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Fraser:

Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts-based journey through the Cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. My name is Fraser Cain, I’m the publisher of Universe Today, and with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University – Edwardsville. Hi, Pamela. How are you doing?

Pamela:

I’m doing well, Fraser. How are you doing?

Fraser: I’m doing great! Alright, well let’s get right into it. So, have you ever wanted to go to space, but lacked the, uh, I don’t know…everything? [laughing] Being an astronaut? A whole new industry of “Space Tourism” will take you where you need to. There are now companies offering 0-G flights, sub-orbital flights, and there have even been paying customers who have gone into orbit. Is this going to be space travel for the rest of us? Let’s hope so. I clearly lack the “everything” to be an astronaut, not that I’ve tried very hard…I don’t know…did you try to be an astronaut?

Pamela: I thought about it very hard and actually thought about going to the Air Force Academy for college, and there is an aspect of me that somewhere in college discovered that physics problem sets and salsa and nacho chips are the perfect combination in life, and so that whole “8-minute mile” thing has been left so far behind…my horse can do it, and I can stay on my horse doing it, and I call that good.

Fraser: Yeah, I mean, astronauts are just such physical, mental, social specimens of human perfection, it’s just like hard to compete: get your PhD, then get another one, then go be an Air Force test pilot, then run, as you say, an 8-minute mile, then go be a volunteer….you know, it’s just crazy. Now, if you got money, you’d be able to go into space, and that’s what the whole space travel industry is about. But I think beyond that as well is the hope that as paying customers come for space tourism activities, it’s going to drive down the costs of space flight across the board and make it more and more available. I mean it’s that same argument used with air travel, right?

Pamela: Right, and it looks like we might actually be at the point that it’s possible. Now, with airplanes there’s the nice advantage that someone can go out in their barn and build a barnstormer, and grab the neighborhood grandma and throw her in the back of the airplane and storm a barn.

Fraser: You’ve got a paying customer, and you’ve started up your plane tourism company.

Pamela: …go land in some farmer’s pasture and charge all the neighborhood kids a nickel. It’s been inflated since then.

Fraser: Yes.

Pamela: Spacecraft – there’s that whole throwing up at 0-G part that requires a certain amount of preparation that you don’t need for barnstorming.

Fraser: Both in terms of training, or in terms of the equipment required to get you into space?

Pamela: It’s all of the above. You have to be able to cope with the physical stresses, at least emotionally cope with the physical stresses, which requires an amount of training that going up in aircraft doesn’t necessarily require. I think that we’re going to reach the point in the not too distant future that you don’t require any actual training beyond what you get in the exit row of any commercial airline flight of, “OK, in the case of emergency, do you agree to lift this lever, pull the door out and not block the exit from other people?” We will get there with spacecraft, but still it’s a much more demanding thing. Steven Hawking has proven with his 0-G flight that it’s not necessarily physical stress, but you need to be prepared for what you are going to experience.

Fraser: Right, so let’s take a look at the spectrum of space tourism opportunities that there are right now, and then where this might go in the future. Now, we talked about Steven Hawking’s 0-G flight, so what’s going on with this?

Pamela: There’s a neat company — Space Adventures — that run 0-gravity, basically “go up in an airplane, drop radically, go up in an airplane, drop radically”…It’s the chance to experience free-fall, which feels like having no gravitational pull in your body for a few seconds, roughly half a minute at a time.

Fraser: This is the vomit comet though, right? It’s got another name, but…

Pamela: That’s true, that’s true, it is the vomit comet.

Fraser: These airplanes, they take this parabolic flight path, and so as they reach the top of the parabola, and then start to head back down, or I guess as they go up into the parabola, then and start to “u” as the person inside the plane keeps moving up and it’s almost like it feels like you’re weightless, but you’re really, I guess you’ve got the inertia of the plane as you went up, or the momentum of the plane as you went up, and that makes you feel like you’re flying inside the plane as you come back down – and you’re weightless and you can do spins and fly through the air for as you say, a few seconds, and then you have to do the other half of the parabola [laughing] where the plane is sort of going back down and then you feel double-gravity, then you do the opposite again.

Pamela: Yeah, you suffer in both directions. You get accelerated upwards, you get accelerated downwards, and it’s only at that peak, only for that brief period at the peak of the parabola that you get to enjoy yourself. Even then, there is a great deal of, well for lack of a better term, “puking” involved.

Fraser: Yeah, if you like that kind of thing – I do not. We went to the Tower of Terror at Disneyworld, and that’s what it is, I mean the tower drops out and you fall – that feeling is the 0-G, so that but more, I guess…uhhhh [laughing], but you can do this, and I’ll bet you there are listeners listening right now who have done this.

Pamela: And it’s the type of thing that it is cost non-prohibitive. For one of these flights it’s $2500, and I know people that have gotten the chance to do 0-G experiments through different high-school and university level science competitions, where you pitch an idea, and NASA or some other agency pays for you to fly on one of the many “vomit comets,” and run your experiment while suffering, or enjoy yourself – or both suffering and enjoying yourself.

Fraser: Now, beyond doing the 0-G flight, you can also do training – again, this is one of Space Adventures. We’re really going to be pushing Space Adventures — they are not sponsors of Astronomy Cast in any way.

Pamela: They just do cool stuff.

Fraser: They just do a bunch of cool stuff, so we’ll be talking about them. I know you can train at Star City in Russia.

Pamela: Yeah, and not only can you train in Star City, but they are also the agency that has teamed up with the Soviet space program to get – they don’t like to be called “space tourists” – but to allow the very rich to train alongside the astronauts for a large sum of money and go into space for upwards of 10 days.

Fraser: Right, but it’s not just…that’s where it’s $20 million and you get to go up into space and be at the International Space Station, but I know there are packages where you can go and learn…

Pamela: Yeah, you can spend a couple of thousand dollars to go to something that’s much more advanced than the adult space camp programs that we have here in the United States. The U. S. Space Camp program, I went to it growing up and it’s a great program, but you’re not using all of the actual simulators, you’re not going through all the rigors, it’s really a “let’s go to camp and learn a whole lot” but there’s a lot pretend.

Fraser: It’s not a real centrifuge that you’re going in.

Pamela: No, they do that, but the space shuttle simulators, for instance, that you’re in are a couple of generations below what the actual astronauts use, so it’s a really good simulation, it’s a whole lot of fun, it’s a worthwhile educational experience, but it’s only a few days, whereas the experience you go through with Space Adventures — you’re training side-by-side with the actual astronauts with the actual astronaut training equipment, going through all the same rigors, all the same “here’s how you do this, that, and the other thing” with a whole lot less make believe involved.

Fraser: That would be pretty amazing, and you can also then go and fly like MiG fighter jets, things like that, so you can experience some pretty tremendous forces on your body, but you’re not actually flying out into space. Now then, the “X prize” was sort of leading up to this, which is one of these ideas, as Peter Diamandis’s idea that regular commercial companies should be able to send people today into a sub-orbital flight, and I guess, eventually, into an orbital flight.

Pamela: It was, in fact, the family of these personal astronauts, one of the “not called space tourists” who went up onboard the space station with the Soviets, who funded the X Prize the Spaceshipone the Ansari X Prize, and that was to go twice into sub-orbit and come back down safely in a very brief span of time, and that positive experience will hopefully lead to positive experiences for many more wealthy individuals coming in the future.

Fraser: Yeah, that feels so long ago, but it was 2004 was when the X Prize was won, and the goal here that a private company had to build a spacecraft capable of taking a team of three above 100 km altitude and then back down to Earth, and then do it again within a week, and in 2004 that prize was won by Burt Rutan’s company Scaled Composites, and took the $10 million prize, which was amazing, and that was like six years ago, seven years ago now. It does seem like forever, but that led into Virgin Galactic created by Richard Branson from Virgin Enterprises.

Pamela: And with all of these different projects, the goal is to eventually get things down to the price that normal human beings can afford. Right now, with Spaceshiptwo it looks like they are going to, in the next few years (it’s hard to nail down what year it is – it’s a moving target), but they’re doing the test flights, they have the spacecraft/aircraft. They are moving forward and they will be taking people up into sub-orbit, where they’ll get to experience a few minutes up above the atmosphere before they come back down, they’re going to be launching out of Spaceport America, it looks like. This is moving forward and people are putting down $20,000 deposits on a $200,000 ticket. They’ve had over 400 people sign up so far.

Fraser: So that’s a real business, you know, those are all the pioneers, but after those 400 have had a chance to fly and people see that they haven’t died yet, other people are going to sign on and eventually the costs are going to come down, and there’s going to be competing companies. You know, it’s like on a cruise ship, you have competing cruise ship companies, right? So this is how this whole thing is supposed to work. And the technologies that are developed for the space tourism for the rockets and, you know, eventually someone’s going to use them to build …use them for commercial purposes, and boom – we’re exploring the solar system!

Pamela: And what’s interesting is watching the way the different technologies are evolving because NASA is slowly getting itself out of building spacecraft and getting itself into the habit of hiring other people to reach toward goals that have both NASA purposes in mind, as well as the development of a fully-fledged commercial space flight program here in America. We have NASA spent money to basically invest in Blue Origin, in Space Acts, in Bigelow, and what’s interesting is watching how all of these different companies are partnering together in different ways. Bigelow’s is personally my favorite one to watch. They’re a company that is aiming to build space stations, and they already have unmanned orbiting balloon space containers happily going around and around the planet filled with random stuff. They have this really neat thing where they let people launch stuff inside one of their blow-up capsules and they have cameras and you can watch your stuff float past…[laughing]

Fraser: Yeah, [laughing] which is a great way to make some of the money back, right? As they’re doing their testing it’s a way of doing some advertising inside the space station. Bigelow is really exciting! Again, none of these companies are sponsors of Astronomy Cast – at all, but we’re going to rave about them anyway.

Pamela: No, we are sponsored by Swinbure, but we just adore the ingenuity of so many of these companies. Bigelow is focusing on taking an old NASA idea of basically building blow-up (not “explode,” but “balloon blow-up”) space stations that can be built out of a bunch of different modules that start small, bloat big and give you a whole lot of space to play in, and this is a really neat model and they’re now partnered with Boeing on some crew capsule ideas. They are booked on a SpaceX launch that looks like it’s booked for 2013 or 2014. They are slowly but surely making steady progress on actually building a commercial space hotel on Orbit!

Fraser: Yeah, I mean again, we’re way beyond the imagination stage. Bigelow has built prototype stations, these inflatable habitat modules, has launched them into orbit and has sort of tracked their progress, and done all their tests and stuff, and you can imagine the next stages where they’re going to be connecting them together and actually having people live up in them, so Bigelow is really moving forward; a lot of these pieces are all coming together. In some cases it’s feels like it’s coming slower than expected, and in other cases, it’s coming a lot faster.

Pamela: The frustrating thing everyone, from NASA to Bigelow, from [missing audio] to SpaceX is “how do we get the people into space?” and that’s where companies like Space-Ex are looking so promising. But right now, they’re the closest to having a human-ready launch vehicle that we have. I suspect that they could choose something out fairly quickly if push came to shove, but no one wants to have push come to shove with manned space flight.

Fraser: Now, isn’t that sort of part of the plan, though, is definitely to make the Falcon, the SpaceX launch vehicle, human-capable at some point?

Pamela: It’s currently “cheese-capable.” I love the fact that they launched a thing of cheese because a big wheel of cheese is about the weight of a human being.

Fraser: [laughing] Right, if you can bring a wheel of cheese back to Earth safely, then you’re on your way!

Pamela: So yes, SpaceX is definitely planning that, but one space company — it has the capacity to do what NASA’s been doing, but we want to do so much more. We want to get to the point that there’s a couple launches a week carrying all people back and forth from Earth orbit, or hopefully, eventually to higher [missing audio] orbit…and beyond. So we need to get more companies out there, and that’s what NASA is trying to do. They’re seeding funds out to Boeing, to Blue Origin, to Bigelow, to all these different companies to try and find all the different ways that we can explore getting people out exploring our solar system.

Fraser: So, do you think that there’s been some kind of fundamental shift at NASA over the last few years to take a lot of this a lot more seriously?

Pamela: I think the failure for the Orion program to move smoothly and steadily forward and be embraced was an eye-opener. It was kind of a vision NASA would chew for, chew for, chew for where we’d have this heavy-lift, low-lift, human-lift trio of rockets that would go to the Moon, Earth orbit and Mars. They had the logos, they had the models, they just didn’t have the launch vehicles, and when that program got so far behind budget, so far behind schedule and pretty much got canceled, it was time to sit back and say, “OK, we need to re-think how to use NASA’s money wisely.” The amount of money going to science is getting cut, and I’ve heard that some NASA centers, some NASA organizations are having anywhere from a repeat of the 2010 budget (which wasn’t that bad) to cuts that take them back to 2008 budget levels or even worse. And when you have your budgets getting cut, and we have big launches like Juneau and the Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity, and all of these big projects getting added on top of current programs, that’s not the time to be designing human flight rockets. That’s the most expensive thing you can be doing. So, partnering with commercial that are going to make this profitable — NASA’s proven it can’t make it profitable, and that’s OK. Now, we look to Space-X and I really think if anyone can make space profitable, it’s Elon Musk.

Fraser: So, do you think then, that…like I know that Peter Diamandis, the SpaceX people, Space Adventures, they’re all counting on space tourism as being a way that takes us into being a human space-faring society? Do you think that that’s going to pan out? Will that follow the same way that the air industry worked with the tourism being the thin edge of the wedge that turned it into a more robust industry?

Pamela: I’m just not sure. One of the things I look at is when you watch airplanes getting loaded at the airport, there is always that big old pallet of shipping stuff, there’s the big ol’ pile of mail, and when you look around the airport, it’s United, Delta, American Airlines, which is what I fly with (just a plug, I don’t know why – they don’t sponsor us either)…

Fraser: Not a sponsor — call us!

Pamela: So all of these different airlines, they’re carrying cargo. Then you look out and you see Fed-Ex, and the big brown planes, the big white planes — all the cargo planes (and I know my husband and I are slowly destroying the environment one “Amazon” box at a time). Air cargo is a pretty major driver in filling up aircrafts when seats aren’t there, and what I’m wondering is what is going to be the equivalent of cargo when it comes to space flight?

Fraser: Right. If it’s Helium-3 off the moon, or whether it’s going to be mining asteroids for their gold and other precious resources…is that going to be the thing that really gets it all rolling?

Pamela: Right. So there’s this next piece that we need to find that goes beyond just tourism. Business travel is the vital underpinning of passenger flights. Astronauts will be the minority of those going up to do research as near as anyone can tell, so this is one of those things that I know there’s going to be some sort of a solution, something I haven’t thought of, and mining has been what every science fiction writer has always written about, so it’s going to be interesting to see what in the next ten years haven’t we thought of that becomes the real reason that space flight for commercial purposes becomes necessary and cheap.

Fraser: So what are going to be some milestones in the space tourism industry that are going to happen over the next couple of years? We try not to date the show, we’re talking about this in early 2011, so what are some of the plans, the things that people should keep their eyes out for over the next coming years?

Pamela: I think the three big things in my head are going to be Spaceshiptwo going into steady flight…

Fraser: When are they expecting to do their first flights?

Pamela: They keep moving the date, so since we try not to be timely I’m refusing to state a date because they keep moving it.

Fraser: In the future from when we record this episode, they should be flying. Yes.

Pamela: So, I think the next big thing is going to be (and I’m not sure which one’s going to get there first), Space Ship II flying on a steady, you go to Space Port America, look at the boards, and you hop on your flight to Space-Ex getting steady launches of both astronauts to and fro from the ISS, and cargo to and fro from everywhere it needs to go – those two things are the next big step getting a commercial space agency handling the day-to-day long haul of the telecommunications research and NASA needs. Then the next thing after that I really think is going to be Bigelow’s hotel.

Fraser: Right. I’ve heard he has plans to launch them as early as 2012.

Pamela: And not for the humans, but it looks like the 2013 launch will have life support onboard. I don’t know when and if they’re planning on trying to put humans inside of it, but it will have that capacity, so it’s 2013-aim, it’s currently on the docket for 2014 unless more spacecraft become available. It sucks that that’s the thing holding us back is how fast can SpaceX produce spacecraft right now.

Fraser: I can just imagine how things are there, that they’ve got so much resistance and so much skepticism about getting this going and now everyone’s complaining that they’re not getting it all done fast enough… “Where are your rockets? Come on!!” I feel bad for them. So let me ask you a question,

Pamela: Would you go into space? Would you take a Virgin Galactic flight? A sub-orbital flight — now?

Pamela: So, the reason I’m being squeamish is because the last time I went skiing at Taos, I got really bad altitude sickness. Now, admittedly, there was a lot of up and down from 5000 feet involved, and that’s just never good, but if I knew I wouldn’t have altitude sickness issues – in a heartbeat. I’m just not a fan of puking.

Fraser: Yeah? I don’t know, I would be pretty scared, I gotta say. I would be pretty scared to do it.

Pamela: See, but you’ve got kids…

Fraser: I know, but I’m also just not a big fan. I’m a total coward when it comes to falling. I’m not afraid of heights, just afraid of falling, so I think… I don’t like doing those “Tower of Terror” free fall-type rides.

Pamela: See, I love ‘em — love ‘em all.

Fraser: I talked to Story Musgrave; I was interviewing him one time, you know, he’s one of the most flying-est space shuttle astronauts ever, and I asked him, “Did you enjoy launching into space?” He’s like, “Not at all. I did not like it. It’s a very terrifying feeling, very anxious, and it’s only when you’re up there that you can kind of relax, but when it’s happening you feel really awful and scared the whole way up.” I think that’s a hard thing…I’m definitely not a risk-taker on that. I’m not that kind of person, so it would be really hard for me to step on a flight — for a little while.

Pamela: See, I jump horses [laughing]…

Fraser: So ten years down the road, everything’s been fine, there’s been lots of good simulators, I could work my way up to it, maybe I would do it, but I definitely don’t think I would do it out of the…so if Branson is wondering if he should give me and Pamela free flights as a promotion, try somebody else first.

Pamela: Hey, I’d take it!

Fraser: Pamela would take it! Right, of course!

Pamela: I’d need lots of Dramamine.

Fraser: Right. OK, well thanks, Pamela.

Pamela: OK, I’ll talk to you later…bye bye.

Show Notes

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Fraser: Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts-based journey through the Cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. My name is Fraser Cain, I’m the publisher of Universe Today, and with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University – Edwardsville. Hi, Pamela! How are you doing?

Pamela: I’m doing well, Fraser. How are you doing?

Fraser: I’m good. We’re both very well rested. You went on a cruise in Europe. I went on a cruise in the Caribbean, and yeah, it’s good.

Pamela: And you’re tanner than I am!

Fraser: No! It was like an icebox, well the Caribbean was warm, but southern Florida was cold…cold…colder than home. So I moved back to the west coast for warmth. And I know the timing is all messed up – we’re actually recording this in January, but the date is December, so…last week we talked about the old way that navigators used to find their way around the planet by looking at objects in the sky and doing some tricky math. The new navigation system, of course, is the Global Positioning System, and it helps you find your spot on the planet with amazing accuracy. Let’s see where this system came from and how it works. Let me just get this off the record, just so people can know my political leanings here – I love GPS! I think GPS is the coolest thing ever! I’ve got an ipad and it’s got a GPS on it, and you’re driving down the road and you can see where you are on Earth – it’s really awesome! So that’s it. If people can keep this in mind as we do this show – I totally love GPS. But the current GPS systems that we have today are very different from the beginning idea. So where did the concept of a satellite-based navigation system come from?

Pamela: Well, it’s basically military — U.S. military — not as warm and fuzzy as ipad. It’s a U.S. military ‘we need to know where we are because we’re doing things in the dark late at night and we don’t want to turn on the lights.’ It’s a system for deploying things, bombing things, destroying things without being able to see them.

Fraser: Yeah, that does take a little of the shine off it.

Pamela: Yeah, kind of… a lot.

Fraser: Right, so the military decided that they needed some way to work at night — you know work in fog, work in the clouds, so…

Pamela: …work in deserts with no markings, and satellites are a good way to do it.

Fraser: So what did they come up with originally?

Pamela: Well, this is basically an extension of the idea of “OK, so I left the city, I went 300 miles straight west, I then went 400 miles straight North, where am I? You can figure it out.

Fraser: That’s dead reckoning.

Pamela: That’s dead reckoning. Then combine with that the idea of triangulation. You look at something you figure out “OK, I know I’m this far away from this object, therefore I can figure out the distance by knowing that.” These are two different ways of figuring out where things are located in space.

Fraser: Right, and you can be standing in a spot, you can see a mountain over that way, and a tall building over in that other direction, and some tower and then you can work out your angles to those objects and determine where you are if you have a map showing where they are.

Pamela: Right. Now, with satellites, it’s not as easy, but in some ways, it’s easier because you can stick a whole lot of satellites in orbit. And that’s what we did. There’s 27 GPS satellites orbiting the planet, 3 of them are sitting in reserve, 24 of them are constantly sending out happy little messages of I am here I am here! Where they actually articulate where they are in time and space sending out messages that include their ephemeris information and atomic clock information

Fraser: And the atomic clock is the important part.

Pamela: Well, actually both of them are equally useful information, so if I said I am 300 miles from a city, and I never say where that city is on the planet, being 300 miles from it – not so useful, and the time is actually that I’m-300-miles-away information. So the satellites have to be hanging out saying “I AM HERE!” saying where they are, and by saying where they are, and when that statement comes from, someone receiving that information can say “OK, I know what time it is where I am. I know what time it was when that information was sent.” And that difference in time gives you the distance because of the speed of light — that’s convenient. And when the satellite tells you where it is, it tells you how far you are from a known point. Now, this gets complicated to think about in 3 dimensions. So let’s think real fast about 2-dimensional space on the surface of a planet. If I say I’m 300 miles away from Calgary (which I am picking because it’s kind of in the middle of a whole lot of flat), so if I say I’m 300 miles from Calgary, that tells me that I’m somewhere on a circle that’s 300 miles in radius. Now, I don’t know where I am on that circle. Now, if I say I’m also 5 miles away from farmer Brown’s farm, I can now know, I’m 5 miles away (radius) from that farm.

Fraser: That kind of cross in two points.

Pamela: Right, so that narrows down my location on the planet to two places. That’s kind of cool! So add to that I’m one mile from the gas station – well, that’s another circle. So if your measurements are accurate you can now, taking this distance from Calgary, this distance from the farm, and this distance from the gas station, figure out exactly where you are on the surface of the planet.

Fraser: But you need those three points. One doesn’t help you, two narrows it down to two spots, but three gives you one single location.

Pamela: Right. Now the problem with dealing with satellites is it’s not a circle that you’re dealing with anymore because you can be on any side of the satellite you want to be. You can even be on the other side of the satellite closer to the moon rather than the side that’s closer to the Earth.

Fraser: Right, they’re like spheres around these satellites.

Pamela: Right, so satellites orbit I think about 12,000 miles up, then that gives me an awful large sphere I could be located anywhere on, and the surface of the planet isn’t exactly flat. You could be on top of a mountain, you could be in a building, you could be in a coal mine — although the satellite signals aren’t likely to reach under the ground…

Fraser: Or you could be near to the equator where the planet bulges, or near the poles where the planet’s less bulged.

Pamela: …bottom of a gorge, there are lots of places you could be that are either higher or lower, you could even be in an aircraft, and aircraft use GPS.
So now I’m dealing with this sphere, and when I’m dealing with this sphere, I no longer can use just three spheres because I still have multiple locations I could be, so now it requires four satellites — four spheres — that hopefully overlap in one point. Now, when we talk about error in GPS positioning, because any of you who’ve ever used an iphone know when you get that little blue dot that lets you know where you are, it has a light blue circle around it on the surface of your map and that circle represents the error, and sometimes you end up with like “I’m somewhere in the state of Ohio,” because it can’t get enough satellite signals, and that’s where you get a large circle of error, and sometimes you just get a little tiny Starbucks-sized circle of error, and that circle of error comes from error in the timing. So if you think about it, I know the signal came within plus or minus nanoseconds, and if I was dealing with my distance from Calgary, farmer, and gas station, that would be the thickness of the circle lines. So instead of having a precise, absolute point-point-point on the surface of the planet, I actually have with the thickness of those three line converges, which might be a Starbucks-sized intersection point. Now, when I’m dealing the spheres, what I’m dealing with is the thickness of the skin of those spheres, which comes together to create a 3-dimensional error in “up-down, left-right, forward and back,” and so the errors are simply timing errors.

Fraser: Now, when you say a timing error, is that a problem with the original clock? Is that a problem with my clock?

Pamela: It’s a little bit of all of the above.

Fraser: Is the speed of light changing as it goes through changes in the atmosphere?

Pamela: No, that isn’t an issue. The speed of light is the speed of light is the speed of light. This is the thing by which all clocks tick.

Fraser: But it doesn’t change as it goes through the atmosphere.

Pamela: Well, the speed of light does change as it goes through the atmosphere. We don’t worry about that one. That one is just built into the calculations. We know where the atmosphere begins; we know where the atmosphere ends – we’re good! But there are minor errors built into the system, and built into the fact that…well, your cell phone has to know exactly “when” it is, and your cell phone doesn’t have an atomic clock built into it…

Fraser: Which is really good, I think…if we were carrying around atomic clocks — that would be bad.

Pamela: [laughing] It would be a whole lot heavier and not fit into my front pant pocket nearly so well.

Fraser: Yeah…”accurate time cancer.”

Pamela: Right. Well, atomic clocks aren’t all nuclear decays, most of them are oscillations, so we don’t have to worry about cancer from oscillations.

Fraser: OK, good…just lugging around a 100-pound clock…

Pamela: [laughing] Yeah, I’m not that fond of cesium. Anyway, as we’re now wandering off the topic…So, your cell phone, mostly kind of sort of has accurate time. It’s constantly updating its time off of towers, which are hopefully updating their time off the network of atomic clocks, but this can lead to small errors in your handheld system. Now, it also used to be — and this has been fixed — it used to be that the U. S. military didn’t want other people to know precisely where they were, and since the way these satellites work is they’re just hanging out in space going: “I’m here! I’m here! I’m here!” over and over and over — anyone can listen to their signals. So when they first put it out, they had an encrypted signal and then they had the public signal, and the public signal had built-in random timing errors, and these built-in random timing errors kind of meant that you only knew where you were within a 100 meters, which is pretty good unless you’re trying to bomb a house, which was what the military was concerned about.

Fraser: But I can see that from their point of view it’s kind of frustrating. You build this enormous expensive satellite navigation system to give you an edge over the enemy and then they can also use it as well.

Pamela: Right. So they built in this fudge factor, this randomization, and the thing was that very determined geologists found ways around this. So if I know where I am within 100 meters, and my friend knows where they are within 100 meters, and my other friend knows where they are within 100 meters, there’s probably only one solution if we know precisely where I am relative to my two friends, and they know precisely where they are relative to the other two – me and the third friend, second friend – three people involved. Anyways, if all three of us know exactly where we are relative to one another, we can figure out exactly where we are relative to the planet using the fact that there’s probably only one solution that allows all three of our measurements that have error bars and the exact locations that we think we’re at.

Fraser: Right, so geologists would use multiple GPSs to overcome the error and find out where they were, and I’m sure that the enemy countries would do the same thing, so I’m sure that’s a big reason that they eventually got rid of that error, which is great. That takes away all the joy when you don’t know where you are within a 100 meters….turn right at this street, which isn’t there. That’s official now, that’s gone now there’s no error anymore.

Pamela: Well, there’s still minor error, it’s the whole “turn left in 5 meters” and you realize, “No, no that left already occurred. Sorry, Mr. GPS System, you lied.”

Fraser: Right, but the U.S. military is not injecting an artificial error into it on purpose. That’s gone.

Pamela: Right. So we still have these small low-scale, not-good-enough-to-land-a-plane-using-simply-your-Garmin-GPS-device, but the thing is they’re landing airplanes using mostly GPS and other control systems that give accurate positions.

Fraser: Yeah, I mean this is one of those situations where we get all these unintentional wonderful benefits with the horrible military technology, but now you get…we’re going to have cars that drive themselves. As I said, you can go for a hike and you can see exactly where you are on the Earth. Getting lost is harder; it’s still possible…

Pamela: It’s still possible, again, that five meter error really can matter at times, but the thing is with the differential idea that geologists and presumably other militaries came up with, we can now, by saying “OK I have a fixed reference point. This pillar at this airport – I know exactly where this pillar is and this pillar. I can use it as another known space in my coordinate system.” And that allows us to take the 24 satellites orbiting the planet, find 4 of them, find the known source, and now I know where I am to within centimeters, sometimes millimeters, and this allows us to land planes!

Fraser: So is this like the assisted GPS system?

Pamela: I don’t know. I haven’t heard that fact.

Fraser: OK. The three G’s and the iphone and the ipad and a lot of these they have a GPS plus, or something like that, so it uses the GPS and it also uses the cell tower network as an additional reference to give you that super-duper accuracy.

Pamela: The thing about cell phones is they’re not using just the satellite system. I was just recently in Venice, and if you’ve ever been to Venice it is an island of alleyways, and in order to use the GPS system to figure out where you are, you have to have a clear line of sight to at least 4 satellites, and if you’re in one of these little tiny alleyways, that is not going to happen. And the way phones and Garmin devices and other devices often compensate – especially, iphones – is they look to see, “OK, what cell networks can I pick up? What wireless networks can I pick up?” And it takes all of this extra information, and uses that extra information: “Can I hit 3 cell towers instead? Can I hit 3 open known location wireless networks instead?” and figure out from that more information on where you are.

Fraser: Yeah, and I’ve noticed that when you’re in a cell service area, the GPS is a lot more accurate. Now, we’re using the word GPS – the Global Positioning System – but that’s like a brand; that’s like saying “Coke is delicious,” and not talking about it just being cola, so in fact, this satellite navigation system, this is just one that’s currently being developed, but there are others in the works and there have been others in the past, right?

Pamela: Right, so the issue is the U. S. has its GPS system and this is the one that all the commercial software is using: all of your Garmens, all of your moovoos (I think that’s a network that may be an MP3 player. Forgive me if I screw that one up), your iphones, your androids, your hiking devices, all of these things are plugging into the U. S. system. It works everywhere on the planet, which says something about how the U. S. military was thinking. But the Soviet Union, now Russia — clearly not so big a fan of having to rely on U. S. technology, so the Russian global navigation was in use by the Russian military only until 2007, running a parallel system that they could use for their own we’d-really-like-to-bomb-that-house-over-there day-to-day problems. There are also plans for the Chinese to build a compass navigation system. The European Union is looking to build the Gallileo positioning system, which I love because Gallileo knew nothing about relativity. So if you actually use the math Gallileo would have known, it will fail miserably, but I’m going to assume that the European Union simply took their most famous astronomer in history, used his name, and will apply relativity liberally.

Fraser: Right. Now, we, in the past, have talked about how relativity plays a part in GPS navigation. So, how does it work?

Pamela: Well, we have two different problems we have to deal with (and this is where I encourage all of you to go back and listen to our relativity episodes): the first problem that we have to deal with is these silly little satellites that do such a wonderful job ARE IN MOTION. A lot of people think that they’re geosynchronous satellites that constantly stay in the exact same place over the planet, but they’re not. That would actually cause problems because the only place you can stick geostationary orbits is over the equator, which means you wouldn’t really have GPS at the poles of the planet, and who knows? Maybe you’d like to bomb an iceberg…

Fraser: So, imagine these are a cloud of buzzing bees around the planet. They’re not staying in one spot; they are constantly in motion?

Pamela: So each of them has a 12-hour orbit; they go around the planet twice a day, and they’re orbiting just like you said – in a cloud — so everyone has at least four in sight at any moment and in particularly lucky moments, you have twelve of them you can use to get your position very accurately.

Fraser: …to within a nanometer.

Pamela: I wouldn’t go that far, but you can get it accurately, so when one things is in motion compared with another, you have to start dealing with time dilation issues, so according to special relativity, the fact that these satellites are moving relative to the person standing lost on a street corner causes a slowing down of the satellite’s clock, relative to that stationary person, of about 7 microseconds per day if you stayed lost for an entire day. So, you have, on one hand, moving satellite, non-moving human. That leads to the two clocks getting more and more out of sync as the satellite continues to orbit over time – that’s one thing.

Fraser: Right, and this just adds up. The satellite is launched, it has a clock on-board, the satellite is orbiting the planet around and around, and this time dilation just builds up over time, right?

Pamela: Right and so this is an ongoing problem that we have to correct for, and that’s OK – it’s math. It means that we can do the calculation, but if you don’t take relativity into account, the difference between the two clocks will build up over time, and how far off your position is gets worse and worse and worse over time.

Fraser: …which is pretty amazing. So, is the satellite doing the math? Are the people on Earth doing the math? Probably both.

Pamela: It’s a combination of both, but that isn’t actually the only problem we have to deal with because if that was the only problem we have to deal with, you figure out, “OK, this sucker is orbiting at a constant rate, I just reset the clocks and move on with life, but if you did only that, you would still be wrong.

Fraser: Wow! Tell me how I’m wrong. How would I be wrong?

Pamela: So, the other problem is we’re within a “gravity well.” So here on the surface of the Earth, we experience more gravity than the spacecraft up in orbit, and this difference in gravity is not identical, but it’s kind of sort of analogous to moving faster. So just like the satellite clock slows down because of its motion, our clock slows down because of our higher gravity, and this is actually a greater fact because we’re that much closer to the center of the earth, our clocks are slowing down 45 microseconds per day compared to that satellite.

Fraser: 45 microseconds…and how much is the difference from its speed?

Pamela: So, we have satellites slowing down each day 7 microseconds compared to no differences in gravity compared to non-motion, then we have –because of the difference gravity — we’re slowing down 45 microseconds per day, so take the difference we’re looking at depending on where you are on the surface of the Earth between 35 and 45 microseconds per day of relativity-induced differences in clocks.

Fraser: Right. So within days/weeks/months if you didn’t account for that, your timing signals would be worthless.

Pamela: Right, and so just one week of not taking this into account is the difference between starting out one day in Columbus, OH and a week later being somewhere over Detroit.

Fraser: Right, and that’s a week, so give it a year and you could be anywhere on Earth, and at that point the satellite’s no help at all.

Pamela: Right, so we have to take relativity into account, and so they actually when they built the GPS satellites, they based their clock on a slower tick rate, so that we can take into account these differences over time.

Fraser: Well, that is incredible! I didn’t know that it was that significant. So thanks, “Einstein!”

Pamela: Relativity isn’t a complete science. We still don’t get the insides of black holes. We still haven’t unified it with anything, but you know what we know about it sure works and allows us to know exactly where we are. And one of the more terrifying things is someone who flies constantly. I’ve learned when they build all of these autopilot systems, they build it so that the autopilot can land the airplane! So, all of those A-Team episodes where Hannibal is landing the plane…

Fraser: Yeah, “Is anybody a pilot?”

Pamela: Right! No, no, no – autopilot does that now.

Fraser: Feel free to let the plane land itself. I can’t wait for my car to drive itself. That will be amazing!

Pamela: Yeah, I don’t trust myself on ice and snow, and I’m not sure how I feel about computers on ice and snow, but dry roads – I’m looking forward to that.

Fraser: Yeah, I would happily give up my control to a computer. No problem. Alright, well that’s great, Pamela. Thanks a lot, and we’ll talk to you next week.

Pamela: Sounds good, Fraser. I’ll talk to you later.

• NASA’s Lunar Outpost Plans Taking Shape – NASA (2007)
• Colonization of the Moon -  Wiki
• Kaguya Finds Lava Tube on the Moon — Universe Today
• NASA:  Why We Explore
• Inflatable Structures on the Moon --NASA
• Paper:  Mechanical Equipment Requirements for Inflatable Lunar Structures
• What if We Lived on the Moon – HowStuffWorks
• Earth’s Magnetic Field — Universe Today
• Rotating Wheel Space Stations -- Wiki
• O’Neill Cylinder -  NSS
• Orbital Megastructures — Universe Today
• Transparent Solar Panels — Ubergizmo
• Ringworld books – Wiki
• Babylon 5
• Babylon 5 Tech Manual
• Arthur C. Clarke
• Dyson Sphere — Wiki
• Swarm Satellites – WorldChanging
• Moving the Earth; A Planetary Survial Guide -- New Scientist
• From the *interesting* files:  We Must Move the Earth Now!



Transcript: Future Civilizations

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Fraser: Hello Pamela.

Pamela: Hey Fraser, how’s it going?

Fraser: I’m doing very well. So let’s assume that humans survive the next few hundred years without destroying ourselves or the planet and we actually become a space-faring civilization. What kinds of challenges will we face and what kinds of projects will we build to expand ourselves out into the solar system and eventually into the galaxy–we just need to think big! Alright Pamela, so what would you say the future holds? Now let’s assume, right… we’ve talked about all the ways that we could kill ourselves and the universe is trying to kill us, we’ve got global warming, we’ve got diseases, we’ve got asteroid strikes, you know, mega solar flares, wandering black holes… there’s so many ways to die. But, let’s assume that we make it through that turbulent period and actually move ourselves into the process of becoming a space-faring civilization, beginning to colonize the solar system. What are some of the kinds of projects that some people have thought of that we might be able to build to support that?

Pamela: Well, I think two of the first real super-giant huge in-space structures that we’re likely to see are, first of all just a colony on the moon. It will probably start as the equivalent of a trailer park on the moon, something built down, hollowed into the sides of craters or… the thing that we’re looking for most is a lava tunnel… underground that was left behind as the cool crust of the magma stayed behind while the hot rest of the lava continued to shoot across the surface creating a tongue of lava somewhere else. We want to be underground, and our first mega-structure is likely to be built roughly under the surface of the moon.

Fraser: So we can imagine sort of as we move towards building that moon base we’re going to be launching up, as you said, trailer after trailer down onto the moon, connecting them together, and eventually humans are going to decide, well… it’s time to stay. So they’re going to dig down into the moon regolith and actually build something underground… I guess excavating out a lunar base, something permanent.

Pamela: And this isn’t the most exciting type of structure any of us have ever imagined, you always want to see the big, shiny dome with the skyscrapers underneath the big, shiny dome. That works great in a George Jetson universe, but the reality is we have to deal with radiation. But, if we ever figure out how to deal with radiation without requiring dirt, water, earth… something between us and the solar wind… if we can make that breakthrough, suddenly the doors open to create much more exciting mega-structures.

Fraser: Right. So, what’s the problem with the radiation? I mean, obviously you don’t want to get radiation…

Pamela: It will kill you..

Fraser: But how does that affect… like as you said, you build some great big space station… what’s the problem?

Pamela: In general, they type of stuff you build a great big space station out of… you’d want to have some sort of membrane, something that inflates like the inflatable domes you see covering some football parks. That sort of membrane, that sort of flexible material… we don’t currently know any that’s capable of blocking high-energy particles, capable of blocking radiation, capable of blocking the type of stuff that is shooting through space every moment of every day looking for a piece of DNA to tear apart and cause cancer.

Fraser: Right, so if you lived in a big balloon, you’d have the air pressure that you needed to breathe and against your skin so you’re not getting space bruises, but it’s the radiation… and I guess if you’re out there for long periods of time you’re eventually going to get hit with a solar storm, proton storm coming from the sun… which could deliver a lethal dose in just a couple of hours.

Pamela: The Apollo astronauts were extremely lucky. We managed to have this wonderful window where the sun was quiet while the astronauts were on the moon. Had we not been so lucky, we could’ve lost some astronauts to the radiation. Now here on the planet Earth, we’re protected by our own magnetosphere. We’re protected by the wonderful magnetic field that comes along with the north and south magnetic poles that allow us to navigate. The moon doesn’t have that sort of a magnetic field. In fact, if you get high enough up in the Earth’s orbit, you don’t have enough protection in orbit, either. The astronauts are mostly, but not entirely protected, because they’re so close to the planet Earth. But, people are working every day to try to develop artificial ways to create magnetic fields that are light enough, that are low enough energy drawing that it might be possible to start to protect spacecraft, to start to protect space structures with artificial magnetic fields.

Fraser: But don’t you also suffer the problem of not having any gravity? I know that the astronauts living on board the space station… their muscles and bones start to waste away if they’re not experiencing any gravity. And exercise can help, but it doesn’t solve the problem entirely.

Pamela: Right. This is another long-term problem. But it’s also a problem that lots of sci-fi writers have started to find solutions for. Now, hanging out on the surface of the moon, you can’t do too much. One solution that’s been proposed, that sounds rather horrific to me, is you sleep in a centrifugal chamber where you sort of imagine going to bed in a carnival ride where you’re in a giant drum leaning up against the wall, and the drum starts to rotate, and eventually you’re experiencing one Earth gravity or more. It might be a comfortable way to sleep, I know I managed to fall asleep in one of those rides at Space Camp once as a kid, but I’m a bit twisted. It’s a solution… but it’s not a day-to-day solution.

Fraser: Right, now rotation, though, I think is the key, right?

Pamela: Yes. So while on the surface of the moon it’s kinda hard to build a structure that’s big enough to work in that’s rotating… that same limitation doesn’t exist when you start building space stations. And here there’s some really neat designs out there that go beyond just Babylon 5 and the space station from 2001 where we start imagining what, to me, look kinda like giant hamster habitats rotating in space. But if you build a large enough tube and set it rotating at an angle to the sun, you can have such that the inside part of the tube experiences daylight for part of the day, and is in shadow… is in its own shadow as it exposes the outer part of the tube to the sun for another part of the day, creating a natural day/night cycle for people living in this partially transparent tube.

Fraser: Whoa… ok, so, hold on… I’m kind of imagining a toilet paper tube, right?

Pamela: Well, think more donut in space… but a hollow donut, like one of those hamster trail things that you can get.

Fraser: Right, but you’re living inside it… on the inside edge of this gigantic cylinder. And it’s rotating at the right speed so that you’re experiencing the equivalent of Earth gravity, and at the same time it’s angled so that part of it is in the shade and part of it is in the sun. Then I guess you would cap off the ends of it so that all your air doesn’t get out.

Pamela: Right, so… well, here’s a good way to think of it. Take one of those completely round hamster trail tube things that if you set it on the floor, you can watch your very disturbed hamster running infinitely in circles and circles and circles. Now, take that completely clear tube and roll it like a wheel through paint, so the outer half of it is completely opaque. Now, instead of having paint there, imagine this entire habitrail is something the size of an orbit around the earth.

Fraser: Whoa!

Pamela: And where that paint is, is where earth is… where dirt is… where structures are. And where it’s transparent, well, that orbiting structure is transparent as well, and that’s how the sunlight gets in. Now you take this donut-shaped… this tube that has on the outer rim earth and buildings and structures, and put it at a 45 degree angle to the sun. Well, the inner part of that donut, that tube, is going to get sunlight coming into it during part of the day, but then it’s going to rotate so that the sun is blocked by the dirt so that the sun is actually underground behind your feet for the other part of the day. So you can build something… in fact you want to build something big enough that as it rotates you can have earth gravity, but also as it rotates you can have a 24 hour day/night cycle.

Fraser: Right, but building a structure the size of Earth’s orbit sounds a little complicated.

Pamela: Yeah, you need to go grab yourself a good asteroid and start mining madly away. But, it’s possible. It just takes time, technology, and money. And it’s mostly the money and the ability to stop radiation that we’re lacking right now.

Fraser: And you could imagine, then, a structure like that, just having an enormous amount of surface area for people to live on.

Pamela: And also an amazing ability to collect solar energy. We are starting to reach the point, technologically, where we can build transparent and semi-transparent solar panels. So you can build a structure where everywhere you have a window, you’re also gathering energy. Since you’re building the entire thing from scratch anyways, you can also put opaque solar panels all along the outer rim, the part that’s going to be opaque anyways because it’s covered in dirt, of the structure. So you can build this as a giant energy collection system. It’s a pollutionless form of energy. You can now have a completely electric society that isn’t doing any harm to its completely enclosed atmosphere other than whatever harm comes from having cows that do cow-like things, or other life forms that do life-form-like things.

Fraser: But in theory if you build something that ginormous you can handle the implications of the life forms that you’ve placed inside of it.

Pamela: Right.

Fraser: So like there’s the Ringworld story… is that kinda what we’re talking about?

Pamela: The Ringworld is exactly the type of thing that we’re talking about. Except you can do this on two different scales. What I’m talking about is you build something that you can imaging the entire donut orbiting in a happy-go-lucky way in place of a planet around a star.

Fraser: Right, I see… so it wouldn’t be ringing around the sun at the distance of the earth’s orbit, it would just be sort of floating in space in the same kind of place where the earth is going. But it would just be rolling around the sun as opposed to surrounding the entire sun… so you could make these as big or as small as you wanted, right? You could make one, as you said, as big as the earth, you could make one as big as the moon, as long as you get the… you could make one a couple hundred meters across… there would be some minimum size where the rotational forces would make you sick to your stomach, right?

Pamela: Well, as long as you do the rotation right, it’s always 1-g. The problem is making the 1-g area wide enough that you can survive it, and tall enough that your head and your feet don’t have radically different gravities.

Fraser: That’s right… yeah, I know that’s the problem, right… people talk about these rotational strategies for dealing with gravity where… but what you don’t want is where your feet are feeling one type gravity and your head is feeling a different amount of gravity because of the different rotation speeds. Is there some size where that sort of goes away?

Pamela: Yes. And it’s not that bad of a size. Babylon 5 did all of their calculations right, Arthur C. Clarke did all of his calculations right. So, this is something that is a buildable size, that’s a feasible size, but what’s not as feasible but is still imaginable–not feasible today, but maybe in the future–is starting to build Niven’s ringworlds where instead of having a regular donut inclined to a sun, happily rolling around… rolling around the solar system… Instead, you just build a ring around the sun.

Fraser: Wow.

Pamela: Yeah.

Fraser: So essentially, you’ve then got Earth everywhere around the entire orbit around the sun.

Pamela: Yes.

Fraser: At the earth’s distance from the sun, it’s just planet. But instead of it being a round ball that goes around the sun, it’s just a flat ribbon that goes all the way around the sun. So, then what’s involved with that?

Pamela: Here again, you see in websites and in science fiction this is often described, like you said, strictly as a ribbon. But you actually need to build it as a domed ribbon. Because otherwise the atmosphere will escape. People talk about… well, if you make it big enough you’ll have gravity… no, if you make it big enough… gravity always points towards the center of mass.

Fraser: Won’t it just turn it into a sphere? It’ll try to, right?

Pamela: Well, it will eventually gravitationally collapse under its own mass into a sphere. But, ignoring that structural building problem, if you make the thing massive enough, gravity always points towards the center of mass, so you’re not going to be attracted to the outer ribbon of this thing, you’re going to be attracted to fall straight into the sun, and that’s a bit of a problem.

Fraser: Right, well I thought the trick was that you set it rotating…

Pamela: You set it rotating…

Fraser: And you give it a rim, and then the air, just like people, is experiencing that 1-gravity. The air can’t get over the edge of the rim, so it sticks around inside the ribbon, just like the people do.

Pamela: The problem starts to be that gases collide with themselves, they’re getting berated by the solar wind, you run into all sorts of problems that will cause, over time, the atmosphere to drift away.

Fraser: Right, it’s very different from escape velocity.

Pamela: Yeah..

Fraser: What you would get with the centrifugal force of it turning…

Pamela: And so now it’s a much more complicated system where you will lose your atmosphere, and it’s something to be concerned about. So the easiest way to prevent that is you just put a lid on the whole darn thing.

Fraser: So, build a big dome… so it’s a ribbon with a dome facing the sun. And I guess then you can also put in your shielding because you’re going to have that same problem, right? You’re not going to have the magnetosphere to protect it, and so it’s almost like somebody somewhere is always going to be getting blasted with protons.

Pamela: Right. The other problem with these is that they’re not actually all that stable. Here with our planet Earth we’re always, quite literally, falling towards the sun. But, we have enough velocity that we are falling at the same rate we’re orbiting, which sounds really confusing. The way to think of it is… if I throw a rock, it arcs down towards the surface of the earth. It falls. But, if I throw that rock hard enough, it’s going to be able to get from me here in Illinois all the way to you in Vancouver before it falls and hits the ground. If I throw it even harder, it’s going to make it curving around the surface of the planet all the way to China before it falls. I keep throwing the rock hard enough, it’s going to make it all the way to friends in Britain before it falls.

Fraser: Right. Eventually it’s going to bonk you on the back of the head.

Pamela: Eventually it’s going to bonk me on the back of the head. And if I duck, it’s orbiting.

Fraser: Right.

Pamela: Now, it’s that velocity that it has that keeps it orbiting. Well, if you have a solid ribbon, it’s not really experiencing a forward velocity. It’s just a stationary object that happens to be rotating about its center of mass. So the only thing holding that Niven ringworld in place is, well, it’s gravitationally attracted to the sun and it’s stopped falling. It just happens to have its gravitational center and the sun’s gravitational center in the exact same place. But, it could become unstable very easily, and it could end up rotating in strange ways. Lots of bad things could happen, so you actually have to have stabilizers on this thing.

Fraser: Yeah, it could just buckle and then break apart…

Pamela: Yeah…

Fraser: So you’d have to be watching every little part of it to make sure it’s not rotating too quickly or not quickly enough, or bending inward or outward, or…

Pamela: Or that it doesn’t inadvertently start rotating about more than just the central axle. You can imagine it rotating like a bicycle… that’s a good thing… where you have the axis straight through the center, the ring is perpendicular to it, it’s going around and around and around… life is good. Now imagine coming up and biffing it from the top so that it’s now the entire ring is rotating around and around and around like a top on its end… that could be bad on many, many levels.

Fraser: Well, I think the initial impact would be bad… Now is there mass… is there material in the solar system to build something like that?

Pamela: The calculations that I’ve seen basically say that if you sweep up all the mass, all the mass… all the asteroids, all the planets, all the plutinos, all the Kuiper Belt objects, sweep up the Oort Cloud… yes.

Fraser: Oh really? Ok, yeah… so if you sweep up everything solid…

Pamela: And melt the stuff that’s not, so that you can make the atmosphere that you need.

Fraser: Yeah, get rid of Jupiter, just ’cause we don’t want its gravitational interactions… you know…

Pamela: Well, we need its mass, also.

Fraser: And its fuel.

Pamela: And its fuel.

Fraser: Might as well chew it up for fuel… but, I mean what we’re obviously talking about here is the ability of future civilizations to actually completely control the mass and matter in their solar system, right?

Pamela: Right. And it’s the energy that in many ways is the real reason for starting to build these things because again, with the Ringworld, you’re able to start capturing a whole lot more of the sunlight simply because you’re now exposing a whole lot more area to the sun. And as you start to build more complete enclosures around a star, you start to be able to capture more and more of its energy and do more and more interesting things. We’ve all seen in Star Trek or in other sci-fi movies where they start talking about Dyson spheres–completely solid spheres enclosing a star. And while they have the same stability problems as a Ringworld, they also aren’t as feasible to build because they require a whole lot more mass. But, if you were able to build one, you could then capture and utilize all the energy from a star.

Fraser: Now, let me see if I understand this… you’re talking about… you just go and scoop up again all of the mass in the entire solar system…

Pamela: And from a couple of others…

Fraser: And from a couple of others somehow… or you figure out a way to make it very strong, you turn it into a ball…

Pamela: A hollow ball…

Fraser: A hollow ball, and you just clamp it around the sun. And you’re now extracting all of the energy that’s pouring out of the sun.

Pamela: Other slightly more feasible ways of doing this are brought up all the time. Instead of creating a new surface on which to live, keep the planet Earth… we kinda like it. We may not like it eventually, but right now we kinda like it. And instead build a swarm of light collectors–a Dyson swarm. Encase the sun in these small moving orbiting objects that are hopefully not colliding, but are all scooping up light from the sun and either beaming or otherwise getting that energy back to the civilization that needs it.

Fraser: Right, and I guess you could leave a window, just for the earth…

Pamela: Right…

Fraser: So you could imagine that you take this swarm of solar collectors, move them in to like maybe the orbit of Mercury, so that they’re very… receiving a very strong amount of radiation, and you configure them so that they’re all collecting sunlight except for this little spot where you let sunlight pour out and hit the earth. We wouldn’t even be able to barely tell the difference, right? I mean, we’d look at the sun, and there’d be the sun in the sky and you wouldn’t even see that there’s a big cloud of collectors….

Pamela: Well, you would if you looked in the infrared because these things would glow hot…

Fraser: They would be very bright… yeah, no, absolutely. But the point being that you could still have your Earth and still have your sunlight, and then of course as the sun gets warmer, you’d just be collecting more sunlight and, of course, you could keep moving the earth further and further away if you wanted to. You could get all your benefits… you could still live on Earth and have free energy for everybody.

Pamela: And taking this a step further, one of the coolest ideas that I think I’ve read about is a type of stellar engine where you actually start moving the entire solar system.

Fraser: What?

Pamela: Instead of worrying about building generational spacecraft, you just move the whole solar system to go exploring. The way you do this is you build a GIANT… a GINORMOUS solar sail, something that is able to block a substantial amount of the sun’s light from going off out into space. You place this giant solar sail such that it’s exactly balanced between its gravity pulling it in–it’s mass and the sun’s gravity pulling it in toward the sun, and the radiation pressure on it pushing it out towards the rest of the solar system.

Fraser: Oh… I see.

Pamela: And this giant solar sail is now preventing the radiation pressure from going off in other directions, and is effectively acting to unbalance the forces.

Fraser: I see. Let me see if I understand it correctly… so the radiation pressure is hitting the solar sail and so it’s causing the solar sail to move away but you figure out a way to make sure that the gravity of the solar sail keeps pulling the sun forward.

Pamela: Right.

Fraser: So what ends up happing is the sun…

Pamela: It’s actually its radiation pressure is doing all this pushing and that radiation pressure being unbalanced because it’s being blocked in this one direction. That unbalancing of the radiation pressure in all directions is able to allow you to start moving the solar system.

Fraser: And so you could imagine moving yourself further towards the core to maybe get access to better resources or…

Pamela: Hey, I’d just head towards the first habitable-looking world out there…

Fraser: Right, and then zoom in and double your size, double your stars, take that one apart…

Pamela: “Hey, we came to visit. We brought our own world!”

Fraser: “And our own sun!” You know, just to show that we’re good guests. So you could then, with enough time, and we’ve talked about how the universe has trillions and trillions and quadrillions of years to go before we start to lose stars, that you could imagine some really advanced civilization eventually moving all of the stars in their galaxy around to wherever they want to put them. Put them in a big ring… put them in a big ball… mash them all together into the super-massive black hole in the center of the galaxy and harvest the energy… can you harvest energy from a black hole?

Pamela: Only if you throw things into it…

Fraser: Like stars!

Pamela: Yes…

Fraser: Right, right… so you drop stars into the super-massive black hole and then harvest the energy that pours back out, right?

Pamela: And what’s interesting, is that you start to imagine a future where we’re basically not just terraforming planets but stellarforming galaxies. “Oh, we need more energy. Aah, we’re not using this red dwarf… throw it in!”

Fraser: Right, right… because if I recall correctly, energy coming out of a black hole is actually a very efficient form of energy.

Pamela: Right.

Fraser: Right, you’re getting almost pure energy coming out of that.

Pamela: You’re getting all sorts of different energy coming out of it, but what is good is the accretion disk is able to convert a fairly significant amount of the mass into thermal energy of all sorts of different types, and this gets radiated away as light.

Fraser: You know what’s interesting about this is that like when you first started thinking about these ideas, it just blows your mind. And yet, nothing here is breaking the laws of physics…

Pamela: Right.

Fraser: It’s just time on your hands… we’re not having to come up with any new methods of time travel, or faster-than-light speed, or any of that… as long as time time’s on your hands, and you’ve got a big plan, you can move stars.

Pamela: And this is the perfect type of plan for someone living on an itty-bitty little red dwarf. You’ve got a few trillion years on your hands, you have a planet with a nice stable civilization, you all love one another… You can start to, in this case, start to make the many-generational plans. With our system, our sun doesn’t have that long left, and you can’t really get these suckers going that fast.

Fraser: Yeah, and I think that… although this sounds kinda like insane navel-gazing, you know… run out of interesting things to think about, so let’s think about, you know, really crazy stuff. But I think that there is a real purpose to this which is that thinking of the kinds of things that future civilizations might do to manage their civilizations gives us something to look for from Earth… which is that each of these things that we’ve talked about is gonna have a radiation signature… it’s going to be instantly obvious… if you find it.

Pamela: And this is where people have talked periodically about looking for stars that have excess in the infrared because that excess in the infrared could indicate oh, there’s a swarm… a swarm of Dyson energy collectors, oh… there’s a ring…

Fraser: So, could you explain that a little deeply? Why would we see an excess in the infrared?

Pamela: So, what ends up happening is that these happy little energy collectors… they’re collecting energy across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Blue light–take it! Red light–take it! They absorb everything… gamma ray, x-ray, it’s all theirs for the collecting. These higher energies aren’t going to make it all the way through the collector and come out the other side. They’re just going to get absorbed, they’re just going to hopefully get converted mostly into energy if you’ve got good efficiency. But the entire structure is going to heat up and heat is the same thing as infrared light. So you have these collectors gathering light, gathering light, gathering light and then that’s on the front… but on their backside they’re going… oh, going to be hot and radiate away infrared energy. So, they’re accepting the blue, accepting the red, and only giving off the infrared. That causes an excess of infrared where you wouldn’t normally have it.

Fraser: Right, so there would actually be a fairly interesting energy signature of a star like that.

Pamela: Yes.

Fraser: You theoretically should be able to detect even with the kinds of telescopes that we have today.

Pamela: It just takes high resolution… well, it doesn’t even take that high resolution spectroscopy, it just takes broad wavelength spectroscopy, very careful analysis, and it has to be very high accuracy because it’s not going to be a lot of an excess, but it’s the type of thing that people are thinking about.

Fraser: Right, and then once again with the solar sail idea you would, you know, be able to detect a… again almost a reflection off of this.

Pamela: Right, so, you end up seeing this very weird infrared signature that is clearly the equivalent of a hot rock rather than a hot star. And what’s interesting is because these things are so big spatially, even compared to the surface of a star, it starts to get to the point where once you find one of these suckers, if they exist, if there’s aliens, if there’s other civilizations nearby… many, many ifs. But if… then you can start to go oh, let me resolve that because we have the technology.

Fraser: Right, right… and give them a clue. So, although this all sounds like wild, dramatic science fiction, searching for these kinds… you can’t hide them…there’s no way to hide a Dyson sphere, or Dyson cloud…

Pamela: Yeah, we don’t know of the perfect absorber.

Fraser: Right. It’s gonna leak out energy in the infrared spectrum and it’s something that would have a very tell-tale signature and we would be able to spot it. That’s the part that is very interesting… it’s another vector, another way for us to search for evidence of alien civilizations. We’re looking for life in the solar system by grinding rocks on Mars, we’re listening for signals from other worlds, and this is another way that perhaps we can search for other civilizations… to look for these specific megastructures out in the universe. That’s really cool.

Pamela: And even if none of them exist, maybe we’ve provided someone with fodder for next year’s NaNoWriMo.

Fraser: What’s that?

Pamela: It’s the “write a novel in one month” competition that’s out there.

Fraser: Oh, there you go… yeah. There’s your idea… give us credit. Alright, well thanks a lot Pamela… that was really cool.

Pamela: OK, sounds good Fraser, talk to you later.

Fraser: Talk to you later.

This transcript is not an exact match to the audio file. It has been edited for clarity.

Show Notes

Major Launch facilities

• Cape Canaveral — Kennedy Space Center, Florida, USA
• Cape Canaveral Air Force Station/Patrick Air Force Base, Florida, USA
• Shuttle and rocket launch schedule
• Mojave Air and Space Port, California USA
• Spaceport America, New Mexico, USA
• Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, Wallops Island, USA
• White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, USA
• Kourou Launch Facility in French Guiana
• Sea Launch Facility
• Baikonur Cosmodrome, Khazakstan
• Kagoshima Space Center, a.k.a. Uchinoura Space Center, Japan
• Jiuquan, Taiyuan and Xichang launch centers, China
• ISRO launch facility, India

Launch details

• Benefits of launching from the equator
• Vehicle Assembly Building at KSC
• NASA’s crawler-transporter system
• Rotating Service Structure
• Launch Complex 39-a and 39-B
• Water Sound Suppression System
• “Walk Down” tour of the launchpad with Jen and Andy Sheer — Astronomy.fm
• 3-D Video of NASA’s launchpads
• IMAX movie, The Dream is Alive
• Space Food
• Spaceflight Meteorology Group
• Shuttle launch profile
• Shuttle countdown timeline (STS-129)
• Ep. 127 — Scott Miller’s trip to KSC
• Shuttle Landing Facility
• Shuttle Emergency landing sites
• Alternate Shuttle Landing Sites
• Video of Shuttle riding “piggyback” on a 747
• Virgin Galactic SpaceShip 2

Download the transcript

Fraser: Astronomy Cast Episode 161 for Monday October 26, 2009, Launch Facilities. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. My name is Fraser Cain, I’m the publisher of Universe Today, and with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Hi Pamela.

Pamela: Hey Fraser, how’s it going?

Fraser: Good. Alright, so this week… launch facilities. Now launching a rocket into space requires a big effort on the ground. Space agencies build up huge infrastructures to store, prepare, and launch rockets. So let’s take a look at what’s involved on the ground at a place like Cape Canaveral… what happens before, during, and after a launch. So, Pamela, have you ever been to some launch facility?

Pamela: Not yet…

Fraser: Ok.

Pamela: I keep hoping, and I’m going to attempt to attend the next space shuttle launch for a NASA Tweet-up. Haven’t made it yet, but it’s my goal to make it while the space shuttle program still exists.

Fraser: Me, either, and me too… I’ve never actually seen a rocket launch either… which is pretty sad.

Pamela: Lots of backyard rockets…

Fraser: Yeah… no, but we’re in this weird transition between the old media and the new media and the company I work for… me… doesn’t have the money to send me to actually cover rocket launches in person. So we have to do the next best thing, which is to report it all through the internets… NASA television and all that. Some day… actually, as you said, before the space shuttle stops launching in the next couple years I do aim to do that. My plan is to go and take the kids on a trip to Disneyworld and sneak out and go watch the shuttle launch.

Pamela: That’s the perfect way to do it because if you schedule to go with the launch at the beginning of your vacation, and if the launch is delayed… you’re still in Florida.

Fraser: Exactly. Sometimes you can fly down and it doesn’t launch… and it doesn’t launch again… and you could be there for the better part of a month hanging out in a hotel waiting for the shuttle to launch.

Pamela: Right.

Fraser: Yeah… or, I guess, work out of Florida… anyway… so that’s going to be my plan. So, let’s talk a little bit about that. What are some of the big launch facilities that maybe people have or haven’t heard of?

Pamela: Well, there’s of course the Cape Canaveral, the Kennedy Space Flight Center, set of launch facilities. There’s actually two separate space facilities down there. There’s the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and then the Kennedy Space Flight Center. These two different facilities… by name they’re really the same facility… it just sort of changed names. But if you’re looking it up, you have to keep it straight. They’re responsible for the majority of the US launches. Now, the cool thing is, it’s only the majority… it’s not all. Over time, we’re starting to get more and more launches spread out across the United States. So we also here in the States have the Mohave Spaceport, and then we also have Spaceport America in New Mexico.

Fraser: Right, and there’s Vandenberg…

Pamela: That one hasn’t done manned launches… and that’s the thing… you have to separate which is manned and which is unmanned. So in terms of manned launches, it hasn’t gotten there yet, but Mohave has actually had a manned launch. Spaceport America is licensed to have manned launches once Virgin Galactic gets there. But for unmanned, we have all sorts of different facilities. Just here in the United States alone there’s the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Virginia and the Alaskan Kodak Launch Complex, basically spanning the diagonal of America. Of course we’ve launched things from submarines, and things have gone up from New Mexico, as well, with White Sands and Spaceport America starting to have their launches.

Fraser: And that’s just a fraction… there is launch… the European Space Agency has its launch facility in uh…

Pamela: Kourou, French Guiana.

Fraser: I can never say the name…

Pamela: I don’t know if I said it right…

Fraser: Exactly. There is the sea launch facility that comes out of Los Angeles in this great big floating oil platform… it goes out to the middle of the Pacific Ocean and launches there. There is… of course the Russians have the Baikonur Cosmodrome… in Kazakhstan.

Pamela: Right, and there’s Tanegashima in Japan which I was so close to this summer, but didn’t quite make it to…

Fraser: And then there’s the Chinese facility…

Pamela: Yeah, the Jiuquon Satellite Launch Center.

Fraser: Right, and they’re human launch, right? I mean they’ve launched the Chinese astronauts that have gone up so far.

Pamela: Yes.

Fraser: So there’s a lot of places… so now the big thing that a lot of these things have in common is that they’re close to the equator.

Pamela: Right. And that’s actually really important because when you’re throwing something up into orbit, it doesn’t have to go just up, but it also has to go sideways. You have to combine the two or you fall straight back down to the planet and go splat in a rather violent and not-healthy-for-the-people-on-board way…. unless you’re a SpaceShip Two and planning it that way. You can get as much as 465 meters per second… that’s almost half a kilometer per second… in horizontal velocity, relative to the surface of the planet, just by launching at the equator. This is where the French Guiana site is so amazing because it’s just five degrees north of the equator. Florida is good, but it’s not that good.

Fraser: So you get to save fuel or be able to launch a heavier rocket just by being on the equator. I guess sea launch has the biggest advantage… they go right to the equator and launch right there.

Pamela: Exactly. This gives them easy access to geostationary transfer orbits. It makes it easier, actually, to do any kind of orbit because you can launch at a variety of different angles to get your project directed in many different ways. You don’t have all those options when you’re launching from our northern or southern facilities.

Fraser: So, if you want to build a launch facility, your first goal is on or as near the equator as possible. What else does a launch facility want to have?

Pamela: You need to not have airplanes flying overhead. That’s actually one of the things that led to the selection of the two commercial spaceports that we have here in the United States, the Mohave spaceport and then the Spaceport America in New Mexico. The Mohave facility is located very close to Edwards Air Force Base which for a variety of primarily military reasons it is a no-fly zone from the ground up to unlimited altitude. So, they’re right next to a place that allows them to not worry about airplanes at all. They also have an area where supersonic flight is allowed. Here we do have a lot of restrictions against supersonic flight, just because it’s kinda bad for houses and windows and humans and things like that to have all sorts of breaking-the-speed-of-sound events going on all around them. Now a similar [situation] also exists for Spaceport America. It’s next to White Sands Missile Range. With White Sands you again have the no-fly zone, so we’re expanding areas with already-restricted flight, and it’s a little bit easier to get it through legislature and the FAA that way.

Fraser: Right. For a place like the Kennedy Space Center, it’s on the coast, and they launch their rockets out over the ocean. You’re not going over populated areas and you can kinda control how many airplanes are going to be in the neighborhood when you launch.

Pamela: And with all the other facilities here in the United States, not many people live in the desert, so Mohave and the Spaceport America are in a very limited habitation area. The one in New Mexico particularly amuses me because one of the cities, about 15 miles away, is Truth or Consequences. There’s just something sobering about taking your last meal in Truth or Consequences before getting on that SpaceShip Two flight into outer space.

Fraser: Right. Ok, then on the ground itself… so let’s take a look at Cape Canaveral because that’s one of the ones that people are maybe most familiar with. What kinds of facilities will they have there?

Pamela: Well, you’ll have a whole combination of different buildings that are needed. First of all, you need someplace just to assemble your rockets. All of the pieces come in, but any one individual piece… that could be an entire semi-truck all by itself… an entire freight train car all by itself. And then you have to put together these multi-story rockets… so you need a vehicle assembly building… a giant hangar. The one that we have down at the Kennedy Space Flight Center is perhaps one of the best-known buildings NASA has. It’s this giant warehouse-y structure that has this huge, larger-than-anything except perhaps the University of Texas state flag…. this huge US flag painted on the side of the building and a giant NASA meatball logo on the other side. This is a building that can open up to allow the entire space shuttle external rockets, solid rocket booster assembly on its little crawler to just roll out and roll all they way out to the launch pad. It’s a giant empty building with amazing winches, amazing cranes, and an amazing group of human beings working to put all the pieces together and check everything thoroughly before it goes out to the pad.

Fraser: Right, and then they put the… once the rocket has been assembled, they put it onto that enormous crawler and it moves at like one mile per hour.

Pamela: Right.

Fraser: All the way out to the actual launch pad. So, what are the pads, then, about?

Pamela: The launch pads have several different parts to them. There’s of course the giant gap beneath where the rocket, the space shuttle, the launch vehicle itself is sitting that they flood with water during takeoff liftoff, in part to try to dampen some of the acoustics and in part to try to prevent everything from melting. It’s really amazing because they just let in this huge deluge of water from right there on the ocean, and then the vehicle goes off, the water recedes, life is good. Then attached to this is also your launch tower so you can get astronauts all the way to the top of the craft… you can check all the aspects of the rocket prior to launch. What’s amazing is they can actually swing this entire thing away. The amazing part about NASA… and I’m going to keep using the word amazing because the scale is kind of shocking at times. You’re watching these giant, many-story-high buildings just fold away, roll away, roll down walkways, and this isn’t the type of thing you expect to see. We’ve all been wowed at different stages by… ooh, giant train car… ooh, giant elephant… all the things that we’ve previously thought of as big are tiny when you start looking at the things NASA plays with. There’s some amazing videos that we’ll have to find of people crawling around on the crawlers, human beings standing next to the entire assembly… it really gives you an amazing sense of scale and just how tiny we are compared to the structures we can build at times. The fact that humans can build not just rockets but buildings that roll… I somehow find that less amazing that we can build a rocket… that’s just chemistry.

Fraser: I mean, isn’t the Vehicle Assembly Building one of the largest buildings… the largest building… in the world?

Pamela: I don’t think it’s the largest building in the world, but it may be the largest building capable of opening that widely in the world.

Fraser: Yeah, yeah… it’s monstrous. Ok, so then take me through what would happen on an average day… or over the course of a couple of days. All of the parts… let’s say you’ve got the space shuttle… the orbiter… is at Cape Canaveral. You’ve got the fuel tanks, you’ve got the solid rocket boosters, you’ve got the cargo… how does that all kind of come together and what happens next?

Pamela: Well, in the assembly building, they can literally mate all of these pieces together. They build all of it vertically, so they stack together the different segments of the solid rocket boosters, they bring in the external tank and assemble it. They have giant cranes where they can pick up and move the space shuttle around as though it was a child’s play toy. There’s some great Omnimax movies that came out of the late ‘80s early’90s… “The Dream is Alive” is one of them… where you can see some of this going on. So, over the course of several weeks they’ll work to assemble all of the pieces, get the experiments that are going into space, get any satellites that are being launched from the space shuttle, all neatly packed away inside the cargo bay. They run through tests on all of the equipment, check over all of the tiles on the space shuttle and all of the insulation. Then of course they have to fuel it up… fill it up with food… each astronaut is allowed to select certain preferred food items. They each have their own little dietary line-up when they’re up in outer space. And little things like making sure the bathroom still works are more than a little bit important when you get to outer space. So they go through all of the doldrums of essentially building and rebuilding and building again all of these different rockets, all of these different space assemblies. When we move into the future, if the Ares I and other Constellation mission rockets continue to be funded by NASA, they have similar assembly guidelines. These are segmented rockets where you have multiple pieces coming in that have to be assembled. They’ll have different interchangeable crew modules, cargo modules, that can all get mounted on these different vehicles. So it’s always a new puzzle every mission… which parts get put together, which parts get shipped around the world and across the country to get everything we need up into orbit.

Fraser: Right. So they’ll mate all that stuff in the assembly building, put it on the big crawler….

Pamela: And then at about three miles an hour, crawl it very, very slowly out to one of the launch pads. Kennedy actually has multiple launch facilities, and there’s some amazing images from right before the last Hubble servicing mission of having two different space shuttles out on the pad at the exact same time. That’s probably never going to happen again, but we might be able to look forward to the day when we have the Ares getting prepped on one pad while we have the space shuttle sitting out on the other, so we’ll be looking to a more diverse future. Now, there’s other things that are also going on. They put the poor innocent astronauts through quarantine prior to launch, so about five days before launch, the astronauts get shipped out from Houston, where we store our astronauts here in the United States, and they get put into quarantine just to make sure that they’re not carrying any bugs. The logic being that most of the things that will make you miserable… if you’re going to get sick… you get sick in less than five days. So fly the astronauts out… stick them in hiding… make sure they don’t have any bugs or anything to worry about. They also put them through all sorts of different tests. They test them in vibration situations… they test the rockets in vibration situations… they test-fire engines prior to launch…. there’s a whole variety of let’s check everything over and just try flushing the system out a couple of times. It applies to both the vehicles and the astronauts.

Fraser: Ok, so the astronauts are getting ready in their facility… the shuttle has been taken out to the launch pad… but it’s all still empty of fuel, right? It still might be a couple of days before it’s going to launch…

Pamela: Yeah, it’s about 27 hours before launch that they start loading the cryogenic fuel and filling up the orbital fuel cell storage tanks… getting ready in preparation for launch. They procrastinate in doing this because it has to be kept under pressure… it can explode… and it really needs to be kept cold, so over time you can see what looks like steam. It’s actually gas going from liquid phase to gas phase coming out of these tanks. So, procrastinate as much as possible before fueling.

Fraser: Right, I mean it’s filled with hydrogen and oxygen, you know, it’s a bomb. It’s a gigantic bomb sitting right there, right on the launch pad.

Pamela: That’s entirely true. One I say T-27 hours, there’s actually a few holds built into the system, so it’s really over 30 hours prior to launch. So then at about T-19 hours, this is the point at which they start to make sure everything is in final prep. They disconnect the orbiter’s mid-body from the launch facility, they purge out the external tank’s nose cone, and they actually have built into the NASA website what’s happening during launch… at this point, they clean and vacuum the crew module. There are NASA janitorial or custodial staff out making sure that the crew compartment’s all ready at T-19 hours and holding.

Fraser: Right.

Pamela: Then at T-19 hours and counting… this is when they finally start the last propellant checks where they have the final preparation of the orbiter’s three main engines, make sure everything’s connected from the main propellant tank. This is where it starts to be ok, we’re going now… really ready. They fill the launch pad’s sound suppression system with water and get the clocks going again. This is the point where you start panicking over weather. At 11 hours, you have the weather briefing and the engineering briefing. Yes, we checked… everything’s working, yes we checked… there’s no thunderstorms, no hurricanes, nothing coming our direction. They also do a walk-through, making sure there’s no random debris on the pad… nothing there that could get blown up during launch… not exploded blown up but just blown to smithereens by the force of the rocket going off. Get the last bits of the flight crew’s equipment stored…. this is also where they move the rotating structure that’s part of the launch pad away from the space shuttle. This is one of the things that I think is so cool… this giant building rotating. This is also where they start turning on and activating all of the systems on the space shuttle… turning on the communication systems, turning on the measurement systems that are keeping track of everything on board the space shuttle. At 11 hours and counting, that’s when they activate the fuel cells and clear the blast danger area of all non-essential personnel. You shall go be in a bunker is basically the word of the day when they are at that point. This is also where they start purging the air out of all the different systems that need to be filled with gaseous nitrogen during launch. There’s a lot of volatile blowing away, cleaning up, just making sure everything is filled up with what it needs to be filled with and that there’s no stray bits of anything to be blown around. It’s a complicated process, and NASA has books and books and binders and binders of checklists that everyone has to go through. It just keeps going, each hour getting more complicated with more built-in holds. They hold again at T-6 hours. This is one of the points where they tend to do a lot of scrubbing of missions. This is where they’re doing the final mission management directive regarding weather… do they have to call it off due to thunderstorms or other problems.

Fraser: And the weather is actually a pretty finicky thing… obviously they can’t have a big storm, they can’t have a lightning storm… and for anyone who’s ever been to Florida, that place is crazy with lightning. It’s very humid… lightning storms all the time.

Pamela: And Florida is kind of beloved of hurricanes.

Fraser: Yeah… but even just like really bad clouds can scrub the mission.

Pamela: Yeah.

Fraser: There’s a certain kind of weather that they want to have.

Pamela: Well, they have to meet certain criteria. First of all, no lightning strikes… that’s just a bad thing. But beyond that, they also need it to be clear enough that the cameras can watch what’s going on, that the airplane flights that they have flying around… the military jets that are checking on everything have all the visibility they need, so it’s a combination of a need for visibility and a need for safety. If it’s patchy clouds, they’re perfectly fine to launch through the patchiness as long as there’s no lightning going on. They also need winds below a certain speed, temperatures above a certain temperature because of concerns over O-rings and icing, so there’s a whole load of different weather difficulties… all of which Florida likes to throw problems at them about.

Fraser: So, let’s say the weather’s fine… countdown…

Pamela: At T-6, this is where we finally get all 500,000 gallons of cryogenic propellants on board, and finish filling the external tank with its full load of liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen, we now have a bomb. But it’s prepared for a big controlled explosion. Finally at T-3 hours we have yet another hold. NASA is very fond of their holds, built into the whole countdown system which lies to you up until the final few moments… it’s not T-27, it’s not T-6… it’s T-a lot. But at T-3, that’s when things start getting interesting. That’s at the point where we have the external tanks on a steady, stable replenishment, filling…. we have all of the systems turned on, all of the tracking antennas going… prepped, ready to follow the space shuttle as it takes off. The final inspection team goes through and makes sure everything is ready to go. This is when they finally load the astronauts on board. The close-out crew proceeds to the launch pad and gets all the final configurations done. They have to assist the astronauts in because the astronauts are now required to be in full space suits… special space suits, but still full space suits during launch. This is where the televised weather briefing goes out on NASA TV, and where the flight crew get their own separate briefing, as well.

Fraser: So, the astronauts are just sitting there on the shuttle for several hours, just waiting… I mean, I’m sure they’re doing some checks and you know… making sure their seat is comfortable, but really… they have to just wait for everything else to get organized.

Pamela: It’s hours and hours… they get loaded at T-3 hours and holding… and that’s not the last hold of the mission. T-3 hours… and the holding is typically about 2 ½ hours in a perfect universe. So they get on somewhere in there, so they’re looking at between 3 to 6 hours of sitting there, in a perfect universe. This is the point where you no longer have any crew on the pad… it’s just the astronauts out there by themselves, sitting on top of a bomb, waiting for everything to take off in a nice friendly controlled manner that leaves them in outer space healthy and well-off with a space shuttle that’s healthy and well-off. They go through a final cockpit check… making sure all the switches are in the correct configuration… and everything they need is actually on board, which so far has always happened. They do communication checks, voice checks, make sure all their mics function. All of us who do podcasting know that you never know when your mic is going to decide it’s not going to work today. Then they get closed in and everyone retreats back to the fallback area except for the astronauts up on top of everything. And at T-20 minutes they hold again. Because that’s what NASA does… pausing for hopefully about 10 minutes. Sometimes a lot longer. This is where they do the final team briefing. Ok, everyone ready? Everyone hopefully yells out “check.” They run a final assessment of all the preflight alignments, making sure all of the measurements off of all the instruments are fine, and then they start counting again. They check the ventilation vents, they close everything out, they transition from the back-up flight system to the launch configuration. Then they stop again at T-9 minutes. If I didn’t mention it already… NASA likes to hold. The final T-9 minutes is where they do the final go or no-go. Once they make it past that, they start the final automatic ground launch sequencer. The computers pretty much take over at that point… it’s a very automated system. At T-7 minutes and 30 seconds we have the orbiter arm retracting. At T-5 minutes we have the auxiliary power units turning on. At T-5 there’s also the solid rocket boosters… their safety and arm devices all get engaged. Then you start all the orbiter air-surface profile tests, making sure all of the engine gimbals work, making sure everything really is ready for a controlled take-off. That’s happening at T-3 minutes 55 seconds. Then they start retracting the oxygen vents, or the beanie cap, off of the external tank. That’s at 2 minutes. At 50 seconds they transfer from ground to internal power, and that’s one of the moments we’ve all experienced on an airplane where everything goes beep and the lights flash. It’s a little bit more sophisticated on the space shuttle, but that’s the point they’re at then. At 31 seconds, it’s auto-sequence start, and that’s when it’s really all go, with the sound suppression systems coming in at T-16 seconds. Main engines igniting their burnoff system at T-10 seconds. Main engine start at T-6.6 seconds. Once you build up all the pressure, at T-0 you have the solid rocket boosters ignition and liftoff. That’s the moment where everyone starts holding their breath. You’re panicked up until then, but once they take off… only once all the engines are done burning and they’re up in orbit that you can fully breathe happily after that.

Fraser: And if you want to hear a pretty compelling story or account of a shuttle launch, we’ve done another episode just on the space shuttle. Although Pamela and I didn’t go, we sent one of our reporters, Scott, to report on what he saw on the shuttle launch. And I believe he was a changed man after he saw that.

Pamela: Yes, yes he was.

Fraser: It’s a really great episode… it’s very different from the rest of our Astronomy Cast episodes, but he’s quite enthusiastic about the launch and what he saw and reports on it. I know we’re kind of doing this story backwards here, but…

Pamela: Well, hopefully, soon enough, you and I will have our own stories to tell, and you’ll be able to tell it through the eyes of your little kids, which will be amazing.

Fraser: Perfect. Now, just one thing, though. Now, after the shuttle has completed its mission, it then lands again, right, back at the Kennedy Space Center.

Pamela: In a perfect world it lands back at Kennedy. Occasionally it ends up landing at Edwards Air Force Base out in California, but they prefer not to do it because Edwards has a woodpecker problem, which sounds rather odd. The woodpeckers like to peck at the tiles on the space shuttle and make little happy nests in the insulation which is not really good for the space shuttle. They can also land at White Sands and that’s again not so good because there all the sand can damage the space shuttle.

Fraser: Yeah, and it also just costs a couple of million dollars just to fly it back from the other side of the country on top of a 747. They prefer to keep it landing in Kennedy and they can just roll it back in and assemble it for the next launch.

Pamela: And what’s cool is, looking towards the future with SpaceShip Two with Virgin Galactic, they’re also looking to launch and land at the exact same facility, in this case Spaceport America which is next to White Sands Missile Arsenal.

Fraser: Right, and that’s kind of different than for example the way the Russian launches happen with the Soyuz rockets. They don’t land on a landing pad, or runway, the way the shuttle does. They just land in the steppes near the launch facility… with a parachute and land right on the ground.

Pamela: Right, and as we move forward with the Constellation, the Constellation is going to have a similar parachute-enabled landing. I’ve seen both water and ground and it’s NASA… I’m not going to make any bets on which one it’s going to be until they day they decide to land. But we’re moving back to a capsule-based NASA-powered future. But with the commercial agencies, we’re still looking at having the horizontal landing… which is just much more humane in some ways.

Fraser: Alright, well, thanks a lot, Pamela. And we’ll talk to you on the next show.

Pamela: Sounds great, Fraser. I’ll talk to you later.

Fraser: Bye.

Transcript

Coming Soon!

Shownotes

• NASA’s Constellation website
• Overview of Apollo missions
• Discussion on BAUT Forum on comparing Ares I-X with Saturn V
• Compare pictures of Ares I-X with Saturn V and Delta IV
• Expanded views of Ares I and Ares V (pdf file)
• Ares I overview
• Ares V overview
• Orion overview
• Altair Lunar lander overview
• What NASA’s Return to the Moon May Look Like — New Scientist
• Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
• LRO’s images of the Apollo landing sites, Apollo 12 site (imaged later)
• LCROSS
• Participate in watching LCROSS impacting the Moon
• Canada’s Avro Arrow project
• Ares D-M Motor test — scheduled for Sept. 10
• NASA’s Ares I-X Blog
• Ares I-X test scheduled for Oct. 31
• The Augustine Commission:  The Review of the US Human Space Flight Plans
• Houston Chronicle:  Obama’s NASA Dilemma in a Nutshell

Transcript: Constellation Program

Download the transcript

Fraser Cain: You’re back from another couple of trips and we’re once again recording on schedule.

Dr. Pamela Gay: I only have two more trips to do to you. I will be at Dragon*Con.

Fraser: That’s the important one.

Pamela: At Dragon*Con there will be a Star Party for Cancer to raise money in honor of Jeff Medkeff who was the blue-collar scientist.

Fraser: Also just to mention last week we talked about Facebook and Twitter and I was expecting a flurry of Facebook friends but both Pamela and I have Facebook pages. Feel free to friend us.

I barely use mine. Pamela uses hers all the time. Same deal with Twitter feeds, Pamela uses her Twitter like crazy; I barely [laughter] send any tweets. We have them and subscribe to them and maybe at some point people can make some suggestions.

This week it has been more than 40 years since humans last set foot on the moon. Plans are in place to return humans to the surface of the moon and maybe even to asteroids and the planet Mars. New rockets, landers and flight technology are all under development.

Humans are pushing out into space again and this time we’re going to stay. Let’s take a look at NASA’s new Constellation Program, what’s been developed so far and what’s coming up. Hopefully most people sort of know where the Constellation Program came from but why don’t we kind of refresh everyone’s memory. What is it?

Pamela: This is one of these times where we have to thank President Bush.

Fraser: Thanks President Bush.

Pamela: George W. Bush on February 4, 2003 said that “the cause of exploration and discovery is not an option we choose. It is a desire written in the human heart”. With these words and later he went on and January 14, 2004 to say “Americans will make these words come true”.

He set forward a new ideal for NASA that was funded – which is always a good thing that we were going to put men back on the moon by 2020.

Fraser: And women, people, humans!

Pamela: And women – I’m using generic. Sorry, humans put humans back on the moon by 2020, and to look out beyond the moon, Mars, the asteroids and to build with that larger vision in place. With this Congress and the Congress budgetary office started figuring out what needs to happen. How do we keep NASA growing and looking out to new human horizons of exploration?

We can’t do it with the space shuttle. The space shuttle doesn’t really get very far off the planet. It gets about 300 miles up. That’s a hair’s breadth away from the surface when you start looking at how far away the moon is from the planet Earth.

We need something that can lift heaver weight, that can lift humans – not necessarily the same spacecraft to do both – and we have to retire our nice friendly pick-up truck of a space shuttle in order to fund this new vision of exploration. That’s okay because the space shuttle was only supposed to make it to the year 2000. It just kept going like the pick-up truck that never dies.

Fraser: Or Hubble.

Pamela: Or Hubble.

Fraser: We’ve got the space shuttle being phased out. They put a hard date on that right? It’s the end of 2010.

Pamela: Yes and we still don’t know if that’s for certain. People are fighting the 2010 deadline because part of our new vision of space exploration requires us to not start from scratch in building rockets but to build something completely new out of the pieces we’ve got.

The new set of rockets they’re looking at, Ares I and the Ares V, we haven’t even tested one of them yet. We’re looking to do that end of August but we haven’t even tested one of them yet. You have to get them human ready.

What we’re looking at right now is we’re going to retire the space shuttle at the end of 2010 and we’re hoping that no later than March 2015 we’ll have humans into orbit on the top of an Ares I rocket.

That’s five years that NASA has to figure out how to support the International Space Station while our government-funded space agency doesn’t have a mechanism to get anyone up to the International Space Station.

Fraser: Currently, the space shuttle is the only human-rated vehicle for launching people up to the space station.

Pamela: In the United States.

Fraser: Yeah, exactly. There are really only two other options. There are the Russians and the Chinese.

Pamela: Or the commercial space agency.

Fraser: But they don’t have a human-rated rocket yet.

Pamela: Yeah they’re still working on it too. What’s unknown is if they’re going to get there before NASA does. The reason that they might be able to get there first is NASA is building a suite of spacecraft that work together.

If you’re working in isolation, if you’re building something strictly for your own needs or for one specific goal, you can go a lot faster. You can work in a much more streamlined fashion.

With the combination Ares I – Ares V system they’re building rockets that in some cases have interchangeable parts. They’re both building on the technology used to build the solid rocket boosters for the current space shuttle.

They’re incorporating that same technology into the new launch vehicle so that they can build all the parts in one factory. They’re also making it so that you launch humans on the Ares I and you launch stuff on the Ares V. You have to figure out how to rendezvous these two spacecraft in orbit.

Fraser: Right this is for safety reasons? This is what we saw was the tragic failure of the space shuttle design is that you’re carrying cargo and humans together on a very dangerous vehicle. We saw the loss of Challenger and the loss of Columbia showed the catastrophic failure that can happen.

In this situation you’ve got the Ares I which is really well rated, very safe – as safe as a rocket can be that’s great for carrying humans and that’s it. Then you’ve got the Ares V which is built with less safety issues and can carry huge amounts of cargo up into space.

Once you get up in space humans and cargo will meet and will dock together and away the spaceship will go. I like it a lot. I like it because you’ve got Ares I has so many redundancies, so many ejection systems, so many ways to bail out. It has very tried and true technology. Ares V is going to be a monster. [Laughter]

Pamela: It’s the same size pretty much as the Saturn V.

Fraser: It’s got a larger launch capacity than Saturn V, doesn’t it?

Pamela: That’s the thing is you stick them side-to-side and they’re about the same height. When you start looking at that little ejection bit on the top of the Saturn V that was used if they had to grab the nosecone filled with people and launch it separate from the rest of the rocket because something is going horribly wrong, that little extra bit makes the Saturn V a nose bit taller.

When you look at them side-by-side the Ares V has the two extra side rockets like we have on the space shuttle. The two solid rocket boosters on either side of the main fuel tank and it is all fuel. Where the Saturn V got narrower as you got up, it’s one large giant column ready to be filled with cargo.

The Saturn V could launch about 118,000 pounds whereas with the Ares V we’re looking at 188,000 pounds. That’s a good difference. The Ares V is going to be able to get a 5ish percent command module of stuff into space to meet up with the human beings going up on the Ares I. That’s going to allow much larger crews to land on the moon.

Fraser: That’s 85,000 kilograms is the launch mass.

Pamela: A hundred and 88 tons is the maximum payload capacity to low Earth orbit. If we’re then looking to go to the moon it has 71 tons to the moon because you need more fuel.

Fraser: The cool thing about this is that with the Ares V you’ve got the capacity to launch not just to the moon you could go to asteroids. If Bob Zubern is correct that’s enough to get you to Mars and back.

It could also be used for launching commercial satellites. I think of all of the development the Ares V is the one that is just the raw technology upgrade that gives so much potential for space exploration.

It could be used for anything. You can put a ton of weight, amazing space telescopes, incredible landers, rovers the mind just boggles. I’m really looking forward to the development of the Ares V.

Pamela: The thing that really did it for me is I saw a NASA presentation where they were talking about the future of space telescopes. One of the things that we really struggle against right now is when we’re building things to put into space they have to be super, super lightweight.

Ounces instead of pounds when you can start comparing space systems to Earth-based systems, they have to be extremely fuel efficient. There is no extra from Earth to orbit fuel to launch the fuel needed to get to Mars.

We could right now if we wanted to take Gemini, one of the largest Geminis – north or south pick either one – one of the largest telescopes in the world, plunk it in the cargo area of the Ares V and off she goes.

Fraser: Right [laughter] there you go – space telescope.

Pamela: Exactly we don’t even have to worry about thinning the mirrors. We don’t have to worry about using special fold-out anything just put it in the cargo hold. Now it’s not going to have any mechanisms to control it, but it would fit. It would work. It would launch.

Fraser: Yes, space telescope. Problem solved – done.

Pamela: Yes, useless space telescope if you launch Gemini but it amuses me nonetheless.

Fraser: So I think people are starting to kind of wrap their heads around this. We’ve got these two rockets there, Ares I and Ares V. Ares I launches up, crew onboard, maybe they go to the International Space Station. Maybe they just go in orbit.

The Ares V launches up with whatever you want, lunar landers, lunar base, and Mars rovers. They dock in orbit, the excess parts all blow away and you’re left with some kind of vehicle which will then go to the destination.

The destination that is really being talked about most is the moon. How is this all going to work?

Pamela: What’s neat is this all feels like plug ‘n play space technology. You have the Ares I which the lower segments of its engines are basically identical to the solid rocket boosters we currently use on the space shuttle.

We’re just reusing technology. It is five segments, reusable. It is tested through the space shuttle program. We know how to make these and factories exist. The upper part is then based on Saturn technology. We took the old Saturn I – these J2S engines and we brought them into the 20^th century or hopefully the 21^st century.

Those are then used on liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen upper set of stages. It launches, it launches, it launches and it gets to orbit and then either goes on rendezvous with the International Space Station or it rendezvous with whatever came up on a parallel flight of an Ares V.

This is where the cool plug ‘n play part comes in. The Ares V has two solid rocket boosters on either side of it that are again these exact same engines that were used on the space shuttle that are being used on the Ares I. They launch straight up.

They started off planning to use space shuttle engines but realized that they could actually build much better engines that were much more efficient. They’re still working on the engine designs, finalizing everything.

They also have for the main parts of this a central booster that has multiple booster separation motors. It goes up, goes into different parts a lot like the Saturn V did. They’re actually again reusing the J2S simplified version of the Saturn 1B engines as they launch with the big Ares rocket.

You have in different numbers in different compositions on both the Ares I and the Ares V – the exact same pieces. You put more pieces together you get to either heavier stuff in space or you get to a higher orbit. It’s just kind of cool. It’s Legos of spacecraft.

Fraser: Right but let’s talk about the cargo part. Let’s talk about what’s going to go to the moon.

Pamela: This is where we have the Altera program. There are some neat, not-to-scale artist’s renderings on the NASA website that what’s cool is the new command module that they have. It is kind of traveling in luxury.

It is still cramped; you’re still in space suits but it now has its own solar arrays so you have more power as you’re flying to the moon. It docks itself up with the Altera lander which is basically a three-story habitat that you land on the moon and you’re set with all of your supplies for you and a bunch of your buddies for about a week.

The original idea is you go, you land, you stay put and explore. They’re working on developing a rover. It looks a lot like a bug right now. It has this forward crew cabin that’s all windows. It really looks like the head of an ant. Back behind it is a much more cylindrical habitat where you go and sleep and stuff. It looks kind of like the body of an ant. It has a ton of wheels.

You land the Altera, go off and explore with your little rover that might have landed ahead of you. They’re still working out those details. Then you come home. In a way you start and end with your mission the same way.

It used to be with the Apollo you and your lander all fly from Earth to orbit to the moon in one piece. Making the system a little bit more complex – which I know makes some people nervous – with the new system, you take off in your rocket, and your lander takes off in its rocket. You dock in outer space.

You go to the moon, land on the moon, take back off, rendezvous potentially again with whatever is needed to get you back to Earth. Then you land. There’s more work but we can get more weight.

Eventually the idea is we’ll also start building stuff on the moon. The first thing that we’re set to build which is part of an international collaboration is a communications network.

We’ll be putting a string of relay nodes out across the surface of the moon. Then hopefully more permanent habitats are to follow.

Fraser: I think that’s the key difference. This time around the plan is to stay. To figure out how to live on the moon for not permanently but in the same way that astronauts are at the space station.

You’re not going to walk around, take a few steps and then pick up some rocks, shoot a few golf balls and then get back in your lander and take off. There is going to be over time a permanent research station on the moon that astronauts will go and stay for extended periods of time, right Pamela?

Pamela: This is where the current Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the matching LCROSS mission are so important. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is capable of imaging the surface of the moon in roughly one meter resolution; one meter per pixel.

This means that most tall individuals if they lay down like they’re sunbathing on the moon you’d be able to see them across more than one pixel.

Fraser: Yes it’ll be able to see the landers and the rovers.

Pamela: We already actually have images.

Fraser: Ha! We didn’t land on the moon! [Laughter]

Pamela: We can see the paths from people walking around on the surface. We can see the landers. What’s amazing about the LRO data – Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data – is as people look through it one image at a time we suspect that we’ll be able to find lost missions.

Imagine sitting at your desk in your office slacking off or sitting on your sofa at home watching TV with your family flicking through images of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and seeing in those images some weird splat that looks like it has metal bits.

You wonder what it is and you report it. It turns out you just found some long lost Soviet mission crashed on the moon because you’re looking through Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter images.

Fraser: Or, alien spaceships.

Pamela: I’m betting more on lost Soviet missions. [Laughter]

Fraser: Alright then interesting mineral veins, that kind of thing?

Pamela: Right and the cool thing about the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is when it went up it took the LCROSS mission on the same rocket with it. LCROSS is the little robot that kills itself. It is an imaging mission that took with it part of the rocket that they flew up into space together in.

It’s throwing ahead of it that empty fuel part of the rocket, crashing it into the surface of the moon and then flying through the debris that gets sent up looking for water. It is looking to see what is the chemical composition of that stuff that gets splashed into space with the collision?

Then LCROSS in its final dying act is going to follow that rocket shell straight into the surface and make its own impact. This is going to be visible to North America and the westernmost coast of Europe.

That’s coming in October where all of us can go out and watch a new crater being made in real-time.

Fraser: And watch that little flash on the moon if we’re lucky.

Pamela: These two missions are helping us figure out if the stuff we need to live on the moon is there. If it is, then where should we land?

Fraser: What changes have happened from the Obama administration now that – I mean it was George Bush that came up with the plan, it was [laughter] it was George Bush who articulated the plan, helped encourage funding for the plan (I’m sure there were a lot of hardworking people at NASA who came up with the plan – I apologize to all of you please don’t e-mail me). [Laughter] But what happened with the change of the administration?

Pamela: Obama is currently going through the U.S. books looking for excessive spending. It’s what we all have to do now and then. I know I’m looking for excessive spending right now. The economic times in the United States aren’t good.

Constellation is an expensive mission. It’s doing everything it can to use existing technology to build on things that we know work. We’re not recreating the wheel but it takes time. Because we’re still flying the space shuttle money is being deviated for that.

At a certain point some really harsh decisions are going to be made. Are we going to keep the Constellation program on schedule by gutting the science mission directory; removing money that would otherwise be used to explore the planets, to build space telescopes to look at the stars and the galaxies.

Fraser: Absolutely not.

Pamela: Are we going to abandon funding for the International Space Station? We have international treaties committing us to different programs.

Fraser: Intriguing.

Pamela: Then we have Constellation itself which is not cheap. Constellation was originally budgeted at about 28 billion dollars. It’s looking like it’s going to be closer to 44 billion today.

Fraser: Hmm what a surprise. What are the chances of that it is going to cost more than people are expecting? When you first saw the budgets for this the way they were planning to do it was to keep the shuttle going and tail it out to keep the space station going.

They were planning to fulfill all their commitments and then as well be developing this all new technology in the background. People called it out as being a little ridiculous back in the day. Here we are and now it looks like the budget is going to be high. It’s too late to go back now, right?

Pamela: Yeah, it’s sort of like saying oh yeah, well the backhoes are out there putting in the new pool, let’s also build an external garage. We already have all the tools.

Well yes but it’s a little harder than you might think. That’s an unfair assessment. NASA is trying hard but I don’t think anyone really realized the complexity of what they were doing. They dreamed large.

Fraser: I don’t think that’s true. I think anybody…

Pamela: Okay, anyone budgeting it [laughter]

Fraser: Well even that I think there were certain things that had to be said to make certain people happy and those things were said and people signed off and the project moved forward.

It’s just like you get a contractor who’s going to put a new addition on your house and sets a price. Then when he tears it open and realizes that termites have eaten away at a part of your house, and then it’s going to cost more money.

Anyone who has been project manager knows that stuff always happens. I’m a little skeptical on that front, I think. I don’t know anything about this and I would have expected the budget would go over budget.

I think people said what they had to say to move things forward. I’m really glad that they’re moving forward. I really wish that the money could be found. The way this usually happens right is you just stretch out the timeline. Instead of you getting there by 2020 you get there by 2025.

Pamela: The biggest concern we’re dealing with right now is that 2015 humans to the International Space Station. We finally almost finish building the thing – we will have finished building the thing when we lose the space shuttle.

Doesn’t it hurt your stomach to think about it’s finally done and now we can’t get there anymore?

Fraser: Sure we can. Just hop on the Russian Soyuz rockets and away you go or Chinese rockets.

Pamela: Yeah and it gets complicated because NASA still has to pay to use those.

Fraser: Right, you know it’s cheaper than developing it. I’m the Canadian here so [laughter] I don’t know. I don’t have any emotional investment on where the rocket got built.

It doesn’t bother me. Launch on an Avro Arrow – Canadians know what I’m talking about. [Laughter]

Pamela: As it stands Obama is in August of 2009 where we stand right now is doing an inquiry into the funding of the Constellation program and trying to figure out what is the best way to move forward. The House of the U.S. government chopped half a billion dollars from Barack Obama’s request for NASA funding.

We’re dealing in a constrained situation during hard economic times. I think this is a mission that the scientists are behind because we can launch really big telescopes if it just stays. We can launch really big rovers. The manned space flight people are in favor of this.

Fraser: Don’t you mean the human space flight people? [Laughter] Sorry.

Pamela: Yes I mean the human space flight people. [Laughter]

Fraser: I’m sorry, we get so many e-mails about why do you say the word manned?

Pamela: Because it’s shorter! [Laughter] It has fewer syllables.

Fraser: We are gender-equal here on astronomycast.

Pamela: Yes, but as I was saying, even the logo for Constellation has a vision. It’s the moon, Mars and Earth in silhouette showing the three bodies that this mission is hoping to help facilitate the exploration of. We just have to get it done.

Fraser: One of the neat ideas was to land on an asteroid. Is that moving forward at all?

Pamela: It’s not one of the things that you see on the NASA website. There are things you can do with the spacecraft – once you have it – and then there are the things that it is built for.

One of the really common things that we do in astronomy is we build something for such reason and then we use it for everything else under the sun. Hubble Space Telescope was built to figure out what are planetary nebulas and what is this expansion rate of the universe that keeps baffling us from the surface of the planet?

We’ve gotten a long ways on both of these questions. We’ve also used it to explore so many other questions, to explore so many different ideas. Constellation is being built with moon, low Earth orbit with heavy stuff and hopefully Mars as its mission.

Once you have it, who is to stop some commercial agency wanting to go mine an asteroid giving all of the launch money needed, give me one?

Fraser: Hmm and some astronauts.

Pamela: That’s no different than today when we do commercial launches with the space shuttle.

Fraser: Right they’ll pay to put their satellite in the cargo hold of the space shuttle and then it gets launched as part of the mission or as the only mission.

Pamela: Right.

Fraser: Although it’s been too expensive, right that’s the problem. It has been poor use of money to launch on the space shuttle.

Pamela: Hopefully by giving up on the idea of a fully reusable craft we will figure out how to save money. This is one of the strange cases of reusable really wasn’t useful. It did a great job but it spent a whole lot of money for what it has done.

Fraser: Yeah that’s a whole other show. [Laughter]

Pamela: Orion, the capsules are each usable for about ten missions. The engines are reusable for a few missions. We are still green but acknowledging that one craft does need to get retired sooner than later.

Fraser: Before we wrap up the show, let’s give some people some important dates. Or at least let’s give them timeframes. When is the first test launch of the Ares rockets?

Pamela: Test launch? I haven’t been able to find a complete date on. What I know is a test firing of the whole shebang. An Ares they are calling X-1 is set for the end of August.

Fraser: When will astronauts probably be flying in them?

Pamela: In March 2015 is the “we will be done by then or else date”.

Fraser: March 2015?

Pamela: Yes we have awhile.

Fraser: Right and then when should we probably see humans setting foot back on the moon?

Pamela: They’re saying no later than 2020. I’m not sure anyone believes that but they’re saying no later than 2020. We’d like to believe it I think.

Fraser: That’s like ten years.

Pamela: I know but it’s

Fraser: It went from zero to men on the moon – sorry humans – on the moon with the Apollo program. [Laughter]

Pamela: Yeah but we’re building really cool rovers that you can rove for massive distances in. The Altair system that is like a three-story lander; it is huge and you can live in it for a week happily.

It’s the difference between building a nice friendly hut out on a hill with your friends and building the world’s tallest building. One takes a bit longer than the other.

Fraser: There you go and that’s where we stand right now. I’m sure we’ll do more shows in the future as the technology works its way out and actual launches start happening and we get closer to the end of the space shuttle.

Then the first Ares launching and eventually if we keep doing this show we’ll do a special on the first landing on the moon. That’s it everyone has to hold out for another ten or twelve years of astronomycast so we can do that show. Keep listening.

This transcript is not an exact match to the audio file. It has been edited for clarity. Transcription and editing by Cindy Leonard.

Shownotes

• Sirius – EarthSky
• How long would it take to get to Alpha Centauri? — EarthSky
• 9.8 meters per second squared — Glenbrook Schools
• Specific Impulse – Northwestern U
• Possible transporter technology breakthrough?
• Different propulsion systems -- Overview by NASA
• The Physics of Space Travel — UC
• How Rocket Engines Work — HowStuffWorks
• How Do Rockets Work? Cornell U
• Ion Propulsion FAQs – NASA
• NASA’s Dawn Mission, info on its ion engine
• How Solar Sails Work – HowStuffWorks
• Atomic Rockets (Thermonuclear Rockets)
• Gravitational Slingshot
• Antimatter spacecraft – HowStuffWorks
• New Horizons Mission to Pluto
• Questions Show discussing a “flashlight drive”
• Rail Guns for Space Launch -- Next Big Future
• Robots Vs. Humans in Space – NSS
• Research in protecting humans from radiation in space — Space.com
• Magnetic Bubble Could Protect Astronauts in Space – Universe Today
• How To Avoid Space Madness — Universe Today
• Faster Than Light Travel (ain’t gonna happen) — Wiki
• Wormhole – Internet Encyclopedia of Space
• Quantum Tunneling
• Drake Equation – SETI
• V’ger (Star Trek Movie) — Memory Alpha
• Voyager Mission
• Pioneer Mission

Shownotes

• SpaceElevator.com: From concept to reality
• Space Elevator Blog
• Liftport
• Space Elevators on Facebook
• How Space Elevators will work – HowStuffWorks.com
• Space Elevators — Wiki
• Space Elevators, Physical Principles by Ranko Artukovic
• Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
• “The first person to think of the basic idea was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a Russian scientist. Visiting Paris in 1895, the remarkable Eiffel Tower made him think about a spire that reached all the way into space. In Tsiolkovsky’s vision, a “celestial castle” would be built at the end of a cable 35,790 kilometers long. This put the terminus of the structure in geostationary orbit.” — Technovelgy.com
• Geostationary orbit -- WiseGeek.com
• Carbon nanotubes – Wiki
• Post about space junk on the Space Elevator Blog
• Science Central article about space elevators, with video
• Conservation of Angular Momentum -- UTK
• The Space Elevator Challenge – Spaceward.com
• Space Elevator Games 2009
• Discussion of space elevators on Mars — Physicsforums
• Lunar Space Elevator – Wiki
• Space Elevator:  Build It On the Moon First – Universe Today
• Japanese Space Elevator Association (in Japanese)
• Article about Japan’s space elevator efforts — Times Online
• Skyhooks — Wiki

Transcript: Space Elevators

Download the transcript

Fraser Cain: Hi Pamela. Space elevators – we had a bunch of people ask us to do a show on this. And we live only to serve. If you want to travel into the solar system, you have to get off the Earth. Traditionally, that meant blasting off in a rocket. But there is another strategy for escaping the Earth’s gravity. Just climb to the top of an extremely tall tower and just jump away. That is the idea behind space elevators.

Theoretically possible, but practically infeasible, space elevators have gotten new life thanks to new super strong materials. Alright, so then, why don’t you explain the problem first that I guess the space elevator is trying to overcome.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Well, in general, getting to orbit is difficult. You have to attach yourself to a giant…

Fraser: Energy intensive.

Pamela: It’s energy intensive and that energy just kind of goes away. So, you fire chemical engine and once you’re in orbit all those chemicals have gone away. You’ve spent lots of money and you’ve destroyed what you flew into space with. It’s kind of sad.

Fraser: Right, you have to get from zero to tens of thousands of kilometers an hour going around the Earth. It costs at least $1,000 a kilogram, more like $10,000 a kilogram to launch stuff into space.

Pamela: So you have severe weight restrictions and it’s just dangerous. Who really wants to attach themselves to end of giant, uncontrollable fire?

Fraser: This is a total tangent, but I did an interview with astronaut Story Musgrave. He’s one of the most-flyingist space shuttle astronauts ever. I asked him “did you find it fun? Did you enjoy your launches?” and he was like “No, no, I didn’t like it at all. It was very unpleasant and very scary.” [Laughter]

He was very aware that he was attached to an explosion and he didn’t like it one bit. So then the solution here is the space elevator. Who came up with this?

Pamela: It’s one of these things where Americans may not realize this, but the idea actually came out in Russia a long, long time ago. Russian scientist Konstantin (and I’m going to mispronounce this and I speak Russian, but it’s written in Latin letters while I’m looking at it) Konstantin Tsiolkovsky came up with the idea that we should build a giant tower where the end of the tower is in geostationary orbit.

His idea was let’s start at the ground and build our way up with basically scientific Tower of Babel reaching up to geostationary orbit. The problem is that it is hard to build.

Fraser: What is geostationary orbit?

Pamela: The only problem is trying to build something that like is 36,000 kilometers tall is a bit difficult. Things tend to flatten like pancakes when you attempt to do that.

Fraser: We haven’t even built a building a building on Earth that is one kilometer.

Pamela: [Laughter] Right, right. Currently we don’t have any materials that we can build up and the materials won’t fall apart underneath their own compression.

Fraser: In theoretically though, if you went out and built a Sears Tower or a CN tower and got all the way up to 36,000 kilometers, then, if you could stand on the top of that tower you could just jump and drift away from the Earth.

Pamela: Exactly. Or at least drift into a different orbit around the Earth. You’d hover there.

Fraser: You would drift into a sort of widening orbit around the Earth, right? Ever widening the harder you push. The point is it is easy to get away from the Earth at that point.

Pamela: Exactly. Having realized that building up is not so good, different people look for different strategies and maybe reversing the idea. The next logical idea was to put something in space and drop a cable down. This is where the original idea of a space elevator came in where the top of the elevator is one way of envisioning it was as an orbiting castle.

This was another Russian idea where you basically have a giant castle attached a tether here on the surface of the Earth. The idea of a castle or an asteroid or some giant something is you want the center of mass of your entire cable to be the geostationary point. That way, you end up with a giant long-armed object that naturally keeps itself constantly in pace with the place on the Earth that it is orbiting over.

You have long tether that reaches all the way down to the surface of the planet. The longer you make it, the more it weighs. Some estimates have this coming in at 18,000 tons. That’s a lot. Then as you build up, you need to balance all of that mass. You stick either more cable past geostationary orbit, or you just build a giant space station, you tether a rock there. You need something to balance out all of that mass.

Fraser: Right, some kind of counter balance. You would, depending on what the number of actual weight of the cable is, you would take that cable, and you would drop it down from some geostationary orbit down to Earth. Then you would need to counter balance that weight by the rock or extend something the other way. Kind of like a teeter-totter, right?

Pamela: Right.

Fraser: The geostationary orbit is the middle point of the teeter-totter, and then the one side of the teeter-totter is down to the Earth. The other side of the teeter-totter is out into space to balance out the weight. You could put a heavier weight on the far side of the teeter-totter, but on the close side you’re going to need cable getting down to the Earth.

Pamela: Right.

Fraser: Okay. That sounds about as easy as building a tower 36,000 kilometers tall.

Pamela: [Laughter] The problem is we don’t currently have anything that is strong enough to deal with this. Let’s imagine that we can use the lightest weight per amount of strength thing that we know of, and that is carbon nanotubes.

With carbon nanotubes you start to be able to imagine making a single ribbon that just very carefully, not really capable of carrying anything, but a single ribbon that spans from the surface of the Earth all the way up to geostationary orbit.

That ribbon, not really capable of carrying anything, is going to weigh 18,000 kilograms. It’s still not strong enough, we think. We are still working on figuring out how to build things out of carbon nanotubes, this is completely new technology.

Fraser: Yeah. From what I understand, people haven’t gotten carbon nanotubes lined up longer than a few centimeters, right?

Pamela: Right. And we’re looking at needing to have something that is about 200 times stronger than steel to make this successful. You can, we think, do that with carbon nanotubes.

This is where we start getting into really strong, stronger than diamond, materials are needed.

Fraser: Right and I know that one of the ideas is that you make it thicker towards the middle point and you thin it out as you go. The end that is actually hitting the Earth is quite small.

The point being that the part of it that is right next to the midpoint has to be holding up everything below it. As you get closer and closer to the Earth, it doesn’t have to be as strong, right?

Pamela: Right. The other thing that you also unfortunately have to deal with is, this cable is getting used to basically yank, not just up, but also in a horizontal velocity whatever sort of elevator car you have going up and down.

The car, when it starts off at the surface of the Earth isn’t moving as fast in the direction parallel to the surface of the Earth as that counterweight way above the surface of the Earth is moving. As it goes up it has to complete every 24 hours a bigger and bigger and bigger circle.

To gain that velocity the cable has to be able to yank it along. If you’ve ever tried to yank something even at a few tens of feet per second, it requires a lot of force. In fact, it is a really good way to break a rope.

We’re looking at having to get something going many, many hundreds of kilometers per hour and you need to have all of the strength to yank it sideways and carry all of the mass at the same time.

Fraser: Let’s say that you could overcome the structural issue and you could overcome this horizontal movement. What would sort of the space elevator then kind of look like, and how would it function?

Pamela: There are basically two different models. In both cases you need to connect it to someplace exactly on the equator of the Earth. That way whatever your counterweight is it stays exactly over it.

One of the things we don’t think about very much is, you can have something that is constantly over the same north/south line on the planet of the Earth that goes around the planet every 24 hours, but as it does it goes up and down, up and down that north/south line. To get something to stay exactly over the exactly same point of the Earth, you can only do that over the equator.

Somewhere along the equator you drop the cable down. There are two different ways of doing it. You either drop it down to the top of the mountain and this is a reasonable idea because it allows you to not have to build as much cable. There are mountains out there that are kilometers tall. You just build on top of one of these mountains and save yourself the extra weight and the extra trouble.

The problem is there is junk in space. If you’re attached to a solid point on the planet Earth and you don’t really get more solid than the top of a non-volcanic mountain, you can’t move your platform and orbit around it all to get away from space junk.

The other idea is let’s instead attach it to someplace out in the ocean. Let’s attach it to a mobile platform of some sort. While this allows you to avoid space junk, it gives you added problems of how do you get power to it?

You’re adding now I have to go across the ocean and then go up. That just adds stress. Then you have the added weight of having to get all the way down to sea level instead of just getting to the top of the mountain.

Fraser: You would have some kind of ground structure, be it on a mountain or be it on the ocean, where the cable is actually affixed to it?

Pamela: Yes.

Fraser: Say you had some cargo you wanted to take into orbit, you would drive to it or take your boat to it, and then you would put it onto some kind of an elevator, right? Some kind of climber?

Pamela: That’s exactly what they call it. Some sort of a climber. These are somehow symmetric about the cable to make it a little bit easy. You still want to keep it as lightweight as possible because the heavier the object you’re lifting, the more energy is needed. You still have to compensate for having one gravitational potential energy when I’m standing on the surface of the planet and I have a completely different gravitational potential energy when I am high off the surface.

You have to give all of that energy via work whatever it is you’re lifting. You have to increase its velocity so that is increasing kinetic energy. You have to add all this extra energy into whatever it is you’re lifting. It’s easier if you do it a small load at a time.

You take your hopefully fairly lightweight whatever it is and load it onto the cable and start heading it up. As it goes up, one of the cool things is conservation of angular momentum actually says that the rotation of the Earth is slowed down minutely as the one object goes up.

When it comes back down the rotation of the Earth is then put back to where it was if the same amount of mass comes back down. But it is still kind of neat to think about that if we slowly but surely sent enough mass into outer space we could slow the rotation of the Earth noticeably.

Fraser: How long would the journey take then? I guess it depends on the speed of the climber, right?

Pamela: It depends on the speed of the climber. I haven’t seen anything on that but you’re traveling 40,000 miles. Well, 36,000 basically. You’re going a long ways. It’s going to take a long time.

Fraser: Right. You’re going to take days, or even like a week to get up to the top of it…

Pamela: Right. But we’re looking at a few hundred dollars to get up there instead of per kilogram and spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per kilograms.

The cost savings is great. Unfortunately, we don’t have the materials to do it yet.

Fraser: Although I am sure we’re going to get a bunch of angry e-mails from people who claim otherwise. I think there are a lot of people who differ on whether we can do it or not. We look forward to your e-mails.

Pamela: [Laughter] There are a lot of people working towards the many different prizes around the planet that. The X PRIZE is set up to encourage cheap vehicles that are capable of going up multiple times in short periods of times. That was what was won by Spaceship One a few years ago. There is an X PRIZE to get to the moon. There are all sorts of really cool X PRIZEs around.

Fraser: There is an X PRIZE just for who can make a climber that can climb up a ribbon the fastest using solar power and even beamed laser power from the ground.

Pamela: That’s how they are looking to be able to fuel these things. The lasers are looking like one of the best options for getting energy onto one of the climbers.

There are people working very hard to try and overcome the how we build a strong enough, long enough cable. What is really cool is there is a company here in America, Liftport, that their eventual goal is to be constructing these carbon nanotube fibers basically to build us all the way into space one string at a time.

While they work on developing the technologies necessary to do that, they are building all sorts of other products that are funding their research. It’s cool to see that there are people thinking about how to do this, and thinking about how to do this in a commercially viable way.

Japan is sinking lots and lots of effort into this. Many countries are thinking about how to do it. There are some companies working very hard in that direction.

We’re still figuring out carbon nanotube fibers. It’s a brand new technology and progress is being made. Hopefully in the next few years this will go from we don’t know quite know how to do this to yeah, this is easy. Let’s go build one.

Fraser: Now there are a bunch of risks to this situation. Obviously, what happens if the cable breaks?

Pamela: That’s a very bad, bad, thing.

Fraser: You’ve got a cable that is longer than the diameter of the Earth, right?

Pamela: It’s actually very close depending on how they build it. If you use the giant floating castle as your counter balance, then you have less length coming down toward the surface of the Earth.

Fraser: You’re talking 36,000 kilometers. The diameter of the Earth is about 40,000 kilometers.

Pamela: Some of the cables they are looking at are 100,000 kilometers long because they are planning to counter balance the cable with more cable. In which case, you now have a giant cable falling toward the Earth for who knows what reason, capable of wrapping itself twice around the planet along the way creating tidal waves. Creating new valleys where valleys didn’t use to be. Shredding cities in fascinating ways.

Fraser: Yeah. [Laughter]

Pamela: Kim Stanley Robinson talks about this in detail in his Red Mars series, where he goes from building the space elevator, to space elevator tragically gone wrong due to terrorism.

That’s a feature that I have to admit scares me a great deal. While I love the concept of space elevators, I’m a fan of space elevators with really large military safety precautions.

Fraser: think one of the issues is where it breaks. If you have actual tension in the elevator that it wants to pull away from the Earth, then wherever it breaks the part that is above the break is just going to drift away from the Earth.

The part that is below the break is going to fall down and wrap around the Earth. I think you’re really only looking at the atmosphere and below. What if a hurricane comes through and tries to tear up the cable? Or what if …

Pamela: A micro-meteor hits it and severs it in the wrong place. That’s where you really have to start being afraid. What if the sucker gets knocked by an asteroid in just the wrong way?

Fraser: I think for a lot of the other, as you said, terrorism is the same thing, right? If you go up to one kilometer and you try to chop the cable or even explode it from the ground, the cable is just going to drift away, right?

Pamela: Yeah. It’s when you get control of that counterweight and you move the counterweight.

Fraser: Yeah, these are gigantic engineering issues and could have some gigantic risks. I think that a space elevator is the most feasible way to get enormous amounts of mass off of the planet and out into space.

Pamela: At the end of the day you still have to wonder is it more feasible perhaps to go out and grab an asteroid and instead of taking mass from the planet Earth and putting it into space, to start mining space itself and move the construction workers into space. These are the debates we’re going to have.

Fraser: But even people, right? Large amounts of people. I could almost afford at $100 a pound, if I really save my money.

Pamela: [Laughter] Sell your house.

Fraser: Sell my house. I’m never going to be able to afford $10,000 a pound to leave the Earth, right?

Pamela: Right. The going rate is $3 million with the Russians. A few hundred thousand if you get your seats now for Spaceship 2.

Fraser: Yeah, exactly. Now what about space elevators in other places? I know the Earth is very high gravity, but there are some other places we can put them.

Pamela: Right this is where Kim Stanley Robinson’s idea of attaching one to Mars was such a straight-forward idea. It’s a lower gravity system. Grab yourself a moon, start mining it and dropping down toward the surface.

In these lower gravity areas you don’t need to have as thick of cable. Suddenly it becomes much easier to weave together enough carbon nanotube fibers.

Fraser: Or spectra or some regularly available stuff.

Pamela: You also don’t need as much energy to get from the surface of the planet to a geostationary orbit when your geo belongs to Mars instead of the planet Earth.

Fraser: One of the big, big issues with Mars we’ve talked about this a bit in the past, landing heavy payloads on the surface of Mars. This is going to be really dangerous, and really scary to do it.

If we’re going to be serious about colonizing Mars, then maybe that makes a lot of sense, right? Build a space elevator there at a fraction of the cost that it would be here on Earth, lower things down.

Pamela: One of the ideas that came forward in Kim Stanley Robinson’s book, which apparently I am just going to keep plugging. I love the book.

Fraser: Yeah if you haven’t read Kim Stanley Robinson’s books. Which one, he did the three Mars books, are you talking about something different?

Pamela: No. This is again all the Red Mars series. But all his books are good.

Fraser: Yeah, Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars.

Pamela: The idea he had was let’s use the space elevator to get colonists from space down to the surface. Then use space elevators to get mine substances, to get basically goods from the surface of Mars back out to orbit. You have this exchange of mass going on.

Fraser: Another really good place for a space elevator is the Moon.

Pamela: There you actually start looking at why we don’t start thinking about sky hooks which isn’t something we haven’t really talked about. Instead of having a nice friendly hanging non-moving elevator, the sky hook idea is you put something in lower orbit and you set it spinning.

You essentially fling yourself into higher and higher orbits on this set of interconnecting hooks. You get caught off of an airplane, spun into a higher orbit.

You get caught by different hook in a different orbit that just happened to line up at the right moment. You get almost a set of interlocking orbiting gears that go in and out of phase with one another and allow you to fling yourself into deep space.

Fraser: I actually did an article a few years ago about an elevator on the moon, same idea. You put an elevator on the moon facing directly towards the Earth. What you can do is put a counterbalance in, there is a Lagrange point in between the Earth and the moon. You could put your counter balance in there and it would be almost like you’re floating something off of the bottom of the ocean. That it floats up and pulled the cable tight because of the way it would sit in the Lagrange point.

It’s the same deal. You could mine helium three off of the surface of the moon and then drive it to the space elevator, take it up the space elevator and then once you’re up to the top, fly over to Earth You could move towards the big space station where you’re going to be harvesting solar power, right? [Laughter]

That, as you said, there are lots of ways we could get the resources from space, and then there are a lot of options then.

Pamela: What is crazy is we’re essentially imagining a future where we’re weaving our own space highways where Buck Rogers and the 21^st Century rocket ship is getting replaced with little spiders climbing between all the different special locomotion places.

They’re climbing between the Lagrange points, between the geostationary obits. Then we have little shuttles that get you between these places. Other than that, you’re stuck on the ribbons.

Fraser: Yeah, yeah. But it allows you to make these changes from gravity walls at theoretically the lowest possible cost. That would be a true space faring solar system civilization.

Pamela: [Laughter] and it always comes down to the economics.

Fraser: Economics. But, hopefully, if the prices come down and if there’s money to be made then boy, sky’s the limit.

I’m sure we’re going to get an e-mail from the Liftport folks telling us how far along their progression is and we’d love to hear from you.

Pamela: And we are supporting what you do.

Fraser: Absolutely.

Pamela: This year it’s not getting built.

Fraser: No, we are absolutely enthusiastic about the concept of space elevators. They are not as crazy. I think that’s the thing is that they are not as crazy as you might think.

Pamela: Yeah.

Fraser: Build a cable from Earth to geosynchronous orbit. That’s insane. But, when you actually sit down and you do the math and you do the costs it’s not outlandish. There are mega projects that get built on Earth that would cost more money.

Pamela: I just want a giant security system.

Fraser: Sure, sure. I don’t. Let’s just make it happen.

This transcript is not an exact match to the audio file. It has been edited for clarity. Transcription and editing by Cindy Leonard.

Shownotes

Show Notes for Space Capsules, Part 1

• Space Capsules – Explore! Fun with Science from Lunar and Planetary Institute
• Space Capsules — Nationmaster Encyclopedia
• Monkeys in Space – Wiki
• Vostok overview -- Astronautix
• Yuri Gagarin
• Russian Aerospace Guide
• The Soyuz Capsule
• Collection of Images from NASA on the Mercury Program
• Project Mercury Overview – NASA
• Project Mercury – Universe Today’s Guide to Space
• Mercury Redstone Rocket
• Make a replica of the Mercury Redstone Rocket – Delta 7 Studio
• Height restriction for early astronauts:  no taller than 5′ 11″ (1.8 m)
• Today, astronauts must be between 4’10 1/2″ (1.47 m)  to 6’4″ tall (1.93 m)
• Alan Shephard
• Gus Grisson – NASA History Office
• “Gus Grisson Didn’t Sink the Liberty Bell 7″ – Space.com
• John Glenn
• Scott Carpenter
• Wally Schirra
• Gordon Cooper
• Deke Slayton
• John F. Kennedy’s speech to Congress challenging the US to send astronauts to the Moon – You Tube
• Before NASA, there was NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics)
• Gemini Program (1962-1966)
  
• NASA picture gallery of the Gemini Program
• Gemini Spacecraft
• 1st US Spacewalk — Gemini 4
• Agena Target spacecraft for Gemini — Wiki
• Agena Docking Sim

Transcript: Space Capsules, Part 1 – Vostok, Mercury and Gemini

Download the transcript

Fraser Cane: Space capsules have been around for almost 50 years when Yuri Gagarin headed to Space in 1961. There have been many programs that have used capsules by both the Americans and the Russians and even the Chinese are using them now for their manned spaceflight program.

Let’s take a look at this rugged dependable space vehicle that’s going to make a comeback in the next decade when NASA sends humans back to the moon. Alright Pamela – the space capsule – so what are we talking [Laughter] about here when we’re talking about a capsule?

Dr. Pamela Gay: The basic idea is you need a rocket to get into Space and you need to put a cone on the top of the rocket to make it more aerodynamic so why not stick a human in that cone?

Fraser: I think of a bunch of reasons why not to stick a human in that cone.

Pamela: Well yeah, there’s the whole do you really want to have that much rocket fuel strapped to your, you know where I’m going.

Fraser: Yeah, to Space and all that kind of stuff. But the shape I guess is a spot where you could put a person.

Pamela: It’s the final part that’s left going all the way up into Space because as the rocket launches, as it sheds segment after segment in multi-stage rockets, it’s that nose that finally makes it with the last segment all the way up into orbit. So stick a person there, why not?

Fraser: But, I think that when you look at the space capsule as one method of transportation and you compare that to the shuttle, there are two different theories going, right?

Pamela: There are two entirely different ideas. In general capsules aren’t reusable. We have actually reused one of the capsules but we didn’t stick people in it the second time it was used.

In general the idea behind capsule flight is it is disposable. Everything goes up, the part containing the people comes back down but other than that, you throw out everything as you go.

With the space shuttle, other than the external tank, everything gets reused. In theory that should, you’d think, cut down on the price. Now the reality is that the space shuttle is extraordinarily expensive.

So much has to go into fitting it, getting it ready to go a second time, refueling it, checking all the electronics, replacing an electronic piece (which sometimes requires eBay nowadays) that it really never was a cost saver. But we thought maybe, but no.

Then there’s also the well with capsules you’re kind of dumping people in large segments of the planet Earth. Either some large air of circle on the ocean, some large air of circle on land.

With the space shuttle you know exactly where it is going to land. It feels more controlled. The escape mechanisms seem a little bit more realistic with the abort ones to orbit. We’re going to get into all of that with our space shuttle episode next week.

With capsules it just feels more dangerous. The reality is it doesn’t seem to be that way. It feels like it should cost a lot more – reality is it really isn’t that way.

Fraser: What are the components of the capsule that we’re looking at?

Pamela: It varies from mission to mission. At the most simplistic level what you have is giant rocket and nosecone containing humans. As we get more and more complicated, we start adding things, a shroud that acts as basically, let’s stick the stuff that doesn’t have to go back to Earth in it area.

For instance with the Gemini mission there was what looked like a bowl basically attached to the capsule that contained the life-support and some of the engines that were used to alter orbits.

With the Apollo missions we carried the lunar lander, the lunar orbiting parts of the spacecraft. All of these were additional segments that were attached to the capsule but only the one capsule section came all the way back down to Earth.

The Soviets have, and in fact the Chinese as well, have also carried this design with them where they have a spheroidal orbiter module that has the accommodations for the crew. It has a little tiny reentry module, that little cone-shaped piece again. There is also again this extra service module that contains extra bits; in this case, solar panels, instruments and engines.

Exactly what gets added to this core cone-shaped component varies with mission to mission and has gotten more and more complex over the years.

Fraser: Let’s talk about the advantages then. I guess there are really only two kinds of vehicles that have ever been used to get people into Space. There’s the capsule method and the space shuttle so next week we’re going to talk about the space shuttle. Let’s talk about the advantages of using a space capsule.

Pamela: The simplest thing is it doesn’t weigh a lot for what it does. With the space shuttle, you have wings, you have avionics. You have to carry your main engines all the way up and all the way down.

With the capsule you have a much more streamlined system. You don’t have all these extra bits. Not only does this save you on weight, allowing you to carry up larger servicing modules, lunar landers, and more equipment, but it also cuts down on the things that can fail. It’s this “WOW, you can do this without having a computer onboard” that allowed the Mercury craft to first take part.

It wasn’t until Gemini that we started sending computer systems up into Space. Before then everything was controlled either via signals from the planet Earth or signals from the astronauts themselves.

Fraser: Right, so simple is better. The shuttle I think is as many call it the most complicated machine ever built, right?

Pamela: The redundancy that are required, yes the Mercury, the Gemini and the Apollo missions all had lots of triple redundant equipment. With the space shuttle now you’re building more things in multiple redundancies.

With the capsules, it’s completely straightforward and a lot of things can fail before you have to actually worry about killing someone. That’s generally good in a spacecraft.

Fraser: Okay, so I guess we should talk about the history of the capsules. Let’s go back to the beginning then. What is the first space capsule used?

Pamela: The first space capsules were the Mercury capsules that were attached initially to the Redstone missiles. They were just intercontinental ballistic missiles that Werhner von Braun developed. Later they were also attached to the Atlas missiles.

Here, basically the Soviets launched a satellite into Space and America went, “oh no, we need to think about a manned space program, what can we do fastest?” Werhner von Braun had been thinking about these problems. According to a speaker I’d heard at space camp a number of years ago, he’d actually really wanted to do manned space flight the entire time.

So as he was thinking about how to build the Redstone missiles he was thinking how he could put a human on top a Redstone missile and actually do sub-orbital flight. He was pretty much ready to start putting things from paper to fabrication when the announcement came down the line that we were going to try and have the Mercury manned space program.

With the Mercury seven we had the first sub-orbital flights and here it makes sense. We launched an intercontinental ballistic missile which is designed to go partway around the planet and come down.

We had people basically go up almost make it to orbit and make it partway around the Earth. As we attach larger and larger rockets we were able to get all the way into orbital flight.

Fraser: I believe you’re missing a whole other country here.

Pamela: Well, yeah I am focusing rather on the United States this point.

Fraser: Yeah, that’s okay; it’s where you’re from. You can’t help it.

Pamela: [Laughter] Well I don’t see any Canadian manned capsules.

Fraser: We’ll talk about it when we talk about the shuttle. Lots of Canadians have been to Space. [Laughter]

Pamela: That’s true you have the whole robotic arm thing going for you.

Fraser: Right but the Soviets with the Vostok with Yuri Gagarin. That was a capsule, the first human in orbit. It was the first real capsule sent into Space with a human.

Pamela: Right and what’s kind of neat about the Soviet program and where I was kind of holding off is his mission was really the very first one that had a human. There’s no stepping back from that.

What’s even cooler about the Soviet program is they started off with the Vostok rockets and then they pretty much moved from Vostok over to the Soyuz and then they stayed there.

They’ve stayed with the same technology, using the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” motto for decades and decades and decades.

Fraser: They still launch them.

Pamela: They still launch them and in fact the entire Chinese fleet, the Shenzhou spacecraft that the Chinese are now using is actually based off of the Soyuz model. It’s just substantially larger. They’ve added to it but the core components are similar.

Sort of like you can buy SUVs in a variety of different sizes. This has been a very fast progression where there were basically three different Vostoks, 1K and 2K and 3KA and it was the 3KA that was used for human spaceflights.

From there they started launching the Soyuz and just kept with it. It was with the Soyuz that they really perfected capsule travel. But before we do that let’s because we can, bask in the glory that is Soyuz and that’s still being used and will be used to get people back and forth from the international space station for a long time.

But, the U.S. did a pretty good job with its Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions as well.

Fraser: Right so I’d love to hear about the developments and some of the improvements and some of the capabilities that went through that program.

Pamela: Mercury was where we first started figuring out what we could do. What’s so amazing about the Mercury program is what we did to our poor astronauts in a certain way. How tall are you in meters Fraser?

Fraser: I’m 1.83 meters; 6 feet.

Pamela: Okay, so the entire Mercury space capsules were 1.7 cubic meters in size. So squish you 10 centimeters and then basically put a one meter by one meter box around you and it is a little tiny volume.

Fraser: No thank you.

Pamela: There are jokes about how Mercury capsules were more worn than ridden. I don’t know how astronauts got in and out of these spacecraft. The astronauts were not your 6 foot 4 giant military men. They actually had to be short to fit in these capsules. We’re working in an oxygen environment.

When they first launched, we hadn’t thought about any of the niceties. We hadn’t thought out the fact that astronauts might need to go to the bathroom, which we discussed in our spacesuit episode. They basically had to figure out with Mercury, can people eat in Space? Can we survive going all the way up and coming all the way down and orbiting in the process? Yes.

We sent up a few monkeys – Sam and Miss Sam. I love the fact that they couldn’t be more creative in the names. We sent up a few chimps, at each stage testing to make sure that each new incarnation was alright to launch.

We went from first with a Redstone missile and a Mercury capsule, we launched Alan Shepard in ’61 and he made a sub-orbital flight. We then did a second sub-orbital flight with Grissom. This one was rather controversial because it kind of sank in the ocean which is rather frightening.

Grissom was able to make it out and in documentation it said that the hatch unexpectedly blew off. These did have explosives built in the door and you can imagine it, yeah something went wrong.

But there was always the rumor that maybe Grissom triggered it and panicked to get out and it thus sank and Grissom was rescued by helicopter.

Fraser: This was the Liberty Bell and they recently discovered it and brought it up and it helped get more evidence on what happened.

Pamela: One of the really cool things is everything was recovered down to the pocket knife that they had. All it really needed was to be cleaned a little bit to be back to new.

Fraser: Wow. So that was two sub-orbital flights and then?

Pamela: And then we launched John Glenn. He went on to be a Senator and he went on to be the oldest man in orbit riding the space shuttle many years later. He was in orbit for almost 5 hours. The previous missions had been just over 15 minutes. He was up in Space for 5 hours.

There were concerns with his particular mission because the one thing that has to not fail on a capsule is the heat shield. The capsules basically come in with the base of the cone at just the right angle so that all the heat from the friction from the air heats up just the base.

You have to come in at the right angle and you have to have a heat shield that has no flaws in it and completely protects the heat from penetrating and rupturing the frame or burning the astronaut. There are many different points of failure.

Fraser: We’ve seen that go tragically wrong with Columbia when the heat shield fails. The heat gets in and then just destroys.

Pamela: We build these things as light as we can which means that we’re using aluminum frames in a lot of cases. We’re using lightweight materials that melt easily so the heat shield is absolutely vital.

There was some concern with his heat shield. He was able to make it back safely. Then from there we went on to Carpenter who did three complete orbits again and he came in off target and landed about 400 kilometers away from where he meant to but it was okay.

One of the sad things is Carpenter wasn’t the one who was supposed to go up fourth. It was supposed to be Deke Slayton, but it was found out that he had an irregular heartbeat.

We always talk about Mercury 7 and in fact all of the Mercury launches the astronaut got to name them and they all added the name 7 to the end of the mission. So you have Freedom 7, Liberty Bell 7, Friendship 7, Aurora 7, Sigma 7, Faith 7, and Freedom 7.

Fraser: Right, because there were 7 astronauts.

Pamela: But we actually only launched 6 of these missions because Slayton was pulled. I love that the camaraderie of this team was such that even though they became just 6 it’s ingrained in our minds there were 7 of them.

You have to actually go back and read and realize that seventh one never launched, there were only 6. It’s good when history causes us to disremember things in a way that commemorates a team member. But there were indeed only six.

From there we went on to extending to more and more orbits. With the Sigma 7 we went on to 6 orbits. From there we stayed pretty much over a day, 22 orbits, one day, 10 hours, 19 minutes.

The last of the Mercury missions was where we proved it is okay to sleep in Space. It’s okay to be in Space for an entire day.

From there we moved on to actually starting the Apollo program. Apollo started before we actually had Gemini in Space.

Fraser: The final goal of the Apollo program was of course to land humans on the moon.

Pamela: We had the Mercury program launched its final mission in May of 1963. It was in ’61 that Kennedy made his famous address that we need to put people on the moon saying: “First I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”

We started that during the Mercury mission. In the process of NASA figuring out (and NASA didn’t even exist when Mercury started being planned, it had a different name), as we started figuring out as a nation how to put men on the moon we realized there were certain things we had to figure out first.

Mercury was basically just strapping yourself to the top of a rocket and going. With Gemini, we started to debug things like we need computers in Space. We need to be able to get in and out of the spacecraft. We need to be able to dock the spacecraft with something else.

Fraser: Or reconfigure the spacecraft so you’ve got it one way, you’ve got to be able to turn it around.

Pamela: With the Mercury spacecraft they could get into orbit. Once they were in orbit they could kind of move the spacecraft from one orientation to another adjusting its pitch, yaw and roll.

With Gemini they actually had additional engines that allowed them to change the orbit of the spacecraft itself allowing docking maneuvers to take place. Gemini was primarily dedicated to figuring out how do we accomplish all of these different things? Once there were one by one each accomplished then we started basically killing off planned launched. There were several planned Gemini launches that never took place.

It was a very short break between the two programs. We had the last Mercury launch in 1963 and Gemini was already starting to put new people in Space in 1965 just two years later. The very first Gemini flight did 3 entire orbits. The second Gemini flight was when we did the first spacewalk with White going out and spending 22 minutes outside of the capsule.

The biggest goal with going to the moon beyond just the technological achievements of can we dock, can we change orbits, can we go outside – that’s actually technology problems. We also had to figure out can we live in Space for prolonged periods of time?

It was with the third Gemini mission that we made a huge jump. We went from just one day max with the Mercury program to four days with the second Gemini to then we went out to 7 days with the third Gemini mission. We stretched it all the way out to almost 14 days – 3 days, 14 hours with the fourth Gemini mission.

Fraser: That must have been so difficult to be in – I mean I guess the space capsule was a little larger but even so imagine spending 14 days essentially side-by-side with another person in some cases, out in Space where everything is so much harder to do.

Pamela: There are a lot of museums that have either original Gemini or mock-ups of the Gemini capsules or Gemini training capsules. I encourage any of you that go to a science museum and have an opportunity to see one of these things to put yourself in the seat and then imagine being in that space for 2 weeks.

A lot of us have trouble sharing hotel rooms with business colleagues. A lot of us live in large houses and like to just sprawl out in all of our space and large bathrooms that are separated by sinks from bedrooms.

In these little tiny capsules, everything you did was completely in the open to the other two people. There was no privacy. There was no escaping any biological function, any argument, and miscommunication.

Conversations between you and your spouse were between you and the world basically. Those 2 weeks must have been a really long 2 weeks. It says a lot about the mental stability of the astronauts that they chose for these missions that all these years later we still aren’t hearing well that crew completely melted down. These are people that have gone on to be national heroes.

Fraser: What was sort of the end of the Gemini program?

Pamela: Gemini went on and from their big 14 day mission after that they pretty much focused on figuring out docking problems. They had problems not so much with the Gemini as what they were trying to dock with.

There were a series of short missions after that no more than nearly 4 days after that. They did a series of shorter missions perfecting docking. Gemini 12 was the final Gemini flight. It flew in 1966 so we had basically this mission the entire Gemini program went from March 1965 to November of 1966. It was a very short period of time that accomplished a ton of technological goals.

From there we jumped straight to the Apollo missions with a slightly larger capsule and a whole lot of additional things that got carried up in Apollo making it much more humane on the astronauts to go up into Space.

Fraser: You know what? We’ve run out of time. Why don’t we next week talk about Apollo and the Russians and the Chinese and the future?

Pamela: That sounds like a plan.

Shownotes

• The Human Body in Vacuum – GSFC
• The Human Body in Space – How Stuff Works
• Understanding How Space Travel Affects Blood Vessels — NASA
• Temperature in Space — Wise Geek
• Spacesuits – NASA
• Spacesuits -- Astronautix.com
• How Spacesuits Work — How Stuff Works
• History of the Spacesuit — Science Museum Learning Network
• Primer on Spacesuits — About.com
• How to Design a Spacesuit
• Different parts of the Apollo/Saturn spacesuit — John Duncan
• How is a spacesuit made and other information — About.com
• What Causes ‘The Bends’ – How Stuff Works
• How to prepare for a spacewalk — How Stuff Works
• The space shuttle orange ACES suit, the Advanced Crew Escape Suit – Astronautix
• Current spacesuits, the EMU – How Stuff Works
• Spacesuit Gallery – About.com
• Spacesuit technology, such as joints, etc — Clavius
• Hubble Servicing Mission 4 -- NASA
• What a Little Lunar Dust Can Do – Wired
• All the things a spacesuit does -- How Stuff Works
• Space Adaptation Syndrome (Space Sickness) – Wiki
• Why Do Astronauts Suffer from Space Sickness? – Medical News Today
• Subsistence in Space
• Going to the Bathroom in Space – Dr. Zebra
• Book:  The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
• Movie:  The Right Stuff
• Astronaut diapers, AKA Maxiumum Absorbency Garments – Wiki
• Manned Maneuvering Unit– the big “jet pack” formerly used by shuttle astronauts– NASA History
• Current “jet pack”, the SAFER Unit, to used for emergencies – Wiki

American Astronomical Society Meeting, Long Beach, CA, Jan 4-8, 2009

Transcript: Spacesuits

Download the transcript

Fraser Cane: As we mentioned before, the Universe is out to get you. For our astronauts, that’s truer than ever. One step outside into the vacuum of space would be a world of hurt for an unprotected astronaut. The freezing cold temperature, lack of atmospheric pressure and the deadly radiation just to name a few hazards and that’s why the smart astronaut puts on the spacesuit first.

Let’s look at the smallest possible spaceship around. Pamela so I guess we have to go back to our constant theme, our regular friend, a Universe trying to kill us. So, human body meets the void of space, what can go wrong?

Dr. Pamela Gay: What won’t go wrong is the better question. If you’re in the shadows there is a good chance that you will start to flash-freeze while simultaneously all your skin starts to try and bruise and the blood vessels in your eyes start to burst.

Your body is trying to figure out whether it wants to bruise or freeze at the same time while you’re also going radical decompression you have nothing to breathe. All sorts of things, it’s really a rush to see which thing causes you to die first.

Fraser: And that’s if you’re in the shadow. If you’re in the sunlight then you fry.

Pamela: Right, right so by fire by ice, neither is nice.

Fraser: Obviously those will kill you fast. You’re talking like a minute and you’re done. But if you could stick around then the radiation, the cosmic rays and the radiation coming from the sun, micrometeorites would chop little holes through your body.

Pamela: Just little things like the ultraviolet from the sun that normally gets a lot of it taken out by our atmosphere, we’re talking massive sunburns.

Fraser: Yeah, so needless to say, it’s a very bad thing. There’s just no possible way to get out into space without some kind of protection.

Now I use the term the smallest spaceship. That’s really what a spacesuit is, right? It’s like a portable spaceship.

Pamela: That’s exactly the way to look at it. It’s nothing more than a device that provides pressure for your body and protects you from ultraviolet. It provides some measure of protection from radiation and allows you to lug around everything you need to breathe and eat and maybe a few other bodily functions.

Fraser: Let’s run through each of those things you talked about. First let’s talk about temperature. How does a spacesuit work to keep you from freezing or frying?

Pamela: There are two different things you have to worry about. First of all, what is the temperature outside? And then what is the temperature inside? The first thing the spacesuit does is works to protect you from the massive thermal gradient outside. It works to reflect to protect you from high heat to prevent you from losing heat into the cold through massive amounts of insulation.

Once you have this wonderfully insulated spacesuit you have to worry about what’s going on inside. We’ve all been in that really well insulated room that has too many people in it and the temperature starts rising and rising. The human body is nothing more than a heat factory. Your spacesuit has to be able to also cool your body off or heat it up depending on what the needs of the various parts of your body are.

The outer layers of the spacesuit act sort of like the insulation around the spaceship. Then right up against your skin, there’s this really neat layer that is basically a cooling garment. It has all sorts of tubing that flushes fluid around your body to help maintain a constant temperature so that you don’t overheat on a spacewalk or flash-freeze, whatever the case may be.

Fraser: Give me a couple of examples. Let’s say you’re out in the sunlight. You’re outside your spaceship in the sunlight, what is your spacesuit going to be doing to regulate the temperature?

Pamela: First of all, they’re painted white. They’re highly reflective. Then they just have layer after layer of material. One of the neat things about space is well, it’s a vacuum. If you’re able to have one layer cast a shadow onto the layer beneath it, there’s really no easy way for the temperature to conduct from one layer of the spacesuit to the next.

So by having pockets between the different layers of material the same way you might have pockets between multi-panes of glass, it’s able to protect that heat from getting into your body on the inside.

Simple reflection and then pockets that prevent the heat from trying to conduct through the spacesuit is the same thing you might do to protect your house just with the vacuum of space making it all that much more effective.

Fraser: Then if you go into the shadow then the heaters will kick in, right?

Pamela: Here this is where the fluid that is going around your body maintains it at a constant temperature. Because of the wonderful insulation you don’t really have to worry about heaters kicking on so much.

You don’t have the heat escaping from the suit either. The same insulation that prevents the heat from getting in is also going to prevent the heat from getting out.

Fraser: So the astronaut’s own body is doing a lot of the work of just keeping them warm.

Pamela: And keeping the astronaut cool is actually one of the bigger problems. You’re out there, you’re working hard, and you’re heating up. In your spacesuit in general there is nothing to wick away your sweat.

There’s nothing to help to allow your body to effectively cool itself off. So this is where they actually need to have a cooling system around the astronaut pretty much all the time.

Fraser: Let’s move on to the pressure part. As we said, no air in space, almost total vacuum, it’s not the nice pressure that we experience here on Earth. You said you’re getting bruised, right? So without pressure what’s going to happen to your body?

Pamela: Without pressure the first thing that’s going to start to happen is all the little tiny blood vessels on the surface of your skin, on your eyes, they’re all going to start to rupture. It’s the pressure from the outside pushing down on your skin that’s helping these blood vessels not explode from your own blood pressure inside of them.

You have these fragile vessels with your body’s own blood pressure pushing away on the outsides of the vessels. Air is normally pushing back. Remove that air and those vessels rupture. So the first thing you have is massive bruising. You also start to suffer from what is called the Bends. This is what happens when you start getting Nitrogen bubbles built up inside your system. It causes terrible, terrible pain and will actually kill you.

You start to also run into problems with the things in your lungs starting to burst. All the small pockets, your lungs are very sponge-like and the pockets of air inside of the sponge-like tissues are going to start to rupture as well. You have lots of parts of your body that are starting to rupture and experience severe, severe pain. It’s not something you want to experience.

Fraser: How does the spacesuit protect us on that front?

Pamela: There’s two different ways. The way it is generally done is you provide pressure inside the spacesuit with an artificial atmosphere. Your spacesuit itself will have either an elastic or hard membrane that is pushing down on a bladder that’s filled with air. You live within this inflated balloon essentially.

It’s kind of hard to move inside of an inflated balloon. You have to move the outer edges of your suit and there’s this pressure that you’re constantly fighting against. As you bend your joints you actually end up changing the volume inside the spacesuit which makes everything even harder to bend.

Fraser: It’s kind of like imagine you put on a sleeve and imagine you could inflate the sleeve so that it was like a great big balloon and then try to bend your arm. You can imagine that the air is trying to stop you from being able to actually bend your arm.

Pamela: The best thing they can really do is just not inflate these things that much. That’s actually not that big a problem. We have a lot of pressure here at the surface of the Earth but we also are in an atmosphere that’s majority Nitrogen. So, every breath I take doesn’t contain that much Oxygen. It contains mostly Nitrogen.

While if you remove that Nitrogen and still allow every breath to have as much Oxygen in it as before, you can decrease the total pressure around you. The Oxygen itself can fill up all the space that’s necessary. All that matters is the number of atoms of Oxygen you inhale, the number of molecules actually, not so much all the Nitrogen that’s around them.

Fraser: I’ve seen some spacesuits and the wearing the big balloon problem; they do have some solutions for that, right? As you say the lower pressure using just Oxygen is one way but actually have like rotating I guess hard points and sort of rotating pivots as opposed to wearing a big balloon.

Pamela: There are several different ways of putting together a spacesuit. There is the all cloth variety. This is what you see in the spatial astronauts during landing and takeoff. They are big orange highly flexible, not inflated that much suits that are only really designed for emergency evacuation of the space shuttle. You’re not going to be wearing one of those on a spacewalk.

Then there are also the suits that we do use for the spacewalks. These are the extra-vehicular mobility units. They’re a combination of a soft shell and a hard shell. The reason that you might want to use a hard shell is it’s more robust. You don’t have to worry about puncturing it as much and if you start to do hard joints you can get into problems though.

We’ve all had the various toys with flexible joints and you can eventually get your Ken doll or your Barbie doll posed into positions that you have to figure out how to un-pose them from because the joints are no longer particularly happy with how you move them.

That can happen with spacesuits too. You start to bend around and twist to grab something and all of a sudden the joints hit the end of their limits. Quite often your spacesuits will have a combination design where they start looking at doing the torso as a hard shell but then they start doing the limbs where you need the extra flexibility as soft.

Then they do neat things with the joints where they bevel it and they have extra folds that allow some parts to expand out and some parts to compress down as you bend and flex your joints. The only problem with this is you still are always going to have limited mobility where the limits are placed by how much extra cloth they can provide to balloon out and take care of well where does that extra volume of gas go as you bend your arm?

Fraser: You can just imagine how difficult it is to try and get the job done while wearing a balloon with these beveled joints. You can just imagine how much more difficult it is for mobility and for flexibility.

For some of the jobs that they have to do where they’re turning wrenches and grabbing small parts and having to grab small objects in their hands, grab a handle and stuff, it’s quite amazing that they’re able to get their work done at all.

Pamela: Anyone who has ever tried to do detailed work in the winter where you’re wearing heavy thick gloves and a jacket and snow pants, you feel like the sta-puff marshmallow man. It’s really hard to function with small tools.

The Hubble servicing mission astronauts are going to be going out and essentially removing screws that are like the ones that hold together a lot of modern computer cases, little tiny screws. They’re going to have to do all of this while wearing these giant bulky suits.

Now they’ve been training and they will be able to do this thanks to adapted tools and just being used to working in this bulky situation. But it’s certainly not pleasant and there have been a variety of attempts to figure out how can we provide the pressure the body needs?

We keep coming back to basically Buck Rogers’ lycra-spandex-elastic putting pressure on your body simply through the tension of the material type suits. But there you still have to worry about radiation. How do you make that so it’s thermally as protective? Just trying to take care of all the needs at once is very problematic.

Fraser: Right, this is an alternative way of providing counter-pressure, right? You’re talking about instead of essentially surrounding the astronaut in a bubble of air, you use stretchy fabric and sort of wear a very tight stretchy fabric outfit where it’s the pressure of the fabric that is pushing against the skin that is providing that counter-pressure that the body needs so that you don’t get the bruising.

Pamela: And in this case the only place that your skin is actually up against the air is in your helmet where you’re doing your inhalations. The rest of your body is just basically – you can imagine being surrounded by a giant Ace bandage.

Another problem is, this is really hard to get in and out of and you have to do all of it inside the spacecraft. You need people helping you and the probability of something going terribly wrong is much higher.

Fraser: Out on the show notes there is a really neat spacesuit that was developed at MIT that followed this direction. It’s pretty cool because the model that’s wearing it, it just looked kind of like a very sleek suit with a great big astronaut helmet on as opposed to the big bulky astronaut outfit.

You could imagine you put on this as you say this Ace bandage over your whole body and then you put on a coat. You put on a warm outfit [Laughter] on top of that. It keeps you warm. But essentially you have so much more mobility. I know that one of the other problems with these suits is at the joints. It’s very difficult.

You can imagine sort of feel your knee or your elbow, it’s very difficult to apply pressure on the opposite sides. Sew on the inside of the elbow and the inside of the knee with an elastic band and not end up with a gap or bad pressure there. So you get bruising on the inside of your joints. It’s sort of the new idea and they’re still trying to figure out if they can make a go of it. Chances are we’ll see hybrid versions of this kind of thing, right?

Pamela: Right, they’re very sexy. You have to worry also about subtle things like an astronaut gains ten pounds or loses ten pounds even worse. Then it’s not going to be providing as much pressure. You also with the moon in particular have to worry about mitigating dust.

Some of the modern designs they are coming up with, you basically dock the back of your spacesuit up against your spacecraft or your rover and you just climb in and out through a hatch in the back of your spacesuit. It’s sort of like someone getting in and out of some sort of a crazy magician’s outfit. It’s complicated and you do have to be highly flexible to get in and out of your spacesuit.

The nice thing about that design is it keeps all of the space dust, all of the lunar dust out of your spacecraft. Lunar dust is an extremely abrasive substance. Getting it into the spacecraft is one of the things you most don’t want to do. It will irritate skin and lungs. It’s like working with asbestos.

Trying to figure out how to keep this out of the spacecraft is something NASA is struggling with. The best way to do it is these big bulky suits that you just sort of climb in and out of and rove around without ever getting the suit itself into the spacecraft. It also cuts down on problems with airlocks and just having to carry an airlock around with you because your spacesuit IS your airlock.

Fraser: Right so the spacesuit always stays outside. That’s cool.

Pamela: And so does the dust.

Fraser: And so does the dust and the dog. [Laughter] Now we talked about I guess relative to pressure is breathing. There’s no air in space and we need air. You mentioned enjoy some pure Oxygen.

Pamela: Pure Oxygen is one solution. It makes it so that you have less pressure inside your spacesuit but it also raises the risk of something called Bends. If you’re going to be in a pure Oxygen environment you have to pre-breathe.

You have to essentially change the atmosphere that you’re breathing slowly over time so that you can get all of the Nitrogen out of your system before you start breathing pure Oxygen and before you start experiencing the lower pressures associated with the pure Oxygen environment. This takes time.

It means that you can’t randomly decide: “Oh no, I need to go fix the solar panel right now.” You have to decide a few hours ahead of time. We are looking at different ways to make spacesuits that you have the pure Oxygen ones that are lower that in some cases have been used.

We’re looking at ways to build things in the future where the atmosphere is more like being a thousand feet above sea level, more like the atmosphere when you’re flying on an airplane. It’s lower than what you get at sea level but it is still a mixture of Nitrogen and Oxygen and it’s something that you can have on the International Space Station, in a lunar rover and in your spacesuit that allows you to have the sudden, oh I want to go outside right now without having to worry about getting the Bends and without having to worry about the Oxygen environment affecting your body different that the mixed environment inside the spacecraft.

Fraser: Radiation. [Laughter]

Pamela: That’s the bad one. So mitigating against that is a lot harder. We can do minimal protection by incorporating deflective things into the fabrics. The Apollo spacesuits actually I read had gold thread in them because the gold thread was extremely malleable and was extremely good at reflecting radiation.

We’ve moved on but it’s still a matter of just using specially woven fabrics that help protect you. In a way it’s the guys with the aluminum helmets. But at the end of the day high energy particles are still going to get through. You still are going to experience significant radiation.

Fraser: Right, the only real form of protection of high energy particles and radiation is stuff, right? [Laughter] Mass in between you and the radiation, so if you’re willing to lug around a few centimeters of lead in your spacesuit then that would help out very much. I think in this case it’s more like prevention is the best way.

There are new detection mechanisms now where NASA satellites can detect an inbound solar storm and give the astronauts a chance to go and hide somewhere safe as opposed to just getting caught out in space when the solar storm passes by and they get irradiated. I think in that situation there is some light protection but most of it is go hide. It’s coming, go hide.

Pamela: Right. One of the convenient things is water is a very good deterrent against many forms of high energy particle radiation. So at least by surrounding your body in a cooling system containing liquid, that provides a little; by having special high-tech fabrics that provides a little bit.

It’s not enough but it’s enough to make it so that every spacewalk doesn’t equal cancer. And UV is of course easy to protect against. You just stay out of the sun and put a mask between you and outer space. Fabric is great that way. We’ve all done it – wear a hat. That’s essentially what the astronauts do as well.

Fraser: And glass too, the glass of the spacesuit, the helmet, will protect you from ultraviolet. Okay, so the radiation – not so much. Now what about micrometeorites? Aren’t there little particles zipping around in space?

Pamela: Yes and that’s actually one of the cool things about the outer-most layer of the spacesuit. It is made out of a really durable material. It’s the thermal micrometeorite garment.

It actually does protect against micrometeorites. It’s again these high-tech fabrics that basically act just like bullet-proof vests. Bullet, micrometeorite – they’re really the exact same thing. So our astronauts are set.

Fraser: Obviously there’s a limit.

Pamela: Well yeah but the same thing is true of bullet-proof vests.

Fraser: Right there’s a certain point where you’re outfit isn’t going to be able to stop something big coming through. It’s sort of a numbers game.

Chances are the amount of time you’re going to spend out walking around in space and the size of the human body; you’re not going to get hit by anything dangerous. That’s the numbers that NASA runs.

Pamela: And you’re protected usually on at least one side by the spacecraft. That’s even enhancing your probabilities.

Fraser: Right, of course. What about space-madness?

Pamela: Well, that one the spacesuit can’t help against. The astronauts who have accidentally gotten space sickness in their spacesuits is really not pretty.

Fraser: Auugh! So, I’m kidding about space-madness, there’s no such thing but [Laughter] there are as you said, other bodily functions.

You just talked about space nausea. [Laughter] I can’t even imagine what that would be like, vomiting in your helmet.

Pamela: Not only that but it’s jet propulsion against the back of your helmet. There’s really no winning here.

It’s only happened twice that I could find documentation of with US astronauts and yes, not pretty. That is just when you go inside and hide your head in shame.

Fraser: But eating?

Pamela: There are liquids and gels – basically toothpaste is the way to think of it. You turn your head one way and you have a little thing you can suck water out of.

It’s kind of like camelback technology. Think of what bike riders use, the same principle applies to the astronauts.

Fraser: Then turn your other way and you get to suck this kind of protein gel paste.

Pamela: Yeah, not fun. That’s exactly what bike riders deal with as well.

Fraser: For some of the longest spacewalks, the astronauts are out for six and one half to seven hours out in space doing pretty hard physical labor. They’ve got to get hungry.

Pamela: The Apollo astronauts were out for twenty hours.

Fraser: Wow. They just had to get so hungry and so thirsty. With those kinds of times though you’re going to have to go to the bathroom, right?

Pamela: Right and here it’s actually interesting to look at the evolving technology. We started off where in the beginning we sort of forgot that this could possibly be a problem. You’ve got to wonder how they think that this won’t possibly be a problem.

If you’ve seen the movie “The Right Stuff”, you know about this. Poor Alan Shepard, he’s out there waiting to launch, waiting to launch, waiting to launch. What they don’t help you realize during the film is this guy is flat on his back with his legs elevated which puts pressure on your lower body. It increases blood flow. It does everything possible to increase kidney production.

This poor man drank coffee all morning. No one had thought ahead and he actually relieved himself inside of his suit which provided a moment’s relief and a lot of embarrassment and discomfort later. There are some things you just don’t want to have wet.

From there they moved on to technologies that applied best to men. Tubes were involved. It worked and they captured things and it was kind of like a bad hospital adventure. But it worked.

As women astronauts started to come along, they were trying to figure out how to solve this problem. Everything they came up with, the general response from the women was: “I’m not even going to try that. Don’t make me.”

They eventually realized that diapers of all things are really the best technology to sort out. There are diapers provided to the astronauts. One for take-off, one for landing, one just in case and then they also have diapers that are for use during all of the spacewalks.

They’re special high-tech ones that pull on and off just like underwear, sort of like the ones that they advertise for toddlers. They contain special chemicals that absorb a thousand times their weight in fluid. They are very effective at absorbing fluids and keeping the poor astronauts dry.

One Google link I found actually documented that astronauts tend to wait to participate in ‘number 2’ until they are back on the orbiter which I found interesting that they felt the need to document. Again, it’s just diapers – it works. The low-tech solution is sometimes the best solution.

Fraser: Yeah, I think that makes sense. Anyone who has had kids with the disposable diapers these days, they’re pretty magical you know? [Laughter] It’s pretty amazing how well they absorb and sort of deal with that.

I’m not going to go into anymore grim details but I think that’s the right solution for the problem. That’s like the cold hard reality of space travel, right? If you want to be an astronaut you gotta be okay with wearing a diaper. [Laughter] Alright Pamela did we run out of risks? I think we did.

Pamela: I think we did and other than that it’s just trying to figure out how to get around in space and the answer there is jet propulsion, just basically a gun filled with air was one technique early on used.

Since then we’ve realized ropes are really the best option to attach yourself to the spacecraft. In general they found small ways to use Nitrogen canisters or other gas canisters to just basically fire themselves around the spacecraft as they need to. It’s kind of cool.

Fraser: There’s a pretty cool technology where it’s like a backpack that they wear.

Pamela: The man maneuvering unit. They used it up until 1986. After the Challenger disaster it was deemed to risky to have the astronauts just sort of flying free.

But up until then they were used to occasionally try and rescue broken commercial satellites. It was everything you ever dreamed of in a jetpack as a small child kind of cool.

Fraser: When you’re in microgravity it is way easier to have a jetpack that lets you fly around in space. [Laughter] That’s very cool. Well, I think we’re done with spacesuits for this week.

Shownotes

Why humans have a hard time surviving in space:

• The human body in vacuum – GSFC
• The human body in space – How Stuff Works

Robotic space missions

• Timeline of missions to the moon –NASA
• Missions to Mars-- JPL

Other Robotics in space

• Space shuttle’s Canadarm remote manipulator system -- NASA
• SSRMS — Canadarm 2 and the Mobile Servicing System — NASA
• Comparing the space shuttle robotic arm to the ISS’s Canadarm 2 robotic arm
• Dextre, the ISS Robot
• Dextre Vs. Hal – Universe Today

Other Robotic Space missions discussed

• Cassini mission — JPL
• Hubble Space Telescope – NASA
• Hubble’s Data Handling System Failure – Universe Today
• Pathfinder Rover — JPL
• Mars Exploration Rover – JPL
• Scientific Equipment on MER – Cornell
• How to Drive the Mars Rovers — Universe Today
• Software Engineering Innovations for MER – JPL
• How the MERs work – How Stuff Works
• Deep Space 1 – NASA
• Europa “Submarine” Prototype Tests – Universe Today
• A Submarine for Europa – Universe Today
• New Horizons Mission – JHU
• Galileo Mission to Jupiter – JPL

Various Equipment/Software Needed for Robotic Missions

• RTG – Wiki
• How Do Solar Panels Supply Energy for Spacecraft? – Northwestern U
• Control Moment Gyroscopes – Wiki
• Space Communications – NASA
• Telecommunications Innovations for the Mars Exploration Rovers — JPL

Robotics Vs. Human Spaceflight

• Robotic Vs. Humans in Space – Astrobiology Magazine
• Manned Vs. Unmanned – PhysOrg.com