Latest / Made of Stars / SpaceX Successfully Launches Starship Into Space

Transcript

SpaceX Successfully Launches Starship Into Space · 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
0:13
and uranus. Listen, that's your own risk. Go ahead. When made
0:23
of stars, made them stars mad sizes. When made of stars, you
0:33
could be from high they would New Mexicomus. Where a stars? When we
0:55
are made of stars. I'm West Carol, joined by my good friend doctor
0:59
Sean Cruising from Columbus State Universities Coca Cola Space Science Center. Hay Sean.
1:03
Hey, well that's good to be with you today. All right, it's
1:07
finally happened. There's been stages of success for SpaceX with Starship. This is
1:15
a new milestone. Like it was, it went up, it blew up,
1:17
and then it went up a little bit more. And then now we've
1:21
had another launch. Can we now call it a successful launch? I mean,
1:26
to be clear, Yes, it's successfully launched. Yes, it successfully
1:33
got the space and then it blew up. I mean so in SpaceX terms
1:40
of course, it's a success because as you said, it's the next step
1:42
in the milestone. That's right, Yeah, right, so this is just
1:47
the next level that they go through in their engineering process. And yeah,
1:53
not everything they had, you know, potentially for it to do today did
1:57
it actually complete? However, it completed all the things that the last rocket
2:01
didn't. So so you know, let's just talk about it in terms of
2:06
what it did do and then we can talk about what it didn't do.
2:08
So what it did do is this? Well, before you before we go
2:10
to that, I just want to ask this. When you say it made
2:13
it to space, did it touch more space than William Shatner and Michael Strahan.
2:16
I mean, that's the first question we've got. I mean, I
2:20
think it's about the same amount. Okay, you know if you think of
2:23
like your Shatner straighthand level of space, uh huh, you know, Wally
2:29
Funk. That's good. Yeah, that's good. Right, it's the it's
2:31
the Shatner straighthand Wally Funk level of space. You know, it didn't it
2:37
didn't orbit the Earth, but neither did they. Yeah, that's true,
2:42
so you know, yeah, it's right in it's right in there with that.
2:44
So it's what is called a suborbital flight. All right, So SpaceX
2:47
launched the Starship on its third test flight. It was kind of epic.
2:53
The whole thing worked on the way up, which is fantastic. So SpaceX's
2:57
Starship Mega rocket is the world's large, the most powerful rocket today. It
3:01
launched from Bokachica in South Texas, the Bokuchika Launch facility. It reached orbital
3:09
speed, so, in other words, it was going fast enough to orbit
3:13
the Earth, which made it the historic flight. It's the most powerful rocket
3:19
to ever reach orbital speed. That's why it's historic. So then the Starship
3:25
vehicle that you know, lifted off about ten about nine to twenty five am
3:30
Eastern daylight time. The announcements, shall we say, I was gonna say
3:38
the tweets, but I can't really say that. The announcements that went out
3:40
on X from the company founder Elon Musk, and that's not X founder,
3:46
it's SpaceX founder. Elon Musk says, this starship reached orbital velocity. Congratulations
3:53
SpaceX team. All right. So so when you ask what the next milestone
3:57
is, that's it right there. It each orbital velocity. It got to
4:01
a suborbital trajectory. It was going fast enough to potentially go into orbit,
4:09
but they aborted that because well they didn't really abort that. They had planned
4:13
to bring it down and do what they call a soft splash test in the
4:18
ocean, and so that's why they fired the engines in such a way that
4:23
it took it back out of orbital velocity. It's important to note that this
4:28
event all happened on the twenty second anniversary of SpaceX's founding, which the company
4:33
pointed out twenty two years ago. SpaceX was founded March fourteenth, two thousand
4:40
and two. So anyway, these are all kind of the you know,
4:43
the lead ups to the actual story, right, so all of these things
4:46
can we can say did happen? And yeah, to this level, sure
4:51
they happened successfully. So first thing, I don't know how I didn't know
4:58
this that it was founded on. I mean, that's a little delightfully nerdy
5:01
in its own right. That and and then for this, uh, and
5:04
for the record, I want to just say this, I ask, can
5:08
we call it a success? And we've covered this over you know the past
5:13
uh, you know, several or the past few months, but several weeks
5:16
of each one was a success in its own right. I mean, that's
5:20
the that's the and it's the nature of the way SpaceX does this. They
5:25
they launch, they figure out what went wrong, they launch again, they
5:29
figure out what went wrong, they launch again, and now they're back to
5:31
that stage of okay, well, now what's next for us? How how
5:35
do we uh, you know, actually have it orbit the Earth? That's
5:39
you know, they it's a progression of things that they have to do,
5:42
so each one successful. But this milestone of actually getting it to space and
5:49
orbital velocity, that's impressive. It is impressive, and you know, it's
5:54
it's kind of a funny battle of words between what I would call the press
5:59
or the media and SpaceX themselves. Of course, SpaceX is calling this a
6:05
success for the reasons that you just said. They have an iterative engineering process
6:12
called agile development, where they solve the next level of problems by seeing where
6:18
the rocket blows up. Right, So I wouldn't say they're intentionally failing because
6:25
they don't see it as a failure. They're intentionally pushing the test designs so
6:31
that they can see where individual system failures occur, fix those individual systems,
6:38
and then eventually you have a perfectly functioning rocket and no rockets ever perfect,
6:43
I get it. But Falcon nine is very close to perfection in terms of
6:47
rocketry, and so they're just taking Starship along the same course of engineering and
6:54
down the agile development road. Now, of course, people in the press,
6:59
they're ltimately going to say, oh, another failure because it didn't do
7:03
all the things that it could have potentially done, which is, you know,
7:08
the vehicle having a re entry to a soft touchdown and the main booster
7:14
having a soft splash down in the ocean and all these kinds of things.
7:19
So was it a success or not. I'm gonna go ahead and say yes,
7:23
because they have completed their next step in the process of checking off boxes
7:28
for milestones. When you go back to the first attempt for this thing,
7:33
all the engines didn't fire and they blew up the launch pad. I mean
7:39
that alone is a big step. The fact that they've moved on from those
7:44
two failures. Yeah, I mean, and you know, to add to
7:46
that, all the engines didn't fire, probably because they blew up the launch
7:50
pad and materials hurtling into the engines themselves. So yeah, that was a
7:55
mistake. Huh. They're gonna go ahead and say, yep, we need
7:58
to fix that, and then they did. Then they fired again and things
8:01
still didn't quite go right, didn't reach that you know, that orbital velocity
8:07
like we just talked about. Okay, so they fixed more problems. Well
8:11
today they now reached orbital velocity. They just didn't bring things back down and
8:16
land correctly. So you know what problems they'll be going after next time.
8:20
Right, So let's just go through a quick summary of what did happen today.
8:24
By the way, so you can check this out on SpaceNews dot com.
8:26
So Super Heavy, the Super Heavy booster which carried the Starship vehicle into
8:33
some orbital flight, all thirty three of its raptor engines did fire correctly.
8:39
They fired for nearly three minutes, which was the intended time. Then they
8:43
did something called hot staging, which this is really impressive. They don't wait
8:50
until that engine shuts off those I'm sorry that set of engines shut off on
8:54
the main booster before going ahead and firing the upper state engines. So it's
9:01
a multi stage rocket, right, So then Starship's upper stage engines fired while
9:05
the thirty three raptors were still in the process of firing again, a process
9:09
called hot staging. Okay, so the hot staging actually worked and they were
9:15
still attached to the super heavy booster, but then they detached after that upper
9:18
stag's engines were already firing pretty amazing stuff. Then the booster performed what they
9:26
intended to be a soft splashdown. Turns out not all of the engines fired
9:31
correctly, and that booster seems to have come in at a high rate of
9:35
speed, something exceeding one thousand kilometers per hour or you know, over six
9:41
hundred miles an hour, and went very violently into a collision with the ocean.
9:46
So that didn't maybe go as quite to plan. If you're gonna be
9:50
really picky, you can call that a failure. Yeah, it's a failure.
9:54
Certainly they're gonna be looking into what happened there. But once again,
9:58
did Starship get to space, Yes it did. Did it achieved orbital velocity?
10:03
Yes it did. Okay, So then Starship the upper stage performed its
10:07
burns and it placed the vehicle into its planned suborbital trajectory. It avoided the
10:11
fate of the previous Starship, which is back in November, which broke up
10:16
at about that stage in its flight. Right it was venting propellant and the
10:20
propellant caught fire and exploded that whole vehicle. So that's what happened to the
10:24
previous starship on launching Temp number two. So while in space in the suborbital
10:30
trajectory, SpaceX opened its payload bayed door that is used going to be used
10:35
later to deploy Starlink satellites out of Starship. Right, so they tested that
10:41
that test went well, which is good. They also did another demonstration which
10:46
they have to do for their NASA contract. Remember, Starship is one of
10:48
the chosen lunar lander vehicles for the Artemis program and one of the things that
10:54
they have to demonstrate that they can accomplish for that NASA contract to It's called
11:01
propellant transfer maneuver where they actually take propellant and move it from one tank to
11:07
another tank inside the vehicle. Now, this is ultimately leading toward in stage
11:13
refueling between two different starships, where you can set up a starship full of
11:16
fuel, it comes in contact with another starship fuels it up so that other
11:20
starship can make the trip to the Moon. All right, So that was
11:24
that demonstration that went successfully. Again, all of these things are why you
11:30
can call it today's flight a success and not feel too bad about some of
11:33
the other end results. So several minutes later, the vehicle started its re
11:37
entry and then a camera on the flap of Starship showed the re entry footage,
11:43
and then all of a sudden they lost that footage, and they did
11:48
track it to the ground using other NASA and Starlink satellite networks, and it
11:54
appears that that vehicle broke up before completing its re entry back to the surface
12:00
of the Earth. So yes, the Starship was once again lost, but
12:05
not before completing several of these milestone tests, which are all first for Starship.
12:11
So Starship is slowly and steadily making its way to pass all of its
12:16
tests required to be the moonlander for the Artimist program, which is pretty special.
12:22
Think about the world that Elon Musk lives in, that he has this
12:28
day and you can he can certainly call it a success, even if you
12:31
know, the haters or anybody wants to call it anything otherwise. But he
12:35
can have this day, this successful launch into space, and then have basically
12:41
the moment where you say, okay, it's you know, they lost the
12:46
image because complications and things However, he flips over to his other company and
12:52
says, hey, but the Starlink satellites relayed everything back to Earth so everybody
12:56
could keep truck on it. So you know, so that was a big
13:01
win for us over there. It's Starlink. And let us not forget he's
13:05
putting out the communication on his other company called X, and people that are
13:11
hating on him are hating on him on that company, which is only helping
13:16
X. And then you know, any of the people that are using X
13:18
that get in there Tesla's and drive home or what. You know. There's
13:22
always so many different ways that Elon can call it a win, I guess.
13:24
But and the media has no choice but to call it X. And
13:28
then in printesy say, formerly known as Twitter, Yeah, like you know
13:33
the Prince, you know, formerly known as some symbol that we couldn't pronounce
13:37
anyway. So so yeah, and then probably there's there's probably like a Tesla
13:41
ad on the media's page. Probably, I mean, there's definitely a way
13:46
to work all of it in. Well, congrats to the folks at SpaceX.
13:50
I almost said it Tesla to the folks at SpaceX. This this was
13:54
a this was another step in this progression and they're they're demonstrating this agile development
14:01
process that they use. It's it's science, man, I mean, it's
14:05
science and action. And I know that. You know, when you're you're
14:09
using taxpayer money, you're you're a little more conservative about some of these things.
14:13
When you're you know, using billionaire money, it's a whole different story.
14:18
Uh. And you you can do things, uh, the way that
14:20
you want to do things. So h a nice win for them today on
14:26
the anniversary of the starting of the company. That's also impressive. Yeah,
14:30
that's pretty cool. And and let's just be clear, the most powerful rocket
14:35
ever built just reached orbital velocity. So so if you don't make it any
14:43
farther than that headline right there, yeah, that's that's impressive stuff. Right.
14:48
So I can't I can't disagree with it being called a success. I
14:52
think it's a successful flight. And yeah, they'll they'll go to work on
14:56
the next round of bugs. But if you remember the Falcon nine program and
15:01
all of those boosters that almost landed successfully on that barge out at sea,
15:05
they almost stuck the landing, Well, now it would be a major news
15:09
story if a SpaceX booster for a Falcon nine rocket didn't land successfully, right,
15:16
It is just like clockwork now. And I suspect that SpaceX is also
15:20
working to that level of proficiency with its Starship system and the super heavy booster.
15:26
They just quite haven't. They haven't quite gotten there yet. All Right,
15:30
we have another rocket story to talk about, and this happened yesterday,
15:37
and I just wonder, is this company in Japan gonna call their attempt at
15:46
launching a success? Are they? Are they working the agile development process?
15:50
Is what I guess I'm asking. I mean, you might as well send
15:52
that out as an internal communication. I mean, everybody got to see the
15:58
launch, and you know, the fireworks show, because that's what it really
16:03
was in the end, but first commercial rocket for them to launch in Japan,
16:10
and this is space one, and it went up and I mean,
16:15
I don't know how high it got. I was watching it and I'd already
16:18
heard the headline, Hey it exploded after launch, so I was waiting for
16:22
it, and then boom, there it was. And then of course they
16:26
showed it over and over and over again, and I was like, are
16:27
we sure this isn't SpaceX, because the way they're covering this, it's almost
16:32
like they're trying to rub it in on SpaceX. Yeah. I mean,
16:36
anybody who tries to be anywhere around a SpaceX launch in terms of your own
16:41
rocket going up within less than twenty four hours, shall we say, you're
16:45
going to suffer the ultimate comparisons. And so yeah, this is this is
16:49
not a very space SpaceX like event, although unless you say yes, we're
16:55
simply engaging in the same agile development process that SpaceX participates in. So the
17:00
company called space one. The rocket was called a Chiros rocket. It's a
17:04
four stage solid rocket. It was lifting off from Spaceport Kii, I think
17:11
is how you pronounced that in Kushimoto, Western Japan. And the vehicle did
17:18
not make it very far off the launch pad yesterday before exploding. Right,
17:22
So the videos out there online you can check it out. Space dot com
17:26
is one of the places that has the story. The flight only lasted seconds,
17:30
it ended abruptly, and the flight termination system was to blame, or
17:37
I should say it's what terminated the flight. And so the flight termination system
17:41
is an automatic system that if it detects too many anomalies or malfunctions with the
17:47
rocket, it just goes ahead and blows it up so it doesn't fly off
17:49
and hurt somebody or damage somebody's property. So that flight termination system is what
17:55
triggered the explosion, And so something went wrong that the flight formination system deemed
18:00
as too big of a hazard and simply in an automated way, exploded the
18:04
rocket there over the launch pad, as you said, kind of like a
18:08
fireworkshow So, I mean, this is one of those cases again, and
18:14
I'm not gonna I know, we were sort of joking by throwing the agile
18:18
development philosophy into the mix of it, but I mean, realistically, this
18:22
is a commercial rocket, private company in Japan. They launched a rocket higher
18:29
than I've ever launched one, So I got to give them kudos just for
18:32
that alone. But at the same time you talk about, you know,
18:36
what caused it to detonate, and the fact that it was a process that's
18:41
in place, it's what it's supposed to do in case there's a problem,
18:45
I would again make the case good for them. They had a successful launch
18:49
in that regard. I'm sure they're probably you know, I don't know what
18:55
the funding situation is for a space one and who owns the company, but
19:00
I mean companies are different, and SpaceX is kind of its own beast,
19:03
and it's not really fair to compare it to them. There's probably people there
19:07
going, oh my gosh, we blew up our rocket. This is a
19:08
devastating day. But again you have to look at it and say there was
19:14
some success in that it did what it was supposed to do if there was
19:18
a problem. Yeah, and all modern rockets have that kind of a system
19:23
on board now, and so all of them, all even the ones from
19:29
China, you know, has those words you were leaving my mouth. I
19:33
thought to myself, well, okay, in the Western world, Yeah,
19:37
most of them anyway, something I don't know, but yes, so I
19:41
think to some level, yes, all of them, even though giant boosters
19:45
from China are still allowed to basically fall on people's houses. But anyway,
19:48
the rocket itself will blow up with all of its fuel on board as it
19:52
takes off with this automated termination system. So so yeah, it's it's unfortunate
19:57
when your rocket is meant to go to space and it blows up, you
20:02
know, five hundred feet off your launch pad. So that can't really be
20:06
termed a success, but it can be defined as the next step in your
20:11
engineering process. And again, I think this is what SpaceX has been very
20:15
very good about putting a positive spin on these quote unquote failures are not really
20:19
failures, that are just their next up step in the engineering process. I
20:23
mean, I guess it's kind of like just saying, hey, there was
20:27
an issue with the plane, but the parachute worked. I mean, I
20:30
know that's kind of what you know this is like. But so there's that
20:34
story, and that was one of those things that you're seeing a lot of
20:37
yesterday on the news, and I guess some this morning, but I think
20:41
SpaceX took the headlines away from them. Coming up after a quick break,
20:47
we're going to talk about a very signific We just mentioned the anniversary for SpaceX.
20:52
Another significant anniversary yesterday, and we will talk about that next. So
21:22
yesterday, thirty five years ago a the day the sun brought darkness. Yeah,
21:30
it did like that. How could the sun bring darkness? One might
21:34
be wondering, Well, it can knock out your power grid, that's how.
21:38
And then the sun sets and when it does that, now you don't
21:41
have sunlight or power. And if that happens to happen, you know in
21:45
March, when it can be quite cold in a place like Oh, I
21:48
don't know, Canada. There's all kinds of even as we record today,
21:52
there's all kinds of blizzards and things moving through the Western United States and Canada.
21:57
I don't think March is a good time to lose power, can It's
22:00
really not. It's not so so. Yeah, if the sun did all
22:04
that, yeah, it's a day that it brought darkness. And that's the
22:07
headline on spaceweather dot com for a great story. A reminder that thirty five
22:11
years ago, yesterday, the thirteenth of March, as we're recording this podcast,
22:17
the greatest solar storm of the space age engulfed the planet again. These
22:23
are the words from spaceweather dot com. A good friend, doctor Tony Philips
22:27
over there. So so the interesting thing is this a solar flare so powerful
22:34
and so effective launched a coronal mass ejection at the Earth that when it struck
22:41
the Earth, it caused an overload in the power grids, so so overcharged
22:51
that it blew out the power transformers and was called hydro quebec and the grid
22:57
failed within ninety seconds. So this was a really powerful surge of charged particles
23:07
coming in from the Sun that managed to get through our planetary defense of the
23:11
magnetic field around the Earth penetrate down through the atmosphere come in and hit the
23:18
power lines and cause the power grid to surge in such a way as to
23:23
blow out major components within the main transformers. And it left millions of quebecios.
23:33
I guess that's the way you say that millions of people who live in
23:36
Quebec. It left them without light or heat for nine hours. Now once
23:44
again in the it's not in the heart of winter, but it's in the
23:48
very early early springtime when it can still be quite cold. This is actually
23:52
not a very a very fun experience. So all of this to say,
24:00
big storms from the Sun really can and have effect that our power grids in
24:06
the past. Now, the power grids of twenty twenty four, well,
24:11
we've learned some lessons along the way, and so the engineers that work on
24:15
our power grids system they've put some precautions in place that protect us from the
24:21
levels of the of solar flares and kernal mass ejections that we experienced back in
24:25
nineteen eighty nine. However, they are not completely immune to the potential for
24:33
very big storms from the Sun, something like what's known as the Carrington event
24:37
or the Great Solar Flare of eighteen fifty nine. An event such as this
24:41
could still bring our power grid down to its knees, and so we need
24:45
to continue to improve our understanding both of all of the phenomenon that take place
24:52
on the Sun, but then also all of the vulnerabilities of our own power
24:56
grids and try to engineer those and protect ourselves. INTI which away that if
25:00
there is that biggest class of solar storm on the Sun and it is facing
25:06
right directly at the Earth, that we have some assurance that our power grid
25:10
can either a totally with handle the shock, or b could be back up
25:15
and running in a reasonably short period of time. Just a couple of thoughts
25:18
on that, And this is one of the reasons that we talk about CMEs
25:22
or we talk about solar activity because this very reason, and you talk about
25:27
you know, we've made some progress with our systems now. I'm sure they
25:33
felt confident with the systems in nineteen eighty nine. So that's another observation.
25:37
And then finally, if you've never had a bowl of Canada's favorite breakfast Cereal
25:41
Quebecio's. You need to try them. They're delicious. They've got a mixture
25:47
of British speaking marshmallows and French speaking marshmallows, mostly French there in Quebecio's,
25:52
and they're really quite tasty. So you should try them if you ever get
25:56
a chance to have a bowl. My favorite are the green clover leaves.
26:00
I like those. Those are good. It's very I understand the red maple
26:04
leaves are pretty good too, so I think I think they swapped out the
26:10
the clovers for the maple leaves, and I think that's the way it works.
26:14
It's a very similar product. But I do like the clover leaf reference.
26:18
Just in time for Saint Patrick's Day this weekend, let's talk about the
26:23
James Webspace Telescope. Another another win for web. Yeah, the James Webspace
26:30
Telescope pulling off yet another amazing discovery, this time some tiny worlds out at
26:36
the very edge of our visible solar system. These are right here in our
26:41
own solar system. JWST performed some infra infrared spectroscopy on about fifty nine distant
26:47
bodies over the past couple of weeks and the results have just been announced.
26:52
You can read about the story on Skyantelescope dot org. That's the website for
26:56
Sky and Telescope magazine, one of our favorite publications, by the way.
27:00
So this effort yielded the compositions of these tiny dim worlds for the first time.
27:04
We got a good look at what these little objects out there at the
27:10
edge of our Solar system are really made out of. And so these objects
27:14
are called trans Neptunian objects or tn os, and so the program is called
27:21
Discovering the Composition of trans Neptunian Objects icy embryos for planet formation, which gets
27:27
a great acronym called disco tn os. Also a great also a great breakfast
27:36
cereal. I mean, I love the tn os that have the little shape
27:41
of the James Webspace telescope made out of marshmallow. It's awesome. They got
27:45
the little Neptune mascot that goes They're tasty, you know, some of my
27:52
favorite I have them every Saturday morning. Fantast tale. My disco tn os
28:00
goes great with a glass of tang and a moonpie. All right. So
28:07
this particular study was led by astronomer Noami Pinali Alonso from the University of Central
28:14
Florida. So this study is designed to help us better understand the processes that
28:22
led to the formation of the Solar System by looking basically at these little chunks
28:26
of rock and the Kuiper Belt that have been undisturbed since the formation of the
28:33
Solar System, so they're unlike the world Pluto itself. Pluto also sometimes considered
28:38
a trans Neptunian object because it cuts inside of Neptune's orbit, so it crosses
28:44
Neptune's orbit in its elliptical path. But the fact that it has an elliptical
28:48
path means that it's probably interacted gravitationally with other bodies or it has collided with
28:56
some other body, and so Pluto itself can't really be conc thatered a pristine
29:00
sample of the early Solar system that's just been untouched and undisturbed since the Solar
29:06
System formed four and a half billion years ago. However, these new objects
29:11
discovered by the James Webspace Telescope and their compositions analyzed, they really are tiny
29:17
objects that are probably left over in an undisturbed manner from the earliest moments of
29:23
Solar System formation. So that's kind of a cool thing. By the way,
29:29
the two objects that have been released most recently are called Moors and Solemness.
29:37
Mores and Solemness the names of these these little tiny worlds. So they're
29:42
both about sixty eight miles across, which is not very much, and they're
29:48
considered to be where called wide wide separation binaries, so that means that compared
29:55
to their size, their distance apart is fairly large. But yet they are
29:59
held in common gravitational orbit around one another. This kind of a system is
30:03
usually considered to be rare and fragile because over the whole length of the lifetime
30:08
of the Solar System, you would think that some other body would have come
30:12
through pass nearby and either gravitationally disturbed these two objects or just run into them
30:19
and caused a collision. So the fact that you have these two objects that
30:22
are look pristine from the formation of the Solar System still orbiting around each other
30:29
in this kind of fragile orbit really means they likely haven't been disturbed since the
30:33
very earliest epochs of the formation of the planets and other objects in our Solar
30:38
system. So a couple of time capsules being studied by the James Webspace Telescope
30:44
and once again you can find out the whole all the information on this by
30:47
reading the whole story at Skyantelescope dot org. Home Game Astronomy Night on Saturday
30:53
for you guys there at the Co Cola Space Sign Center, Yep, we
30:56
love to have our Astronomy Knights here at Space Science Center, and that's partially
31:00
because we have our big telescope here and on clear nights when we have our
31:04
home game Astronomy Nights, we open up our telescope and let the public tour
31:10
the dome and the main instrument up there inside our Midwest Bake Observatory, our
31:15
West Rock Conservatory, and so we also those set up our telescopes out on
31:18
the pad on the south lawn and we'll show people the nighttime sky and friends.
31:23
We are hoping, we are hoping, keeping our fingers crossed that the
31:29
installation team that happens to be in our facility right now installing a brand new
31:33
planetarium system. We're hoping they have it done by Saturday, because if they
31:38
do, those folks that come down for that Astronomy Night might be the very
31:41
first people that are privileged to see the display from our brand new planetarium system,
31:48
our digited our seven system from Evans and Sutherland Corporation, will for sure
31:53
be opening up our planetarium with that system next week, but we might be
31:57
done as soon as Saturday, or I should say the technicians here installing it
32:01
might be done as soon as Saturday, and so that group that comes down
32:05
for our home game Astronomy Night here at Space Science Center might get the chance
32:08
to sneak preview our brand new planetarium system in the Atmosphere theater. Well,
32:14
thank you for listening, and Sean and I will be back again next week
32:17
to do it again. Overhead Door Company of Columbus has all of your garage
32:28
door needs covered residential and commercial service and repairs. If you need a new
32:32
garage door, or you're just looking to upgrade or repair your current door,
32:37
Overhead Door Company of Columbus has you covered. Plus they've got your emergency repairs
32:42
or service covered as well. Seven oh six three five eight forty five hundred
32:47
seven oh six three five eight forty five hundred O Dccolumbus dot com