Paul: 0:14

Hello everyone and welcome to Space Week, where we bring you weekly space for everyday people. I'm Paul Miller and I'm Blake Brown. Sorry for the long hiatus. Again, we wanted to squeeze the UFO hearing with Congress in, which pushed us back a bit. Then I had to be out for work and then someone left his microphone in a backpack while his fiance was out of town. Are we talking about?

Paul: 0:36

Yeah, yeah okay, sure, so, but but we're here now. So in today's episode we'll be talking about the first methane rocket to reach orbit, nuclear rockets trying to have their own spacewalk. And we have a birthday as well, so we're saving the congressional hearing for last, so stay tuned for that. So I've got five SpaceX Starlink launches to cover here, so I'm just going to rattle them off real quick, beginning with Starlink six. Dash five Launch time was 1158pm local time, july 9th at Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

Paul: 1:13

It launched a batch of version two minis with the Falcon 9 booster landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. Next was Starlink five, dash 15. This is an important one and I'll tell you why here in a second. We just lifted off at 1150pm at SLC 40, again in Cape Canaveral on July 15th. The first stage booster landed on a drone ship, once again in the Atlantic. What makes this launch special is it was the final batch of version 1.5 satellites to be launched. So going forward will be the version two minis and eventually the full size V2s when Starship becomes fully functional. It was also the record tying 16th launch of this particular Falcon 9. So if you remember previously, we're kind of wondering how many launches are they getting out of these boosters?

Blake: 1:59

Well, yeah, 16 is the number now.

Paul: 2:03

Yeah. So my last three Starlink launches will obviously be version two mini launches, starting with Starlink six, dash 15, which took place at 9.09pm on July 19th on the West Coast at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, with the first stage landing on a drone ship in the Pacific. Starlink six, dash six, which launched out of SLC 40 at Cape Canaveral around 8.50pm on July 23rd it was originally delayed from July 22nd due to weather the first stage landed on a drone ship in the Atlantic, of course. And then, last but not least, is Starlink six, dash seven. This launched just after midnight on July 28th at SLC 40, again marking a new launch pad turnaround record of 99 hours and 11 minutes. So just 99 hours between launch times on the same launch pads. That's. That's pretty darn quick.

Blake: 2:57

Yeah, definitely.

Paul: 3:01

Our next launch has been a hot topic and will continue to be over the coming months is successful. India is once again heading for the moon. So at 2.35pm on July 14th, india launched a LVM3 rocket carrying the Chandra3 lander and Pragyan rover. I don't know, I hope I pronounced those right, but we're just going to go with that.

Blake: 3:27

That sounded right. I mean close enough, right, Right.

Paul: 3:31

But I'm just going to refer to them as the lander and the rover going forward just to make it easy. The mission comes about four years after the previous pair crashed into the moon due to some sort of glitch. This mission is aimed for the lunar south pole, which isn't really a surprise. The south pole has been kind of a hotspot for landers now because of the possibility of ice down there. The new lander comes with some important upgrades over its predecessors, especially in terms of its landing abilities in both the software and hardware side.

Paul: 4:01

For example, the new software will gather data in real time during descent, rather than predetermined data. I believe this will allow it to make corrections if something seems out of place. If you remember our Japanese lander Hakudo R.

Blake: 4:16

Yeah, the one that crashed on the moon, unfortunately.

Paul: 4:18

Exactly. Yeah, I didn't make it because data that it was seeing in real time didn't match up to data that was there before it literally fell down a cliff. It didn't want to believe it was there. Hopefully this software on the Indian lander will mitigate that. We'll see India's lander will also have improved landing legs over its predecessors, as well as a larger landing zone, so it can take a better impact and has a larger margin for error.

Blake: 4:46

Yeah, that's what it sounds like.

Paul: 4:49

Once landed, the rover will explore the moon for about two weeks, depending on solar and battery capability. It's rather small. It's equipped with instruments for measuring seismic data, soil composition and temperature, and multiple spectrometers which measure X-rays and things of that nature. The payload is currently in orbit around the Earth and is steadily increasing that orbit. To intercept the moon Touchdown is aimed for late August, somewhere, maybe like five days before the end of the month, I think is what they were saying. So we'll see. So that's India. Now let's talk about China for a second. Have you heard about this one, blake, the methane rocket?

Blake: 5:28

The methane rocket.

Paul: 5:29

No, okay. So China launched a methane-fueled rocket to orbit for the first time ever. All right, we sort of had a race for the first methane rocket to orbit going on between Relativity Space, spacex with Starship, and China. So if you remember us talking about Relativity Space with the 3D printed rocket.

Blake: 5:49

Yeah, that was our first episode, I believe. Yeah.

Paul: 5:52

And then we kind of carried forward, I think in a couple weeks after that. But it didn't make it after the second stage didn't light, it would have made it.

Blake: 6:00

It would have made it to orbit if that second stage just lit Right.

Paul: 6:05

Exactly, but it looks like China has made it first. As far as methane goes. Other companies have also been working on methane rockets, but these three were the closest. I think. The other companies, if you're curious, are Blue Origin Rocket Lab and United Launch Alliance, all working towards methane, each with their own set of delays, really. Anyways, china launched the Zuki II rocket I'm guessing that's how you're going to say it around 9am July 12th.

Blake: 6:40

That's my best guess too. Looking at your notes, yeah.

Paul: 6:44

ZHUQUE is the English spelling. So yeah, try it. But China reported, and the US confirmed, that the rocket did in fact make it to orbit. So some of you are probably wondering you know what's the big deal with methane. So I'm going to go ahead and give you guys a lesson on rocket fuels, woohoo, yeah. So here we go. I'll try and keep it short and simple. Hopefully won't run over in my heads here with all this.

Blake: 7:13

Yeah, good luck with that.

Paul: 7:15

But methane is thought to be more green compared to the standard RP-1 rocket fuel. So RP-1 is a highly refined form of kerosene which is very similar to jet fuel. Therefore, it's not very environmentally friendly, but it's cheap to produce. Now what about liquid hydrogen? Okay, well, liquid hydrogen is actually better than RP-1 in terms of specific impulse and, to make things easy, just imagine you get more thrust. Okay, the problem with hydrogen is it's far less dense than RP-1, meaning you'll need a much larger tank. If you do the math, I think it works out to about 14 times larger, so a significant increase in the tank size for the fuel. It's also less stable and harder to engineer around because of it. So, even though hydrogen is much more environmentally friendly, it literally exhausts water vapor. Okay, because you're combining hydrogen and oxygen, and it provides more thrust. It's high cost and low density lead manufacturers to use RP-1 for their main stages of getting out of the atmosphere. So methane comes in as kind of like our Goldilocks. Methane, though still less stable than RP-1, is much easier to work with than LH2, or liquid hydrogen. It burns cleaner than RP-1 and produces more thrust than hydrogen as well. Its density and chemical makeup allows manufacturers to carry less fuel and more oxygen also. Just a little bit more oxygen, but much less fuel. So to wrap it all up, rp1 is cheap, it's easy to work with but doesn't burn very efficiently. Hydrogen or LH2 is very expensive, hard to work with but is extremely environmentally friendly. Methane is somewhere in the middle in terms of cost, but is easier than hydrogen, produces more thrust and is still relatively green in its burning efficiency.

Paul: 9:18

So there you have it Now you know about RocketFields Sweet, hopefully. Finally, in our list of launches okay, we're almost done with our launches here I know there's a lot. Rocket Lab launched and recovered an Electron Rocket. Okay, so big thing there is that they recovered it At 1 27 pm July 18th in New Zealand. The mission named. I gotta love Rocket Lab. Baby, come Back, baby.

Blake: 9:49

Come Back. Yeah, you can blame it, oh me.

Paul: 9:52

We don't want to hear Blake's rendition. Oh man. I thought that's what we were here for, yeah yeah, it's karaoke night, but they carry that, oh God.

Blake: 10:09

Okay, okay, you can settle down now. It's time to get back to actually podcasting.

Paul: 10:13

Yeah, yeah, oh gosh. The mission carried NASA's Starling mission, which consists of four small CubeSats that will test satellite swarm capabilities. Okay, so these aren't a bunch of little bees out in space.

Blake: 10:29

All right, swarms Space bees, oh no, this is quickly going off topic.

Paul: 10:38

I'll stop. I promise this has gone downhill so fast we can save it. We can save it, okay. Swarms are basically groups of satellites that can autonomously communicate and work together on mission objectives and maneuvering. Okay. So think about you. Know you send a group of these small satellites out. They can work together automatically and figure things out by themselves, including maneuvering with each other and avoiding things. The mission also carried Telesats LE03 demonstration, set into three U satellites for Spire Global that provide data for weather models and forecasts. So we're seeing more weather and forecasting satellites go up. So that's kind of cool.

Paul: 11:26

Yeah, the electron rocket splashed down in the Pacific Ocean and was recovered via a recovery vessel where it was secured to the side of the ship. It's actually a relatively small booster when you see it. A question that may come up is why not land them vertically like SpaceX? Kind of thought about this. And the answer to that is, number one research and cost. You know Rocket Lab is a much, much smaller company than SpaceX and I imagine they don't have the time or resources SpaceX did. And number two electron rockets are a lot smaller than Falcon 9s and they simply can't carry the extra fuel and weight required for vertical touchdown. You know, that's just about it.

Blake: 12:07

Well, that does it for our launches. This week, china actually had a spacewalk.

Paul: 12:13

That's pretty darn cool.

Blake: 12:14

Yeah, if you guys remember, previously we've talked about the Tian Gong station that they have up there in orbit right now. They were actually on board and they performed the spacewalk A pair of Chinese astronauts and I'm going to butcher these names like crazy, I'm trying very hard here Jing Haiping and Zhu.

Paul: 12:34

Yangzhu, I would say maybe Haiping, haiping.

Blake: 12:38

Yeah, that sounds better. Both of them performed the first spacewalk of the Shenzhou-16 mission, an eight-hour extra vehicular activity, or EVA which is essentially just activities performed outside the vehicle. Easy enough, right Yep? Extra vehicular activity yeah that A really interesting note about the spacewalk. It was actually a third astronaut assisting the team from inside the station. They did this by controlling the space station's robotic arm.

Paul: 13:11

Oh yeah, so this is very similar to what they did in the ISS when the Russians were moving things around. Yeah same sort of deal.

Blake: 13:18

And another very interesting tidbit was that before the spacewalk, it was announced that the spacewalk would take place in the near future. So no exact date and there was not an EVA broadcast of the spacewalk. They even only announced that the spacewalk took place after the astronauts were back safely inside the Tian Gong station.

Paul: 13:37

So yeah, I mean it sounds like they're being secretive there, but I could see that, as maybe it's their first time doing this. If things go bad, they don't want the world to know.

Blake: 13:47

That's exactly my thought too. Yeah, I was thinking okay, yeah, it's China. They're usually pretty secretive about the things that they do. But also, too, I don't think I want to see an astronaut floating away from the station.

Paul: 13:59

Yeah, yeah, it would suck to see that on a live broadcast. So, yeah, I get it. I mean, these guys are doing so many firsts here in just the past decade maybe.

Blake: 14:11

Yeah, past decade for sure. And I mean think about how much would you see China in these past few episodes that we've actually covered them.

Paul: 14:19

I mean it's so much, it's crazy. I mean this isn't really something for this week, but I saw you know they're wanting to do moon stuff by like 2027, 2030. I mean just crazy fast.

Blake: 14:31

Previously I saw 2030, but if they're pushing that up because they're seeing so much success, why not? You know yeah.

Paul: 14:40

So, rolling into something completely different, we have a birthday this week, or I say this week, we're actually kind of covering the end of July, by the way in this episode, so we're kind of covering two or three weeks worth. The James Webb Space Telescope turned one on July 12th. Sort of Webb sent back its first images on July 12th of 2022. So NASA was kind of calling it its birthday. It's really the birthday of the data, if that makes sense.

Blake: 15:12

Okay, how about this? It's the birth. I don't know where I'm going with this, sorry. Oh, I was trying to do something and say something silly, but it did not work out, so we're just going to leave it there. We're just going to leave it there.

Paul: 15:30

So yeah, but the first images sent back from Webb were July 12th of 2022. I'm sure you all know by now. Webb has been extremely helpful in unraveling the mysteries of our universe and continues to send back important data and amazing images like never seen before. So happy birthday Webb, or Webb data.

Blake: 15:50

Yeah, more on Webb this week as well, because the James Webb has captured two new stars forming close to home. In an article I found on phisorg, nasa's James Webb Space Telescope has captured the antics of a pair of actively forming young stars known as Herbig-Hero 46, slash 47. This image was taken in high resolution near infrared light, so basically light we can't see with the naked eye right.

Paul: 16:21

Yeah, that's what a lot of what Webb does. Yeah, it kind of pierces through everything to see that. Yeah.

Blake: 16:27

The image looks incredible. I don't know if you got to see it.

Paul: 16:30

I haven't seen it yet, Dude it's pretty sweet.

Blake: 16:33

You got to check it out and we'll talk more about that in a second. But you see this red disk mixed in with this cloud of blue dust with bright stars all around it, highlighted by the diffraction spikes of the James Webb Space Telescope, which is really cool. Whenever people show me astrophotos, I always love diffraction spikes because it makes the star look like a star.

Paul: 16:56

Right, yeah, some people hate diffraction spikes. I tend to love them as long as they're not overdone. Yeah yeah, exactly.

Blake: 17:02

Yeah, in the image the red diffraction spikes show the location of the two stars within this orange slash white cloudy area. They kind of like named it like milky area, I don't know, it looks like a cloud to me. So, gotcha, the red disk I mentioned is a bunch of gases and space dust being ingested and ejected from the two stars over and over throughout their formation period. And just in case you guys were wondering, I do have the stages of star formation written down, so we're going to go through that real quick, just for quick educational purposes.

Paul: 17:37

This is a big education episode, it sure sounds like it.

Blake: 17:41

So to start, we have a giant gas cloud just gases, that's it, that's all it is. A star begins to form as a large cloud of gas, and then the gas cloud begins to collapse under its own gravity, which forms the proto star. And in over millions of years the proto star grows hotter and way denser to form a T towery star, where the star continues to contract until it reaches a temperature high enough to begin nuclear fusion, at which point it becomes a main sequence star. This is where the star will spend 90% of its life. This is our sun. Our sun's a main sequence star at the moment. One day it will get so big it'll become a red giant, and then by then we'll be dead. So who cares? Which is funny, because that's actually the next stage is the red giant. As the star runs out of hydrogen fuel, it begins to expand and cool, becoming a red giant. Eventually, the red giant fuses heavier elements in its core, becoming denser and denser, until it collapses on itself. Then it explodes and kills everything around it. So there's that.

Paul: 18:50

Yeah, yeah. So once again I mean we'll be dead and hopefully humans will be off the planet by then. But fingers crossed, yeah.

Blake: 18:59

But no real talk. After that it basically becomes a supernova in then a black hole or a few other different things. I can't remember exactly the whole list.

Paul: 19:08

Just depends on the mass of the star.

Blake: 19:09

Yeah, the importance of the near infrared is of the image that we see, is if you were to look at this star forming nebula with only visible light, you'd see a giant black cloud next to the two stars forming and no stars peeking through it. Really cool stuff. Yeah, herbic-hero 46-47 lies only 1,470 light years away in a Vella constellation, which, for you astrophotographers out here because I actually looked up to see if I could maybe image it you're going to have to live or travel to the southern hemisphere for a good shot, gotcha.

Paul: 19:49

Is it actually close enough to maybe get a shot for amateurs?

Blake: 19:53

I believe you'll be able to see it. In fact, I did see some images of it from amateur photographers in the southern hemisphere if I remember right.

Paul: 20:04

Well, that's pretty cool. We say that we get images. It's nothing compared to what I was going to see, but you can still capture an image. That's pretty neat, that's pretty neat.

Blake: 20:13

There were Hubble images as well, but I tried to narrow down the actual images of it.

Paul: 20:20

Gotcha Well cool. Well, speaking of nuclear fusion and how stars form and everything like that, we're actually moving on to nuclear rockets. We talked about this briefly. I want to say a couple episodes back.

Blake: 20:38

I think there was a contract right.

Paul: 20:40

There was something like that. I brought it up briefly, but we actually have something going here now. Lockheed Martin has been selected by NASA and DARPA to develop the nuclear rocket for the Draco program, which is demonstration rocket for agile CIS lunar operations. As soon as 2025, 2026 or 2027, depending on your source. Yeah, I looked at like three different articles and they gave like three different dates. So one of those years soonish. Pick a year, y'all, come on. So average amount 2026. Okay, there you go. The project will test NTP, or nuclear thermal propulsion, as a way to cut journey times and vastly increase efficiency for future missions to Mars and beyond. Ntp works by pumping cryogenic hydrogen, so super cooled hydrogen, through a fission reactor core where uranium atoms are split. The heat produced by the reactor heats the liquid hydrogen, converting it to gas and expelling it out of nozzle to produce thrust. Make sense.

Blake: 21:53

Yeah, I'm trying to visualize it in my head. Listeners, I'm sorry, just put it that way.

Paul: 21:59

Well, you know picture you got like a tank of super cooled hydrogen right, just like any other rocket fuel, you got a bunch of cooled hydrogen.

Blake: 22:06

Yeah.

Paul: 22:07

And imagine, like a tiny pipe and it's funneled through this super hot reactor that turns that liquid hydrogen into a gas that expands rapidly and has to have, you know, go somewhere. So you throw it out of nozzle at the back and that's how you produce your thrust.

Blake: 22:24

There you go, yeah, so yeah.

Paul: 22:27

The demonstration rocket will head to a relatively high and safe orbit around Earth under conventional propulsion methods. Once it arrives, a wire very similar to a control rod will be removed, starting the reaction. So in reactions here on Earth, guys, we have control rods that can be inserted either partially or fully to control the rate of reaction or even bring it to a stop if needed. They're made of a metal that absorbs the particles that keep the reactor going. So you throw the rods in, particles get absorbed, no more reaction. That's kind of how it goes. Anyways, there's no telling just how complex the engineering behind this may be. Lockheed will be working with BWX technologies to develop the reactor in propellant Neat. Yeah, that's awesome.

Blake: 23:18

I really look forward to their progress on this, because more efficiency to get tomorrow as fast or as always, nice.

Paul: 23:25

Yeah, yeah, that's a big hurdle that we have to get over for sure.

Blake: 23:29

Yeah, I mean, you got to test in orbit first and you know, one thing that's really cool about things in orbit is we're going to be sending up 3D printed hearts into the International Space Station 3D printed hearts. I know dude, technology just continues to amaze me.

Paul: 23:43

Right, everyone asks about the applications of space and what we're doing up there. Well, here you go. We're 3D printing organs now, freaking awesome.

Blake: 23:51

Yeah, that's awesome. So the reason I bring this article up from spacecom is we're preparing for a future in which astronauts will get to adventure deep into our solar system. Scientists are developing 3D printed hearts that they plan to launch to the ISS in 2027. The idea is to study these artificial organs and see how they fare when exposed to harsh space radiation for long periods of time. We'll have to know whether or not our heart can handle it. You know, while we're in space for so long Brief like negatives of space travel for so long and being in the station for so long I have heard that it's more likely that you'll develop cancer if you're an astronaut in space for a really long time. You can also develop like breathing problems.

Paul: 24:41

Yeah, there's a few different things. That was the deal with the nuclear rockets, because they're going to be out in. I don't want to call it deep space, because you know, deep space to me is beyond our solar system. But, they're going to be, you know, outside of Earth's influence for a long period of time on their way to Mars, and during that time they're going to be exposed to a lot of radiation. So that's one of their biggest fears and that's why they want to shorten that journey time as much as possible.

Blake: 25:07

Yeah, exactly. People don't realize it, but the space station is still within the bounds of the magnetic field of the Earth, so it's still protecting the astronauts from the harmful rays of radiation from the sun.

Blake: 25:22

Yeah, anyways back to the heart behind all of this is a company with an incredibly fitting name Pulse Okay cool. Pulse's main goal is to make long term space exploration a safer and more viable option. However, they do understand the implications of their project on Earth-based medicine as well. So they're you know, oh hey, we're going to send it up to space mostly, but also here, have this technology, because it would literally save people's lives.

Paul: 25:52

Yeah, and they'll realize that. You know, organ transplants are way more than just finding, unfortunately, you know, like a dead person with an organ. There has to be a match and it's got to do with blood type and all kinds of things.

Blake: 26:08

Oh, yeah, yeah, and you know we deal with this. We sometimes do a medevac and you know we're on call for the medevac and then they have to get a match, they have to test the organ, get a match and then it's a go or no go from there.

Paul: 26:22

Exactly, it's a big deal.

Blake: 26:25

So why do we need to know all of this about the heart, you might ask? Space's environment sort of mimics the effects of aging on the human body, except in fast forward. So you know you're literally aging way faster than you would be. These long-term studies would be much more accurate than previous tests on just single heart cells or, like you know little, I forget what they call them, but like little tests slides of the heart cells just up there in the space station.

Paul: 26:54

Oh, I know what you mean, like they're like little like a Petri dish of heart cells kind of thing. Well, maybe not the Petri dish but something like that.

Blake: 27:01

You know, I don't know. I can't remember what it's called in. I don't know.

Paul: 27:06

It doesn't matter. Cultures of heart cells. Thank you, cultures of heart cells, there we go.

Blake: 27:11

So mimicking a full heart would lead to better information and much more intricate data of the effects of microgravity on the human body. On top of that they also talked about because I looked this up on their website I was like super interested. I was like what the heck, you know? They also talked about, you know, having these hearts down here on earth, infecting it with a virus and seeing how it attacks the heart.

Paul: 27:35

Huh.

Blake: 27:37

The main reason that they would want to know that is okay, so it attacks it this way, Maybe we can defend it this way. You know, kind of like that, Just super basic thing like that. They's a benefit of all 3D printed organs, by the way. So lungs, liver, you name it. They need to know.

Paul: 27:55

Right, yeah, you can just start throwing things at it and see how it works. That's pretty neat.

Blake: 27:59

Yeah, pulse's goal is one of the advancement of science for all of us, be it space exploration or medicine on the ground. I'm really looking forward to these results.

Paul: 28:09

Yeah, I'm really excited about this too. But continuing on with kind of the topic of astronauts in space, on the ISS, nasa actually lost contact with the ISS for a little bit. Mission control at JSC has been undergoing upgrades to their power systems and, as a result, they lost power for about an hour and a half on Tuesday, july 25th. This resulted in their loss of contact with the ISS. For the duration, it was kind of known that this was going to happen. Astronauts on board were never really in any danger, however, and communications were still being made via Russia. So really no big deal, but hey.

Blake: 28:53

No big deal at all. Yeah yeah, that's interesting because during the Great Texas freeze, if you'll call it that, I remember a lot of people were bragging about how they were on NASA's power grid.

Paul: 29:05

Yeah.

Blake: 29:06

They never lost power because of that. I was like man. I wish I lived on that grave. Yeah, so then I'm losing power here. It's like you suck kind of thing. No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I don't want that on anyway, but yeah, that was a big deal back then. Now it's like dang. I honestly thought it was a failure, not like an operator.

Paul: 29:28

That's what I thought at first. Yeah, until I started looking into it.

Blake: 29:34

All right, paul. What's our favorite topic to talk about ever?

Paul: 29:38

Black holes or not? Black holes no.

Blake: 29:42

Not black holes, I'm not sure of those things. Space junk. Yeah, space junk. There you go. Oh man, space junk this. I actually titled it a lesson in what happens if we're not careful. A car-sized object has washed ashore in Western Australia.

Blake: 30:01

It's thought to be space junk, car-sized, car-sized. You heard that right no-transcript. And you know, I know, paul, and I hear lament about space junk a lot. But I promise you guys it's for a good reason. Imagine you're walking along with not a care in the world. It's a beautiful day outside, maybe you got a nice raise or promotion you've been wanting for so long, some big life event happened and you're feeling pretty good and then bam, you're crushed by space junk space job.

Paul: 30:32

I Was quite the buildup, my guy I.

Blake: 30:39

Had to, it was too good oh.

Paul: 30:42

God, where's he going with this?

Blake: 30:43

No, I'm not saying that's what happened here, but it could happen. The Australian Space Agency has stated they're working with other space agencies to identify the object, which appears to be made of a woven material. So from the picture it kind of looked like a A fuel tank to me almost.

Paul: 31:02

I'm not 100% sure when you say woven, was it like like fabric or was it like a Like carbon fiber type woven I?

Blake: 31:09

think it was more closely to carbon fiber, some kind of like metal that was like woven together or like some Composite, really strong, positive, woven together, gotcha, their first guess was that it's an upper-stage engine from an Indian rocket. Just cuz well, proximity and all that. Whoever launched the object into space would be responsible for its disposal. Of course, isra, which is Indian Space Research Organization, I think, has not commented on the object found, so we're not for sure who's it actually was. The object has been treated as hazardous and authorities are urging the public to stay away so they don't get harmed. Police will remove the object following its identification and its origin is discovered, hmm, so yeah, the main reason that they're like trying to keep people away from it is hydrazine is very carcinogenic.

Blake: 32:07

Yeah, which is one of the main things in rocket fuel. That's what I was thinking.

Paul: 32:10

I was like yeah, there's any sort of you know hazmat materials on on this thing.

Blake: 32:14

Right could burn your skin or other things like that yeah and I think even in the article they were saying that some locals were able to get like pictures, selfies, with it and I thought it was funny. But because that's just a public in a nutshell, yeah, yeah, don't know what this is here. Let's snap a picture and touch it. Yeah.

Paul: 32:35

Wow, this is a UFO right here. We'll get to that later, all right guys.

Blake: 32:42

It's time. It's time. Please don't listen to this while you are about to go to bed. It's time for nightmare fuel.

Paul: 32:53

All right, I'm gonna go ahead and just kind of get us started this. This first one's not not bad, really, honestly. Actually none of these this time around are too bad. But Hubble and partnership with ESA has observed a massive galactic cluster in a distant sector of the universe, 8 billion light years away. The cluster called emacs J1353, decimal 7 plus 432 9 that's just scary enough to say it right now. It's an enormous cluster resulting from two clusters merging together. So, as a reminder, here I'm talking about galactic clusters, so giant groups of galaxies.

Paul: 33:35

Okay, dang, the gravity of the cluster is large enough to create a pretty large gravitational lens, so much so that you can see the effects in Hubble's image. You can see this by looking at the two central galaxies. If you, if you look at this image and and then looking to the right of the rightmost one, but to the left of the bright foreground star, so you're gonna see a bright star off to the right of the image it's got diffraction spikes, can't miss it and then two little orange galaxies in the center. If you look to the right of the right hand galaxy and the left of the big bright star, you'll see what I'm talking about. There will be curved lines where the background galaxies seem to merge around the lens. The image was taken with Hubble's wide field camera as part of a program known as Monsters in the making, meaning, yes, there are more of these giant space time bending clusters out there fun. The cluster will be looked at in greater detail later with the.

Paul: 34:39

James web. So yeah, so now we got giant galactic clusters creating Warps and bends in space time that you can now see you in a simple bubble image.

Blake: 34:50

Sounds like the beginning is a black hole in my head. It's, it did be a really like in big black hole. Yeah, it'd be huge.

Paul: 34:57

Yeah, you just got a bunch of galaxies Coming towards each other, so that's fun. Um. Next up is our two-faced star. Researchers at caltech are looking into a very unusual white dwarf. Okay, question.

Blake: 35:12

Yeah, does it flip a coin until you head, you live, tails, you die it just might I mean Batman reference, sorry, yeah depending on what side of the star you're looking at that day.

Paul: 35:26

Um, the star nicknamed Janice for the two-faced Roman god of transition Is located somewhere in the constellation Andromeda, around 800 light years or so from earth, so it's actually very close. It spins at a rate of around once every 15 minutes. Uh now, scientists have discovered that one side of the star is exceptionally bright and emits intense x-rays Indicating a high level of activity and strong magnetic fields. In contrast, the other side appears much dimmer and exhibits significantly weaker x-ray emissions. So, if you look at the bright side, or dead if you look at the dark side, I know I'm kidding.

Blake: 36:10

So it's actually the opposite.

Paul: 36:12

Yeah. They believe that the difference between the two sides could be attributed to a variety of factors, such as an uneven mass distribution, complex magnetic interactions or the influence of a nearby companion star. However, further research and analysis are required to unravel the mystery behind Janice. So, putting this into plain English for you guys Janice seems to be burning hydrogen on one side and helium on the other. It's not an even 50 50 split, but it's distinguishable enough. They're trying to figure this out and they think that it's Uneven. Magnetic fields could be causing the helium to float higher where it's weak and the hydrogen to pool and burn where it's strong. It's this weird cosmic dance of convection that we've theorized but never actually seen before.

Blake: 37:05

So hey, we've seen it now. We've seen it now. Yeah, that's a good thumbs up, that's a positive in this sector. Hey, all right.

Paul: 37:17

Now our last one. This one's my favorite, okay is our glitched star, is what they're calling this. This was an article on spacecom. Astronomers have discovered a unique star that might offer insight into phenomenon of fast radio bursts, or FRBs. Frbs are a very quick we're talking millisecond burst of energy whose strength and origin we can't yet explain. Some of these can be billions of times brighter than our sun. So, um yeah, just a millisecond burst of energy, with enough to be that much brighter than our sun.

Paul: 37:53

So that's like A flashbang but on steroids a flashbang on a galactic scale, yeah, yeah.

Blake: 38:00

Yeah, wow, okay.

Paul: 38:02

So now the star in question, known as psr j 0952-067 another scary name.

Blake: 38:11

I'm telling you, man, they need to come up with better names like this number.

Paul: 38:14

I like Janice. Janice wasn't bad, I know.

Blake: 38:16

Janice was super easy.

Paul: 38:17

Come on y'all. Um, this star is a pulsar located roughly 3000 light years away from us. I can see the look on Blake's face now. You now understand. Um, pulsars are insanely dense and rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit beams of radiation. The beams sweep across space much like light from a lighthouse, except this lighthouse spins anywhere from once every few milliseconds to several seconds. Uh, notice, I never went as far as minutes.

Blake: 38:50

So did you barely cross seconds there?

Paul: 38:53

Yeah yeah, that's. That's how fast these literal stars are spinning. Um, anyways, scientists have observed what they're calling a quote glitch in the rotation of said spar, spar, said star, which is basically an abrupt change in its rotational speed. You know, okay, big deal. Well, they think that this abrupt change in rotation also has something to do With frb's, or when they occur.

Paul: 39:23

The idea is that some sort of catastrophic event, such as the movement of an unseen companion like another star, black hole or simply an asteroid, could trigger movement in the fluid core of the star. So neutron stars are weird, as we already know, but they have like a superfluid core of moving neutrons superconducting protons in other subatomic particles, and then a crust of ions and electron gas. So it's like a superfluid thing on the inside and then a crust of more things on the outside. I mean, I really can't explain what ions and electrons look like, but, yeah, when the fluid is disrupted, rotation can change and FRBs can occur Just a bunch of things that we really just know nothing about. But we're observing it and it shoots out blasts of radiation and times quicker than we can really picture with our minds. It's cool, is it, though it's pretty cool.

Blake: 40:35

Yeah, no, it's pretty cool, but it's also kind of nightmare-inducing. That's why we have the nightmare fuel segment. But yeah, that's it. Yay, if you made it this far, woo-hoo.

Paul: 40:48

I like the timing on that Okay.

Blake: 40:50

Yeah. So moving on to, I guess, well, maybe not the biggest topic, but definitely one that a lot of people are anticipating. The congressional hearing on UFOs.

Paul: 41:01

On UFOs. They're real. Now they say they're real.

Blake: 41:06

Oh my God, yeah, actually. No, let's back up real quick. You've been following the stories on UFOs for the past however many years. You know that we've all but literally confirmed that they're real.

Paul: 41:20

Yeah, this is really. I mean, we're going to talk about this because everyone's talking about it, but we're literally just going to do just that. We're just going to kind of talk about this real quick. It's nothing necessarily new.

Blake: 41:35

No, as far as I know, all of the witnesses in testimony were already things like out in the public, just not in front of the well people that matter, I suppose.

Paul: 41:49

Yeah, yeah. So the whole purpose of this whole thing, right, everyone's like you know what happened. We had a bunch of people, we had a gathering recently, the two of us with some people, and they were all asking us you know, are y'all going to talk about this? What happened? Blah, blah, blah.

Paul: 42:02

So really, the whole point of this entire congressional hearing was to finally have some sort of formal get together really with these people and kind of make a call upon government transparency and accountability when it comes to these things. Right? So they're saying you know that everything's over classified. There's no reason to classify all this stuff unless it poses like some sort of weakness to our national security or anything like that. I mean, if there's any sort of images of the UFOs, there's no reason for those to be classified under the definitions and the things that are classified. They're classifying them so much that even the people with the property security clearance can't get access to them. Like they have the proper level of clearance, yet they're still being denied. There's no transparency going on whatsoever, and that's really what this whole thing was about.

Blake: 43:01

Yeah.

Paul: 43:04

By the way, am I cutting you off? No, you're good, Okay, you know they had three witnesses. Right, you had David Grush, which was a former intelligence officer. Ryan Graves, which was a former Navy pilot, who had his own accounts and he's got like this website for reporting for both military pilots and civilian pilots. And, of course, David Fraver, who you guys may know was the Navy pilot from the famous Tic Tac video that was released.

Blake: 43:30

Yeah, that video's dude. I love that video. It's so cool.

Paul: 43:33

It's awesome so if you hear his story and he'll talk about it in the hearing. So I went ahead and watched like two hours of the hearing. I think I was missed like the last like 30 minutes of it. I fell asleep. Okay, I'm not gonna lie.

Blake: 43:44

Well, it's Congress. Everything there is boring yeah.

Paul: 43:47

And again, it was basically a bunch of stuff I already knew that I've already heard before, but you know the Tic Tac story. You can hear Fraver go over this in detail with a bunch of different people. I think he talked to Joe Rogan on it and all this stuff. But yeah, so again, no real new information. But what I found was interesting was Graves with his website for reporting this was. Another big topic for them was when military and both civilian pilots as well as non-pilots tend to see these things they're always afraid of, like the repercussions, right, you know, am I going to lose my job? Are people going to think I'm crazy? Are people going to make fun of me? Are people going to come after me?

Blake: 44:30

Yeah.

Paul: 44:31

So it's kind of like this call for a means of safe reporting. Right, you know, can I report this? Is there a way to do it? Is anyone paying attention to it? That was another thing you know Fraver was saying a lot of the Congressmen were asking Fraver well, what happened when you guys got back on the ship and told people about this? Do you like care, like was there any follow up? And he's like no, not whatsoever. He's like it turned into a really cool story at the bar and that's about it.

Blake: 44:57

So which blows my mind, because that video is something else.

Paul: 45:01

It really is. It really is. So everything's just kind of swept under the rug, it's just kind of washed away. Nobody ever hears about it. There's tons and tons of accounts that we just don't hear about, and some of them really are accountable.

Blake: 45:13

So so, yeah, yeah, it's crazy because they had some witness testimony. I forgot which witness said it, but basically they were talking about you know, they were calling them unidentified aerial phenomena or anomalous phenomena. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Uap is like a new term for it, yeah, so it's really cool. They're basically redefining it, I guess, because they might think that, oh, it's a UFO, but it's not necessarily flying, it's just something that entered our atmosphere, something like that.

Paul: 45:50

Exactly, I think it expands upon the idea that it could be unidentified aircraft, as well as, like unidentified, like happenings in the sky that, like, we can't explain or isn't in correlation with known natural phenomenon that we know of. Like, yeah, you know the, the northern lights, okay.

Blake: 46:10

Natural phenomenon that we can explain.

Paul: 46:14

If you saw something like that. You know, over the equator in the middle of the day. That's not normal, yeah, yeah.

Blake: 46:22

So that was kind of interesting that they decided like, oh hey, we're going to like create a new blanket term for all of these things. Another thing that I really thought was really cool is they actually had one of the witnesses claim that during like the well they were talking about, that the government was spending a lot of money on UFO crash site recovery kind of things. They mentioned that there was recovered non-human biologics.

Paul: 46:51

Yes, that was Grush, and he also like, plainly said that. They straight up asked him do you know the location of this stuff? And his answer was yes, you know, can you tell us? Well, no, and a lot of his answers were, I can tell you, behind closed doors. It was things that like yeah. And he's also still under going like a whistleblower investigation type thing, that's right.

Paul: 47:19

So there's a lot of things that he can and can't say in front of the public. Number one, just because of clearance, and number two for, you know, his own security and his ongoing investigation with him involving him. So you know. A lot of the answers to his questions were yes, it's there, but I can't really tell you. If we meet privately I can, but I can't say anything in front of the public yet which is what we're working towards as well with this whole thing.

Paul: 47:47

So, yeah, there was a lot of that going on, but yeah.

Blake: 47:51

Yeah, I mean that's, that's really cool. Basically confirms aliens are real Not really, but you know it's fun to think about. Yeah. Yeah, I mean the whole thing was well. If you're like me and Paul and he'd been keeping up with the whole thing, it's basically a nothing burger, but also, too, there's some juicy tidbits inside of it.

Paul: 48:10

Yeah, there's some interesting things that you catch and it's like you know. I mean, they straight up ask Rush at some point, you know, have you faced or do you know anyone who has faced like physical retaliation because of you know things that they've come forward on? And his plain answer was yes, I personally have you know. And then they asked him have you heard of or know of anyone that has been murdered? And again his answer was I can tell you, behind closed doors.

Blake: 48:41

Yeah, okay, this is going to be sort of off topic, but it's also pretty interesting. I'm a little weird. Okay, I like paranormal stuff. Okay, like ghosts and stuff like that. Really interesting stuff, like it's a science that we don't know about.

Paul: 48:58

Right.

Blake: 48:59

I'm a skeptic. I don't. I kind of believe in it, but I don't really believe in it. It's hard to explain, I don't know. There's these videos of these guys called the Men in Black, like real life Men in Black, Really really spooky stuff. Pretty sure all of it's fake, but it's fun to think about, right.

Paul: 49:21

Yeah.

Blake: 49:22

So there's these guys, that Men in Black. They they wear the suit in the tie and then they wear these black fedoras. I believe they're called. Yeah, it would be a fedora the small ones, the trilby, whatever. There have been like videos and like reports of people that have been visited by these guys after they've seen a UFO or they've seen something similar to a UFO or they've been abducted or something like that. Whether or not there's any credibility on these accounts, I'm not sure.

Blake: 49:57

But you bring up the point like, oh, have people been murdered over what they're? Yeah, men in Black. Yeah, who knows, who knows, who knows.

Paul: 50:06

Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, it's just, it's a really, for lack of a better word, we'll just say bad situation for people like Grush, you know, who are in high intelligence positions and they can't come forward on these things. So yeah, again, it goes back to the whole safe reporting thing, you know.

Blake: 50:25

Yeah, yeah, and you know well, there's like that stigma oh I've been abducted and you automatically seem to think lesser of the person, like, oh, they're just crazy, crazy.

Paul: 50:37

They were on drugs, you know, on drugs.

Blake: 50:40

They're doing something, they're trying to be as a story right. So that's something to think about too, but also, too, hopefully it kind of clears up and the stigma is gone and we'll see more information about these EOAPs soon.

Paul: 50:57

Yeah, so it'll take a while for all this classified stuff if they do move on it, for anything classified to be declassified. It's a big process and so it's going to be a while. But yeah, hopefully with stuff like this we'll see some follow up hearings where we get to kind of hear more of what's really going on.

Blake: 51:16

Yeah, that'd be great. I mean, honestly, I'm just interested. I like that stuff. I want to know if aliens are truly real, which of course they are, but also how they visited us. So that'll be it for the news this week. Time to move on to our next segment, listener questions. Remember, you can send in your listener questions by messaging us on Facebook, tweeting at us on Twitter, which is now X, I guess. Thanks, elon at spaceweek underscore. Or you can send us an email at contact at spaceweekco. Please reach out with your most pressing questions and we'll choose our favorites and we'll answer them on the show. So I'll get us started here. Our first listener question is what is a solar cycle? How long are they and are there different types? We talked about the solar cycle briefly in our last episode when we talked about a massive solar flare and kind of like, what causes solar flares?

Paul: 52:13

Yeah.

Blake: 52:14

So, to briefly sum up, a solar cycle is a change in the sun's magnetic field which flips every 11 years, which is about the average duration of a cycle. It seemed to be a little bit longer, it seemed to be a little bit Give or take Shorter.

Paul: 52:27

Yeah.

Blake: 52:28

It said, it's usually 11 years and it's usually pretty on time. There are, in fact, different types of solar cycles. A regular solar cycle it goes from minimum solar activity to increasing solar activity, to maximum solar activity and then back down to the minimum and then the start of a new cycle. So it kind of tapers up and then peaks and then tapers back down.

Paul: 52:51

Right Pretty easy.

Blake: 52:52

There is one called a grand solar minimum, which is a period of several decades or longer of minimal solar activity. This can actually lead to cooler temperatures on earth and changes in weather patterns. Not much, from what I could gather. I'll talk more about that in a minute. And then there's a double solar cycle, which is exactly as it sounds. There's two of them going on at once, really, but more like it's.

Blake: 53:19

Two solar cycles are overlapping, so it starts with the beginning of one, will overlap with the end of another, and then, finally, we have the irregular solar cycle. There's not much information on the irregular it's apart from they're weird, but yeah, so the irregular solar cycle, from what I gather, was just like okay. So it goes up and then comes back down and up and you know, it never like goes back to normal. And before you ask, I did do a little bit of research on whether or not the solar cycle actually had a major impact on our climate. Does it cause global warming? Does it cause this insane heat wave that we're seeing? This is a hot button issue, it seems. However, to keep things brief and nonpolitical, the overall consensus was that it's not a huge impact, unlike greenhouse gases.

Paul: 54:11

Gotcha. Well, I had a question regarding supersonic airliners and if those were a thing, you know, we forget about our younger listeners sometimes and also some people just aren't aware, and that's fine, it's what we're here for. So back in, I believe, the mid 70s to, I want to say, 2003, we had Concorde. Okay, beautiful airplane, freaking awesome. Concorde was a supersonic airliner that was really a technical marvel at the time. It had purpose-built engines, this enormous sweeping delta wing and a nose that would actually move to point down so the pilots could see during landing, since it landed so nose high. Yeah, it flew around Mach 2 and tickets cost somewhere between 7 to 12,000 one way. Now, every seat was pretty much a first class seat, yeah, so there's that too.

Paul: 55:10

It was a collaboration between British Airways and Air France and produced by British Aerospace, who had a different name at the time. I think it was two companies that merged. It was the British company and the French company, and they merged and became British Aerospace. I think it was BAC and God, I can't remember the name of the French one, but anyways, it wasn't the only supersonic airliner developed.

Paul: 55:35

The Russians built the TU-144, which actually had its first flight before Concorde, but suffered from extreme economic challenges and had a crash at an air show in the 70s, which didn't really help much. The US tried to develop one with Boeing, called the 2707. However, it also became too expensive to develop and the program was canceled before the first prototype could be built. Concorde eventually suffered the same fate due to high operating cost and an accident in 2000. That didn't help it either. So there are some of them on display in museums. I think there's one in New York, seattle, and then a few in England and probably one in France. Yeah, but yeah, that's kind of the history of Concorde. So we're trying to get back to that. Our major hurdle now is noise.

Paul: 56:29

That's why we were talking about the aircraft last week that they're starting to roll out to make the quiet sonic boom.

Blake: 56:38

It would make like a sonic boom, like the door slam. That's how loud it would be for everyone else.

Paul: 56:43

Exactly, it's like really nothing.

Blake: 56:45

Yeah, because one of the big problems with the Concorde itself, besides how expensive it was to operate and how expensive tickets were, because $7,000, that's insane.

Paul: 56:59

Yeah.

Blake: 57:00

Anyway, was the sonic boom. It would fly up and it would have to get as high as possible and then it would reach Mach 1, have the sonic boom and then people's windows and all of that would shatter because of that so big inconvenience for them high economic costs for the airline to repair that, I guess.

Paul: 57:26

Yeah, and it was pretty much limited to flights over water. Supersonic flights over water, that was about it. So that contributed again to the high cost, because now you're limited on your routes that you can run. Yeah.

Blake: 57:37

You can only go between, well, the Pacific and the Atlantic, or more than that. But not many people were willing to pay to go from Brazil all the way to Africa.

Paul: 57:49

I guess, I don't know.

Blake: 57:51

Not sure where I was going with that, but, point being, there weren't a lot of units shipped because it was so expensive and then the demand just wasn't there. Yeah, I think another thing that came about too was the invention of the video phone sort of, or like video calling and stuff like that, because one of the big benefits of the Concorde was getting people to business meetings in London or in New York really fast. But now they don't need to do that because they had the video call. Yeah, yeah.

Paul: 58:23

I mean it's just yeah, it's so easy to call someone up now. Back then you kind of needed landlines and all that other stuff. It was kind of a big deal to organize something like that between time zones, but not so much anymore with the age of the internet and cell phones becoming more of a thing. And then, yeah, eventually video calls. But we're talking about 2000, 2003.

Blake: 58:43

So yeah, that's when video calling was kind of reaching its infancy, I suppose. Anyways, kind of a shout out to a YouTuber that I watched, captain Joe. He had, and I want to say, four or five videos on nothing but the Concorde, and that's kind of where I learned most of its history. Really really cool videos. Go check them out, honestly, you'll learn quite a bit. Yeah, that wraps it up for us this week. Thanks for tuning in and listening to us tell you all about the exciting things happening in the aerospace industry and in space. If you like what you're hearing, leave us a comment and a review and a rating. It helps to spread the word and reach more people. We'd really appreciate all of your kind words. So be sure to check out our website, spaceweekco, where you can find links to all of our social medias, such as Facebook and Twitter. So give us a shout. We'd love to hear you. Well, that about wraps it up.

Paul: 59:38

Keep your eyes on the skies. This is Paul and Blake signing off Signing off.