Lost Wanderer Podcast: 11/30/25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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. H. M.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
All fair Man on Biable. Today is a.

Speaker 1 (00:36):
Day from morning and remember Nancy and I are gained
at the core, but the tragedy of the Shuttle challenge.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
The following program may contain false language, adult themes.

Speaker 1 (00:47):
And bad attempts of human Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 3 (01:05):
What is President Trump's goal?

Speaker 2 (01:08):
What is his vision?

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

Speaker 1 (01:26):
Within anguality days.

Speaker 3 (01:28):
Here the ankle I landed.

Speaker 4 (01:32):
I am Jef also known as a cosmic bard over
on Twitter slash x And this is the Lost Wonder
podcast for November thirtieth, twenty twenty five, coming to you
from the new and improved acs Serenade Observatory. We're being
high above the right and night's side of the Earth.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
Tonight's top story.

Speaker 4 (01:54):
Well, let's face it, sometimes the story of the week
doesn't begin in the stars. It begins on the ground
on a quiet morning at Bacchanor where a soy used
rocket was just simply sitting there waiting for the kind
of routine preparations that have fed the ISS for more

(02:14):
than two decades routine, until a piece of ground hardware
the size of a small house beside it it had
reached the end of its patients. A twenty ton swing arm,
one of the massive steel structures that cradle a soil
used before launch, fueling lines, data, umbilicals, and the whole
kind of nervous system of the pad jammed during a

(02:36):
positioning sequence. And when it jammed, it twisted, metal groaned,
bolt sheared, and something ancient in the design finally let loose.
I'm just gonna double check something here perfect. There were
no flames, no explosions, a brutal mechanical failure, the kind

(03:03):
that instantly kind of brings.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
A halt to everything.

Speaker 4 (03:08):
Now ross Cosmos engineers rush toward a pad, suddenly full
of questions. Was anything electrical compromised? Did the fuel lines
take a hit? How much load did the support spine absorb?
Can you even trust a structure after it absorbs that
kind of shock? The answers didn't come quickly, because, let's

(03:29):
face it, they never do, and somewhere above the ISS
dripped it across another sunrise, unaware that one of its
most reliable launch channels had just snapped a twenty ton
reminder of its own fragility. Because the ISS doesn't survive
on magic. It survives on timing, on dockings and departures,

(03:52):
on resupply rhythms, so constant we forget they're actually fragile.
So I use vehicles carry humans and I think, probably
more importantly cargo. They BACKFIEL missions when other nations fall behind.
They are the quiet workhorses of low Earth orbit. But
those workhorses depend on the old steel at Bachanor, and

(04:14):
one of those steel arms just tore itself out of alignment.
That's the part that makes spaceflight maybe feel suddenly human again.
Not dramatic failure, but the quiet kind, the kind of
comes from age. You know, when you wake up in
the morning and just look at the light wrong where,
and you know, machinery built from a bygone era. Ross

(04:36):
Cosmo says the damage is repairable, and it probably is,
but inspections take time, and time is the currency the
station is always short on. If this pad stays closed
longer than expected, schedules will slip, crew rotations will have
to stretch, Supply chains will tighten. Orbital choreography gets a

(04:57):
little more improvisational down here, it feels like it's an
engineering problem. Up there, it feels like a soft shutter
running through a ship that's older than most of the
people listening to this broadcast, or at least.

Speaker 2 (05:12):
Close to it.

Speaker 4 (05:13):
The ISS has survived solar arraysterars, coolint leaks, unexpected thrusting firings,
and more micrometeor strikes than anyone is comfortable to admit
in public. It will survive this too, But each failure
on the ground is a reminder the station lives on
trust and timing, and that neither are guaranteed. Look at

(05:36):
the photos from inside the kapola this week. They're sliding beneath,
blue and bright. Inside the crew moves calmly, checking the systems,
sending down telemitary heating meals, preparing for sleep. Life continues
at seventeen thousand miles an hour, even when the world
below as it tates.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
Now there's a strange elegance of this movement.

Speaker 4 (05:57):
A twenty ton arm breaks when a remote pad and
causes Kazakhstan, and somewhere in orbit, a tiny habitat keeps circling,
waiting for the world to catch up. Like I said,
the pad will be repaired, Schedules will have to shift,
and the station will continue to turn another dawn after
dawn after dawn. But you have to admit the sky

(06:19):
feels a little more fragile, and the silence around Bakanor
carries a weight only orbit may truly understand and well
Russia grappled with damage on the ground. Another reminder of
spaceflight's fragility arrived from orbit itself.

Speaker 5 (06:53):
And now assholes in space China, China, China.

Speaker 4 (07:17):
Oh yeah, my system is still slow out to the reboot.
I apologize for that. But up aboard Teeing Young three
astronauts were settling into the rhythm of their mission, you know, experiments,
daily maintenance, the quiet choreography of life and micro gravity.

Speaker 2 (07:35):
When the alert came in.

Speaker 4 (07:37):
Their return capsule, the vehicle meant to carry them safely
back through heat and gravity and sky had just taken
a hit. A small strike, probably a shard of someone
else's abandoned satellite or more likely their own, or a
fleck of a rocket body insulation, drifting through low Earth
orbit and nowhere better to be. All too often we

(07:59):
think tiny things don't matter, But in space, tiny things
travel at seven kilometers per second, a grain of metal
becomes a bullet, a fragment becomes a threat, and a
perfectly good spacecraft becomes a question mark. Now, China's flight
controllers didn't hesitate. They did something rare, something that doesn't

(08:20):
happen unless the math leaves no room or improvisation. They
actually launched a replacement, a brand new return capsule, an
emergency lifeboat thrown up or through blue and into the black,
racing to rendezvous with the station like a rescue skip,
cutting across the dark ocean. Now, it's not dramatic in

(08:42):
the way you know movies would imagine it. There's no heroism,
there's no last second dock clamp snapping shut. It's quieter
than that. It's a measured excent. It's a cold orbital ballet,
a new capsule taking positions so three people don't have
to wonder if their scorch mark on their original ride

(09:04):
hides something deeper, something structural, something well that would probably
betray them during reinjury. But this moment, this week, it
carried a sharper undertone because experts across the world looked
at that incident and didn't just.

Speaker 2 (09:20):
Say, oh, good call. They admit it.

Speaker 4 (09:25):
This is the future and we're not ready. Look, we
have rescue services for oceans or mountains or forests, for hurricanes.
We'll pluck a stranded a hiker off a cliff of
the helicopter and think nothing of it. But if a
crud spacecraft it gets hit by the pre in orbit, the
world's first.

Speaker 2 (09:42):
Reaction is.

Speaker 4 (09:45):
Anyone, anyone can you? Can you spare a rocket anyway?

Speaker 2 (09:50):
Hey?

Speaker 4 (09:50):
You over there, do you have a spacecraft available?

Speaker 2 (09:54):
Guys who can? Who can reach them? And at this
point there doesn't.

Speaker 4 (10:00):
It seemed to be a unified answer, no international protocol,
no dedicated space rescue fleet, just to hope that one
nation has a vehicle, fuel prepped and pointed in the
right direction. Unless we prove the marginists thinner then has
been advertised. It was a glancing strike, a damaged capsule,

(10:20):
a replacement launched in a hurry. Three astronauts now relying
on a fresh machine because the old one absorbed just
enough violence to make engineers worried. Don't worry. Quiet, professional,
and probably mostly invisible is what moves policy years from
now towards something like a real rescue capability. For now,

(10:44):
though the crew boardingong is safe, their new return capsule
sits doc pristine, pressurized, waiting for the long fall back
to Earth when their mission eventually ends.

Speaker 2 (10:55):
But the lesson.

Speaker 4 (10:56):
Lingers around them like a bit of an echo. We
half filled Low Earth orbit with ambition. We've also filled
it with debris. With progress, comes leftovers, with dreams, remains
the shards of dreams, and every once in a while

(11:20):
the two collide. This time, thankfully, no one was hurt.

Speaker 2 (11:26):
This time.

Speaker 4 (11:26):
The solution seemed pretty straight forward. But in the soft
tongue of teen Young's life support fans and the cold
glow of the windowed horizon, the truth, well, the truth
feels unmistakably clear. We are explorers, and explorers often need lifeboats,

(11:50):
and not metaphorical ones, real ones, waiting ready for the
day when just a small strike ends up being something, something,
way more. And it was weird because, as we think
about this, for a few strange weeks, we had the

(12:13):
skies over America's launch pad feeling a little quieter than
they perhaps should have been. Not silent SpaceX still flew
at night, satellites still hummed overhead, but we had daytime
launches being frozen in place, suspended under a rule. It
wasn't about rockets or debris or any of that.

Speaker 2 (12:32):
It was about people.

Speaker 4 (12:34):
When the US government shut down hit, the FAA's Office
of Commercial Space Transportation lost its ability to oversee daytime operations.
That oversight is mandatory on any launch that might intersect airspace,
ground safety corridors, or hazard zones. Night launches could continue
their flightplass were predetermined and easier to isolate, but anything

(12:55):
scheduled under daylight needed FAA personnel on station.

Speaker 2 (13:01):
And FAA personnel.

Speaker 4 (13:04):
Well, they weren't allowed to work.

Speaker 2 (13:09):
Rockets.

Speaker 4 (13:10):
It turns out to care deeply on timing. They care
about windows, weather, trajectory, and the intricacies of celestial mechanics.
They do not give a rats ass about government funding bills.
So for nearly a month, companies cross the country held
their breath as schedule slipped, vehicles rolled paused, and teams
stared at rockets that were ready, now all of a sudden,

(13:33):
forbidden to fly. When the shutdown finally ended, the FAA
returned to its consoles and almost immediately lifted the daytime ban. Thankfully,
it was like someone unleached a pressure valve over the
entire industry, and within hours launch complexes along both coasts
started to rearrange their calendars. Teams were reactivating flight simulations,

(13:56):
safety views, and very importantly, range coordination. Payload specialists confirmed
that perishable or time since itive cargo was still within
mission tolerances, and suddenly the year's final push toward orbits
was put back on track. Now that said, the first
flights to benefit weren't glamorous. It was a handful of

(14:19):
commercial satellites of whether Monitor, a cluster of CubeSats built
by university teams who had been biting their nails through
the shutdown, but each one represented weeks of delay evaporating overnight.
The broader industry, though, felt the shift even more acutely.
Companies like SpaceX, Ula and rocket Lab maintain tight cadences.

(14:41):
Missing missing one window, especially for SpaceX, can ripple into
the next six missions. NASA depends on commercial partners for resupplies,
Space Force depends on the international security launches, and small
companies depend on them just for the mere simple survival
of meeting contractual milestones. Single bureaucratic freeze can shake all

(15:04):
of this, and that's the part that they felt as
the band lift the sense of modern spaceflight isn't just
boosters and payload bearings. It's infrastructure, its logistics, it's coordination.
It's a global relay race where one mishandoff and you
lose the sprint. And yet when the FAA did return

(15:25):
the machinery, launch cadence spun back in the motion almost instantaneously.
It's amazing what private companies can do. The rockets didn't
care what caused the delay. They just stood patiently waiting,
as they tend to do, like they do, waiting for

(15:47):
the moment when the weather clears, when the range opens,
and that human voice in the headset says the words
they've been listening for. Proceed to terminal count and then
that way, and what mix of routine and wonder. Another
piece of sky became accessible again, thankfully, not with fireworks

(16:08):
or maybe even spectacle, but with a signature, a lifted restriction,
and the unmistakable hum of a nation getting.

Speaker 2 (16:17):
Back to work.

Speaker 4 (16:21):
But while the FAA's returned reopened America Sky, another corner
of the launch world, UGH got a gentle little reminder
that progress doesn't always rise.

Speaker 2 (16:31):
Sometimes it buckles down.

Speaker 4 (16:35):
At the test stands in Boca Chica, the air carries
a bit of metallic hush, a kind that settles just
before a machine shows you you know just what it's
really made of. SpaceX rolled out of its new Version
three super heavy booster, the largest first stage they've ever attempted.
A towering cylinder of stainless still meant to lift our

(16:56):
ship toward lunar and further ambitions. This test, well, it
was relatively straightforward. Got pressure loading, the mechanical honesty check.
Every rocket endures. You fill the tank, you push the limits,
and you give a gentle listen to the mental as
it creaks and groans. This time, though, the metal decided

(17:19):
to answer and return with a bow. A sudden deformation
rippled down one of the booster's rings. Not a rupture, no, that,
not a fireball, no, but a visible buckle, a structural
fold that told engineers unequivocally that this iteration had reached

(17:39):
its tolerance. It's that kind of failure that actually feels
a little more intimate than dramatic. There was no explosive shockway,
no shattered hardware scattering across the pad, just a massive
test article quietly slumping against itself, like two elephants tied

(18:00):
to the nose.

Speaker 2 (18:00):
And go hep.

Speaker 4 (18:03):
Some of the olds in the audience will get that
humor and appreciate it. A reminder that the physics of
extent begins with the physics of endurance. Space Axe has
walked this roads many many times. Starship's early prototypes split, crumpled,
tore open like soda cans under pressure. Each failure became
a new blueprint. Each blueprint became you know, the next iteration.

(18:28):
Progress in their world is an unbroken chain of maybe
not yet, but soon, oh yes, soon, and let's face it,
Version three has raised the stakes. This booster is part
of the architecture that NASA is eventually counting on for
the Moon, heavy cargo, lunar infrastructure, and cadence of Artemis itself.

(18:49):
So when it bends, the ripples don't stop At Bokuchka.
They touched timelines, they touch budgets, and of course they
touch expectations that were already stretched to the thinnest And
within minutes of the buckle teams, we're analyzing stress patterns,
adjusting reinforcement concepts, and reviewing WELLD sequences. There's no drama
inside those control rooms, just the rhythm of engineers now

(19:12):
doing what they've always done. Try to learn quickly, fixed, decisively,
the most importantly, move forward. And the truth is, this
kind of failure is not even really a setback. It's
the wish you pay for building the biggest rocket in
human history. Soon another booster will take the stand, probably
a little stiffer, probably a little stronger, carrying the lessons

(19:34):
written in today's crumpled ring. That's the arc of rocketry.
The sky just doesn't grant progress. It challenges you to
earn it over and over and over again. But under
the Texas sun, besides a booster built to touch the Moon,
you can almost hear a future exhale, a long, patient

(19:56):
breath that says, try again, You're so close. And while
Starship learned another hard lesson on its test stand, NASA
confirmed something many teams had already suspected, and some had

(20:17):
even announced. Artemist three is shifting to twenty twenty eight.
Now I know the Moon isn't any further away. The
engineering simply needs more time, which only gives credence to
those people who don't believe we've ever been to the
moon more legitimacy. But NASA's announcement doesn't come with drama.

(20:38):
It just comes with simple number schedules, milestones, and that
unrelenting math of a program where every piece depends on
every other piece. Artemist three isn't a single rocket or
even spacecraft. It's a chain of systems that all have
to work on the same day, in the same order
and without any real hesitation. Right now, that chain is

(21:02):
not ready. Yeah, you could say, O, Ryan is flying. Okay,
the space launch system is progressing. Kennedy's ground systems are
for all intents and purposes, are in place. But the Lander,
the starship based human landing system, still has a few.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
Major checkpoints ahead of it.

Speaker 4 (21:24):
It needs long duration flights, It needs propellant transfer tests.
It needs a demonstration mission that shows space x can
move tens of tens of tons of cryogenic fuel between
vehicles while everything is coasting along through microgravity. All of
this takes time, and none of it can be skipped. Now,

(21:47):
the booster buckle didn't cause this to the lay, but
let's face it, it didn't help it either. It reminded
everyone involved the scaling starship in the lunar. Lander isn't
about spe speculation, It's about real life liability. Artemis three
can't launch until NASA has confidence in the full stock
from the ground to the lunar surface and most importantly

(22:08):
back again. So the timeline now slides to twenty twenty eight.
It's not canceled, it's not abandoned, just shifted, the way
complex engineering often is. When risk margin needs to widen
the bit and inside the program, the mood is still steady.
Engineers are just simply adjusting their milestones, and astronauts may

(22:29):
have to change their training cycles. The flight controllers will,
of course revise timelines and mission sims. It air is
a bit of disappointment, but in the end it is
work and the goal, well, the goal remains the same,
a crude landing near the Moon's southern pole, where ice
waits in shadowed craters, and the future lunar exploration begins.

(22:56):
And though Artemis has maybe stepped back a little on
the calendar, there is another player who used a moment
to step forward, quietly but with an unmistakable ambition, and
I'm not even gonna make fun of him this time.
Blue Origin confirmed that it's developing a super heavy variant

(23:18):
of its new Glen rocket, a large and more powerful
evolution of the booster that has yet to fly its
first orbital mission. But this upgraded version is in a
small tweak deliberate, pushing the same performance class as Falcon
Heavy and possibly eventually Starship, and with their last launch,
Blue Origin looks like it might be I don't I'm

(23:39):
not gonna say catching up, because right now SpaceX's record
is simply, pardon the punt, otherworldly, but Blue Origin looks
like it's at least going to enter the same arena now.
The company hasn't really released every technical detail yet, but
early outlines point to a more stretched first stage, expanded
propellant comp and a higher thrust Bee four engines to

(24:03):
match the new increased mass, and its goal is relatively simple.
They want to lift heavier payloads to higher orbits with
enough margin to support possible lunar infrastructure, deep space cargo,
or large scale satellite the deployments in other worlds. They're
building a rocket for the next decade, not the last

(24:26):
now New Glen It already stands tall at ninety eight meters,
with a reusable first stage designed to land on an
ocean platform, just like Falcon nine, and like it showed,
it can actually do the super heavy configuration would push
those capabilities a little further. What makes this announcement interesting
isn't well, isn't just the hardware as much as the

(24:46):
hardware is amazing. And if you watch the launch, you
saw the rocket basically come down looking brand new, clean,
because the different fuel type they use, it look beautiful.
I hate saying it because Amazon Jeff Bezos fucked up
Rings of Powers, but the rocket itself looked absolutely stunning
and amazing. But the timing SpaceX has less face that

(25:09):
dominated the heavy lift conversation for years, Ula has Balkan
coming online. The Chinese Long March fleet continues to scale upward,
and now Blue Origin is signaling that maybe Nuclint, just
maybe will not be a single static vehicle, but a family,
a platform that can grow with ambition rather than being

(25:29):
outpaced by it. And the company, to its credit, has
also emphasized cadence, not just one launch but many, not
just capability, but reliability. Bezos himself put it bluntly in
a recent interview. Blue Origin attends to quote move Heaven
and Earth unquote to support NASA's path back to the

(25:50):
Moon for the first time. For those in the audience
that are like that, there is a sense of quiet
confidence in that theatrical It's not even boastful, just a
steady push forward from a company that knows it has
some catching up to do and is taking its first
steps to doing so. It'll be amazing to see and

(26:16):
this guy will get a little more crowded, and maybe
our dreams will become crowded as well. With that, let's
take a little breakup about three and a half minutes,
we will be right back.

Speaker 6 (27:32):
Skim through my ship sleek st rise.

Speaker 7 (28:42):
Where the choir used to be.

Speaker 6 (28:53):
Fractional pieces dressed.

Speaker 7 (29:04):
So oh no, keep the still.

Speaker 2 (29:21):
Ra Welcome back. Hope you enjoyed that little intermission music.

Speaker 4 (30:16):
For tonight, And as the second half begins, our tension
turns to something universal in space flight, how crews actually
eat when home is hundreds of miles below them. Now
I do apologize for this first story, but it has
to be talked about. In Europe, the EESA has begun

(30:39):
testing a new food production method designed for deep space
missions and long duration habitats. It uses a microbial process
called power to protein yay protein, where microbes convert carbo
carbon dioxide, nitrogen, hydrogen, and minerals including nutrients recovered from
astronauts urine into edible biomass. Now that sounds a bit

(31:06):
like science fiction workaround, but it does solve an actual,
real problem. Carrying food for months or years becomes unrealistic
beyond beyond low Earth orbit, a closed loop system that
turns waste and atmospheric gases in the protein would re
reduce the resupply needs and allow lunar or maybe even
Martian crews to produce food on site. As you're not

(31:31):
going to be surprised with the early samples are not gourmet.
They resemble a protein rich paste or powder similar to
nutritional supplements, with a mild flavor and no texture beyond
what process any process adds later. But the system works,

(31:52):
and if we're being honest, in spaceflight works is the
requirement that matters. And meanwhile, over on the China SAW ten,
Young Space Station astronauts tested a completely different approach to
food preforation, a compact space oven designed for grilling. Instead

(32:20):
of relying solely on prepackaged meal, this oven uses controlled conduction,
heating and airflow management to warm foods safely in microgravity
without creating smoke or free floating particles in their demonstration video,
the crew heated and meat sealed and foil pouches, then
opened them carefully to prevent drifting crumbs or droplets. Now

(32:42):
it wasn't grilling in the traditional sense. There were no flames,
there was no char.

Speaker 2 (32:45):
But it produced.

Speaker 4 (32:48):
Specially heated food with noticeably improved texture and aroma compared
to standard space meals. The technolog is simple, but it
is important. Adding even small variations and meal preparations can
improve crew morale, appetite, and long term nutritional health, critical

(33:10):
factors for missions lasting months at time. So, in a way,
we had two different developments, opposite ends basically the same
challenge ESA pushing towards sustainable, long duration protein production in China,
improving meal quality aboard a current generation station, and somewhere
somewhere as a South Korean camper going can I get
that grill? But after I don't know. After spending a

(33:39):
moment on the delicious thought of future of food in orbit,
we have to shift to a rare story about saving
something already out there, a spacecraft that was left drifting
and the company bold enough to bring it back, or
at least try. The Swift Observatory launched in two thousand

(34:01):
and four was never supposed to live this long. It
was built to study gamma ray burst the universe brightest
briefest flashes, and over the years it involved in the
quiet workhourse of high energy astronomy. But aging satellites they
don't really get retirement plans. Their orbits decay, their components

(34:22):
were out, and eventually the mass says, yeah you, it's
time to say goodbye, like Leonardo DiCaprio says to his
twenty five year old girlfriend turning twenty six. But Catalyst
S Based Technologies wanted to disagree on the first part,
not the LEO part. They're basically a relatively small company

(34:45):
compared to the giants of the launch world. But earlier
this month they now something almost unheard of. A plan
to rendezvous was swift using a modified pegasu's class launch
vehicle and attempt a stabilization mission. Not a full repair,
not a refit, but an effort to extend life at
attitude control, push the orbit upward and by scientists a

(35:11):
few more years of data from a telescope that actually
still has value. The mission profiles a bit unusual pegas's
launches from a carrier aircraft not a pad, meaning the
rescue vehicle can be deployed from virtually anywhere with clear skies.
Catalyst plans uses a flexibility to match swift declining orbit

(35:32):
with minimal fuel expense, a kind of orbital intercept that
leans less on raw power and more on math and
clever trajectory design. Now, once the spacecraft reaches swift, the
goal is to dock with the satellite's bus structure using
a set of articulated capture arms. If they succeed, the
attached module would provide fresh avionic small electric thrusters and

(35:55):
a control package to maintain orientation and counter drag. Unlike
elementary school libraries. Oh did I say that out loud?
But if they fail, there's no debris net those second
attempt waiting in the rings, just an aging spacecraft that
will continue its slow fall toward re entry. Now NASA

(36:15):
isn't leading this operation. They've acknowledged it. They've even supported
some data exchange. But the initiative and the financial risk
all belonged to Catalysts, And to me, that's what makes
this mission interesting. Twenty years ago, a rescue like this
would have been the domain of national space agencies. Today,

(36:36):
it comes from a private company with a modest budget
and an ambitious engineering team working to prove that orbital
servicing doesn't have to be science fiction or even to
the exclusion to multi billion dollar defense contracts. If they
pull it off, Swift won't just survive longer, it will
become proof that old satellites do not have to die quietly,

(37:00):
and we don't have to send up Clint Eastwood to
save them. They can be helped, stabilize and given one
more chapter and a proper ending, and in the sky
I'm filling with aging hardware. This idea actually might matter
more than I think some would admit.

Speaker 2 (37:24):
But another.

Speaker 4 (37:27):
Aging spacecraft made headlines for helping itself this week, quietly
proving that autonomy in orbit is no longer a concept,
but now could be considered a capability. Earlier this month,
an Earth observation Saturday that operated by joint European commercial
team experience a guidance anomaly, nothing catastrophic, no tumble, no

(37:49):
loss of contact, but enough of a deviation to trigger
the onboard fault detection protocols. Normally, this is the moment
when ground controllers would step in, issue commands and guide
the spacecraft back into attitude lock. This time, the ground
didn't get there first. The satellites onboard AI control system

(38:12):
detected the air classified the type of rotational drift, and
initiated a corrective sequence automatically using its reaction wheels and
star trekers. The system calculated a recovery path, counter torque
the drift, reacquired the target attitude vector, and resumed its
imaging schedule, all before the next contact window. From anomaly

(38:33):
to recovery took near mere minutes, not hours, not a
ground team scrambling minutes.

Speaker 2 (38:42):
Now.

Speaker 4 (38:42):
Granted, the speed isn't what makes this important. It was
the demonstration of independence and lower orbit satellites circling the
planet roughly every ninety minutes, spending much of that time
out of direct communication range.

Speaker 2 (38:56):
When something something goes wrong.

Speaker 4 (38:59):
During those blind arcs, recovery usually has to wait until
the next ground pass. That delay can cause data, fuel
and well in some cases the aircraft or spacecraft itself.
An autonomous system that can diagnose and correct drift in
real time is a change in the equation. It means

(39:21):
fewer missed imaging cycles. It means less wasteed propellant. It
means spacecrafts can survive anomalies that used to become mission enders.

Speaker 2 (39:30):
Now.

Speaker 4 (39:30):
The AI didn't override mission control or rewrite its operating limits.
It followed the constraints embedded by engineers. But it did
demonstrate that what industry has been predicting for years, the
Arab satellites that can maintain.

Speaker 2 (39:44):
Themselves, is upon us. Now.

Speaker 4 (39:48):
This same technology is being explored for deep space probes
where communication delays stretched from minutes to hours. I know,
I know already this is how you get vigor reader.
I know, but a spacecraft at Mars or the outer
planets can't wait for Earth to troubleshoot every hiccup. If
this low orbit test and it is any indication autonomy

(40:09):
will soon be essential for emissions beyond the Moon now.
Engineers reviewing the event confirmed that the system responded exactly
as designed, identified the drift mode, prioritized safety, executed, controlled recovery,
and log the entire sequence for later analysis. There was
no drama, no panic, just a machine proving that spacecraft

(40:30):
can take care of itself if and when they need to.

Speaker 2 (40:40):
No.

Speaker 4 (40:41):
I find it interesting because you have some satellites that
may not be making groundbreaking news or in the scene
a lot. Some seem to be very quiet, and some
are doing it so quietly, you know, mapping things like
all I don't know the universe with a precision no

(41:02):
human hand could ever match. And one such thing is
the EUCLID space telescope, launched by the European Space Agency.
It has completed its first year of full scale observations
and those numbers that are coming back, they're a little
bit staggering.

Speaker 2 (41:21):
Now.

Speaker 4 (41:21):
In just twelve months, EUCLID has cataloged one point two
million galaxies each one a collection of hundreds of billions
of stars, all captured across the patchwork of imagery and spectroscopy,
deeper than any wide field survey attempted before, which is
why I am working on the Stoner equation to replace
the Drake equation.

Speaker 2 (41:41):
Now.

Speaker 4 (41:43):
Euclid's mission is simple to describe, an incredibly difficult to
execute though, map the large scale structure of the universe
and help astronomers better understand things such as dark matter,
dark energy, you know, the two invisible components that seem
to shake cosmic evolution. To do that, EUCLID carries a
one one point two meter telescope, a high resolution visible
imager and a near infrared spectrometer. Together they're building a

(42:06):
three dimensional map of the sky, measuring how the galaxies
actually end up clustering, how light stretches across the distance,
and how cosmic expansion changes with them. The telescope's wide
field of view is one of its biggest prints, where
instruments like Hubble tend to zoom in to tiny patches

(42:27):
of sky for ultra a deep detail euclid scanning with
broad swaths spotting galaxy groups, filaments, voids, and giant arcs
of structure that reveal how gravity has sculpted matter over
billions and billions of years. That said, among the early findings,
we have massive galactic filaments stretching hundreds of millions of

(42:47):
light years, precision weak lensing measurements showing how dark matter
distorts background light, new dwarf galaxies previously hidden by low
surface brightness, improve distance estimates for clusters in the cosmic
and the beginnings of a data set that will ultimately
map billions of galaxies over the next six years. I

(43:09):
know sometimes we think of the image as a photo.
We should think of it at a bigger, grander scale.
It's a data cube. We have collar position, red shift, brightness,
structural information that together reveal the shape and the motion
of the universe itself. And what matters and how. What
makes this so important is the.

Speaker 2 (43:31):
Scale of it all.

Speaker 4 (43:33):
Dark energy, the force accelerating cosmic expansion, leaves faint fingerprints
in how galaxies drift apart. Dark matter leaves equally faint
signatures and the distortions of the background light. The more
galaxies you measure, the clearer those signatures will become. Now,
euclid's first year release isn't a conclusion, it's it's just

(43:54):
a good foundation to build upon, a massive, precise, carefully
calibrated starting point that will let cosmologists test ideas about
the universe fate with far more more accuracy than they've
had before.

Speaker 2 (44:12):
Now, I know.

Speaker 4 (44:16):
I talked about this a little bit on my guest
appearance on Jack's Position. Once again, lady, thank you for
letting me fill in. Got to talk about it here
too on this program. The Interstellar Visitor thirty one or
thirty I Atlas, only the third confirmed object to arrive
here from another star system, has now passed parahelion, giving

(44:39):
astronomers a rare window to capture a detailed image while
it was brightest. This new deep exposure shot reveals exactly
what physicists predicted, a break nucleus, a well well formed coma,
and a dust tail shedding material in a smooth arc
behind it. None, of course, none of this stopped Harvard's

(45:01):
most headlined friendly theorist abviy Lobe from briefly and continually
suggesting the object's shape might hint at something engineered, but
Atlas itself. We spend no time providing the rebuttal. As
it heated near the sun, its outer layers began fragmenting
a regular chunks, breaking off volatile ices venting in the space,

(45:22):
and the classical behavior of a natural commet under thermal stress.
If this were a spacecraft, it would be one that
arrived rusted, shedding panels and leaking gas. And I know,
I know, firefly makes it possible, but it's not exactly
the galactic equivalent most would think of of a diplomatic
first impression that said, Spectroscopic analysis backed it all up.

(45:49):
Observatories detected carbon rich dust, silicates, cyanide compounds, and diatomic carbon.
The entire chemical structure set found the comets, but none
of the material associated with anything that we would we
would deem artificial. It's brightness, curve rotation, and structural shedding
all match standard comet models with way way too remarkable accuracy.

Speaker 2 (46:14):
That said, even it now seems its.

Speaker 4 (46:16):
Trajectory is stubbornly natural. I know, people change course. It
is really following a clean hyperbolic escape path with no
real thrust, no anomalies, no deviations, just the smooth slide
of an interstellar object passing through a gravity well and
continuing on because the bugs missed us.

Speaker 2 (46:37):
Now.

Speaker 4 (46:38):
Unlike Umamau, which sparked years of well debate fueled by
weird geometry and very sparse data, Atlas actually ended up.

Speaker 2 (46:46):
Being very cooperative. In the end. It behaved like a comet.

Speaker 4 (46:50):
It broke up like a comet, at out gas like
a comet, photographed like a comet, and chemistry had screamed
I'm a comet, which leaves very room for you know,
my people, or other extraterrestrial engineering unless the Aliens are
building their starships out of frozen methanol, ammonia and dust grains.
And trust me, that doesn't work because they wouldn't be

(47:13):
staying airborne long. But as it recedes into the dark.
Atlas gives astronomers a clearer picture of what interstellar debris
may actually look like. Not mysterious and not even exotic
to the large scale, just a fragment from another stellar nursery,
passing through, lading up briefly, and moving on. But the
fact that we're being able to catch this and see

(47:35):
it eventually eventually, that means aviy Low will be correct
With one of these. I'm not sure if I'm going
to enjoy that day or hate that day. I'll leave
that up for you to decide for yourselves. But after

(47:59):
watching an interstellar comet drift back into the dark, we
got to face it. It's not hard to look further
far beyond debris, planets, and even galaxies, towards the question
that waits at the edge of all cosmology, how does
the universe itself end? I've done a ICC on this
very matter back in the early days when I only

(48:20):
did thirty minute recorded shows, so we've gotten even more
data since then, but it's still the answer itself is
not a singular answer. There are still several competing models,
each grounded in physics, each depending on how dark energy behaves,
how matter thins out, and what happens to the fundamental

(48:41):
particles that make up everything we've ever seen.

Speaker 2 (48:45):
Now?

Speaker 4 (48:45):
Of course, the most widely accepted scenario is the heat death,
or also known by its other name big freeze. I
always thought that's what my ex wife was called. But anyway,
in this model, the universe keeps expanding forever. Gallay's drifted apart,
stars burn out, black holes evaporate through Hawkings radiation to
Cosmos then becomes a thin, cold field of straight particles

(49:08):
and fading photons stretched across. The distance is so large
that no structure remains. There's no collapse, no explosion, just
a long, slow slide in the thermal equilibrium, where no
energy differences exist and therefore nothing can happen at all.

Speaker 2 (49:22):
Also like the marriage second one that I had now.

Speaker 4 (49:27):
Another possibility is, of course, the big rip. This also
depends on a version of dark energy that grows stronger
over time. If increases faster than matter can resist, the
expansion of space, fists face eventually overwhelms everything. Galaxies will
tear apart, stars will disassemble, planets will disintegrate, and even
atoms will lose cohesion. The timeline varies by the model,

(49:51):
but the mechanism is the same, expansion accelerating until structure
becomes impossible. But there's also the Big Crunch, once considered
the leading idea before dark energy was discovered. In this version,
the universe eventually just stops expanding. It reverses direction and

(50:13):
collapses inward. Galaxies converge, background radiation heats, and everything falls
back into a dense hot state similar to the Big
Bang's origin the universe creation, not the here that was
on what CBS Current data strongly suggests this won't happen,
but it remains mathematically valid if dark energy behaves differently

(50:35):
than we expect, and hey, we barely know what dark
energy is, so it could very well do this and
a related idea, the Big Bounce, argues the collapse doesn't
end everything. Instead, the universe rebounds into a new, wonderful,
glorious expansion, creating cycles of birth and death stretching across
unimaginable time, which leads to some people think that's why

(50:56):
we have deja vull It's speculative, yes, but not impossible
on the smallest scales.

Speaker 2 (51:04):
Particle physics.

Speaker 4 (51:07):
Offers another long term process, proton decay. If protons eventually
break down something not yet observed. Then matter itself has
an expiration date. Even in stable thermal universe, that decay
would slowly erase stars, planets in every atom. None of
these endings are thankfully soon. Even the most dramatic models

(51:28):
operate on scales of tens of billions to quadrillions of years,
far beyond the life span of stars, galaxies, or well,
let's face it, probably anything humans will ever touch. So
cosmology isn't predicting tomorrow. It's mapping possibilities on a canvas
larger than time itself that we understand it, as.

Speaker 2 (51:51):
You know.

Speaker 4 (51:52):
And after talking about the end of the universe, I
figured we could in the show with something a little later,
something that doesn't, you know, involve protohonda ka evaporating black
holes or the long slow cooling of everything that ever was.
How my last marriage could get any cooler?

Speaker 2 (52:12):
I don't know.

Speaker 4 (52:13):
But hey, here we are, and we have, of all people,
Amazon to think for this. I know what you're saying. Wait, Amazon,
you know the people that brought you Rings of Power.

Speaker 2 (52:28):
Yeah, I'm talking about them.

Speaker 4 (52:33):
Please please don't ruin this one, Amazon, please, because yes,
it is finally official they've greenlit a brand new Stargate series.
No casting yet, no trailers, no set photos, just confirmation
that a writer's room is assembly and the project really

(52:56):
is moving forward and buried underneath all the corporate press
language is to promise the hope that they're aiming for
a return to the classic tone exploration, adventure, ancient mysteries,
and at least one moment per episode where someone insists
the wormhome wormhole is totally stable, seconds before it sparks
like a cut power line, and after the stretches Space

(53:21):
News we covered tonight pad failures, buckling boosters, emergency orbits
to ground lifeboats. The idea of a show where the
biggest problem is oops, we dialed the wrong planet again
actually sounds a little relaxing as long as General Carter
is leading Stargate. Now with that, I think it's time

(53:45):
to turn to the sky for the.

Speaker 2 (53:48):
Next two weeks.

Speaker 4 (53:49):
The Night Skettles settles into its early winter rhythm, crisp,
steady and full of familiar winter landmarks. Shortly after sunset,
look low in the southwest for Vena. It's sinking fast
toward its next solar conjunction, so visibility will drop as
de December continues. This is one of the last easy
windows to spot it before it disappears into the Sun's glare.

(54:12):
To the east, Jupiter dominates the evening sky. Even a
simple pair of binoculars will reveal its four big moon,
shifting position night by night, a small, reliable, glorious show.
As winter sets in and just above Jupiter, the Pleightes
reach higher each evening. Even under modest like pollution. The
cluster's cold blue sparkle is very unmistakable and closer to midnight,

(54:35):
Orion climbs in the full view. His belt clears the
horizon around eleven, with the Orion nebula glowing faintly below,
a soft smear of light worth taking in if the
air is clear and Mother Nature is not snowing on you.
Meteor watchers should mark December thirteenth and fourteenth for the
Geminid meteor shower. This year, the Moon will be in

(54:56):
a waning crescent, meaning darker skies and good conditions under
clear weather emphasisto and clear, the Geminids can easily produce
several dozen break meteors per hour. Now now to the
full moon, December brings the cold moon reaching full elimination

(55:16):
on December fourth, and several Native nation traditions, including Northeast nations.
The moon carries names tied to winter's arrival and the
long nights ahead. One Abenaki name is hey bunkas pronounced
probably wrong, and I apologize and advance for whatever I
just did to that pronunciation. Please please, Abenaki, do not

(55:36):
scout me. Send the emails to the alien at kloranradio
dot com because right now our servers are down, so
it won't be sent at anyway. This full moon rises
at sunset and climbs high through the evening, bright enough
to cast long shadows across frost or snow. Finally, in
the pre dawn hours, looks southeast for Saturn, riding low

(55:57):
and steady. It's faint but unmistakable when horizon clears. So
that's up your sky for the next two weeks. Bundle up,
look up, maybe toss mother Nature and middle finger if
it's knowing too much and you can't see any of this,
and as always, please keep wondering. So that's it for

(56:20):
tonight's transmission. Thank you for tuning in whenever and however
and whyever you do special thanks to nasaspacexpace dot com,
our technical NASA Spaceflight, popular mechanics, and everyone out there
keeping humanity's eyes on the stars. With me at the helm,
the executive producer, plotting our next course in the ship's
computer in the back, whispering star maps through the static.

(56:42):
This has been the Lost Wanderer Podcast until next orbit.
I hope you enjoyed the show, learned a little something.
Maybe I had a laugh or two as well. The
universe is a pretty big place.

Speaker 6 (56:57):
It's bigger anything anyone.

Speaker 7 (57:00):
Has ever dreamed of before.

Speaker 5 (57:04):
So if it's just us, it seems like an awful
waste of space.

Speaker 7 (57:12):
Right when I was young, it seemed that love was
soon