Space in 2023 Geek Out

How'd you like to listen to dot NetRocks with no ads? Easy? Become a patron for just five dollars a month. You get access to a private RSS feed where all the shows have no ads. Twenty dollars a month. We'll get you that and a special dot NetRocks patron mug. Sign up now at patreon dot dot NetRocks dot com. Hey, welcome back to dot net rocks. It's another geek out. It's that time of year. Yeah, happy times. I'm Carl Franklin. That's Richard Campbell. He's got some goodness

for you. Ah. You know. The funny part is these are hard to write right up until you're really pushing the deadline, and then they get really fun to write. Like I stayed up late last night, yeah, double checking a bunch of numbers and really working on some aspects of this. So it's like when you get into it, when you're deeply into it, like it's all in your head. It's really quite fun. But they are

a lot of writing. It reminds me of when I used to stay up all night on Sunday nights editing Mondays to publish on Monday morning, crying right, just absolutely peeing myself laughing. Yeah, yeah, Hey, just a weird story. I just got a tweet from a friend of mine which was a link to a TikTok video where he said, and the title was, I've changed my mind. I'm embracing chat GPT. He had a friend from New York who has a bagel shop who wanted chat GPT to generate, you

know, with dally a delicious bagel. So it came up with something that looked fake and plastic and had cold cuts and some sort of spread on the bottom and lettuce and tomato, and then he said, make it more delicious, and it basically doubled the size of everything means more delicious. And then he kept going, make it more delicious. And he did this four or five times until it was like four feet tall with a little big at the top and bottom. It's just terrible. You want any more proof of shat

GPTs is us centric. More is better, More is better. There you go and make it more delicious. That's so funny. I love it. So uh, I do have a better no framework, so roll the crazy music, well, and we should do that. What do you got? I went looking for the most expensive coolest, highest rated electronic computer driven telescope that I could find on Amazon, because you can spend a lot of money

on telescopes if you want. Yeah, this is not by far not the most expensive, but I think in the consumer category it's right up there, and it's got eighteen hundred and seventy three ratings. Most of them are at an average of four point four stars, so most of our five stars Celestron Nextstar one thirty SLT computerized telescope, compact and portable Newtonian reflector optical design. Rich's going to explain all this sky aline technology, computerized hand control, one

hundred and thirty milimeter aperture. The only thing that I recognize there is computerized, Yeah, which is the important part because aiming a telescope well is very challenging, and so using the fact that we have ultra precise GPS these days and great maps of the sky make it a lot easier to allow a machine to point very precisely for you. And honestly, I'm looking at this thing. It's less than six hundred dollars, like this is a bargain for all

the time Knowles, you're talking about It looks really, really good. It also has this feature called sky Online where it can align itself to three or more celestial objects, like it just knows based on the date and time and where you are, where things are in the sky right right, and then it actually to get even more precise, will do some pointing to try and get some alignments done so that it knows what it's doing. You know, there's a thing one of the things you find if you get into astronomy.

It's one of the reasons I've stayed away from it. What I'm hung around with folks that are serious about their hobby is that setting your You know, you can't leave your telescope all the time. You don't have an observatory, you know, yet, so you've got to set it up, and then you've got to realign it both internally and externally. So you've got it figuring out has it twisted, is it too warm to cold? All those sorts of things to actually get the telescope itself happy and then figure out where it

is, how it's pointing. You know, all of these physical things about motors that turn your telescope, they're a little analog, they've got a little slack at them and so precision is really really tough. It takes a lot to get great results when you're going to go looking at things that are very far away. I wish these things were around when I was a kid.

My father used to take us out and you know, show us, you know, the constellations that we could see a Ryan's Belt and yeah, which is great fun too, right, and the sky app apps on your phone are awesome for that for just totally them go yeah, yeah, that really is Jupiter and you know that kind of thing, because again he leads on GPS. But now, you know, my girls were kind of too young and not really interested. But I do remember the I don't remember what year

it was, but we had just an amazing meteor shower here. It was a Leonid meteor shower. I think it was, and I mean my oldest daughter was probably six, so it was two thousand and one, maybe two thousand and two, I can't remember, but it was they come around every year. Well, this one was supposed to be like the last one that was going to be this spectacular, and as soon as you could see anything in the sky, it was like a meteor every two seconds, right,

So you don't have to maintain long attention span because it's just bombing. It's everywhere, right, So I figured, I mean, and I went up to my mother's house and she has a big open field and there's no light pollution and stuff. And I got her up at three in the morning when the moon was going to be down. So it was literally we walked out three o'clock in the morning and sat out there and just in amazement. Awesome, and it was. It was the best media shower I've ever seen in

my life. Here's the question when it comes to telescopes. Is I keep talking about you know here being here on the ocean. Yeah, the haze is a bit of an issue, but we don't have a lot of light pollution because people are pretty far apart up here. Right When actually goes to looking into the telescope, you go, you got to kind of walk outside and get your eye down on that epiece after it's aimed and sort of stare at it for a while. It's like one person at a time. Is

it is compelling? If I put a CCD in it and then put it out on screen so everybody can see it, well, the resolution is going to be lower on the screen to a degree, But then again, the telescope can zoom in on what it's looking at. Sure the CCD, you know, you go for like a four K resolution CCD to a four K

screen, Like you could try and optimize this to a degree. But I'm just thinking a night of skywatching, you know, in the winter, when it's cold and clear out on the deck and being able to stay inside where it's war I'm going to look on the screen at what we're pointing at. It's kind of compelling. I just I don't know that that's as magical. It could just be TV then, right, as opposed to there's something about

putting your eye over the eyepiece and seeing the thing. I remember being on Grand Manan Island and going outside and looking up the most stars I've ever seen because there's like zero light pollution in the northeast there, and being able to see the Andromeda gally see with binoculars. Unbelieve it's big. It's big, big in the sky, no two ways about it. Yeah, But I you know, I fear you know this about me. I fear new hobbies. Yeah, because you know how I go, you know it's going to

happen. Yeah, I mean did I Did I do some math for where I could put a little observatory in for an eight inch Yeah? Yeah, I did. How many hours and how many dollars will this hobby cost? Yes? Yes, this is five figures? Now time vampires. Am I going to be able to teat a marriage through this hobby? These are the prop by problems. Absolutely, But if you know, if grandkids come around and they're interested in it, yeah I might get something like this. But

you know, you pulled up the perfect example of the middle ground. Something you you know, under one thousand dollars you could put in a closet. You don't feel too bad about it when you pull it out. You can make an evening with it. Yeah, yeah, awesome, Yeah, that's it. Good choice. Are you going to pull up a comment? Sure, Bobby, we do. I got one from last year's Space Geek Out.

Great, that's eighteen twenty six, and this comments from Dave who said you brought up uranus at the end of the show no jokes please, which brought to mind this podcast episode I listened to a few months ago where it sounds like they're actually going to get a mission to uranus. And yeah, the National Academies has proposed to NASA that we should be sending an orbiter out to the outer planets. So we've put probes in orbited around Jupiter and Saturn,

but we certainly have done Uranus or Neptune. They're very far away. Go two ways about that, but they are unusual. Uranus, especially so with an with a looks like an orbital inclination of almost ninety degrees, like the planet's laying on its side, like how did that happen? Not only that, but it looks like one of those shakes that you get in March at McDonald's the blue marble. Yeah, a shamrock shake. You know, it looks like I think that there's more green. Urinus is very blue.

But yes, yes, yes, I mean some of the other proposals in that was that it probably makes most sense to use nuclear propulsion for that spacecraft, and that would be the first mission where you're really like, hey, we really need this like this not just RTGs, but something more advanced to provide more energy, more speed, Like if you wanted to start testing more

advanced rocketry, this is a good mission for that. I would if I was designing such a rocket, I wouldn't fire up that nuclear reactor until I was outside, well outside the airs atmosphere. Yeah, yeah, it's not going to work otherwise, Right, they heat problems and so forth. Right, nuclear powered space is complicated, but you need a ton of energy.

You're way too far away from the Sun for solar RTGs. I mean, the big problem here is we've I managed to get probes out to your A. It's like voyager, but we did them by slingshotting, so that by the time they got out there, they were moving and there was no way to stop them. So to actually go into orbit around your ANAS is to be able to break and that's a You need fuel. You need resources to be able to slow down enough to be able to stay there and really spend

some time exploring. And that means I'm either a much larger vehicle or some more advanced technology. And so these robotic missions are the kinds of things that would open the door to advancing technology for all space flight going forward, and I think it would be a great opportunity. I hope they execute on it. But you are talking about a multi decatal effort ten plus years to build

and develop a ten year flight time. It's a long way away, so you know, someone would literally put their entire career into a mission, you know, realistically, Dave, thank you so much for your comment and a copy of music go by. It's on its way to you. If you'd like a copy of music go buy, I write a comment on the website at Donetrocks dot com or on the facebooks. We publish every show there, and if you comment there and I read on the show, we'll send you

a copy of music. Oh and you can follow us on Twitter if you want. That's cool. We've been there a long time. But the cool kids are hanging out on mastadon. I'm Carl Franklin at tech Hub dot social and I'm Rich Campbell at masadon dot social. Send us a two yes, and we learn any comments about uranus we won't, or the probe that's going in the Yeah, okay, wow, we're not still that low yeah, full grade nine experience. There you go, speaking of Mondays, where's Mark

Miller Yaks? I mean, you know what's fun about these is I go read my notes from previous years and then laugh just about you know, wow, that we're gonna this will happen in twenty twenty three, dope didn't happen. Now it's push twenty twenty four, that kind of thing. But also I'm sure things that you thought were going to happen in the next five years have already happened, right, Yeah, some have, some haven't, you know, but let's talk about it. I mean, our larger story to

my mind for space flight twenty three is SpaceX. So Elon's goal for twenty twenty three was to have one hundred flights in a year, which is astonishing right when you think not that long ago there were not one hundred flights of anybody in the whole world an a year, And even now we're around two hundred and nine flights for twenty twenty three, So we're talking half of all

flights came from SpaceX. Although they didn't get to one hundred at the moment, and we're recording this towards the end of December, there might be a couple more squeezed in before it's over. They're at ninety four flights. Wow, so eighty eight Falcon nines with every single booster landed successfully. Four Falcon heavies flew with side boosters recovered. They've never recovered a center and they're not even bothering these days. It's just too energetic and the two starship flights.

Yeah, so even if they did one a day from now until the end of the year, they still you know, with weekends, they still probably wouldn't reach the goal. Yeah, it's pretty unlikely. And part of the problem is that December weather was very problematic. They went ten They've been at a cadence of every three or four days, they have a flight a couple of week at least. That's how you get to one hundred, and they

went ten days on a flight in December. Partly weather, but also they have a Falcon Heavy flight that's supposed to go We're supposed to leave a while ago, back at the beginning of December, and it's carrying the X thirty seven B. So that is the Space Force Experimental Mini Shuttle, which is first time it's ever flown on a Falcon Heavy, and in fact, there's

a lot of debate. It's to why is it flying on a Falcon Heavy because it can fly in a regular Falcon Falcon nine and it has flown on the Atlas five and so forth, So they're doing something unusual and flying in on the heavy They're obviously going to give it a lot more energy, maybe a much higher orbit or a much heavier payload. Nobody really knows. It's all very secret, but we get into one of the current if you're going to brun it this cadence of a flight every couple of days. Yeah,

the way that spaceflight works right now is somewhat inefficient. The big thing is that pads have to be configured for a flight. So yeah, yeah, the pad that they've got set up for this fulcon heavy flight can't fly anything else. It's really set up for that flight. And so when they had a weather delay that pad obviously no, nothing was going to fly anyway.

But then now they've had other problems with it to the point where they've actually taken it off the pad and back into the building to do some work on it. And in the meantime that pad is hung essentially like do you reconfigure that pad back to fly something else or do you just wait for the heavy flight to finish and so on. I remember when we were down in Orlando for dev Intersection just a couple weeks ago, there was a Starlink launch.

Yeah, and you know, we were busy with stuff, we couldn't have seen it. But you know, the cape is only an hour a way. Yeah, you know, theoretically we could have gone to see it, but actually we could have just looked up. Yeah. No, I that night I did go outside. It was like a one in the morning. Yeah, and you saw it in this You saw a light. It's it's pretty brief. It's like less than a minute, minute and a half and it's gone. Yeah. I think I was seeing the inside of my eyelids

at that point. It just seemed very reason. It was very late at night, and we were late in the conference too. We're always yeah, so yeah, I mean. Elon said that his goal for twenty twenty four is one hundred and forty four flights, and that they're going to have to continue to optimize their strategies for how you reconfigure pads, how you can put if a vehicle has a problem, they'd use the pad for something else, like those kinds of things to maintain this kind of cadence. What's the benefit

to Elon to do so many flights in a year. Well, you know, you bring up a great point, which is a obviously he can the more efficient he gets the more you reduce the price, right, the faster you run the machine, the more you can tune it. He gets paid for a lot of those flights, although of those eighty eight Falcon nine flights, fifty six of them were Starlink flights. So he's still populating out the

satellite, the satellite network for Starlink. They're now over five thousand Starlink satellites, which means it's more than half of all of the satellites at orbit are Starlink. Does he want to disrupt the land based internet cable modem market kind of thing? I think that's possible. It's the reality is that starlink is about the same speed as a cable modem more or less. But it works out almost anywhere I have one. I've been in the early data. But

it's expensive, although again they're trying to get the price down. They've certainly made less expensive equipment for you to buy. Used to be I think almost eight hundred dollars now it's a couple hundred dollars. But they're also saying they now have enough customers that starlink actually profitable. That's cool, And one of his missions around Starlink was to fund the trips to Mars off of the back of building this massive network. So I mean they're so far ahead now they

have a working network, they have this huge number of satellites. And the other thing that's happened by flying these starling flights is it continues to mature the Falcon nine. So all of the most used flights, like they're up to one of the boosters has flown seventeen times. They think they can fly it twenty times. Now those limit flights are always Starling flights, so they're only

risking their own hardware. Plus those starling flights are maximum weight. They're flying as heavy as they can fly, so they really are constantly testing the vehicle to its limits every time they make a Starling flight, and it makes their rocket better. So you said they have reused those rockets the first stages. Yes, the first stages, and that's something that was supposed to be a

feature of the Shuttle, wasn't it. Well, the shuttle did get use, but not the and the boosters were refilled and the external tank was thrown away. The problem is that to get the Shuttle ready for a second flight, there was such an extensive teardown it was almost a rebuild and so just became prohibitively expensive. And one of the problems you have with the Shuttle is that it really only had one technological update from the original design in the nineteen

seventies. In the nineties they did a digital upgrade internally, but for the most part, they never improved shuttle. So over the thirty plus years that it was flying, the technology was kind of frozen in place and it was just old and it got older, and so as the vehicle got the vehicles got older, their inspections became more and more extensive. So in contrast, you said, this was the Falcon nine that they reused. Yeah, so they reused the first stage. Yeah, so they reused the first stage.

How much of teardown and rebuild did they have to do to that? And we don't really know, because not a public company, they don't have to tell us, right, it's all typically held. But we do know that they're able to turn the same booster round in relatively short orders, so we don't think it's very much that they and again there pressingly gets their own edges. We're not really seeing failures, like we haven't had an engine fail at

a really long time on a climbout. So it feels more and more appears after hundreds of successful landings and reuses, that they really understand the vehicle. Well, I remember the couple of years of epic landing failures. Yes, those are over, are they. Yeah, there hasn't been a failed landing in ages. They all land, they're all successful. Some of them land back on land, some land on barges, which is then other point about if they're going to increase the numbers or they want to get to one forty

four, they need at least one more barge. Yeah, they just it takes Typically those barges are far enough out that it takes several days to get back. And so considering your flying going to fly every other day or you know, every third day, you're gonna know the barge or two. I remember during those years, you and I were sitting in a in a pub or a restaurant or bar at a conference and I can't remember where it was, but it was somewhere in Europe, and we were looking on the internet

to watch the re entry and it just blew up. You know. It was one of those times where the landing just failed. Yeah, and it's you know, it's the problem with it being so routine now is we forget just how insane it is. It is pretty insane, you know, it's

crazy. I went reached out on the twitters or whatever the heck it's called now thes I formerly note about Twitter, had said like, what would you like, you know, any questions for me as I'm writing these geek outs, And Stuart Quinn asked me about the environmental impact of so many launches.

Yeah, you know that launch canes has never been higher. SpaceX alone, with almost one hundred flights this year had lifted over a million tons into low Worth orbit, Like, it's just so much bigger, and we're starting to head towards this idea of more space tourism, so the flights may go up even more, of course they're expected to. And the simple answer to this is, I mean, compared to air travel, space flight is just a

tiny drop in the bucket. But there have been carbon footprint measurements for keeping humans in orbits, specifically the astronauts in the space station, and yeah, that number is thousands of times larger than a human on Earth. And then again which there's only a few of them, so and again, there's a volcano in Iceland right now that's spewing out tons and tons and tons of toxic gas. Yeah, it just happens sometimes, not that much. It's not

that's a good volcano. It's not that pyroclastic. But those are also normal cycles of the planet, and the planet recovers pretty quickly from this. Yeah. Yeah, The actual emit rockets are such short duration. I mean, they burn a lot of fuel fairly quickly, but typical flight to orbits like eight minutes. So compare that to a trans atlantic flight, like the environmental impact per person because there's so many more people on a Translantic flight, are

more efficient, but it also depends a lot on the fuel. The most polluting rocket engines are the solid rocket motors, so look at you Artimis and Shuttle. Those are use and aluminum ammonia compound and it's fairly toxic stuff. Again, doesn't those only burn for a couple of minutes, but still it's a lot, you know, Speaking of that comment that you read from Scott, I know this isn't an air travel geek out, but are there any

are there any updates in terms of more eco friendly flight fuels? Slash methods that actually are interesting to you. Yeah, not really, but understand interesting is not a good idea anyway. They certainly continue to push on what on zero carbon fuels, but those are fuels grown biology and considered zero carbon because you're not getting new carbon out of the out of the environment and adding it

in. This is taking carbon it's already there. You know, you grow algae by it consuming carbon dioxide, and then you're putting it back into the environment again as you turn it into jet fuel and burn it. It's just much more expensive than traditional aviation fuel. So I saw this past year on Facebook and I don't know how and I have since, uh, you know,

hidden these posts were gotten rid of the messages. But it was some sort of new science kind of you know, stuff that people crap science basically, and yeah, it was snake oil science. So it was about this gigantic plane that is, you know, not built yet but supposedly nuclear powered and can fly continuously around the Earth. And basically you take a little plane and connect to it and then get on it and you can like live in it and there's swimming pools and communities. It was just over the top.

Well and the US military looks seriously at making a nuclear powered bomber, yeah, to drop nukes, because that it could fly continuously. It's just that to build a reactor with enough energy to keep flying like that, it's very heavy and it has and it's very dangerous. So yeah, especially if you if you blanket the Earth through nuclear bombs, what are you flying over or too or where are you gonna fly? But where are you gonna land? Kind of slow things down there here? Yeah, And I'm not I don't

particularly want to do a nuclear weapons geek out. We're not in a great time with nuclear safety. No, But yeah, the the emissions around rocketry, they're an issue. I mean, you would think that the hydrogen engines, the hydro lockx engines like they used on the Shuttle, the ARES twenty

fives, would be low emission, except that they're so energetic. They don't just make water when they combine like with auction liqui hydrogen together with that energy level they also make they rip nitrogen out of the atmosphere in the process and make nitroxies. They make hydroxyls. Like it's just a very energetic reaction. What about blimps, But it's small compared to the other emission source. What

about blimp technology? Has it gotten any better? I know you're not going to get there much faster, but no, no, you're gonna get much slower. And yeah, I know the biggest blimp in the world ever is currently being test flown. It's been called the Walrus. But then again, you could make a hotel in the sky with a blimp. Yeah you know

that, you would actually want to spend time. But now you're having a long emissions while you're up there for ages, right, and yeah, you got to feed those people, so now you're running supplies up to them. Like this, math gets difficult. It's better to travel in less time. And would they do it? Dave Matthews train bridge thing to get rid of the waste. I don't want to think about what drops out of that thing.

Yeah, all right, enough of that, I'm gonna I want to wrap up on SpaceX by stalking and talking about Starship, because in twenty twenty three we had the first flights of something that starship shape. Yes, there was hoppers and things before that, but the real stack, the largest rocket in the world, flew twice last year on test flight. The first one was in April on April twentieth. Yeah, yeah, for twenty. In fact, I'm debating why. I still wonder why Elon did this flight.

It made no sense. It was an obsolete rocket designed. They would never fly that configuration again. It was an obsolete engine setup. And you probably sell this on the news. It did tremendous damage to the pad. Like they had lots of rockets, but they only had one pad. Yeah, and so when they rocket, when the heavy booster ignited, three of the engines failed on ignition, and so the thrust aweight ratio was almost into one and so he climbed out really slowly, and that just blasted the pad.

It dug a twenty foot hole foot deep hole underneath the pad. It blew concrete for miles around. It blew dust even further. There's great video of a camera, an empty camera van. Nobody's in it, but there's all these cameras on it just getting spiked by a chunk of concrete. Thankes, it was I'm and it was a bit of an environmental disaster. That is a remember sensitive wetlands. So honestly it set the starship program back because it

took time to fix it. They put a water to lose system in to help suppress that, which, by the way, they already had under construction, like the parts were arriving even before the flight. She gets back to why why would he do this flight? It damaged the pad and create all these problems. Yeah, and it was really studying, you know, a stumper for me, the best idea I've had. There's two thoughts. What is he does have investors and they wanted to see something fly, and so

they were basically ready, let's go. How bad could it be, not anticipating that he would shred the pad. And the second was a recruiting problem, that this flight would be the flight that got new engineers on board, because by all accounts, Elon burns smart people out and so they were always looking for new talent and somebody flying a rocket is compelling to those who want to make rock. Sure and in the end of flight did not go over

it, they still learned from it without without a doubt. But yeah, they had multiple engine failures on climb out, their separation from the furt between the stages failed, their self destruct failed too, so the self destructions went off. But because the tanks were made a stainless steel. They held together for a couple of minutes before they finally ripped themselves apart, so it destructed

in the sky and jumped into the ocean and fell into the ocean. That's right, ye, which you know the second flight did too, and many flights will as they learn. Yeah, So I mean I'm not pleased with the first flight. It seemed like a really dumb thing to do. Yes, somebody should have done the math about the pad. I mean I think they had, but they didn't care. They didn't think it would be that

bad. What's funny is, going back over my notes for the twenty twenty two geek out, I mentioned the fact that when they were doing static fires of Starship, they were talking about the amount of pad damage that occurred. So, I mean they'd already done tasks that we talked about that showed how much damage was going on. But they fixed the pad. It took them a few months. It took longer to get FAA qualification, and fish and Wildlife had to say as well, but they got through all of that.

They added this massive water delucism, so a huge amount of water sprays up towards the rocket as the engines were light to decrease the acoustic shock and to sort of strengthen the whole system. All right, So then by this November we're ready for the second Starship flight. Now they've upgraded the pad obviously with the water to lose system, and repaired all the damage. They've also upgraded

the rocket extensively to better engines. They're now using electric gimbling instead of hydraulic like the earlier flight, which they said they were gonna use electric all along. They also changed the staging system, so you know, traditionally in American spacecraft, the staging system is a shut down ullage system. So they the lower stage will shut down and then there'll be a little ulage booster to stabilize things in the two rockets. The two pieces will separate and in the upper

stage will light. What does uledge mean. Pullage is literally little thrusters just enough to settle the fuel to be able to fire the next engine up. But they do it as a cold stage. The two pieces separate with all the engines off, and then the upper engine fires up and off the coast. But that's not the only way to go about things, and Elon switched over to a hot stage now the Russians used hot staging for the so used rockets. This is where literally you light the engine of the upper stage while

still attached to the lower stage. Although rapidly they push each other apart. Now this sounds bad, right, yeah. So the way you do this is that you have an interstage layer between the two parts that has VENs in it, someplace for the gas to go, and you armor the top of the fuel tank on the lower stage so that you can take the blast. And that's what they did. The upside to that approach is that it's energetically

efficient. You're able to fire the upper stage very quickly, you don't have to wait for separation and stuff, so you ultimately are going to get more delta V into orbit. And so for this second flight in November, it went pretty well. A all thirty three engines lit. In fact, they

were gorgeous. You know, when these really high performance engines run, they create this thing called a mock diamond, basically a shock wave coming out of the bell and this is thirty three of them, so there was literally a mock diamond of mock diamonds. So the engines combined into their own additional shockwave, which was. It's just extraordinary to look at. And the first stage burnt its duration perfectly, and then they had to do separation, which is

that hot staging. And so what they did was they shut down most of the engines on the first stage, not all of them, because the intent was to not attempt a landing, but at least attempt to fly the first stage away. When this is fully operational, they do want to recover both stages ultimately, right, so they were going to attempt this, So they they throttle down the engines, but they have thirty three engines still shut down, so they didn't shut them all off at once because the shock would be

too much. They shut them down in groups. It was really quite beautiful to see the outer ring of engines shut off, then an inner ring, and then the next ring, until it was just down to the three that were burning sort of minimum power. And then the upper stage lit and the gases blew out through the vents and the upper stage fired away, and then the lower stage started to maneuver. Uh and then shortly after that had a

rapid unscheduled disassembly. Yeah, I loved that. Yeah, rapid unscheduled disassembly. So did this happen while it was still inside the Earth's atmosphere or outside it's getting high, so you know, atmosphere, there's not like there's a clear end to appen. No, no, no, yeah, but yeah they were, they were pretty high up by the time they stage you. But again only a two and a half three minute burn before the separation occurred.

So it brings me to a curious question, which is, and forgive my ignorance, but I feel like I'm I'm not alone in this ignorance. Here. When you're when you're swimming, you're pushing against water, right, and it's very dense, and you can you can move fast. Right when you're in the Earth's atmosphere, you have gravity pulling you down, but you

also have air to push against. Right when you black those thrusters. If you're around in space right and you're not is bound to the Earth by gravity and there's no atmosphere to push against when you fire thrusters, is there, is it less effective because there's nothing to push against, or well, one would argue it's more effective because there's nothing holding you back. Either. In the end, what a rocket engine does is throws mass out its bell and

that's what's That's what's pushing your rocket forward. Right, You're literally tossing that mass, that combusted fuel at velocity out the back. You don't have to combust it. You could literally just pressurize a nitrogen container and leed that out and we'll give you thrust as well. But it comes down to the mass that you throw out the belt, right, So I imagine that's where the

math comes in. It's like what the cost benefit analysis of fuel expenditure to resist the I mean, I guess you have that with every vehicle, right. Well, the important part here is can you throw enough mass at high enough velocity. The more velocity you have, the more net thrust you're going to get. And so that's why we talk about these very high performance engines. Three thousand bar pressure inside that combustion chamber accelerates that burnt fuel and an

extraordinary rate, and that it turns into more effective thrust. Okay, and the atmosphere has very little to do with it. In fact, it's an impediment. The nose of that rocket was heating up as it was accelerating through the atmosphere because it was moving so quickly. And I suppose you know in getting back to the water things. Swimming through water takes more energy because you have more resistance. Yes, right, and we do all these hydrogenamic effects

to try and reduce that resistance as much as possible. Yeah, okay, so successful separation. It was beautiful. It looks like what went wrong with the first stages They throttled down a little too much and so the fuel stopped sitting at the bottom of the tanks and actually bounced upward in the tank. And then as they throttled back up, its slammed back down to the bottom

of the tank and it broke things. And so if you watch the footage of the first stage maneuvering away, you start seeing gas emitting from different directions, the kind of directions it said, that's not right. And then shortly after that there was the RUD and it was not a commanded RUD. So I mean, there is a self destruct system and the software does make sure that the rocket is flying down it's lane the safe air can flying and if it goes out of that land in any way, it'll destroy it. That

that didn't happen. Did Elon come up with that term rapid unscheduled disassembly on schedule, unplanned disassembly. No, it's it's an industry term. But he does love it is he uses it a lot. Well, yeah, I mean, and you kind of have it tongue in cheek now right, it's yeah, it's everybody knows what you're talking about. In wink wink, you know. Yeah, And again the news often talks about, you know, Elon flies another rocket and it fails. But it's like, listen, this

is what testing, dynamic testing looks like. Now I get it. Spending years planning and planning and planning to have one perfect flight. It's like, you fly it, you blew it up, you learn. And clearly there was progress between flight one and flight two. The upper stage, by the way, went on almost to orbit. It burned very well, but it did seem to have some There was a point towards the end the of the flight when it would have gone into orbit where the oxygen tank rate consumption went

up, so it's likely that the tank ruptured and started losing fuel. And once that had happened, now they did destroy it because they knew it wasn't going to get where it was they wanted it to get to, and so it was safer to wreck it it at its highest altitude, so the parts broke up as much as possible. That being said an amateur astronomer in Puerto Rico who wanted to try and get pictures of it going overhead managed to get

footage of the a portion of the nose of Starship after destruction tumbling. Wow. Wow, it was just an extraordinary fine to get that video, and it's amazing. But it's like, yeah, that was that's the header tank looks like it was still intact and still leaking fuel and this silvery thing is tumbling end over end as it falls into the sea. So an extraordinary second

flight. The most important thing is they did not wreck the pad. The footage afterwards showed that the lift off did strip all the paint off of everything, and because it's right by the ocean, within hours russ started appearing, so they do have to quickly repaint it and so forth. There is some damage that the pad that quick disconnect systems were damaged. The launch mounts, the things that actually hold the rocket down until it's time for to lift off,

all had to be replaced. Do you have a link to that video of the amateurs, Yeah, I'll included in the show note, but yeah, i'd love to see that that. Both the second flight's amazing and the video of the tumbling piece is amazing. It's all great. So obviously more upgrades to be done to the pad. They're changing the tank system around, but for the most part, a very successful step forward and again largest rocket ever flown both by height and by mass fully fueled. That whole rocket was

seventy five hundred metric tons. Wow, that's like the weight of a destroyer and you made it fly. So yeah, it's they're planning another flight for first quarter to twenty twenty four. Five is an intempt to fly four starships next year in their learning because this is the vehicle that's supposed to become the Lunar Lander. In other rocket news, not a lot happened in twenty twenty three. We've been talking about Blue Origins New Glen, which is a seven

meter rocket. This is Bezos's company. They did fire their CEO this year, and Bezos obviously a stepped down a CEO of Amazon, but he's still on the chair. He's got a new guy into Blue Origin. New Glenn is years late. They've been moving some hardware around at the Cape so it looks like they've actually built something, and he's swearing that new Glen's going to fly in the first quarter of twenty four and then it's going to have a

working payload. So their first Chess flight is actually going to be a working payload, which is a little bit crazy to me. But okay, you do you when you say working payload, you're not talking about people, no spacecraft? Okay, Yeah, like they often to with first flights. They literally put a billet of concrete in for the first flight of fulk and heavy. Elon put his Tesla roadster in right right. What a great shot that was. Yeah, profound moment. We talked about it. We made a

whole show around that. Yeah, that whole moment. But normal for first flights you just use a dummy payload because the risk is high. He's pretty confident and so they're going to actually take a payload in their first flight. The United Launch Alliance these are the guys who used to run the Shuttle then and have been running the Atlas five in Delta four rockets, both of which are being retired. No more are being built. They're using up the last

of them. Have a new rocket. They've been developing four years called Vulcan, also a methylox rocket like Starship, much smaller, a much more reasonable sized rocket. They promised that they would fly in twenty two than they promised in twenty three. They still in flood. There is a rocket on the pad that they're doing testing with and they swear it'll fly in twenty four. I'd also note that there are rumors flying around that United Launch Alliance is on

the market. It's going to get sold and it might even complete early in twenty four. One of the possible buyers being bluored. What about Virgin Galactic. So Virgin Galactic had their first paid tourist flight. So this is the Spaceship two, the thing developed originally by Bert Rutan, that gets lifted by the White Night by this carrier aircraft up to about sixty thousand feet and they drop it and it fires a very odd Nitrox rocket engine. It gets up

to about three hundred thousand feet above the carbon line. You get about a minute or two of free fall and then it reorients. The vehicle turns its tailplanes in this particular angle called the shuttlecock mode, so they can re enter under control, and then it comes in for a landing and you know you can get your two minutes of zero G for a quarter million dollars something like that. So, yeah, they had their first flight and then they didn't

fly again. They swear they're going to fly again in twenty four where New Shepherd had a bunch of flights and then they were doing it. They had an unmanned flight with some experiments on board and the booster failed. The separation system worked perfectly. If people have been aboard, I think they would have been fined if separation system fired. The capsule landed on parachute. They rocket

was a total loss, and they have made some improvements. They say, what's not gonna happen again, and they're going back to flight next year as well. Huh. All right, should we take a break. Yeah, let's take a break and then we'll talk about the space station. All right. We'll be right back with more geeking out after these very important messages, and we're back att net Rocks geek Out Edition, the Space geek Out Show of twenty twenty three. I'm Carl Franklin. That's Richard Campbell, the brain's

behind this show. And if you've never heard of geek out before. There's a lot of them. If you just search for the tag geek out or search for geek you'll find them all. And Richard likes to do research on a particular topic and then tell us what he's found. Yeah, a lot of these are notes I took throughout the year as I saw interesting things.

But you still have this push at the end of the year to sit down and organize it, figure out what I missed, you know, go back and check some things, double checks some facts, you know, try and you got to prioritize these. The show is long, but it could be way longer. Yeah. International Space Station not a lot of news. You know why it's busy. You know, it's the twenty fifth anniversary of the first components going up. The first operational mode was in nineteen ninety eight and

here we are in twenty twenty three and it's at capacity. This has you know, six astronauts on it all of the time with other visitors. On top of that, they are running the most number of experiments ever run in the year was twenty twenty three. So they are at work as a laboratory. Was there some rumblings about shutting it down, Yes, and for a few reON. One is it has a lifespan. Yeah, right, parts wear out, no two ways about it. Original plan was to run it

till twenty twenty five. Now they're talking about trying to keep it going to twenty thirty. The oldest components are also some of the most vital components, and there are Russian and they're having more problems than the others now, you know, you can blame that on Russian hardware. The Russians have built a lot of space stations. They kind of know what they're doing, but they're all kind of broke also, you know, Wars notwithstanding, and they are

still working together. You know, for as much as there's a conflict between the Western Russia, the space station still depends on those two getting along. The Russians have made noises about wanting to take their parts and separate from the rest of the station in twenty five. Screw you guys, I'm going out well. And there's a case to be made for some of the Science Lab parts on the US side that are younger, that were flown in the aughts,

that still have another few years in it. In facts, Axiom Space, which is a group of former NASA folks are starting to build their own space station, and they've been flying missions to the space station on Falcon nine crew dragons for money, and so they want to actually build out a free

flying space station by building it again connected to the International Space Station. And now there's a conversation going on about maybe they will take the science module with them when they separate off as the International Space Station is ending, so there's lots of debate about how to end it. One of the biggest issues being the International Space Station is the largest thing ever flown in space. It was

assembled up there, it took a long time. It is very heavy, it's four hundred and fifty metric tons, and so de orbiting it in a controlled way is a important because that is going to a lot of that mass will make it to the ground and b complicated and expensive. They need to build. They need to build a high power tug to actually decelerate enough so they can aim it for what they call Point Nemo, which is in the

southern the Pacific Ocean. That's where they generally drop old spacecraft because there's nothing there. It's a safe place to drop things off. What I know about the ISS is that it's modular, yes, So that in the international part means that Canada built the module, the United States built the module, and the you know European countries, yes, et cetera, a Russia. So I guess it's is it Is it crazy to think that you could decouple the

modules and replace them if they're wearing out. I mean, that's one of the thoughts. And if I think if conditions were better with the Russians, there's a conversation to be had about replacing the what they call the FGP or the main control module. But the conditions aren't better. There's also never it's never been done. One of the weird things that happens in space is that

metals tend to fuse together. Really, so there is a question as to whether or not those components that have been that have been docked together now for twenty years, whether they would come apart. We just don't know. Is it because the extreme temperature changes and things? Yeah, and yeah, this is weird effect that happens up there with metal welding. You have these very flat surfaces and they meet up and over time they literally fuse together. They

won't come apart. Wow, And so you know, now you get into the economics of it, is it cheaper to try and spend time dismantling this thing versus just fly a new one now. And NASA has an initiative initiative now for commercial space stations. So what they're saying is we're not going to build another space station, but we will rent time on space stations. Here's

what we expect from the space stations that we rent time on. Their goal is to have multiple companies flying smaller stations with that you can rent time on. These will probably be man tended the way they built International Space Station. With the limits of the technology at the time, there needs to be somebody on it all the time to maintain it or you'll lose control of it.

But technology is advanced enough now that we could be man tended so that you could operate it remotely and then set it up for people to go visit it, spend a month up there, and then come back down. There's also different kinds of experiments you want to do. The ISS is strictly a microgravity lab, so there's exactly for example, there is no experiments for centrifuge is on there because those vibrations affect other microgravity experiments. So there's a taste to

be made for building centrifugees in a separate space station. We need to learn to simulate gravity for humans to have extended stays in space. We generally limit space station astronauts to six months on the station, and it takes them over a year to recover. So could we put them in artificial gravity? Could we spin the space station so that they could have enough gravity to stay healthy and be able to stay up for longer? And we've never built anything that

big. Yeah, weird things happened to your Weird things happened to your bones. Muscles atrophy like you. Yeah, you lose a calcim at a fairly alarming rate. You need to do two and a half hours of exercise a day even to slow that process down. There are lots of problems, and one of the solutions would be to create a centrifuge, a rotating ring so that you had enough gravitational effect to keep your body functioning normally. But we've never done it. Is that what they had in two thousand and one,

Yes, a space honesty, a centrifuge. Yeah, and Kubrick, being the crazy director that he is, actually built one on a sound stage that rotated. It's crazy because he was awesome. Yeah, you know, the whole idea that we you never actually flew the moon, that it was actually Kubrick for him was like that might be true, except that knowing Kubrick, he would have demanded to do it on set. So they yes, I'll only do this, but only if we shoot it on the moon. Yeah.

Oh man. Anyway, I mean that's the space station is at its peak right now. It is doing the most work it's ever done. It is an extraordinary achievement by mankind. It is a point of peace, you know, that's one place where they're not fighting, and it is coming to the to an end. I'm also excited that NASA is commercializing this the same way they've commercialized resupply of both crew and cargo. Now they're going to commercialize it for the actual station itself. Well, there's a good way to get

money out of the one percent something like that. Yeah. The speaking of the resupply part of the space station, there are two resupply offerings, right There's the one from SpaceX with their cargo Dragon, and then there's also the one from Orbital Sciences, which is the sickness. It's now owned by North of Rumant, Okay, but they both resupply space station. And then on the crew side there's Crew Dragon. There was supposed to be star Liner,

which still isn't working. Whose genius idea is that Boeing Boeing, Yeah, was going to build an alternative to Crew Dragon. They didn't want to have redundancy, right, but it's gone so badly. They did their one test flight to the station successfully after on their second try and then they found so many problems they've now delayed the next attempt, the next test flight to twenty twenty five. But one of the competitors for the cargo resupply missions was the

Dream Chaser. This is a little lifting body based on the NASA's AHL twenty that looks like a mini shuttle, basically made up of two components. You have the spacecraft that can re enter, and there's a cargo module that bolts on the back with solar panels and stuff on it that you leave behind lifted

on a rocket. So it typically was supposed to fly on Atlas five now with fly on a vulcan wings fold up to fit in the payload fair but it lost but they kept working on it anyway, and with all of the problems around star Liner, NASA is now supporting dream Chaser, and Dream Chaser is ready for a test flight. Will actually be able to do resupply to

the station. No crew yet, but who knows in the future. What's interesting is that it has a return payload capability, so the sickness craft the oneworl Sciences lifts more to the station than Cargo Dragon can, but it has no return, so it just burns up the atmosphere on the way down. Cargo Dragon does have a return. They have a heat shield, so they're able to recover payloads, so you can do experiments in space and bring them

back. The problem is that it's a capsule, so a it re enters under high gravitational stress, so that can damage your experiments and it lands in the ocean, which is an environmental problem, and then it has to be recovered, which means if you've got a delicate experiment and say something that has

to stay refrigerated, that kind of thing, it's at risk. If Dream Chaser starts working, it can return payload back to Earth, but it can also land on a runway, so a lot less gravitational stress and be you know, quick back into under controlled environments so you can recover an experiment quickly. So there is a case for Dream Chaser, and they are pretty far along. They're supposed to fly. They're supposed to be the second flight of

the Vulcan. So the Vulcan's been delayed a lot. The first flight for Vulcans supposed to carry a payload to the moon. Brave but okay. For the second flight is supposed to be in April of twenty four and it's supposed to be the dream Chaser test flight to the station. No payloads, just a test flight. But exciting new vehicle. Yeah, that is ex and one that could be turned into a Mann vehicle at some point. Wow, do you personally want to take a flight when it becomes feasible into space?

You know that might be too late for me. Yeah, I just you know, we were just a dev intersection and I went to you know, we rented out part of Universal Studios for the party. I went on a couple of those hogwart rides and I was damaged with or without Scotch. Yeah. It was pretty sober to the part where I'm like, this is not smart and so yeah, I don't know. My head really was to go. My body's like you're an idiot, So yeah, I don't know. It's a great question. Fifty six. Yeah, so you know, who

knows. We'll see. So let's talk a little bit about the moon, because we yeah, going on the moon. There were a bunch of landers that went to the Moon in twenty three. One of them was the Russia Luna twenty five. The previous Luna twenty four was in the nineteen seventies, but apparently they dusted off the old design and tried to fly to the Moon ahead of the Indian lander. Also China, right, China has already been on the moon. They landed on the far side of the Moon a few

years ago, Yeah, which was astonishing. It was the first and that lander I think and rover is still functioning. But India had a flight and then Russia jumped in out of no where. They did get to the Moon before the Indians. They just landed with bigger, big with anybody. You could see if you go search online for the Luna twenty five landing, you can see the blast mark where it hit the Moon at several kilometers percent. Oh, it wasn't a manned moonflight then no, no, there's no there's

been no new man moon flights so far. Okay, these are all remote control landers and some in some case we're over. So the Russian flight was more like a missile, yeah, something like that. They were attempting to land, they were in their their landing burn, uh, and there was some kind of malfunction and they lost control it and it hit the moon with figure now the same thing. We've had a bunch of landers go that way, including an Indian one. Yeah, that that impacted hard, and an

Israeli lander a couple of years ago. Also hard. Landing on the Moon is hard. That being said, Uh, the Indian space program is serious business and they continue to work on this problem. And in August this year, Chander and three soft land a lander and a rover on the south pole of the Moon first time ever. That's so cool. There are only the fourth country to soft land on the Moon America, Russia, China, India. The Japanese have a lander on the way to the Moon as we're recording.

This supposed to be sometime in twenty twenty four. And we wish them, you know, all the best. Yeah, that's great. The artemist missions. There was no artimist mission in twenty three. There was an artist mission. It was an unmanned artimist mission. This is NASA's Moon rocket, derived from Space Shuttle parts. Yeah, right, And understand this rocket is a political rocket. NASA, I near as I can tell, NASA doesn't

want this rocket. But understanding that NASA is funded by Congress, and that over the evolution of the Space Shuttle program, every single state in the Union participated in the Space Shuttle program, and so that's a lot of jobs. And so when the space Shuttle program ended in twenty eleven, Congress refused to stop funding it, and so what what they were funding them was re implementing Space Shuttle related parts into a rocket. Now there's a case to be made

here. The Space Shuttle itself weighed almost one hundred tons. So if you get rid of the Shuttle and just use the engines and the tanks on a ton left to orbit is a lot. That's Saturn five class moon rocket technology. And so there have been several versions of this over the year. Believe me, this idea of repurposing Shuttle technology into a rocket was an awesome idea in the nineteen nineties. Yeah, okay, now it's obsolete, but it

has continued. It costs billions and billions of dollars. The current estimate for the Artemis one flight was four billion bucks. And it's really because of constituencies that don't want their jobs taken away. That's right. They don't want to have to say to their constituents, Yeah, we've shut that program down, find a new job. Is it really that simple? I mean, is that the only reason? No, it's not. I mean, it's easy to say that, Carl. But the other side of this is these are

skilled people. They're not replaceable. Yeah, there isn't new ones, right, you do have to train people up in this, and so losing that skill set is an issue without a doubt. That being said, this is a primitive rocket relatively speaking. It's insanely powerful, but it's still using hydrolock sensions on its first stage, which is kind of insane, right, because the fuel density is so low. That's why that tank is massive. Because

the hydrogen tank is eight times the size of the oxygen tank. If they were using methane, the tanks to be about the same size. And they've extended the booster stage and the Orion capsule is an extraordinarant capsule. The upper stage still needs to be improved. They did announce the Artemis two flight in twenty three. This is a manned flight to go around the Moon, you know, sort of like the Apollo eight mission in nineteen fifty five. Yeah,

they're just going to go around the Moon. The Artimist one flight was unmanned. They sent the Orion capsule around the Moon and they did some really interesting maneuvers with that Orion capsule. They know more about gravitation they've ever known before. They did some interesting gravity tricks. But the second flight is going to be a straight up free return send humans around the Moon for the first time in fifty plus years. They probably won't make the twenty four date.

They're behind schedule. They have selected the four astronauts, three Americans, two men and a woman, and one male Canadian. So there's going to be a Canadian going around the Moon, which sounds cool until you realize we're trading. We know we're able to fly a Canadian into space because we con attribute to the program and we're using up our flight around the Moon flight rather than a land or flight because Artimists three is supposed to be actually landing on the

Moon. So okay, it's a trade off. You know, when you mentioned the Artist program, I can't help think of the tension between you know, the private sector i e. SpaceX etal. And the government and NASA. And isn't there any kind of creative way that these two things can benefit each other? Well, and one would argue they have because NASA put out to bid the Lunar Lander and SpaceX won it. Right, So the lander part of the Artemis three mission is this commercial vehicle, And to be clear,

it's a commercial company that's building Artemis. It's United Launch Alliance. Okay, right, the guys who built the Shuttle. But they're being funded by the Congress though. Yeah, but then again, so is the lunar Lander missions, right right, But SpaceX isn't no space SpaceX absolutely is but getting contracts from the US government to resupply the space station to ship the fly crew up there. Okay, I see. Now you can argue about the type

of contract, which is a legitimate argument. Yeah, right, that Artemis missions are very much based on a cost plus contracting model. So it's like these are deliverables. You know, make an estimate of the budget, but if it runs over whatever, if you make if you stay in budget on time, you make a bonus as opposed to the commercial resupplies missions, which is, we will pay this much ton to orbit, this much ton for

return. How you do it up to you, here's the cadence we want and how much money move right, And so there's an incentive in those commercial contracts to be cost efficient, and there's a disincentive in the cost plus missions to be cost evoctive. Yeah, right, so they structure the contract matters

a lot that you know. The argument in favor of cost plush contracting is you're doing new research, you're doing something nobody's ever done before see James web right, Want of a Kind vehicle, And so we don't know how much it's going to cost. Really here's our guess. But as we develop it, we're going to run into problems so that it'll cost more. But building the same rocket over and over again is not an experiment. Yeah, that's

right, so you should probably do it. And it's also ann chunk of science now, right, So it does make sense to get this out of the way. And given that starship starts to function eventually, or it's going to be silly and having United Launch Alliance sold to another entity, you know, is that going to make a more lobby centric or less lobby centric? Like, all of this is very interesting for how it's going to evolve.

Well, and then there's just the idea that you know, these people, if they don't like their government jobs, could go apply at SpaceX, you know, or or other places. Possibly. Yeah, it's just a question of are they willing to work the new way too right? You know, are arguably SpaceX was founded on the back of a group of frustrated rocket engineers that really wanted to fly stuff and didn't want to you know, Congress may have funded the project, but they funded it minimally, not enough to actually

build any hardware for a really long with that literary for decades. Shuttle stopped flying in twenty eleven and the first flight of Artemis is twenty twenty two. That's a long time mm hm. So you know, the the gave them enough money, barely enough money to actually build anything. Like, if you really wanted to move this, you would have spent more or shut it down. That being said, at this moment, Artemis is the only thing to

carry people beyond Earth orbit. You know, maybe Starship will someday, but Starship is only flown twice and went boom. Both sides like, we're a long way away from it being a working vehicle. And so they had and they have commitments for Artemis. They have They had sixteen engines left over from the Shuttle program. That's what they were used to use four per flights.

So the first four flights of Artemis have engines. They're now cranking up the production to make new versions of these engines, very expensively, to to do another, to plan out another for Artemis flights. But these are flights to the Moon. And one of the questions I got on Twitter was from Bob Archerus, is are we going to have a base on the Moon before we go to Mars. It's like that seems to be the plan, but we're not that far along on that plan. But first off, there are no

real plans to send people to Mars, not really. Elon talks about it right just to desire, but it's not real. There are no missions, there's no permission, nothing set up. Nothing is real. Yet do we have real plans to put humans on the Moon. Well, yes, build

a base, not so much. But you remember in twenty seventeen, I did that Moon Base geek out, and I encourage you to listen to it, and that was based on reading papers by both the European Space Agency and NASA about building bases on the South Pole, very much like Antarctica, man tended bases that you'll probably stay at for a month a month and a half at a time to do original science on the Moon. There's a lot of things to learn up there, if I remember correctly, there was some influence

that you had on NASA itself, you Richard Campbell. Well after we did that podcast together, you and I in early twenty seventeen. Later in twenty seventeen, NASA call now, which is crazy when you think about it, but you also know that's not the first time. Right when we did the Space Telescope speak out, NASA called and said, hey, would you like to come and meet a space telescope out over here, And we're like,

oh, yes, yes we would. And we also interviewed Greg Tooley about the Plasmo Dynamics mission he was working on, and a bunch of other stuff, and then we went and remember we went into that back in the back warehouse and saw the test kit for fixing a hubble and like just his storage, this giant tube of epoxy with a wooden spatula. No, he wasn't

kidding anyway. Uh. Yeah. So when I got reached out to by the NASA Ames group about that Moon based podcast, they asked me if I would do a talk on it, which, by the way, I'm still doing. Yeah, but you did it to NASA. I did it to NASA themselves, yes, And what you know, Richard is very kind and not braggadocious, but he connected the research from several different departments in NASA that weren't really talking to each other and presented it to all of them at the

same time. So yeah, that's that's what ended up happening, and it was good. I think you had some influence there, I hope. So I get some nice I get message from some of those folks routinely as the work is ongoing. The work is ongoing. Uh, the getting to the moon is really hard. Then the lander is the heart is one of the hardest parts. We don't have a good lander. The lander we had the old Lamb was a very dangerous machine, and we wouldn't use that today.

We need a better lander. We need to be a usable lander, and that means something more than a commoard. Well, it's not just a compute power. It's do you is it? It has to be big enough to be fully reusable. The old Lamb had a descent stage that you left behind. If you're going to build a base, you can't keep leaving bits behind each time you visit it, right like that, because eventually you run out

of a room. So we need a fully reusable lunar lander. And for better or worse, the only props for a fully reusable vehicle is Starship is Elon's giant rocket. Once it works, now it has problems. It's very once it works, it's very tall, it's very large, and there's a huge payload, which is awesome, but the people are at the top part. So you a, you got to land this thing on something pretty flat

because you don't want to tip over. That would be bad. And then once you have landed, you're still like one hundred and fifty feet in the air, so you're gonna need an elevator. You're gonna have to get this stuff down like I wish we could come up with a better design, but this is what we've got Jeffries tubes. Okay, that being said, because that is obviously in process. You know, there's a discussion about building a

better lunar lander. I ran across a capability study by DARPA. Remember DARPA, of course I remember DARPA, So this is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Group. I find DARPA to be very serious individuals. These are the ones in the early oughts that started on automated driving. That's led us to a lot of what you're seeing now with welling smarter and smarter cars. Go back

even further, that was the origins of the internet. Yep, the internet comes from there, so when when dark and they're also tackling problems with neural nets, just you know, understandable AI. I take DARPA's research stuff seriously. They're also the ones to say there is no good solution here and end

it. Like often my problem with a lot of science papers is these scientists want to stay employed, so they'll always write a paper that ends with give or more money and I will do more right where DARPA will say, ah, this has gone as far as you can go. We're done because they're funded regardless, they're funded by the military incentives. That's what it's all about. Yeah, So DARPA has started what they call the Luna ten Capability Studies.

So this is literally about commercial Moon technology. Okay by twenty thirty five, so in the next decade, can we emerge sure power mining, in situ, resource utilization, communications and navigations, logistics systems, constructions and robotics, all the things to create a commercial space on the Moon. Now it's a capability study, So what they're really doing is setting a bar is this feasible? You know what it's going to end up being, buddy freaking Walmart.

You know, Walmart goes with the customers on I don't think there's there yet for better or worse. I'm afraid this is going to be space force kidding, this is going to be. But at the same time, like ex maturing the ability to distract water ice from the Moon to be used as fuel for interplanetary travel. So rather than keeping on bringing the fuel from Earth and that heavy gravity, will you can take it from the Moon. Couldn't

be cost effective. We've talked about my original moon based talk going all the way back to twenty seventeen is what could you do on the Moon. It's cost effective and generating electricity, interesting part of it building solar panels, resource extraction construction. The gravity well of the Moon is much much lighter, and so if you're going to do stuff in space, it makes sense to work

from there more than work from here. As difficult as are there any resources available deep in the Moon or is it all pretty much one just big chunk of the same kind of rock. No, it's interesting you ask that because it doesn't have it has some geological activity. It does seem to have some core, and there was volcanic activity on there really, but there's also mass concentrations that represent large asteroid strike, so they are surface mineral concentration. Okay,

so they represent potentially valuable resources as well. But in the end, the Moon is mostly made of aluminum, you know, and at silicon, like pretty normal substrate materials that are useful, no two ways about it. Like you can you should be able to do some useful mining there and to get resources put together. Yeah, we just got to mature the technologies. We don't know enough yet. We just got to start small, and you need the energy to run all of these extraction machines and all that stuff.

Yep, and that means maturing forms of power generation on the Moon, which is right on that list. Now you know, you think it would be solar except for that whole Hey it's dark for fourteen days thing, that's problematic. So now we get into some of the sterling engine based nuclear like Crusty, which are you know, ten kilowatt solid state reactors. So there's lots of possibilities there. Anyway to back to Bob's comment, Yeah, we're definitely

working on a base on the Moon. It's a lot got of ways to go yet, but more is happening in the past couple of years that have happened the previous thirty pretty cool. Twenty twenty three was a great year for asteroid exploration. Okay, the Osiris REPS mission. So this is a mission from a decade ago that actually landed on the surface of a Cyrus Rex and picked up some samples of that asteroid Jesu. Was it really ten years ago? It seems like yesterday. Yeah, I know, crazy. Uh,

their capsule made it back this year intact, perfect landing. There was a little bit of a problem with the parachutes, but it's still worked out fine. The only problem they have now is that they picked up so much, so many rocks that it they can't open it. It's jammed. Like you gotta imagine. They don't want to contaminate these rocks. These are pristine rocks

from an asteroid, right in a sealed container. So they want to work in a vacuum, you know, with remote controls essentially to minimize any exposure of these rocks so they can test them, you know, with not Yeah, this is the problem, right, Like they can't get the bolts out, they're jammed, so they have to come up, how do we open this without contaminating it? Right? Like, that's the battle is. You know, we got these rocks from menu and now we've got to try and

and get them get access to the world cantaminating them. So, I mean, these are so many good things have happened, they success, says the mission. It even came back, and now they're just down to this one teeny little problem. You can't open the can. Uh. Also this year we launched a new mission to a new asteroid, to the Psyche asteroid,

which is believed to be a planetesimal core. So you know this idea that there was a planet between Mars and Jupiter and that's why there's a huge asteroid field between the two, Okay, and this is where some of the biggest asteroids in our Solar System like series live in that particular space. Well, Psyche is one of them. But it is a metallic asteroid. So most

asteroids are carbonaceous, mostly carbon compounds and rubbel piles. Uh, this one looks to be solid and metal and so they are value and it's astonishing, it's massive. So they've to the Psyche mission is going to take a good look at it, and it's going to take a few years to get there, but it took off in September, so it's on its way. One more asteroid related mission and this is about Dart, which we talked about last year because Brian Schreer asks, hey, what do we learn from Dart.

So Dart was the mission to see can we modify an asteroid's path? Right? You know, one of the things that makes is different from the dinosaurs. Besides, you know Candy Crush is we can see him coming. We can see him coming, maybe we can do something about him. And so the Dart mission was our first attempt. We found this perfect binary system for doing the testing. A we can observe it it orbits beyond the Earth,

but we can get good images of it. It's actually a two asteroid systems, so the big asteroid is called Didimus and Dimorphoses it is orbiting it, and so the impactor actually hit dimorphis the smaller one thing. They can call it diddy moon if you like. We talked again. We talked about this last year's Space Geek Out. It hit it successfully and it reduced its orbit

by about a half an hour, so we really did do something. And now we've continued measurements of it and we've figured out we probably blew as much as a thousand metric tons of mass off of Dimorsos with that impactor because it was a rubble pile. They are still tracking boulders that were blown bigger boulders twenty thirty feet across that were blown off of it in the impact and are

now orbiting on their own, and they're not done. Next year, in October twenty four there's a mission called HERA by the European Space Agency to go back to Didimos and dimorphis to take more readings. So we are learning to protect ourselves. Right, that looks like the impactors were far more effective than

expected. It opens the door to we would have a chance. Now when you say it delayed the orbit by thirty minutes, the orbit of the little one around the big one or the orbit of the big asteroid around us. That's right, the little round around the big one. And so that does what to the orbit of the big one around us? Nothing, But that's one of the things we want to test. Is so far we can't help

me was the mass of the big one is so much bigger? Like, believe me, we still have a long way to go, right, Like this asteroid wouldn't have particularly dangerous in the first place, but it was I thought there's something to test with and and you know, we learned from it without it cool. Yeah, it's it's just you know, we talk about science pretty abstractly, but this was pretty darn real, right, Like this is this is our first real test. So uh just I'm just pulling up

the old notes from last year. So dimorphis is about a five hundred foot across rock weighing about four point eight million metric tons. Orbiting about a kilometer off the surface of Didimus and it took about twelve hours to do it. Or yeah, that's big, and now it does it in eleven hours and twenty three big because of us. Well, the big one is twenty five hundred feet across, like half a mile across, and weighs five hundred and

twenty metric tons five hundred and twenty million metric tons. There's one thing that you brought up in one of these older space geek outs, which was mining precious metals in asteroids like gold and stuff, gold and platinum. But I

mean, just think about golds for a minute. Like if you doubled the amount of gold immediately on the market in the world, would the price go down catastrophically, But you wouldn't double it, you would you would increase availabily about a hundred times, Okay, right, Like that's the real problem. If you if you talk about Psyche, that mission that's headed up there, it's very likely they're platinum class metals up there. Yeah, and you can

extract them and you bring back you'll just you'll crash one. I can understand because you use it in cell phones and things like that. And that makes everything cheaper. But gold is something that you know, people hold on to and invest in and feel is special and precious, and people people invest in all sorts of metals. But yes, you would absolutely crush market. And gold has important use industrial uses too, right, Admittedly it hasn't because of

its non reactivity and ability to manipulate it. It has a special place in a lot of people's hearts. But as shame. Yeah, it's also a question of the just the cost. It is dumb to spend that much money to get up there just to bring the stuff back down and reduce the values of it worldwide. You will absolutely tangle market without a doubt. You here that you all there, you go. Let's take a break and then we'll talk space health. Come okay, we'll be right back after these messages.

All right, we're back break number two, The Space Geek Out twenty twenty three. I'm Carl Franklin, that's Richard Campbell, and yeah, we're going I know this is a long one, but there's just a lot to talk about. Well, now we're getting to the part you asked me for, right, which is the crisis in cosmology. But first let's we've got to talk about Hubble first. So originally a space station, one of the great observatories. It was lifted on the Space Shuttle. It's a modified Spy satellite.

It's been operating. It had optical problems they got corrected in the nineteen with the squeegey smeared the lens at the stoplight. That was a little more complicated than that. But yes, last service mission by the Shuttle was two thousand and nine. Yeah, now there are no more shuttles. It counts on a set of six gyros. You understand, in the orbit, it's energy about four hundrechlometers up for it to point in an area of space as

it's whizzing around the Earth. These gyros continuously move the telescope to keep it pointing in the same direction so you can do your observation. It's like a camera on a gimbal. Yea, yeah, exactly. And so these gyros fail over time. There were something they replaced every on every servicing mission. There were several of them, and now it's been since two thousand and nine that they've been replaced in there down to three and they're starting to fail.

And so there is a question of what to do, and it's you know, for all of the years of Hubble, it seems a shame to just abandon it. So it's already outlasted an predicted life, oh by miles. But you know, it was the first of the serviceable satellites, right It was an experiment to see can we service the satellite. They upgraded solar panels, they upgraded, they replaced instruments many times, they fixed it, and they certainly kept replacing the gyros. There is a proposal, there's two proposals.

One of the things they did in the two thousand and the last two thousand and nine mission is they put a prototype of the universal adapter on the bottom of Hubble. Hubble was set up to be able to be picked up by the shuttle, but nothing else. But they this adapter is with the col A Pedal adapter, which is what we use now for docking, although the current modern one is a little bit different than the what's on Hubble right now, but that's fine. What we have is a place that a robotic

vehicle or another vehicle could grab onto, designed to be grabbed. It's sturdy, it's a locking, a lock on point. It's on the bottom of Hubble. So the first off is if we lose control of the gyros and it's low on fuel, we could have an uncontrolled d arbit from it, although it'll take a while. An uncontrolled d orbit. Yeah, there's not a lot of atmosphere a four hundred klometers, but it's still a little just like the space station, which is too around that same height. You have

to keep reboosting it. So we lose control of it, we can't do that anymore, eventually it'll re enter. It's pretty pretty, uh you know, low thing to treat one of the most celebrated satellites. Yeah. Yeah, And let's face it, it would fit inside of stars like if Starship gets up and running. In theory, they could they could use Starship to go pick up Hubble and bring it back. Like, doesn't it deserve to be hanging in the Smithsonian? Absolutely? You know how big is Hubble?

Did you say how big it was? Yeah? Well, Hubble fit inside the payloa bay of the Space Shuttle. Obviously, it's how it was launched. So it's about forty feet long and about fourteen feet across. It's big, you know, it's bust sized. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, and but the other question is, like, it's obviously it's still useful as an observatory. Why not just keep maintaining it while it's still able to work? All we got to do is replace the gyros. But really there's

still these two missions. The first is can we keep it under control so at least decide if we're going to retrieve it, so send a mission up there to boost it and maybe to provide guidance. So you can imagine a little tug that would attach out of the back of Hubble. Even if we're not going to still use it as a as a telescope, at least keep it under control. Yeah, maybe even build a module like that that could

do its pointing for it. But I don't know if you remember this guy, Jared Isaacman is this billionaire adventurer, and he had the first tourism flight to orbit where he flew. He took he bought a crew dragon, raised a bunch of money for children's hospitals while doing it, and took three people with him up and spent three days in orbit in a crew Dragon. So he wants to go back. He's not done. You know, flying his

MiGs isn't enough. He wants to go back into space again, and so he's part of proposing to He has a mission currently in planning now with Elon to do the first because commercial spacewalk. He wants to walk in space, not as an ass astronaut, as a citizen. So they're working on a suit. It would be tethered, but he would take a crew Dragon up with a couple of other people. They would depressurize capsule, open it, and then he would be able to go out and walk around, like float

around in space. He wants to have that experience, and he's a billionaire. There you go, so there you go. But he's now been a part of a proposal to service Hubble. Could we ad modify a crew Dragon to get up to it, dock to it, and then work from there to replace the gyros and do some maintenance on it and do a reboost of it. It's not impossible, and and because of the low price of Falcon

nines, it's even reasonably cost effective. Like relatively speaking, you know, every Shuttle flight was a multi billion dollar operation, this would be hundreds of millions. And the issue of course is that this is this would be a one of a kind mission. If you mess it up, you may wreck Hubble. But and and Hubble could be going and could be operating in a degraded state even if they lost another gyro. There's a couple of tricks they

can do with solar balancing and so forth. They would it would limit their number of places that public could point, but they could still get science from them for a while. Or do you take the chance on a unique servicing mission to keep it running and perhaps to keep it running for a really long time until and arguably until starship flies, because one starship is flying. Starship

is nine meters in diameter. You could build a space telescope into one of those things that would be bigger than the James Webb James Webb is six and a half meters across. And then really bringing it home and celebrating it hanging in the Smithsonian would be awesome. Yeah, that would be wonderful. So that's all I got to say about Hubble. Yeah, James Webb. So

let's talk about James Webb. And you specifically asked me, it's like you're gonna talk about this right because when we did this last year, James wedd had only just been gearing up right. It launched in December of twenty twenty twenty one. It got to L two its location balanced between the Earth and the Sun, in January twenty two, and it took six months or so

of checkouts to started to get it up and running. So by when we were talking about this last year in December twenty two, it had really done some checkout images, some initial surveys, Like the pictures were astonishing. It it worked, was working amazing, but the big science stuff had only just gotten started and they hadn't really looked back at the Big Bang yet or anything. Yeah, they'll because those imaging take a while, all right, and

believe me, like James Webb, is scheduled out the Yan Yang. Now there's a ton of experiments, but we've learned a bunch of things. So they've set the records they expected to set. So the quick scan stuff they did, like surveying exoplanets, they've already done some of that and got some results back that we talked about last year. But the longer duration of stuff

with things like locating the most distant galaxies. So the current understanding and cosmology is that the universe is about thirteen point four billion years old, maybe thirteen thirteen point six. And so now you're peering back at light from thirteen billion years ago. And a few things are important here. One is that the universe continues to expand, and so light that was emitted thirteen billion years ago

in the visible spectrum isn't in the visible spectrum anymore. It's been stretched and so it's been red shifted, which is one of the reasons that James Web is an infrared telescope, because that's where the old light is. It's in the infrared spectrum. And so yeah, they found these four ultradistant galaxies. That's thirteen point four billion year old light way down in the infrared spectrum.

Crazy, so it's like, there they are, we've found them, we've done the thing, but we've also got some problems with what we found. And that you know, before James Web, cosmology was pretty comfortable, right, They had this sort of sense of concordance. They'd gotten to a place where they can call it concordance cosmology. This is our little domain here. You know, we're all happy and comfortable and what's out there is not going to hurt us. It's far away. Well, maybe we should we should

back up what's cosmology about? What is it? It's really the science of understanding the origin development of the universe. So as telescopes have matured over the past hundred couple one hundred years, we've been able to look further and further deeper into space. We found some stuff, and we've been trying to understand the universe around us. You know, the idea that of galaxies, of multiple galaxies is less than one hundred years old. You know, it's taken

a while. You know, for a long time they thought Andromeda was just a nebula, not another galaxy. But those things, you know, evolve over time. You start to learn and get this idea of how big is the universe and it's hard to me. It's not like you can measure it right, it's not a measuring tape. What do you what do you do? Like, how do you even start to calculate that? And this is where you get into this relationship between cosmology and and nuclear science or atomic science.

We understand the behavior of atoms pretty well. We study them up close, and we know by frequencies elements emit, what frequencies of light and understanding that stars are Essentially, fusion engines that this huge amount of masks that they collect together causes atoms to fuse together, starting with hydrogen, which the most amount an element, then fuses together into helium. So we need our periodic

table to sort of understand the chain. And when that fusion takes place, and it makes a particular kind of light, and depending on the size the rate of fusion, you'll get different frequencies of light. And so by measuring that light we can sort of tell what kind of fusion is taking place, and that gives us a sense of its mass. Now you take its brightness and relative to its brightness, you know what its distance is. It'll be dimmer of its further away, you know, by the frequent see the kind

of fusion that's taking place. So now you can tell by determined its distance by how bright it is, and that's you know, the first calculations you start to get for distance. And then we find particular classes of stars. So an astronomer by the name of Henrietta Swan leave It a woman in nineteen oh eight identified set of stars they call the cephid variables. So cephid variables change in brightness, that is at a standard period, so they appear to

pulse, okay, and this is separate from atmospheric effect. They have this pulse. The current understanding today is that these are stars far enough along in their sequence that there's enough helium in there in their atmosphere, in the corona that surrounds them that that helium, as it blows the electrons off the helium, they become more opaque, it blocks more light, and so it caused

it to dim. And as that dimming occurs and it loses some energy, the electrons come back onto the helium and so it becomes more transparent again. And so there's this throb that happens to these stars at this point in their age, and you can measure them. But it must be at a particularly high frequency though, I mean, it isn't something that you could probably look at and see it pulsing. It is. No, No, it's very

visible. It's not that fast. Wow. I just think though you know the speed at which chemical reactions happen, it would it would be very fast. Yeah, and these are high energy plasma reactions too. But you are talking star scale, Yeah, I get it. So, and you can well go watch video of so big and you'll see that. Yeah, big pulse. And this is not a pulsar. That's not the same thing as a pulsar. No, that's a different thing. That's a that's a rapidly

spinning thing. And it's also useful but not necessarily useful distance so much as as useful for a location. Right, Okay, but this this is before we had all those We're still talking about optical sensors, right. Radio telescopes haven't really started yet, Like we're not able to measure into the gamma frequencies and at this point it's too early. We're very much in optical times. But they utilizing SEFID variables. Knowing the frequencies and knowing the pulse rate helped

us determine more accurate distances. Okay, So and Levitt was they sort of wrote the original paper on this, with many other people contributing. It's I'm always tricky to mention names because there are there always other folks. We always build on the bat shoulders of giants. So let's jump to twenty years later with Edwin Hubble. And yes it's that Hubble. What the Hubble telescope is

named for is Edwin Hubble. So Hubble in nineteen twenty nine using telescopes measuring with sephid variables shows that not only we've already now at this point we determined there as multiple galaxies, but that he's also he's the one who figures out red shift. So the further the galaxy he is away, the more red shift that it is. Although he's only looking in the optical frequency range. Show eventually the red shift off a visible range, but he starts to be

able to build the math around red shifting. So red shift looks red and it looks right. So typically when you talk about ultra large stars, much bigger than our stars, they are blue giants. They are very much in the blue because they have so much mass, they have a very intense level of fusion. So they're up in the nine ten thousand kelvin frequency range of ultra blue light. But then they are they are are so old and so far away the light has stretched and it's no longer blue. It's becoming red

and it's red to us. So if you were up close, red deep blue like everybody else, Yeah, if you were there, I mean again, you're looking back in time. You're talking looking back billions of years ago

get effectively. And this is also the time when Einstein's written his special relativity theorems too, and special relativity talks about the stretching of space time, and so what was brilliant about what Hubble was measuring by looking through telescopes is very precise of observations lined up with what special relativity said would be the distortions too. So we have this theoretical physicist and this cosmologist getting numbers that degree.

You know, when we're trying to do signs like this, we're looking for multiple strategies to do measurements, because if they all consolidate out on the same number, then we have more certainty that number is correct. So one of the things that Edwin Humble figured out was that the further those galaxies were away, the more red shifting they were. And so what he showed was that the universe was expanding, and it continued to expand. It it expanded at

a particular rate, which for a long time they called Hubbles constant. These days, we don't call it a constant anymore because there's a lot of debate about whether it's actually a constant. We call it Hubbles parameter. And did they figure that out because the stars that were far away were getting more and more red over time. Yes, well in galaxies too, you know,

the galaxies were getting more and more red. But he was measuring their changes over time and was able to show how far away they are, and that they are it's actually expending their getting further away from us in all directions, because universe be weird. Yeah, right, I know, it's strange, it's crazy. Isn't anything heading toward us? All kinds of things are,

but not at the cosmological scales. So now let's fast forward into the nineteen sixties and we're getting into radio astronomy, and as we're tempting to measure the radiation coming off of supernovae, we keep running into this hum, right, and they keep and I think it's like man made to look at all those things, but it takes a while from the really realize, oh no,

that is literally the hum of the universe, the cosmic ome. Yeah, they might this microwave background radiation, and so now they call it the cosmic microwave background, but literally it is the buzz of the big bang of the initial and it's not really a bang, and it may have actually been really tiny initially, although it got a lot bigger. But it is literally the background radiation of the initial light of the universe, and it is not even

the hum varies depending on which way you point in the sky. We now have cosmological background radiation maps. Because the universe wasn't perfectly uniform, a lot of that light got concentrated down. The darker, the cooler areas in the background radiation are where the first gallance is formed. So the process of gravity taking a hold and consolidating these galaxies cooled off that area faster, and so from the background radiation map we can sort of see where the galaxies sort of

appeared. But it also allowed us to use a completely different strategy to measure the age of the universe by the rate of cooling of the of the cosmic map of the CMB. Sure, and so and up till before James Web, the two numbers were close enough that it's like other within the rare error rate, so they probably the same number the margin of error, that's right.

Yeah. Then James Web showed up and started doing more precise measurements of both, and as the science has been coming in, the numbers are beginning fur through up. And the numbers we're talking about are the red shift rate. Okay, we're talking about the age of the universe. How long has the universe been around. There's a few things that have messed with thirteen point seven. One is that we're as we understand the red shift rate more and

more detail. And one of the things that's happened is that the James West based ELSCO has been able to show find objects of red shifts in the in the teens like thirteen point two, like literally at the beginning of the universe kind of numbers, and they're way bigger than they should. You know.

The idea was when the universe started and it was just protons, there's not a lot of mass concentration there, so the stars should have been very short lived, and those galaxies should be small hule and they seem to be large and complex. We're talking like Milky Way class galaxies from thirteen billion years ago, from the first two or three percent of the lifespan of the universe as

we understand it. Damn you, James Webb telescope. It's yes, it's confusing, right, but also and both methods have shown that there's something we really don't understand. And this is the sort of dark energy dark matter part. That the matter that we're seeing in both measurement strategies represents less than five percent of all the matter, right, that there seems to be something more in the neighborhood of twenty five twenty six percent dark matter matter we cannot measure

but has gravitational effects, otherwise galaxies wouldn't hold together. And that there's a tremendous amount of energy, like sixty eight to seventy percent energy that is immeasurable but must be there because of the behaviors that we see weird. So we really have the sense that we don't know much, like we're only able to observe a little bit of what's going on out there. And now as we

get into these measurement better measurement systems, they're getting further and further. But that means that we're due for some new kind of revelation that we have not

yet even conceived. And that and here lies the crisis. Is now a lot of folks that were maybe on the periphery, like one of the proposals run around out there right now is that maybe the universe is twice as old as we think it is that it's twenty six billion years old, and that's why the galaxies are more organized as you get back to the thirteen billion year

mark, because we have these impossible early galaxies. Now those are the paper proposed that says that has not done enough research to justify such a great a serious statement, right, you know, great proposals require great evidence. So we're not there yet, but you are seeing this sort of fragmentation of ideas.

Well. You know, if I apply my imagination, which Einstein say is more important than knowledge, if you apply your imagination, I would think that perhaps the percentage of dark matter and dark energy that we imagine should be applied to our estimate of the age of the universe. Well, without a doubt it is this. The thing is is we got to these estimates. That is why we said there must be some kind of energy we can't measure. This wouldn't work, so it's sort of been this catch all of us.

So if you let's say you say that there's sixty percent of the universe's dark matter dark energy, well maybe we should inflate that thirteen point nine by another sixty percent. Well, it's it's more far more than that. It's seventy five. Okay, But there's a few things you can go after.

One is our measurements wrong. You know, the one of the ideas around the Sephid model is that we're biased bright that because there's so many stars that every time we track a measure of a star, there are other stars contributing to that light, and so that might be distorting it. Again, James well Hells has addressed that because it's even more precise, those measurements are still ongoing, so maybe we can offset that. Also. You know, I

hinted at maybe it's not Hubbles constant. Maybe at different times in the universe the expansion rate changed. It would be under processes is we don't understand, right, But that's why they're starting to refer to it as a parameter, because that parameter may have some variability. Maybe there's other states of matter. We still don't understand that that impact other areas of the universe that change its

raptational constants, they change its behavior. All that's happened with James Webb is we've like most new experiments, they introduced new questions and make us force us to get uncomfortable with our current set of measurements that we have should be crisis of cosmology is yeah, I mean, listen, we call it a crisis. It's learning. This is a This is a bunch of science people going huh, well that's odd. And now it's sort of you know, you

had this consensus moment before these new measurements came in. It's like, ah, we're close enough, and now it's like, maybe we're not that close. Uh. And it's not like this is the last telescope to fly. More will come and our instruments will can get better. But James Webb has done its job. It has opened our eyes to there is more to no and new science is being done right now as we learn more from the measures we could take from it. It's exciting. It's very cool. It sounds

like the end of the geek out. Oh no, yeah, I'm sorry it's this long, but that's how much I had to say. All right, well, thanks again and we'll see you next time on dot net rocks. Dot net Rocks is brought to you by Franklin's Net and produced by Pop Studios, a full service audio, video and post production facility located physically in New London. Connecticut and of course in the cloud online at pwop dot com.

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