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 NASA's
Psyche asteroid probe finally launches with thehelp of Falcon Heavy. SpaceX defends their
Starlink constellation in the face of anew FAA report, and Spin Launch gets
a wealthy new partner. This isthe space race. On a saugy Friday
(00:20):
morning, NASA's Psyche Asteroid Survey missionfinally got underway, lifting off from Pad
thirty nine A on a Falcon Heavyrocket. The October thirteenth launch went off
without a hitch after more than ayear of delays, forcing the one point
two billion dollar probe to wait forthe start of its journey to a metal
rich body in the asteroid belt betweenMars and Jupiter over two point two billion
(00:44):
miles away. Psyche is named aftersixteen Psyche, the asteroid it will be
studying, discovered in eighteen fifty two. Sixteen Psyche is the biggest known metal
rich asteroid in the system, ofwhich we only know nine. This big
metal object is one hundred and seventythree miles by one hundred and forty four
miles, roughly potato shaped, andorbits so far from us that scientists can
(01:07):
only make it out as a smallpinprick of light, so they aren't even
sure of its composition. They knowit has high metal content, of course,
but are unsure about the other partsof its makeup, which could be
rock or sulfur or anything really,and it's this mystery that the Psyche probe
was made to unravel. The sixthousand pound probe is going to take six
years to reach its destination, usingHall effect electric thrusters to slowly but steadily
(01:33):
accelerate halfway there before decelerating. Thissystem uses power from the probe's two to
five panel solar wings to ionize theatoms of its xenon fuel in a very
efficient reaction. Once in orbit aroundthe large asteroid, the Psyche probe will
use two multi spectral cameras, apair of magnetometers, and both a gamma
ray and neutron mass spectrometer to checkfor the chemical composition up close. It's
(01:57):
also equipped with a radio expair thatwill attempt to measure the asteroid's gravitational field.
That's a lot of equipment, especiallyfor a mission that had been delayed
so long. Sixteen. Psyche hadbeen chosen as a mission target for the
Discovery program back in twenty seventeen,this being the same program that produced the
Pathfinder and Insite Marslander missions. Originallytargeting a twenty twenty three launch, the
(02:23):
date was moved to twenty twenty twoto match a more efficient trajectory, but
then along came COVID and messed everythingup, forcing the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to
push the launch date back to twentytwenty three again. An independent investigation of
JPL and the delays to Psyche foundthat a lack of staffing was primarily responsible,
which yeah, COVID had been keepingpeople out of the lab for most
(02:46):
of twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, so no surprise there. And then
just when they were preparing for anOctober fifth launch, the team found an
issue with the engines and the wholething was forced to delay one more wins
until Psyche finally got its date witha Falcon Heavy on the thirteenth. And
that sort of effort, price,and scale of mission tips us off that
(03:08):
Psyche is a little more important thanit looks on the surface, and that's
because sixteen Psyche represents a unique opportunityto see what the inside of our own
planet could look like. Metal richbodies like this asteroid are relatively rare at
this size. Again, we onlyknow of nine in the whole system so
(03:30):
far, and scientists at NASA believethere are two possibilities for how it formed.
One sixteen Psyche was the core ofa protoplanet, a molten ball of
rock that got smashed out of itsplanet during the formation of our Solar system.
Or two, it's an unmelted bitof metal that was part of the
original material drifting around our star wheneverything was forming. Either way, we
(03:54):
get a good chance to see whatthe core of our own planet looks like,
position, gravity, magnetic fields,and maybe even how it formed.
And it doesn't hurt that the Psycheprobe will be helping NASA test the current
strength of our deep space laser communicationsgrid, a system that we are currently
building out and will be extremely importantfor our operations around Mars and beyond in
(04:17):
the next couple of decades. Unfortunately, any dreams of mining this asteroid are
not realistic. While the amount ofmetal sixteen Psyche contains makes it worth somewhere
in the ten quintillion dollar range,that's only a raw estimation that looks fun
in video titles and headlines. Truthfully, we don't have any technology that could
(04:39):
safely bring sixteen Psyche close enough formining to be feasible, and the amount
of metal it has would flood markets, making it relatively worthless, So we'll
just have to keep it in mindif we're ever in need of raw materials
for space manufacturing when we have thattechnology. For now, the real value
of this asteroid is in what itcan tell us about our own planet and
(05:00):
planets like Mars. These sort ofsurveys help with everything from material sciences to
asteroid defense, just like the OsirisREX mission, which recently returned a capsule
full of regolith from Benu, amuch more common type of asteroid, while
the main vehicle went on to studythe potentially dangerous asteroid apifice. In that
case, the samples returned could helpus with strategies for dealing with those sort
(05:25):
of objects if they are ever projectedto hit Earth, but also find out
about how more organic materials made itinto Earth's composition in the first place.
Sometimes it's enough just to be curiousabout something. After all, there's a
lot we still don't understand about ouruniverse. On October fifth, the Federal
Aviation Administration posted a report on therisks associated with the re entry of low
(05:48):
Earth orbit satellite constellations, and ina rare move, SpaceX has already fired
back. Back in twenty twenty,the FAA was ordered by Congress to hire
an inn dependent body to report onthe potential risks of all these new satellite
constellations popping up, of which SpaceX'sStarlink was and still is the most prominent.
(06:09):
But while the report suggests that bytwenty thirty five, we should expect
debris from deorbiting constellations to injure orkill one person every two years, SpaceX
says that the report's authors, acompany called the Aerospace Corp, used outdated
information and guesswork. First off,reports like these are almost always guesswork based
(06:30):
on available statistics, so that partisn't what's wrong with the report. Aerospace
Corp was asked to calculate risk basedon available data, and they did that,
finding that on average, the spaceindustry hasn't quite met the required ninety
percent success rate for disposal of debrisafter emission, which primarily includes debris from
launching rockets, and to be fairto Aerospace Corp. Knowing that SpaceX has
(06:54):
permission to grow their Starlink constellation totwelve thousand satellites and wants to continue growing
to over forty thousand low Earth orbitunits, their right in thinking that math
equates to a significant risk from justSpaceX alone, never mind other constellations like
Amazon's Project Kuyper. But here iswhere the SpaceX rebuttal raises some really good
(07:15):
points. First off, SpaceX principalengineer David Goldstein, who wrote the company's
reply, says that the original analysismakes the assumption that SpaceX has the same
aftermission disposal rates as the rest ofthe industry, when it is in fact
one of the industry's leaders in thatregard, performing at a ninety nine percent
disposal success rate post missions, mostlydue to the reusability of company vehicles like
(07:40):
the Falcon nine. But second,and most importantly, SpaceX designed their Starlink
units to fully demise, as Goldsteinputs it, meaning their components and structure
are so delicate that nothing survives theheat of the re entry process, and
this has been proven as over threehundred and fifty Starlink satellites have reportedly de
(08:01):
orbited to date, and no newsof debris has cropped up. And this
is where the report really falls flat. The analysis done by the Aerospace Corp
Uses a twenty three year old studyfrom NASA about debris survival rates of old
iridium communications satellites, which are sofar removed from the way that modern satellites
are made that this data couldn't accuratelypredict danger statistics for any current constellations.
(08:26):
Now this isn't to say that AerospaceCorp Is the only one at fault here.
Yes, they used bad data andthey never bothered to reach out to
companies like SpaceX to get updated modelsfor re entry, something that SpaceX would
likely have complied with seeing as howAerospace Corp Was working for the FAA at
the time. The real issue isthat the FAA accepted the report and published
(08:48):
it without double checking. And look, government agencies tend to be underfunded and
understaffed, but this is the FAA'swhole job. They published a report that
did it take into account data newerthan two decades old, that didn't consider
constellations from foreign governments like China's upcomingGuang Network, and didn't consider recent changes
(09:09):
to FCC filings assuming over fifty fourthousand licensed Starlink satellites as opposed to the
current number, which is about seventyfive hundred or so. The report itself
also seems to have focused on thegrowth of the SpaceX system sidelining other constellations
like Amazon's Project Kuiper, which Imean, we make jokes about Amazon not
being any competition, but we're nota regulatory body. The biggest issue with
(09:33):
this flop is that this sort ofreport is actually needed. SpaceX has a
great record, but even they losetrack of a fairing or have an uncontrolled
re entry of a rocket, andthey're far from the only ones operating right
now. Consider what the space racewill look like by twenty thirty five.
Regulations need to be made, butthis report is just a waste of resources.
(09:54):
The FAA will need to find amore trustworthy independent body and star Earlier
this month, space technology start upSpin Launch, makers of the world's first
kinetic orbital launch system, announced thatthey had formed a partnership with Japan's Sumitomo
Corporation. The Japanese investment firm hasagreed to take on not just its usual
(10:16):
investment type role, but they alsowant to represent spin Launch into all of
its hardware within Japan's borders, withthe stated goal being to foster sustainable space
technologies. Some of you might rememberthat spin Launch has basically developed a high
powered catapult using a giant centrifuge insideof a vacuum sealed chamber to throw a
payload at over forty seven hundred milesper hour into the upper atmosphere. Once
(10:41):
the vehicle reaches an altitude of aboutsixty kilometers, it activates its engines and
finishes the orbiting process. This methodremoves the need for a traditional first stage
booster, the part of a vehiclethat easily takes up the most weight of
a rocket. But the spin Launchsystem is not without its own drawbacks.
Just the logistics alone are a hugeproblem, with a three hundred foot diameter
(11:03):
vacuum chamber being needed for the finalfull size model as well with the speeds
involved with the wind up of thecentrifuge arm, any potential malfunction could be
catastrophic. But that's nothing new inthe rock tree field, of course,
and it seems like Sumitomo was impressedwith spin Launch after its smaller scale tests
back in twenty twenty one. Thatscaled down accelerator was one hundred and eight
(11:26):
feet in diameter and hurled its testprojectile up to nine point one kilometers in
altitude. It was an extremely impressivedisplay of engineering. Spin Launch has come
up with a pretty unique way toget payloads into space, and it's great
that they've secured a huge investing partnerto help them across the finish line.
Seeing the full sized version is goingto be incredible.
On today's episode, we are gettinginto the latest space news, including NASA's
Psyche asteroid probe finally launches with thehelp of Falcon Heavy. SpaceX defends their
Starlink constellation in the face of anew FAA report, and Spin Launch gets
a wealthy new partner. This isthe space race. On a saugy Friday
(00:20):
morning, NASA's Psyche Asteroid Survey missionfinally got underway, lifting off from Pad
thirty nine A on a Falcon Heavyrocket. The October thirteenth launch went off
without a hitch after more than ayear of delays, forcing the one point
two billion dollar probe to wait forthe start of its journey to a metal
rich body in the asteroid belt betweenMars and Jupiter over two point two billion
(00:44):
miles away. Psyche is named aftersixteen Psyche, the asteroid it will be
studying, discovered in eighteen fifty two. Sixteen Psyche is the biggest known metal
rich asteroid in the system, ofwhich we only know nine. This big
metal object is one hundred and seventythree miles by one hundred and forty four
miles, roughly potato shaped, andorbits so far from us that scientists can
(01:07):
only make it out as a smallpinprick of light, so they aren't even
sure of its composition. They knowit has high metal content, of course,
but are unsure about the other partsof its makeup, which could be
rock or sulfur or anything really,and it's this mystery that the Psyche probe
was made to unravel. The sixthousand pound probe is going to take six
years to reach its destination, usingHall effect electric thrusters to slowly but steadily
(01:33):
accelerate halfway there before decelerating. Thissystem uses power from the probe's two to
five panel solar wings to ionize theatoms of its xenon fuel in a very
efficient reaction. Once in orbit aroundthe large asteroid, the Psyche probe will
use two multi spectral cameras, apair of magnetometers, and both a gamma
ray and neutron mass spectrometer to checkfor the chemical composition up close. It's
(01:57):
also equipped with a radio expair thatwill attempt to measure the asteroid's gravitational field.
That's a lot of equipment, especiallyfor a mission that had been delayed
so long. Sixteen. Psyche hadbeen chosen as a mission target for the
Discovery program back in twenty seventeen,this being the same program that produced the
Pathfinder and Insite Marslander missions. Originallytargeting a twenty twenty three launch, the
(02:23):
date was moved to twenty twenty twoto match a more efficient trajectory, but
then along came COVID and messed everythingup, forcing the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to
push the launch date back to twentytwenty three again. An independent investigation of
JPL and the delays to Psyche foundthat a lack of staffing was primarily responsible,
which yeah, COVID had been keepingpeople out of the lab for most
(02:46):
of twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, so no surprise there. And then
just when they were preparing for anOctober fifth launch, the team found an
issue with the engines and the wholething was forced to delay one more wins
until Psyche finally got its date witha Falcon Heavy on the thirteenth. And
that sort of effort, price,and scale of mission tips us off that
(03:08):
Psyche is a little more important thanit looks on the surface, and that's
because sixteen Psyche represents a unique opportunityto see what the inside of our own
planet could look like. Metal richbodies like this asteroid are relatively rare at
this size. Again, we onlyknow of nine in the whole system so
(03:30):
far, and scientists at NASA believethere are two possibilities for how it formed.
One sixteen Psyche was the core ofa protoplanet, a molten ball of
rock that got smashed out of itsplanet during the formation of our Solar system.
Or two, it's an unmelted bitof metal that was part of the
original material drifting around our star wheneverything was forming. Either way, we
(03:54):
get a good chance to see whatthe core of our own planet looks like,
position, gravity, magnetic fields,and maybe even how it formed.
And it doesn't hurt that the Psycheprobe will be helping NASA test the current
strength of our deep space laser communicationsgrid, a system that we are currently
building out and will be extremely importantfor our operations around Mars and beyond in
(04:17):
the next couple of decades. Unfortunately, any dreams of mining this asteroid are
not realistic. While the amount ofmetal sixteen Psyche contains makes it worth somewhere
in the ten quintillion dollar range,that's only a raw estimation that looks fun
in video titles and headlines. Truthfully, we don't have any technology that could
(04:39):
safely bring sixteen Psyche close enough formining to be feasible, and the amount
of metal it has would flood markets, making it relatively worthless, So we'll
just have to keep it in mindif we're ever in need of raw materials
for space manufacturing when we have thattechnology. For now, the real value
of this asteroid is in what itcan tell us about our own planet and
(05:00):
planets like Mars. These sort ofsurveys help with everything from material sciences to
asteroid defense, just like the OsirisREX mission, which recently returned a capsule
full of regolith from Benu, amuch more common type of asteroid, while
the main vehicle went on to studythe potentially dangerous asteroid apifice. In that
case, the samples returned could helpus with strategies for dealing with those sort
(05:25):
of objects if they are ever projectedto hit Earth, but also find out
about how more organic materials made itinto Earth's composition in the first place.
Sometimes it's enough just to be curiousabout something. After all, there's a
lot we still don't understand about ouruniverse. On October fifth, the Federal
Aviation Administration posted a report on therisks associated with the re entry of low
(05:48):
Earth orbit satellite constellations, and ina rare move, SpaceX has already fired
back. Back in twenty twenty,the FAA was ordered by Congress to hire
an inn dependent body to report onthe potential risks of all these new satellite
constellations popping up, of which SpaceX'sStarlink was and still is the most prominent.
(06:09):
But while the report suggests that bytwenty thirty five, we should expect
debris from deorbiting constellations to injure orkill one person every two years, SpaceX
says that the report's authors, acompany called the Aerospace Corp, used outdated
information and guesswork. First off,reports like these are almost always guesswork based
(06:30):
on available statistics, so that partisn't what's wrong with the report. Aerospace
Corp was asked to calculate risk basedon available data, and they did that,
finding that on average, the spaceindustry hasn't quite met the required ninety
percent success rate for disposal of debrisafter emission, which primarily includes debris from
launching rockets, and to be fairto Aerospace Corp. Knowing that SpaceX has
(06:54):
permission to grow their Starlink constellation totwelve thousand satellites and wants to continue growing
to over forty thousand low Earth orbitunits, their right in thinking that math
equates to a significant risk from justSpaceX alone, never mind other constellations like
Amazon's Project Kuyper. But here iswhere the SpaceX rebuttal raises some really good
(07:15):
points. First off, SpaceX principalengineer David Goldstein, who wrote the company's
reply, says that the original analysismakes the assumption that SpaceX has the same
aftermission disposal rates as the rest ofthe industry, when it is in fact
one of the industry's leaders in thatregard, performing at a ninety nine percent
disposal success rate post missions, mostlydue to the reusability of company vehicles like
(07:40):
the Falcon nine. But second,and most importantly, SpaceX designed their Starlink
units to fully demise, as Goldsteinputs it, meaning their components and structure
are so delicate that nothing survives theheat of the re entry process, and
this has been proven as over threehundred and fifty Starlink satellites have reportedly de
(08:01):
orbited to date, and no newsof debris has cropped up. And this
is where the report really falls flat. The analysis done by the Aerospace Corp
Uses a twenty three year old studyfrom NASA about debris survival rates of old
iridium communications satellites, which are sofar removed from the way that modern satellites
are made that this data couldn't accuratelypredict danger statistics for any current constellations.
(08:26):
Now this isn't to say that AerospaceCorp Is the only one at fault here.
Yes, they used bad data andthey never bothered to reach out to
companies like SpaceX to get updated modelsfor re entry, something that SpaceX would
likely have complied with seeing as howAerospace Corp Was working for the FAA at
the time. The real issue isthat the FAA accepted the report and published
(08:48):
it without double checking. And look, government agencies tend to be underfunded and
understaffed, but this is the FAA'swhole job. They published a report that
did it take into account data newerthan two decades old, that didn't consider
constellations from foreign governments like China's upcomingGuang Network, and didn't consider recent changes
(09:09):
to FCC filings assuming over fifty fourthousand licensed Starlink satellites as opposed to the
current number, which is about seventyfive hundred or so. The report itself
also seems to have focused on thegrowth of the SpaceX system sidelining other constellations
like Amazon's Project Kuiper, which Imean, we make jokes about Amazon not
being any competition, but we're nota regulatory body. The biggest issue with
(09:33):
this flop is that this sort ofreport is actually needed. SpaceX has a
great record, but even they losetrack of a fairing or have an uncontrolled
re entry of a rocket, andthey're far from the only ones operating right
now. Consider what the space racewill look like by twenty thirty five.
Regulations need to be made, butthis report is just a waste of resources.
(09:54):
The FAA will need to find amore trustworthy independent body and star Earlier
this month, space technology start upSpin Launch, makers of the world's first
kinetic orbital launch system, announced thatthey had formed a partnership with Japan's Sumitomo
Corporation. The Japanese investment firm hasagreed to take on not just its usual
(10:16):
investment type role, but they alsowant to represent spin Launch into all of
its hardware within Japan's borders, withthe stated goal being to foster sustainable space
technologies. Some of you might rememberthat spin Launch has basically developed a high
powered catapult using a giant centrifuge insideof a vacuum sealed chamber to throw a
payload at over forty seven hundred milesper hour into the upper atmosphere. Once
(10:41):
the vehicle reaches an altitude of aboutsixty kilometers, it activates its engines and
finishes the orbiting process. This methodremoves the need for a traditional first stage
booster, the part of a vehiclethat easily takes up the most weight of
a rocket. But the spin Launchsystem is not without its own drawbacks.
Just the logistics alone are a hugeproblem, with a three hundred foot diameter
(11:03):
vacuum chamber being needed for the finalfull size model as well with the speeds
involved with the wind up of thecentrifuge arm, any potential malfunction could be
catastrophic. But that's nothing new inthe rock tree field, of course,
and it seems like Sumitomo was impressedwith spin Launch after its smaller scale tests
back in twenty twenty one. Thatscaled down accelerator was one hundred and eight
(11:26):
feet in diameter and hurled its testprojectile up to nine point one kilometers in
altitude. It was an extremely impressivedisplay of engineering. Spin Launch has come
up with a pretty unique way toget payloads into space, and it's great
that they've secured a huge investing partnerto help them across the finish line.
Seeing the full sized version is goingto be incredible.
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