Latest / Made of Stars / Virgin Galactic Successfully Launches Final Test Flight

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Virgin Galactic Successfully Launches Final Test Flight · 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 stars? You could be from High Hollywood,
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New Mexico, Mars. Where are stars? When we are made of
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stars? Joined by my good friend doctor Sean Kruzen from Columba State University's Coca
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Cola Space Science Center. I'm Wes Caroll. We have to start it with
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good afternoon, Sean, because we delayed our recording of this week's show by
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a few hours for good reason. And I'm just going to preface this whole
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show by saying we from time to time we'll have stories about private space companies.
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This week we got a lot of stories about private space companies and none
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of them are SpaceX, which is really weird. But I guess the only
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real elon Musk News that doesn't relate to us really was the whole Twitter announcement
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with Ronda Santis yesterday. That was all a giant mess, so he's got
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other things to worry about, trying to figure out how to get those live
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streams working. But we got Virgin Galactic to talk about right out of the
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gate, because they're the reason we delayed our recording time today and by all
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accounts at this point and we all we know is what we've seen immediately after,
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but a successful launch for Virgin Galactic today. Yeah, the first thing
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I'd like to say is simply Richard Branson. You know, we've said Elon
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Musk and Jeff Bezos so much on our podcast here that I just really want
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to say Richard Branson. There it is, Ladies and gentlemen, there's another
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name. I mean without him, Without him, I don't know that we
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would be at this stage with any of these companies. I think they would
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have all eventually gotten there. But he certainly was the guy who saw this
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from the very beginning, from the very early stages of all of this,
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the potential of all of this. So without it, without him, I
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don't know that we'd be at this stage with any of these companies. So
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there's that. You know, you and I, between the radio show and
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this podcast, have been doing this long enough that we kind of remember those
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early days of when Virgin Galactic was the lead company. They were the you
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know, not air apparent, they were the you know, the leader apparent
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in this pioneer. Yeah. Yeah, the Pioneers. That's right. Thank
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you, the pioneers for taking people to space as a tourist destination, as
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a hobby, as commercial just regular people flying, you know, much like
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people would fly on a commercial airline, flying on a commercial SpaceLiner to space.
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And since that time, there's been various complications that have happened with Virgin
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Galactic, and no need to beat the druma on those, because today we're
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kind of celebrating the fact that they have flown their final test flight as a
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successful suborbital mission of both what they call Spaceship two and their carrier aircraft.
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This particular version of Spaceship two is called the Vssunity. That was the actual
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spacecraft that took these six people, six individuals up to space today for Virgin
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Galactic. And then the carrier craft, which is that big double fuselage jetliner
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where you can straddle the spacecraft mountain underneath, that was called the VMS Eve.
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And both of these vehicles at this point now seem to have performed flawlessly.
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As West mentioned a few minutes ago, we didn't go on live recording
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of this podcast until we were sure that that vehicle was safely back on the
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ground. And so just moments ago, VSS Unity with its crew landed back
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at Spaceport America into Mexico, and they are safely on the ground and everything
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seems to have been a success. So the vehicle was slated to fly to
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a height of roughly fifty thousand feet. Just over that altitude crosses the line
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for some definitions of being in space. It's not really past what's known as
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the Carmen line, but it is higher than both NASA and the United States
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Air Force considered to be in space. So we're not going to argue those
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definitions on this program today. We're just going to say that that's the target
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altitude. They achieved it, and now they have some additional people have been
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up there and visited space, certainly low Earth and not orbit because it's a
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suborbital flight, but high enough to be in space to experience that microgravity for
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some short period of time and then come back down. So they now have
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come back down. They've landed safely and everything looks good for a celebration for
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Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic out at Spaceport America in New Mexico. So a
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couple of things I want to talk about how this particular launch is different.
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You mentioned the plane, and there's a reason that they do it the way
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that they've done, and it has a lot to do with, you know,
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a jet fuel costing less than rocket fuel and all those sorts of things.
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But just as an observation, because like you pointed out, we've been
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talking about Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic for a long time now. It seems
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to me, and I mean just covering this the way that you and I
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cover as a company, they have done the slow, methodical process that we're
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used to seeing from NASA. UM. You know, it's it's clipping the
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bonsai tree for the purposes of getting everything just right. And it feels like,
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you know, SpaceX in a lot of ways has been you know,
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much more of I don't know, the guys with the machine guns and Predator,
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it's a lot more, you know, just in that sense, it's
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like, let's get the job done, and let's move on to the next
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thing. I mean, is that an accurate sort of I'm sure I'm over
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dramatizing it, of course with the predator thing, But as far as the
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similarities between the way Branson's company has done it versus the others, I think
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this is true. I think that certainly in the early days of Virgin Galactic,
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they were pushing the envelope pretty hard too, and they and they were
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really wanting to get out. I mean, they they have the first ever
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commercial space vehicle, which is Spaceship one, hanging in the Smithsonian National Air
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and Space Museum, right, So they really were on that kind of rapid
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development bleeding edge for a while. But you know, they had an accident,
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So let's not forget that. You know, we don't again, we
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don't want to beat these drums of negativity on a day where they're celebrating positive
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things. They actually lost a pilot in the test phase of this whole thing
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and had to do some pretty serious redesigns. They did notice some structural complications
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not too long ago, so they had to do some re engineering of the
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structural components of the vehicle and even some of the materials and so so yeah,
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I mean, if it looks like they slowed down a bit, it's
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because they ran into those technical problems. And they ran into those technical problems
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in part because of the design of their vehicle, not being a capsule on
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top of a giant rocket stick like SpaceX is doing. And that's because you
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know, SpaceX just went with a different model, and actually Blue Origin and
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Jeff Bezos in terms of their new Shepherd rocket, they went the same model
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that SpaceX did up they went with a suborbital version of that, and so
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anyway, so there are differences in the designs, which, yeah, I
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think once this is more complicated design in a way, and once they ran
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into some of those technical issues, it did slow Virgin Galactic down. Maybe
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the company's focus was a bit distracted because they had Virgin Orbit, which was
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essentially a similar platform, except instead of dropping passengers from out from underneath a
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carrier vehicle, they were actually planning to drop rocket payloads to get them actually
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into orbital flight for small satellites and things like that. And just within the
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few last few weeks that company has gone belly up and has declared bankruptcy and
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they now sold off assets, some of their equipment they had worked on.
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So for Branson maybe in general and the Virgin Empire, there were some of
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these distractions, right, some of these things that were certainly barriers slowed the
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whole thing down. They dropped that a site for a while. But today
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today's reason for success. They have now flown the vehicle and assuming now that
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once they do the kind of post flight redress of looking at everything and making
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sure they understand all of the mechanics that went on, making sure that the
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vehicle didn't suffer the same kind of strains and cracks that they had seen in
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previous versions, that they'll be ready to go for for commercial launches. Right,
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so they'll you'll probably likely hear a lot more about Virgin Galactic taking everyday
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people to space at ticket prices that are probably a whole lot cheaper than say,
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Blue Origin. We know roughly what Virgin Galactics asking for right now.
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They're asking for about four hundred fifty thousand dollars a seat, whereas we don't
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really know what Blue Origins asking for, but we get the idea that it's
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more than that. So these are all you know, this is kind of
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the state of the industry and whereas Virgin was quiet for a good long time.
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Depending on the successful outcome from the actual engineering and the you know,
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the body integrity of their vehicle things like that, they might just rapidly jump
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into the space news scene for being a company that's taking people at least on
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these suborbital flights. Could be now time for them again to to start moving
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forward at a much more rapid pace and just worth noting. And you're talking
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about, you know, obviously them having the accident. You know, NASA
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had those kinds of problems along the way too. There's a reason that it's
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done at the pace that it's done by NASA, and I just just kind
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of noticing that, like you said, Virgin got to a quick start from
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the beginning, but as you know, work their way to the stage where
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it feels like it was a much longer slow burn to get to this stage
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for them. And of course, uh and it's not that the other companies
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aren't also being careful and safe, you know, they just haven't had that
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kind of high profile accident. I guess that that you know, calls them
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now of course, and we're not talking really a lot about space X today,
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but obviously they had their environmental issues and things that happened with their most
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recent launch that could be a little bit of a delay for them. But
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today is not the space X day. Today is about Virgin Galactics. So
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kudos to them for this successful launch and and what this will mean for them
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being able to move forward. Yeah, it's it's really hard to talk about
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the present state of space flight and the the aerospace industry without somehow mentioning SpaceX.
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Yeah, we know Branson, Branson and Musk or buddies. I mean,
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they're you know, we talked a little bit about you know them.
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They show up at each other's house in the middle of the night apparently,
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so so they hang out and sleep on each other's couch that's right, barefoot
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with a kid and tow or whatever. You just don't ever know their their
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buddies. So, I mean, it's it's hard not to at some point,
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uh mentioned that and know that there is some sort of I mean,
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this is a you know, a commercial space race that is sort of going
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on, and between those two at least it's a it's a friendly challenge.
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Yeah, those two companies are doing something very different. So whereas Virgin Galactic
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has these kind of suborbital roller coaster rides. That is their primary marketability.
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SpaceX is taking astronauts to the International Space Station, right, And that's kind
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of a cool segue into our second story, which is which is all about
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SpaceX just doing that on a Falcon nine rocket delivering yet another Dragon capsule to
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the International Space Station, but this time doing it for Axiom for their AX
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two mission. Right. And we talked last week about the X two mission
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and the fact that they were getting ready to launch some history made a very
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significant I think last week I called it a bulletproof glass ceiling that was now
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shattered. So a successful launch for AX two. Yeah, so notably aboard
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AX two a veteran hero astronaut from the NASA Space Corps now retired, but
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now a commercial astronaut for Axiom, and that would be Peggy Whitson retired again,
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retired NASA astronaut, but now she has a fourth flight to space.
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She had three flights to space with NASA, where she became the longest duration
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space flight astronaut in the American Space Corps. She had six hundred and sixty
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five days in space, more than any other American astronaut period male or female,
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but also more than any other female astronaut in the world. Right,
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so she is literally a legend of astronautics. And now she's got a brand
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new flight back up to the International Space Station, but this time not directly
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with NASA, this time with Axiom Space and their AX two mission, which
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put Peggy along with fiber optics entrepreneur John Schaffner and a couple of Saudi Arabian
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astronauts ali Al Karney and Rihanna Barnowie who are now aboard the International Space Station.
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They're gonna be up there for eight days. That astronaut crew, which
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is a full commercial crew, only the second time that a full commercial crew
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has launched to the International Space Station. Right. No, no governmental astronauts,
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you know, a way to think about it, No, no astronauts
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supported by a nation state, but rather just by a company. That's why
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we call them the commercial astronauts. So no, no NASA astronauts aboard,
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only commercial astronauts up to the space Station. They'll be up there for eight
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days doing research. They're also gonna be doing a whole variety of public outreach
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activities with kids across the Middle East see that's something that's pretty cool. Now
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these two Saudi Arabian astronauts are aboard our International Space Station and can give children
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all across the Middle East a new goal to shoot for, a new target
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for a life path, which is to become an astronaut or aerospace engineer or
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that kind of thing. And so there's a lot of positive energy with that.
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So anyway, that's that's the crew aboard the AX two, which is
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Axiom second NASA sanctioned private astronaut mission to the International Space Station. There are
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now eleven people on board the International Space Station. Now this is kind of
15:26
like having eleven people in your Winnebago, you know, like we're all staying
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in the same motor home traveling to the Grand Canyon. But you know,
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we started out there, it was like three of us, and now there's
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eleven of us because we picked up some hitchhikers along the way. Anyway.
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So yes, So the AX two crew, four of them arriving at the
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International Space Station took the space station crew from seven astronauts to now eleven astronauts.
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So conditions aboard considerably more crowded aboard the International Space Station than prior to
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this flight, and you pointed out the being able to reach out to a
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new audience as far as the kids and the bulletproof glass ceiling I was referring
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to last week and we talked about it. But having a Saudi Muslim woman
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in space, that is a monumental milestone to be you know, the first.
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Yeah, it's it's a really cool thing. And you know, it's
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a Again, I believe a lot in the inspiration of role models, and
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we've done a lot with that around our facility where we've had a variety of
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astronauts come to our museum, meet with school aged children and actually inspire them
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to not only do well in science, but they actually produced pursue careers in
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the space industry, which now many of our former students and graduates here at
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Columba State University are working at places like the Marshall Space Flight Center and a
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variety of other space industry locations including Blue Origin by the way, too.
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So so yeah, it's a it's a great thing to be a role model.
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It's a great thing to have role models who you can somehow relate to.
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You know, people say things like, well they look like me right,
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or I can envision myself being in that person's role because I have a
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similar upbringing or something along those lines. So yeah, the more people of
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diversity that we can introduce into the space endeavor, certainly, the more children
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around the world will be inspired to want to pursue these kinds of adventures.
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And this is a number of hurdles that she would have had to clear to
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get to this point. So it's a it's a great story. There.
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Let's talk about another commercial space flight company and this is some big news for
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Blue Origin from NASA. Yeah, again, we're it's gonna be hard to
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avoid that other company when we have this story too, but well we mentioned
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them scaringly anyway. So so NASA has awarded Jeff Bezos company Blue Origin,
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and quite frankly, it's a team of different companies led by Blue Origin.
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They include Lockeed Martin by the way in there, so that's another familiar name
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in that team of companies. But this company, led by consolidation of companies
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led by Blue Origin, has been awarded a three point four billion dollar Artemis
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Moonlander contract. Now, wait a minute, ladies and gentlemen, let us
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think for just a moment, who already had the contract for landing astronauts on
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the Moon in the Artemis program. Well here comes that mentioned. We can't
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avoid that was SpaceX and their starship. So they already won the contract,
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and when NASA awarded that contract, they did it in such a way that
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SpaceX was the only company awarded. Now, they could have awarded multiple companies
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at that time, but they did not. They said, no, SpaceX's
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concept is so far in advance of their competitors that were simply going to award
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the contract to SpaceX and SpaceX alone. Well, shortly after that, Jeff
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Bezos and Blue Origin filed lawsuits against NASA for non compete or not, you
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know, not the ability to compete kinds of things. Anyway, So that
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the notion is that wasn't Blue Origin just suing NASA. I mean they were
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just suing it. And actually so a judge just came out not terribly long
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ago, twenty twenty one and ruled in favor of NASA, ruled against Blue
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Origin. But now it's twenty twenty three and they're all buddies again. They
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went out and had a couple of beers, they all made up, and
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now a secondary contract for a lunar lander has been awarded to SpaceX. Mind
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you, it's under a different administration, but okay, so it's been awarded
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to SpaceX. So here we go. So now SpaceX has a contract for
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building a lander. By the way, you can read more about this on
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spaceflight now dot com. They have a really great story about this contract.
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It's not a small contract. At three point four billion dollars, that's a
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pretty big one. And so the NASA administrator, Bill Nelson had some comments
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about this very large contract awarded to Blue Origin. He said this, we
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want more competition. Now. He's not saying I don't like SpaceX. He's
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just saying, well, you know, probably best to have a couple of
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different taxi companies going back and forth to the lunar surface. Why don't we
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look for a second vendor, maybe get them involved. Maybe that competition will
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spur on excellence. I actually kind of happened to believe in this model myself.
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I think that's the kinds of tactics that were employed that caused an explosion
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in the commercial space industry in the first place. Don't just have all your
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eggs in one basket. So there's a second basket now, So okay,
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Bill Nelson. We want more competition, is this quote, and to continue
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the quote, we want two landers. That's better. It means that you
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have reliability, you have backups. It benefits NASA, it benefits the American
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people. It helps NASA share the risk, the technical risk, and the
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financial risk to enable at the end of the day, mission success. So
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there you go. That's the quote from Bill Nelson on the award of these
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contracts or the secondary contract for a lunar lander to a coalition of companies led
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by Blue Origin. I tend to agree the options are good and competition is
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good. That only seems to be something that would drive those companies forward and
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put NASA in a position for success. So I tend to agree with that
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statement as well. Coming up after a oh sorry, what do you yeah?
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More? Well, I was gonna say, you just can't help.
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But notice the battle of billionaires, right, I mean, so there's that
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James Bond kind of aspect of the whole thing about So it's entertaining for us
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in this particular branch of the media to kind of say, hey, look,
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Jeff Bezos swinging a swing back at Elon Musk. Here we go again.
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So anyway, there is that aspect that is somewhat mentionable as we go
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through, and it makes sense. There's a lot at stake here for these
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guys that are trying to push this forward, as you know companies that they're
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running, So it's understandable why they would have such an interest in securing contracts
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like this. So it makes sense, and it makes sense why you know,
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NASA might want to keep options open and hopefully and hey, who knows,
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eventually we could have a third and fourth option and there all of that
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is a possibility down the line. Coming up after a quick break, a
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supernova spotted in the Penweel galaxy. We'll get into that. Then a supernova
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spotted in the Pinwheel galaxy last week. Yeah, this is just a neat
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story we hear at our observatory. We deal with college students and we like
23:11
to train them on how to use telescopes with events just like this one.
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We have images from something else called the Whirlpool galaxy or a supernova went off
23:22
a few years ago, and we had both before and after pictures of that
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one going off. You see, ladies and gentlemen, supernova supernovae are so
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bright that you can see them in other galaxies because one star assists exploding could
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actually produce more light than the entire galaxy which hosts it. And it really
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depends on the angle that the supernova's going off relative to its parent galaxy,
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how much dust and gas or in that galaxy. A lot of different things
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like that. But now we see in this relatively nearby galaxy called the Pinwheel
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galaxy. Amateur astronomers know it as Messier number one on one or M one
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O one. So this this is a galaxy that's a familiar backyard telescope object.
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You can go out and see it in the backyard near the Big dipper.
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Well, there's been a super Knov explosion that went off on that one.
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It was first noticed by someone who reported it on May nineteenth, Itigawa
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Koichi Itigawa from Yabagada, Japan. And so you know, I always just
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love these names that I butcher on here. I'm I'm very sorry, mister
24:26
Ittigawa. Hope, I hope I didn't say your name completely wrong anyway.
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So a Japanese amateur astronomer reported this the on May nineteenth. People then started
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looking at their pictures of this galaxy and realized that they may have had some
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images that were even before the reporting of that. So the earliest confirmed image
24:45
was taken on the night of Thursday, May eighteenth, so like a night
24:49
before the Japanese astronomer reported it. But now there's been some images that have
24:55
reported the very earliest imaging might have been even several days before that. Now
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why is it important to know that? Well, first of all, you
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can kind of argue about who the actual discoverer really was. But the other
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thing is all of those images are kind of precursory to the brightest part of
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the supernova. They form together something called the light curve. And if we
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know how rapidly this supernova develops in time, or in other words, how
25:23
much the brightness grows over a certain period of time, and we know the
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shape of that light curve, how the rate at which that star is brightening,
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we can kind of deterell we can kind of determine some physical characteristics of
25:38
the supernovac itself. And so that's why it's really important to go back and
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look at some of those archived images and just see if we can see precursory
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images of this supernova in development. So astronomers are now doing that. By
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the way, the Pinwheal galaxies about twenty one million light years from the Earth,
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which really sounds like a long ways. It sounds like wow. Okay,
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so took twenty one million years for the light to travel from that galaxy
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to hear But if you compare that to the scale of the cosmos, it's
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actually somewhat relatively nearby. It's not that distant, it's not extremely far.
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So this is a galaxy relatively in our neighborhood, which means we can do
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a little bit better job of studying it because we can see it in better
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details. So all of these things now are leading to a variety of astronomers
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beginning to look at this object. And on the day we're recording this podcast,
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which is the twenty fifth of May, you can visit spaceweather dot com
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and they have an article up about the discovery of the supernova and how it's
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progressing and what astronomers are learning about it. So, for instance, one
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of the things that they think they're learning about it early on is that it's
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what is called a type two supernova, and type two supernova are those that
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are the very large stars that have core collapse rather than a red giant white
26:53
dwarf binary system where the red giant's throwing material on the white dwarf until it
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explodes. That's a Type one A supernova. So so there, that's it's
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a it's an important distinction. And again a lot of that is determined from
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that lightcurve. So these observations of these amateur astromers end up being very important
27:11
in the actual scientific investigation of this cataclysmic event in space. You don't feel
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too badly about his name. I don't see a single download or listen from
27:22
Yamagata, Japan in the last thirty days, so I don't think he's listening.
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But if he does happen to, you know, tune into this episode.
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By all means, we'd love to have you on the show. That's
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all I'm saying. Let's talk about a sun spot that is rapidly growing,
27:38
and I guess just in like twenty four hours or so, it's grown a
27:45
lot to the point of not being visible to visible. That's quick. That's
27:48
exactly right. Yeah, Yeah, that's exactly right. West. So,
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so as solar astronomers are watching what they call active region number thirty three fifteen
27:57
that's a sun spot group. You know how the Weather Channel will now like
28:02
name weather systems as they come across, and the way that people name hurricanes
28:07
at the National Weather Service anyway, So solar astronomers kind of do something similar.
28:11
They give them names, but they really are catalog numbers. So this
28:15
sunspot group active region number thirty three fifteen yesterday not even really all that visible
28:22
to solar telescopes, but as West just said, within twenty four hours it
28:26
has now grown to four times the size of the Earth, and so that's
28:33
huge, and so it developed basically overnight as far as we're concerned here on
28:38
the East coast of the United States. And when sunspot groups are growing that
28:42
fast, that means they're very volatile. And when they're very volatile, that
28:48
means they can explode into what we know as a solar flare. And AAR
28:53
thirty three fifteen happens to be rotating into an orientation that points it in the
29:00
direction of the Earth. So that's why all of these things are kind of
29:03
adding up to a thought process that says, hey, we need to really
29:07
kind of pay attention to this. Now. I'm gonna point back to our
29:10
friends at spaceweather dot com once again, because this is a good place to
29:12
go and check out the development of this sunspot group as it grows. And
29:18
again as we're recording this is May the twenty fifth. It's about four times
29:22
as wide as the Earth. But because it's so fast growing and it's breaking
29:26
through the Sun's southern hemisphere, it's a good candidate for in the next say,
29:33
forty eight to seventy two hours, erupting in very powerful solar flares.
29:37
So certainly solar astronomers are gonna be watching this big sunspot group as it's in
29:42
development. They're gonna be watching it to see if it's hurtling dead, deadly
29:47
material at the Earth. And the folks, like the folks at spaceweather dot
29:51
com, they're gonna be letting you know all about that. And actually,
29:53
spaceweather dot com has a really cool service. You can actually sign up to
29:57
receive next messages when solar flares are going off. Why on Earth would you
30:04
want that, Well, it's so you can go outside at night and see
30:08
if you can see that beautiful northern light phenomenon that is tied to solar flares
30:15
as they impact the magnetic field of the Earth. So there's a solar flare
30:19
alert that can you can sign up for from our friends at spaceweather dot com.
30:25
Summertime pretty much here. I know we still have a little bit for
30:29
you know, official summertime, but we sort of acknowledge it. As as
30:33
we get past the Memorial Day holiday, which is obviously this coming weekend,
30:38
things change a little bit for you guys there at the Cocola Space Science Center,
30:42
and you do in the summer have these opportunities. I guess it's eventually
30:45
going to start to feel like summer because we've had a very mild May as
30:49
far as temperatures go. I'm not going to complain. I've enjoyed it very
30:52
much. Thank you, Please let it continue. But you guys look for
30:57
opportunities to get out and and look up at the sky for some Astronomy nine
31:03
events. Yeah, I'll tell you just quickly as a complete sidebar, that
31:07
we're very glad here at Space Science Center for the mild May that we've been
31:11
having because our air conditioning's out, so that's not cool week. Yeah.
31:21
We had a conversation last week about how valuable it is to come into air
31:25
conditioning and why you should visit museums when it's hot outside. And as soon
31:29
as we had that discussion, our air conditioner here at Space Sign Center seems
31:32
to have broken. But I'm a shirt. I'm a shirt within the next
31:34
twenty four hours that our AC is gonna be back up and running because there's
31:38
a part that's being flown in from the west coast of the United States to
31:41
fix it. Anyway, all that aside West is right. We've had kind
31:45
of a mild May that's been kind of nice down here in the Southeast.
31:48
It's gonna get hot soon enough, but it's gonna be very pleasant in the
31:51
evening hours to come out and join our astronomy team as they venture out to
31:56
Callaway Gardens and we go out and do our Monday night astronomy program out at
32:01
Callaway Gardens. That's a private something that's like a state park, but it's
32:06
a private organization, but they have lots of outdoor recreational spaces at Callaway Gardens
32:10
and we run a collaboration with our education program where when folks come out after
32:15
the gardens closes down after hours, you can get in for free on Monday
32:21
nights and come out and join in on these astronomy nights where we set up
32:23
our telescopes and we show people the nighttime sky. And what was so cool.
32:28
I was at a professional conference about oh it's been about eighteen months ago,
32:32
but it was a science teachers conference, and I had a young lady
32:37
who was a science teacher from South Carolina come up to me and she said,
32:40
you might not remember me, doctor Kruzen, but I remember you because
32:45
I was a kid that went out to Callaway Gardens when my family was there
32:47
on summer vacation, and you showed me the nighttime sky. And I remember
32:52
that so well that I decided to become a science teacher. So that's kind
32:57
of a cool thing. It was an experience that we had. If you
33:00
want your children at least exposed to the opportunity to learn a bit more about
33:05
the universe and about space science in general, bring them out to one of
33:08
our astronomy nights, ladies and gentlemen. They are free, and they are
33:12
fun, and we're in a nice dark location at Calawie Gardens and there's some
33:15
really fun things to see in the nighttime sky. Those sessions are led by
33:19
doctor Rosa Williams, who is our observatory director here at the Columbus State University
33:23
Coca Cola Space Science Center. Join her in the astronomy team at Calawie Gardens
33:28
on a Monday night this summer and see the nighttime sky for yourself through our
33:31
telescopes. Thank you for listening, Sean, and I'll do it again next
33:36
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