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Is that down again?
I'm Carl and that's Richard. Hey, mostly Richard's stuff in this show, I'm gonna be asking dumb questions and agreeing with him. We're disagreeing. I doubt I'll disagree that much.
You try. But you know I work pretty hard to be pretty middle of the road on a lot of this stuff.
Right, Yes, you do, Yeah, and work hard you do. So this is our annual space geek out, right.
Richard, Yes, it's time for the space geek out. It's been a good year.
Yeah, but before we do that, let's do a little better. No framework awesome?
All right? Man?
What got Okay? Well, our friend Brian McKay sent me this.
That guy again, I know that guy?
Yeah, he sent us this. Basically it's called suno s uno dot com and you can essentially create your own song music with lyrics with the vocalist just by creating a prompt.
Wow.
And yeah, and Brian really loves this because you know, he doesn't.
Have because he's not you who could make a song.
Yeah, he doesn't have a recording studio. He can't lay down tracks, you know. So so I kind of see this.
Or incredible experience and expertise and making music, you know, years of effort.
Yeah, so at first I was At first, I was, you know, like you, I had a negative reaction, like you know. Also, it didn't help that he was saying all the recording companies are out of business.
It's like, yeah, which is daft not true.
Well, they're already screwed, you know, they're.
Yeah, and by the way, mostly scumbacks, right like the artists are. So we're gonna have a hard time being unhappy about it when those guys are done, because they have been providing value for a long time.
And I also think that, you know, when you have these things out there and people are hearing them and then learning that they're AI generated or whatever, they tend to swing back the other way. They want to go out and see live music that's done by real people, and they want to you know, engage with their favorite bands and stuff all over again. And it's kind of like what happened with Vinyl, right, you know, people come back to the stars.
I think the Vinyl thing is bizarre to me because it's an it's not that good a reproduction of music, per se.
No, but it's the romance of it that people like. The ritual.
Yeah, the ritual. Yeah, I'm with you. And you know, I think part of it is that in contemporary music these days, with the Spotify's and so forth, music is totally background. And if there's any person who taught me about music being listened to, it was you, because.
I, oh, really, and you've been a listener of music for a long long time though.
Sure, sure, but I've never What I learned from you was like, you never want to be background music. If I'm playing, it's you want to listen to me? Yeah, you don't want to listen to me. I'm not going to play, right, And I realized I don't play music all the time because I tend to play music to listen to it.
Yeah, right, And that's a dying practice. I think there are less people with really good Hi fi systems and speakers where they go into a dark room and they put on an album or something and just listen. Yeah.
Yeah, I think it's very rare and imdally I don't have that kind of gear, you know. I think my best sounding system is my Bow's earbuds. Yeah yeah, because they're they're super local and they they're noise suppressing, so I just hear the music.
So the way I and as I said before, my first reaction was like, you know.
Blah blah blah blah.
But the way I look at it now now that I've had some time because he first told me about this, you know, way earlier in the year, The way I look at it now is sort of like the evolution of the cassio keyboard, you know, and maybe.
Right right, which was a joke and then became an instrument, yeah.
And maybe garage band, you know, where people who don't really know how to play or do anything can put together music. And I just see it as sort of an evolution of that so that the people who aren't musicians can get the same sort of satisfaction, right that somebody who writes and record as a song would.
Have, you know, admittedly without the work, but also a limited ability to do anything about it too. So yeah, it's a toy, but it's a toy that leads to more creativity. I think that's cool.
But if you listen to some of the songs just on son dot com, you'll think, what that sounds like a professionally recorded wow song? Yeah that how can that not be a human? But so I don't know like where they're getting their samples from and how they're redoing things.
That's always the question, isn't Yeah, yeah, I can't tell you how people have now sent me copies of of AI generated podcasts where the male voice sounds like me.
Yeah, like I haven't. I haven't received one of those yet, but you can easily make one.
I mean yeah, so but I am I. Is it likely that my voice has been sampled? Yeah? Pretty likely? Probably thousand hours out there, you know, like, yeah, what are you gonna do? Right? Anyway?
Right? Anyway? So that's it, thanks Brian, and we'll have more from him, I'm sure in subsequent episodes. So you got a comment, Richard, Yeah, I.
Grabbed a comment off of a geek out. Actually I went back to the Interplanetary Transport System. Geekout. That's thirteen sixty four, the one we did back in twenty sixteen, which was when Elon started talking about the vehicle that would become Starship.
Elon the next president of the United States.
I thought he was a Speaker of the House. I'm sorry, oh,
well whatever, whatever. But yeah, you know, he had this whole idea of the its and being on having a million pede on Mars by twenty fifty, which all of which I think is a kind of an insane idea and you know, questionably and smart, but it he focused on the real problem, which is less expensive lift the space, which is what SpaceX has been doing all along, right, like right before SpaceX it was about twenty thousand akilo to lower th arbit and then I mean today, I
think a Falcon nine is maybe eighteen hundred dollars a kilo, and Starship at being fully reusable could be under one hundred dollars. Is astonishing.
Wow.
If it works, it's making progress, but it's not there without scorching the earth, blowing holes in the ground or any of those fun things. Yeah, like if they're working that stuff out, yeah, way sure, lots of comments on that show, and admittedly these are a few years ago, but the comment I grab is from James O'Sullivan who says, Hi, Richrid and Carl, longtime listener, first time caller, great show.
As always, you pair have been keeping me entertained and educated on my commutes since the early hundreds.
Wow.
Okay of episodes, right, So okay, it occurred to me that there doesn't have to be any single launch missions. When a payload requires all the fuel to achieve orbit, that vehicle just be parked and then provided a sufficient
fuel leftover. You know, you can park the launch vehicle away a bit and then maybe this is all science fiction, but a tanker mission could be used to refuel the vehicles and then you can do subsequent fly from there, which is exactly what's being proposed, right, even for the upcoming lunar missions or a star is that they want to build a tanker solution with starship to do these things. You know, the vast majority of fuel gets consumed trying
to get into orbit and it limits missions. In fact, this will come up a few times in the geek Out today, right, And so solving the tanking problem something that's never been done. We've never transferred fuel between the vehicles before in orbit will be an interesting challenge, and certainly in the cars it's.
A challenge if you think about it, because all right, you take all this fuel to get off the ground, so the tanker also has to get a lot of fuel to get off the ground, and how much of it is left by the time they get to the to the you know.
The fully loaded fueled starship stack as it stands today is about five thousand metric tons and it gets about one hundred potentially one hundred metric tons to orbit, which
is actually credible. So yeah, so it could do to be able to fully fuel the thing to be, the tankers will not be able to transport that much fuel when in the original the current set of proposals for the starship based moon Lander, there's between like four and sixteen refuelings of that lander once they get into orbit before it can fly to the Moon.
Can we talk on a previous space geek out about having a solar powered station on the Moon that would generate fuel, so that could be like a dock to jump off to Mars or something like that.
There's a few options there. I mean One of the issues here is that chemical fuel is very heavy for its total power. Like a nuclear fueled rocket or operating rocket would only have to carry propell and it wouldn't also need the oxidizer, so that gets more efficient. We've talked about electrical energy systems, so hal effect thrusters where you're only carrying a little bit of fuel and you're using electricity to accelerate that fuel turn it into a plasma.
It's not a lot of thrust, but it's very efficient, and you could offload that energy generation with microwaves. So between the Earth and the Moon, you could reasonably use a microwave relay system to operate that. There's all kinds of interesting ideas in this space.
Microwaves are great, just don't get in the middle of them.
Yeah, it depends on the frequency of the microwave. Most of the time microwaves won't affect people at all. It's just if you happen to use the microwave frequency at tuned to water, it'll burn you, but just burn Yeah.
I guess I was thinking of microwaves for power, right, I mean, they have to be a pretty high whatever it is watts, volts amps in order to work over long distances, and those things would fry you if you happen to walk onto it.
Or they'd pass right through you, one or the other, right, Like, it depends on the frequency, whether not they're interact with yourselves or not. Photons are funny that way. You know you have estrinos going through all the time.
Well I knew that. I just thought microwaves were a particular wavelength that was very small all that been focused and therefore could be really damaging.
The microwave band is larger than you think, So it depends. The answer is it depends. But yeah, in general, don't hang out with micro.
This is why I like talking to you, Richard, because you know, I clear up these misnomers that.
It's more complicated than you think, and so is everything, right Like, that's sort of the reality of it. So, James, Hey, thanks so much for your comment, admittedly a few years ago, but still relevant today. And a copy of music Cobey is on its way to you, And if you'd like a copy of music Code, I read a comment on the website at dot NetRocks 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 copy music co buy.
Music to code by is your friend for coding. You should not code without it. Go to music to code by dot net if you don't, in fact, win a free copy. But you can do that also by getting on the social media's where we've been on ex Twitter for a long time. Of course, we're on Blue Sky and we're I'm astaed on and I think even on threads, but I'm not really paying attention to threads, are you.
Yeah, I mean I check threads that I post on threads, but yeah, and it's got a lot more users in Blue Sky, but not at the same level of engagement.
And I think we're on Instagram too by nature of the fact that we have dot net rocks on.
Facebook, right sort of. Yeah, I really have never paid because always some p Instagram is very picture centric and that's not what a podcast is. Yeah, all right, so do you want to do the history thing.
Let's do the history thing just really briefly. So this is episode nineteen thirty, and this is when the Great Depression was really in full swing.
Get going, right, Yeah, So.
In twenty nine the you know, more than four million people were unemployed as a result of the crash, and notable events included the discovery of Pluto yeah by Arizona scientists, and the first US Census question regarding radio ownership, reflecting the growing interest in communication technology. Cool what else you got for nineteen thirty.
The year that sliced bread was invented? Really true? Yeah? Yeah? Is that that late?
Wow?
I wonder why trying to get be more efficient with bread? Funny that, And you know, discovering Pluto's not a trivial problem. He kind of got lucky that he took to Tombak, took two pictures of the same area in space and saw it and saw Pluto moving through it because it's very dim and not gravitationally irrelevant and not a planet, never rt a planet, a dwarf planet.
Have you ever heard Neil de grass Tyson defend his vote on because everybody blames him for killing Pluto right now, it wasn't his fault, it was it wasn't his fault at all. And he said that there's there's thousands of Pluto sized asteroids floating around the Sun that you know, we don't call planets because they're not a planet.
Well, an there's Pluto. It was Sedna that was really the problem, because Sedna, as the calculations came in, was going to is larger than Pluto. And so it would have if if Pluto is a planet, then said as a planet, and at least three or four more, and then you get into the smaller ones and the ones we haven't seen yet and so forth.
It gets hard.
So it's not in the ecliptic plane. It transitions across some of the the across Neptune's orbit. Yeah, it's a dwarf planet. It's fairly All of these definitions are arbitrar.
So I thought planet meant wanderer, and.
Well that's what the That was the literal translation from the grind.
And if it orbits around the sun, right, isn't it a planet?
Well, that means all of the Trojan asteroids and all of the debris and the asteroid belt and so forth, Like now you get into millions of objects.
Right, so I guess at some point you have to say it's the size that matters.
Yeah, like it can. And so they've started to fabricate a more elaborate description of planets, like clearing your orbital playing like that kind of thing and all with degrees of issue essentially. But Pluto was absolutely an odd duck when you look at its behavior, it doesn't behave the same as the other eight planets.
But man, those close up images that we came up with.
Were beautiful, total miracle, right that way, more interesting than anybody ever expected. Astonishing. Really, it was supposed to be just a nice ball, totally uninteresting, and we were wrong again again. It's a great thing about exploration. You find new things, and we found new things.
Okay, man, you have the floor.
Well, so this is the fourth year in a row of a record number of space flights for the world, two hundred and fifty one launches, with two hundred and forty four successful, five flat out failures, and two partial failures.
And we can talk a little bit about those.
And that's all over the world, right.
All the way around the world. But of that, to be clear, one hundred and thirty six of them are SpaceX so more than half. Right, Like, it's astonishing. Their goal was to fly one hundred and forty four times this year. Then they raise it to one hundred and forty eight. But now they looks like it's actually gonna one hundred and thirty six. Yeah, you know, he's not quite done yet. Every time I start thinking ill of Elon, I think about SpaceX and then yeah, and admittedly he's
just one person in this equation and certainly a driving force. Yeah, but they're Glenn Shotwell is an extraordinary woman and really runs that company well. And there's a huge number of engineers creating miracles, you know, making a tremendous program.
Fantastic.
So the Falcon nines now had over four hundred flights, putting it into the league almost by itself only so used playing them.
Wow. And the Falcon nine is the one that can land vertically.
It lands. It's yeah, that's landed its booster now over three hundred times.
Wow.
They've also had a record this year of fastest turnaround for a booster. They reflew it two weeks later.
Wow.
And that included several days transport by barge. She got it back into shape and fluid again.
So take that Space Shuttle.
So if you figure there were one hundred and twenty two Falcon nine flights, how many boosters do you think there are to fly one hundred and twenty two times a year?
I don't know.
Double that. Yeah, there's only eighteen in rotation. What because they because they keep reusing them, right, wow, So yeah, eighteen boosters currently. Sometimes they throw them away, sometimes they fail, but and they old. This year they set a record two boosters have set a record now of twenty four flights.
That's amazing, including at one point they a few times this year they flew three times on the same day too, because they've got two pads in Florida, one pad into California and they use them all on the same day.
Wow.
So yeah, And at the point where we're recording this, which is sort of mid December because it comes out right after Christmas, there's still more six more flights planned for the end of the year to get to that one hundred and thirty six. They also flew two Falcon
heavies this year, and there were five Starship flights this year. Now, one of the reasons that SpaceX flies so much compared to the rest of the world is of that one hundred and twenty two Falcon nine flights, ninety of them we're Starlink three more expected in December, So they are their own biggest customer, I mean, arguably just the starlink flights alone are more flights than the rest of the world combined just a few years ago.
Wow. Right.
Every once in a while, I see somebody post a picture on Facebook of the path of the starlinks going by, and they're like, anybody know what this is?
It's more starlinks.
Yeah.
So they they used to fly as many as sixty satellites per launch, but as they've been coming making them bigger to do more, they are typically given flights only twenty two of the version two starlinks. They're also they fly the limit of Falcon nine every time with these. Right, it's a maximum PAYLOAOD about seventeen metric tons. So they've been pushing Falcons over and over again, so they know so much about There's now four million subscribers to starlink.
I'm one of them. It's available in ninety countries because they limit the downlink locations, all that's gradually changing. This year's Starlink completed the first constellation of what they're calling direct to sell, So if you're a T Mobile customer, you can sign up for the beta program. This is in the US only to do text messaging via Starlink.
It went to space.
It went literally went to space, as.
Luis k says, So I wanted to know you have starlink. What is your bandwidth like?
About four hundred megabits down and two and one hundred up at twenty milliseconds.
It's not bad.
It's not bad. I mean that's totally more than you'll get at your average hotel. Yeah, or and anything other than fiber. Really you're not going at any more than that. So it's as good as any cable connection and things like that. I was. I was in the first ten thousand. It was one of the original beta testers because I'm so far north, so they were very interested in my location and so I was able to get in early.
And I use it as a backup because I do have a gigabit fiber surection here and we have regular power outages and I can keep the star Link up. It doesn't only consumes about seventy five watts that I went operating, so it's pretty good.
When we do the energy geek out, I will ask you about Wait a minute, is the energy geek out coming before this?
No, it's after. Yeah.
When we do that one, I will ask you again about failover from generate from electricity to generator power because I think there may be maybe some advances in.
That, but yeah, I'm looking at some changes from the coastplace. Yeah, cool file things on a couple of things left on startlink. There's sixty seven hundred satellites in the network now as of twenty twenty four. That's three times more than all the other satellites combined. So SpaceX rat flies the largest fleet of satellites by miles, and their goal is to have twelve thousands, so more than to double that.
Are people still complaining about them polluting the night sky, you know, astronomers and things.
But they're also working hard to have less pollution, so their machines are less reflective. They're flying them in a different orientation to minimize the effect for the most part, software and correct for a lot of the problem should it fly through the field of view during a long observation, so it's not going to go away. This is you know, there are other companies and other countries wanting to build
networks like this. Yeah, you know, they lowering of the price of space flight, which is what Falcone's really done, which facilitates starlink because these satellites only last for about five years at best. Oh really, Yeah, they're in such a low orbit to have that short ping time. They low latency, and they just the atmosphere's always dragging on them.
Do they when they're done, do they fall out of space or do they have a they burn up? Yeah, but do they have a control burnt? Do they do? They fly them down into the water at a place where now.
But they're small enough that they so they can land anywhere. Yeah, they fully burn up. Nothing makes it to the right. Oh they're small, okay, right, and they have no real strong structural members, so yeah, they fully burn up. Wow, they're just a little asteroid. Well but you get the idea that it means they have to keep continuous to launching them because they're losing them right right. But if they go, if they fly in a higher orbit, then
the ping time gets longer and the network's not as good. Right.
It wasn't the goal of starlink to bring Internet access to places and countries that are remote, you know, African countries and places where they just don't have the infrastructure.
But so far the network because it requires immediate downlinking. You have to have permission to downlink in that country. And so there's many countries that still allcovered because they're not offering that. But part of the expansion of the network the higher shells is to start doing laser relay, which gets us closer to that whole doctor No effect. Yes,
lasers in space. So the point being that you can take the connection from the satellite and then relay to another satellite far enough away that it can downlink somewhere else so that you don't have to put a lot of downlink notes.
And information travels pretty fast by laser, does it? Lasers quick quick, kind of like light.
Yeah, it's kind of exactly like life. There's another network that's being built by SpaceX for the Department of the Defense called star Shield, and Elon sort of acknowledged he got into a situation around the Ukraine conflict where Ukraini military was counting on starlink this and you know, his relationship with Putin was a problem, and so the DoD is now paying for a separate network called Starshield that is military controlled, because he wants Starlink to stay a
civilian network and stay out of that whole problem.
Space Well, Elon's kind of making the budget, so he should be able to get that money.
Yeah, I don't know. I mean there's a whole argument here that this is the militarization of space because spaceflight has gotten so much cheaper. You're also seeing like the Chinese military is working on rapid iteration and recoverable spacecraft too. Like right now we only have really one spacecraft that lands.
We have another one that's landed once Starship, but New Glenn is coming and supposed to be able to land, and the Chinese government is an experimented with a couple of different landings.
New Glen is what.
Let's talk about that in a minute, because let's wrap up with SpaceX first, because the new landing vehicle is Starship, right, So this is what I referred to in the comment with the Interplanetary Transport System. It's what evolved into what is now known as Starship. It's supposed to be a fully reusable rocket. So I already know how to land boosters,
so they made a much larger booster. So where the Falcon nine is a three point seven meter diameter or roughly you know, eleven foot across rocket, this is a nine meter rocket, so thirty foot across. It's enormous. Yeah, I think Saturn five sides, except it's taller, and of course so the lower stage does it's two and a half minute burned and would turn around in land, but instead of putting legs on it, because it's so heavy,
the legs would be really hard. They're going to do this crazy They've now done this crazy things where they catch the booster in flight capture of what they call chopsticks, steel arms. God, it would be ridiculous except that it works. Yeah, in October and on Ift they did it. So I mean they flew four times this year, right Once in March it was only the third flight, which it was the first time they actually got the Starship up to orbit, although it had a malfunction once it got there and
broke up, probably was an explosion. Then in June was the first complete flight. So this was the booster took off and then turned around and flew back and landed so precisely in the ocean that they had put a camera on a boy and the landing was completely in that shot. Wow, and Starship did its re entry. And
this has always been the question mark. You know, it's one thing to get for the booster to come back, so it's not going that fast, but once you get to orbit and you're moving twenty five thousand miles an hour, now you have to slow down again. And so they had but Starships so big. Normally, when a vehicle re enters, like even the Space Shuttle in re entry, the plasma field that's created by re entry completely blocks all communications.
But Starship is so big the backside of the vehicle is not in a plasma envelope, and so they have real time video via starlink for the entire re entry, never seen before.
Wow.
And on Ift four, which was a really fun one, they had a camera on one of the flaps to sort of watch because it was taking the most heat and it started to burn through. So the heat shields had blown off there and there's literally flames going through. You can see this. It's almost becoming X ray is glowing, white hot pieces flying off of it.
Wow.
And we were expecting at any moment the signal was going to cut out, and then all of a sudden, it finished its re entry, went through the transonic regime and did that pivot to land on its tail in the ocean, and it worked even with it all partly burned up. It's still phrase function. We called it a little flap that could you know, it was just hanging in there somehow, and so that I sort of spoke to the resilience of the And so the October flight where they caught
the booster was also the one where it didntny. The heat shield system has been vastly improved. And this last flight, just in November, they changed up the times so they were flying in the afternoon seat of the morning, so that it would be daylight when they landed the Starship so they could see it, and this time they had a very precise landing. There's a bunch of things that happened this last flight. Ay the booster did not make its landing. They canceled it the last second it was
on its way. It probably could have done it, but there was damage to the launch pad it did the the antenna had been damaged, so there was signal problems, so they out of abundance of caution, they didn't land. They just dropped it in the ocean, but it probably could have landed. But Starship was the breakthrough on this last flight where they finally ReLit a raptor engine in orbit, which they'd never done before. There's no way to really
test that. You just have to do it. And it did a precision landing, same trick boy with a camera and it landed right in front of the boy. We could see the landing. We also saw like the.
That's booey for our American listeners, there.
Are booie if you're not poying correctly.
Now you pronounce it correctly for a Canadian.
And right away the fact that it was daytime in that we could see a bunch of things, one of which was the whole bunch of heat shields that popped off right at the interface point between the fuel tanks and the payload bay, which arguably is the weakest part of the ship. So there was The theory now is there was enough flex in the kick turn so it's falling on its belly to slow down, it's ready to fall, and then when it goes to land it has to fire its engines and pivot to land on its tail,
which is insane. Yeah, but that's what it does.
It's amazing though, but.
I think there was enough flex in the ship when that happened that it actually blew all the heat tiles off along that flex line.
So you know, this is not only an amazing feat of engineering, but of imagination. Yeah, you know, somebody had to imagine that this could be done, and then other people had to go away and crunch the numbers and try and find a way to build it. Try to find a way to build it. Yeah, just the imagination.
Is off the I mean to make a ship out of stainless steel instead of out of ultra light aluminum and so forth. Like, there's a lot of interesting decisions made here to make a more reusable spacecraft, and there's still problems that aren't solved. Right. The next lunch supposed to be in January, and it's pretty much fallen the same flight profile as the last one, so the FAA's already got permission, they'll probably go ahead. But they are actually using a larger version of Starship on this next
flight because they've realized they need more space. But one of their next goals, either that flight or the one after, will be to try and catch Starship too. Wow, that would make a fully reusable system that you got both vehicles back, nothing thrown away, no disposable.
So that's exciting really.
Yeah, it's it's progress, and it's you know, there was an amazing They're all amazing to watch, every one of them. But they when it finally is fully working, a lot of things change. Space flight drops by another order of magnitude.
So that means that there is going to be more flights, but also flights for different purposes than we're seeing now. Right, Yeah, maybe even more space travel tourism.
Yeah, tourism becomes a lot more feasible. Now you're talking about a ticket to space in the one hundred thousand dollars range instead of I mean, right now, you can get a crew dragon flight for about twenty five million bucks. It's one hundred million roughly to fly, so you need four seats so you know, save up. But bab, we could get it down to around the hundred grand range. That opens it's a trip of a lifetime for a
lot more people, yep, than it is just billionaires. Right. Sure, That's not the only new rocket the United Launch Alliance, the guys who were flying the Atlas five in the Delta four finally flew their Vulcan rocket, which was the
replacement for both. The development for that rocket started back in twenty fourteen, and it really was intended to be a replacement for Autlas five because the Atlas five's rocket depended on the Russian RD one eighty engine, and I don't know if you noticed, but the relationship with the Russians a little it's a little cold right now, tricky, a little tricky, so they wanted to move away from that. So this is an all domestic rocket in the US.
Methane engine the B E four built by Blue Origin, and it's been literally a decade of development, but their first flight was in January this year and it was perfect. The rocket worked flawlessly and no, nothing recoverable yet, so it was a fully thrown away a rocket, which is hard. They're talking about coming up with strategies to recover the booster or at least the engines, but nothing's been done
there yet. It had a payload on it, the Peregrin Lander, which is supposed to go to the Moon, which is very cool for a first flight. Normally for a first flight you fly a billet, a concrete or if you're Elon, you fly a sports car. Yeah all right, that was so cool. Yeah, I like that, Elon, Can we have that back?
That was the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life.
And I climb my sports car.
I wish my father was alive to see that. He would have got a real kick out of it.
But it was you need you need a DeVault payload, and so Fallulcan actually had a working payload. It was the Peregrine Lander and it was supposed to land on the Moon, but the lander had malfunctions, had fuel leak problems, and so it didn't have enough fuel to actually make the landing. So they did go around the Moon and then let it cut fly back to Earth and reander. They had a second flight of Vulcan this year as well, in October to complete their certifications, and it had a malfunction.
One of the solid rocket boosters on the side of the rocket blew its gnawsele off, which would normally be a loss of rocket like that should have been a complete failure, and it wasn't. The control systems off Vulcan are strong enough that it actually compensated for the loss of thrust from the damaged booster and it made it
to its orbit anyway. Now, it was supposed to be a certifying flight for national asset flights for spice satellites, military satellites and things like that, So normally it should it had to be a perfect flight, and it wasn't. But on the other hand, it's like, this is almost better that it had this kind of a failu and still got to fit to orbit. Like it's astonishing what they pulled out there. And this is a big, big
rocket there. You know, where the Falcon nine will do seventeen metro tons to lower thorbit, this is twenty seven metro tons to lower thorpe. So it's a pretty capable rocket. It's expensive, and United Launch Alliance has its own problems, like there's this there's a rumor going around that it
might actually be for sale. This was the collaboration between Lockheed Martin and Boeing that was formed to operate the Space Shuttle, and then it took and it got Delta four in Atlas five, and now it's over to Vulcan. So it's a question of whether it makes sense. Another thing that Vulcan is supposed to fly but has never flown is Starliner.
Okay, Spacelink, Starship, Starliner, star Live, many names all right, Starliner. Back in twenty fourteen when NASA was NASA now commercialized resopplya the Space day, right, that was crewed. That was the Cargo Dragon and the Signess vehicles. So instead of paying cost plus for every flight of supply to the space station, now they were paying by the kilogram, so fixed cost flights essentially. And then that incentivizes the company to get more and more efficient so they can keep
more of that money. And so you had two companies today. The Signa spacecraft is own by Northrop Grumman and SpaceX has the Cargo Dragon. They do resupply to the space station. So in twenty fourteen they say, let's do this for cruise now, and we don't have the space Shuttle anymore.
We have it for a few years. They intended to have this ready by twenty eleven when they last shuttle aanded and they didn't. But let's go a flat rate to fly cruise into space. And so they put out
two companies one Boeing one and SpaceX. Now the time, SpaceX is still the new guys, right, So they got a deal for two point six billion dollars to develop and fly crew Dragon for six flights to the space station, and Boeing at the same time got same kind of deal, but it builled Starliner and fly six flies to space station. But they got four point two billion. They got almost
double the money. Wow. But the point was they were the conservative choice, right, like, this was going to be the safe way to get cruise back into space halfway up the dar blew off of way worse. So there's both vehicles supposed to be operational twenty nineteen. SpaceX was a little bit late, but Starship or a star Liner far later. Their first unmanned test flight was in twenty nineteen. It was a partial failure, is the way they phrased it.
You're talking about Starliner Starliner. Yes, it got to orbit, but it got to orbit so badly it couldn't make it to the space station. I mean it's really a failure because they NASA ordered the flight reflown and it was mostly software problems at the time that caused the thrusters to misfire, burn off too much fuel, and so I know it was written in JavaScript something or to
the lowest bidder whenever language it was in. So then they they it took them two years to get ready for the next test flight in twenty twenty one, but that didn't work out. That was in March of twenty one, so they deleted till April, then Hey deleted August. Then they scrubbed it for the year, and it wasn't until May of twenty two they tried to fly again, and that time again unmanned. They made it to the space station with a small payload. They had about two hundred
and fifty kiloads. I think we talked about this last year too. Yeah, and then they actually took the same a ount of spplies back down. So this year was the next flight. So that one was that last on Man one was in twenty two. So this year they finally flew a test crew. This is the same thing that's the crew Dragon did. But in June they flew Canita Williams and Butch Wilmore up to the space station successfully,
but they had problems on the way. They had helium leaks in the pressurization system, they had more thruster issues, and so they're still there. They are still there. Yeah, Cedi and Butcher's supposed to spend eight days and they delayed departure while they were studying the problem. Now this is a legit thing. Most of the issues were in the trunk portion of Starliner, which is the part thrown away,
So there was no way. The problems aren't necessarily in the star Liner itself but in the trunk, and so they wanted to actually do as much testing as can, but as they couldn't properly characterized all the problems, eventually NASA says, now you.
Can't fly astronauts back on them.
Yeah, it's not worth their risk.
So what's interesting about those two is that their attitude is like, this is great. We get to do more science, We get to hang out with these people.
They get to hang out in the space, right, like.
You get to hang out in space. This is not a problem for them.
These guys had been to the space station before, right, They knew what they were doing, and they never expected to fly again. They figured these days were the last time they were ever going to go in space in their lives. They are having the time of their lives. They are astronauts are crazy.
Well, you know, their bones are atrophying and everything, but that doesn't matter.
But this is our last flight in space anyway, right, But this is the crazier part. So in September, when they decide, okay, we going to bring Starliner back empty. The thing is that every astronaut on the space station has to have an evacuation vehicle. They had if there was a you know, if they had lost pressure or something, they had to evacuate. How these guys are going to
get off? And so the initial plan. But what they did was they modified the Crew Dragon nine mission to actually only fly with two people, so they could bring the two down, but they couldn't bring it up there while Starliner was still there. So for two weeks. The solution for their departure was to strap themselves to the cargo palette of Crew Dragon eight. The cargo palette, yes, so crew Dragons are set up to carry four, they could carry more. They have a cargo palete area under
the seats that carries more than enough weight. So literally their goal if there was an emergency evacuation those two weeks is they would go into Crew Dragon eight, strap themselves to the cargo pilot, and hope for the best.
Oh my god.
Anyway, a couple of weeks later later in September, Crew Dragon nine comes up with only two astronauts on it, and that's the two seats for them, and they're still there. They're supposed to return in March, which will be a ten month stay for Butchercineta and obviously their last ones.
And I fought Elon offered to send a rescue to that.
He did, And that's effectively what they did by taking the two crew members off of Crew nine, which are supposed to fly with four. That's the solution. Here's the interesting situation for Starliner now it's twenty twenty four, presuming next year, in twenty twenty five, they actually get operational and can start flying missions, which is not true. It's probably going to be longer than that. They can't complete
their contract. Their deal for four point two billion included six flights to the station, and you only get one a year, and the station only lasts till twenty thirty, so they get up a run in twenty twenty five. They can't fly enough flights, So.
Do they have to give some money back.
They might have to give some money back or they're not going to be paid all of that money in the first place. But this has been such a debacle for Boeing. They've kicked in a couple billion of their own cash already.
Well, it's not the only problem Boeing has had in the last year.
It is symptomatic of the way Boeing has been for a while with a bunch of things.
No tools about it all, right.
Can wrap up the rocket conversation with the failures this year. You know, there was a whole lot of successful flights. Most of them are not particularly interesting. One of them, mostly me is that actually one of the Falcon nine flights, the Starling flight, failed. It had a leak in the second stage engine enough that it didn't get to full orbit. They deployed the Starlink satellites anyway, but for the most part they all burned up. They just didn't make it up.
The other interesting failure was the Japanese space program has a new rocket called Kiros. I'm probably mispronouncing that name. They had their first flight in March. It exploded five seconds after launch, and then they tried again in December and it flew a little bit longer than tumble out
of control and exploded as well. So just a reminder, space flight is hard, right, Yes, other crewed flights besides, you had you had Crew Dragon eight in note in March, which was the one that was going to be the temporary rescue vehicle. Crew nine. Dragon nine was in September. That's the one that's actually going to bring them back. Those are the crews for the space station. The only way to get there there was an axios mission to the ISS, which is a tourist flight to the space
station in January that came back down in February. They're only up there for a couple of weeks. And then one more crew flight and that was Polaris Dawn. So this is Jared Isaacman and Jared Eisaman had the Inspiration four flight a couple of years ago, which was the first commercial tourist flight ever where he flew four of them went out. And Jared is this billionaire that's been
facilitating these and he had another flight. This is Polaristan and Polaristan is where he did a spacewalk, two of them. Actually I thought that was Richard Branson. Richard Branson's got urging galactic and they only do suborbital flights.
But I thought he brought some friends up into space.
He did on the spaceship too, but they can only do They're only up for two minutes, right, They don't get up to orbit. They get above the carbon line, but they can't they don't have orbital capabilities. But at Jared Isaacman is a billionaire. He made his money in a company called Shift four, which is a payment processing company.
His story is pretty interesting, like he was sixteen years old when he formed the company in nineteen ninety nine and twenty years later listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Along the way, he formed a company called DrAk And International, where he owns a collection of fighter jets and he provides adversary training for air forces. So remarkable guy and now is currently proposed by the Trump administration to be the new NASA administrator.
Wow.
But he's also done a spacewalk right by the way, when POLARISTAM was doing that in September, we broke the record for the most number of people in orbit.
Wow.
There were the four people at Roma, there were three people in the Chinese Space station, and there were twelve on ISS, including Butch and the Insignia. Although shortly after that the next Soyuz came up and took three back down. So yeah. Jared Eisiman also proposed to do a mission to Hubble, to do a servicing mission on Hubble.
Okay, now, I thought Hubble was completely out of commission.
Nope, Hubble's working. It's just crippled, right. It's running out. Its pointing systems are starting to wear out. The gyroscopes are wearing out, and so he proposed to replace those gyroscopes to do a mission. They win. The last shuttle left Hubble. They put a docking mount on it. It's not quite a standard because it was before the standard
was fully established, but that was fixable. And so they were playing with the idea of is there a way to send a crew dragon up there and connect up and maybe swap the gyroscopes out and NASA has NASA turned that down. They considered the risks too high. It's a completely experimental mission. And Hubble is still usable, admittedly in a reduced state, and they're running out of money to fund Hubble anyway, I could cost money to keep
the crews working on it and so forth. And the Nancy Roman Space Telescope is about to go up and it will be better than Hubble in every respect. And we have JWST already.
So am it? What's this new one? Nancy?
Who the Nancy Roman Space Telescope? So, and it was originally called w first it's in more of as a low infrared or high infrared satellite, but it'll take opticals as well.
How's it compared to JWT.
JWST is a different creature. JWST is in which directions. It's in the deep infrared rather than in the optical range. And it's meant to see very very far away in a narrow field of space, where the w first or the Rancy Roman is designed to have a much wider field to see much more than Hubble can. Okay, it's a lot more advanced technology. Ruble's very old, right, I mean it's been around since the eighties for crying out Loud. Oh, arguably when they lose control of it, they'll leave it
in that orbit. Like you know, starship could go pick Hubble.
Up, drag it back home.
Well, it would fit inside of the of the payload bay. That's nuts, Yeah, And I mean that would be the great outcome was that thing should be in the Smithsonian for Crying Out Loud.
Absolutely hanging up right next to the Spirit of Saint.
Louis Darren Wright. And also at that point it will have been like thirty or forty years in space. But it's in a high enough orbit it'll stay up there for a long long time, so it's it's worth retrieving. It's just not any But the interesting thing now is the guy who proposed the mission and was turned down maybe the next NaSTA administrator. So who knows what happens with that?
Who knows?
Right, I haven't talked about Blue Origin yet, sure, normally I don't talk about rockets that haven't flown, but they look like they're really really close. Finally, after all these years, you know, they've been talking. He's you know, Jeff Bezos has never flown anybody into He's just flown a whole bunch of New Shepherd missions, which are our suborbital flights. They get above the carbon line, but they don't stand over.
They don't go fast enough. The rocket's tiny comparison, but he's been working on this six meter rocket, so not as big as Starship, but big with a landable first stage. That's the proposal at a disposable upper stage. And they kept they were very secret for many, many years, but they now today when we're recording this, have our rocket on the pad, a fully assembled new glenn Is at Kennedy Space Center, and so far they've done some tanking tests,
but they haven't done a static fire yet. The FAA has not published a launch window for it yet, so we don't know if they don't have permission yet or they just don't want to publish exactly when they're going to fly. But generally by the point by the time you're doing tanking tests, you're about ready to fly. So they may fly before the end of the year, it may not. It's very close. The other vehicle it's really close to flying now is one called dream Chaser. This
is Sierra Space. This was another one of the competitors for the commercial resupply of the Space station, and it's a little space plane, and they finally have a completed vehicle that's going through testing. The first flight should be in May of twenty twenty five, and they could win a contract to actually do resupply to the space station.
Plus they can recover payloads better than SpaceX Camp. The cargo Dragon is a ballistic capsule, so their landing's fairly rough and it lands in the ocean, so it's there for a while before they can pull it out and do all the things where Dream Chaser actually lands like an airplane, so you could put it down on a runway much gentler, less g loads on it and get supplies out of it. So there's a case for this thing. They'd like to build a crew one, but who knows
when that's ever going to happen. Right now, the testing shows that it's a cargo space plane that should last at least fifteen missions, so fairly reusable. And they've got a second one under construction. Now they're calling Reverence cool. All right, should we take a break and then we'll talk about the moon.
Yeah, let's take a quick break and we'll be right back with more space geeking out with Richard Campbell after these very important messages, be right back. Did you know that you can work with AWS directly from your ID? AWS provides toolkits for visual Studio, visual Studio code, and jet brains rider. Learn more at AWS dot Amazon dot com, slash net slash tools Attention dot net developers looking for the ultimate SDK to handle electronic document processing. Meet txtext Control.
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demos and see it in action. All right, we're back. It's dot NetRocks the geek Out edition Space geek Out twenty twenty four. You know you're waiting for him, right absolutely?
Second half. I did put out any asks for questions. Folks said things I should address, and Jay responded when he asked how realistic is the twenty twenty six schedule to get back to the Moon? And my answer to that is not realistic at all.
I just want to know, like, of all the things to do in space, why go back to somewhere where we have been already and know a.
Lot about We only know a little bit about about the Moon, But don't we know enough? Nope, there's lots
more to know. The main thing is we I mean, arguably the missions in the late sixties early seventies, which were military missions, even if they wrapped them in a science wrapper, like eleven of the twelve people that landed on the Moon were test pilots, one was a geologist, Jack Schmidt, right, the only scientist to ever set foot on the Moon, and they all landed roughly all on the near side of the Moon, and all roughly equatorial. Because of the limitations of the vehicle. The vehicle was
very dangerous. The Apollo system had many failure modes that were not survival, so continuing those flights after they'd accomplished their goal was questionable. So the reason to go back to the Moon now is A, we can do it much shaper. B. There's a lot of research to be done, and we've proven pretty categorically that there's water ice in shaded areas on the poles, and that sets us up for making a lot less expensive to be on the Moon.
So back in twenty seventeen, I did a geek out about building a based on the Moon based on the ease of papers and so forth, which NASA liked enough that they asked me to come and speak to them about their own stuff, which is weird.
Yeah, that was truly mind blowing.
But the point was what had been proposed and which still makes sense, is equivalent of like Antarctic style missions, but on the Moon, to put scientists on for a period. The current periods like forty two days at a time, So that's a day cycle, night cycle, day cycle on the Moon to do experiments on the surface, and there's a bunch of interesting things to do. Obviously, the water ice is number one. If you can get water ice.
You said forty two days or forty two hours, forty two days a day cycle, a night cycle, in a day cycle.
So if you're standing on the equator of the Moon, you will have fourteen earth days of sunlight on you and because of how it rotatescause of how it rotates, yeah, yeah, and so you had alloys up the end up with forty two days. So you you know, you're there long enough to really do a lot of experimentation, right, you know the long again. We only ever had one scientist on the moon, jash Smitt. He had three six hour shifts on the moon. He found more things, more important
things on the Moon than the rest of them. Com mind, because he's actually a scientist. Like what would happen if you allowed scientists to actually work in an extended period?
And so you certainly don't want to be on the dark side or in the dark at all, because one it's darker than dark is dark.
It's pretty damn dark.
And number two, it's actually freezing.
It's very cold, very very cold. But the suits will protect you. The intent is you would do a full dark cycle too.
Wow, I can't imagine.
That would only be fourteen earth days in the darkness, right, Like you ask a guy who's up in long ear bin in this falbarred islands, they do four months of.
Dark, right, But I mean there is ambient light. There is no ambient light on the space side.
Oh, there's absolutely ambient light. There's still stars.
Yeah, I suppose.
Right, but in fact you'll get you out. And by the way, no astronaut is really ever seen them from the surface of the Moon because they were only there for three days in daylight the whole time.
Yeah, so I imagine the stars must look amazing.
There must be astonishing, without a doubt. What you won't see in the sky would be, you know, the.
Moon, the moon. You might see the Earth.
But you will see the Earth and it will be like and it reflects more light than the than the Moon does, so you'll probably get quite a bit of light from that. But it's certainly part of the whole experience. So twenty twenty four, there was a bunch of missions in the Moon. I mentioned one of them already, the Percan mission in January, which didn't make it to the Moon. Then the Japanese, also in January, landed the first Japanese spacecraft the Moon. Ever, it's called Slim. It didn't land well.
They dropped a couple of little rovers and then as they went to land it tipped over on its side, solar panels down, so it only lasted for a few hours.
Hey for efvert.
Those little rovers were able to take pictures and show that one of the engine nozzles was missing, so that's probably why it tipped over. It blew an engine.
Nozzle lot, which is unfortunate.
Well, I fully expect that the Japanese will be doing amazing things on the Moon.
I imagine, yeah, they'll keep trying. I mean again, it worked for a while, and their little rovers worked great. Twenty in February, Nova Sea landed on the South Pole, one of the first few. It was line of South Pole. The Indians got their first. It landed badly too. It had a little bit too much lateral coming down and it snapped a leg and tipped over. Although in that case, it landed on its side solar panels up, so we still have able to do a bunch of missions successful.
Who had the most success on the Moon. In twenty twenty four China. China launched a pair of communication satellites to add to their existing communication satellite that covers the far side of the Moon because they have a series of additional missions on the far side of the moon, Changes six, seven, and eight. And then they flew Chang E six which landed on the Apollo basin which is on the far side of the Moon. And not only landed,
this was a talk about a complicated spacecraft. So this had an orbiter, a lander with a rover, and an ascent stage four pieces wow. And within a couple of days of landing they picked up samples from the lunar surface and put it in the ascent stage, which then went back up into space, connected up with that orbiter and flew back to Earth and re entered successfully re entered a capsule successfully into the Mongolian desert, so they have the first new samples from the Moon since the seventies,
God bless them. And then the arbiter they changed its orbit into a stable Orbits is going to be there for forever. So huge accomplishments on the Moon for China so far, and they're on they've got a plan to put humans on the Moon as well, which means we should probably talk about the NASA Moon missions.
Let's do it.
That's the Artemis missions, right arm being the sister to Apollo yep, if you catch the meeting. So there's been one Artimist flight so far, was in November twenty two. It was unmanned where they flew in Oryan capsule to the Moon and they did a bunch of gravitational tricks there, things they'd never done before. As much as it looks like a basic mission, they did advance the science. They validated a bunch of order models and so forth. The second flight, Artemist two, is supposed to be the first
man flight. It's a replay of Apollo eight. They're just going to fly around the Moon and back again, lots of systems to validate. Four people supposed to be on that, including one Canadian. Was originally planned for twenty twenty three, and then they bumped out the twenty twenty four which would have been this year, and then in September twenty four, they said no sooner than September twenty twenty five, and then a month later said, as she'll be April of
twenty twenty six. One of the problems they had and been reviewing for a while was that the heat shield on Artist one, which functioned and made it back on the surface, had a lot more damage on it than expected. It had big chunks blown out of it, actually, and it's taken them a long time to come to this conclusion, but they finally figured out that it was the skip effect. So this vehicle. The problem here is that when you fly back from the Earth to the Moon the Moon,
the Earth grabs you and accelerates you. So you leave the Earth going towards the Moon and maybe twenty seven twenty eight thousand miles per hour just enough to get there, and you're slowing down the whole time you get there. But just before you would start falling back to Earth, the Moon grabs you and you start to accelerate towards
the Moon. But when you're flying back from the Moon to the Earth, it doesn't take a lot of thrust to leave the Moon, so you're only moving about three thousand miles an hour, but as you fall towards the Earth, you start accelerating and accelerating, and by the time you get back to the Earth you're moving about forty thousand Yeah, this is the problem, right, It's like you're going. This is why we've never ever put anything back into orbit around the Earth from the Moon. All we've done is
do direct re entry. But you go in so fast. If you came in too steeply, you'd just burn up. And so one of the things they did for the apoll Miisians and the experiment and they were doing, or they first rhyme mission, is that it is skip re entry. So they actually go into the atmosphere the Earth to accelerate and then come back out of the atmosphere, let the heat shield cool down, and now they've slowed down enough that they fall back in again.
That makes sense, bouncing sield atmosphere before.
You effect on it, but not too many. And I want to make it so vigorous as like a boying. It's not that kind of bounce. It's a skim in to slow down and then cool.
It's like skipping stones on the walls.
The problem here is then the heat shield on Theryon's much larger than the Apollo capsule. It's a much bigger vehicle, and it's new material, and it appears that the cooling of the material from that skip created bubbles that then when they heat it back up again, they burst and blue chunks out of the heat shield. Oh, so the heat shield needs to be revised. It's probably the pacing item now and they but they feel like it probably
would have worked anyway. But yeah, they're definitely going to correct it, and that's why they pushed out to April twenty six. Okay, and then that leaves us with Artemis three, which is supposed to be the return landing on the Moon, currently scheduled for September twenty twenty six. So back to Jay's question, how realistic is twenty twenty six, Well, considering they're going to do the the two flight in twenty twenty six, there's no way they're going to land on
the Moon in twenty twenty six. The lander's not ready. That's a modified version of Starship And maybe'll we run anyway twenty six, Probably not. These are all unmanned flights, right, No, these will be manned, will be manned, and Artemist three will be manned, No kidding, Yeah, an Armist three was originally going to be a Lunar Gateway mission. The original proposal was that they build a space station in arbit around the Moon. There was a bunch of reasons why that was a good idea.
The Chinese missions weren't manned, though, were they.
Nope, nobody else is. Nobody's falling back to the Moon yet. Okay, theory, the first time we're going to get anywhere near the Moon again will be in twenty six with Artemis two. In theory, I don't know if it's actually gonna happen. It's been delayed a bunch.
So off the top of your head, what are the countries that have had manned landings on the Moon.
Well, there's only one, the only the US has been.
To the Moon.
I thought, I thought the Russians were too.
Russians wanted to, but they never got there. Their moon rocket may never guid into orbit. They only had four attempts with the end one and they all exploded. And then they stopped because the Americans already already done it. Huh okay, so yeah that's it then, And the Russians, you know, are kind of out of money right now, they've been fighting an unnecessary war of their own making that has debilitated their economy.
Oh man, it's sad. It's sad. And now they're wasting, not wasting, but they are wasting North Korean troops. They're just throwing them in and busting them out bodies.
Just it's horrible, totally unnecesary when you could be working on something interesting like actually going to the moon. But the Chinese are all in, They're working hard to get to the moon. The big thing about these artemist flights is it's a space launch system. Right. This is We've talked about this on many geek outs. The space launch
system is basically modified Space Shuttle parts. Lately, I've been saying this would be a really cool rocketed in nineteen ninety nine, but in twenty twenty four, it's really archaic. It's also catastrophically expensive.
So why are they doing it?
What current calculation is two and a half billion dollars of flight?
Why are they doing it so seriously when you have SpaceX out there that clearly has is cost effective and tirable.
Well, now we get into you know the reality of NASA, which is NASA as a government agency and Congress holds their purse strings.
Yeah, and it needs to exist because of all the people that work there.
Right well, and yeah, the reality is even NASA didn't want SLS, but the Congress did you know, NASA cleverly to keep the Space Shuttle flying even with all the problems with special had made sure that every state in the Union did something related to Space Shuttle, which means they had all these Congress people who cared about NASA.
And when the Space Shuttle had to end, and it did make sense to end it, we had serious problems that was going to kill more people, they did want to lose those jobs, and so Congress continued to fund an alternative to Shuttle using those technologies. The big requirement was you shuttle technologies so that all of those workers
in all of those states would keep working. But it makes it really expensive, and they're only barely funded it efficient, right, They only funded it enough to keep the people working. It was almost an accident. They actually succeeded in building a vehicle, but it keeps going on, right, because they don't have enough funding to quickly build a mobile launcher. They've tripled the budget on the mobile launcher. That's not
the procket. This is the thing that holds a rocket, which current expectation is a billion one point eight billion to build. To finish the mobile launcher, it's supposed to be a few hundred million. It's still too much, but it's just incredibly inefficient, and you're right. With Starship coming up, it's becoming sillier and sillier. But it's not that easy to cancel. Like my concern with a guy like Jared
Eisenman being the administrator is he's a tech billionaire. He made his money being at the top of a company you had complete control over, and NASA is not that. Right. You have to negotiate with Congress for your budget, right, you have to work out that relationship. And NASA has never been able to cancel us the less themselves. Every time they tried, the Congress put it back in the budget. So how do you change that? That's a very difficult thing.
Now you can make fun of NASA for the tactic around the Space Shuttle, but it's also how the station got built. The reason the International Space Station exists is that it had multiple countries involved. So now an administration can't just cancel it. They have agreements with other countries, and that got the station done, and we might as well talk about the station, Okay, you know, continuously inhabited since November of two thousand, so twenty four years straight.
It's been about two hundred and eighty people that have visited the station over that time. It's supposed to be operated until twenty thirty, which point it'll be deorbited minus a couple of years.
I have an app on my phone that every once in a while alerts me that the space station is going to be overhead, and I go outside and look, and it's just amazing to think that this thing that looks like a shooting star going across the sky is traveling at sixty thousand miles an hour and there's people on it.
Okay, maybe fifty six to ten. Yeah, I found it with six of the ten people. No, it's about twenty six thousand miles an hour, but oh, okay, six to ten people on it, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it is extraordinary. But they I mean, the issue here Russia says that they're going to pull out in twenty twenty eight. But I don't know that kind of broke. I don't know what they're going to keep doing. But the reality is that the older parts on the space station are
starting to wear out. There's a persistent air leak on this Vezda module, which was the second, one of the first modules up there. They have been able to fix it. They're finding microfractures many of the older parts, especially the docking ports space chunk.
Yeah, little particles hit the space station can ripple in it.
That's an issue, but it hasn't been a big issue lately for whatever reason. But just wear and tear. Space is hard on parts. Those parts have been up there for a long time. They weren't ready to be up there much longer. Right, twenty thirty is kind of the outer edge of as long as it's going to be.
I think it was last year you told me they were working on a new station to replace the.
ISS more than one. Let's get there, all right. Cool. This year they did issue the contract for deorbiting the space station. Because it takes a few years to build a deorbit it's not surprisingly SpaceX won that contract. Current estimates about eight hundred and fifty million to deorbit the station. The reason is it weighs four hundred metric tons. It
is really really big. That's nearly a million pounds. The original plan back in the nineties when they were planting to doing this, is that they would use three of the Russian Progress spacecraft working together to diorbit it. That plan would never work. Actually there's not enough ports, it's not lined up correctly, and the Russians.
Aren't and it's kind of Russia. Yeah.
Yeah, So SpaceX is propose is this thing they called the USD orbit Vehicle. It's a modified Dragon. Are you surprised? I don't think you're. Still it would be launched on a fulcon heavy because it's really quite bulky. Thirty metric tons of fuel onboard, so six times what a normal
crew Dragon or cargo Dragon would carry. So it's a normal command module, be still a cargo Dragon, but the trunk is much bigger and full of fuel and thrusters forty six Draco thrusters on instead of sixteen, and so it would just have this huge, powerful burn that would last for quite a while. To deorbit it safely, it's such a big thing that it would be very dangerous not to deorbit it under control, and the space station cannot be unmanned, right, it needs continuous tending. That's just
the way it was built. And so it's lots of folks are saying, like, why would you throw this away? Why not put it up in a parking orbit. Well, you put them in a parking orbit. It's very expensive to do that, and then you want not ever going to be really able to use it because you're going to quickly lose control of it. Risk of explosion is high. There's a lot of pressure vessels and things like. It's dangerous to have it up there.
And also if it just eventually falls to Earth, there's no telling where it will fall where we turn up and four hundred what is it, four hundred metric tons metric tons? Yeah, four hundred metric tons hitting the Earth would be a bad thing.
Yeah, a bunch of it burn up, but a bunch of it wouldn't. When they diorbited mirror. You know, many parts made it into Point Nemo, that a spotless in the Pacific where they drop this stuff. There's also a
question of why not take it apart. It's like, well, you know, the space station was designed to be assembled, but it was not designed to be disassembled, right, so many many one of the things is that one of the effects when you have very tight seals of metal in space is they weld together, so they're very likely not to come apart, even if you wanted it to.
Much less, after they initially connect those pieces together, they add a bunch of other connections on top of that to hook everything up, so they very difficult.
All right. So just one thing that's in the back of my mind that maybe you can do as an aside here is enumerate all of the different SpaceX rockets, because I'm totally confused with all these names and their sizes. So starting at the very smallest one is the Falcon Well.
Really there's only two. It's really Falcon nine is really the only Falcon nine.
But then there's the Falcon Heavy.
Falcon Heavy's just three Falcon nine strapped together more right. And then there's Starship Starship, which is the big mother, yeah, which is his experiment to make a fully reusaal space.
And that's the one that really hasn't got off the ground yet because it's been just so no, it's flown six times, but it's never Wait a minute, well, what was the one that just kind of destroyed the landing pit? That was the first flight of Starship. Oh okay, all right, and they repaired the pad and continue flying. They're up to six flights though. Okay, so there's those three.
Yeah. Yeah, And admittedly Heavy is just a variant of Falcon nine.
Okay, but it's three times as big.
But this, you know, this deorbit vehicle would be unique. It would fly on Heavy and it's just a deorbit the space station.
Okay, now, yeah, thanks for comparing that up. I got confused. It's like alphabet soup. We did talk last year about Axiom Space. Now, Axioum Space has been flying tourist flights to the space station. They've had three of them as
of this year. And they intended to build a intend to build a space station, a commercial space station up there, and they were going to dock it to the International Space Station as they were a stumbling it and then when it was got to a certain size, they would detach and.
Fly off on their own. And this scout formalized back in twenty twenty one when NASA established the Commercial LEO Destination program. So NASA said, hey, we're getting out of the lower orbit space station business. We're going we want to rent time on space stations if commercial will build them, and they offered up some money to basically do their research to figure out what kinds of space station is.
In twenty twenty three, there were eleven teams that applied and that really came down that consulted down into three plans. One of them is the one I just told you about the Axiom station. So their original plan was to this is another billionaire. Their original plan who who to dock a component? Dock the components to the space station as they're assembling them, so they didn't need their all their own propulsion. It makes the system simpler. And then
once they're fully assembled takeoff. They have money problems, not surprising like most space companies do. And so while their original plan was to fly five modules space station, so that was a control module, they call the PPTM, a payload power thermal module, then a habitat, then an air lock, then a second habitat, and then a research and manufacturing module which would also have this great couple on it.
So having good views.
Now literally this month in December, they've said, okay, we're going to fly the PPTM to the space station in twenty twenty seven, and then in twenty twenty eight will fly the HAVE one and then we'll detach from the space station. Will be a controllable space station on them.
We'll finish the rest later. And there's also a proposal they might be able to take Canada Arm to with them, which is the arm system that's on the space station, which is still perfectly functional and while it's large, it could be left in space and usable, or they go bankrupt, the l whole thing falls apart. They've been con The argument against Axiom is that they've been operating like their NASA with that guaranteed budget, so they've been spending more
than they needed to. They're overstaffed, they've been contracting out their construction. They're using tails to build their space station components, which admittedly those guys know how to build spacetation components. They build a bunch of the International Space Station. But I don't think they have enough money to fund everything, and they're tourist flights don't even pay for themselves. They haven't paid SpaceX for their flights so far. They're in trouble.
The other proposal is Orbital REEF. This is the partnership between Blue Origin, Sierra Space, Boeing and a few others. This is the space station dependent on New Glen, so the component, the core component would be six meters because that's how big New Glen is. Their design would come out almost the same size as the International Space Station, but in much fewer pieces. Their crew transport would be dream Chaser and star Liner. Star Liner being the thing that doesn't work.
It doesn't work and.
Almost at the point of flying cargo, but has naturally flown into space yet.
So we're not too hopeful about this one.
This one, I mean, Blue Origin has deeper pockets. Uh, and if New Glenn's works, which is a big mask, it's at least more possible. They certainly have a good crew with them. There was some argument that there was a conflict between them and Sierra Space, but officially they're saying it's still all good. The third proposal, this is all of the commercial projects, is called star Lab, and that's Lockey Martin with Nanoax, also part of Voyager Space.
Lockey Martin seems to have ducked out of this over the past couple of years and Airbs has taken their place, and Northrop grum And join them. So Airbus has an aerospace group which we don't. That's where are and space comes from, or are they're involved with. Northrop Rumman now owns the Sickness spacecraft which does the resupply of the station, so that's a fliable component. But they've committed to using
Starship to fly star Lab. They only and this is a much smaller space station and midtedly the ISS arguably is too big. That it's about four hundred and fifty or nine hundred square meters inside, and that's big enough to eluse stuff all the time. They spend a lot of time looking for things in the space station, and so Starlab in some ways I think is the most practical in the sense that they're just talking about a
two piece module. A service module has propultional in power, and then an inflatable halb module that inflates up to eight meters in diameter. So that's pretty big. It'd be about half the size of.
It's like a bouncy castle in space.
More or less. But there's a problem when you get that largely. Can't leave that volume empty because if you can't reach a handle to pull yourself around, you can get stranded.
Stranding without a way, you can't really swim in nothing.
Nope, they can't swim. You can't like blow air like, none of that works, right, and so they'd have to fill the interior in like we complain that the space that the International Space Station is a bit of a rabbit warren because all those modules had to fit inside of Shuttle. But they were a thing of three and a half meters across. But that meant that you always have a handhold. Yeah, right, and that's good. So you mean none of these guys were talking about launching earlier
in twenty twenty seven or twenty twenty eight. They don't have enough money.
But are they at least trying to make them expandable. I mean, one of the benefits of the ISS was it's modular, and they all yes.
Well, and so and so was mirror. All of these have multiple docking points that they could add more to.
Yeah, and all the other countries could get involved and put in their modules and whatever. That's the whole idea.
So those are the three from the commercial pro rams so far. There's one other that just recently showed up, and it's called vast So a cryptocurrency billionaire by the name of Jed Micaleeb started the company in twenty twenty one, did not submit for the commercial project. He's basically funding this himself, but he's shooting low in that sense. His initial products called space Haven one, and they've actually bent metal.
They're in qualifications for their first components small enough to fly on a Falcon nine next year, supposedly, so only about eighty square meters, so about the tenth the size
of the space station. This is little, but to keep it simple, he's going to do crew transport with crew Dragon, but the crew Dragon will also be the life support and the communication systems and so forth, so sort of a man tended little orbiter that you put your crew Dragon onto and then you pressurize it and operate it and so forth, so you don't have to put all that stuff in, and then he wants to build bigger
ones from there. So I mean, I'm always worried about billionaires in general with this stuff, because they're you know, kind of come and go on it. But at least his goals are pretty simple. But he's had very little time. It's only been a couple of years, so at least his goal space is small, so it's worth paying attention to ask, but again nothing flowing yet. There is another space station, right, there's the Chinese one, Tianggong. I didn't
even know that, Yeah, Tiangong. The first components went up in twenty twenty one, and then crews went on there. They added more modules in twenty twenty two. It's been continuously crude since twenty twenty two. It's all Chinese, though it's all Chinese. Only Chinese have been on it. So there's three modules. There's been seven resupplies and seven crew rotations on it. It's about one hundred metric tons, so about a quarter of the sizes of the International Space Station.
It's very much like Mirror was with a three module designed. There's a fourth module is supposed to be coming in twenty twenty six, which is a telescope similar to Hubble. No kidding, yeah, wow. So we don't know a lot about it because it's Chese don't publish a lot of things.
They keep in the solves. But they have been talking to a few other countries about being involved, one of the not US centric countries for the most part, because of course, one of the reasons they built this is because the Chinese weren't allowed to participate with NASA, right, so they they built an alternative and they are you.
Know, the countries Russia, China and North Korea, they're all kind of getting together and trying to see how they can support each other against the great evil West.
Well, yeah, they don't necessarily get along all that. Well, they're other than disagreeing with the West, they're not the same. Right. You know, there's this idea of bricks that doesn't almost make sense. Anyway, let's move past the space station's definite. We'll get into the other exploration of the Solar System. And it was a comment off of the interwebs from Jordan Maxwell. He said, hey, what will starship do for
outer planetary exploration? Can we do direct emissions? And when he's talking, Jordan hits on a point with a mission that flew this year called Europa Clipper. So Europa Clipper is a spacecraft flying to Jupiter specifically to explore Europa. It's not going to orbit Europa. The radiation is too strong there, so it's just going to fly in and out around Jupiter, get itself out of the radiation belt, parodrectally, but make a series of close passes on Europa.
And Europa is one of Jupiter's moons. That's, yeah, probably the most interesting body in the Solar System other than Earth.
Don't you think I'm you know when you think I would also put in Settleists in that list around Saturn, the one that our friend Rob Connery wrote about.
I haven't read that book, by the way, but I would love to.
Yeah, it's a great book because it's also an ice it's in. What we're finding is that there is a few of these planetoids or moons that have liquid water under an ice cap, under an icy surface, and so the radiation regime is very severe, but the moons are being kept warm by tidal flexing. So because they're so close to a gas giant, either Jupiter or our Saturn, that stress keeps them warm. It's like the same way when you keep bending a piece of metal back and forth, it warms up.
When you move water it warms up.
Yeah, and you're flexing the whole core of the planet. And so Europa is one of these. It's also one that Arthur C. Clark wrote about for in his book twenty ten, where he said attempt no landing here.
Ye.
So the other interesting moon would be Titan, which is different. Again, it's also around Saturn. Saturn Europa's up there. You know, you've got Calisto, Ande Gandamat as well in the Jupiter system.
But some of these, a lot of these have liquid methane atmospheres, right, so they're liquid, but they're not water.
Titan does. Europa is an ice ball, so doesn't look like as much atmosphere at all. That the action should be under the ice. And so the proposal is we can learn enough about it and get good pictures to figure out what to land that we'd land something there and melt through the ice and put a submarine down.
Last pictures of fish within a machine gun.
You something like that. I would think, I think we're shooting for bacteria, but you know, anything to find life somewhere else. So originally this is one of the most expensive missions ever. It's huge. Outer planet exploratory spacecraft are small. This one's five and a half metric tons. It's big, so big, and so it was supposed to fly. They spent five billion on this thing, or four billion to build it, plus a budget of over a billion for operations.
Now, who's they, Who's doing this?
Is NASA okay, although it has with involvement from Issa and Jackson a few others as well. But this is one of the largest missions ever built to the Outer Solar System, and originally it was planned to fly on SLS, the same rocket to fly it is supposed to fly the ARTEMISS missions because it was so heavy and it would be a direct flight. So SLS at the time was expected to have enough power to fly Europa Clipper directly to Jupiter in about three years.
To stop at Mars, for example, we.
Didn't have to do any slingshots right and launch in twenty twenty four, arrive in twenty twenty seven. But at two and a half billion dollars a lunch plus, you're going to be late. Because they build them slow slowly. They switched to a Falcon Heavy, so instead of two and a half billion dollars, they spent one hundred and eighty million dollars, so less than percent of the cost. But and this was a Falcon Heavy doing full push, no reusable, no recoverable cores. They burnt up every bit
of fuel to get Europa Clipper on its way. But it doesn't have enough thrust and so now it's going to take six years to get to Jupiter, including a fly by of Mars and twenty twenty five and a fly by of Earth in twenty twenty six to get additional boost to get it out to Jupiter by twenty thirty. So would Starship make a difference. Yes, Remember this is a vehicle. It only weighs five point seven metric tons and Starship is supposed to lift one hundred metric tons.
So you could put a big old kickstage plus that thing in there and get it directly to Jupiter. Although all of this conversation about refueling might open the door to like right now, they're only talking about taking those tankers flying like the Lunar Lander into orbit, which is a kind of starship, and then flying tankers up to it and refueling it till there's enough fuel in it. Yeah, but why not actually builds a refueling depot.
Yeah, that's what we were talking about the very beginning.
Yeah, a refueling depot where the tanker would go there and well, now you could have all kinds of spacefts go up, take up fuel from the from the refueling depot, and then go out.
Where they want.
So it's kind of like a queue in software. Right. It's a place where you could have asynchronously flights bringing fuel up and then flights filling up from it.
Right. Yeah, Well, and you could get to a place where that's another commercial product in space.
Yeah.
Hey, we want methane and liquid oxygen, and at this depot you can fly them from the Earth, which will cost you a certain amount from low with orbit. But if you could say, extract those resources from the Moon and bring it back yeah, same, you.
Well, that's what I was talking about before. When we have some sort of solar power, solar powered factory on the Moon that produces fuel somehow.
It's one of the possibilities, and then we just need to build a refueling depots. The other problem is when you're trying to transfer fuel, which again we've never done. Yeah, is that in free fall the liquid's not sitting by the drain port. Yeah, right, you have to accelerate the vehicle.
That's to be pumped.
Well you can't. That can't even be pumped. It has to actually be settled. Yeah.
I don't know enough about that kind of fuel.
If the liquid's floating around in the tank, how is the pump even going to pull on it, right, you're right, yeah, yeah. So your solution then is to accelerate the tank. Just give it a little thrust, right, Okay, you'll always see when a rocket does a relight on an engine, little vern air thrushs will kick in first, and it's to get all the fuel to settle to the bottom of the tank, right, so they can start the engine. The problem is it changes arbit when you do that. Yeah.
Fortunately, space is a big place and you have some room to wiggle around.
Yeah, so you can wiggle around, but also you got to find things right, that's true.
Now, where did I put that?
So one of the proposals is here somewhere. So one of the proposals would be to build a rotating fuel depot. So you dock to a ring and then you spin it up enough to settle the fuel. Then you pump it and then you spin it down and you can undock again.
Physics, it's not just a good idea, it's the law.
Kind of the law, all right. So that's the Europa Clipper mission. Another mission, another mission that launched this year was the Hera mission. This is the follow on to the Dart mission, which was the asteroid redirect mission, so Hara another Greek another, although it's an acronym. Okay, So if you remember back in twenty two, I was actually twenty one when it launched, but twenty two when they
actually impact. There was this binary asteroid system, Dimorphose and Dittymouse or diddy Moon, where the DART mission hit the smaller moon that was in orbit of the bigger moon or the bigger asteroid. The orbital period before they started was eleven point nine hours and their goal was to try and change it by a minute. They were hoping for seventy three seconds, and the actual result was thirty two minutes. So they really moved thematic change. They moved it far more than expected.
Well that's good news because you know, if we find a satellite.
It open some possibility. But we're still trying to find out why. So there's been a lot of observery. One of the reasons they'd picked Dimorphos is that it passes close enough to the Earth that the telescope is going to look at it. Yeah, so they've been collecting as much information as they can and there's a huge tale of debris. One of the things we've come to realize is that Ditimos was a rubble pile. It was not
a solid asteroid. It was a conglomerate of little pieces, and so when they hit it, those little pieces sprayed out for tens of thousands of kilometers.
Wow.
And so Hara is the emission that should get there in twenty six to go take a look at it. And by the way, the Hara mission is a typical outer outer planet's spacecraft. It's about one metric ton like Europea clippers, almost six metric tons like this is that's really really big. Yeah, this is the normal size. So it's got a couple of cubes, thatt and so forth. But it's going to go back there and get additional information, image, more detail the state after the impact, and we're going
to learn more about protecting our planet from asteroid impacts. Yeah.
I mean, if there's anything that should unite the countries of the world, it's that.
Yeah, you know that thing that way, you know, why did the dinosaurs die out? Didn't have a space program? That's right, you know, this makes the difference. Don't be like the dinosaurs. The Parker Solar Probe is going to make its closest pass on the Sun in on the on Christmas Eve this year what solar probe the Parker Solar pro So this is okay that this is a exploratory vehicle for getting close to the Sun. It's the it's the closest approach to the Sun we've ever done.
It's also the fastest moving spacecraft because you really have to change your doubt ear vector to get closer to the Sun.
Yeah, you got it. It's like it's like putting your hand in a pizza oven.
Yeah, it's moving.
Only have so long.
Yeah, so it's uh, we'll we'll see what we learn. We're learning more about the Sun all the time. We had an interesting sun yere, right, I remember we Oh, yes, so we were at the solar maximum. And so we've had a couple of big coronal mash to charges and so people have seen aurora that never thought they'd ever see aurora.
I could not believe that I went to bed early on the night that there were there was the aurora in New London, Connecticut. Like I literally could have gotten my car driven five minutes and seen it.
And we saw it here. We laid on the deck looking straight up. It was over us. So jealous, but apparently we're not done, like, oh no, there's going to be more. Our events though, will be more, Yeah, without a doubt. By the way, that shortened the lifespan of a whole lot of starlink satellites.
Oh interesting.
So when CME show and these choral mass ejectionally show up, they energize the atmosphere, and the atmosphere expands, and so it increases the drag for low orthopities. It's also why we lost Skylab when we did. Remember the original Skylab was the original US space station, built out of an upper stage of a Saturn five back in the seventies.
Seventy seven, seventy six, seventy.
Seven, something like that. Yeah, And the intent had been to get back there with the Space Shuttle to save it, but it re entered in seventy nine, and the Shuttle didn't go up till eighty one.
I remember.
One of the reasons was there was a solar maximum that expanded the atmosphere and increased the drag on skylabs.
They lost them.
So we had a blizzard here in Connecticut in nineteen seventy eight, the Blizzard of seventy eight. It was a big one, and I remember we had no school. There was literally five feet of snow.
Wow.
And so my brother and our friends got together and we built what we called Skylab, which was just this snow. I don't know what to compare it to. It had tunnels and they had places where snowballs could go down in. It had compartments. I just remember this as a kid, and it's great. When you said Skylab, it took me right back to being a kid because that was in the news.
And that was that was in the news then because they were going to lose it. I think there was nothing they could do about it. I was a huge space station. If you go to Houston, there's a model of it that you can walk around in full scale. The test unit. Wow. One more mission to mention, and that is ingenuity. This was the little helicopter on Mars. Okay, so back at twenty one when the Perseverance land or landed me on Mars, the last thing we've sent up
to Mars, and it had an experimental little guy. It's like four pounds and little rover experiment. Can we make something fly on Mars? The roaders have to move really fast, is because the atmosphere pressure is extremely low. It was only supposed to fly four test missions, but it worked perfectly solar powered, so they just landed to recharge and fly it again, and it basically could scout ahead of the rover. It lasted three years. It flew seventy two missions.
Well, the rover lasted a lot longer. Whatever the opportunity, a lot longer than they thought, a lot long enough. And Perseverance will last many more years. It's radio thermal is powered like it'll be great, brilliant. But in January this year we lost Ingenuity to an accident caused by
confusion in its flight computer. They were flying ahead of Perseverance over some really simple terrain and it uses an optical reader to figure out its orientation, and the train was so featureless it got confused as to where it was, and so it tried to land and it landed moving too quickly, and the rotors hit the ground, and some jobscript programmer didn't do the right lamb to expression, and.
They fixed a bunch of problems in Ingenuity. Along the way, they learned more about flying on Mars. Though.
Yeah, hey, by the way, I'm not disparaging JavaScript. It's just an easy target. It's the language you love to hate because we all have to use it.
All right, never mind, it's not you know that. Now there's going to be more flyers on Mars withoutout a doubt. There's a mission being developed called dragon Fly, which is actually a flyer for Titan the Moon. Because the atmospheric pressure on Titan is really high and the gravity is really low, you could flap your arms with you know, plastic wings on and fly there. I mean you freeze to death because it's negative two hundred degrees there, but you could fly yourself on Titan.
Wow.
They yeah, they're going to make a flyer for Titan called Dragonfly. It's apparently going to fly in twenty twenty eight on a Falulcon heavy. Wow. That's pretty good. All right. So last last thing, Yeah, James Webb Space the same we wrapped up last time with James Web.
Now, those who don't recall the history of dot Net rocks with the James web telescope, we actually went there. Yeah, it was launched. We met with the crew, and we met with some of the people at NASA there that and we got to see it, you know, in the clean room in person.
They would have let us in the clean room, which is no fun.
But no, but we got just you know, there's a room with great big windows where you can look down in the clean room and everybody's.
We saw James Webb in person.
It's true.
And that is where Richard ingratiated himself to the people at NASA that called him back to talk to their various organizations, because Richard knew a lot about what all these different sections of NASA was doing, and they all didn't really talk to each other all that much. Right, They like the way I tell stories, So, oh, come on, you are being so modest, my friend.
It was good. It was really a lot of fun.
It was really great fun.
So let's catch up on James web Flew Christmas Time twenty twenty one. So it's been up there a few years. In fact, they are currently taking their fourth cycle proposals, right, so if you want to use James Web you basically after there's every so often they make a propos they may open up a window for proposals. That proposals window just closed. There was a lot of proposals. A total of seventy eight thousand hours of officeration time has been
requested for twenty twenty five. Considering there's only eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty hours in a year and they've asked for seventy eight thousand. That's a problem.
That's a little bit of a problem, a math problem, actually.
Yeah, but it's this is how popular this this spacecraft is, right, I mean, it's teaching us amazing things. They're also taking requests for a Hubble, but now they're starting to limit the mission the uses of Hubble based on budget that they can't afford to have as big a cro on Hobble as it's getting so old. There's not enough money to fully utilize Hubble even with its problems.
So Richard, I know that you probably subscribe to JWT images that come down. What is the most fascinating picture you've seen?
Well, there's so many things to talk about in that space, like it has it made better images, but if you had to pick one, I don't know, like the better images of the of the horsehead Nebulam, Yeah, that have so much depth they're unbelievable. But to me it's actually
the science that it's doing. Yeah. You know, we talked about the crisis in cosmology last time, which is that we have two different strategies for measuring the age of the universe, and they're not the same and initiation, and we thought James Web would bring this together, and then for a while that it looked like it pulled it apart. There's an image that shows an ancient, ancient galaxy like in the first few hundred million years of the existence
of the universe. But because James Web was so sensitive, they're actually able to get some of a spectrographic analysis of it. And the galaxy is too big and too developed for the model of our understanding of the universe. So, you know, we thought that the universe would it came into existence a particular way that as it expanded in the inner and the temperature started to decrease, it started forming up into galaxies, but those initial galaxies would be
short lived, very large hot stars. But the pictures don't line up with this.
So it's really challenging our assumptions of how the universe started and how it's we've actually reached, and how it's aged. And we recently discovered that it's accelerating faster than we thought, right.
That it's at well a weird why is it accelerating at all, and b why is it increasing the acceleration? Right, there's a theory that's been bouncing around that's starting to get a little bit more attraction now. And it's even weirder, is it?
The dark matter theory?
So the dark matter theory exists because of general relativity. We've pretty much proved that general relativity is correct, right, that it explains how gravitation works, except that there's not enough measureable matter for general relativity to make sense. The galaxy should fly apart. You can't see enough matter to make it make sense, and so dark matter was created as the offset. Now it's not a little correction, it's not like a couple percentage, it's like sixty percent. Yeah,
more than all that know matter? Right, And so one of the theories that's been flying around is this idea that black holes gain mass as.
They age, and that the oh that makes sense because they're eating things, aren't they Well.
Generally speaking, they're not. Everything gets stuck in the accretion disk. As the material starts to accelerate towards the speed of light, it can never actually get there, so it gets hung up in the accretion dish.
It doesn't the mass of a black hole increase because it's I mean, something that is consuming more stuff and packing it into denser and denser spaces would tend to increase in mess.
It doesn't actually consume anything. They're all trapped in the accretion disk.
I don't understand, but I guess I'm going to take your word for it.
Yeah, it's complicated, and it's losing Hawking show that there's hawking radiation, which is missions from the black hole. So it should be losing mass. But they're thinking that as you get to the older and older parts of the universe, you're looking further and further away ten eleven, twelve billion light years away. Those are some of the oldest bits of matter in the universe, and so they've gained more
mass than anything else would. It's one way to address the acceleration problem, but it might also address the mass problem. See one of the issues you hear with the age of the universe.
It's almost it's almost reverse of what we understand.
Yes, you would think as things got older they would lose, but they don't seem to be. So that schis them that crisis in cosmology because we use two different strategies right. One is that we use local stars that we can measure precisely, because that's what our telescopes can do to calculate the age of the universe. And the other is
that we use these much older structures. And so the argument now is that as the older structures are different than what we think, that they've been aging in a weird way, and so that an error creeps into general relativity as we get into the older parts of the universe. Okay, so it's helping us to change our understanding of gravitation.
With these observations from James Webb.
There were predictions from this, but they, you know, without any evidence, it was hard to deal with. Going back to the eighties, there were proposals for these kinds of things, but back in the eighties you only had things like Hubble, and Hubble couldn't see far enough back. Right, So we finally have an instruance seeing far enough back that we might be confirming some of these ideas.
You said, eleven twelve billion years, But how old do they anticipate or how old do they believe? That the Big Bang.
Is thirteen point eight all right, so it's it is jwt able to see back that far, or is twelve billion about the well closest that can get. No, we get we get closer because there's a point at which the universe existed for a while before we could actually form anything like. These numbers get complicated and you know we're in the error probability error zone here too. But yeah, we're starting to see you back that far.
It's really just amazing. I mean, it's a time machine, the JWT really.
That's that's its job. So there's yeah, there's an argument. The jades GS, which is the oldest galaxy we've seen, was formed two hundred and ninety million years after the Big Bang. So thirteen point four thirteen point five billion, wow, so that is way way back there. Like we have an instrument now, we have a set of eyes that is impossibly old.
Here's another thing, because the universe is expanding, is it possible and we see something that old that it is closer now? And then could you focus the telescope on where you expect it to be now or after a certain amount of period and be able to track it through time.
Well, you're always looking back in time when you're looking back to these things anyway.
Right, But the amount of time you look back depends on how far you're looking.
But you're missing a key part to this, which is that with the acceleration of the universe, it means there is light that will never reach us. So we can't see to the edge of universe because there's no edge.
Okay, but let's see the one that you the galaxy that you just mentioned. Because we're looking that far back, right, is it possible to focus the telescope on another part of space where we think that galaxy may have traveled too, because it's expanding, and actually see the same galaxy, but because it's in a different time, it'll be different.
Well, we can't. We only see it in one place. What will happen as time goes by is eventually we won't see it at all as it gets past the visual horizon for us.
But what about things that are coming towards us?
Nothing is everything's move expanding away from us. The universe is getting.
Bigger, Everything is expanding away from everything else.
That's correct, Yeah, right, Other than in the local system, nothing is getting closer.
I'm going to pour another glass of wine.
You're probably the right thing to do. Yeah. Yeah. When it comes to the vast majority of the universe. From any point in the universe looking out at the universe, it is expanding away from it.
I just think of galaxies and as spirals, right, yes, and those spirals are moving within themselves, and then the entire spiral is moving away. However, and Rameda and the Milky Way are moving toward each other, well, that's and will collide. So that blows that theory that everything is moving away from each other.
Well, only in the local system. Right as soon as you get a little bit further away that as soon as you get to the point where things are accelerating, they're all moving away.
It's fascinating.
And they're getting you know, there's an argument that they're getting faster than the speed of light that eventually the light never reaches you, these things will start to wink out.
The calculations just are mind boggling. I just didn't I didn't pay enough attention in class in college for that.
Well, and a lot of this is new science. It wasn't in class. You know, when we were in class, there were nine planets. Yeah, wow, there's more, but I'm not going to do it. We've been doing almost more than an hour and a half.
Okay, but you know, we should pick this up somewhere on the twitters and on the Mastadons and on the Blue Skies and maybe even on the facebooks. So I'm sure people have questions, Richard, and I'm hoping that they will last them well.
And if you write those comments, you write those comments, I do answer them.
Yeah, very good, Thank you, Richard.
There you go, dude. Talk to you next week for energy Energy.
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