This Week in Space 155 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Tariq Malik
Coming up on. This Week in Space, the private Polar Fram2 crew comes back to Earth. NASA's Starliner astronauts speak out. And why is everyone so mad at Katy Perry launching on Blue Origin? We'll find all that and more plus tariffs in space, so tune in.

0:00:20 - Rod Pyle
This is This Week in Space, episode number 155, recorded on April 4th 2025. Space News You Can Use... if you're not stuck on the ISS. Hello and welcome to another episode of This Week in Space, the cool space news you can use if you're not stuck on the ISS edition. I'm Rod Pyle, editor-in-chief at Astro Magazine. I'm joined by that space ace new hound, space ace news hound, I might say Tariq Malik, editor-in-chief of space.com. Hello, partner.

0:00:53 - Tariq Malik
Hello Rod, happy Friday, happy Friday.

0:00:56 - Rod Pyle
Happy Friday to you.

0:00:58 - Tariq Malik
Or podcast day. We should say right.

0:00:59 - Rod Pyle
And your custom-made, very cool sweater.

0:01:05 - Tariq Malik
That's nice, isn't it? My wife made this for me. That's my favorite color it's orange for people who aren't watching.

0:01:09 - Rod Pyle
Nobody's ever made me a sweater, so we're going to talk later. Today we're playing catch-up with Cool Space News because we kind of got behind the eight ball due to having a slate of really good guests. But for the next hour or so we're going to make that up to you by covering a full range of topics, from butch and sunny's wild ride to orbiting the earth's poles, to mysterious russian orbiters. Now, before we begin, please don't forget, do a solid make sure to like, subscribe and the other cool podcast things so that we can keep bringing you just fine content. And now a space joke from, and I quote, andy water and andy watterson's daughter, merit watterson, merit, hey, tarik, yes, rod, what was the name of the nuclear physicist's best friend?

0:01:55 - Tariq Malik
I don't know what adam, adam, oh, like like an adam okay, yes, helping at them.

0:02:05 - Rod Pyle
Got it now. Uh, from megan on discord. Hey, tarik, yes, rod, why don't planets ever speak the truth? Um, I don't know why, because they prefer to spin oh, I like that, I got that one.

0:02:22 - Tariq Malik
I got that one faster okay, Okay.

0:02:24 - Rod Pyle
One more from yours truly. Why did America win the space race?

0:02:29 - Tariq Malik
Why.

0:02:30 - Rod Pyle
Because the Soviets were Stalin.

0:02:35 - Leo Laporte
Got to think about that one right.

0:02:37 - Rod Pyle
Wow, bring out the torches and the piss forks. Okay, I've heard that some people want to send us to a Russian gulag when it's joke time in this show, but you can help by sending us your best, worst or most indifferent space joke to us at twisttv and we'll be your huckleberries. Oh, speaking of which, how sad is it that we lost Val Kilmer at 65?

Yeah, he was young, I didn't realize he was younger than me because, as bad as I look, he doesn't didn't look younger than me. But uh, he had been through some pretty heavy stuff.

0:03:11 - Tariq Malik
But star of red planet, the sci-fi movie you know before matt damon.

0:03:15 - Rod Pyle
Well, for the show that's appropriate. But I mean, if you're going to talk about starring roles for, for him, tombstone, I mean yeah, yeah that was just I don't know, top gun was quite good, but you know where?

0:03:27 - Tariq Malik
I first I first saw him in um hot uh top secret. Do you remember that? Yeah, that was the first movie.

0:03:34 - Rod Pyle
I ever saw him in, so that was funny. Yeah well, we'll see about. All right. Um, let's jump into some headlines, because this week we're all headlines, all the time. Headline news.

0:03:47 - Tariq Malik
Oh, I missed it again.

0:03:52 - Rod Pyle
We need to name her. Who is that? What are we going to call her?

0:03:56 - Tariq Malik
Well, we should like. How about the people help us decide? Let's get some suggestions there. We go From the listeners on the podcast.

0:04:03 - Rod Pyle
I was thinking Carla, but it could be anything.

0:04:07 - Tariq Malik
Well, it could be Astronautica. It could be like who was the queen in? Was it Millennium or whatever? That was that Fritz movie.

0:04:23 - Rod Pyle
No Metropolis.

0:04:24 - Tariq Malik
Metropolis, yeah.

0:04:27 - Rod Pyle
Mechanical Lady. I don't remember her name. All right, let's actually do something productive here um I'm just the one two. Oh, this is a cool flight, so they're back, but, um, and I think we touched on it last week, but can you give us a recap? I mean because this is it didn't get as much airplay as the Polaris missions, at least I didn't think it did.

0:04:54 - Tariq Malik
Well, it did, and there's a reason.

0:04:55 - Rod Pyle
Yeah, there's a reason for that, but it's cool because it was polar and nobody had ever done that before, not even anything like it before.

0:05:01 - Tariq Malik
Yeah. So this is hot off the presses because, as we are recording this, the astronauts are being plucked from their capsules, if they haven't already been out in the Pacific Ocean. But SpaceX's latest private orbital mission, fram 2, which was financed by cryptocurrency billionaire Chun Wang, I think, of Malta, just returned to Earth after a four-day mission. So it was a very, very short mission. They launched this week, they landed this week and, as you mentioned, rod, this was the very first ever in the 60-plus years of space exploration flight that sent astronauts over Earth's poles, and that's because most of them always kind of go either on an equatorial direction or in an inclination that can reach the space station. What is that? Like 52 degrees, something like that. But Chun Wang is an explorer, he has gone to the poles, he has climbed mountains and he wanted to go see Earth's poles from space, and they named it after a famed Fram polar expedition with ships and stuff like that.

Well, okay, the ship was called Fram, it was admins and go into the Antarctic, yeah yeah yeah, I knew that you would know more than I did about that, rod, but that's why it's called the Fram 2 mission and it seems like it went pretty smooth. But you are right For and it seems like it went pretty smoothly, but you are right For a private mission. We had a lot less ballyhoo about this flight. Apparently, by design, it sounds like Chun-Wang didn't really want as much pomp and circumstance as what Jared Isaacman has done his Polaris Dawn and his inspiration for missions in philanthropy, in I don't want to say activism, but like awareness and whatnot, where he was really trying to push every little aspect of it to drive fundraising and that type of things for St Jude's, and this one was really kind of dedicated to, you know, chun's desire to see the earth's poles as well.

I think they did 22 different experiments. Some of them were photographing the auroras while people on the ground photograph the auroras from the surface, that sort of thing, but we didn't see anywhere as near as the in-depth media run-up to it and even like during during flight. However, one thing that was different they had like video snippets, almost like cell phone videos, of what life was like on the capsule every day and it seemed like that starlink connection that they've added to these spacecraft is really paying off, that they can get a video. I think as he was being strapped into the capsule, he was tweeting out live video about what that was like. It was pretty crazy to see.

0:07:48 - Rod Pyle
That's cool, All right. Next up we have from Space News, we have the first launch of Kuiper internet satellites. That's right, Starlink, eat your heart out.

0:07:59 - Tariq Malik
We're just talking about that Five days, yeah, april 9th, you know, uh, as we are recording, this is the launch date for um, for amazon's first batch of kuiper satellites. This is, uh, they're going to launch 27 of these kuiper internet satellites. Of course, uh, this is amazon's answer to spacex's starlink, which has had such a leg up, uh, and I think what? How many years? About two, three years to really solidify its hold on space-based internet.

0:08:28 - Rod Pyle
Well, what are they? Up to 3,200 satellites.

0:08:33 - Tariq Malik
Well, they've launched for over 4,000.

0:08:34 - Rod Pyle
Over 4,000. So, kuiper, even if they're more efficient, they have some work to do to catch up. Even think about catching up.

0:08:42 - Tariq Malik
Amazon is planning a constellation of 3,200 satellites all in orbit to provide maximum coverage of Earth at high speeds for internet, and so this is their first mission. It's called Kuiper Atlas 1 because it's launching on an Atlas 5. In fact, I've heard that this is going to be the heaviest Atlas payload ever for the rocket.

0:09:02 - Rod Pyle
So at least they get to use their own engines, right?

0:09:04 - Tariq Malik
Yes, yes, so at least they get to use their own engines right, yes, yes, so there is that Not their own rocket, and so it'll be interesting to see how this mission goes. If you might recall, amazon launched kind of like a Pathfinder set I think it was two Pathfinders in recent years to see if the technology was ready. It sounds like it was, but it's been a bit of a road to get here. In fact, the folks at Blue Origin that were also working a little bit on this had to really kind of push, and whatnot is what I've heard through the grapevine. So we'll see how this does, because they have confidence that they're going to be able to have this operational constellation fairly in short order, and it's based in Kirkland, washington, which is kind of very close to where Blue Origin is based as well.

0:09:51 - Rod Pyle
And the home of all the best cheap generic brands at Costco.

0:09:54 - Tariq Malik
That's right, apparently All right.

0:09:56 - Rod Pyle
From People Magazine. That's a first. Yeah, we have Olivia Munn complaining about the all-female Blue Origin space crew for the next suborbital launch. Yeah, and.

0:10:09 - Tariq Malik
I picked this one. So April 14th is the launch date for Blue Origin's next crewed space flight, and it is organized and led by Lauren Sanchez, the fiance of Blue Origin's billionaire founder, jeff Bezos, and Sanchez has put together kind of like an all-star list of scientists and singers Katy Perry is one of them, gayle King, the news reporter, another, and the whole big thing is that it's an all-female crew. So it's the first all-female crew since Valentina Tereshkova launched in the 60s, right? So it's the very first time that they've done this and, for whatever reason, this one blue origin mission is spawning such hate or anger or, um, uh, like drama online. You know they've launched how many of these rod, like like a good 10 or 15, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think they just had their attempt. Yep, yeah, I mean they've launched.

0:11:05 - Speaker 3
how many of these Rod? Like a good 10 or 15, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think they just had the 10th.

0:11:09 - Tariq Malik
They've launched a lot. They've launched several times over the last two years and this is the one that is getting the biggest backlash. I didn't see this backlash when they launched William Shatner to space, or Michael Strahan to space, or even Wally Funk, who at the time, was the oldest person that they launched into space on that first flight, or even when they launched jeff bezos to space. You didn't see. You didn't see this much, uh, backlash.

And olivia munn uh, I'm pointing it out here because I've seen her comments just echoing throughout the, the general culture sphere. Uh, new york post has it, uh, people has it here. But she wasn't the first. Uh, first, a lot of the kerfuffle started a week or two ago, with other people complaining about how this is the dumbest mission ever. That they're saying. And the only thing that strikes me and perhaps it's just my lens is that it's an all-female crew and it feels like it's open season on this mission and I don't know, I don't know, what do you think about that rod, about the fact that there's this big pushback against it?

0:12:10 - Rod Pyle
in these times it's hard to be surprised by much of anything, yeah, but but with you, I'm with you, it's. It is kind of weird because there's certainly been other missions you could criticize if you're going to, and especially because you know this is a privately funded, low resource mission that talks about a terrific waste. It's a suborbital flight for six minutes. It's like a couple of jet airliners I'm minimizing it a bit, but you know what I mean.

0:12:33 - Tariq Malik
I understand the point. Just don't get me wrong, because space tourism is a fabulous Lee like the target what I'm trying to say. It is a spectacularly like example of conspicuous consumption, right? Yes, and we are in, you know, some tough times economically wise. We've just got these tariffs, which I think we're going to talk about in a little bit, and we were talking about the price of eggs earlier.

0:13:01 - Rod Pyle
This is not going to lower the price of anyone's eggs like this, this launch okay, but we may be able to deliver them from point to point by starship soon.

0:13:08 - Tariq Malik
There is that there is that, but anyway, I just it's something to watch and everyone out there you make, you make the call. Why do you think this mission is being such blasted so publicly, whereas the last 10 have not been? Just think about that. I want to know your answers, so send us some. Just think about that.

0:13:24 - Rod Pyle
I want to know your answers, so send us some Think about that and send us your answers After we come back from this break. We will be right back. Stand by.

0:13:36 - Tariq Malik
Sorry, I didn't mean to give everybody homework.

0:13:38 - Rod Pyle
It's okay, this one's on you, pal. Are you ready? Yeah, from Reuters, tariffs in space. Now, I just said it, like your name what a great tariff tariffs in space. Um, so I'm I'm letting you take all the credit for this one when the when the mail comes in.

0:13:57 - Tariq Malik
But go for it, yeah well, this one, I mean people, these are, these are really fresh. Like as we are speaking, I think we have what it's been just like less than 48 hours since the, the new tariffs yeah the stock market shock is still sinking in yeah, that was yesterday when everything cratered and went through the floor.

It's the lowest stock, the huge, the biggest drop in since 2020 since the covid, basically, uh, but I'm asking the question because I don't think that we know what's going to happen yet. But for people who maybe didn't see the news, the government in the US, the Trump administration, released a sweeping wave of very high tariffs across the board I think 10% from most countries. China is 34%, the UK is 10% and we run a surplus trade for them, and it's going to touch on everything from cars to all sorts of technical imports, steel, all of that stuff. And so the question that Reuters is talking about in this article here, as well as the times before, is what is that going to mean for the aerospace industry? We have talked a lot about international cooperation. A lot of the companies not only have international partnerships, but they rely on parts that are made in other countries to build their vehicles, their planes, their spacecraft, whatnot? I mean, think about Northrop Grumman Rod, right, they build the Cygnus spacecraft, but it is a pressure vessel built for them in Italy and then shipped to the United States by Thales, right, exactly. And so what is the tariff on that going to be? I don't know right.

And so it seems like the economy specialists in the aerospace industries, particularly in the European Union, which did get hit fairly hard, are keeping a close eye on all of these components, all of these industries. You've got Airbus that needs to ship their, or not Airbus, arion Space that builds their rockets and then has to ship them all the way down to Karoo, you know, and from different parts all around. There's a lot of moving parts in this whole industry and it's unclear to me how that's going to be affected. In fact, we've got a story in the works at space all about that, uh, that you'll probably see next week. Maybe we'll talk about it on the show. So this is just something that I want to put everyone's on, everyone's radar, because it could touch everything that we consume here, because much of the stuff that we we buy or need or whatever is, is imported imported. But the same is true for these companies SpaceX probably, not so much. They build a lot of their components in-house. Almost all of them.

Almost all of them yeah, and when they've had some failures, it was a third party part that they ended up replacing in-house in the past. But what about Boeing? What about Northrop Grumman? What about lockheed, when they're trying to build them things that we need? Uh, for these launches we'll have to wait and see well, and things that NASA may need as well.

Yeah, I mean this is why uh ula shifted from the russian engines to their, their new ones for uh, for um, for the vulcan rocket. It is is why Blue Origin built their own engines. No one wants to have to deal with importing those critical parts. And it's why you know that Northrop Grumman is building a new version of their Antares rocket that doesn't use, you know, a stage built from Ukraine. You know they've had to really shift away from that.

0:17:23 - Rod Pyle
Very good points. All right, I'm going to skip one down and go to. Spacex is going to be flying a test run soon. We hope for the US military to deliver cargo anywhere in the world in less than 90 minutes with the Rocket Cargo Vanguard program.

0:17:41 - Tariq Malik
Do we hope? Do we hope that that's going to happen soon?

0:17:44 - Rod Pyle
Well, you know I I'm kind of neutral on the military aspect, I guess. But uh, the reason I hope that is because it will give them a hobnail boot to the posterior to get going with starship, because they're, by rough estimation in my mind, about five years late. Well, umhmm. Well, I just had one more thing yeah, go ahead keep the.

The test landing zone apparently is going to be my favorite place in the planet Johnston at all. In the Central Pacific there are concerns about seabirds and sea life and so forth and and if you've ever been to Johnson Island, I mean it is designated a natural preserve now and part of the Pacific Wildlife Heritage Trust or something, I don't remember the name, but it's a protected area. But Johnston has been a military dumping ground in the Pacific. I mean, other than the places where they tested atomic bombs, johnston's about as bad as it gets. I was there once for a few hours transiting to points west from there, and it looks like when you're coming in it looks kind of like an aircraft carrier. It's this big rectangular thing literally the middle of, literally in the middle of nowhere, 700 miles from Hawaii, and it's a kind of a dump. You know it's a sheared off because the Navy's been there a long time.

They were used from world war two on, certainly, and it is known for a place where you can land and refuel an airplane and where they used to have a single building down at the end of the airstrip where they would burn bioweapons that were no longer necessary. So that's the kind of place it is. So, while I understand you know we we have to be cognizant of species and so forth, of all the places where you could get concerned about you know which which fish or birds are going to piss off, and literally it's small. I mean it's just big enough to land a 727 and take off again, which is why they fly 727s down there, because it's too darn short for it was. I don't think they're using it for that anymore. Too darn short for, like, real airplanes. So it's an interesting.

0:19:59 - Tariq Malik
So anyway, sorry, that was kind of my take on it well, well, so I mean, I, I take the point, I take the point, although, like, while it's small for airplanes, it's not small for the birds that are there. You know, I I understand why, why the people are upset, but this isn't anything new for spacex, by the way. We should tell people. So this rocket vanguard thing, it's's Starship. The Air.

Force wants to explore using Starship for point to point cargo transportation.

In the solicitation or announcement in the Federal Registry about what these are, it's a vanguard thing for up to 10 reentry landings per year over four years to test and demonstrate these capabilities to deliver 100 tons of cargo wherever 100 tons of cargo is the payload manifest. Uh, at least currently uh for starship, so that that's the vehicle that we're talking about. Uh, the world's largest rocket. They want to land that on this remote atoll in the south pacific. And uh, and the concern, at least from the American Bird Conservancy. They sent out a blast today, but this story was also reported by Reuters earlier this week to say that they're really pushing to stop it because they saw what happened in South Texas where Starbase is, where the first launches destroyed a bunch of really invaluable nests for some birds, I think, that are either at risk or on the endangered list. But they say that there are some species where there's only like 70,000 of the birds ever left on the planet which is as I understand it, small for birds.

I'm not an ecologist at all, but this is their main stomping grounds and, having, you know, the world's largest rocket land here possibly crash, right, we don't know, uh, it's, it's a.

0:21:51 - Rod Pyle
There's a big downside there, it's, it's significant, you know, but, but, but I would ask, you know, if it's not fair to ask a conservancy group this question? I'm just spitballing here. But if you're going to object to that specific place, help us find one that is okay, like Mojave Desert, right?

0:22:14 - Tariq Malik
Or somewhere. Well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait All right.

0:22:17 - Rod Pyle
I mean, wherever you go, you're probably going to upset some part of the ecosystem. That's the nature of human beings. I mean we're kind of parasitic that way, right.

0:22:25 - Tariq Malik
What is stopping the government and the military from just building the platform right offshore of the place? I mean, it's SpaceX run by the world's richest man.

0:22:36 - Rod Pyle
They can afford to build their own thing right, but we know he doesn't spend money unless it's in his own interest.

0:22:41 - Tariq Malik
I'm just saying I don't think, I don't think, or Okay.

0:22:47 - Rod Pyle
Or do what they did in the Galapagos, which is there was one island that had a terrible rat infestation, so they took everything else off that island and put it in temporary holding pens in other islands that island and put it in temporary holding pens and other islands birds, turtles, um, a breed of pig or boar, a bunch of other stuff physically transplanted it temporarily long enough for them to kill off the rats, who were an evasive, non-native species, and then bring them back. So you could certainly transplant things for less money, that you could build a seagoing platform. But yes, your point is taken.

0:23:24 - Tariq Malik
I don't think it should be on the ecologist to find another site. They could just say, hey, look like take this into consideration, but I don't know.

0:23:30 - Rod Pyle
Well, that's because you're not a boomer. I lived in the age of progress in the space age, but well, yeah, there was no conservation. It's like, hey, leaded gas is good.

0:23:39 - Tariq Malik
It goes down to your lungs earlier, and we're a goddess right.

0:23:41 - Rod Pyle
Okay, we've got to go to another break. We'll be right back. Stand by, okay, were you done?

0:23:53 - Tariq Malik
with that one, I'm done. Yeah, I just We'll wait and see. We'll see what happens right. We'll see what happens right, we'll see what happens. There's got to be a place out there.

0:23:59 - Rod Pyle
That's kind of how we're looking at everything these days. We'll see how it happens. All right now, this is a big one. Um, ours technica eric berger, our friend of the show, oh yes, an article uh, about the starliner flight in which he uh related how he had a chance to talk to butch wilmore and he was supposed to have a 10-minute slot at the end of a very long press day, but he and Butch apparently get on well, so it went on for a half hour plus and, wow, apparently that flight was a little more contentious and scary than we had been led to believe.

0:24:37 - Tariq Malik
Yeah, this is a good one.

0:24:39 - Rod Pyle
Some thrusters went out, but we didn't realize it was life-threatening in the way that it was.

0:24:44 - Tariq Malik
I think that we all thought it was. I thought it was really concerning right, those thrusters get out. They're not at the space station, they don't know what's going to go on. Well, I thought it was concerning.

0:24:51 - Rod Pyle
But we kept saying, okay, there's one, oh, there, you know, it's like somebody was was rolling the dice. But as I understood, uh, the way those clusters work, I thought, well, that's okay. Until you discover that most of the ones that went out were all pointing one direction.

0:25:08 - Tariq Malik
Yeah, and then suddenly you have maneuvering issues to get out of orbit and that gets scary, so take it away well, I have to admit I actually missed the big press conference this week with sonny williams and Williams and Butch Wilmore talking about it. But it sounds like from this article and looking through it that Eric put together it was stuff that came after the fact that we didn't hear there. But it was very interesting to see how candid Butch was in describing what it was like both to pilot the Starliner, because he did say in the public well, I guess the wider press conference that he enjoyed that aspect of being really hands-on with the vehicle, being able to have that kind of control. But yeah, it seemed like it was a lot hairier than it appeared to maybe a lot of us on the ground. I thought obviously they were in a good fit of trouble. When you lose attitude control and you're in free drift, which they were, that's not a good place to be when you are on a brand new spaceship.

0:26:11 - Rod Pyle
And real close to a great big metal object in orbit that you don't want to bump into.

0:26:16 - Tariq Malik
Exactly, and it really is a good read this article by Eric. I really encourage it because you weren't hearing the descriptions of what happened filtered through Eric's voice, which is always a great voice, right? This is really kind of a transcript of what they were saying was going on, and it is extremely interesting. There will be books written about this, if there haven't already been, right Rod, about all of this. And so he's talking about how they're losing the thrusters and now they're single fault, tolerant for the loss, and they're really starting to-.

0:26:53 - Rod Pyle
Meaning that they're right on the line yeah, exactly, exactly so.

0:26:57 - Tariq Malik
and he's like "'We're supposed to leave the space station? And he and the, how are they going to be able to get through all of this? It's just, it's just crazy. Um and so it is really great. And they also praise, uh, the, the people in mission control that are doing all the tiger teamwork just to make sure that they can get to the space station, let alone.

0:27:16 - Rod Pyle
um, uh, you know, do the other tests and maneuvers that they were going to be doing it did cause you to wonder. This is one of those. This is the kind of question that somebody should be asking me and I should be able to answer, and I wouldn't be able to answer, which is if they had had a maneuvering problem sufficient that they could neither get to the station station nor get back, which is unlikely but possible. In any case, how long would it take to cycle up one of the spacecrafts on the ISS to perform a rescue?

0:27:51 - Tariq Malik
I don't know. I don't know. That's a really good question. Could they even do it, Rod?

0:27:55 - Rod Pyle
Yeah.

0:27:56 - Tariq Malik
How would they do it right? The suits that they had on Starliner. I'm glad that we didn't have to find out the answer to this, because the suits that they had on Starliner are those Boeing pressure suits, right, right, and I don't think they're rated for full vacuum.

0:28:13 - Rod Pyle
Neither are the SpaceX suits, which presumably you would need right, no, but well, I don't know how different the ones on um it's uh, polaris dawn were, but they're rated. They are pressure suits, not eva suits, and my understanding is the differential is primarily about wear points and thickness, and all that for safety reasons. But they are designed to be at full vacuum for as long as they have to be to get the astronauts back safe. So if you're not moving the joints a ton and rubbing up against stuff, I think that's the whole point of them. It's like you're expecting.

0:28:50 - Tariq Malik
But attached. How do?

0:28:52 - Rod Pyle
you get out of the spaceship, well, you'd have to be on umbilicals and that means that you then have to, I guess, uncouple and recouple in the spacecraft that's rescuing you, which, of course, the Boeing suits aren't standard to SpaceX and vice versa, so I don't know how they do that and that probably argues for standardizing suit fittings and couplers and things because that's kind of important.

0:29:15 - Tariq Malik
I think that's one of the biggest lessons that I think that NASA should have learned from this whole thing. It's great to be a customer and it's great to tell them what you need, and that's what they did for these two companies. But perhaps pushing for that kind of interoperability, I still can't say it. I think it's great because you get in a car. You know how the car door works. It works very similar to every other car door right and um, uh and so uh, or the lights on the cars, that kinds of thing.

I think the only time I've had a problem is when I bought a saturn my space car and you had to use special tools to open things and that was really annoying. Uh and so uh. So I I hope that there is that kind of thinking going on for the future, if there's ever. Another evolution of this is to find that kind of uh system where they can just ship up an extra suit and it fits, because they can plug it into whatever, or an adapter just have someone build an adapter, you know well, and certainly if you're going to have to go, eva, for a rescue, you should have, and they may have.

0:30:24 - Rod Pyle
I don't know this. One way or the other. We should look into it probably. Uh, whether they have one of those small emergency backpacks or not or the bubbles right, those, those, those bubbles, those number one, the bags where you got zipped inside. Yeah, I don't, I don't. I guess they they tested them, but I don't think they ever tested them I would freak out so much.

0:30:47 - Speaker 3
Oh yeah, vacuum bags and then what did you get? What did you get in the hatch?

0:30:51 - Tariq Malik
and then like yeah, and then it gets snagged in the hatch and then you can't get in or out of the space.

0:30:55 - Rod Pyle
Cat I'd be, I would freak out well, they should be in the right position to kiss the proper part of your anatomy goodbye so okay, I've never claimed I'd be a good astronaut.

0:31:03 - Tariq Malik
I've never claimed it.

0:31:05 - Rod Pyle
So I know I wouldn't you know when I get that flop sweat in between floors on an elevator, when it slows down too much, um, let's uh get one more in before the break. We have some some mystery russian objects in space. Yeah, my friends, cosmos 2581, 2582 and 2583, and cosmos is uh, it's funny that they continue that on. For the soviet days, cosmos was always the designation for satellites they didn't want to talk about. And now there's three more. They don't want to talk about conducting what we pol three more.

0:31:39 - Tariq Malik
They don't want to talk about conducting what we politely call proximity maneuvering tests, which basically amounts to potentially intercept the destroy, or intercept and grab tests, yeah, which are making people nervous yeah, so these spacecraft, they all launched on the same soyuz rocket in February, on the second, I believe, as we're recording, and because they're military satellites, they have that Cosmos designation, so that's how you know that they're probably some kind of government or military type function. They also launched from Plesetsk, which is the northernmost concentration. I think Plesetsk is in Siberia, is that right?

0:32:18 - Rod Pyle
Rod.

0:32:20 - Tariq Malik
Rod, yeah, and so they do a lot more military flights out of there. And in March, the people that track these satellites Jonathan McDowell and others noticed that the three of these satellites, these three satellites, were all kind of hovering around each other doing different types of approaches and whatnot, and that's why they think they're doing proximity operations to study how to do, you know, reconnaissance or investigations in space. And on March 18th, as they're doing these, the US Space Force, which tracks all the objects around, all the satellites around, found a new object in the orbit which they think might have been released by the Cosmos 2581. So it's a satellite that spit out another satellite and they don't know what it is. So that's the cloak and dagger aspect of all of this.

What are these three satellites doing? What are they deploying in space? What are they testing? These three satellites doing what are they deploying in space? What are they testing? Uh, because it could be anything. It could be a target right, like a, like a debris capture target. It could be some other kind of target, you know, uh. It could be for formation flying, it could be a docking target we don't know, uh.

0:33:32 - Rod Pyle
And it could be a science experiment too so there's a lot, so that's that's a good point. You know, it could be nefarious from our point of view, or it could also be completely neutral, could be an accident Could be debris.

Yeah, I mean to be square about it. Russia hasn't been flying a lot of pure research stuff lately because their space budget's in a shambles and their space program's in a shambles for reasons we don't need to talk about. And we fly the X-37B, which is also secret. And we fly the X-37B, which is also secret. But at least according to the third-party observers, who are the ones I think we have to believe, in this case, our spacecraft doesn't seem to be carrying out anything quite as suspect as what we're seeing with Cosmos and, frankly, the Chinese are doing this a few years back as well.

0:34:16 - Tariq Malik
And they've seen these kinds of things with Chinese and Russian satellites too in the past. Right so they've seen these kind of trios doing work. It's just really strange to see it. And then it begets another satellite. What is that up to? So you can expect that the Pentagon's watching it pretty closely right now.

The machine overlords are spawning, at last Quick get Leo in here they're having babies just be nice, always say thank you to your robot right? Yeah, because there's a story in the times today about humanoid robots and how there's a company that's selling ones that can help out in your house using ai, and also if they want to, because they also will have you alone in the house at wee hours of the morning and you have to sleep sometime.

0:35:02 - Rod Pyle
Oh my gosh. I often tell my girlfriend Okay, let's run to our last ad break and we'll come back with Starship Test 9. Used rocket anyone Stand by? And we are back with more ad breaks to come, as I was informed.

0:35:19 - Tariq Malik
You said, but you said, I said, but I said, you said it was the last starship test nine coming up, um, and I believe, uh, they've.

0:35:29 - Rod Pyle
No, they haven't been cleared for test nine yet. They got cleared for tests for the results of test seven, which is explosive, but they're still investigating test eight, which uh means means they're not yet cleared to schedule a date for test nine. My brain hurts, but one thing that's very cool about it is that they're reflying one of their boosters now. That strikes me as a little odd, considering that the upper stage can't be reflown because they keep blowing them up. But you know, you get your progress where you can, and it's going to use 29 used engines.

0:36:00 - Tariq Malik
Yeah, not only that it's a big week for Starship for SpaceX, because NASA added Starship officially to the launch offerings that SpaceX can offer NASA this week. And then this happened where SpaceX took the Flight 7 booster, which launched in January, and then they put it up on a test dam and did the static fire for their next flight, with mostly reused engines 29 of the 33 on the first stage which is crazy that they were able to do that with confidence that it wouldn't just blow up. Well, crazy in a good way, right.

0:36:35 - Rod Pyle
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:36:36 - Tariq Malik
And I just you know it's enormous. Again, I mean, I've told you this, I've been there. Uh, you can stand across the street from from that giant thing, uh, to see it, uh.

0:36:46 - Rod Pyle
But yes, because people pay you to travel well, yeah unlike some of us space journalists we should.

0:36:52 - Tariq Malik
We should hit the road, we should hit the road, cry me a river you can stay on the floor of my hotel next time I get to go there. How about that rod? How about that right, or? We'll get look at like a, like one of those futons creating you can stay on the floor of my hotel next time I get to go there.

0:37:05 - Rod Pyle
How about that Rod? How about that right? Or we'll get like one of those futons. Creating disturbing images, but go ahead please Just get a doggy bed.

0:37:14 - Tariq Malik
No. So we saw this iterative approach that SpaceX took in the early days of the Falcon 9, where they did the test fires. They did the little hopping at their McGregor site in Texas, and now they're taking the next step. Elon Musk has said that the whole point of Starship is that it's a fully reusable vehicle. Now, as you point out, they have not managed to reach orbit with the new version that debuted in January and then again in March. Both of them failed during ascent, but the two boosters themselves did not, and they were able to catch one of them, I think one of them. They redirected out to sea, but they've managed to catch it a few times now, and so they think that they can turn it around at the pad and try this reflight. So that will be a really big win if they're able to do that, especially if they can fly most of the engines again and that is what I am a bit more impressed by the 33 engines of this Raptor 2. And they're building these at record paces to be able to accommodate such a massive booster. So I think that it'll be very interesting to see how this flight pays out, but there is a lot of road to go.

Space six doesn't really know why the starships failed, the vehicles, the ship vehicles themselves failed on. On the last few flights they did change the design from the previous ones all the way up to flight six, and that could be a factor. There's something in that design that isn't working the way they think it is. But you know, two of those have failed. The boosters themselves seem to be getting all of their, their, their, their kinks ironed out, and, and so it'll be interesting to see if they can cross that, that threshold with the upper stage and finally reach orbit and then reuse both of the things, because then you've got, maybe, something that you can scale up to reach the flight rate that they'll need for this point to point, stuff we were talking about earlier.

0:39:01 - Rod Pyle
Well, and or and and for or and for artemis and for the crew stuff, you know, and for mars as well.

Uh, all of that stuff is is hinging on this reusability and at least they're like one step closer with this test well, and I I'd have to think that, uh, this test Well, and I'd have to think that, and maybe we have some people that have been with us on the show that do have NASA access. It'd be interesting to ask. But I have to think at this point there are some nervous folks wondering about how soon, if ever, this is going to make sense for a lunar lander. Now, to be fair, two or three flights of a new design do not something robust make and they've done it very quickly, and when you look at that you start complaining about that. Versus the SLS, which is at this point about a 22-year project and has only flown a couple of times, SpaceX is still really killing it and it's impressive.

And they're willing to hang their underwear out in public and have failures like that. It's just. Yeah, it's a little concerning.

0:40:08 - Tariq Malik
I'll tell you I would be more concerned if there was actually a functional Boeing exploration upper stage for SLS, something that there was a very clear alternative that could carry a different type of a design, because right now, even if there was another design for a lunar lander, there's still no rocket to carry it right, except for what Starship would be.

0:40:28 - Rod Pyle
Well, or you'd just break up the flights. I mean, it's been postulated, and I will add, we have an article coming in the next edition of Ad Astra, which will be out in a few months Not this one that's coming out in a couple of weeks, but in a couple of months about the idea of segmenting this into the New Glenn and Falcon Heavy, which could easily transport the components needed to be linked up and used for a lot less money than we're spending. But that's a show unto itself and actually we should get somebody on who's fluent in that. That would be interesting. That would Really talk about the alternative approach.

0:41:08 - Tariq Malik
And I'll close off with this one last idea, because I fully expect and believe that once SpaceX is able to figure out both the ship vehicle in a way and I think they'll do it quickly and and the booster, like, like they've shown that it will be like scaled up massively, very, very quickly, like we just passed what recently 400 right, 400 plus landings for for SpaceX for the Falcon 9, and they didn't start landing them until what. It's only been 10 years and 400 times they've done that in 10 years. I mean what the NASA launched, they launched like four space shuttles a year you know, and that's it.

Let's not forget an environment where nobody ever landed a rocket back exactly ever so on ships moving in the ocean, so anyway I think that we're going to get there, but it well, it's, it's, there's, there's, there's rose to hoe, as I'm saying you know what's?

0:42:08 - Rod Pyle
oh, and you got it right. Yeah, I thank you for that. So it's not roads. Um, let's do one more before we go to our next ad break. How about japan's jaxa? Their space agency is planning to send many mini rovers to mars and a lander to phobos. Um, and it's interesting. They're looking for rides, but it's interesting that they're finally jumping into this.

So you know, they've they've tested some of this technology already on the moon, but the idea that they could get multiple mini rovers down and they're talking about using one of these soft fabric expandable decelerators like NASA tested. And the article in Space News says oh yeah, NASA tested the LDSC Is that right, lou? Yeah, a few years back, but that article claimed successfully, and if you recall having Rob Manning on here who was the chief engineer on that, I don't think they ever had a complete success.

0:43:13 - Tariq Malik
They flew two different designs. One was successful, one, I think, spun out.

0:43:17 - Rod Pyle
The big one was not yeah.

0:43:20 - Tariq Malik
So now this is interesting. I actually was glad that you had flagged this one because I saw Jeff Faust's piece. This is from Jeff Faust at Space News and it actually is a presentation that the new Director General of Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Sciences gave. It's part of JAXA, the Japan Space Agency, gave at the National Academy Space Week this week on April 1st. So it was not an April fool's joke that they want to do this. But they are looking at this inflatable reentry vehicle. It's like a heat shield to allow them to land bigger things on Mars, and what they think that they can do by using these decelerators is really scale up what they deliver.

0:44:04 - Rod Pyle
Sorry, so let me just jump in for a second. So the idea behind these big soft decelerators? Is you can expand them much larger than the diameter of a rocket ferry and they can make it to Mars. If you don't use something like that, you have to have a small hardened heat shield, which becomes problematic. What is weird, however, is they're talking about 200 to 440 pounds of uh deliverable mass to the mars surface, which is half the weight of the mars pathfinder, which was already tiny so they're talking really small machines.

0:44:36 - Tariq Malik
They're small rovers, so they would. You would expect they would be small but built to be capable, right uh?

0:44:42 - Rod Pyle
yeah, but you still need a lander platform. So you're getting down to rovers that are probably like 15 pounds a piece or 25 pounds a piece, I think I think it'd be very interesting to see if you really in fact did so.

0:44:53 - Tariq Malik
This inflatable air aeroshell, by the way, this heat shield, is designed to slow things slow, to slow a lander down substantially more, without the need for a really really big and expensive and heavy supersonic parachute that you need, you know, and that hard air shell that Rob was talking about earlier, and I would say that if you coupled that type of a thing with you know additional of these rovers, maybe those rovers themselves are surrounded in airbags.

you really don't need a lander at all, they just pop, pop, pop like popcorn and then they inflate on the bottom. That's just one concept, but it depends on really how the nature of the mission is going to be. They think that they've got this strategic fund of something like a trillion yen, that's 6.7 billion dollars over 10 years, to advance different space technologies. This is one of the technologies they think will really bring mars within reach for surface exploration and jaxa already has uh, their you mentioned their slim uh moon landing, uh moon lander, which had a auger in approach that, like no, landed on its nose and then spit out a camera to take a picture of it, which was spectacular, um, but they're, they're, they've got a mission um their martian moon's exploration mission um to go to phobos, like you said, and collect samples and bring them.

Uh, uh, bring them back. I, I think, is that right?

0:46:16 - Rod Pyle
no just no, I think they're just examined there, because the sample return is even from yeah well, I'd be all for it, because we we hear nothing but sadness from that tail. Uh, we have to go to one more break real quick. And uh, let's come back and talk about carnivorous dust devils on mars, because that's cool cannibal, cannibal dust.

0:46:36 - Tariq Malik
devils, yes, carnivorous cannibal Cannibal dust devils, yes.

0:46:44 - Rod Pyle
So our friend Perseverance took a series of still pictures of a dust devil that was moving. Quote erratically unquote, which sounds more like a police report than one from the Perseverance. Rover. And then another littler one popped up and they merged and one devoured the other and that's really kind of the extent of the story. It was just such a cool headline I couldn't resist.

0:47:05 - Tariq Malik
By the way, rod picked the Gizmodo version of this story, which just had the picture of the dust devils, and so that's why I replaced it with the jpl one on. If we're showing it, where you, you can actually see the dust devils moving around. I thought the one I put I had a video link too, didn't it? Uh, I didn't see it in the shell at the top, but I could be wrong. I could be wrong. I apologize, but you can see.

If you're watching our, our, our, our youtube stream, uh, or, or you know elsewhere, you can see there's this one really strong, uh, dust devil. It's a bit like a cyclone on the martian, uh, uh, what is it? A desert floor, you know, uh. And then you see the smaller one come up behind it, smack into it and then, like it just gets all torn up. Hey, buddy ow. I know what I like about this view, because it's a landscape view is that in the background you can see another dust devil just kind of going on its own way, going. I don't want any part of that. You guys are all up to yourself. It's way in the distance.

0:48:03 - Rod Pyle
This reminds me of the center class every day in junior high school right before we went in the showers and got got beat up. I want to hear what it sounds like there.

0:48:12 - Tariq Malik
You know, I want, we have to know. Yeah, I know, but I want to hear that dust devil, like, uh, like smacking in the what if it screams like an angry person?

0:48:22 - Rod Pyle
would that be cool?

0:48:25 - Tariq Malik
or maybe it sounds like the tasmanian devil but these are, by the way, they the way. They're not small. They're not small. The larger dust devil that we're seeing in this image is 210 feet wide, that's 65 meters. The smaller one was only 16 feet wide. There's two other ones, so I missed it. There's that one in the background, around the mid-body, but there's another one that's somewhere else. I can't find it. Oh, I do, I see it now. It's on the left. You can see it way, far away, wow that is awesome.

0:48:55 - Rod Pyle
So, all of you people out there in audio listener land, this is what you're missing by getting the video stream, which is available for only $7 a month and and free, of course, on YouTube. One thing that this did remind me of seeing the dust being blown around like that is that weird paper that came out recently. That was shocked shocked, I tell you to find that martian regolith is probably toxic to human beings.

that's right now, I'm sure that there was. I'm hoping there was some level of misrepresentation there, because we've known pieces of that story for decades about perchlorate and people, so maybe this was just putting a fine point on it. But I thought that was kind of weird when I saw that it's like yes, and yeah, I know right, you know perchlorate's bad for us got it.

0:49:44 - Tariq Malik
maybe we just need a reminder before we start sending like uh, all the people we can fit in a starship there, right?

0:49:50 - Rod Pyle
So this one I want you to just take and run with. It's our asteroid 2024 YR4 update.

0:49:57 - Tariq Malik
Dun dun, dun, dun, dun, dun dun dun dun, dun, right, do we do the law and order the? Yeah Da-dang. There was a study that came out this week, or recently actually, where you know this is the asteroid, asteroid, what was it? 2024? Uh, I'm gonna get this wrong.

Asteroid 2024, yr4 um that was discovered in over christmas time and and we saw what was it was. I think it was february. Oh my gosh, it's gonna kill us. No, it's not gonna kill us. It's the highest risk ever. Wait, no, it's not. Uh, you know, it's up and it's like katie perry going, going, going on her launch. It's up and it's down, right, uh, except she.

0:50:38 - Rod Pyle
She won't be running into the moon, we hope well, there is that and I'm going to.

0:50:41 - Tariq Malik
I'm going to touch on that. So at the end of um, at the end of that month, they said they were going to, they, they had gotten um time on the james Webb Space Telescope to point it at this asteroid so that they could actually see how big it actually is. And they were able to do that and James Webb was able to pin down the size of the asteroid. They think that now it's about 200 feet wide, so it's a little bit bigger. It's the size of, I think, the Empire State Building type of a thing, a 15-story building 15-story building yeah, and I think the Empire is like what? 30 stories, something like that.

Yeah, so 60 meters wide, and so they know it's not as nebulous like what the size is because of the infrared capabilities Right, because they had a range before, exactly exactly.

0:51:29 - Rod Pyle
Size is because of the infrared capabilities Right because they had a range before Exactly exactly A range of error.

0:51:34 - Tariq Malik
yeah, and you can see the images that they captured from James Webb, both at space.com but also from the Space Telescope Science Institute, for what they were able to see and similarly, they were able to use those James Webb information and this is the second link, john, that we've got there to take another look at what the impact probabilities are for the moon.

0:52:00 - Rod Pyle
So they were able to observe it long enough to narrow it down further.

0:52:03 - Tariq Malik
Exactly, yeah, they did say that. Uh, you know, as of as of the, the, those observations, it it did increase a bit the chance of it still still like astronomically small, 96.2 chance that it's going to miss the moon yeah, but it almost doubled.

0:52:20 - Rod Pyle
I mean there's there's two ways of looking at it went from 1.7 to 3.8 percent. 3.8, exactly. We're making a show exactly so.

0:52:28 - Tariq Malik
So so those are the two big findings. I think that we've still got some time. We've got what Between now and 2032. Help me out with the math Seven years. We've got seven years, right? John is giving me a thumbs up before this asteroid swings by to see how things go, but it is smaller than we thought because the upper range was 300 feet before, so that's good. And now the upper range is 200, 220 feet and it has a higher chance of hitting the moon, but still like an astronomically small chance of hitting the moon Well, and this gives better cause for setting up on the lunar poles, because it's a lot less likely to smack into a pole than somewhere roughly equatorial.

Yeah.

0:53:14 - Rod Pyle
Yeah.

0:53:15 - Tariq Malik
But man, can you imagine? We have a moon base there that is sitting there waiting to wait, that's what I was saying.

0:53:19 - Rod Pyle
Yeah, yeah, go down to South pole where you can hide in the dark. That's right, let's see which one do you want to do?

0:53:29 - Tariq Malik
Immortal Duke on YouTube says we'll just jump up before it hits, so that way it misses us.

0:53:36 - Rod Pyle
Yeah, it's like jumping in the elevator right before it hits the ground. I thought this was kind of cool. I called it Scat Lunar Dust Firefly NASA just announced from something that was actually published a couple of weeks ago, but I just saw it was Firefly Aerospace's lander Blue Ghost. Blue Ghost, right, Blue Ghost.

0:53:57 - Tariq Malik
Yes, yeah, we knew they had an electric static, not to be confused with Space Ghost.

0:54:03 - Rod Pyle
There it is my favorite as a kid.

Space Ghost yeah, I actually saw it the first time. I actually saw it the first time Set up an experiment using electricity or electrostatics to repel lunar dust, which had been talked about a lot, because lunar dust is highly staticky, which is one of the problems. And if you saw, if you ever flipped through a book or a website pictures of the Apollo program, when they got in those longer moonwalks for Apollo 15 through 17, those guys come back. It came back in the lunar module filthy. Their pristine white suits were dark gray and there was dust everywhere.

And it's a real problem. It's abrasive, somewhat toxic, but worse than that, you can get asbestosis from it, because the fibers get in your or the little sharp bits that have never, ever seen weather of any kind get in your lungs and possibly kill you, besides messing up your equipment. So it's important to figure out how to do mediation for this. So for years there's been a talk about well, when they go in the airlock, we'll hit them with a sonic bath or, you know, dump antifreeze on them, or there's all kinds of ideas of how to do it. I'm exagger, exaggerating there, but electrostatically is a really cool idea. So this is called the electrodynamic dust shield.

0:55:14 - Tariq Malik
Yeah, and in fact, John, before you go on, John, if you hit that play button, if it works, we should be able to see this in action while Rod is talking about what it is. So go ahead.

0:55:25 - Rod Pyle
Rod yeah, oh, that is good. I actually hadn't seen that. Yeah, um, oh, that is good. I actually hadn't seen that. Yeah, I wouldn't call it a video, but it's a like a gif loop. Yeah, um, you know, this is going to be a real problem on on the moon and mars. So the fact they were able to actually do this little experiment remember this mission was short, it was only a couple of weeks. It had to be all in one lunar day. So I'm I'm so impressed with what firefly did what a land.

0:55:50 - Tariq Malik
Lander, that was right.

0:55:51 - Rod Pyle
Yeah, given the other ones that have augured in, and no ding on the other companies and countries trying to do this. It's hard, it is hard. But Firefly nailed it on their first outing and to be able to actually pull off this experiment and have it show something repeatable. And this was first proposed in 1967 and apparently would work for a variety of objects, including solar panels, possibly windows and even spacesuits.

0:56:19 - Tariq Malik
Radiators too, which you need to shed heat you know, in a spacecraft.

I mean, the example that we were seeing in the video for folks watching was NASA testing it both on glass and also on thermal radiator material, and so you know you need glass for your windows so you can see outside, and you need, or for your gauges that you need to measure, for instruments and whatever. And the radiators that we're talking about are kind of key to shed heat for any kind of heat exchange that you're going to have on your vehicles themselves, and so you know this is just like a. I think this was what the CLPS program, the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, was for was to take an idea at this technology, actually test it to see if they can do it on the moon, and then they can implement that if they want to, with the higher tier missions, with the people that are going to land there, with the factories or manufactories or whatever you're going to do. So very, very, very cool stuff and I think the closest to sci-fi that we're going to get this year, possibly on the moon. We'll see, we'll see.

0:57:22 - Rod Pyle
Part of what Clips is for I mean, part of it also was hey, if you land there and pick up a rock or some dirt, hey, if you land there and pick up a rock or some dirt, we'll pay you for it. You don't have to bring it back, just pick it up, which was a really interesting way to kind of introduce this whole conversation of, I wouldn't say property rights, because that's not cool under the Outer Space Treaty, but resource allocation. You could say, I don't know, that's what we pay, like Amazon for or the supermarket.

0:57:51 - Tariq Malik
They go pick up our groceries and put it on a shelf for us to go there and pick it up, right?

0:57:53 - Rod Pyle
Then I got to put pants on to go to the store. Oh, oh, talk about a right turn. Pick a last story for yourself.

0:58:00 - Tariq Malik
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know it's been a week, it's been a week and a half, but I really think that we should end it.

0:58:10 - Rod Pyle
Actually, we don't have a lot of stories left Rod.

0:58:12 - Tariq Malik
We almost got through them all.

0:58:14 - Rod Pyle
We may have one or two more, but you go ahead and take your best shot no-transcript the types that we have available now.

0:58:39 - Tariq Malik
And why spin launch is cool is because, instead of using, like actual chemical rockets from the ground, they're going to like slingshot them halfway up with this giant centrifuge thing that spins, and spins and spins and then, and then it goes straight up, and then a rocket, once it gets at its apex, ignites and launches the thing into orbit, and so this is a very novel approach, I think, to the well, excuse me, it's, it's, it's interesting, it's novel, and yet it's as old as science fiction, right, yeah, yeah, in the late 1800s.

0:59:15 - Rod Pyle
And what kind of strikes me about it is these things are going to be subjected to like 10,000 or more Gs, which means you got to really hammer-proof those electronics. What I could not find anywhere was the actual. I know that the test object, at least the last one, was 10 feet long. It didn't. I couldn't find anywhere the specs that said the diameter of the actual launch tube. The diameter of the vessel is a few hundred feet. Excuse me, the centrifuge itself spins this thing up, but I could not find the diameter of the exit tube. It looks to be about three feet.

0:59:53 - Tariq Malik
It was small. It wasn't big at all, but that was their prototype though, because it didn't actually go to space either. It didn't go suborbital. When they did that, I think they're based out in New Mexico, is that right?

1:00:04 - Rod Pyle
Yeah, they're at the spaceport.

1:00:12 - Tariq Malik
Yeah, that's what I thought at Spaceport America, and so you know, if they wanted to launch bigger payloads, they do have to have a bigger vehicle, so so, I'm waiting to see which they're planning.

1:00:17 - Rod Pyle
They're going to scale it up by, I think, a factor of three right.

1:00:20 - Tariq Malik
Yeah, yeah. And they're receiving 12 million in funding from Kongsberg Defense and Aerospace to develop and commercialize satellites, and so they want to have an on-orbit demonstrator launched by next year, which suggests, rod, that their concept is fairly mature, right, if they think that they could try this next year. It is either that or it is very, very straightforward to scale up like you were just talking about there, because the physics are fundamental. You know, it's, it's a it's a.

1:00:54 - Rod Pyle
It's a sling basically it's a real basic works or it doesn't, kind of thing. There aren't a whole lot of fine points. Once it exits the uh cannon, if you will, the centrifugal accelerator, you know it's it either goes high enough to escape the gravitational well or it doesn't.

1:01:12 - Tariq Malik
Yeah, yeah. And so they're calling this their, their, their base constellation to achieve significantly, and I quote, higher broadband capacity in a satellite constellation compared to with what is available on the market today. And what is available on the market today, starlink right and the other, the, the two others you know Starlink right and the other the two others you know, you got Kuiper and you got the other one.

1:01:33 - Rod Pyle
Well, their main point is that they'd be able to. Even if Starship brings down costs a lot, they should still be able to do this for much less than a rocket launch.

1:01:42 - Tariq Malik
Much cheaper, yeah.

1:01:43 - Rod Pyle
One web is the other one. Right, that's right, oh, okay. And they're hedging their bets by reminding us all that it's roughly 70, 80% less invasive in terms of resources. Yeah, because they do still need an awful lot of power, but they're not burning up hydrocarbons.

1:02:01 - Tariq Malik
And there is a John. There is a video on that page. If you scroll down, you'll find it too Boy you are working this poor guy to death.

1:02:08 - Rod Pyle
Here I know Mining his own business on his treadmill, watching us do our thing, and you're working him to death.

1:02:15 - Tariq Malik
Kudos, by the way. John, for the treadmill, that's pretty cool that you're able to get that thing. I should do that for you. Thank you, I appreciate it, it's been it's been nice.

1:02:23 - Rod Pyle
It's been nice. Aren't people that engage in fitness irritating to her?

1:02:32 - Tariq Malik
I don't know, I've lost 11 pounds in the last month. Oh, I was just waiting for you to give that one. You teed me up for that, you knew.

1:02:35 - Rod Pyle
I'm proud of it and you wanted me to share it with the world. Yeah, and how many pounds have I lost since January? How many have you lost? Almost 20.

1:02:41 - Tariq Malik
Wow, even better. That's great Congratulations.

1:02:43 - Rod Pyle
The thing that I noticed when I was way younger than you are is that when you reach a certain size and you lose 20 or 30 pounds, people look to go did you change your hair mustache longer? You know they don't get it until it's like 50 pounds and they go. Well, you're skinny. You look better when you're fat. No, so I would like to queue up the video on line. 30 Tariq predicts the future there he is. We got to hear the audio, the question of how accessible.

1:03:14 - Speaker 3
These programs will be to the average person, not just the super super wealthy Talk about space tourism. I'd like you to listen to the assessment of Chris Anderson. He runs Space Adventures, which provides private space flight programs. Let's listen.

1:03:26 - Rod Pyle
Within the next 10 years, there will be literally thousands of people going to space every year, and so it's certainly not millions, like in civil aviation, but it's a heck of a good start. Is he optimistic or is he right?

1:03:39 - Tariq Malik
You know, if you had asked me, you know, a decade ago, if he was on the right track, I would say he's dreaming.

I look like a baby, you know watching this industry develop over the last 15 years. Like I have you know, up until until now, only about 550 or so people have flown in space. Uh, spacex, uh boeing, uh virgin galactic. They're not building a spaceship for one person. They're going to be carrying seven people at a time on these vehicles. Uh, if bigelow aerospace builds their space station, that's six people oh, that didn't age well um. He has set his sights for space hotels on the moon.

They're not oh, doesn't it oh no, spacex wants to put people on mars in the next 20 years, so uh, how hard could it be. I think that if they can. They can get this, uh, the cost down. Uh, we're seeing that with reusable vehicles, that, uh, we could see this. This whole market change um as swiftly as what Eric is saying.

1:04:32 - Speaker 3
Well, you're a space guy. Do you ever dream of this actually being something that you might do?

1:04:36 - Tariq Malik
Wow, I look so young yeah.

1:04:40 - Rod Pyle
You're a handsome lad once I probably still have those clothes.

1:04:42 - Tariq Malik
Of course you still are.

1:04:44 - Rod Pyle
Yeah, right somewhere.

1:04:45 - Tariq Malik
Man, that big old aerospace thing that did not age? Well, not at all, right right well it.

1:04:50 - Rod Pyle
You know it was tough, because at that point we were hearing I still have the glasses, but they're my computer glasses now.

1:04:57 - Tariq Malik
They're the same exact ones, so oh, trip down memory lane.

1:05:01 - Rod Pyle
So at that point, you know, we were hearing just the first inklings of starship and the incredible things SpaceX was doing and, of course, in in, to an extent it's very self-interested, of course, but the industry the space tourism industry such as it was, you know, was was gassing off about. Oh yeah, how hard can it be? There'll be thousands and thousands of people going into orbit because the economy of scale and everybody want to do it and all that. Well, you know, we're still up in the hundreds in terms of people that have gone to orbit and in the what probably just the double digits in terms of people that have done suborbital. So it's not quite working out that way.

And the endless news stories we heard and read about the space. You know the gigaton space hotels that were going to be built. Because how hard can it be? Well, as it turns out, it's really freaking hard. And I think people that had a good sense of this at that time knew it was pretty hard and thought, well, okay, so yeah, it hasn't quite worked out as we hope, but fingers crossed, you know.

1:06:10 - Tariq Malik
So, yeah, it hasn't quite worked out as we hope, but fingers crossed, you know. Yeah, well, you know. By the way, for some context, that clip that you just ran was from CGTN America, so it's like the English Chinese news agency, part of their CCTV. And that was. It was eight years ago, so eight years ago was 2013. Is that right? So, oh wait, what's, what's? What's? 20? 2017. Wow. We know where the math skills lie.

1:06:40 - Rod Pyle
Thank goodness we can write.

1:06:42 - Tariq Malik
But, but. But, man, I have to say the the the one little thing from that. If you look at that clip online cause I don't know if Rod's going to include the link the CGTN was the first agency or group ever to call me an astrojournalist, which is what we were calling myself, my friends and I, when I was in college, trying desperately to try to figure out what I was going to do with my life.

1:07:05 - Rod Pyle
So it was a validation of my career aspirations. You look like a Fox News reporter in that still clip that we're seeing. So there's two outfits.

1:07:14 - Tariq Malik
There's this one, which is a blue collared shirt with the red tie and the black sport coat, and then I have one that is the red collared shirt and the blue tie, and I would interchange them.

1:07:24 - Rod Pyle
Oh, so you're crossing party lines. I got it All right. Well, thank you for allowing me to run that, which of course you did because I didn't ask you. It was fun to go back at a time warp, and none of us would have guessed any better.

1:07:38 - Tariq Malik
So I'm not digging you, I had so much more hair Look at that.

1:07:40 - Rod Pyle
I'm not digging you at all for that, it was just I stumbled upon it by accident completely and I thought, god, that guy looks kind of like Tark. Wait, that is Tariq Disaster journalist. All right, everybody, thank you so much for joining us today for episode 155 that we call Cool Space News, that you can use if you're not stuck in the ISS, tariq, where can we find you battling Dr Sloan these days? Did I get that right?

1:08:04 - Tariq Malik
Well, dr Sloan, well, no, that was like three chapters ago, rod. But that was like three chapters ago, rod, but I really applaud you for the effort, right?

so dr sloan was a villain in fortnite everybody. Grandpa looked it up all by himself. No, uh, actually. Uh, you can find me at space.com, as always, as rod alluded to. You can find me on youtube playing video games marvel rivals and fortnite and others at spacetron plays. This weekend you will find me doing my taxes, part one. But also I will be at the Northeast astronomy forum in Suffern, new York, on Saturday.

It's a two day astronomy conference. They bill it as the world's largest astronomy Expo. We can see all the latest test telescope and sky watching equipment. Eileen Collins will be there. Hoot Gibson astronaut extraord Collins will be there. Hoot Gibson, astronaut extraordinaire will be there. Sarah Seager of MIT will be there to talk about exoplanets. So I really suggest, if you're in the New York area or you want like an hour long trip you know it's a short day trip out to upstate New York get on a train head on over there. It's going to be a lot of fun and it's all put on by the Rockland Astronomy Club at the State University of New York in Rockland Community College.

1:09:17 - Rod Pyle
Well, geez. Well, now that you spent 10 minutes promoting that, I should mention also in let's see just a skosh. Over two months, Tariq and I will be at the International Space Development Conference in Orlando, florida, which is put on by the National Space Society, my employers and Tariq is going to be getting the Space Pioneer Award handed to him by me, and it's a big metal, heavy metal globe. So watch out. It might be worth coming just to see what happens with that, because last year no, two years ago when I gave it to Pascal Lee, I threw it on the ground. It's actually a mock-up.

No, I made a mock-up of it that looked just like the real thing, but we got into a tug of war over the award because I pretended that I wanted it. Then I made sure that the fake one fell on the ground and there is an audible gasp from the audience, which was my intention. But anyway, this conference is the highlight of my year. It's usually about 1,000 to 1,200 people that get together and it's for everybody. You know, we have the same, most of the same guests you just mentioned, but a number of astronauts Jared Isaacman's going to be there, ooh, by that time, possibly, probably. Yeah, the NASA chief, uh, greg otter, will be there, of course.

Number three in the agency, um, a number of writers from ad astra, you, uh, pascal, who we've had on the show, and just a whole bunch of uh, I think we have six astronauts coming number of senior NASA officials and so forth. So it's a good time. I like it just because I get to hang out with my tribe and I don't get that blank stare that I so often get when I talk to people about space stuff and they go. Can you get away? Can you back up three feet so I can?

1:10:59 - Tariq Malik
run away from you, please.

1:11:00 - Rod Pyle
You get the blinking stares of Well, yeah, and what's more fun than Orlando in the early summer, right?

1:11:11 - Tariq Malik
Well, yeah, I. I look forward to being there. Much of my family's gonna come out too, because not only are we gonna go to ISTC, but we're gonna go ahead and check out Star Wars land at Disney World, or maybe go see a rocket launch or seven, depending on how many your space it's gonna launch.

1:11:22 - Rod Pyle
Yeah, right well, that's what's remarkable. I mean I've no, I've relayed this before. At the last time I was in Florida, I was up at ksc, at the national space society headquarters which is on the kennedy space center in the kennedy space center, and saw two SpaceX launches in the same day, about four hours apart. Now it's, it's amazing enough that they do that on two separate coasts, but but to do it from the same general area within a mile or two of each other which they did this week too.

1:11:50 - Tariq Malik
Yeah, breathtaking.

1:11:51 - Rod Pyle
Yeah, and of course I've got that Dr. Sloan thing and there I'll have to do better research next time. You can find me at pilebooks.com or at astromagazine.com, and maybe playing in a tiddly winks tournament at a derelict gas station down the road, because I don't live the high life like Tariq does. Please remember you can drop us a line anytime at twis@twit.tv. That's twis@twit.tv. We welcome your comments, suggestions, ideas. Read every email and somebody usually me will reply to them.

New episodes of this podcast publish every Friday on your favorite podcast podcatcher or venue. So make sure to subscribe, tell your friends, give us reviews and I know I always read that quick, like I'm just trying to get out of the way, but I really mean it. If you tell word of mouth, you can't buy that. So if I could, I would. So if you don't mind, please tell people if you enjoy the podcast, because we need your love.

And of course, don't forget we're counting on you to step up and join Club Twit sometime this year, because supporting besides supporting twit in general would be supporting us, and who brings you more love on a weekly basis than Tariq and Rod and bad jokes? Uh, you. You will get uh video streams on your, your podcast venue, although you can still see them for free on YouTube, so don't worry. But there's a lot of extras available there and it's just good juju for everybody. So if you want to keep the electrons flowing your direction, join Club Twit. You can also follow the TWiT Tech Podcast Network at Twit, on Twitter and on Facebook, at twit.tv, on Instagram. Tariq, my friend, yes, it has been a pleasure and a joy. It always is, rod, always is, and I will see you and everybody else next week. Peace.

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