Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
On today's episode, we are gettinginto the latest space news, including leaked
renderings of an updated starship Moonlander.A new launch window has opened at Starbase,
and researchers are developing a real lifetractor beam to help eliminate space junk.
This is the Space Race. OnNovember, two images of what appeared
(00:22):
to be an updated design of theSpaceX Human Landing System Moonlander starship variant We're
posted on x dot com by userDavid Willis, claiming to be new renders
of the vehicle from SpaceX. Willisposted two images that show the HLS in
orbit of Earth and parked on thelunar surface. But other than his claims,
(00:43):
there's really nothing to say that theseimages are from SpaceX at all.
In fact, when asked for hissource, Willis literally just said trust me,
all right. Memes aside, it'spretty clear we can't trust that these
images are genuine. But it hasbeen over a year and a half since
we've seen any renders of the starshipLander, So on the off chance these
(01:03):
images carry any weight, let's justquickly go over them here. First off,
the images are fairly good looking,but that's not too difficult to do.
These days. The most credible thingfor these images is the nose cone,
which shows just the slightest hint ofa dragon capsule like docking port.
This hasn't really been a point ofcontention in the community. It makes a
(01:26):
good deal of sense that the modifiedcrewed versions of the Starship would make use
of a similar connection point as thecompany's only other crew vehicle. A careful
look at the flanks of the rocketshows a new design for the landing thrusters,
changing them into individual vented pods alongthe side rather than the open RCS
(01:46):
style ports from the original renders.This is also actually in line with some
of the only sightings of HLS hardwarewe've seen from Starbase back in August,
as SpaceX maneuvered around their crude prototype nose cone. Again, nothing concrete,
it's just interesting that this is liningup a little bit. The strange
(02:07):
bits start to stand out with thedeployable solar panels from the render. These
flexible panels would be stored in thewall of the fuselage and deployed once in
orbit, and would likely be retractable, but it doesn't seem like a method
SpaceX would use if they could avoidit. There are a lot of points
of failure with this sort of system, and the second render shows it deployed
(02:29):
while the HLS is landed and inthe Moon's gravity. There would likely be
even more problems with retracting and deployingthe system. It just doesn't seem right.
Following onto that, the legs onthis render look thinner and spindly,
the opposite of what SpaceX would probablyredesign them to be. That's got to
be a mistake at best, anda clear sign of a hoax at worst.
(02:52):
Overall, there isn't much radically differentwith these renders from the last ones,
but too many things stood out asstrange design choices for us not to
mention a total lack of verified source, we're gonna have to say that these
aren't genuine. Wherever Willis got themfrom, it likely wasn't SpaceX, though
we'd be happy to be proven wrong. The Starship saga continues this week,
(03:13):
with the FAA completing its safety review, the Fish and Wildlife Service scrambling to
complete their site analysis of the Bokachkacoast, and SpaceX booking some very specific
outside help and giving us a potentialtimeline for their next Starship test launch starting
with the FAA. On October thirtyfirst, the administration, which has been
in charge of recertifying the massive Starshipsuper heavy rocket for flight operations, announced
(03:38):
that they had officially completed their safetyreview. You could all be forgiven for
wondering how yet another review was goingon after all that other work previously mack
In early September, the FAA closedtheir mishap investigation, which involved auditing the
SpaceX account of their April twentieth testflight, which exploded after a four minute
(03:58):
burn. That in investigation involved amore direct probe of the vehicle and available
evidence as to what had gone wrong. The safety review has an altogether different
focus, that being the danger toproperty and the local population. The FAA
also clarified that this review looks overthe applicants organization safety protocols and the flight
(04:19):
safety features they employ. And sinceSpaceX has been working so closely with the
FAA this whole time, this partof their review was extremely easy and quick
to complete. But this review wasdefinitely not the major barrier to the next
Starship flight. That dubious honour goesto the investigation currently being conducted by the
(04:41):
FISH and Wildlife Service, and it'sall because of that cool new water w
system that SpaceX designed to make sureStarship doesn't blow another hole in the starbased
concrete. The FWS has a verystrict mission statement, which revolves around ensuring
that the local environment isn't adversely affectedby whatever new activity is applying for an
(05:03):
operating license. They are usually calledon to test the area around drilling operations,
but rocketry is also something they cover, as many rockets tend to use
toxic fuels, shed harmful debris,and produce noise and vibration at levels harmful
to most wildlife. That's said,those concerns have already been dealt with for
(05:24):
Starship, but their new deluge systemhas not. Over the last couple of
months, SpaceX has designed and builta slick flame diverter system that pumps thousands
of gallons of water through a steelplate directly under the engines of their super
heavy booster, cooling the plate andabsorbing both the engine blast and the noise
it produces. From early testing,it definitely looks like it will work as
(05:48):
intended, but that's just the problem. Water is fairly absorbent when it comes
to chemicals, so the fuel,hydraulic oils and what little debris could be
produced during a launch could be aproblem for the local coastline as thousands of
gallons of potentially contaminated water gets dumpedfrom the w system. However, the
(06:09):
past week or two have been markedwith congressional hearings about the need to cut
through this additional red tape caused bythe licensing procedures being beholden to several different
authorities instead of a single, unifiedone, and all this talk seems to
have lit a fire under the FWSteams at Bocachica with a window of possibly
(06:30):
one hundred and thirty five days oftesting. The FAA and FWS have both
stated that this stage of the investigationshouldn't take long at all, and maybe
that's why SpaceX is back to bookingpossible launch times. Back in October,
when it looked like things might bewrapping up, SpaceX issued a notice to
mariners that included a small stretch ofdays that didn't end up getting used for
(06:54):
obvious reasons. These notices are putout to warn any boats and ships to
keep clear of the launch trajectory ofa rocket just in case, and it's
a good indication of a serious possibilityfor a launch, except when they have
to reschedule. Recently, another noticeto mariners went out warning local water traffic
that a launch could take place fromBocachica, Texas no earlier than November sixth.
(07:17):
That's a good sign, but aswe've seen, it's hardly solid.
Luckily, we have something way moreconcrete. It looks like a WB fifty
seven plane has been booked for workfrom November third to tenth. These planes
are converted bombers which NASA and otherUS agencies now use for high altitude photography.
(07:39):
One of these planes took part inthe April twentieth launch of Starship and
is the source of some of thosecloser videos we've seen from that event and
might be what this booking is for. So while this is also something that
could be rescheduled, it's a muchmore difficult thing to have an expensive research
aircraft waiting to fly if you're notgoing to use it, and likely expensive
(07:59):
to book if you miss that launchdate, which makes this a pretty confident
move by SpaceX considering there's still anactive investigation going on involving processing samples of
the Bocachica soil, But as usual, it's likely the folks at SpaceX are
working very closely with the Fish andWildlife Services and the FAA, so they
could very well know something we don'thear. It seems pretty far fetched that
(08:22):
a starship launch is in the cardsso early this month, but if SpaceX
is booking planes, then it's gotto be close to go time. This
new space race has a huge problem, and it's been growing with every launch
and even with every attempt to mitigateor solve it. Space junk is building
up in Earth's orbit and finding agood way to clean it all up is
(08:43):
proving very difficult. But with anew space race comes new technology which opens
the door to solutions straight out ofscience fiction, and for researchers at the
University of Colorado, Boulder, oneof these sci fi tropes seems to actually
be within reach. We are talkingabout a real life tractor beam. That's
(09:05):
right, a staple of space basedfiction from Star Trek to Star Wars,
the ability to use an energy basedbeam to hold and attract a distant target
might soon be a reality thanks toa research team led by Professor Hans Petter
Shaub. Unlike the many strange versionsof fictional tractor beams from sci fi.
Shob's team is using the physics ofelectrostatic charge to manipulate objects in a zero
(09:28):
G environment. The current design iscentered around a spacecraft armed with an electron
gun, which would fire a streamof negative particles at the target, be
it a piece of debris or anold satellite. The target would then become
negatively charged and be attracted to thenearest positively charged object, which in this
case would be the towing spacecraft,and could then be maneuvered wherever an operator
(09:52):
would like, albeit slowly. Andthis isn't just theoretical either. The team
at UC Boulder have been testing anditerating their design for over a decade now,
with fairly strong results. The universityis home to a metallic vacuum chamber
called the Electrostatic Charging Laboratory for Interactionsbetween Plasma and Spacecraft or Eclipse, which
(10:13):
allows them to test the effects oftheir electrostatic tractor on a smaller scale.
The biggest benefit to using an electrostatictractor is it doesn't require contact between the
operation's vehicle and its target, substantiallylowering the possibility of creating more debris which
is the biggest concern during orbital cleanup. Orbital cleanup is becoming a well studied
(10:37):
field these days, with several companiesturning their hands to making a new type
of vehicle. Magnetic grapplers, harpoons, and robotic arms are all being tested
in orbit right now, but allof them involve direct contact with their target,
whether its debris from past launches orold satellites. Space trash can range
from the size of a basketball allthe way up to the size of a
(10:58):
school bus, and all of themmoving at their own speeds and rotating in
odd ways. Trying to hit somethinglike that with a harpoon or grapple,
or even just matching its speed toattempt to grab with robotic arms, are
all extremely dangerous to both objects andwill almost certainly lead to more debris,
something that the electrostatic tractor method wouldn'thave to deal with. But that doesn't
(11:24):
mean there aren't problems with the tractor, of course. The first is that
this method is very slow. Movinga single satellite sized target into a different
orbit would take more than a month. These speeds mean that without a huge
fleet of orbital tugs armed with theseelectrostatic devices, there's no way this method
could keep up with the current paceof launches, which brings us to the
(11:46):
second big problem funding. As auniversity team, it's safe to say that
CHOBS researchers just don't have the sortof capital to make a full sized vehicle
armed with a very expensive electron gun. So if this tractor idea is going
to get used at a level whereit can be effective, the technology would
almost certainly have to be picked upby a commercial provider. Currently, the
(12:07):
team is looking at finishing their smallscale tests in UC Boulder's Eclipse machine,
and then they plan on finding someoneto fund their first mission. But considering
the safety of their method alone,it might not take much longer to convince
a larger company to help them out.
On today's episode, we are gettinginto the latest space news, including leaked
renderings of an updated starship Moonlander.A new launch window has opened at Starbase,
and researchers are developing a real lifetractor beam to help eliminate space junk.
This is the Space Race. OnNovember, two images of what appeared
(00:22):
to be an updated design of theSpaceX Human Landing System Moonlander starship variant We're
posted on x dot com by userDavid Willis, claiming to be new renders
of the vehicle from SpaceX. Willisposted two images that show the HLS in
orbit of Earth and parked on thelunar surface. But other than his claims,
(00:43):
there's really nothing to say that theseimages are from SpaceX at all.
In fact, when asked for hissource, Willis literally just said trust me,
all right. Memes aside, it'spretty clear we can't trust that these
images are genuine. But it hasbeen over a year and a half since
we've seen any renders of the starshipLander, So on the off chance these
(01:03):
images carry any weight, let's justquickly go over them here. First off,
the images are fairly good looking,but that's not too difficult to do.
These days. The most credible thingfor these images is the nose cone,
which shows just the slightest hint ofa dragon capsule like docking port.
This hasn't really been a point ofcontention in the community. It makes a
(01:26):
good deal of sense that the modifiedcrewed versions of the Starship would make use
of a similar connection point as thecompany's only other crew vehicle. A careful
look at the flanks of the rocketshows a new design for the landing thrusters,
changing them into individual vented pods alongthe side rather than the open RCS
(01:46):
style ports from the original renders.This is also actually in line with some
of the only sightings of HLS hardwarewe've seen from Starbase back in August,
as SpaceX maneuvered around their crude prototype nose cone. Again, nothing concrete,
it's just interesting that this is liningup a little bit. The strange
(02:07):
bits start to stand out with thedeployable solar panels from the render. These
flexible panels would be stored in thewall of the fuselage and deployed once in
orbit, and would likely be retractable, but it doesn't seem like a method
SpaceX would use if they could avoidit. There are a lot of points
of failure with this sort of system, and the second render shows it deployed
(02:29):
while the HLS is landed and inthe Moon's gravity. There would likely be
even more problems with retracting and deployingthe system. It just doesn't seem right.
Following onto that, the legs onthis render look thinner and spindly,
the opposite of what SpaceX would probablyredesign them to be. That's got to
be a mistake at best, anda clear sign of a hoax at worst.
(02:52):
Overall, there isn't much radically differentwith these renders from the last ones,
but too many things stood out asstrange design choices for us not to
mention a total lack of verified source, we're gonna have to say that these
aren't genuine. Wherever Willis got themfrom, it likely wasn't SpaceX, though
we'd be happy to be proven wrong. The Starship saga continues this week,
(03:13):
with the FAA completing its safety review, the Fish and Wildlife Service scrambling to
complete their site analysis of the Bokachkacoast, and SpaceX booking some very specific
outside help and giving us a potentialtimeline for their next Starship test launch starting
with the FAA. On October thirtyfirst, the administration, which has been
in charge of recertifying the massive Starshipsuper heavy rocket for flight operations, announced
(03:38):
that they had officially completed their safetyreview. You could all be forgiven for
wondering how yet another review was goingon after all that other work previously mack
In early September, the FAA closedtheir mishap investigation, which involved auditing the
SpaceX account of their April twentieth testflight, which exploded after a four minute
(03:58):
burn. That in investigation involved amore direct probe of the vehicle and available
evidence as to what had gone wrong. The safety review has an altogether different
focus, that being the danger toproperty and the local population. The FAA
also clarified that this review looks overthe applicants organization safety protocols and the flight
(04:19):
safety features they employ. And sinceSpaceX has been working so closely with the
FAA this whole time, this partof their review was extremely easy and quick
to complete. But this review wasdefinitely not the major barrier to the next
Starship flight. That dubious honour goesto the investigation currently being conducted by the
(04:41):
FISH and Wildlife Service, and it'sall because of that cool new water w
system that SpaceX designed to make sureStarship doesn't blow another hole in the starbased
concrete. The FWS has a verystrict mission statement, which revolves around ensuring
that the local environment isn't adversely affectedby whatever new activity is applying for an
(05:03):
operating license. They are usually calledon to test the area around drilling operations,
but rocketry is also something they cover, as many rockets tend to use
toxic fuels, shed harmful debris,and produce noise and vibration at levels harmful
to most wildlife. That's said,those concerns have already been dealt with for
(05:24):
Starship, but their new deluge systemhas not. Over the last couple of
months, SpaceX has designed and builta slick flame diverter system that pumps thousands
of gallons of water through a steelplate directly under the engines of their super
heavy booster, cooling the plate andabsorbing both the engine blast and the noise
it produces. From early testing,it definitely looks like it will work as
(05:48):
intended, but that's just the problem. Water is fairly absorbent when it comes
to chemicals, so the fuel,hydraulic oils and what little debris could be
produced during a launch could be aproblem for the local coastline as thousands of
gallons of potentially contaminated water gets dumpedfrom the w system. However, the
(06:09):
past week or two have been markedwith congressional hearings about the need to cut
through this additional red tape caused bythe licensing procedures being beholden to several different
authorities instead of a single, unifiedone, and all this talk seems to
have lit a fire under the FWSteams at Bocachica with a window of possibly
(06:30):
one hundred and thirty five days oftesting. The FAA and FWS have both
stated that this stage of the investigationshouldn't take long at all, and maybe
that's why SpaceX is back to bookingpossible launch times. Back in October,
when it looked like things might bewrapping up, SpaceX issued a notice to
mariners that included a small stretch ofdays that didn't end up getting used for
(06:54):
obvious reasons. These notices are putout to warn any boats and ships to
keep clear of the launch trajectory ofa rocket just in case, and it's
a good indication of a serious possibilityfor a launch, except when they have
to reschedule. Recently, another noticeto mariners went out warning local water traffic
that a launch could take place fromBocachica, Texas no earlier than November sixth.
(07:17):
That's a good sign, but aswe've seen, it's hardly solid.
Luckily, we have something way moreconcrete. It looks like a WB fifty
seven plane has been booked for workfrom November third to tenth. These planes
are converted bombers which NASA and otherUS agencies now use for high altitude photography.
(07:39):
One of these planes took part inthe April twentieth launch of Starship and
is the source of some of thosecloser videos we've seen from that event and
might be what this booking is for. So while this is also something that
could be rescheduled, it's a muchmore difficult thing to have an expensive research
aircraft waiting to fly if you're notgoing to use it, and likely expensive
(07:59):
to book if you miss that launchdate, which makes this a pretty confident
move by SpaceX considering there's still anactive investigation going on involving processing samples of
the Bocachica soil, But as usual, it's likely the folks at SpaceX are
working very closely with the Fish andWildlife Services and the FAA, so they
could very well know something we don'thear. It seems pretty far fetched that
(08:22):
a starship launch is in the cardsso early this month, but if SpaceX
is booking planes, then it's gotto be close to go time. This
new space race has a huge problem, and it's been growing with every launch
and even with every attempt to mitigateor solve it. Space junk is building
up in Earth's orbit and finding agood way to clean it all up is
(08:43):
proving very difficult. But with anew space race comes new technology which opens
the door to solutions straight out ofscience fiction, and for researchers at the
University of Colorado, Boulder, oneof these sci fi tropes seems to actually
be within reach. We are talkingabout a real life tractor beam. That's
(09:05):
right, a staple of space basedfiction from Star Trek to Star Wars,
the ability to use an energy basedbeam to hold and attract a distant target
might soon be a reality thanks toa research team led by Professor Hans Petter
Shaub. Unlike the many strange versionsof fictional tractor beams from sci fi.
Shob's team is using the physics ofelectrostatic charge to manipulate objects in a zero
(09:28):
G environment. The current design iscentered around a spacecraft armed with an electron
gun, which would fire a streamof negative particles at the target, be
it a piece of debris or anold satellite. The target would then become
negatively charged and be attracted to thenearest positively charged object, which in this
case would be the towing spacecraft,and could then be maneuvered wherever an operator
(09:52):
would like, albeit slowly. Andthis isn't just theoretical either. The team
at UC Boulder have been testing anditerating their design for over a decade now,
with fairly strong results. The universityis home to a metallic vacuum chamber
called the Electrostatic Charging Laboratory for Interactionsbetween Plasma and Spacecraft or Eclipse, which
(10:13):
allows them to test the effects oftheir electrostatic tractor on a smaller scale.
The biggest benefit to using an electrostatictractor is it doesn't require contact between the
operation's vehicle and its target, substantiallylowering the possibility of creating more debris which
is the biggest concern during orbital cleanup. Orbital cleanup is becoming a well studied
(10:37):
field these days, with several companiesturning their hands to making a new type
of vehicle. Magnetic grapplers, harpoons, and robotic arms are all being tested
in orbit right now, but allof them involve direct contact with their target,
whether its debris from past launches orold satellites. Space trash can range
from the size of a basketball allthe way up to the size of a
(10:58):
school bus, and all of themmoving at their own speeds and rotating in
odd ways. Trying to hit somethinglike that with a harpoon or grapple,
or even just matching its speed toattempt to grab with robotic arms, are
all extremely dangerous to both objects andwill almost certainly lead to more debris,
something that the electrostatic tractor method wouldn'thave to deal with. But that doesn't
(11:24):
mean there aren't problems with the tractor, of course. The first is that
this method is very slow. Movinga single satellite sized target into a different
orbit would take more than a month. These speeds mean that without a huge
fleet of orbital tugs armed with theseelectrostatic devices, there's no way this method
could keep up with the current paceof launches, which brings us to the
(11:46):
second big problem funding. As auniversity team, it's safe to say that
CHOBS researchers just don't have the sortof capital to make a full sized vehicle
armed with a very expensive electron gun. So if this tractor idea is going
to get used at a level whereit can be effective, the technology would
almost certainly have to be picked upby a commercial provider. Currently, the
(12:07):
team is looking at finishing their smallscale tests in UC Boulder's Eclipse machine,
and then they plan on finding someoneto fund their first mission. But considering
the safety of their method alone,it might not take much longer to convince
a larger company to help them out.
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