy ions, often
Speaker 3: the nuclei of atoms like iron or carbon that have
Speaker 3: been stripped of their electrons and accelerated to nearly the
Speaker 3: speed of light by cataclysmic events outside our solar system,
Speaker 3: like distant supernovas.
Speaker 2: Basically microscopic cannonballs.
Speaker 3: That's a very apt description. Because they possess such immense
Speaker 3: kinetic energy, they are incredibly difficult to shield against. When
Speaker 3: a GCR smashes into the aluminum hull of a spacecraft
Speaker 3: or you know, the fabric of a spacesuit, it doesn't
Speaker 3: just stop. It shatters the atoms of the shielding material,
Speaker 3: creating a secondary shower of highly energetic subatomic particles that
Speaker 3: continue inward.
Speaker 2: Oh I see.
Speaker 3: And when those particles strike human tissue, they sever the
Speaker 3: bonds of DNA strands, leading to long term severe health
Speaker 3: consequences like cancer, central nervous system degradation, and cataracts.
Speaker 2: So how does lts actually measure this invisible barrage. The
Speaker 2: documentation notes it relies on a compact solid state silicon detector.
Speaker 2: But how does a piece of silicon tell you what
Speaker 2: kind of radiation is hitting you?
Speaker 3: It all comes down to the physics of semiconductor junctions.
Speaker 3: The silicon in the LT sensor acts like an electronic tripwire.
Speaker 3: When a high energy particle, whether it's a proton from
Speaker 3: the Sun or an iron nucleus from a supernova, passes
Speaker 3: through the silicon lattice, it violently knocks electrons out of
Speaker 3: their orbits. This creates what we call electron hole pairs.
Speaker 2: So it essentially generates a microscopic electrical charge inside the silicon.
Speaker 3: Exactly, and the magnitude of that electrical charge is directly
Speaker 3: proportional to how much energy that specific particle deposited into
Speaker 3: the silicon as it passed through. This is the linear
Speaker 3: energy transfer the instrument is named for, so doesn't just
Speaker 3: buzz like an old school Geiger counter to say warning radiation.
Speaker 3: It measures the exact energy profile of every single particle strike.
Speaker 2: Meaning it can differentiate between a barrage of solar protons
Speaker 2: and a heavy strike from a galactic cosmic ray.
Speaker 3: It maps the localized radiation environment with incredible fidelity, and
Speaker 3: by flying elets on all four of these different commercial landers,
Speaker 3: we can finally answer the critical questions about secondary radiation,
Speaker 3: like does landing inside a deep crater provide natural shielding
Speaker 3: against GCRs coming from the horizon, or does the chemical
Speaker 3: composition of the regolith at the south pole generate more
Speaker 3: secondary particle showers when struck by radiation than the regolith
Speaker 3: at the equator.
Speaker 2: We have to know those answers before we pour the
Speaker 2: concrete for the habitats. I mean, if the secondary radiation
Speaker 2: shower from the regolith is too high, you can't just
Speaker 2: pile dirt on top of your habitat to protect the crew,
Speaker 2: which has been a leading theory for base construction for decades.
Speaker 3: Exactly the ality edgent directly dictates the engineering pipe line
Speaker 3: for the entire Artemis program. It tells the material scientists
Speaker 3: exactly how thick the walls of the pressurized rovers need
Speaker 3: to be. It tells the spacesuit designers what kinds of
Speaker 3: hydrogen rich polymers they need to incorporate into the fabric
Speaker 3: to absorb those heavy ions.
Speaker 2: It's all infrastructure scale PSS maps the dust, so we
Speaker 2: don't destroy our own hardware. LRA lays down the immortal
Speaker 2: navigation grid so we don't get lost. LTS maps the
Speaker 2: radiation hazard so we don't inadvertently poison the crew. These
Speaker 2: three instruments are the advanced scouts. They are, but NASA
Speaker 2: isn't just planning for the scouts. They are already designing
Speaker 2: the heavy industrial machinery required to follow them.
Speaker 3: And this is where we transition from the theory of
Speaker 3: a moon base to the physical reality of an industrial operation.
Speaker 3: The infrastructure currently moving through the procurement and design phases
Speaker 3: is just massive.
Speaker 2: Let's look at the robotic source, specifically the Promise rover,
Speaker 2: the polar rover for observation, mapping and INCITU exploration. The
Speaker 2: engineering lineage here is vital because is heavily based on
Speaker 2: the architecture of the Mars Perseverance and Curiosity.
Speaker 3: Rovers which are incredible machines.
Speaker 2: Right. Those are nuclear powered, incredibly robust platforms that have
Speaker 2: survived years in hostile environments. But Promise isn't going to
Speaker 2: the Moon to look for ancient microbes. Its mission is
Speaker 2: pure resource prospecting.
Speaker 3: It is the ultimate expression of incitu resource utilization or ISRU.
Speaker 3: We briefly touched on the tyranny of the rocket equation earlier,
Speaker 3: but we need to look closely at the math to
Speaker 3: understand why ISRU is the only path forward.
Speaker 2: Let's do the math because the concept of bringing everything
Speaker 2: from Earth sounds reasonable until you calculate the mass fraction right.
Speaker 3: To put one kilogram of payload onto the surface of
Speaker 3: the Moon, you need dozens, sometimes hundreds of kilograms of
Speaker 3: rocket fuel just to break Earth's gravitational pull and execute
Speaker 3: the translunar injection burn. If your permanent Moon base requires
Speaker 3: thousands of gallons of water for the crew to drink
Speaker 3: and thousands of kilograms of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen
Speaker 3: to fuel the turn rockets back to Earth, you cannot
Speaker 3: mathematically launch all of that from Florida. The rockets would
Speaker 3: have to be impossibly large.
Speaker 2: You would be like trying to build an entire city
Speaker 2: in the middle of Antarctica, but you stubbornly refuse to
Speaker 2: use the local ice for water, and instead you insist
Speaker 2: on airlifting every single plastic bottle of Avian all the
Speaker 2: way from Paris. The logistics chain would bankrupt the planet.
Speaker 3: It is an economic dead end. So the only way
Speaker 3: a permanent presence survives is if it can live off
Speaker 3: the land. And we know from orbital spectrometry that the
Speaker 3: permanently shadowed craters at the lunar South Pole contain vast
Speaker 3: deposits of water ice.
Speaker 2: Right Because those crater floors haven't seen sunlight in billions of.
Speaker 3: Years exactly, they act as massive cold traps, preserving the
Speaker 3: ice delivered by ancient.
Speaker 2: Comments enter the Promise rover.
Speaker 3: Promise is designed to drive down into those lightless cryogenic craters.
Speaker 3: It is equipped with ground penetrating radar and drills to
Speaker 3: map the exact concentration and depth of the ice deposits.
Speaker 3: It is laying the groundwork for the extraction machinery.
Speaker 2: The extraction itself is a terrifying thermal engineering problem. Yeah,
Speaker 2: let's say Promise finds the Motherlow device. It's sitting in
Speaker 2: a vacuum at roughly forty kelvin, which is just barely
Speaker 2: above absolute zero. You can't just scoop it up and
Speaker 2: put it in a bucket.
Speaker 3: No, you can't. If you apply heat to water ice
Speaker 3: in a vacuum, it doesn't melt into a liquid. It sublimates.
Speaker 2: It flashes instantly from a solid straight into a vapor.
Speaker 3: Exactly capturing that vapor, pressurizing it, and then running an
Speaker 3: electrical current through it. Electrolysis to split the H two
Speaker 3: molecules into hydrogen and oxygen gas, and then cryogenically cooling
Speaker 3: those gases back down into the liquid rocket fuel. Doing
Speaker 3: all that autonomously in a dark crater at absolute zero
Speaker 3: is one of the greatest engineering challenges in human history.
Speaker 2: But if we solve it, the Moon ceases to be
Speaker 2: a destination, It becomes a gas station. It becomes the
Speaker 2: primary refueling depot for the entire Inner Solar system.
Speaker 3: And Promise is just the tip of the industrial sphere.
Speaker 3: We are also looking at the Artemis Lunar Terrain Vehicles
Speaker 3: leaded for twenty twenty five. This is not the little
Speaker 3: fold of dune buggy that Apollo fifteen brought along. The
Speaker 3: LTV is a highly capable, unpressurized utility vehicle. It is
Speaker 3: designed to be operated manually by suited astronauts, but critically
Speaker 3: it can also operate completely autonomously when the crew isn't there.
Speaker 3: It has to survive the brutal thermal cycling of the
Speaker 3: lunar night, meaning its battery and thermal management systems are
Speaker 3: orders of magnitude more advanced than anything we've deployed before.
Speaker 2: And to manage all these autonomous rovers, supply landers and
Speaker 2: prospecting drills, you need bandwidth, which brings us to perhaps
Speaker 2: the most critical piece of municipal infrastructure, the lunar communication
Speaker 2: and navigation relay constellation. It really sounds like they are
Speaker 2: laying down the lunar Internet and the municipal power grid.
Speaker 3: That's exactly what they're doing. You cannot run an industrial
Speaker 3: operation on a delay, and you certainly can't run it
Speaker 3: if your assets lose line of sight with Earth. Currently,
Speaker 3: if a rover drives behind a mountain or into a
Speaker 3: deep crater at the South Pole, the bulk of the
Speaker 3: Moon physically blocks the radio signal to Earth. The rover
Speaker 3: goes completely dark.
Speaker 2: So plan is to launch a dedicated fleet of relay
Speaker 2: satellites into lunar orbit. We are essentially building a high
Speaker 2: bandwidth municipal Wi Fi network that allows the Promise rover
Speaker 2: down in the dark crater to beam its ground penetrating
Speaker 2: radar data up to a satellite, which then relays it
Speaker 2: seamlessly back to mission control in Houston.
Speaker 3: It provides constant connectivity and redundant navigation to the entire
Speaker 3: lunar surface. When you combine the commercial FedEx delivery fleet,
Speaker 3: the SCALP PSS zoning data, the immortal LRA navigation grid,
Speaker 3: the Lickyse radiation models, the Promise prospecting operations, and the
Speaker 3: orbital communications relay, you are looking at the birth of
Speaker 3: a complete, self sustaining logistical ecosystem.
Speaker 2: Which brings us to the ultimate question, why why are
Speaker 2: we pouring billions of dollars into building this permanent industrial
Speaker 2: municipal grid on the Moon right now with these specific
Speaker 2: missions in late twenty twenty eight. To understand the urgency,
Speaker 2: you have to pull back and look at the brighter timeline.
Speaker 2: This isn't happening in isolation.
Speaker 3: The broader architecture is advancing at an incredibly aggressive pace.
Speaker 3: We are looking at the Artemis, a second crewed flyby
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty six, which will take humans beyond lower
Speaker 3: th orbit for the first time in half a century.
Speaker 3: Following that is the highly complex Artemis the third mission,
Speaker 3: which aims to return boots to the surface. And simultaneously,
Speaker 3: the commercial sector is matching the pace, with companies like
Speaker 3: Blue Origin conducting massive structural testing of their MK one
Speaker 3: endurance cargo landers.
Speaker 2: So what does this all mean? It really is a
Speaker 2: golden age of aerospace engineering. For decades it felt like
Speaker 2: we were permanently stuck in low Earth orbit, just doing
Speaker 2: laps in the space station. Now the paradigm is shifting
Speaker 2: underneath us in real time. But the Moon, despite all
Speaker 2: this incredible infrastructure, isn't actually the final goal, is it.
Speaker 3: If we connect this to the bigger picture, the Moon
Speaker 3: is the ultimate operational stress test everything we are building,
Speaker 3: the resource extraction, the radiation shielding, the dust mitigation. The
Speaker 3: autonomous logistics is explicitly designed as a dress rehearsal for Mars.
Speaker 2: Because Mars is an exponentially more difficult physics problem.
Speaker 3: It is a completely different regima survival. The Moon is
Speaker 3: essentially our backyard. It is a three day transit from Earth.
Speaker 3: If a catastrophic failure occurs, say an oxygen scrubber fails
Speaker 3: or a habitat depressurizes, the communication delay to mission control
Speaker 3: is only about one point three seconds. You can talk
Speaker 3: to the engineers in Houston in real time troubleshoot the problem,
Speaker 3: and there is a theoretical possibility of executing an emergency
Speaker 3: aboard and getting the crew home in a matter of days.
Speaker 3: We survive the Apollo thirteen explosion precisely because of that proximity.
Speaker 2: But Mars strips away that safety net entirely.
Speaker 3: The orbital mechanics of Mars are ruthless. Depending on planetary alignment,
Speaker 3: it is a seven to nine month transit just to
Speaker 3: reach orbit. Once you land, the physics of the Solar
Speaker 3: System dictate that you cannot simply turn around a fly home.
Speaker 3: You must wait on the surface for roughly a year
Speaker 3: and a half until Earth and Mars align again for
Speaker 3: the return window, and.
Speaker 2: The communications delay is the real killer.
Speaker 3: Light speed delay to Mars can be up to twenty
Speaker 3: two minutes each way. If an electrical fire breaks out
Speaker 3: in a Martian habitat, the crew cannot ask Houston for help.
Speaker 3: By the time their distress call reaches Earth, twenty two
Speaker 3: minutes have passed. By the time Houston's response reaches Mars,
Speaker 3: another twenty two minutes have passed, a forty four minute
Speaker 3: round trip for a single sentence. The crew is entirely,
Speaker 3: profoundly on their own.
Speaker 2: It demands a level of operational autonomy that humans have
Speaker 2: never achieved. If we can't figure out how to mathematically
Speaker 2: model the dust erosion of a landing plume, if we
Speaker 2: can't figure out how to reliably melt absolute zero ice
Speaker 2: into rocket fuel, and if we can't figure out how
Speaker 2: to shield against galactic cosmic rays while we are only
Speaker 2: three days away from home, we have absolutely zero chance
Speaker 2: of surviving a multi year isolation on Mars.
Speaker 3: The moon base is the crucible where we forge that autonomy.
Speaker 3: We are building the commercial supply chain and the industrial
Speaker 3: machinery there so that when we finally depart from Mars,
Speaker 3: we aren't just exploring, arriving with the proven capability to
Speaker 3: live off the land.
Speaker 2: We have covered a massive amount of ground today. We've
Speaker 2: seen how NASA's nearly six hundred million dollar investment is
Speaker 2: fundamentally reshaping the economics of spaceflight, transforming commercial companies into
Speaker 2: a reliable lunar logistics fleet. We've examined the brilliance of
Speaker 2: forcing those commercial landers to carry standardized instruments establishing a
Speaker 2: planetary baseline of scientific data, and.
Speaker 3: Those three instruments lay the exact groundwork for human settlement
Speaker 3: SCALPSS mapping the violent abrasive physics of the landing plume
Speaker 3: to establish safe zoning distances. The LRA deploying an immortal
Speaker 3: zero power navigation grid across the barren landscape and Late
Speaker 3: is characterizing the microscopic lethal barrage of solar and cosmic
Speaker 3: radiation to engineer survivable habitats.
Speaker 2: It is the foundation of a new human economy, supported
Speaker 2: by prospecting rovers like Promise, the art of its terrain vehicles,
Speaker 2: and the Lunar Communications Relay. We are watching the transition
Speaker 2: from exploration to sustained municipal settlement.
Speaker 3: We really are.
Speaker 2: I'll leave you with one final thought, tom all over tonight.
Speaker 2: We are actively transforming the Moon from a wild, untouched
Speaker 2: celestial body into a managed, highly capitalized human suburb. We're
Speaker 2: laying down the navigation grids, deploying the weather stations, and
Speaker 2: designing the heavy machinery for resource extraction. But when that
Speaker 2: infrastructure is firmly in place, when multiple commercial companies backed
Speaker 2: by different sovereignations, are making regular scheduled deliveries and extracting resources,
Speaker 2: who actually gets to decide the zoning laws in the Moon.
Speaker 3: That's the billion dollar question.
Speaker 2: Right. If the Promise rover discovers a massive, easily accessible
Speaker 2: deposit of water ice in a South Pole crater. Who
Speaker 2: owns that ice, does the first company to mine it
Speaker 2: possess a monopoly on the local fuel supply? Who mediates
Speaker 2: the traffic on that busy lunar highway, and who assigns
Speaker 2: liability if an autonomous supply freighter crashes into a permanent
Speaker 2: communications relay. As we pour the concrete for this new neighborhood,
Speaker 2: we are dissolving thermodynamic engineering problems. We are going to
Speaker 2: have to decide very quickly who governs the final frontier.
Speaker 2: So tonight, when you step outside and look up at
Speaker 2: that glowing silver disk, remember you aren't just looking at
Speaker 2: a silent rock. You are looking at a bustling construction site,
Speaker 2: the crucible for our survival and the absolute bleeding edge
Speaker 2: of the human future. Thank you for exploring it with us.