Lost Wanderer 7/27/25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Time for this nation to take a clearly leading role
in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the
key to our future on Earth.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
H m hm.

Speaker 3 (00:21):
On all their promm.

Speaker 4 (00:24):
On Bia. Today is a day from morning, and remember
Nancy and I are gained to the core, but the
tragedy of the Shuttle challenge. The following program may contain

(00:45):
folse language, adult teens, and bad attempts.

Speaker 3 (00:48):
A human listener discretion as avibe what is President Trump's goal?

Speaker 4 (01:08):
What is his vision?

Speaker 3 (01:09):
He wants to put an American flag on Mars.

Speaker 1 (01:26):
Griffin Anguality das here.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
The ankle I have landed.

Speaker 4 (01:33):
I am your host, jay E doublef also known as
a cosmic bard over on Twitter slash x and this
is the Lost Wonder Of podcast for July twenty seventh,
two thousand and twenty five. Happy Sunday evening, and welcome
aboard the Serenade. Now I know, I know, it's been

(01:53):
a been a bit of a long drift through the void.
The ship seemingly went quiet after the fifteenth of June,
but one fractured ankle and one unexpected er visit later,
the Lost Wanderer went from cruising through the Cosmos to
being grounded by gravity and maybe with a little bit
of help painkillers. But we are back. The course is reset,

(02:18):
and while I still have a little bit of a limp,
the signal is strong. Now this episode isn't just about
what's happening out there in the stars. It's about reclaiming momentum,
recalibrating and asking the big questions. Is thirty one Atlas
really a threat? We're just the latest rock to trigger
and avvy lobe press tour. Why are our telescopes whispering

(02:43):
dark secrets in the cosmic background? And how many times
can we launch the same Falcon nine? Be four? It
demand's retirement plan. Now, the universe didn't stop while I
was down, and neither did you. So let's catch up
with me at the helm ep setting course and with
a little bit of the helps of the ship's computer

(03:04):
in the back, whispering some star maps through the static.
For this is the lost wonder a program. Cue the music,
Dunt Dun dun, something eerie with a slow cosmic pulse,
like the hum of an old radar dish lost in
deep time. They're calling it thirty one Atlas, a new

(03:25):
interstellar visitor streaking through our system. Like a ghost ship,
and I don't care if it's three. I I'm calling
it thirty one because that's better. But this ghost ship
has no return address, no known origin, and no clear
intentions as of yet. And of course that means right on,
Q heavy Lobe is here to tell us it might

(03:48):
be just maybe possibly alien technology, not any kind of
alien biology, not a rock behaving badly, but heck intentional,
most likely hostile, probably a probe diggoity, oh my god,
possibly a weapon. Where we heard this before, Oh right,

(04:15):
back in twenty seventeen with whom I'm out elongated, fast moving,
tumbling on oddly, Abby said it might be a light sail,
and the world turned its ears and listened. The afterrophysics
community blinked. And now, just like herpie simplex B, he's
back with a new paper and the same message. But

(04:40):
here's the thing. Load's not wrong to ask this question.
He may be wrong to treat it like a press conference.
You know this, There is such a thing as scientific caution. Instead,
this is more like salesmanship, urgency wrapped in mystery, with
a side of end of time's energy, and all without

(05:01):
really a shred of confirming data. So let's be clear.
Thirty one Atlas is weird. It's orbit doesn't match typical comments.
It is fast, it is erratic and certainly not from
around here. But weird. That doesn't mean weapon deleape from

(05:22):
unknown to all of a sudden, Oh my god, extraterrestrial threat.
Trust me, I know that below it isn't science, it's
storytelling and Lobe he's writing his own chapter and the
quote aliens are real and they may hate us unquote manual.
Now he's not Galileo fighting the church. He's more al
gore out but for UFOs sounding the siren, whether or

(05:47):
not there's even smoke. And maybe that's what frustrates me
in the rest of the community, not the question. Everyone
everyone loves a good mystery, but in a certainty in
his uncertain the public declarations, the book deals the branding.
What we need is careful eyes on objects like thirty

(06:08):
one Atlas. We need the bait, honest debait. But what
we don't need is panic dressed as prestige. This is
in contact. This isn't Independence Day. Either it's a lonely
rock or maybe not. But it's a story that's still unfolding,
and science should be the one turning the page. So

(06:33):
what is it? Is it a lost shard of something ancient?
Is it a natural body with odd momentum? A postcard
from somewhere we can't yet imagine. We don't know, and
that's the point. Until we do, Maybe we throttle back
the doomsday press releases a little and let the data

(06:55):
do the talking, because, let's face it, even if it
is an alien invasion, what are we gonna do about it.
So now that I hopefully quiet at the alien alarm
bells a little bit, and I know some of you
out there are going, aw, you's just spreading misinformation. The

(07:17):
alien from Alpha Centari's telling us not the look. I
get it, I get it, But let's do actually take
a moment to appreciate what we're actually looking at. It
is our third confirmed interstellar visitor. It was discovered on
February sixteenth and twenty twenty four by the Atlas Observatory

(07:37):
in South Africa. It came in fast, like a wrecking ball,
and a steep approach from far above the ecliptic, crossing
through our Solar system like a marble skipping off it's
gravity well. Its orbit is hyperbolic, unbound by the Sun,
meaning it's not from here and it probably won't be back.
And all, by the way, it's big. It's an estimated

(08:01):
ten to fifty kilometers in diameter. Atlas dwarfs the first
two interstellar objects that we've detected, Umimao in twenty seventeen
and Borisov in twenty nineteen. Unlike Borisov, which flared with
an unmistakable coma of an act of commet or uma Maao,
which did well really a bunch of weird things, Atlas
has been remarkably quiet. There's been no outgassing, no spin

(08:25):
induced acceleration, and really no surreal surprises. And that silence
is part of what makes it special. It gives astronomers
a chance to study an unaltered body with no break coma,
no dust obscuring its shape, no jets to confused emotion,
just a dark, fast moving relic from another star system,
drifting through ours for a fleeting moment. Its closest approach

(08:52):
to the Sun was back on June twenty second, just
outside Earth's orbit, and it's passed closest to Earth about
a week later, on June twenty ninth, seventy one million
kilometers away, far enough to be safe close enough to
be studied at least for a little itty bitty while.
And that said, it's already fading from view. Observatories around

(09:16):
the world, including the IAU's Minor Planet Center and NASA
Scout program, confirmed its extra solar origin. Based on its
velocity and trajectory. It likely came from deep space, flung
loose from another planetary system, maybe ejected during a gravitational
shuffle where giant planets stirred up there to brisfield. Maybe
it was cast off by a passing star. Or maybe

(09:38):
just maybe it's been on this path for millions upon
millions upon millions of years, drifting alone, only now getting
to feel the warmth of crossing a star once more.
That said, no one knows exactly where it came from.
Its current data suggested path through the constellation surpenes tracing

(09:59):
its exact origin back through interstellar spaces, like trying to
reverse engineer a leaf's journey across the turbulent sea. Now
there is a bit of poetic weight to that this object, quiet,
dark and agent may have once orbited Sun not perhaps
so different from Earth's somewhere that we may will never see.

(10:21):
And now, after its long journey. It's sipping back into
the dark, unchanged, unbothered, unseen by any life except hours.
And that's the real story. Not weapons, not probes, just
an untouched piece of a different solar system, letting us
know that the space between stars isn't necessarily empty, and

(10:43):
that it's full of motion, full of matter, and every
once in a while it brushes past us. We call
it this one by chance. Next time, maybe we'll be ready,
maybe we'll see it coming sooner, maybe we'll send something
to meet it. But for now we just let it
go as another visitor in the night, gone before most

(11:07):
ever even looked up. Now, in all this hustle and
bustle of alien invasion, you could be forgiven for losing
track of the Falcon nine launches these days. I mean,
let's face it, there, about every second or every third day,

(11:27):
sometimes twice. They become so routine, so precisely they're basically
a blur into the background home of modern spaceflight. But
Starlink Group ten twenty five, launched on the twenty fifth
of July, deserves a moment in the spotlight, not because
of the payload, but because of the ride itself. Booster
B ten sixty seven lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space

(11:50):
Launch Complex forty, carrying twenty three more Starlink satellites in
the orbit. That by itself isn't necessarily news, but this
launch mark its twenty second flight, tying it for the
most flown Falcon nine booster in the fleet. I remember
this stage first flew in June of twenty twenty one.

(12:11):
Since then, it's carried cargo to the ISS, deployed satellites
across multiple constellations, and returned home again and again and
again on a cushion of fire and precision. And it
did it again. Eight and a half minutes after liftoff.
Ten sixty seven landed safely on the drone ship, all
short fall of gravitas, stationed out in the Atlantic like

(12:34):
a mechanical welcome mat, a quick kiss with the ocean wind,
and another flight was logged, where once rocket stages were
discarded and forgotten, flaming wreckage in the ocean or aluminum
corpse says in the orbit, this one returns over and
over again, say steal a veteran of what is now

(12:56):
you could call the orbital Highway, And with each reuse,
SpaceX sharpens the edge of launch economics, the reliability, the cadence,
the quiet normalcy of doing what was once considered unfathomable.
So yes, twenty three more satellites joined the starlink swarm,
and that does matter as well, But the real marble

(13:18):
was in the launch hardware, a rocket the phone more
than most astronauts, a booster is as starting to feel
less like a disposable tool, will more kind of like
a trusted crew member. And as we have that dream
of mars, of lunar bases, of maybe a star hopping civilization,
we should remember the future is built on platforms like

(13:39):
this one stage twenty two flights. If you want to
get the space, he might have to get in line
behind ten sixty seven. Now, that said, while Falco nine
continues its rain as the most reliable warkhorse in the orbit,
all eyes remain fixed still on the beast, still pacing

(14:01):
in the high bay, and that is yes Starship. On
the fifteenth of July, Elon Musk gave a all too
familiar but no less attention grabbing updates. Next flight is
about three weeks out. All that estimate estimate puts us
near the beginning of August give or take us, you know,

(14:23):
a static week week or two, and also a static
fire and heaven forbids weather delays. No real official date
has yet to be announced, and given the regulatory hurdles
and hardware checklicks that are still in play, that's probably
probably wise. What we do know is that we'll be
carrying meaningful upgrades. There will be more heat shield tiles,

(14:46):
there will be improved vector control for the raptors, there
will be adjustments to stage separation, and you know, let's
face it, after the last few with a trial and error,
this one feels more like a system's level test than
maybe even a daredevil's stunt of the past few. That said,
the key objective is still re entry, not reaching space,
but surviving the way back down. If Ship thirty or

(15:08):
whatever this designation is going to be, when it flies
can stay intact through atmosphere and heating, then SpaceX moves
one step closer to a reusable high mass orbital system.
Now this isn't a production vehicle yet, of course, it's
still very much a work in progress, but the pace
of progress is actually accelerating, and with each test the

(15:32):
distance between concept and capability shortens. Is to fight all
the incidents, and we hope the next time Starship takes flight,
it won't just be another flash in the sky. It'll
be another checkpoint on the road to something much bigger.
Maybe we'll start to see real momentum behind it. So
while we wait for the final checks in the stainless steel,

(15:54):
dreams on this. The business with space isn't just built
on the booster sometimes, unfortunately, it is shaped by boardrooms, budgets,
and of course a president with a sharpie. Because it
turns out not every high flyer gets cleared for launch,
especially especially when politics and pride end up colliding in

(16:20):
the strange orbit of American space policy. A few stories
have spun quite like this. In a recent interview with
The Washington Post, President Donald Trump revealed that he had
planned to nominate billionaire pilot and Polarious Program commander Jared
Isaacman to lead NASA, but ultimately pulled the nomination after

(16:42):
Isaacman apparently publicly praised SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Yes, yeah,
it's real, and yes it tracks in a timeline where
spaceflight is equal parts engineer and I'll say it ego management. Isaacman,
best known for bankrolling and commanding the also being an
inspiration for mission in twenty twenty one, was by all accounts,

(17:06):
a very serious and probably leading candidate. He's flown jets,
he's built companies, he's led missions, and it's currently prepping
for an even more ambitious Polaris down a mission could
take aim, you know, higher than any humans have traveled
in quite some time. But praise Musk in public that

(17:31):
by all appearances was disqualifying and his words, according in
Trump's words, he was going to be my NASA guy
until I saw him on television saying what a great
guy Elon was, and apparently that was enough to scrub

(17:52):
the launch before the nomination ever left the pad. Now
you may see it may seem like I'm upset by this.
I am. I'm pissed by it. There was one thing
I praised Biden on during his two and a half

(18:13):
weeks of presidency, and the rest of the title know
who was doing it. But in the four years that
Biden was the commander in chief, the one thing I
praised was his selection of NASA Chief Isaacman. Was going
to be a very good head of NASA. Now, setting
aside this middle school drama, this fat gives us a

(18:39):
glimpse into how fragile leadership decisions can be, even in
agencies that depend on cold calculations and complex physics. Because,
let's face it, the head of NASA doesn't just sign
off on telescopes and trajectories. They are the face of
public science policy, the interpreter of launch delays and lunar budgets.
And in this case, the seat was he was allegedly

(19:00):
offered then yanked away over a televised compliment. Now, to
be fair, Isaacman didn't necessarily ask for the job in public.
He hasn't publicly confirmed or denied the story at all,
but the details come from Trump himself in the middle

(19:21):
of an election cycle with no shortage of median media
oxygen to burn. And so the story now orbit's public record,
just one more hypothetical timeline that seems that will never unfold.
And of course, the greatest irony in my mind is
Jared Issagman's actual space career may have more impact than

(19:43):
a you know, bureautocratic posting. Ever, would He's not waiting
for a cabinet position to fund next gen suits, test
EVA protocols, or push private space flight past its comfort zone.
He's already doing it. He's just doing it now in
a flight's again, and not to suit and tie he
would have. I still think it's the wrong decision. And

(20:06):
as for NASA, well, they guess they've moved on under
the Biden administration. Bill Nelson was confirmed as administrator in
twenty twenty one, and he was a coursely former senator
and astronaut. He was a safe pick, a good pick,
I may add, he was politically seasoned, and he aligned
with the existing Artemis goals. The agency, outside of a

(20:28):
couple mandates by the Biden administration, really didn't suffer, but
it did perhaps miss out on a different kind of energy,
maybe one that's needed at NASA, one that could have
presented a bold, risk tolerant private sector pulse the Isaacman
undeniably carries. Leadership in space is rarely about just rockets.

(20:53):
It's more about the vision. It's about patients and apparently
knowing when to keep your compliments off camera. Now, whether
or not the offer was real, the lesson is, in
a universe full of vacuum, the loudest thing in the
room is still pride. And I'm waiting for already to

(21:13):
put the quote in chat. Now, as we continue in
the political realm, the FY twenty twenty six space budget
rolled out by Trump made headlines for one reason. It's honestly,
it's kind of bold. Despite my hate for what he

(21:35):
did to Isaacman, the plan is a necessarily decent one.
Crued lunar missions by twenty twenty six, renewed emphasis on
American boots on the Moon, a streamlined focus NASA with
fewer delays, more launch pads, and less bureaucratic drag. But

(21:55):
what got less attention and least outside the science press,
was actually what some of the cuts were, and whether
those cuts are surgical or perhaps reckless. Now the plann's
NASA budget would drop by about twenty four percent, but
science programs would take a much harder hit nearly forty

(22:17):
seven percent. That includes reductions to Earth observation, planetary science, iliophysics,
and astrophysics. Flagship missions like Mars sample return, the Roman
Space Telescope, and data analysis support for JUNO and New
Horizons are all facing some form of cancellation or indefinite shelving. Now,

(22:40):
at first glance, this kind of sounds like a war
on science, But the reality, like everything is a bit
more layered. Much of the staffing reduction roughly a third
of NASA civil servants, doesn't just target low level ad minerals.
It is aimed at senior technical staff, and many of
them in the GS thirteen the GS fifteen, which include engineers,

(23:01):
mission planners, and division heads. These are the people who
know how to manage deep space missions, process data, and
translate equations in the flight pass. Removing them can not
necessarily be seen as tremming, but could from certain dvantage points,
be seen as tearing muscle. That said, some of these

(23:22):
roles were managerial, and there's been long standing criticism that NASA,
like many, if not most, federal agencies, has grown a
bit top heavy, and from that perspective, a focused aff
reduction isn't necessarily sabotage. It could just be long overdue
house cleaning. And yes, there is a DEI angle to

(23:45):
all of this. As we may remember, under Executive Order
fourteen one point five to one, NASA had already dismantled
its DEI programs, or at least was in the planning
of it, scrapping training, community outreach, and internal diversity roles.
Offices were closed, reassigned or just let go. And depending
on who you asked, that was either a correction to
political overreach or a loss of morale, building talent, attracting infrastructure.

(24:10):
Those people who thought that are probably let go. But
in hard numbers, you know it's not going to be
a fun cut if everything goes through. But this is
where some of the vision does get a little cloudly cloudy.
If the goal is to shift NASA toward private partnerships
and crude missions, this logic makes sense. A leaner agency,

(24:35):
more hardware, less overhead. Companies like SpaceX have proven you
don't need government scale infrastructure to reach orbit or even
land a booster. You need precision and drive. That said,
private rockets do need some public science. This budget does
have some ambition. It really does push artemis forward. It

(24:57):
should get people excited and it challenged is the agency
to work leaner and smarter. These are not bad things,
but there is some concern when half of your science
budget and thousands of your most experienced specialists could be
on the chopping block. It is a fair question to
ask what kind of NASA are we building going forward?

(25:21):
Is it going to just be a launch agency? Is
it going to have any more learning. What is the
ultimate goal of this? These are legit questions, and I
would love to hear your thoughts on that. Now that said,
there are a lot of things in space we cannot ignore,
and asteroids, well, let's face it, we should probably pay

(25:47):
attention to these because they don't give speeches, they don't
respect borders, and they don't care who's pulling well in November.
Asteroids in general move fast, quiet, potentially are lethal, and
when one head's our way, we won't be able to
talk our way out of it. Now, for years, NASA

(26:09):
has been the go to agency for tracking near Earth objects.
They had the data, the detection networks, and well the
orbital math. Their Dart mission even proved that we can
nudge a small asteroid off course with the kinetic strike.
But as futur Rama told us, I'm not sure that
was a wise decision. But here's a question nobody seems

(26:33):
to be answering, even with Atlas and Abby Lobe spilling
his thing. What if something bigger shows up, who actually
is going to call the shot? Because let's face it,
NASA isn't a military agency. It really doesn't have rapid

(26:57):
response teams outside, but it doesn't carry weapons for most part,
and when a threat needs to be neutralized in weeks,
not decades, committees and conferences, let's face it will not
cut it. So that is where the US Base Force
enters this conversation. They were created to secure American assets

(27:19):
in orbit, but there's growing interest in expanding their role
to include planetary defense, not just you know, tracking threats,
but actually dealing with them. They have the structure of
the authority and the budget flexibility to make real time decisions,
none of which NASA is equipped to do. And you know,

(27:44):
we're going to be honest and that's what we love
to do on this show. And an actual emergency do
you want response to one? The response run by grant
raiters and panic reviewers or by someone who can give
the order without a twelve week proposal process. But right now,
right now, there's no real unified strategy, there's no real

(28:05):
clear playbook. NASA watches the skies, FEMA handles disaster logistics,
and you know, Space Force is just kind of currently
staying in it's a little lane, but those lanes are
starting to blur and they need to because of an
object the size of a football field is inbound within
ten days. Notice, we can't afford to have agencies arguing
over whose jurisdiction it falls under, and you know damn

(28:27):
well it would. And sadly there is some hard truth here.
We've already been lucky. Once in twenty thirteen, a meteor
came in over Russia, no warning, no interception, just a flash,
a shockwave, and over one thousand people injured. Now, admittedly

(28:50):
this wasn't an extinction level event, but you could probably
classify it as a warning shot. And the sad reality
is we were not ready. If we ever do get
something bigger and bound with no early warning, no dark
practice run, someone is going to have to step up,

(29:11):
not study it, not model it, but stop it. And
if we're still holding press briefings and debating agency turf
when that moment comes, and then all the tracking data
in the world won't save us. So the question remains,
when it's time to pull the trigger on this, who
actually gets the call? So with that, let's go top

(29:32):
off our coffee or you know whatever you're gently nursing tonight.
Let's take a breath, take this moment, stretch, refeel, maybe
even step outsides. If you're in a place dark enough
to see some stars. We will be back in a
few minutes.

Speaker 2 (30:03):
Audio trade of.

Speaker 5 (30:52):
Fusion and plain breathing light in the vell lit of
the night.

Speaker 6 (31:08):
I danced with the gravity comes.

Speaker 2 (31:13):
Carving time and to do Sunday.

Speaker 6 (31:16):
Light my smallen moves, I whispered, he grapple, semiarm Sir.

Speaker 2 (31:45):
They sang my name, and I said, starlight. I'm now silence,
wait soon as something wrong.

Speaker 1 (32:13):
My bass is raising, my heart is burning through its core,
that feel ways collapse, saying the tiway.

Speaker 5 (32:37):
My checking, the crown of plasma flares and fury sore
screams in every.

Speaker 4 (32:56):
Song, My whirl like Chucks do, and welcome back. We

(33:21):
start the second half of this show with our good,
our familiar friend, the ones we love, talking about Boeing
or as you know we tend to refer to on
this program, less lightly tilted, perpetually delayed, possibly curse sibling
a SpaceX. Yes, star Liner, it's back in the news again,

(33:47):
and yet still somehow it's not the good kind of news. Shocking.
The company has now officially confirmed what we already suspected.
Star Liner won't fly again until twenty twenty six, and
when it does, it's not allowed to carry any astronauts.

(34:10):
This comes, of course, after a long chain of malfunctions, delays,
failed valves. Sticky thrusters had that issue once Telementary Grimlins
in public relations duct tape. The most recent flight, of course,
CFT one did get the two NASA astronauts to the ISS,
but that was supposed to be, you know, mission that

(34:32):
pro Boeing could finally deliver a functional crew capsule, but
the return trip was postponed a bit, then delayed, then reclassified.
And of course we know, Butch and Sunny, you know,
stayed up there for eight and a half months. There again,
Boeing that is effectively stuck in the world's most expensive

(34:54):
orbital waiting room while Boeing tries to figure out whether
star Liner can ever be trusted to bring any ash
or notts back. And let's face that that trust is
wearing pin So the fact is Boeing is still troubleshooting

(35:14):
the first generation of hardware. Space X is onto its
third gen, and of course we have to be fair
storylineer did technically fly, it did technically dock, it technically
didn't explode, and probably for Boeing that should be considered

(35:36):
progress lately, but there's no version of this current timeline
where twenty twenty six looks like it will ever lead
to success. The worst part is this program began in
twenty ten with their first test flights originally targeted for
twenty fifteen. It is now eleven years behind its intended schedule,

(36:01):
and even with NASA support, multiple resets and billions in funding,
still hasn't cleared this bar. At what point do we
just nix it. We need someone I don't know, say

(36:23):
Jared Isaacman, the head NASA, that would look at Boeing
and go, no bad Boeing, get back into the doghouse
where you belong and stay there. I mean, at least

(36:45):
at least the Russians can do it, right Boeing, Speaking
of Russia, Progress ninety two launch from the back of
Door Cosmodrome in the early hours of July third, riding
a sow used to point one a rocket toward the ISS. No,
let's face it, it's not a sexy spacecraft. Nothing Russian

(37:08):
ever is outside of their women from the age of
eighteen to twenty nine. It doesn't return, It probably won't
be remembered in twenty years, but it works and that's
more than we can say, you know, for some of
the American alternatives lately. Now Progress was carrying nearly three

(37:29):
tons of cargo that included nine hundred and fifty kilograms
of propellant, four hundred and twenty kilograms of water, and
fifty kilograms of pressurized nitrogen gas to maintain the station's
internal atmosphere. No real fancy experiments, no billion dollar payloads.
This one was just more of a really nice essential
uber run I'll Tucked inside this pressurized section was roughly

(37:53):
two hundred to three hundred kilograms of food and crew provisions.
These were all, of course, shelf stable meal. There might
be some fresh fruit or vacuum pack of vegetables, you know,
some hygiene kits, maybe a few personal items. Once again,
much to the chagrin of the Lost wonder At podcast,
no menu was released to the public. But let's face

(38:15):
that these missions typically follow a tight pattern. Protein packs,
greening range and rations, nutritional bars, occasional morale boosters, maybe
a few surprise items from ground control. None of it
really instagram worthy, but all of it is necessary and
to ask or to answer a question in chat from

(38:37):
Canadian heavy haul over at our friends at shr Media. Yes,
Artemis missions will actually go to the Moon, probably sooner
rather than later, depending on our starship launch goes. But
you know, thinking about food, I found this next story

(38:59):
really intriguing for well many reasons because you know, you
know who else needs a good supply of food, maybe
even you know, some vacuum packed delectables and you know,
freeze dried kim Chie campers and not just you know,
the trail trailhead kind. For those that don't know, here

(39:22):
at the Lost Wonder Of podcast, we have an admitted
sauce spot for one specific breed of campers, South Korean.
You know, they're stylish, they're efficient, they have the latest gear,
and if we're being completely straightforward and honest, they may

(39:42):
well as be the easily the most photogenic on Earth.
And it turns out they may not be staying on
Earth much longer, because South Korea has announced a bold
and surprising goal to build a permanent Moon base by
twenty forty five. Not a lander, not a rover, an

(40:08):
actual base, operated supplied and supported by South Korean technology,
launched aboard South Korean rockets. This isn't a quiet science
mission or a tech demo. It is an honest to
god end game goal. One time to coincide with the

(40:28):
one hundredth anniversary of the nation's liberation from Japanese occupation.
And here's the kicker. They're not treating it like a maybe.
President Yunsilkul says the government will invest seventy billion dollars
into aerospace sector over the next two decades. That includes

(40:49):
building their own heavy lift launch vehicles, a domestic nuclear
propulsion program, deep space communications infrastructure, and orbital autonomy tech.
That's kind of a serious list. It also sort of
signals something bigger. South Korea doesn't just want to participate
in space exploration. They kind of look like they want

(41:12):
to try to be the leader, and they're coming in
at an interesting angle. Their KSLV to Neuri rocket already
launched satellite successfully and their lunar orbiter, the Nuri entered
luminar orbit in twenty twenty two and is still returning
high rest terrain maps. Now, these missions really didn't make

(41:34):
huge waves outside of Asia, but they were proof of
concept flights and now they're going full commitment and their
timeline is sort of aggressive. Base construction by twenty forty
five means infrastructure needs to begin showing up in the
mid twenty thirties. The lander design, the cargo systems, the

(41:55):
lunar power grids, habitats, surface rovers, and they'll need redundancies,
you know, they'll need radiation protection for amal stability, and
a way to keep humans alive for months at a
time on the Moon's our side. That's not camping anymore.
That's more off world colonization prep. And while most people

(42:17):
think of the US, China, or even ESA when they
picture moon bases, South Korea is quietly building one of
the most advanced, compacted, efficient engineering cultures on the planet.
Seriously look at their South Korean camping videos. Also, just
you know, ask anyone who's you know, driven a hyundaev
or flowing a Samsung drone prototype. Well, let's face this,

(42:41):
this is more about intent than it is even the tech.
This isn't military flexing or even a touch of that
Cold War nostalgia. It is about South Korea national pride,
long term economic vision, and planning a foothold in the
next frontier of human expansion. Twenty forty five sounds, you know,

(43:02):
a little bit far away, until you realize it's only
five US presidential terms from now or two and a
half Olympic cycles. A child born today will only be
twenty when South Korea hopes to break lunar soil. If

(43:23):
they pull this off and won't be just another flag
on the moon, it will actually be a message we
can't prepared. We pack smart, and we brought dinner, and
the k campers may just beat everyone to the quietest
site in the entire Solar system. Now, speaking of hot

(43:46):
things in space, it turns out Uranus is warm. Okay, look,
I really want to play this one straight. I really
really do, but I think the headlines may make this
nay impossible. Scientists have discovered that Urinus is warm. Not

(44:10):
just warmer than you expect it for a giant, gassy
planet tilted on its side, but warm in a way
that science can't fully explain. And if you think I
got through that sentence without smiling a little bit, you
don't know the show very well. Now, technically, Urinus is
classified as an ice giant, which sounds majestic until you

(44:30):
remember it's basically a frozen fart cloud wrapped around the
rocky core, drifting out where sunlight is a Rumorvoider two
flew by it back in nineteen eighty six, gave it
a once over, and we haven't been back since. Sounds
like my first marriage. There's no orbiter, there's no probes,
just one awkward glance in four decades of speculation. But now,

(44:51):
thanks to some infrared telescopes, astronomers have picked up something weird.
Uranus is a medium emitting more he then it should be.
Now we're talking about a planet nearly two billion miles
from the Sun. It should be cold, it should be dark, quiet.

(45:12):
Somehow it's glowing just a little an infrared kind of
like it's got an inner furnace that no one has
accounted for. And now the scientific community is asking the
question we all know was coming. What's really going on
inside Urness. I'll give you a moment, maybe me a moment. Now.

(45:41):
The best theory is so far from it's holding onto
heat from when it was formed to We don't understand
how fluids behave over ten thousand miles of pressure. Some
suggest internal mixing, deep convection, or phase changes in supersonic water, which,
if you're wondering, is exactly as sci fi as it's sounds.
But the important part is this, we actually do not

(46:03):
know because we have never bothered to study Urineus properly
once again, kind of like my first marriage. And when
I say we, I mean all of US, NASA, ESA,
and even those guys at JACKSA who build satellites that
look like vending machines. No one has sent a dedicated mission.
But that is now there is a push planetary scientists
won an orbiter, maybe even a probe, maybe a moon

(46:26):
landers to study one of the icy satellites, something that
could spend a few years out there, peeling back the
layers and figuring out why the planet is breaking the
thermal rules. Now there is actually a good reason to
do this because out of all the exoplanets that we
found so far, the most common ones are Urinus sized
ice giants. That's what the galaxy seems to be full of.

(46:50):
If we figure out this one, we might unlock the
key to understanding thousands of others. But the catch Funding
a mission like this this is hard because no one
wants to stand on the Senate floor and say we
need to explore urine Us. There's no way to say
it without someone coughing in the back of the room.

(47:12):
You know, even the mission names are probably cursed Urinus
or of it urin this pathfinder or the Deep Probe initiative.
But let's face it, science doesn't care about your middle
school sense of year. The data does say something weird
is going on out there, and if we're serious about
exploring the Solar System, we've got to check it out.

(47:36):
So yeah, Urinus is warm, the science is solid. I'm
really trying my absolute best to deliver that without snorting
any But one day we will get spacecraft into a
uh you know, stable orbit, and we'll send that probe
through its atmosphere, maybe even landing on something on one

(47:58):
of its strange sideway and move UNEs. Until then, we'll
just have to giggle like that middle schooler. We all
are inside now. We spend a lot of time scanning

(48:20):
the planets, scanning the stars, listening, waiting, hoping that if
someone's out there, they're broadcasting back. But what if they
don't have to? What if the signal we've been sending
wasn't intentional but what you would consider leakage And yes,
I just made a leakage joke about Urinus. In the
story following Uranus, I need a pay raise and with

(48:44):
is already maybe you know someone, We've gotten someone's attention.
That's the idea behind a recent study by astrophysicists looking
now at messages we beamed out on purpose, but at
the background noise of civilization, specifically airport radar systems, the
rotating radar installations that keep air traffic safe and organized.
Turns out they could also be creating one of the loudest,

(49:06):
most coherent artificial radio signatures on the planet. And it's
also not just noise. These are signals that are directional, repetitive,
and intensely regular, exactly the kind of a signal that
a patient far away intelligence might notice. Now, the researcher
suggests that if an alien advanced civilization were conducting its

(49:28):
own version of SETI listening for signs of artificial transmission,
they'd most likely pick up on our radar leakage before
they ever noticed a purpose built broadcast like the Aersiba
message or the Voyager Golden wreckets that gave us, you know,
pornographic nudes with our home address with a mixtapes added
to it. Because unlike a one time signal fired off
into the void, airport radars never stop. It's persistent, it's

(49:52):
structured and it's already left the solar system. To put
in another way, we've been broadcasting our location for decades accidentally,
and the signal is only getting stronger. We now have
more airports, more satellites, more ground based tracking systems, GPS, corrections, transponders,
emergency pangs. All of it noise to us. It's a

(50:14):
map to someone else. Now, if that is a cause
for concern, one might ask, depends on your level of optimism.
Some argue that this is really a non issue, that
any species capable will be detecting our radar leakages already
far beyond as technology wise, and probably knew we were
here long before the first airplane never left the ground,
and probably have already visited us. Others say this is

(50:36):
a case of shouting into a forest without knowing who's
out there or what they might want. We've long debated
whether we should actively try to contact other civilizations, you know,
just not Alpha Centauri area. Okay, that's all I'm saying.
Sends out, you know, messages to whoever we want, raise
our hand and wave, hey guys, we're over here. But this,

(50:58):
this wasn't actually a choice that was considered. This was
an electronic heart beat of modern life. That it's already
out there now from this next story, Because screw you
Rick and a lab. Tucked away from the noise of
everyday world, Sometimes extraordinary things just happen. Physicists have created

(51:22):
the first antimatter cubit. Now that sentence may not hit like,
you know, a rocket launch or a Mars rover touchdown, but
if you understand what it means, you know the universe
just blinked a little. So let's break this down. Cubits
are the quantum version of bits, the building blocks of
quantum computers. Instead of just being one or a zero,
a cubit can be both or somewhere in between. That

(51:44):
uncertainty is what makes quantum computing so powerful, so weird,
and so full of promise. Up until now, all working
cubits have been made from normal matter, ion's electronics, superconducted
loops of currents, stuff like that. But in the new
experiment at hashtags cern is innocent. Researchers successfully used a

(52:06):
single positron, the antimatter counterpart of the electron, to build
a functioning cubits. This wasn't just a particle trapped and measured.
It was coherent, controllable, and quantum mechanically usable. They turned
anti matter into information. The experiment involved confining a positron

(52:28):
in a magnetic trap and using its spin as the
carrier of quantum information. It's no longer just a proof
of concept. It's a completely new door because antimatter behaves
just like regular matter and almost every way except its charge.
That means the physics should match. But the possibilities of
new testing grounds and quantum theory are now wide open.

(52:49):
And it also comes with an amazing practical twist. Positrons
don't experience the same magnetic interactions as electrons, that could
make antimatter cubits more resilient and certain environments with less
noise more stability, at least in theory. Of course, you know,
no one's building an antimatter quantum computer tomorrow or probably

(53:09):
next year. The tech isn't ready. The positrons aren't exactly
easy to come by. But like so much in physics,
the real story isn't about the immediate use. It's about
what just became possible. Because now we know we can
encode information into the stuff that shouldn't exist. That's not

(53:31):
just clever, that's rewriting the rules we thought were already
etched into the walls of the universe. Antimatter, once the
realm of particle collisions in sci fi propulsion systems, is
now speaking the language of logic, gates and entanglements. It's
as if we just taught a ghost to whisper in
binary a tiny moment, a fraction of a particle, but

(53:53):
it might be the spark that lights the next era
of quantum exploration. Antimatter isn't just exotic anymore. Now it
can compute now. It is the tail end of July,

(54:13):
and the nights are starting to whisper. Still warm, but
there's a bit of a shift. Crickets now hum under
longer quieter stars. Out east after sunset, the summer triangle
is climbing high. It's three main stars, Vega out here
and the Knebe acting like a celestial welcome sign. Vega
and Lira, of course, is the brightest out Tire and

(54:35):
Aquala flashes with the hard speeds rhythm, and jeb out
in sickness, holds its glow like a patient lantern. If
you're out around midnight, look overhead. Saturn is rising in Aquarius,
bright and golden drifting just above the haze. Jupiter follows
in the early morning hour, chasing the last of the
percys before sunrise. And speaking of the percied, meteor shower

(54:58):
is already ramping up. It'll peak August twelfth, but even
now under dark skies, you can catch some early streaks,
especially after midnight when the radiant and Perseus climbs higher.
These are fast, clean meteors, often leaving glowing trails that
linger like old secrets do. On August fourth, look for
the waning crescent moon near Dripiter, just before dawn. It's

(55:20):
a quiet pairing, but a beautiful one, a silver curve
brushing past a world of swirling storms. And for you
know full moons we got August ninth, it'll be the
sturgeon moon, known to be Ana Shanhabi as Mana Mickey
gives us the racing moon where wild rice harvesting begins. God,

(55:43):
I swear Ep hates me. It's not even episode for
the phone. Here we are. So if you can get outside,
even for just ten minutes, let your eyes at chest,
let the skies remind you everything up there is still
in motion, and so are we. So that's it. For
tonight's show. Thank you for tuning in whenever, and however

(56:04):
you do, stay tuned for Sunday Night with Alan Ray Special.
Thanks to NASA Space dot Com, space x Ars Technica,
NASA Space Like, Popular Mechanics, and more for the stories
and inspiration the night once again with me at the helm,
the EP setting course, and the ship's computer in the
back whispering the star maps out through the static. This

(56:26):
is the lost wonder until next doorbit. I hope you
enjoyed the show, learned a little bit, and maybe had
a laugh for two along the way.

Speaker 7 (56:38):
The universe is a pretty big place. It's bigger than
anything anyone has ever dreamed of before. So if it's
just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.
Right when I was young, it seemed that I was

(57:04):
so wonderful