Latest / Made of Stars / SpaceX Prepares Another Starship Test Launch

Transcript

SpaceX Prepares Another Starship Test Launch · Made of Stars

0:00
Warning. The following podcast contains an entertaining look at astronomy, physics, and
0:04
space news throughout the known universe. Listeners have been known to learn about astronomical
0:08
phenomenon the scientific method, and expanded vocabulary to include terms like quasar, asterism
0:14
and uranus. Listen, that's your own risk. Go ahead. We're made
0:23
of stars, made them stars may when made us stars, you could be
0:34
from high they would New Mexico maas where stars when we are made of stars.
0:55
I'm Wes Carol, joined by my good friend doctor Sean cruising from Columbus
0:59
State Universe citi's Coca Cola Space Science Center. Hey Sean, good morning,
1:03
Wes. Good to be here again this morning. We have a major story
1:08
on the CUSP. We do, and it's something we've been talking about for
1:12
quite some time. A week ago, we were talking about the fact that
1:17
it seemed like Elon Musk and SpaceX were really putting the screws to the Fish
1:25
and Wildlife and the FAA at one point and trying to get another launch approved
1:33
for the super heavy Starship another test flight. We know what happened last time.
1:40
It feels like the stakes are higher this time. I mean there's just
1:42
that palpable feeling that there's a lot more going on here. Now we know,
1:48
we hope at least that they learned from the first launch that did not
1:53
go I mean, it was considered successful to them, right, I mean,
1:57
they did what they wanted to do. The problem is is they also
2:01
did several things they didn't necessarily want to do, or that fish and wildlife
2:07
and environmental agencies and people who have property in the nearby area would not want
2:15
them to do. So now that they've learned things, now that they've put
2:19
some precautions in place, tomorrow could be the day they're scheduled to launch and
2:24
give another test flight. So what's the latest on the Starship? Yeah,
2:30
not to mention in that list you were going through there, the Federal Aviation
2:34
Administration, Yeah, not very happy with the performance, but I would imagine
2:39
But I would imagine though, that in the course of human events, when
2:44
something like a rocket gets launched, I would imagine the FAA's toes gets stepped
2:50
on much more frequently than fish and wildlife. That's just that's why I kind
2:55
of left them off, because I assume they're probably like the like network sensors
3:00
on TV they're always kind of looming in nearby, and like, did he
3:05
just say that? I don't think we can use that word. Let's look
3:07
it up, you know, those sorts of things. I feel like the
3:08
FAA is always has an eye on it, and I assume you got environmental
3:14
agencies keeping an eye on it as well. But I mean, they didn't
3:17
just kind of like, you know, step in a puddle. They kind
3:22
of did a cannonball into a lake, I guess. So, yeah,
3:25
it's unclear whether any fish were actually hurt during the last launch. It's unclear
3:32
if any fish were harmed. But anyway, yes, well, at the
3:39
very least it may be made it a little harder for the fish to breathe.
3:43
How about that? Is that Is that a fair I think that could
3:46
have been at least part of the problem. All right, let's let's be
3:49
serious about this. So the Federal Aviation Administration after the last disastrous launch,
3:55
successful, disastrous, disastrous success was another man's disaster, my friend, That's
4:01
all I'm gonna say. Yep, you are not wrong that SpaceX put out
4:06
the uh self congratulatory communications and said, wow, what a fantastic success,
4:13
and and you know, objectively, we have to say, they launched the
4:17
most powerful rocket in the history of humanity and it went up. Yep.
4:24
Now, it didn't necessarily go according to plan, didn't go according to script.
4:30
Several things happened that maybe were unanticipated or at least only partly anticipated,
4:35
but the thing went into the sky. So okay. That's where SpaceX kind
4:41
of drew their line and said, well, hey, yeah, there was
4:43
a few things that didn't go quite like we thought, but we're gonna call
4:46
this success a success. Now. One of the reasons it didn't get to
4:50
its projected orbit is because when the thing fired on this launch pad, which
4:58
was not protected by a sound suppression system where you dump the whole bunches of
5:02
water over the launch pad to mitigate the acoustic waves generated by the loud rocket
5:09
engines. NASA learned this long ago, by the way, which is why
5:13
they had done that for almost the entirety of the Space Shuttle program. All
5:16
right, So anyway, so when you go ahead and launch the world's most
5:20
powerful rocket and you don't put in lessons learned by NASA, including a sound
5:26
suppression system, and you obliterate your launch pad and scatter it over a very
5:30
large area, yeah, then fish and wildlife's going to get involved, and
5:36
you know there's gonna be some complications. But yet the rocket went up,
5:43
so it's at least a partial success, and we have to kind of that
5:46
kind of tip our hats to SpaceX to say, all right, some things
5:50
to be learned here, but okay, well and fully in their defense when
5:56
it launched and they said, hey, look what we did. We did
5:59
so celebrate it with them. We were like, wow, what an accomplishment.
6:02
And then as more information started to come in, we went, oh,
6:06
so we were actually here that day at the Space Science Center with a
6:11
whole group of students who had gathered around the very large monitor out in our
6:15
exhibit gallery, and we're watching that launch live and they kind of showed this
6:19
shot from the ground up toward the massive number of rocket engines, and it
6:27
was pretty clear that not all the engines were lit. In other words,
6:31
not all those engines were firing. And it's because the concussion of those very
6:38
strong sound waves on that brittal launchpad blew materials from the launch pad back up
6:44
at the engines and knocked them out, and that's why they didn't make it
6:47
to the projected orbit in the first place. So yeah, it was more
6:51
than just a little bit of a miscalculation. It actually prevented the flight from
6:56
achieving its goals. And so I guess maybe that was number one and one
7:02
A on the list of literally one thousand upgrades that had to be made to
7:10
SpaceX Starship in order to pass FAA certifications. These are mandated corrections by FAA
7:18
along with just improvements that SpaceX themselves knew they needed to make to keep that
7:23
thing from happening again. Oh wait now, so now they've made it.
7:27
Now they're ready to launch. So that's the short story. I know you
7:30
don't have the checklist in front of you, but a thousand upgrades, Like,
7:34
is this something that they said, hey, we've upgraded a thousand things,
7:39
or do we think that this is a over a thousand things or do
7:42
we think this is a list the FAA said, here's a thousand things that
7:46
you need to tweak. Because if it's coming from SpaceX, maybe they just
7:50
painted a different color and they go, that's an upgrade, all right.
7:54
I mean, I'm just wondering, were there really over a thousand individual problems
7:59
that need to be resolved? So we do know some of this. So
8:03
the FAA themselves only mandated sixty three corrections. Ah, okay, that still
8:11
seems like a big number, right, Hey, there's only sixty three things
8:16
wrong with your rocket. I mean that's still a fairly large number. And
8:20
it's not just on the rocket, it's on the launch pad, it's on
8:20
the whole process. Right, So we understand that, but let's remember less
8:24
it's an important, important time to remind all of our listeners how SpaceX does
8:30
things. They participate in a process which they refer to as agile development,
8:35
which means we're not going to figure everything out on the chalkboard, because you
8:41
never figure everything out on the chalkboard anyway, even when you try to the
8:45
nth degree to figure out every detail on the chalkboard or in simulations is a
8:50
better, you know, kind of twenty twenty three thing to say, there
8:54
are still problems that occur. So what SpaceX says is, well, we're
8:58
just going to get it to some of a more primitive state. We're gonna
9:01
go ahead and try it, and then we're gonna figure out the thousand problems
9:05
that we need to fix from it, and that way we can be moving
9:11
in real time towards solutions, rather than arguing about parameters in some kind of
9:16
a simulation in the back room. We actually see what happens. We blow
9:20
it up, we fixed the problems, We blow it up again, fix
9:22
the problems, blow it up again. You and I have discussed on this
9:26
podcast how that seems similar to the Star Trek Next Generation characters of the Borg.
9:33
It's the way the Boorg did things. They just kind of went into
9:35
battle and they saw what you did, and as soon as you did something,
9:37
they modified on the fly to where you couldn't do that thing again,
9:41
and then pretty soon they're defeating you because they made all the necessary modifications.
9:45
I'm not saying Elon Musk is in the Borg. I'm not saying that.
9:50
I'm stopping short of that, but I am saying that perhaps as a younger
9:54
person, he watched Star Trek the Next Generation and said, you know,
9:56
if I ever have a space company, we're gonna do things like a Borg
10:00
does it, because they are very efficient in their engineering processes. We cannot
10:03
confirm he's in the Borg. We also cannot confirm that he was a fan
10:07
of the tennis great Bjorn Borg either. Neither of those can although he does
10:13
have that one T shirt that says locutest of musk. It seems odd.
10:20
It does seem odd. So I mean, in a perfect world, they're
10:24
gonna launch this thing tomorrow and it's gonna go up, and everything's gonna go
10:30
exactly the way it's supposed to. We know, based on what you just
10:35
said, there's always a possibility that it's not gonna go exactly the way they
10:39
want it to. Uh. And I would assume as long as they make
10:43
a little bit of progress, they're successfully carrying out this strategy that you're talking
10:48
about. If something happens and it doesn't actually lift off of the launch pad,
10:54
then I guess then they would call it a failure at that point.
10:58
Well, or is it just a next step in the agile development That's true,
11:01
maybe they learned something else about it, right exactly. So again,
11:05
it's important to keep in mind that that core philosophy of engineering that is used
11:11
at SpaceX. And let me just say, let me just say, they
11:16
have been enormously successful, Wes. They have been able to do these things
11:20
in a way that made things that seemed like science fiction twenty years ago happening
11:26
right in front of our eyes. Including like twin boosters coming back down and
11:28
landing simultaneously on launch pads from Falcon Heavy, including a Tesla roadster in orbit
11:35
around the Sun, traveling out by the orbit of Mars, all of these
11:39
things. They've been enormously successful in creating a platform to carry astronauts back and
11:46
forth to the International Space Station, as well as supplies, cargo, all
11:48
that kind of stuff. They are now building the most powerful rocket ever,
11:56
including more powerful than the mighty Saturn five that took astronauts to the Moon,
12:03
including more powerful than the N one rocket that the Soviet Union tried to launch
12:09
for a number of years during the Moon Race, and they never made it
12:13
work. It exploded on the launchpad and killed their director of their space program.
12:20
You know, this is these are all things. This is something that
12:22
governments could not do just a handful of years ago, and SpaceX is doing
12:28
it. So we make fun, we tease about agile development that process,
12:35
but yet it seems to be enormously successful. And I don't know if the
12:39
agile development their way through the you know FAA and their review and you know,
12:45
fish and wildlife or whatever. But they did send Bill Gerstenmeyer to the
12:48
Hill Kirsty Gersty went to the hill and spoke with the folks up there and
12:54
said, y'all are getting in our way. We're ready to launch this thing,
12:58
and you're holding us up with government red tape, and you are preventing
13:03
the acceleration of the exploration and usage of space for economic gain. So get
13:09
out of the way. If you don't know who Bill Gerstenmeier is, by
13:11
the way, ladies and gentlemen, he's the former head of human Spaceflight for
13:16
NASA, so he's a really well known person in the space industry and in
13:20
governmental circles as well. So all of this stuff is happening, and now
13:24
we are, as we record the show, less than twenty hours away from
13:28
a potential launch of the most powerful rocket humans have ever built. So about
13:35
eight am on Friday morning, seventeenth of November. In case you're listening in
13:39
the as we like to say, future, future, future, So if
13:45
it goes well, you'll know we were talking about it here it was about
13:48
to happen. So the best case scenario is that they've improved on a lot
13:54
of the problems. I mean, well, best case I guess would be
13:56
that it's a completely successful one and they want to send it up up around
14:01
the planet and then splash down in the Pacific, what near Hawaii, that's
14:05
right, And so so it's going to make you know, a loop around
14:09
the you know, the planet and demonstrate the fact that they can actually launch
14:15
this payload into a successful orbit. And that's the big thing. Remember,
14:18
folks, there's Starship has two components. It has a vehicle that's also called
14:22
Starship, and it has the Falcon super Heavy booster, which is where all
14:28
the rocket engines have to work. But the vehicle called Starship that sits atop
14:33
that booster is NASA's ride to the Moon in a sense. It's it's the
14:39
vehicle that the NASA vehicles will rendezvous with to go down to the lunar surface.
14:45
SpaceX has already won that contract, and so them launching this vehicle is
14:50
not just you know, a billionaire playing with toys. This is actually part
14:54
of NASA's Artemis program. Right. They have to be able to launch Starship
14:58
into a lunar orbit so that the Orion capsule can rendezvous in lunar orbit with
15:05
the Starship, and the Starship takes astronauts back and forth from lunar orbit down
15:09
to the surface of the Moon and back up to rendezvous with Oryon again.
15:13
So this is again not just a frivolous project. This is part of the
15:18
Artemis program being demonstrated. Okay, So it's also a means of getting more
15:24
payload, more cargo into space, which is also important, and I guess
15:28
that'll segue into our next story, because now the White House laying out possible
15:35
rules for private space stations and other space based activities. So you're gonna need
15:39
a vehicle that can take you know, large amounts of cargo and things into
15:45
space so that they can actually build more of these, not just the bounce
15:48
house space stations though, the actual ones that are gonna have actual walls to
15:54
them and stuff. Not that a bounce house isn't a wall, but I
15:58
just think about the bounce house, you know, it sounded that we talked
16:02
about the bounce houses what five six years ago the first time we talked about
16:04
that as a as a possible hotel, and then not long after that,
16:10
we had all these stories about, oh, this was a bounce house at
16:12
a birthday party, and then augusta wind blew him six and a half blocks
16:17
up the road, and I was like this is not This doesn't seem like
16:19
the best case scenario for astronauts or or just people going to a space hotel.
16:26
I mean, fortunately, Low Earth orbit is almost entirely free of giant
16:32
wind guss. That's true, because there's no atmosphere, so they have that
16:37
going for this. That's true. But you know, I mean, there
16:40
was a point where I don't think anybody really thought that those little bounce houses
16:44
at the birthday parties were going to go flying through the air either. So
16:45
we don't know, we don't know what's gonna happen. It's a reasonable point,
16:49
well taken. I don't know if the space industry has looked at bounce
16:52
houses at birthday party four because they know about the wind. But what else
16:57
is out there? I mean, how many times? How many times is
17:00
a tiny little piece of space debris gonna cause an ammonia problem on the International
17:06
Space Station? One of those hitting a bounce house. It could fly well,
17:10
it's not gonna fly around like a balloon, but you get my point.
17:11
It wouldn't be good. I mean, you could have a cosmic ray
17:15
with an over inflated self importance, right, yeah, cause something like that
17:19
could I don't know anyway, So what WESS is referring to, by the
17:22
way, ladies and gentlemen, it was a company called Bigelow Aerospace who had
17:26
a contract with NASA to install an inflatable module onto the International Space Station and
17:33
blow it up and test it. They did some of that work, but
17:37
it never really inflated, if you know what I'm saying. Yeah, So,
17:42
anyway, so that company has since gone bankrupt. However, there are
17:48
a variety of other commercial space companies and they want to put people in space,
17:51
they want to send lots of tourists to space, they want to do
17:52
economic activities on their own without NASA and the governments, well they're behind.
17:59
And then this happens in lots of industries where the government goes, wait,
18:03
I'm sorry, who's overseeing that, Who's making sure all of that's good to
18:07
go? Oh, well, our regulatory agencies have not caught up with that
18:11
particular activity yet. Therefore, we're going to pass various pieces of legislation which
18:17
assign oversight to activities to various organizations within the federal government. So that's what's
18:25
happening right now. There is legislation moving through the halls of Congress, to
18:30
better oversee a variety of space activities and mostly split up the oversight to two
18:37
departments within the executive branch of the federal government, the US Department of Transportation
18:42
and the US Department of Commerce. And the bill which is being proposed by
18:48
the National Space Council, which is an oversight group for the it's an advisory
18:53
group really for the space industry. But it has been chaired by vice presidents
18:59
all the way back to the Trump administration. Doesn't feel that long ago anyway.
19:03
Mike Pence's job was to oversee the National Space Council. That was the
19:06
Trump administration that brought that back. But then, I mean, you hand
19:08
off the baton, right, So it's Vice President Kamala Harris who is now
19:14
seeing overseeing the National Space Council. And so it's Vice President Kamala Harris who's
19:19
leading the effort along with the Space Council to increase oversight to a variety of
19:25
activities in space. What kind of things are we talking about, Well,
19:29
space stations, commercial ones, right assembly and manufacturing in microgravity, the removal
19:37
of space debris and broken down satellites which are definitely a hazard. All of
19:45
these activities are now going to be overseen if this legislation passes by either the
19:49
Department of Transportation or the Department of Commerce. If human beings are going up,
19:56
it's going to be overseen by the Department of Transportation, and it's going
20:00
to be their job to put in new regulations to protect all of these unwitting
20:04
people who think that there's really no risk in going to outer space. Then
20:11
if it does not include human beings on board, if it's simply robotic economic
20:17
activity, that will be overseen by the Department of Commerce, the US Department
20:22
of Commerce, and that will include the things like manufacturing and satellites and such.
20:29
So it'll be interesting to see number one, if this legislation gets passed,
20:33
and number two, how far reaching it is, because early discussions about
20:37
this legislation not only regulate activity in low Earth orbit orbit around Earth, but
20:45
also out to the Moon, and early reports indicate that they have language in
20:52
this document that also says and other celestial bodies like that covers literally the rest
21:02
of the universe. It does doesn't leave it to the federal government to think
21:08
that their reach extends to the outer reaches of the entire universetain because other celestial
21:17
bodies would fall in in some tidy manner into that category. So does it
21:22
have the word multiverse anywhere in it too, because I would think they might
21:25
consider that as a I mean, I'm not sure why they didn't include that.
21:27
They might as well have probably in another universe, like in what part
21:33
of the multiverse they've already claimed it. Maybe that's what happened. I tried
21:38
to see any kind of reaction from Bill Gerstenmeyer on all this new uh oversight,
21:45
shall we say, by the federal government. I didn't see any quotes
21:47
out there by gersty but they're going to be coming, so I can't wait
21:51
to hear what what you know, he and others have to say about the
21:55
new legislation being proposed by the National Space Council. All right, let's talk
22:00
beetlejuice. We talked about beetlejuice around Halloween, which was appropriate, that was
22:04
fun. And we've been talking about beetlejuice in some capacity now for quite a
22:10
while because there's been you know, potential activity, but something different now with
22:15
beetlejuice to talk about. Let's be clear on our listeners, our regular listeners
22:18
already know this. We get Beetlejuice into the conversation. Any chance we get,
22:23
any day we get to come on and do a Beetle Juice story just
22:27
makes me happy. In today's the day, friends, because next month,
22:32
in December, on the twelfth of December, there's an asteroid, a lonely
22:36
little asteroid. It's even pretty far down in the catalog. It's number three
22:41
nineteen, it's three to nineteen Leona, and it's a lonely asteroid out there
22:47
in the main asteroid belt. But it's going to do something rather remarkable on
22:51
December twelfth, from the vintage point of the surface of the Earth, that
22:56
little asteroid's going to pass in just the right place to block out one of
23:02
the greatest stars in all of the nighttime sky, the upper right shoulder of
23:07
the constellation of Oriyan the Hunter, the super massive red giant star red super
23:12
giant star, Beetle Juice. And when one celestial body blocks out another,
23:19
that's called an occultation. Now, if you think that is just some strange
23:22
word that has to do with Halloween or whatever, why do we use that
23:26
word in astronomy. Literally, the word occult means to hide, So it's
23:33
a hiding that's taking place. The asteroid will pass in just the right position
23:37
to hide the light from Beetle Juice for a very short period of time from
23:41
the surface of the Earth. But here's the interesting thing. Astronomers, well,
23:45
they're clever people, and they figure out during these kinds of events how
23:48
to use these events to measure things. And as that asteroid passes over the
23:56
disk surface of the star Beetle Juice for microseconds, it will reveal different structures
24:03
within the atmosphere of Beetle Juice. And if some clever astronomers can take data
24:10
at a rapid enough pace, they can put together a time sequence of this
24:14
hiding of that star and come up with some measurements of surface features on the
24:21
star itself, sunspot groups, or complications in the magnetic field of that star
24:27
Beetlejuice, which might give us more indication of what's taking place inside the star.
24:33
And then it feeds data to all the theoretical astrophysicists who can model what
24:40
may be happening to the star Beetlejuice. Because again, if you're a regular
24:42
listener, you know that that star is about ready to go supernova, at
24:48
least on the timescale of the lifetime of stars, which could be tomorrow or
24:53
it could be twenty thousand years from now. But that's again on a star
24:59
line lifescale, that's a relatively short period of time, and so what's happening
25:04
on the surface might give us some very important clues as to when, on
25:10
that rather broad timescale, Beetlejuice might actually be approaching an actual explosion. Is
25:15
it soon? Is it still relatively far off compared to our lifetimes. We
25:19
don't know, But this occultation on December twelfth by three nineteen Leona might give
25:26
us clues about the physics taking place inside the massive star Beetlejuice. Coming up
25:32
after a quick break. The Red planet has one spacecraft seeing green. We'll
25:37
talk about that next planets. Okay, so it's known as the Red planet,
26:03
but it sometimes glows green. What's this story, Sean, Well,
26:08
we didn't really know that until some brand new data came in from a really
26:12
cool spaceship called the Exo Mars from the European Space Agency. And the Exo
26:19
Mars has an instrument on board called the Trace Gas Orbiter, so it's the
26:23
Exo Mars Trace Gas Orbiter TGO. So this instrument aboard the European Space Agency
26:30
vehicle was able to detect something very cool, which is this. Let me
26:36
back up right now and tell you a story. It turns out that when
26:38
the Sun goes down, the Earth's air actually glows at night. And I
26:45
don't mean just the Aurora borealis that happens when the Sun gets extra grumpy.
26:48
I mean every night. Every night, there's something called air glow. The
26:53
air absorbs energy from the Sun during the day and it re emits some of
26:59
that energy night and so there is actual luminescence coming from the atmosphere of the
27:04
Earth in the evening hours from this process called air glow. Well, for
27:10
the very first time, the EXO Mars Trace Guess orbiter has discovered air glow
27:18
at night, which we call night glow, on the red planet Mars.
27:23
So this spectrum of light has been observed for the very first time glowing air
27:29
on Mars not caused by interaction with solar activity. And it's very beautiful and
27:37
very interesting because it's glowing ready, ready, green green glow from the red
27:44
planet. That seems unusual. Why would that happen? Let me just ask
27:48
this because I just want to make sure that this has already been ruled out,
27:52
and I understand, we know. My role on this is just to
27:55
ask the questions that the listener at home might want to ask, and I'll
28:00
leave the actual science to the scientists. That's your role. Are we sure
28:03
that the person who was looking at this was it colorblind? Is there a
28:08
possibility that that's what happened and it's not actually green, it's red? I
28:14
mean I have I can't neither confirm nor deny the color blindness status of the
28:21
individuals examining these data coming from the Exo Mars trace guess order. But what
28:26
I can do is talk like a scientist and say, we can actually measure
28:32
the wavelengths with numbers, so therefore we don't have to actually see the colors.
28:37
We can just see the length of the wavelengths of light coming in and
28:41
we know what part of the color spectrum they fall in without having to either
28:47
be positive or negative on the color blindness issue. So therefore we quantify things.
28:52
That's what we do in science. All right, smart guy, I
28:55
got you. I thought maybe rods and cones played a part, but I
28:57
guess not. I mean, it's not that they don't they play a role
29:03
somewhere along the line, and whether or not you can perceive these color differences
29:07
coming from the Martian atmosphere, However, what's really taking place is that two
29:11
oxygen atoms are recombining into an oxygen molecule and giving up a very specific amount
29:18
of energy, and that very specific amount of energy always translates into a wavelength
29:25
of electromagnetic radiation being emitted that falls squarely in what we would refer to as
29:30
the green portion of the visible light spectrum. So it's a number that we
29:36
see, and that number correlates with a color that if you don't have red
29:40
green color blindness, you can detect with your own eye. So there's how
29:44
that all ties in. So but the cool thing is this, not only
29:47
do they know what reaction is causing this very specific glow in the atmosphere of
29:52
Mars, they also know the altitude, and that piece is very different than
29:56
on the Earth. The Earth puts off this same green glow in its atmosphere,
30:02
but it's from a much different altitude, and that's because the structure of
30:06
Earth's atmosphere, being far more dense than Mars, is very different from the
30:11
Martian atmosphere. And so the altitude that this occurs on Mars is at thirty
30:15
one miles, a very specific amount of altitude, and that does something for
30:22
both astronomers and engineers. It gives us a really good idea of the structure
30:27
of the Martian atmosphere and where it is more dense and where it is less
30:32
dense. So this color indicator coming from the glowing night glow of the Martian
30:37
atmosphere is actually helping scientists and engineers understand the Martian atmosphere better so that they
30:44
can do a couple of things. Well, the natural scientists, they want
30:47
to model the Martian atmosphere and figure out more about its chemical properties than otherwise.
30:52
But engineers just want to know can they drop a spaceship throat without burning
30:56
up? Or how big does the parachute have to be in order to keep
31:00
this thing from hitting the ground at a certain speed. And so these new
31:03
pieces of data, these new pieces of evidence coming from this nightglow are helping
31:08
better understand the structure of the Martian atmosphere for both those interested in modeling the
31:15
atmosphere and those wanting to put payloads through the atmosphere or figure out how much
31:21
Martian atmospheric drag there is on satellites or other kinds of payload concerns traveling through
31:27
the Martian atmosphere. So important again, both for theoretical scientists and good old
31:33
practical engineers trying to get payloads down to the service of Mars. Twenty years
31:37
of friendship, about thirteen years of doing this version of the show on radio.
31:42
This is our one hundred and fiftieth podcast in this format. Here,
31:48
first time I've ever called you a smart guy. I mean, and I'm
31:55
not even sure that fits all that well. I'll be honest, I'm just
31:57
a guy that spent too much time in school. I guess you could think
32:00
I was smart. I don't know, but I do. I do play
32:05
that role here on the Show's right, So thank you for referring to me
32:09
with that moniker. Maybe it helps people think I'm actually smart. I'll be
32:13
inquisitive guy, you'd be smart guy, And I think we got something going
32:15
for us. All right, let's talk about the Cocola Space Science Center,
32:20
because you guys shift into Thanksgiving week mode next week. We are. Yeah,
32:23
we're coming up on the holidays, and there's lots of things that change.
32:27
Here's The first thing I would encourage folks to do simply follow us on
32:30
Facebook because that's where a lot of real time information about our programming and other
32:36
things is coming out right there on Facebook. Also, visit us on our
32:39
website because we update our holiday hours there regularly. But the quick version of
32:45
the story is we are going to be open for some period of time during
32:47
the week of Thanksgiving. We're gonna be opening up Monday, Tuesday, and
32:52
Wednesday of that week, and then then we're gonna be closing down and spending
32:57
some time with our family just like everybody else. So you know, we
33:00
hope that you have a wonderful holiday and enjoy that time. But we will
33:06
be closed the remainder of that week and we will not be opening up again
33:10
until the Monday following Thanksgiving, which is November twenty seven, And we plan
33:17
to do a show next week. That'll be a show one we'll see if
33:21
we can work a smart guy into that show. Thank you for listening,
33:25
and we'll do this again next week. Overhead Door Company of Columbus has all
33:37
of your garage door needs covered residential and commercial service and repairs. If you
33:43
need a new garage door, you're just looking to upgrade or repair your current
33:46
door Overhead Door Company of Columbus has you covered. Plus they've got your emergency
33:52
repairs or service covered as well. Seven oh six three five eight forty five
33:58
hundred seven oh six three five eight forty five five hundred O dccolumbus dot com