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Starship Stacked and Ready (Pending FAA Approval) · Made of Stars

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Warning. The following podcast contains an entertaining look at astronomy, physics, and
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space news throughout the known universe. Listeners have been known to learn about astronomical
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phenomenon the scientific method and expand their vocabulary to include terms like quasar asterism and
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uranus. Listen, that's your own risk. Go ahead. Where made of
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stars? Made of stars? Made size? When stars you could be from
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high Theywood, New Mexico, Mars. Where stars? When we are made
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of stars. I'm West Carroll, joined by my good friend doctor Sean Cruising
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from Columbus State University's Coca Cola of Space Science Center. Hey Sean, good
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morning, last good to be here with you. I was. I'm just
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kind of a few days back from Dragon Con in Atlanta. Thank you again
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to you and the folks of the co Cola Space Science Center for sponsoring our
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coverage. I thought about you in a very specific moment over the weekend and
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thought about this podcast because I was basically walking through the Dragon Con parade that
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happens every year on Saturday. It's one of the biggest parades in the Southeast.
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I would say, arguably, I mean, I'm not this isn't an
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official account, But I would say probably the biggest, most significant parade that
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does not involve you know, shamrocks and doesn't involve beads. Other than that,
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I would say it's it's up there at the very least. It's pretty
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close to that. But it's one of the free parts of the convention.
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With Dragon con people come and just kind of Saturday morning check out the parade
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and and some you know, go inside and check out the rest of the
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conventions. Some just go on about their day in Atlanta. But anyway,
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I was covering it walking through the parade, taking photos of the you know,
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different folks coming through the different there's not so much floats, there's a
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few of those, but there's vehicles and things that go through. But there
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was a large group that was representing the Periodic Table. Okay, and there
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that they have the that tells you that the nerd perspective on the convention,
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but they were holding a sign that's had the Periodic Table on it. Each
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person was dressed as a different element, and someone had a sign that they
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were holding that said you are made of us. And I thought, oh,
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that kind of fits in with our whole theme here on the whole made
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of stars thing. So anyway, I just had that moment there at the
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parade and I just relived that listening to our good friend Grahams saying about how
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we're made of stars. But anyway, and I'm bad. That is one
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of the things when I talk about our podcast and I try to tell people
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that, you know, the inspiring idea is that we are actually part of
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our universe. So as we as we study the universe, we're really studying
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ourselves. We're not separate from it. We're part of it. You know.
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We are literally built out of star stuff, as Carl Sagan used to
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say, and so so yeah, it's it's an interesting thing to maintain that
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perspective of, well, I don't need to know what's going on in space
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because it has nothing to do with me. No, it has everything to
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do with you. You know, You're you're part of this great uh,
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this great cosmos that we see above our heads in the nighttime sky or during
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the day for that matter. And so it's it's kind of a it's kind
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of an interesting reminder that we are actually connected to it physically, chemically in
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those ways as well. Just like even if you didn't get to go to
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dragon Con and you got to listen to the coverage of it on the Dragon
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Con Pregame show podcast. You're kind of part of that too, you know,
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in your own life, as as I was, you know. So
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that's that's how I was connected, because unlike you, I didn't get to
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get make it up to Atlanta, but I did listen to the pregame show,
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which was fantastic, by the way, and I love the particularly the
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Adam Savage interview. I loved hearing Adam Savage talk about inspiring the next generation
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and what he felt like his role was. But then also how you know,
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how he viewed the role of mentoring the next generation and how important that
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was, and so both of those points resonated with me. Folks. If
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you haven't heard the pregame show, I know Dragon Con was wrapped up now,
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but they're still out there. You can still hear him, and they
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were really good and very interesting. I would encourage you to go and check
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out on the West Carol Podcasts Network the Dragon kN pregame Show for twenty twenty
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three featuring Adam Savage from MythBusters and Phil Lamar and got to catch up with
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both of those guys, as well as some of the guests past guests from
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different interviews from over the past years, Jason Marsden, Cooper Andrews, and
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some others. George de Kay was also I didn't see George this year.
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I saw him obviously the year that I interviewed him, but I didn't see
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him this year. But he was there. He had a huge line of
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people waiting to maybe they had to move that crew because the line was so
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long they had to move him to a different room. I don't know.
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That happened sometimes when guests are of a certain status, and I think he
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probably qualifies for that. All right, let's jump into some space news,
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because that's really what we do here. I mean, this is all fun
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catching up, but you know, we got some space news to talk about.
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And I mean, Japan is having a pretty good week, you know
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when you go for the double bank shot off the corner whatever. Anyway,
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So I'm doing terrible analogy, but the idea is it's like the old that
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McDonald's commercial with Michael Jordan, Larry Bird right all off the TV, off
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the wall, off this ceiling, you know, and nothing but net.
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Yeah, very similar to what the Japanese Space Agency called Jackson has just done
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because they have launched two very important payloads on the same rocket. And they're
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two you know, both both not tiny spacecraft, and they have very different
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missions, but they were able to launch them from the same rocket. That
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happened on the calendar technically this morning at about eight forty two AM, but
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that's Japanese local time. In fact, here in the United States Eastern daylight
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time, it was seven forty two pm last night. But the Japanese Space
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Agency was able to launch from their Tanagashima Space Center in Japan a H two
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rocket built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and aboard this rocket were two missions,
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two two missions and one that's right. So anyway, so the first mission
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was something called the X Ray Imaging Spectroscopy Mission. So the X Ray Imaging
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and Spectroscopy Mission is a joint space telescope project between the Japanese Space Agency obviously,
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but also the National Aeronautics and Space Agency here in the United States NASA,
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and the European Space Agency. So it's it's Jackson, NASA, ISSA,
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a three way collaboration to build this X ray Imaging in Spectroscopy mission.
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Telescope or they call it chrism, and in that the X is kind of
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sounding like a CE or like a hard hard s sound or a K sound
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chrism as it does you know in Latin, I believe anyway, So chrism,
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I don't know Latin. Don't write, don't write the show. No,
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No, you're you're, you're, you're on point there, because that's
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the whole the origin of the like Xmas, right, you know it.
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It goes to that when people would go, oh, you're taking the you
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know, putting an X in place of Christ. It has a connection,
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I'm sure to all that, and and it just it made me wonder when
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I saw the name, and I thought, okay, chrisms with an next,
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did Elon must name it? We don't know that he didn't. There
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you go, the show can neither confirm nor did not something to do with
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this. You're saying, there's a chance I'm pretty sure that Prince wasn't involved.
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Okay, point yeah, that's it's a good safe assumption. I don't
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know that either, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have a high confidence that
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the artists formerly known as Prince didn't come up with CHRISM, but Elon might
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have anyway. So the bottom line is it's a it's an important mission.
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And in the words of Richard Kelly, NASA's CHRISM principal investigator. So this
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is the PI from the NASA side. Uh. This is a quote from
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him appearing on space dot Com. He says this, some of the things
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we hope to study with CHRISM include the aftermath of stellar explosions and near lightspeed
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particle jets launched by supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies. Now that's
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a pretty good start, right, you know, if that's one of the
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things you want to study. Obviously, in the X ray wavelengths, that's
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extremely high energy phenomenon that are being detected if they're admitting X rays. And
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so you hear the PI saying that one of those candidates is these jets from
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supermassive black holes. Well that's fun. Then he goes on to say quote,
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but of course we're most excited about all the unexpected phenomena that CHRISM will
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discover as it observes our cosmos. So basically, this instrument is more sensitive
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in the X ray. It also has higher resolution than previous telescopes, and
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that's going to turn up new phenomenon that we don't even know to look for.
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We just see these X ray sources out there, but this telescope is
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going to be able to resolve them in better detail and with more sensitivity,
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and so there are likely going to be new discoveries made of things that we
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can't even imagine might be true right now. Which that's one of the fun
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parts about anytime a new space based astronomical instrument goes up, we know that
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that it's gonna find things that we didn't even think to look for. And
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that's one of the fun parts of the Chrism mission. One of the doubleheader
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two missions launched on the Japanese spacecraft. Now, the second one is called
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the smart Lander for Investigating Moon. I don't know why it was necessary to
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leave out the Moon, but they did smart Lander for Investigating Moon. As
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you know, it's like Dave, smart Lander for investigating Dave. It's just
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like the name of the moon is moon. Yeah, well it is,
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right, I mean I guess it is it is now, so anywright,
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So if you're gonna name the moon Moon, then every time all of us
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write the word moon. We should capitalize it. That's a that's a that's
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a reference back to a previous spot that you and I did many years ago
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that NASA officials actually came out and said, yes, you should capitalize moon
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when writing the word moon anyway, all right, unless it's referring to not
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our moon, some other moon of another planet, then it's find a lowercase
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the thing. Wow, have I really derailed this conversation. I was going
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to derail it more and just say, if you're mooning, you don't capitalize
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it either. I mean, it's not necessary to capitalize that unless your name
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is Moon, in which case, if you're mooning, then you might want
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to capitalize that anyway. So but we don't have to go there, all
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right. So on board the H two a rocket, the mission called Slim
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Smart Lander for investigating Moon. Slim. These things make me laugh anyway.
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So all right, So this is a lightweight Japanese design spacecraft, and its
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purpose is just to do some very specific things. It's going to demonstrate navigation
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systems that help for pinpoint lunar landings. In other words, let's harken back
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to Apollo eleven. Neil and Buzz are coming down with the Lunar Lander getting
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ready to land on the surface of the Moon, when at the last minute,
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literally Neil realizes that the landing spot that has been chosen is full of
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boulders, and these boulders are actually big enough to make their landing spacecraft tip
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over, in which case they would be forever stranded on the surface of the
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Moon and would not be able to get back home, which seems shall we
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say bad? That seems bad. So at the last second, Neil,
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realizing this, grabbed the control handle the joystick and overrode the computer and just
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started flying manually and skirted his way across a massive crater to land safely in
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a smooth location with literally less than ten seconds of fuel. This is a
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it's an amazing story of flying. It's an amazing story of an American hero,
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but it's not something we want to repeat. So the notion of the
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SLIM mission by the Japanese Space Agency is this thing is going to have a
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system on board. It's kind of a demonstration proof of concept for this navigation
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system that is able to on its way in basically do with a computer.
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What Neil did with his eyes identify the proper landing locations in rugged terrain and
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automated, through an automated process, navigate that spacecraft down to the safe location.
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So this is kind of an artificial intelligence proof of concept landing system.
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So that's what SLIM is. It's made to be deployed on future missions to
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the Moon where there are very few runways or shopping mall parking lots. We
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have no evidence that Elon Musk is in any way associated with the Chrism naming,
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but we do now have an Elon Musk story, and it's about Starship,
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and it's now waiting. It's been waiting, I guess for a little
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while the FAA license approval to do another launch. But we know how the
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last one went, we know why. There's an FAA involvement in all of
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this. So they're getting ready and hoping to launch as soon as they can.
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Right, yes, So what's happened in the recent last couple of days
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is that Starship has been stacked on its launch pad, which means down there
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in Boca Cheka, Texas, at star Base, they've been able to rebuild
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that launch pad and get it all ready to go. Now, when I
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say get it all ready to go, they had to put in some some
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additional safety features from the last time when they flew. Do you remember that.
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Do you remember when Starship launched and just totally obliterated its own launch pad.
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Yeah, I remember that too, and it blew dirt, rocks,
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and sand all over the neighbors and it's part of why the FA investigations still
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go on. So as part of the new infrastructure around the launch pad,
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SpaceX has added what they call a water deluge system. This is something that
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NASA has been using for rocket launch as a Kennedy Space Center for quite some
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time, like over thirty years. So apparently Elon had to learn the lesson
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for himself instead of understanding from other people's experiences that you really want to flood
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your launch pad when the rock is it is launching, so that you don't
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with the acoustic waves generated by the sound coming out of those really powerful rocket
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engines, you don't completely obliterate your launch pad with acoustic waves. And the
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way to do that is just flood it with large amounts of water that break
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up the acoustic waves and keep your launchpad intact. So that was modification number
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one and number two. If you remember when they were trying to push the
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abort button. Yeah, so there were two halves of the rocket. The
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first is called the starship vehicle, the second is called the booster. And
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so the booster and the starship vehicle simply wouldn't separate, and they were trying
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to separate them. So they didn't necessarily have to destroy both vehicles. They
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can maybe just navigate one or the other, but no, they had to
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blow the whole thing up because they didn't separate. So now SpaceX has introduced
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what they call a staging ring at the top of the booster, the super
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heavy booster that will alter the way that the first and second stages are connected
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and so that they can separate those more reliably during the ascension phase of the
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rockets flight. So all of these things, ladies and gentlemen, you can
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read them on spaceflight now dot com. And it will also tell you that
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even though they have Starship number S twenty five and Booster B nine made it
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together and standing on a launchpad as if a flight is going to take place
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at any moment. You never know about SpaceX, But they have still not
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achieved the Federal Aviation Administration's license for launch because they're still going through the safety
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process, and it's important to know that both NASA and there the National Transportation
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Safety Board also have oversight. They call it an observer status on that particular
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release of license. So maybe that physically the starships ready to fly again,
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the launch bad's ready to go, they're still hung up a bit in the
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legal processes taking place before they can get this rocket off the ground. A
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second time, last week we talked about clean up of space debris. We
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got another cleanup of space debris to talk about. There's a lot of it
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up there, isn't there. There is a lot of it up there,
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and it's it's a serious problem. And that's one of the reasons why you're
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going to see more and more of these stories coming up, and we'll share
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a few more of them here. But there's the method that we talked about
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last time. There's a company that's deploying what amounts to a giant bag,
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and they're hoping to just kind of scoop up, almost like you'd scoop fish
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out of an aquarium tank, just kind of scoop up with a big old
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net any kind of debris up there, and then enclose that bag and bring
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it back down to the leaders safely. Okay, So that was last week's
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story. This week, there's a company called Turian, and Turian a California
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based company Irvine, California. They have a model to do three different things.
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But one of those things is to clean up debris in low Earth orbit
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and the other two things. One of them is what we call space situational
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awareness. That's just being able to be there and monitor in real time satellites
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that might be passing by or other spacecraft that might be passing by. And
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also servicing for satellites which could be anything from you know, maybe possibly simple
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repairs in orbit or also just deorbiting that satellite as a whole so it doesn't
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run into something else and becomes space debreede. Right. So these are all
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things that the company Turian does. They have spacecraft that they're designing that are
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called droids. Wonder where they got that Maybe from dragon Con, I'm not
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sure. Maybe somebody was walking around with the word droid on their name tag.
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I don't know. But anyway, so Turian has come up with the
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spacecraft called droids, and what the droid spacecraft are going to do is they're
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going to be able to mitigate the space debris, produce space situational awareness,
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and also serve as satellites in orbit. So CEO and founder of the company
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a person by the name of Ryan Westerdaal. This is on payload space dot
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com. By the way, here's a quote. He says, we're trying
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to grow the economic carrying capacity of Earth orbit, or grow the economic output
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of Earth orbit. End quote. Now, so what is he talking about.
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Well, the econom carrying capacity is this, you can't put there's a
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limit on how many satellites you can put into orbit if giant bands of the
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orbital space are polluted or contaminated with space debris, and so it's almost like
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having too many potholes in a road where you can't drive the vehicles down anymore,
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then that road no longer makes you money. Well, it's kind of
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like that. If spacecraft can't fly in certain shall we call them lanes of
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orbit around the Earth, then those satellites can't deploy and they can't bring money
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to the global economy, the space economy back you around Earth. So the
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notion is, deploy these spacecraft, clean up those bands within low Earth orbit
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and then satellites that can actually make money and contribute to the economy can then
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fly in those areas. Again. Coming up after a quick break, we're
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going to talk about black holes and belchings. We'll do that next. I
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think it's inevitable if you have a movie and or a cartoon, something eats
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something, then it immediately belches right afterwards. We've seen that play out in
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some different uh you know scenarios that happened in you know, Star Wars,
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Boba Fette goes down in the sarlac pit. It belches. My dog anytime
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he eats a meal, immediately afterwards he lets out a nice, hearty belch,
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which is in some cultures that just shows it they really appreciate the meal.
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Now, conversely, I guess you can burp up things, which I
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guess is the opposite of devouring them when you're talking about black holes. But
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what is this about black holes? Poly just belching out stars previously engulfed.
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I mean, so it's very similar to the dog or the you know,
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the Star Wars reference you made there, which is simply when a black hole
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eats a star. Apparently there is a belching episode that is not all that
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uncommon. To take place afterwards. So the question is due black holes burp.
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Black holes keep burping up stars they destroyed years later, and astronomers don't
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know why. So this is a new study from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for
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Astrophysics. Those of us in the business know it as CFA, So this
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is the This is a CFA led study where they monitored twenty four black holes
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that that had these flare ups of radio waves after consuming star. So imagine
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a big black hole at the center of a galaxy. There's enough material nearby
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that there are these star killing events, so they're star killing black holes where
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they're still feeding on their surrounding neighborhood. And then as the star falls in
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something happens. In about half the cases, the black holes burp. But
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the weird thing is they do it years after the event. Now the starmers
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aren't really throwing around these kinds of terms too often. This is kind of
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colloquialisms. But the black hole eating a star is not called eating. It's
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called a tidal disruption event. So the gravitational field from the black hole the
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star gets close enough that the star's composition or structure is tidally disrupted. And
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the material in falls into this singularity that we know as the black hole.
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When that happens, according to this new study, about half the time,
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within some number of years, there seems to be a follow up event,
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which is that the black hole has a sudden flare up of radio waves.
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There's just kind of like a radio burst that comes from not the black hole
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itself, because it can't. We know that a black hole is an object
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that's so dense and so massive that not even light can escape its gravity,
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and radio waves are light, so they're not getting out of the black hole.
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But the radio waves appear to be flaring up from the accretion disk,
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from the ring of material orbiting around the black hole that's awaiting its time to
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fall in. So it's almost like an echo of the destruction of the star,
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which occurs some number of years later, somewhere between three and six years
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after the title disruption event, which is strange. Now, how did they
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know this well, because they were monitoring these twenty four black holes that were
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observed to have devoured stars or had tidal disruption events, and then they watched
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them to see if the burp was coming. And again it's not a burp
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it's not gas. It is a blast of radio waves echoing from the accretion
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disk around the black hole. Folks, if you're hearing this story, which
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you are, if you're hearing me talk right now, this is weird,
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right, What physical phenomenon could lead to that taking place when the material falling
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into the black hole should be completely causally separated from the material in the accretion
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disc by that point. So the fact that this does happen, which is
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pretty clear from this test from Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics CFA. In the
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CFA study, it pretty clearly does have, but they have no physical mechanism
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that they can suggest as to why this has taken place. So guess what,
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it's an astronomical mystery found by those observational astronomers that now the theoretical astronomers
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have to go back to the blackboard or the whiteboard or the computer screen or
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whatever they do these days, and they have to rethink their theoretical predictions and
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forecasts to come up with a method where this particular physical phenomenon that has now
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been observed multiple times can take place. It's going to be interesting to see
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what they resolve. There's more to come on the story burping black holes.
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This is what I'm looking forward to us following up on down the line,
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because it certainly is. It's fascinating and wanting to know eventually where this goes.
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So this will be interesting. And you know, who knows how long
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it's going to take. This may be something years from now. We're going,
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oh, hey, remember when we talked about that. So I'm trying
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to mentally make a note that it was in September of twenty twenty three,
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so because you could take years, it could take years for them to figure
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this out. Likely will take them that long. All right, let's talk
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comets and the effect of coronal mass ejections uh solar activity and how it affects
27:15
the tales of comets. I mean, imagine you're a comet. You're coming
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in to visit the Sun. You know, you haven't seen the Sun in
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a while, so you're just gonna come in for a visit, and as
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you're driving in, the Sun just like blasts you with a giant atomic storm
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to tell you that you're not welcome. I mean, basically, it's it's
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it's a sad story, really it's, but it's a story worth telling.
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It's what's pretty much what's happened. It's what happens to my skin every time
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I go outside. I mean, it tells me very quickly, keep your
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irish behind in the house. I mean, that's basically what it does.
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So you know, I mean, the Sun can be a pretty unfriendly character.
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Let's just let's just keep that in mind. Yes, So when we
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tell these stories about the Sun, sometimes it's being unfriendly. Let's particular story,
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ladies and gentlemen. I'm going to refer to one of my favorite websites
28:03
for space news, which is called spaceweather dot com. And the thing I
28:07
love about space weather it's a solar monitoring website in particular, but it also
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has lots of other great stories about how the Sun interacts with the rest of
28:15
the Solar system, and this is one of those. And so check out
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space weather dot com on a regular basis so you can follow the Sun and
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it's increasing activity heading for solar maximum sometime within the next year or two.
28:26
All right, So, comt Nishi Mura was discovered this year. It was
28:30
discovered in twenty twenty three, and it's a comet that's coming near enough to
28:34
both the Earth and the Sun that it could be visible to the unaided eye,
28:40
in other words, without a telescope. And so that's kind of cool.
28:42
In fact, right now, as we do the show today, it
28:47
was last reported to be kind of at that naked eye visibility limit of the
28:51
fifth magnitude. So it's not going to have to get much brighter for you
28:55
to be able to see it with your unaided eye. But if you have
28:57
a pair of binoculators or a backyard our telescope, it should already be in
29:02
view. Okay, So it's fun. I love when comets come around.
29:06
Comets are just chunks of ice. They're coming from the outer part of the
29:07
Solar system. They get near the sun, the sun heats them up,
29:11
they begin to melt or sublimate, which is going straight from a solid to
29:15
a gas, and they have these long tails of both gas and dust that
29:18
can be either joined or separated. Usually they're separated. And so now you
29:22
see this lovely sight in your backyard telescope. It's a big ball of ice
29:26
with a tail behind it, and we say, oh cool, it's a
29:30
comet. Look at that, isn't it fun? So Comet Nishimura is just
29:33
following the course of what comets do coming in for its close accounter on September
29:38
seventeenth, where it actually is inside the orbit of Mercury. And as this
29:44
comet approached the Sun, the Sun just started shooting at it. It started
29:49
blasting coronal mass ejections in the general direction of this comet, and what it's
29:55
done is it's actually disrupted the structure of the tail the comet. You can
30:02
see the images of this taking place if you visit spaceweather dot com. And
30:07
if you don't do it on the day we record of this, just go
30:08
back in the archive and look for it for September seven of twenty twenty three.
30:12
That's our release date here today, So check that out and you will
30:17
see the tail of comet Nishimura just kind of being obliterated by what researchers call
30:25
a disconnection event, which is the tail is actually separated from the head of
30:30
the comet, and the tail is actually literally being ripped apart by the interaction
30:34
with these charge particles moving at very high speeds with lots of energy coming off
30:40
giant blasts from the surface of the Sun called coronal mass ejections. That all
30:45
sounds very dramatic, and it's because it is ladies and gentlemen, very dramatic.
30:52
Check it out spaceweather dot com. A great story. By the way,
30:56
the comet was first photographed and discovered by an amateur astronomer named Nishi Mura,
31:00
and that's why it gets that cool name. So there you go.
31:03
Check out komat Nishi Mura in the backyard. Check out the story on spaceweather
31:07
dot com. It's a really fun interaction to study it, to watch as
31:11
it's unfolding real time before our eyes. All right, speaking of fun interactions
31:15
that unfold before your eyes, let's talk music under the Dome because one of
31:19
the absolute best concert experiences that you can have anywhere, somehow happens here in
31:26
Columbus, Georgia. And you guys put this thing on multiple times a year,
31:30
and it is time to kick off a new season of Music under the
31:33
Dome right there in the Omnisphere Theater in October so Coca Cola Space Science Center
31:41
as part of Columbus State University. I'm on the faculty at Columbus State and
31:44
so we collaborate with other units within our university and the Shub School of music
31:48
is one of those units, and this is our collaboration event. What happens
31:52
is musicians and artists, singers and the like come from the Schub School of
31:57
Music and perform live concerts inside our planetarium, and then artists or our own
32:05
planetarium director, mister Lance tankers Lee, they coordinate visual arts for the Dome
32:10
that are choreographed with the music, and that combination of sight and sound one
32:19
of the coolest concert experiences and most different kind of experiences that you're ever going
32:23
to see. So, ladies and gentlemen, if you're anywhere near the region
32:28
of Columbus State University, which is in west central Georgia, and you can
32:30
get down to the Space Science Center on the early evening of October three,
32:36
it will be our kickoff concert for the Music under the Dome season. Come
32:39
down and check out that concert or one of our other concerts on the schedule
32:44
for the coming year. This is a really creative and fun event, very
32:47
different from a lot of the programming that we do here. But really it's
32:53
a there's a phrase that's used in education called STEAM. It's an acronym that
32:59
stands for science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and mathematics. It's where you
33:04
combine the arts with the sciences. And this is a true steam event.
33:09
It's art combined with science, combined with technology, all unfolding in your eye,
33:15
before your eyes in our Omnisphere theater for you to enjoy as a wonderful
33:19
and relaxing concert. Come check it out Music under the Dome. If you
33:22
want to know about that event or any of our events happening at the Coca
33:25
Cola Space Science Center, first follow us on Facebook. That's a great way
33:30
because we do real time updates. But also you can just come and visit
33:34
us at the website. Yes, we still have one of those. The
33:37
website address is www dot c c SSC dot org, Charlie Charlie SamSam Charlie
33:46
dot org. Come down and check out the website and look for the information
33:50
on the upcoming Music under the Dome concert series. And we thank you for
33:54
listening. As always, we'll do it again next week. Overhead Door Company
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