Space Geek Out 2025

four was released. It was five ninety five wow, which they kind of undercut the whole market when they did that. And they way they did that is that they owned they had vertical integration, They owned the supply line, including the processor moss, which is a very end of the sixty five or two called the sixty five ten, and so they were just able to apparently the component price was down like an one hundred and fifty dollars range, so it's just we were able to.

Nineteen eighty two is also the year that the Time magazine. Remember Time magazine, I do. They used to do a Man of the Year, and in nineteen eighty two, the Man of the Year was the personal computer. Yeah, they still do that because the person of the year person. Yeah, you know, that was the idea. This is also the

year the following companies are founded. I just went with the ones you would know immediately, like some microsystems, Yeah, Compact, Adobe, Autodesk, geez Electronic Arts, Yeah, LucasArts, Lotus micropros semantic like clearly the explosion, right, the expansion of all this. This is the year that Microsoft releases their competitor, VisiCalc called multi Plan for the Apple two and for CPM machines, which would later become Excel and I mean might be a

separate product. Multiplan was built in this cross compiling way. This was Charles Simons's great vision, so they could compile the multiple platforms, which meant it ran equally slow on all of them. Yeah, that's right, And that's why you know, next year nineteen eighty three, when I Lotus one two three comes out, we'll just clobber the market because it was built for the IBM PC of fast, fast, fast fast, right.

But A two is also the relatively the year they rebrand PC dos to MS dos because you're trying to focus on Microsoft. Is the year that word Perfect comes out version one of word Perfect.

just a propagator. Yeah, just a propagator. Yeah, just a propagator, as they often were back right. This is the year the movie tron came out with all of its CGI graphics and you know stories of hackers and oh my user. Yeah. I mean to this day I often still say greetings programs directly from that movie. And I'll end with a science thing, which is Richard Feiman describes quantum computing in nineteen eighty two. Man, he was awesome. He still is amazing. Guy. Yeah.

On the space side, this is Space Shuttle Columbia's third and fourth flight. The third flight is in March. It's the first time they fly with an unpainted tank, saving several hundred pounds of weight because the spacecraft is wild overweight and will not be able to do the missions that it was designed to do. They'll never be able to do a polar orbit with any of them. Actually, and this was the heaviest one by far.

limited a lot of its capabilities. It was the only time they ever landed at the White Sands Air Force Base because they were supposed to land at Edwards but it was flooded and that's bad, so they wand over there, and that meant that they had to send over all of the equipment to pick the shuttle up and put it on the seven forty seven to fly it back to Kennedy. Wow. So they would quickly realize this was a really expensive and difficult proposition. You should always landed Kennedy.

But on the fourth flight same year, in June, so only a few months later, this is the final of the test flights. They would landed Edwards Air Force Base. So they did on total calumbated four test flights with just two astronauts in pressure suits with ejection seats to validate the vehicle, and that finishes in nineteen eighty two. That last flight at Edwards, Ronald Reagan and Nancy are there.

They meet the astronauts, they make a big speech and while at the end of the speech, the Space Shuttle Challenger flies by overhead on the seven forty seven on its way to Kennedy. The next Shuttle has been built. Very cool. That wasn't timed or anything. Emily, Yeah, I know pretty sure. Maybe just a little bit a little bit of timing there. Over in the Soviet side, Vanera thirteen and fourteen, their Venus Explorers land. They launched in eighty one. They took about four months, so they land

early nineteen eighty two. You've seen the photos from these. These are the famous panoramas with the little saw tooth edge of the landing ring. And Vanera thirteen survived one hundred and twenty seven minutes at four hundred and fifty seven degrees celsius. That's eight hundred and fifty five fahrenheit. That's crazy enough. To melt lead and eighty nine atmospheres of pressure. Venera fourteen. You know there's a Pepe's pizza oven.

It's almost that hot, almost that hot. Yeah, I think it's like six hundred degrees six hundred and fifty degrees. That's a yeah, it's good, an unbelievable pizza. Yeah, but you know, you know you're in there for very long. No. Vanara fourteen landed a week later, did the same sort of panoramic picture. The funniest storia. This whole thing is one of their mission. One of their probes was to test soil compressibility on venus. But the arm is fixed

in place. When it swings down, it has to hit a particular point, and it turned out to the point where it was going to swing down is exactly where one of the lens caps had popped off. So it measured the compressibility of the lens cap. Geez, unfortunate. Oops, Yeah, I don't know.

the Earth. And this is not a very big object, maybe about a half kilometer across, but it is booking. It is because it's not not a Solar System object. It's an interstellar object. When it was detected, it was moving at fifty eight kilometers per second, right, is really fast, and of course the Sun's pulling it in, so it accelerated it. When it made its closest plasts on the Sun in October, it was going sixty eight kilometers per second, so we would not have a lot of time to

respond to this. This is kind of a worst case scenario, but the good news is it missed us. Obviously.

to know for sure. Certainly from our galaxy, it's not going that fast. But the reason for the alien thing, it's most likely a cosmologist, a fairly famous one, a guy named or his name is Abram, to call him Avi Lobe. He's a Harvard cosmologist, very well respected until the past few years, when he's just kind of kind of whacky on the whole aliens are coming thing. He said pretty much the same thing about a Muamuha, that this could be a spacecraft, although it wasn't. It was just an asteroid.

out of our solar system fairly quickly. So Tom, I hope that answers your question, and thank you so much for your comment, and a coffee of music, Cobi. It's on its way to you, and if you'd like a cofee of Musicobe I read a comment on the website at dot at Rockstock Calm or on the facebooks. We publish every show there, and if you comment there and in the show, we'll send you a copy of music Go.

the collection an MP three, flack or wave formats. And with that, sir, I'm handing over the microphone to you, because the geek outs are all Richard.

was lost in a drone ship failure. So the more starlink satellites there are, does your bandwidth speed go up because I know you have starling? Yeah, it's actually creeping back up again because the number of users has gone up. There are at eight million subscribers now. They doubled in just over a year. Last year we were talking about They got to four million in the summer of twenty four and by November twenty five they were at eight million.

So that does impact. Although I mine, not that I use mine all that much because we're so far north, I really haven't had a lot of performance problems. Yeah, but in the busier areas obviously it matters. But yeah, the network continues to grow there. They've launched over ten thousand satellites. Now they've got more satellites than the rest of the world combined, like twice over. Wow, that all of those are operational. He was about somewhere in around

seven thousand operational. To go this quickly, they have launched three or four times a week. They have shortened the turnaround of a pad down to fifty five hours, so two and a half days they can launch and then launch from that pad again. Wow, really efficient. The Falcon nine booster, which was originally planned to be ten reuses,

they have continued to stretch that. They stretched that with starlink, so starlink being a maximum load, launch as heavy as and go about seventeen metric tons and still get the booster back. Their current record now is thirty two landings from one booster. Wow. Yeah, that's so cool and it's crazy.

SpaceX is hard to ignore. Rumor is that they're going to IPO next year, which is interesting, and I got some questions online for folcusing what you know, if they IPO, how is this going to change the company? I suspect it's going to be an IPO the same way that Facebook's a IPO, which is they're going to have a small amount of ownership available. So it's not really going to be a publicly owned company per se. They just want to raise some more money. I suspect Elon's going

to maintain control of the company for better or worse. Yeah, I want to move on from Saceing as quickly as possible. But it can't not talk about Starship. They did six launches or five launches this year. It didn't necessarily go all that Well, mind.

eleven in twenty five. In twenty four where they were all the Block one the original test articles twenty five they were all Block two, so they only did five flights of Block twos. The first one in January. The booster landed successfully. And by the way, the starship Booster, as huge as it is, does not have landing legs. They catch it out of the sky wow, with a pair of arms they called chopsticks, so they don't have to carry the weight of the legs. Wow. That which

is amazing. But the first block to spacecraft had problems and by the time it was near the top of its apogeea that never fully goes into orbit, there were propellant leaks and it blew to pieces of a rain to breed out across the Caribbean. Jeez. Not good. So then IFA eight was in March, just a couple months later, and it was almost identical of that. It did the same thing they did land the booster, but they starship itself broke up in orbit and fell like to Earth.

But the flight itself in August went fairly well. The booster was deliberately splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico. The ship actually got up to its peak orbit, desployed these Faate Starlink satellite so the little door opened on

the side of the ship. They popped out these They were all going to re enter, but they just showed that they could displease them, and then it actually landed it on its intended target in the Indie ocean within a few meters enough that they were able to put a boy out there with a camera that was able to film this thing re entering, although the ship itself was fairly damaged by re entry, but it worked perfectly well.

So cool. The very last launch in October of a Block two because now they're moving on to Block three, worked almost flawlessly when exactly we're supposed to deployed. It simulated satellites and then landed right on target with almost no damage on it at all. So they clearly off Block two wired in, so now time to move on to Block three. And that was also the last time they would do a flight off of Pad one. This

is in Bokachika, Texas. This was the pad that on the very original flight they bore a hole into the ground because it took off so slowly. And then they upgraded and so forth. But the Block three version of Starship is dramatic bigger again, it's longer, taller, and they've been building a second pad Nick cleverly named get this Pad two. And this one has a flame diverter, so instead of being a set of legs with a water to spercial unit to control it, they've actually had a

popper flame diverter. It also uses water as well, but it's a better design all around, much more complex landing. You know, Elon always had this idea that he didn't want to have big infrastructure on the ground because he wanted to be able to go to Mars and take off again and so forth and not need to build infrastructure. And it's just like it's not feasible you actually have

this infrastructure. So at this particular point, they are in the development of Block three, including a new larger booster, although in November, the first of the Block three boosters, called Booster eighteen, during testing had some kind of explosion. It wasn't a duratic one. It was just burst and

damaged the vehicle enough that it was scrapped. And so now they're getting another booster together for IFT twelve, which will be sometime early next year year, and they're going to do the current plan is IFT twelve and if T thirteen where the sort of finalizations of the design.

They expect IFT thirteen to be the first full orbit of Starship, to put it properly to orbit, and then to deorbit it and catch it to show that they can do all those things, and all subsequent flights of Starship currently outlined are focused on making the Moonlander for the contract they've gotten with NASA. Tell me about that. Let's a push forward. This was a couple of years ago with the Artomis program so forth, and we're going

to talk about Moon a little later on. It's not a lot happened Moon related stuff this year, just a few things. There was competition to develop a moon Lander for the Artemis missions, and the whole point was to make a reusable Moonlander, and the only company that offered a potential reusable lander is SpaceX And what is a modified version of Starship, which is kind of nutty because it's enormously tall, so you got to land at somewhere very level or have some very adjustable leg something we've

seen any of these things. It's also huge, but it has a massive payload and it would be fully reusable, but you got to refuel it. Not that anybody's ever done that before, and how many refuelings is it going to take? But this is all stuff that needs to be developed.

lander and that's what SpaceX has proposed. They're behind schedule, but so is everything related to the Moon, right and they so now apparently they're we're going to see developments in twenty twenty six.

But they do need to find a level spot to land there's lots that needs to be figured out on this and starting with or just as you said, adjustable fee, Yeah, I mean just the idea of a sustainable life support system right Like right now we have the space station which has a life support system that is constantly refueled every couple of months. We keep adding stuff to it. If you're gonna have a life support system that sits on the Moon for an nextated period of time, like

we've never done that. We don't have good long term life support systems yet, right We've had we have them work for a couple of weeks at a time, that's what the old Apollo missions did, and we have the space Station one. But they build a long term, you know, self contained life support system we can last for months. That will be a breakthrough when that hasn't been achieved yet.

there now that this is necessarily all good news. So let's talk about United Launch Alliance. So these are the guys who used to operate the Shuttle. This is a combination of Boeing and Lockheed Martin working together. It's an independentity going. When we did this last year, we talked about how ULA had finally launched their Vulcan rocket twice actually,

and they were projecting in twenty twenty five. According to the CEO, Tory Bruno, they're going to have twenty launches in twenty twenty five, ten of Atlas five, which is the old rocket, and ten of Vulcan, the new rocket. So what actually happened in twenty twenty five. There was one Vulcan launch. It was a military payload launch and

it had problems itself, although it was successful. And the issue here is that Vulcan does use solid rocket boosters, and their second launch, one of the solid rocket boosters spit off its nozzle. The rocket was able to compensate and continue to its flight successfully. It was very close. Thing.

now there's ten. Speaking of Kuiper, this is a subsidiary of Amazon. This is an alternative to Starlink. They started back in twenty nineteen. This year for some reason, because I like the name Kuyper, it's a good name. They renamed Amazon Leo okay, and that nice. So and again this is just a large network of satellites to provide

Internet service. So the FCC authorized into fly three thousand, two hundred and thirty six satellites and they are allowed to begin service after they have five hundred and seventy eight satellites, of which, according to the terms of the FCC, they have to have half of that two hundred and eighty nine flown by July of twenty twenty six and the rest by July twenty twenty nine.

lift forty nine. So they're on track to meet their FCC goals and proposed that they'll have initial functionality by the edit twenty twenty six, so there will be a competitor to Starlink supposedly, okay, and a heck of a lot more satellites. Right We're going to fill up a lot of space with satellites. The good news is there's a lot of space up there, and the reality, of course is that This is always going to be an

ongoing project. In order to keep latency low to make this a usable Internet service, you have to fly them low enough that they're constantly re entering. Typical lifespan for these satellites is going to be five years and then they're going to re enter. So you have to get up those three thousand satellites and then keep replacing with the rate that they're just that they re enter. Now when they re enter, do they just crash in the ocean.

There's no recovery of these satellites, is there. They burn up? No, they burn up. These things are only a few hundred kilows. Nothing makes just the ground. Ah okay. The only time we run into issues with things reaching the ground is when they are in metric tons of as right, large second stages are the only things that reach the ground.

been under development for decades. While SpaceX has been doing all the flying, there was this big rocket. Now, the design of New Glen was a good design in the sense that it's a big rocket. It's a seven meter rocket, so much larger than Fulcan nine, but not as big as Starship. And last year when we were doing this year, they were say they were going to fly in Deceeber twenty twenty four, which they did not. They flew in January of twenty twenty five. After over ten years of development.

They only flew a prototype spacecraft, a carrier thing called Blue Ring, but it flew and it was gorgeous and again a massive rocket, like one of the largest rockets ever flown, big proper heavy left rocket. Later they later in the year, in November, they did their second flight, and this time they actually took a payload, a two space refoo to Mars called Escapade. We'll talk about that in the Mars section. There was also a vias that payload.

But more importantly, on the very second flight of New Glen, ever, they landed a booster no kidding, They stuck it on the on the on the landing ship jackline about four hundred miles out to see.

did it. Falcon nine can't do that. What made Falcon nine so challenging the land is that at the lowest thrust of a single engine, when they're down to the landing weight, it's too much thrust. It'll go back up, and so they had to do a perfect slam landing oh right, or what they call a suicide bird. You have to continuously accelerate so that you got zero velocity

the moment you touch the ground. It's incredibly hard to pull off, and it's why it took so many tries to get the calculation exactly right so that you are at zero velocity when you reach that drone ship. Math. That's the challenge with Falcon nine. Math is huge, huge math. I remember that thing's moving, yeah, and your weight is changing. You don't know how long your burns were, Like you're timing has to be continuously adjusted to be able to do exactly the right burn, to be able to stop

at the exact moment when you're at the surface. And New Glenn didn't have to do that. But let's be clear, that's the second orbital class booster to actually be landed, right. The starship boosters have never Starship's never gone into orbit, so it technically doesn't qualify, although they did successfully catch the booster. More the ones and Refly one in fact, and the next flight expected in January twenty twenty six of New Glenn will be the reflight of that booster

that was caught. It landed in November, so they're on it. Wow. They've also announced a heavier version of New Glen. So the existing configuration of New Glen, which is seven meters rocket, has seven B fours, the big engines on the bottom and two vacuum engines on the upper stage. Did they call it B because it's a big engine? Is that what it stands for? Four? It's a Blue origin engine? Okay, yeah,

it's not as much fun. By the way, those B fours that are on the New Glen are the same engines that the Vulcan rocket uses over on for Ula. So they've now said there's going to be a heavier version of New Glen with nine primary engines on the booster and four engines on the second stage, which should be able to carry substantial payloads to the Moon and to other heavy lifts. And we're going to talk about new heavy lift things coming because we're now having a

collection at heavy Lift rockets. So yeah, next flights in January. It's going and it's going to lift a the Blue Moon mark one lander to the Moon. And at this moment, there's only three missions scheduled in twenty twenty six for New Glens. So they're not flying anywhere near the frequency of Vulcan nine, but they're getting there. Oh that's good. Yeah, So we've talked about SpaceX, we talked about ULA, We've talked about Blue Origin. There are a bunch of other

flight platform out there, different rockets and so forth. Electron is a light is a light platform. Left they had seventeen flights this past year. Flyerfy Alpha had a SUCSS flight in twenty twenty four. They had one attempt at twenty twenty five when they failed. There's a bunch of others, but none of them have removed a lot of mass yet they're still at the beginning. So there's an interesting space you know, evolution going on right now. But other

companies are trying to build recoverable rockets. They just haven't got anywhere. And I will talk about them when they start, you know, nail and payloads, but at this point they happened, Okay, all right, let's take a break, all right, we'll be right back after these very important messages. Stick around. You know.

space stations over the decades. In fact, every single space station with the exception of Skylab, has flown with a

salute core of one form or another. Obviously, all the salutes mirror the original that was originally a salute core, with a bunch of add ons to that, as well be Internet and the Tiangong space station, the Chinese one derived from a salute design, and this Vezda module was originally a salute modified to be a mirror, then modified to do this, so it was already twenty year it was almost a twenty year old hull when it was flown in two thousand and it's leaking air. So the

first detection of leaks were in twenty nineteen. Now that the this is Vesta modules quite large. It's made up of three parts, and the aftmost part is where the progress supplies the shuttles come in. They where they dock, and there's a tunnel that connects from the central module through to that progress booster, so you can take supplies and so forth. And it's somewhere in that tunnel is the leak. They've tried multiple repairs, they've not been able to get it nailed. It loses about a kilo of

air a day. Wow geez. And so yeah, I believe it's just the Russians say it's fatigue. It's cracks from fatigue. It's just that old. It's taken all the shocks from docking. It's The current procedure right now is to keep that tunnel closed off during operation, so it just loo. It depressurizes on its own and then they put air back into it. It's relatively small, but when they do open it, they close off the US section just for safety's sake.

But the fact that they have not been able to get that control is they've now this past year, they stopped commercial flights to the space station, so the Axium four flight, which was tourism to the space station, which is how Axiom was making money. They're trying to build their own space stations separate from the International Space Station. That whole flow has been cut off because of this issue. So they don't they're just they're losing enough air that

they're trying to be careful. These last few years of the station are problematic. There's also an argument of rather than re enter it, why don't we take the newer pieces off. One of the problems that the space station was designed to be assembled, but it wasn't designed to be disassembled. And what is very common in space is when you put two metal surfaces in close contact to each other, like you would for an airtight seal, they

actually weld together and they won't come apart. Huh yeah, wait a minute, I thought space was cold, not hot enough to weld metal. Well, this is cold welding, right, This is cold welding. Absolutely, yeah. It is the cold soak. And what it is is that they've when you have no normally when you have metals and you're in an atmosphere. As soon as you shave them, and they're pure metal, they oxidize. They create a little coating on top of the text them. Right now, when you put them together,

the oxidized layers, they're not going to meld together. But when you're in space, when you're in a vacuum and there's no oxidation happening, there's really almost no difference between those two pieces of metal when they come in close contcent he eventually they just bond. That's so weird, and there's no way to unbond them. Yeah, it's one of

the mainy weird things that happen in space. Well, I had no idea, Yeah, And so it's you know, I've always thought, well, just take the newer, take the laboratories off. They're newer, Like, why would you given you that up? Can't can't get them apart, can't do it. It's just no way to get them off. Yeah, sort of thing.

It just re enters, so they typically fill it with garbage and it's and then it burns back up, but and the hdv X will do some things, they'll move that out. Therefore, we talked of there will be two crew dragons this year ten and eleven. Eleven is the one that's currently there, and there's two soyas is up.

They're both still up, but I need to talk about twenty eight which is the current last say years, it launched no problem, but after the launch it was discovered that the launch platform that it flies from in Baikanar this is in Kazakhstan Okay had an accident. Oh that has taken it offline. It's very serious. So the Soyus design is from the sixties, right, it's been a long time and they so they literally put a kind of match up into all the rocket engines to launch them.

And to do that, there's this slide out platform. So they bring the rocket into the pad on its side on a train and then they stand it up over a flame trench, this giantic lighter that somebody has to like what well, in order to get to those engines, there's this slide out platform that comes in underneath the rocket and there's a bunch of work that's done there. This is how they arm a bunch of things and

do a bunch of tests and do the ignition. Well, during the launch of MS twenty eight, somehow that platform forms slid out from its protected helding area, got blasted by the rocket, blown off its rails and into the flame trench. It's destroyed, Oh my gosh, and it has to be rebuilt. So at this moment, there's no way to launch a soy Use or a progress rocket capsule

to the International Space Station. That is the only pad that can do it, and you can't go to any of the other pads in Russia because they're not in the right angles for actually getting to the International Space Station. So they have to repair this one, and it begs the question will they There's only five years left of the station, and the Russian economy is not in good shape right now. They got into a little mistake, i

would say, a little excursion in Qukraine. It's been going on for years and it's destroying their economy and this is a lot of money to repair this thing. So there's a question of whether or not they're going to be able to fly, and there's even a question of whether it was an accident. You know, it's one thing to just demandon this's nothing, to have a mysterious accent and not be able to do anything well.

the Zevezda module for station reboosting. There's automatic connections between Progress and that Zvezda module the pump fuel for that exactly that process for doing reboosts.

they're not designed. The docking ports on the Russian side are different from the docking ports on the US side. So it is an open question right now.

open question. And this only happened in November. There's no good answers right now, and it and it genuinely jeopardizes the International Space Station.

there's time. We probably got a year to figure this out, but it does need to be figured out, and we're just you know, we're happen to be recording when nobody knows.

data has just been a steady series of failures. In twenty four and June at twenty twenty four, they finally did a flight to the space station with Butch Wilmar and Sunny Williams on board, right, and then the launch itself went very well, but they the capsule it still

started having problems as soon as it got there. And at the time when we were talking about this twenty four, they didn't really have all the details yet, but it's now come out as to how serious the situation was, and the situation the issue was these control thrusters so around the Starliners made up of a capsule with a

service module mounted on the back. The service modules dropped before they re enter, and that service module has all these trusters on it, and they put them in these four little bays they call dog houses, and each one of them has seven thrusters along with the primary boost engines, the engines that actually put it into orbit. That might be part of the problem because it was never tested properly in integration. It appears to overheat when it's fully assembled.

And so as they were coming in towards the space station, they were at v Bar, which is about two hundred and sixty meters away or eight hundred and so feet, they had they had two boosters to two of the thrusters fail and at that point they're one failure away from having to aboart according to the rules, right, and both the failures were on the lower side of the ship, and there were the thrusters that push aft right each doghouse there's four of them, have two aft thrusters, two

forward thrusters, and then three radial thrusters that pushed the side or rotate.

the craft. Right, so there's a debate of j we aboard and now then question is can they even safely aboard? Could they safely re enter? Right? They're not sure if they can get in a proper position just to re enter, And so the on the ground side at Houston, they decide to reset the computer, turn it off, turn it back on again. The universe will fix. That's it. And then the interview with Butch Wilmore about this. He's really not keen, like what if this thing doesn't come back?

Like I'm stranded, right, and he doesn't want to give up control. But they do it, and in that reboot, two of those thrusters come back, so it's like, Okay, that's in. Now it's controllable.

even Wilmore doesn't have to do it. They now are in the automatic dock rules, and so they turn an automatic dock dock to the space station. That's why the state the docking took so long.

that and they came back in March of twenty twenty five. Yeah, and then they were able to catch up with everything else.

station to do those six flights. So they I don't know how they're going to renegotiate the terms on all. They returned some money something like that. Good luck with that, something like that, Yeah, good luck. Another vehicle for really to space station is Dream Chasers. This is Sierra Nevada Corporate now call this Elciera Space which has a little like shuttle like vehicle called dream Chaser. So who's behind that company? So Sierra Nevada, it's their own company, and.

But in twenty twenty six they got a slot in this second commercial resupply services, so instead of flying crew, fly cargo. And there's a case for Dreamliner because it lands on a runway, it undergoes a lot less acceleration than a capsule. So if you have a delicate experiment you want to bring back to Earth, Dreamliner might be the only way you could do it.

they just weren't ready. Then they delated twenty two, then they delayed in twenty three. They only finish flight flight testing in twenty twenty four.

They seem to be putting things back together. That might be profitable one day, right, but I don't know the star Line are salvageable right Anyway, Dreamliner was supposed to fly in twenty four, but it was supposed to be on the first Vulcan flight and that got bumped for

a national security flight. And then the Vulcan has been delayed so they haven't been able to fly, and so then they bumped it out to May of twenty five, and then it's September twenty five, and finally now NASA's amended the contract the CRS two country to say, hey, we're going to just do one free flight, will pay for you to fly Dreamliner a dream Chaser once. Do you think without resupply, do you think.

back around to him again. And this is the guy who did inspiration for he's actually flown in space. He's the first, you know, non astronaut to do a spacewalk. He's for civilian to do a spacewalk. Like he's a billionaire, so he's, you know, weird, has his own air force, but he's very much into space and so we'll see what this does. And he's certainly playing on the angle of the US needs to get to the Moon ahead of the Chinese, and to try and stay ahead of

the Chinese. That's sort of his vision, all right, So I mean dream Chaser. Hopefully they'll get a flight. It's cool to have a new little space plane. But we'll see, And especially when we talk about the alternatives of the International Space Station, Chaser has a role to play. That's good. One more thing related to the International Space Station. That's HDV X. I mentioned it as one of the vehicles

that was currently at the space station. This was a successor to Japan's contribution to the International Space Station, which was the HDV supply vehicle. Their goal, and this is such a good goal, cut the cost of the HDV in half while supplying the same number of supplies, and they pulled it off. Wow. They simplified the vehicle so it actually carries as much still as a four thousand

kilogram payload, same as the HDV, but simplified. And so that was the test flight happened this year, it's passed, and so next year they'll fly twice two more htvx's.

ten resupply missions and ten crew missions on board. There's supposed to be another module coming next year, space telescope, similar to Hubble. We'll see if that actually happens. They have begun hosting international experiments. Belgium, France, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Peru, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain all have experiments on the Tiangong space station. Wow. Cool.

There is a Pakistani astronaut currently in training to do a short flight, probably only a week in between the two recent two crews onto the space station. It's sometime in the future.

crew back down c Shenzo twenty. They found a crack in a window. Oh, it looked like there've been a debris impact of some kind, and they considered it unsafe for re entry. So the crew that was supposed to return in Shenzo twenty instead took Shenzo twenty one down. So they returned with that, which meant that the crew that was up there didn't have a safe vehicle of return on since the twenty was still there. Wow, but

the Chinese be the Chinese. Instead of taking six months to get Shenzo twenty twenty two ready, they got it ready in three weeks and put it up there without a crew on board. So that I now have a safe return, and they also send up repair equipment for the twenty all right.

one of them, twenty two's on the other. They can't bring up a new crew on twenty three without getting rid of twenty So the plan is to attempt to repair on the damaged window on twenty they've already done a spacewalk to evaluate this and then send it down empty to see how that goes before twenty three goes up. So this is going to play out in the next six month.

But it might be just because of the Chinese space station up there. But in twenty twenty one NASA did start the commercial space station program. So it's the idea of we're not going to build a space station. You're going to build a space station, and we're going to rent time on it, right, And eleven teams applied and they've now consolidated that down to three teams. And this year they updated the partnership of proposals. They've actually dialed

back the goals. So the original plan was to have a permanently crewed station, and now the new requirement is a man tended station, so station that can operate with nobody on board, which is an important feature because the space station International Space Station can't do that and can operate with a four person crew for at least a month at a time, and they want a demonstration. They planned to at least two designs. The goal is to have more smaller stations rather than one giant station. I

really love the idea of the ISS being. You know, every country, every nation that participated, made a module that fits somewhere on it for a particular purpose, and that's just a wonderful thing. You know, the nations get together and do that. So how how are we going to have that sort of cooperation if there're a lot of smaller ones. Is every country going to have their own

little space station? I think you'll probably see that there's going to be common platforms like your basic docking, fuel supply, maneuver, propulsion, and so forth, and then you add a module to it for various experiments. Look, the problem with building one big station is it only can handle one class of experiments,

typically micro gravity experiments. If you want to do other classes of experiments, if you want to do something more in manufacturing, or you want to start simulating gravity, do rotation, so forth, they not compattle with each other. I see. So having more stations means you can try a larger array of things.

talk about that in a minute. So the original is axiom Space is a bunch of X space station folks that have been working for a while. These the guys who've been flying tourists to the space station until that was shut down this year. Right. And their original plan, which I always thought was a good one, was to deliver components to the International Space Station to expand it with the intent of removing it before the space station

is re entered. Wow. So they were going to bring up the habitat and a lab and an observatory and so forth, and only at the end to add this payload power thermal element that can actually do the free flying and then separate from the International Space before was reacity.

Out of the new circumstances, they've changed the plan basically to get directly to a free flying space station by twenty twenty eight by flying that payload power thermal the primary control all but first, and then adding and have to it later. We'll see. They always struggled for enough funding. That's why they were doing all the tourist stuff to try and make money. They're not working on space seats again,

another attempt to get revenue streams. It's a challenge to have enough money to do this.

Although that expenditure started back and that's a lot of Amazon on Prime movies. Yeah, but you figure he's worth two hundred and fifty billion, so he could fund the whole thing himself, and he doesn't need to. But he wants to be flying by twenty twenty seven. And he's got New Glenn because his design is using these is using that width of New Glenn, the seven meters, and

then using inflatable habitats. They figure one of their modules will be almost like a quarter of the size of International Space Station, although so big you're going to have to fill it up with stuff, which is something they actually have tested. So this year they completed what they call the human in the Loop testing where they've actually built out mockups of the interiors of orbital reef to show all of the common workflows for doing science and where to sleep and where to eat and all of

that sort of stuff. So they finished that qualification now, so they're pretty close to actually starting to build hardware and to fly in the next couple of years. Wow, that's cool, it's exciting. Yeah, they've really come a long way. And the fact that new ends flying is the important part because he couldn't lift it anyhow. Next is Starlab Space. So this is originally a partnership between Lockheed Martin and Voyager Space. Lockheed Martin has mysteriously disappeared from this today

it's now Voyager Space. They call themselves Voyager Technology and air Bus of all folks. They've signed the agreement. They have Grumman on board. North Grumman owns the Signus cargo ship. So because northro Grumman had originally made their own proposal did not get selected. Starlab's intent is to use Starship to do the launch and also to have an inflatable

habitat and to be man tended. And they are only the beginning of doing their human loop testing, so they're just building mock ups now, so they're fairly far behind Ortal Reef. Again, these are all a few years away, so we'll see the most interesting story on the space station side. I lasted the end which is Vast is the name of the company Vast. This started in two thousand and one by a tech crypto bil millionaire named

Jed Mcallib. Did you say crypto or crypto crypto crypto billionaire. Yes, made his money on bitcoin and has decided to sucked it out of everybody else's wallet something like that, and decided he wanted to build a space station. He wants to get to artificial gravity, so rotating space stations. But he started with this goal called Haven One's company's not small, eight hundred employees, a whole lot of X SpaceX people

apparently there wow. But their initial vehicle, Haven one is supposed to be a single launch space station that you could launch on a Falcon nine. So fourteen metric tons is in the realm of what the what Falcon nine could lift, but short life man like it should be able to function for about three years but only be inhabited for the way they did the math was one hundred and sixty astronaut days. Yeah, so that would be four astronauts ten days at a time, four times kind

of thing. But it fits within Sean Duffy's requirements of thirty days of usability. And they actually have built a hull and it's painted and prepped and pressure tested, and the life support systems have been tested. They earlier this year in November, flew a test article a five hundred kilo on the Falcon nine a testing power, propulsion and communication systems for the station. So they believed to be

able to launch next year. No earlier than May, but possibly next year this initial product, and it's guy far enough alone that NASA has now gotten involved and they are signing on to the round two of the Commercial Space Station program.

They're going to do a free or Richard return around the Moon with four passengers on Orion. So not much to say on there. But what did happen on the Moon in twenty twenty five is three different landers. Well, the first one is called Blue Ghosts. This is built by Firefly Aerospace. They also make the Alpha rocket, which they have flown successfully once and also failed on, but it's not big enough vehicle to actually send anything to

the Moon. So this flew on a Falcon nine with another moonlander called how Kudo R. This was in January twenty twenty five. The Blue Ghosts did twenty five, got them into low Earth orbit, spent twenty five days doing their checkout. We did a translunar burn, took them four days to get to the Moon, did an orbital insertion. They spent sixteen days in lunar orbit to time their landing perfectly, so they landed the beginning of a lunar day because they don't have the ability to survive at night.

So you're gonna get fourteen days out of this thing. That's all they can get if they landed right. And they did a march second. They put it down a mere Chrisium in a that's a three hundred miles wide basin on the edge of the visible disc of the Moon, and they timed it so that they would have a full fourteen days to do operations. They had ten signs payloads on totally about two hundred pounds worth of stuff and it operated flawlessly until March sixteen when this lunar

sunset happened and it went cold. And that's the end of that. That's it. That's the best news story we got out of all the lunar landers. Was Blue Ghosts Firefly's first attempt and they nailed it. So Hakudo R, which flew on that same Falcon nine, was actually Mission II. There had been a previous attempt, Mission one in twenty twenty three, which had crashed onto the Moon having run out of propellant on its way down. Unfortunate, So this

was their second attempt. This is a company called I Space, is a Japanese commercial space company, and they used a totally different approach, so they took them longer to get to the Moon. They did a flyby on February fifteenth, finally got to lunar orbit in May and circularized by the end of May. They attempted their landing in June and crashed agains. This time it was a laser range finders. They got further down. They did not run on a fuel, but they did lose control of the vehicle and so it

impacted hard and nothing was functional. Unfortunate second try. I hope they go again. Third lander, Intuitive Machines. This was their second attempt. Also, they had flown in the first one and in one on landing when the legs had

broken and it tipped over. This time they flew on a Falcon nine in February, did their lunar did their lunar insertion on in March, and got straight to a landing attempt, lost contact, possibly due to lunar dust the terminal dessense phase, and when they got communications back, it was once again laying on its side, just like I am one.

bloody thing tipped over again. Something went wrong on the landing once again, they hid some solar power, so it actually functioned for about thirteen hours and they ran as much experiments as they could. It had a couple of rovers on board that weren't able to be deployed. Two failures.

what Blue Ghosts did. What Firefly did was the very first successful landing by a commercial company on the Moon. And finally on the Moon. This is something I talked about. We've talked about originally some of the basis on the Moon, which is European Space Agencies moonlight missions. So this is the moonlight lunar communications and Navigation Services Mission. What it is is a set of orbiters around the Moon to

provide communications and basically equivalent a GPS navigation information. The idea is so that spacecraft going to and from the Moon don't have to carry redundant navigation and communications gear. They'll carry some, but they'll count on this network to do their communication, so they can carry more useful payload,

don't have to do quite as much stuff. And it was only a proposal when we first talked about this with twenty seventeen twenty eighteen, but this year they sent out the contract to tails Alinia, who are actually going to build those navigation satellites so they.

They're focusing on the South Pole because that's where all the interest is right now, is trying to get to Shackleton Crater and see if we can extract water ice from the Moon. And so one satellite for communications, four for navigation, so that you can do triangulation between the four. Now, they don't orbit the way you would think because the lunar gravity is so irregular. In order to have stable orbits that don't need constant fuel, use use highly elliptical

orbits they call these elliptical lunar frozen orbits. For the navigation satellites, they'll have a period of twenty four hours. So they go from point from start at one point close to the North pole, then go out ten thousand kilometers away from the Moon, mostly looking at the South Pole, and then come back and that takes about twenty four hours. And so those four mean that over the period where you'd be landing, if you time it right, you'll be

able to see all four of them. To be able to continuously triangle at your location when you're landing or when you're moving around. The comsat would only be a period of twelve hours, so it's not continuous communications, but it's enough that you don't have to carry the heavy transmitting gear to go all the way back to Earth. You just communicate with the satellite in the windows where you can see it, which will be ten hours a

day roughly. So they're fully funded. They'll be funded. The East member states have committed funding through to twenty twenty eight, which it'll be in full service construction starting now in twenty twenty five. So there's going to be a navigation network on the Moon. Wow, that's really cool. It's cool. It is it's really exciting, and it speaks to building infrastructure, not just one and done missions, but adding infrastructure to make every other flight easier.

supplies there. Here's the real issue. The real issue is right now, for every space flight, especially all the manned ones, we bring every breath of air, every drop of water, every scrap of food, everything with us when you launch, all of it. And so to go to the Moon, it's just so many supplies, right, And to go to Mars even more so. The whole goal of what we're doing on the Moon is to start using resources on the Moon, starting with water. Water is a kilo for

every leader. It's a lot of weight. And so if you could actually start to extract water on the Moon or on Mars, you don't have to carry as much. And this is why we were talking about earlier. The South Pole is an optimal place because not really doesn't have the ice cap, but it has sunlight twenty four hours a day.

We should do this mostly with robots before we send people down there, but we should be experimenting with trying to get ice, and there are missions coming up in the next couple of years to actually go and extract that ice. It's just I got to understand how cold those shaded areas are. This is like negative two hundred degrees. That ice is hard, and we don't know what form it's in, right, We don't know if it's powdered, if it's crystals, if it's block like. We just don't know

how it was created. So we don't know what shape is in and what's going to take to actually extract it. So there's a lot of experimentation to be done before we go further down the path. But if you can do it, you can start to extract resources, and then we start talking about the other resource of the moon is all kinds of metals, all kinds of materials that are easy to work on if we can get them

up there. So it's the beginning of making a space faring civilization, and the Moon is a great testing ground for that, sure, and you can carry that to Mars. That being said, not a lot happened in Mars in twenty twenty five. It's an off year for easy flights. That being said, there was a flight to Mars. It

was the New Glen launch of Escapade. This is a space This is two spacecraft called Blue and Gold, are relatively small that are doing atmospheric analysis on the Moon on Mars, and they're gonna they're gonna take them a year and a half to get there, but they launched this year. And it's about all that happened on the Moon on Mars except for one other thing. This is new news, relatively speaking. Okay, So there's a set, there's a there's a relay network, a set of spacecraft around

the Mars right now. Some of them are older, some of them newer. There's a spacecraft called Odyssey, there's the use vehicle called Express. It's a reconnaissance orbiter. There's Maven, and there's a trace gas orbiter and one of the These are all sensor sets orbiting the Mars that collect information. They've gotten pictures of landslides and detected water and all those sorts of things. But they also relay data from

the various landers, things like perseverance and curiosity. Instead of having to communicate directly to Earth, they send their data up to these various orbiters who then relay it back to the Earth. Right again, like we're trying to do with moonlight over on the Moon. We have infrastructure on Mars to make things easier, and it's the Maven spacecraft that's in trouble. So this was originally proposed in two thousand and six, it was selecting two thousand and eight.

It flew in twenty thirteen, arrived at Mars in twenty fourteen, so it's been operating up there for another for a decade. It should be good for another five plus years. Its main original job besides this communication relay, was studying the magnetic fields of Mars, because one of the problems with

Mars is this magnetic field is largely missing. There's evidence that there was liquid water on Mars, that it had a useful atmosphere, a dense atmosphere, but the lack of a magnetic field has allowed solar particles protons to strip that atmosphere away and we're trying to figure out why it will help us understand why the Earth hasn't had

that happen. And there's also a case fore this might have been happening with Venus as well, and so part of the experiments that Maven does is it flies into the atmosphere of Mars on a regular basis, and it's specifically designed to be able to do this. It's solar panels point forward, so it's stable in that way, but it has to turn to be able to send data

and to collect power and so forth. And so it was set into a one hundred and eighty kilometer by forty five hundred kilometer orbit, which is a dip into the atmosphere it comes back out. And the way it happened to be aligned when they did this back in December is that it flew behind Mars relative the Earth, so we couldn't see it as it went into that dip. But when it was supposed to come back out, it didn't reconnect and call home, so we were trying to

figure out what was going on. I didn't get telemetry, so then we went in did the raw data analysis, and it looked like something happened while it was doing that, and it's now tumbling. The signal sort of came and went. Wasn't strong enough to maintain a carrier, and so maybe a fuel leak or an engine misfired or a reaction wheel is defunct. But we've had problems with it before. In twenty two and twenty three it went into safe modes with problems with its inertial navigation, and it was

able to recover. But this is a particularly inopportune moment, not only because it's now skimming the atmosphere. Sure every time it does is it gets a little lower orbit and they'll lose it, but they don't get it handled quickly. But also we're about to go into sun conjunction, so the Mars is moving to a point where the Sun is between us and between the Earth and Mars, so we're not going to be able to communicate it with it.

So we only have a few weeks to try and figure out what's happened with Mavin and do and get it recovered, or likely by the time we can talk to again, it'll be gone. Wow. So and there's a question about replacing it, getting another mission up there, and this is a tough time to be talking about new missions. So sure, yeah, so that's going on. Okay, a couple more things. I got to talk about James Web. Yes, although not a lot of excitement around James Web these days,

it's now doing the hard work it is. You know, last year we talked about they were doing cycle four and how they there was twenty three hundred proposals. We're asking for seventy eight thousand hours of observation time, noting there's only eight thousand hours in a year, so they had to select down. They've now done the cycle five proposals and so well, there were twenty three hundred proposals in cycle four, there is twenty nine hundred proposals to

cycle five, so huge demand for the thing. And the crisis in cosmology, which we talked about a lot last year. I'm not going to go in too much detail because it's not resolved, but it's also kind of good news. The crisis in cob osmology is how do we figure out

the age of the universe. And there's two differential strategies, and James Webb helps make one of them more accurate than the other, and they are now overlapping less like it used to be that they were both they overlapped in time within their areas of their circular area of probability, and now they're not overlapping. The indication here is that we're going to have to develop new science to make sense of any of this. All right, So I got a question.

gotten further back. Like, the problem is that you get to a point where light didn't work the same way. Right, there was too much energy in the universe. It was just all white. So you can only see so far back. But we're seeing much further back and we're finding errors in our math. That makes sense. We have to update our math. That's always good though, that means good things. Yeah, this is where new science comes from. Like James Webb is doing its job. It's challenging our assumptions about how

things work. That gravity behavior may have changed over the duration of the universe, that mass may have changed over the duration of universe. Like really tricky concepts.

It's awesome. Yes, Okay, last couple of things. There's a company recently formed called K two Space, and what they're talking about is taking advantage of the new heavy lift vehicles like New Glend and Starship to build big satellites. You know, for a long time, the push has been smaller and smaller status lights because they're cheaper and our ministurization works so well. But they're saying, let's start big,

big one. They call them Mega class, so three meter by three meter platforms like that would only fit in really large spacecraft. They've already raised two hundred and fifty million dollars. That's enough money to fly something, and they have a contract with the Space Force for demonstration flight. One of the key pieces of tech they have with them is a very high powered hall of Thark thruster, so twenty kilowatt Halifac thruster that takes a lot of electricity.

Those are big solar panels, so you would be talking about building really big satellites. I think this is super exciting that we're shining looking at things like New Glen and Starship and saying what can we build that would actually take advantage of these heavy loads, and that's what

these guys are working on. That's cool, and that leads us to our last topic, which I wish I didn't have to talk about a bunch of people in asking questions, especially a fellow named Kieran Lanning who pinged me online to say, hey, what about space based power and this whole AI in orbit thing?

that artificial intelligence has put on the power grid. Yes, and so one of the proposals and has now been companies farmed like Starcloud to say, let's just put it in orbit, let's put data centers in orbit and power off of solar panels.

of charging the batteries. Because they spend forty five minutes in sunlight forty five minutes in darkness, they're constantly switching between solar power and battery power, solar power, battery power.

big deal. Okay. The downside is it's six hundred milliseconds of latency. So a data center is stupid up there, just doesn't make sense. It's a great place for power, it's a terrible place for a data.

do it. And then you're going to deploy some huge solar panels because you want a lot of electricity to run your data center. Well, all those solar panels create additional atmospheric drag, so you're going to need even more fuel to try and stay in orbit. And it's hard to move something that big without breaking it. And that's not even the heavy part. The heavy part's going to be the cooling of those computers. It's hard to cool them on land, Trying to cool them in space is

hugely problem at it. So the sensible thing if you really want to put a data center in space, would be to actually put the power up a geostationary orbit where you'd never have to move it and then relay to the data centers. Are you going to do that? Just put the data center on the ground, right, What's the diff're because the cooling is easy. You don't have

to lift all that stuff up. Like the logical thing to do if you really want to do this stuff in space is to build geostationary orbit power because then you don't care about the latency. You're just beaming electricity down. And it'd be great if you would drive that forward. But if when you do the math on what it's going to cost to lift those solar panels up, this makes no sense. This is the pets dot Com of the AI bubble. And let's let's face it.

what are you doing right? It's just it's another way to raise money and to keep people distracted and to keep people excited while you're at the tail end of and that's a crazy bubble. We'll go further into that when we talk about the power problems and the energy I.

all about the AI powerhouse. By the end of twenty twenty five, it's all about the AI bubble. You can see it coming. It's pretty obvious. And this is just the silliest part of it. So far right. I'm all for space based power. If we want to build it, that's great. It's expensive, right, That's why the proposal was Actually mature technology is on the Moon because all the ingredients to build solar panels are on the Moon, and that reduced gravity. You'd actually make better crystals on the

Moon than you would on Earth. And then it's not that hard to get back to geostationary orbit from the Moon. It's really quite easy because the green gravity is so much lower. So it would make sense to construct those panels up there, send them back to geostationary orbit, assemble it, and then beam the power to the surface, which is one of the things that Bezos was talking about. Yeah, this is all possible, but it's not. Also, it's a decade away or more.

was just an idea. Like if it's only when we get down to this couple one hundred dollars a kilogram to lowerth orbit that even becomes vaguely feasible. But I would think the more practical thing to do would be to get mature the technology is on the Moon to be able to do construction there because here's the fun part.

As soon as you've got space based power working at scale, it's not just zero emission energy landing on the Earth and that's awesome, it's also infrastructure for flying spacecraft around. You know, every space vehicle to be able to maneuver has to carry some kind of propellant, some kind of engine, and some kind of power source. When we use chemical rockets, we've combined the compower source and the compeller pealant together.

But if you think about an electrical engine, like a Hall effect thrust or an ion engine, your power source is typically solar panels, and then you have a high density fuel or propellant like xenon, and the engine is electric. It accelerates the zene on at high velocities. But solar panels are heavy and they take up a lot of room. So what if you could eliminate those by having the power plant be a stationary thing. So geostationary orbit power system.

You're flying spacecraft back and forth between the Moon and the Earth, and you could actually beam the power onto that thing so it doesn't have to carry the weight of its own big power plant for running those engines at high power, so it can decelerate. It's really smart, it's interesting, and it speaks to a more complex future where we build out this infrastructure in space that allows us to move vehicles around. You might be only running.

You imagine if we started putting spacecraft into Mars cycler orbits. So this is like, once you get up to speed, it'll fly you to Mars in about six months and back to the Earth in about thirty months on its own. It doesn't need any more energy after that, but you've got to get it up to speed. Well that's the point where you'd be close enough to that space based power that you could actually beam the power on board to run that engine, to get it to its speed,

and you never need to run it again. Interesting.

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