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Bolides Over Manhattan · 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 expanded vocabulary to include terms like quasar asterism
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and uranus. Listen, that's your own risk, go ahead. When made
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of stars, made them stars, madies, When maida stars you could be
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from high they would New Mexicomus, where a stars? When we are made
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of stars? I'm Wes Carrol, joined by my good friend doctor Sean Cruising
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from Columbus State Universities, Coca Cola Space Science Center. Morning Shawn, Good
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morning, Wes. Good to be here today. We got some you know,
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we have a few death from the sky type story we do. We
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have got this crazy story that we're going to start with and towards the end
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again, we're going to talk a little bit about what we're doing next week,
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because it's a big deal, and it's becoming a bigger deal. It
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seems like every day the more we're learning about our trip to the Kennedy Space
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Center. We'll be doing that next week, and next week's show, at
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the very least will be from there and we may do some extra shows.
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I don't know. We'll see what all is available to us. We learned
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last time. If it's available, just say yes. When someone walks up
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to you when you're at Kennedy Space Center and says, how would you guys
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like to just say yes. You know, whatever comes in just fill in
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the blank. It doesn't matter what they're going to ask. It's gonna be
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something awesome, you know, cause you don't know if it's going to be
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you want to go on the roof of the va B, you want to
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ride the vomit comment whatever it is. Yes, Yes, I would like
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to do whatever it is you're about to ask, because it's going to be
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something awesome. So we don't really know how many shows we may do next
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week or if it's going to just all be part of our Thursday maybe an
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extra long show that we do on Thursday next week. But we'll talk more
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about that coming up. Let's start with this crazy like Independence Day the movie,
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not the occasion that we just had. But it is kind of weird.
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It was, you know, in the month of July at least I
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guess that this happened this week. As a matter of fact, it's just
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nuts. So Manhattan seemed for a minute like maybe it was under attack like
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in the movies. You know, do we always have to blow up New
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York City and our sci fi movies like every time? Yes, we do.
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Like it's the first to go always. I mean it's like, oh
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and New York, Yeah, it's gone. I remember that weird feeling.
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I watched Independence Day, you know, open opening night and crowded theater and
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you know, the White House blew up and everybody went crazy and cheered,
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and I was like, this is not where this should be. This is
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this feels weird. This feels weird that we're cheering white and cheer. That's
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just maybe not good. Yeah that was you know, pre nine to eleven.
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But you know that's still not a good thing. Yeah, you know.
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Yeah, So interesting Independence Day story. When Independence Day of the movie
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came out motion picture, I was actually a grad student at UNLV and I
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was living not far from Area fifty one and the et Highway. There's something
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called the Extraterrestrial Highway in Nevada, which is, you know, a highway
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that runs along the north side of the Nevada Test Site. And so yeah,
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I was I was. Actually I watched the movie in a theater,
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came out in North Las Vegas. Came out of the theater and basically as
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I was walking to my car, looked out across the desert where you know
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a lot of that was staged and thought, huh, yeah, that was
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maybe too close to home. I don't know, something like that. Kept
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an eye out for Brent Spiner with long hair walking around. You just never
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know what you were going to see, because in Las Vegas there's a lot
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of those kind of people. That was pretty well done, fairly accurate,
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I would say, yeah, right. So anyway, this story takes place
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in New York, much like some of the scenes in Independence Day, and
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it probably to some might have been like, wow, we're under attack.
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And it also the story reminded me of I guess not long ago, we
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had the tornado in downtown Atlanta, and that probably for them was like what
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is going This is not normal. We're not supposed to have this. Something
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is a miss. When everyday life begins to resemble a sci fi or disaster,
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it's a good And I have to believe that if I personally was a
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resident of Manhattan, which I'm not but if I was, and I would
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say, oh, I don't know, walking to work along the sidewalks of
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Manhattan, or you know, driving my car across a bridge in Manhattan or
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whatever, and I saw a giant fireball coming basically from the direction of the
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Statue of Liberty, I don't think I would be comfortable. And if said
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fireball was then accompanied by a gigantic exploding sound that was either like thunder or
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like an earthquake. Both of those two statements were actually quoted by New York
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residents that they felt it was either like an earthquake, quote like an earthquake
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or a quote like thunder. I think this would be very alarming to me,
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particularly since I'm seeing this fireball at eleven am in the morning, which
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means the fireball in the sky is bright enough to be seen in nearly the
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noonday sun. That's pretty bright. That's bright. That's going to be alarming
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to me personally. I mean, you know, listeners, put yourself in
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the position of these people in Manhattan. You don't know what this is.
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All you see is this giant streak of really bright light coming from the Statue
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of Liberty ish and then streaking you know, what westward over to New Jersey
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and then you hear a fantastic explosion that rattles the ground like an earthquake.
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That's alarming. Yeah, that would be a big cause for concern. And
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on top of that, you know you're talking about this happening. I mean
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a lot of people in New York still remember nine to eleven, So anything
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like this would be like, what's happening? Yeah, it's either that or
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it's like it's New York. It's right, It's like, oh wow,
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it's a generational thing. You'll show your age, whether you go oh no,
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or you just kind of go eh, How does this affect my commute?
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I don't know. Great, great, this is gonna Can I still
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get across the bridge? I'm trying to get back home? Yeah? Yeah,
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So Tuesday of this week, which as we're recording, that would be
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July the sixteenth, twenty twenty four, all of this actually took place.
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Friends, We're not making stuff up. This actually happened. Where there's many
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many reports out there. The website I prepped from was NBC News New York
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to Nbcnewyork dot com, and you can check out the story on that or
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many other great sites, because this really happened. A giant fireball came over
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the over New York City. It passed from New York City heading toward New
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Jersey in a flaming hurry about thirty eight thousand miles per hour according to NASA,
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and the direction of that of that street took it over a good portion
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of Manhattan, where then the fireball, approximately twenty nine miles up above the
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surface, exploded. The explosion was produced enough sound that actually more people were
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alarmed by the sound than the actual fireball. I guess maybe in New York
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it's kind of hard to know. You don't see a broadswath of the sky.
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You're kind of in the concrete canyon of giant skyscrapers, so maybe you
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don't have a great look at the sky. So not too many people reported
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seeing the fireball, although there were definitely reports of that daytime fireball, But
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lots and lots of people reported the sound because apparently that shock wave of sound
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was pretty loud and again described as quote like an earthquake or quote like thunder
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around just after eleven am Tuesday morning, from everywhere from New Jersey to Brooklyn
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to Queens and if you know the burrows, you know, kind of set
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up up there. That's a pretty broad swath of real estate that people that
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reports came in from. So according to Bill Cook from NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office,
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Bill Cook, We've talked about Bill on this show a lot. We've
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got some science center connections. I'll I'll tell more about that later. But
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according to Bill Cook, it says this quote, you have to have one
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bright enough, and it has to be right over New York to get all
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that attention. Daytime fireballs are fairly rare, and New Yorkers got to see
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one this morning. Unquote, says Bill Cook from NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office,
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the official NASA branch that monitors interactions between rocks from the nearby space environment and
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the Earth's atmosphere. So he's basically the world's leading expert in that. So
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one of the one of the right people to have comment on this particular occurrent.
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It's Bill Cook from NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. So, and they don't
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track them this size, and that's why once they hit the atmosphere, that's
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when it becomes glaringly obvious that they're there. Yeah, So, from Bill's
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description, well, let me say it this way. Let me say it
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differently from the data and description of the sound and the sightings by a lot
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of the folks there also with some NASA data that they were able to provide,
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it looks like this thing was about the size of a beach ball,
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which again is a really sizeable meteoroid. It's far smaller than an asteroid or
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comet, right, And so we try to track when we can, all
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of the dangerous near Earth asteroids or comets that might become a potential threat.
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But there is a threshold of size for objects that we can track on a
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reliable basis, particularly when they're not just in orbit around the Earth, they're
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actually coming in from some deeper part of the Solar System. And this guy
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is just below that threshold. So this thing that came over in New York,
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it's just a little bit too small. And again, if you think
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about it's about one foot in diameter, or about the size of a beach
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ball. I don't want to get hit by this rock traveling at thirty eight
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thousand miles an hour, but again, well below the threshold of being able
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to track this with the kinds of technology that we have today, So,
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yeah, it's a sucker punch. It's something that comes in and gets through
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our detection apparatus and explodes over a city like New York and startles people because
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we didn't know what was coming. So that's kind of what happened. And
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no reports of impacts or anything, at least not from according to the Emergency
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Management Department. Yeah. So the good thing about objects like this is they
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doe end to burn up high in the atmosphere, high enough that even the
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fragments don't really make it down. Nothing really survives. Maybe some meteoritic dust
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or ash from this thing eventually falls down to the atmosphere, but nothing's coming
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in in chunks that can break windows and cause damage. So both NASA,
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both NASA and their reporting team said that no meteorite fragments were found, along
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with New York City's Emergency Management Department, which said it was unaware of any
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reports of any kind of damage or impacts to the city. So it's you
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know, it's it's just an exciting morning. It's not really anything that did
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any kind of damage or we can't really find the effects of it on the
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ground, but it just things got exciting for a while over Manhattan when all
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of this occurred. We've talked a lot about successes and wins for SpaceX.
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We've talked about the fact that, you know, since SpaceX says kind of
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taken over as the main ride back and forth to the International Space Station for
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astronauts twofold, it's great for them. It's great that we have a ride
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back and forth that doesn't involve, you know, having to rely on the
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Russians to get us to and from. But we've also talked about the fact
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that there is this issue where if there was a problem, there's not really
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a backup system in place. So now we've had a problem a week ago,
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and there's some concerns now about trying to schedule the number of astronauts that
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will to and fro to the International Space Station. Let's talk about what went
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wrong with this Falcon nine rocket that launched last week. So the Falcon nine
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is one of the most reliable rockets in the world now, right, and
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it is a system that can come down and land their main stage booster vertically
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and reuse that thing over and over again. So we have gotten very comfortable
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and very used to talking about success after success after success for SpaceX with its
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Falcon nine rocket. Now, SpaceX in general really has been very successful,
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and you know, maybe one of the things that gets pointed to is the
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first flight of their Starship rocket, which kind of blew up and scattered some
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debris all over Bokachika, Texas and caused some concern for the FAA. But
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really even that when SpaceX themselves kind of touted as a success because they found
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out things about their engineering that they fixed and flew the next rocket, and
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yes, it blew up too, but they fixed those other things and flew
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it again. And the third one, even though it had one or two
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minor difficulties, pretty much made a successful flight. So again we talk a
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lot about the successes of SpaceX. However, it's very reliable workhorse had a
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very surprising and potentially interrupting kind of incident. We'll call it. In SpaceX
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lingo, they call it a RUD, which is a rapid unplanned disassembly.
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And so so they had it exploded. And what was it that exploded,
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Well, SpaceX was using their Falcon nine rocket to launch another batch of Starlink
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satellites to complete their constellation they're working on. On July eleventh and the first
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stage, that workhorse Falcon nine booster did fine, got the payload to a
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certain altitude, and then that main stage came back down landed successfully like it
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has done so many times. But there's a second stage of that rocket that's
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required to take that payload the rest of the way to space. And it's
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in that second stage that the problem occurred because the second stage had this explosion
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on it. Really it was one it was the engine itself that exploded,
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a single engine on that second stage. And so the payload actually did make
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it technically to orbit, it's just not the orbit that they wanted to put
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it in. It didn't get a boost long enough to put it into the
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useful orbits that they had planned. And so, yeah, you lost a
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batch of Starlink satellites off your SpaceX and that's annoying and they'll have to,
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you know, provide funding and build new satellites and et cetera, et cetera.
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However, the problem becomes that second stage is also necessary to send SpaceX
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crew dragons to the International Space Station or to send SpaceX Dragon capsules on commercial
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missions, both of which were planned for the very near future, and now
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the FAA has put that rocket system under an investigation to see why this second
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stage exploded, and these human beings will not be allowed to fly on that
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system until there is a successful complete to the FAA investigation and mitigating steps are
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taken to make sure that this second stage rocket does not have the same problem
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again. So the agency officials from the FAA released a statement on Friday,
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July twelfth that said this quote, Cruise safety and mission assurance are top priorities
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for NASA, and they added they will provide updates on agency missions, including
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potential schedule impacts if any has more information becomes available. So and I said
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that was FA that was actually a NASA statement. So the NASA put out
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that statement saying, hey, you know, we got to wait. We
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got to see what the FAA comes up with and what SpaceX discovers about this,
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and until we do, the cruse safety is the top priority. So
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we're going to wait on sending any people up to make sure we understand this
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failure. Now this puts to put this in context, This puts a lot
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more scrutiny back on Boeing, believe it or not, the rivals of SpaceX,
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because they still have a leaky star Liner up there hooked to the International
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Space Station, right, and you know whatever about that particular capsule. But
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the star Liner was supposed to be the backup system for SpaceX crew Dragon,
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and so if it can't get certified because they can't figure out why and how
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to stop its leaks, then it's not in the bullpen warming up to be
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the backup spaceship to take astronauts back and forth to Low Earth orbit for NASA
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like it was supposed to. And so that's the thing is the NASA necessity
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for redundancy of launch systems was put in place because they said, well,
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if something happens to our primary system, we want to have a secondary or
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a backup system. Well, now something's happened star Liner and Boeing not ready.
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Boeing received almost twice as much money for the commercial crew program as SpaceX.
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So again this heightens all of the scrutiny that has almost become a weekly
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feature of our podcast because it's a really important set of circumstances in America's space
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program right now. And so it's all fine and good to say, well,
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those astronauts aren't really stuck up there aboard the International Space Station. Yeah,
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that may be true. But Starliner is also not in the bullpen warming
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up ready to back up SpaceX Dragon either, And so we're seeing that now.
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In this case, I suspect there'll be a reasonably rapid investigation into into
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SpaceX. SpaceX has a way of getting through FAA red tape fairly quickly or
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resolving FAA issues rather quickly, and we can point to Starship as an example
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of that. And so I suspect that, you know, whatever delay this
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is with SpaceX and inchulon its launch system won't be too long. But this
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is just me. I'm just a casual observer. I am, after all,
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just an astronomer es. I'm not actually in the space industry. I
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just simply talk about space on this podcast. So so well, we're also
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I don't have any insights on the inside, but I can tell you that
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it's putting Starliner in kind of a bad optic. You left out one term.
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We're space media. We got the emails from NASA to prove that.
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But more on that later. That's a teaser from West Friends. Another teaser
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for we have something very important to say at the end of the show.
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Don't tune out, listen all the way to the end. There you go.
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More fun to come quickly before we take our break, because we got
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this cool story also after the break about caves on the Moon. But let's
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talk about this solar flare that's causing the auroras on Mars, or could cause
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auroras on Mars, which I assume with the camera equipment we've got there,
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we ought to be able to get a nice shot of those, right,
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yeah, exactly, So, yeah, come back after the break because you're
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gonna I want to know why you might want to have a cave on the
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Moon someday. But right now, what we're going to talk about is a
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very powerful explosion that occurred on the Sun from active region number thirty seven thirty
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eight. That's just a catalog name for a sunspot group, but this sunspot
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group erupted on Tuesday with a very powerful flare. It's an X one point
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nine, basically an X two class. If you don't know what that means,
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check out some space weather media and they can explain that. But basically
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X is the most powerful category of flare that can occur on the Sun.
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It goes all the way up to ten and I've seen all the way up
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to X twenty nine, which is a logarithmic scale. It means this is
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a powerful one. Not one of the most powerful ever recorded. However,
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it's powerful enough to have planetary interactions or effects on either the Earth or Mars.
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It did affect the Earth because the X rays coming from this had ionization
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effects in the upper atmosphere, which caused shortwave radio blackouts over the Atlantic Ocean
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on Tuesday. So that was an immediate interesting effect right here on the Earth.
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But this explosion also caused what's called a coronal mass ejection, a super
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huge, mountain sized amount of deadly radiation which has blown out from the Solar
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surface out into the Solar System itself. Thankfully, it's not heading our way,
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but if you are a colonist on Mars, it is heading your way,
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and so it's headed toward the red planet, not the blue planet.
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That's the point, right, The corona mass injection is heading for the planet
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Mars. It should impact as we're recording the show on a Thursday, should
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impact this Saturday, which is July twentieth, and so it could actually be
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powerful enough to spark global auroras on the red planet. On the planet Mars,
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right, and so we might see what we would refer to as northern
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or southern lights here on Earth. We might see that same effect the interaction
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between charged particles streaming out from the Sun after an explosion, and the interaction
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between that and the atmosphere of the planet. That might occur on Mars as
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soon as this Saturday. And this wave is powerful enough that NASA scientists have
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actually estimated that it could erode the Martian atmosphere. It could excite gases in
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the upper part of Mars' atmosphere enough that they could actually escape the gravity of
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Mars and drift off into space, thereby reducing the density overall density or mass
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contained within the Martian atmosphere by some percentage. So spaceweather dot com is a
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great website. We monitor it continuously for this podcast and for other reasons here
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at Clembstate University. Spaceweather dot com has this story. It's in their archive
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for Tuesday the sixteenth. Check it out. Coming up after a quick break.
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I got a real estate opportunity for you on the Moon. We'll talk
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about that right out after this. So a discovery on the Moon. This
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has huge implications obviously for I guess it feels more like when, not if,
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but the hopes and plans to colonize at least in you know, short
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term, we may not be sending anybody permanently up there, but maybe doing
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rotations like the International Space Station, but being able to send people to the
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Moon and give them someplace to take shelter when necessary, or to house equipment
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or whatever caves on the Moon. This is pretty significant. So let's talk
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about that just a little bit. Actually, we have a very exciting announcement
25:02
at the end of the show. If you hadn't picked that up, I
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mean we dropped, we dropped some so subtle hints at it ties into all
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of this. It's very moon centric. Yes, so staycly so our Moon
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story. Apparently there's something that Sean and West want to tell everybody at the
25:21
end of the show. So anyway, so so, but it has to
25:23
do with the Moon, and we are working to get human beings back to
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the Moon here in the United States. The American Space Program is working on
25:30
that very diligently. Might have something to do with this, you know,
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this announcement at the end of the show. Anyway, So on Wired dot
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com and in other places you can find a story about a very important discovery
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coming out of Italy, and the discovery is from the University of Trento in
25:48
Italy, a group of scientists there that did some work with the archive data
25:53
of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is a NASA satellite that
25:59
was doing radar studies of the surface of the Moon. And what's happened is
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this group from Italy has gone back and done analysis of this Moon radar data
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and they found something that could settle a long term debate that's been taking place
26:17
in the astronomical community whether or not the Moon has large accessible underground areas.
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And if the Moon does have large accessible underground areas, that would be a
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very interesting set of circumstances for potential future Moon explorers or colonists, because if
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you hang around on the surface of the Moon long enough, bad things can
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happen. First of all, we just did a story about auroras or sun
26:48
interaction with the Martian atmosphere. Well, if you'd have been a lunar astronaut
26:55
walking around on the surface of the Moon when a shockwave like that one went
26:59
by that is directed at the Moon. You could just receive a whole massive
27:03
amount of radiation to your body through a circumstance like that, and that's not
27:08
a good thing. That's a very unhealthy thing. So finding some kind of
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way to shelter or to protect yourself from large doses of solar radiation due to
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solar flares is a very important thing for future Moon colonists. In addition to
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that, the lunar surface is kind of a risky place or micro meteorite interactions,
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and if you're out there for a short time, you'd have to be
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fairly unlucky to get hit by a micrometeorite a small rock space. But if
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you are colonizing or living there for a long period of time, obviously you're
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going to increase your chances just because you're increasing the amount of time you're spending
27:48
on the lunar surface. And so both of those extenuating factors really make it
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interesting to be able to find some kind of shelter that's already in place,
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some kind of shelter that you wouldn't have to construct or build yourself. There's
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a term in a solar system exploration called in C two. Resource utilization in
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C two means in place, and so if you can find these resources in
28:15
place without you having to take things there or try to manufacture things out of
28:21
the lunar soils to protect yourself, well, that would be a really important
28:25
thing for future lunar colonists. So this group out of Italy, they came
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up with a very interesting discovery, and that was they found in this collection
28:34
of radar data from the Lunar Reconnaissance orbiter evidence that the lunar surface, or
28:41
just below the lunar surface, is kind of riddled with these long networks of
28:48
tubes and tunnels or caves. Most of these likely were created by lava flows,
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and so we can think of these as lava tubes. If you've never
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been to a lava tube. There are several that you can visit in the
29:03
United States. One of those lava tubes, which I've been in a couple
29:07
of times, is down in New Mexico. It's at a place called Elma
29:11
Payis National Monument. Down in Elma Pais National Monument, you can actually walk
29:17
through one of these lava tubes and explore it yourself. There's another one that's
29:21
in the state of Oregon, and that's a really long one that you can
29:23
walk down in you feel like you're walking maybe through Carlsbad caverns, or you
29:29
know a cave like that Mammoth Cave up in Kentucky, but it's actually created
29:34
by a river of lava that was flowing underground. Well, that same phenomenon
29:40
has taken place on the Moon and these structures have been hypothesized for more than
29:45
half a century, but this is actually the first evidence that we've ever had
29:52
that actually demonstrates their existence. So a quote from Lorenzo Bruzone or Brizzone of
29:57
the University of Trento is this, we analyze these images with complex signal processing
30:03
technologies and recently developed in our own laboratory, and found that part of the
30:08
lunariconnaissance orbiter radar directions are from the area of the search inquity and can be
30:15
attributed around conduit. So they for sure identified one of these large underground lava
30:26
tubes in the Sea of Tranquility. The reason you know the name of that,
30:30
that's an area on the Moon where the Apollo eleven mission landed. By
30:33
the way, we are in the week of the fifty fifth anniversary of the
30:37
Apollo eleven moon landing. So ya, you know, Buzz and Neil,
30:40
Yeah for that one. And so that Sea of Tranquility is a lava basin
30:48
which actually makes kind of a smooth surface up there on the Moon, and
30:52
that's the location where those guys were able to land up there. So now
30:56
in that same lava basin, now they've found a very very large lava tube
31:00
that could potentially be used for lunar inhabitants of the future. Another quote from
31:07
one of the researchers from Italy. This is Leonardo Carer of the University of
31:11
Trento. He says this, this discovery provides the first direct evidence of an
31:17
accessible rock tunnel beneath the surface of the Moon. Analysis of the data also
31:22
enabled the researchers to construct a model representing the initial part of a tunnel,
31:26
so says the article from Wired dot Com. One more quote from Carreer says
31:30
this, it is very likely to be an empty lava tube, this thing
31:33
that they're seeing on the radar data. So all of this is pointing toward
31:38
a nice location for a future lunar colony where they don't have to build shelters.
31:45
Themselves out of the surrounding material. They can just go jump in a
31:49
hole in the ground that the Moon is already provided and set up well,
31:55
set up house, so to speak, on the Moon. Yeah, it's
31:56
pretty convenient that it's there and obviously offers a lot of potential opportunities. All
32:04
right, So, as promised in forecasts, our big announcement, we talked
32:08
about it a little bit last week and we got a little bit more details
32:13
on it, but honestly, some of what we know is embargoed anyway,
32:16
so we can't talk about all of it. But what we can say is
32:20
that we're taking the show down to Kennedy Space Center next week and we will
32:25
be covering the arrival of the Artemis Moon Rocket as it gets starts to get
32:34
settled in talk about making a home in a cave on the Moon. It'll
32:37
be making its home there at Kennedy for a little while, and we'll be
32:43
catching it as it arrives. Yeah. So it's the main stage booster for
32:47
the SLS, the Space Launch System, which is the power plant behind launching
32:54
the Artemis program, and it's Orion space capsule up to an orbit around the
32:59
Moon with the next crew of astronauts. This will be the Artemis two mission,
33:04
and they assemble these things and test them to some degree in a couple
33:12
of places down on the Gulf coast, at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi and
33:15
then the show facility in New Orleans. This main stage booster has been at
33:22
the me Show facility. They loaded it on a barge. It has now
33:27
barged its way through the Gulf of Mexico, around the southern tip of Florida,
33:31
up the Atlantic Coast on the east side of Florida, and is coming
33:36
into Titusville next week at some embargo time which we're not allowed to talk about.
33:43
But the fun thing is that we're going to be able to be there
33:45
because we've been invited by NASA to be part of the press crew and be
33:50
part of that core of reporters down there that's talking about and interviewing peoples as
33:55
it relates to the Artemis program. So we're really excited about that. Wes
34:00
and I get to go have a good view of the inside of operations at
34:06
least as this giant rocket stage comes from the barge to the shore. They
34:10
bring it from sea to land and then they are going to move it to
34:15
the vehicle assembly building, so we're going to get to see and be part
34:19
of some parts of that process. Now, the cool thing is, if
34:24
you don't follow the show on Facebook, you need to follow the show on
34:27
Facebook because we're going to be doing some fun things as we're down there.
34:30
Well, I'm sure we'll do some at least some photos posted to the Facebook
34:35
page for Made of Stars, if not some live videos from there. We'll
34:39
do some Facebook lives and some other things as we can. We may also
34:44
have the opportunity to speak with some of the people involved in various aspects of
34:47
this project, and so we'll be looking forward to some possible interviews things like
34:52
that. So we'll be doing a combination of having some of those for later
34:59
shows here on the PODC Cast, doing a little bit of stuff on social
35:01
media, and so come and hang out with us, right, just follow
35:06
us virtually as we go through this process where we get to go to a
35:08
really fun thing and we want to take you with us. We want to
35:12
share all of these things with you, our listening audience. So so it's
35:15
an exciting time. And yes, we're getting back, getting ready to go
35:19
back to the moon. Wes said it had to tie to these caves.
35:22
Well, it's going to be the Space Launch System and the Artemis program that
35:25
starts sending people back to the surface of the Moon, and it will be
35:29
those lunar explorers that will be eventually looking to build habitats and permanent stations on
35:37
the Moon. One of the slogans for the Artimist program is back to the
35:42
Moon for good. So that is implying that NASA wants to stay right.
35:46
They want to keep an astronaut presence on the Moon. As Wes mentioned earlier,
35:51
it's it's not that the same astronauts would be up there, but it
35:53
would be kind of like Antarctica where we send various research teams down there,
35:58
but there's already an infa structure there when they go down to visit of various
36:02
places to stay and research labs and things like that. So this is what
36:07
NASA is hoping to set up on the Moon. And yeah, those lava
36:10
tubes will be involved, but the mighty SLS NASA's Moon Current Moon Rocket for
36:16
twenty twenty four, and those giant power plant RS twenty five engines, which
36:22
by the way, there's four of them aboard the core stage. By the
36:25
way, they were the main power plant for Space Shuttle, although they've been
36:29
modified a little bit. I think they took them to that garage where dukes
36:31
of hazard worked on their car, you know, and cooters stood up.
36:37
They cooter a cooter, right, So maybe cooter's working down there, you
36:43
know, at Stennis anyway, So they boosted the they boosted those engines to
36:46
where they're putting out more horsepower than they were in the old Space Shuttle days.
36:50
But it's the same RS twenty five engines. The reason I like to
36:52
mention that is because right here at Columbus State University's Coca Cola Space Science Center,
36:58
we happen to have a giant component of an RS twenty five engine on
37:00
display. We have a Space Shuttle main engine nozzle in the exhibit gallery of
37:06
the Space Science Center here in Columbus, Georgia. So if you're in the
37:08
vicinity, you can come down and see that rocket component. It's a nine
37:13
times space flyer. It's been a part of several very important Space Shuttle missions,
37:16
but it's also tied to this future of NASA where we're using those same
37:22
RS twenty five engines to send people back to the Moon and the next step
37:25
in that is the part the West and I get to be involved with,
37:29
which is to be there sometime next week when this thing comes ashore and we
37:32
get to take pictures of it and share them with you. It's an exciting
37:36
time and just the fact that we're going to get to be a part of
37:38
any small part of it. But this is obviously the next big part of
37:43
it as it arrives there, And as you said, we'll do some interviews.
37:46
If anybody that will stand in front of us and let us point a
37:50
microphone at them, we're happy to interview them. So we'll be doing as
37:52
much of that as we can and as many photos and videos, and who
37:57
knows, we've got it. We're road tripping this thing, so you know,
38:00
we'll have some time where maybe we record some bonus content for Meta Stars,
38:05
because you know, we tend to have some very interesting pop culture type
38:09
conversations, especially about sci fi movies and things like that, because anytime we've
38:15
road trip that tends to be where things eventually gravitate. Maybe we can settle
38:17
the debate about whether or not the Beatles were in fact a boy band to
38:25
the level that that has something to do with NASA. We can absolutely discuss
38:30
that. Hey, it's bonus content, so you know, anything we can
38:32
tie into it, we'll do that, Sean, and I thank you for
38:37
listening, and we'll do this again from Kennedy Space Center next week. Overhead
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