Podcasts about Kessler syndrome

In Earth's orbit, there are millions of debris objects that pose a collision risk for satellites and space stations. If left unchecked, the situation could lead to a cascading effect known as Kessler Syndrome. While space agencies worldwide track and monitor objects in orbit to prevent collisions, strategies for active debris removal are needed and many are being researched.

ชมวิดีโอ EP นี้ใน YouTube เพื่อประสบการณ์การรับชมที่ดีที่สุด https://youtu.be/n-M2i9Wtg8I หายนะจากขยะอวกาศอาจทำให้เราสำรวจอวกาศไม่ได้อีกต่อไป! ภัยพิบัติที่มนุษย์กำลังเผชิญไม่ได้มีแค่แผ่นดินไหว น้ำท่วม หรือภูเขาไฟระเบิด เท่านั้นแต่ยังมีภัยจาก ‘เศษซากขยะอวกาศ' อีกด้วย โดยขยะอวกาศที่โคจรอยู่รอบโลกนั้นมีความเร็วที่สูงมาก ไม่ต่างจากกระสุนปืน ทำให้มันอาจสร้างความเสียหายอย่างใหญ่หลวงได้ จากการไปชนวัตถุอื่น ๆ อย่างดาวเทียม จนมีความเป็นไปได้ว่าการชนกันเพียง 1 ครั้ง อาจลุกลามกลายเป็นปฏิกริยาลูกโซ่ที่ก่อให้เกิดขยะจำนวนนับไม่ถ้วนได้ ซึ่งในหลายกรณีก็เกิดขึ้นโดยไม่มีแม้แต่การแจ้งเตือนล่วงหน้า และหากเป็นเช่นนั้นอนาคตของการสำรวจอวกาศอาจต้องหยุดชะงักลงไปหลายร้อยปี แล้วอะไรคือทางออกของเรื่องนี้? หาคำตอบร่วมกันกับ กร-กรทอง วิริยะเศวตกุล, นิว-ภริดา ผ่องศรี และ พัตเตอร์-วรเศรษฐ์ ผลเจริญพงศ์

Matthew Weinzierl and Brendan Rosseau are the authors of Space to Grow: Unlocking the Final Economic Frontier. The new book explains the business side of space. Watch all four videos about Space to Grow I interview Brendan Rousseau, one of the two co-authors. In this episode, we dive into the Kessler Syndrome, which might keep us stuck on Earth!  Watch our interview on YouTube! In our second episode, Brendan Rousseau discusses how close we are to having space hotels and joyrides. Is space tourism around the corner? See the video interview. In our first episode, Brendan Rousseau shares his origin story and how he ended up at Blue Origin. He discusses why space isn't what it used to be. Watch the Video of episode 1 of 3 About Brendan Rousseau  Current Role: Strategy Manager - New Glenn, Blue Origin: Focuses on orbital launch strategy. Education: Williams College: Bachelor's in Astronomy and Economics. Phillips Exeter Academy: MacKenty Prize in Astronomy. Professional Experience: Harvard Business School: Teaching Fellow and Research Associate. Booz Allen Hamilton: Senior Consultant supporting U.S. Space Force programs. Williams College Astronomy Department: Teaching Assistant. Publications & Awards: Co-author of Space to Grow: Unlocking the Final Economic Frontier. Recognized as a Payload Pioneers - 30 Under 30 and Via Satellite Rising Star. Questions In these podcasts, I ask them the following questions: 1. If you were an entrepreneur, what space-related startup idea would you pursue? 2. What are some of the most surprising findings from your research? 3. How do you envision the future of human habitation in space? 4. In what ways can space exploration contribute to solving Earth's economic challenges? 5. What ethical considerations arise from expanding economic activities into space? For example, can we colonize Mars or Europa if we find non-DNA-based bacteria there? 6. What were the challenges you faced during your research? 7. How do you foresee international relations evolving as nations compete for resources in space? 8. What are your predictions for the next decade in space exploration? 9. What are your thoughts on space tourism? 10. Who is the primary audience for this book? 11. What do you hope readers take away from "Space to Grow"? 12. What's a popular vision of space exploration that probably won't happen? 13. What narratives or myths about space need to be challenged? 14. What's the percentage chance that the Kessler Syndrome catastrophe will occur in the 2020s, 2030, and beyond? 15. How can public awareness be raised regarding the importance of investing in space? 16. What advice would you give entrepreneurs looking to enter the space industry? 17. In what ways might our values shift as we become a multi-planetary species? 18. What is a rarely discussed consequence of expanding into outer space? 19. If there was one message you want readers to remember, what would it be? 20. Do you want to clarify any misconceptions about the space economy? 21. What do you wish you had mentioned in the book? Perhaps some breaking news? 22. Lastly, how can interested individuals get involved or contribute to discussions around space economics?  23. What tips do you have for co-writing a book? 24. Did you change your mind about something during your writing process? 25. Do you have action items for the audience? Feedback Leave anonymous audio feedback at SpeakPipe More info You can post comments, ask questions, and sign up for my newsletter at http://wanderlearn.com. If you like this podcast, subscribe and share!  On social media, my username is always FTapon. Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram TikTok LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr My Patrons sponsored this show! Claim your monthly reward by becoming a patron at http://Patreon.com/FTapon Rewards start at just $2/month! Affiliate links Get 25% off when you sign up to Trusted Housesitters, a site that helps you find sitters or homes to sit in. Start your podcast with my company, Podbean, and get one month free! In the USA, I recommend trading crypto with Kraken.  Outside the USA, trade crypto with Binance and get 5% off your trading fees! For backpacking gear, buy from Gossamer Gear.

Matthew Weinzierl and Brendan Rosseau are the authors of Space to Grow: Unlocking the Final Economic Frontier. The new book explains the business side of space. Watch all four videos about Space to Grow I interview Brendan Rousseau, one of the two co-authors. In this episode, Brendan Rousseau discusses how close we are to having space hotels and joyrides. Is space tourism around the corner? See the video interview. In our first episode, Brendan Rousseau shares his origin story and how he ended up at Blue Origin. He discusses why space isn't what it used to be. Watch the Video of episode 1 of 3 About Brendan Rousseau  Current Role: Strategy Manager - New Glenn, Blue Origin: Focuses on orbital launch strategy. Education: Williams College: Bachelor's in Astronomy and Economics. Phillips Exeter Academy: MacKenty Prize in Astronomy. Professional Experience: Harvard Business School: Teaching Fellow and Research Associate. Booz Allen Hamilton: Senior Consultant supporting U.S. Space Force programs. Williams College Astronomy Department: Teaching Assistant. Publications & Awards: Co-author of Space to Grow: Unlocking the Final Economic Frontier. Recognized as a Payload Pioneers - 30 Under 30 and Via Satellite Rising Star. Questions In these podcasts, I ask them the following questions: 1. If you were an entrepreneur, what space-related startup idea would you pursue? 2. What are some of the most surprising findings from your research? 3. How do you envision the future of human habitation in space? 4. In what ways can space exploration contribute to solving Earth's economic challenges? 5. What ethical considerations arise from expanding economic activities into space? For example, can we colonize Mars or Europa if we find non-DNA-based bacteria there? 6. What were the challenges you faced during your research? 7. How do you foresee international relations evolving as nations compete for resources in space? 8. What are your predictions for the next decade in space exploration? 9. What are your thoughts on space tourism? 10. Who is the primary audience for this book? 11. What do you hope readers take away from "Space to Grow"? 12. What's a popular vision of space exploration that probably won't happen? 13. What narratives or myths about space need to be challenged? 14. What's the percentage chance that the Kessler Syndrome catastrophe will occur in the 2020s, 2030, and beyond? 15. How can public awareness be raised regarding the importance of investing in space? 16. What advice would you give entrepreneurs looking to enter the space industry? 17. In what ways might our values shift as we become a multi-planetary species? 18. What is a rarely discussed consequence of expanding into outer space? 19. If there was one message you want readers to remember, what would it be? 20. Do you want to clarify any misconceptions about the space economy? 21. What do you wish you had mentioned in the book? Perhaps some breaking news? 22. Lastly, how can interested individuals get involved or contribute to discussions around space economics?  23. What tips do you have for co-writing a book? 24. Did you change your mind about something during your writing process? 25. Do you have action items for the audience? Feedback Leave anonymous audio feedback at SpeakPipe More info You can post comments, ask questions, and sign up for my newsletter at http://wanderlearn.com. If you like this podcast, subscribe and share!  On social media, my username is always FTapon. Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram TikTok LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr My Patrons sponsored this show! Claim your monthly reward by becoming a patron at http://Patreon.com/FTapon Rewards start at just $2/month! Affiliate links Get 25% off when you sign up to Trusted Housesitters, a site that helps you find sitters or homes to sit in. Start your podcast with my company, Podbean, and get one month free! In the USA, I recommend trading crypto with Kraken.  Outside the USA, trade crypto with Binance and get 5% off your trading fees! For backpacking gear, buy from Gossamer Gear.

SpaceTime Series 28 Episode 44The Astronomy, Space and Science News PodcastNew Discoveries About Uranus, the 2025 Space Environment Robert on Space Junk, and NASA's Starliner Testing UpdatesIn this episode of SpaceTime, we explore groundbreaking insights into the atmosphere of Uranus, derived from two decades of observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Uranus, an ice giant with its unique tilt and rotation, reveals complex atmospheric dynamics that scientists are just beginning to understand. We discuss the implications of Hubble's findings, including the distribution of methane and the changing aerosol structures as the planet approaches its northern summer solstice in 2030.The 2025 Space Environment RobertNext, we delve into the European Space Agency's 2025 Space Environment Robert, highlighting the growing challenge of space debris orbiting Earth. With thousands of defunct satellites and rocket stages contributing to the clutter, we examine the risks posed to operational spacecraft and the urgent need for international debris reduction measures. The report underscores the potential for catastrophic chain reactions in space, known as Kessler Syndrome, and the pressing need for sustainable practices in orbit.Nasa and Boeing's Starliner Testing PreparationsAdditionally, we provide updates on NASA and Boeing's ongoing efforts to address issues with the CST-100 Starliner spacecraft. Following a series of test flight challenges, the teams are preparing for new evaluations and propulsion system tests aimed at certifying Starliner for future crewed missions. We discuss the history of Starliner's difficulties and what lies ahead in its journey to becoming a reliable transport vehicle for astronauts.00:00 Space Time Series 28 Episode 44 for broadcast on 11 April 202500:49 New insights into Uranus's atmospheric dynamics06:30 Hubble's long-term observations and their implications12:15 Overview of the 2025 Space Environment Robert18:00 The growing threat of space debris22:45 NASA and Boeing's Starliner testing updates27:00 Summary of recent space exploration developments30:15 Science report: Microplastics and health impactswww.spacetimewithstuartgary.comwww.bitesz.com

Matthew Weinzierl and Brendan Rosseau are the authors of Space to Grow: Unlocking the Final Economic Frontier. The new book explains the business side of space. Watch all four videos about Space to Grow I interview Brendan Rousseau, one of the two co-authors. Brendan Rousseau shares his origin story and how he ended up at Blue Origin. He discusses why space isn't what it used to be. Watch the Video About Brendan Rousseau  Current Role: Strategy Manager - New Glenn, Blue Origin: Focuses on orbital launch strategy. Education: Williams College: Bachelor's in Astronomy and Economics. Phillips Exeter Academy: MacKenty Prize in Astronomy. Professional Experience: Harvard Business School: Teaching Fellow and Research Associate. Booz Allen Hamilton: Senior Consultant supporting U.S. Space Force programs. Williams College Astronomy Department: Teaching Assistant. Publications & Awards: Co-author of Space to Grow: Unlocking the Final Economic Frontier. Recognized as a Payload Pioneers - 30 Under 30 and Via Satellite Rising Star. Questions In these podcasts, I ask them the following questions: 1. If you were an entrepreneur, what space-related startup idea would you pursue? 2. What are some of the most surprising findings from your research? 3. How do you envision the future of human habitation in space? 4. In what ways can space exploration contribute to solving Earth's economic challenges? 5. What ethical considerations arise from expanding economic activities into space? For example, can we colonize Mars or Europa if we find non-DNA-based bacteria there? 6. What were the challenges you faced during your research? 7. How do you foresee international relations evolving as nations compete for resources in space? 8. What are your predictions for the next decade in space exploration? 9. What are your thoughts on space tourism? 10. Who is the primary audience for this book? 11. What do you hope readers take away from "Space to Grow"? 12. What's a popular vision of space exploration that probably won't happen? 13. What narratives or myths about space need to be challenged? 14. What's the percentage chance that the Kessler Syndrome catastrophe will occur in the 2020s, 2030, and beyond? 15. How can public awareness be raised regarding the importance of investing in space? 16. What advice would you give entrepreneurs looking to enter the space industry? 17. In what ways might our values shift as we become a multi-planetary species? 18. What is a rarely discussed consequence of expanding into outer space? 19. If there was one message you want readers to remember, what would it be? 20. Do you want to clarify any misconceptions about the space economy? 21. What do you wish you had mentioned in the book? Perhaps some breaking news? 22. Lastly, how can interested individuals get involved or contribute to discussions around space economics?  23. What tips do you have for co-writing a book? 24. Did you change your mind about something during your writing process? 25. Do you have action items for the audience? Feedback Leave anonymous audio feedback at SpeakPipe More info You can post comments, ask questions, and sign up for my newsletter at http://wanderlearn.com. If you like this podcast, subscribe and share!  On social media, my username is always FTapon. Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram TikTok LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr My Patrons sponsored this show! Claim your monthly reward by becoming a patron at http://Patreon.com/FTapon Rewards start at just $2/month! Affiliate links Get 25% off when you sign up to Trusted Housesitters, a site that helps you find sitters or homes to sit in. Start your podcast with my company, Podbean, and get one month free! In the USA, I recommend trading crypto with Kraken.  Outside the USA, trade crypto with Binance and get 5% off your trading fees! For backpacking gear, buy from Gossamer Gear.

On this episode of Crazy Wisdom, I, Stewart Alsop, sit down with Gabe Dominocielo, co-founder of Umbra, a space tech company revolutionizing satellite imagery. We discuss the rapid advancements in space-based observation, the economics driving the industry, and how AI intersects with satellite data. Gabe shares insights on government contracting, defense applications, and the shift toward cost-minus procurement models. We also explore the broader implications of satellite technology—from hedge funds analyzing parking lots to wildfire response efforts. Check out more about Gabe and Umbra at umbraspace.com (https://umbraspace.com), and don't miss their open data archive for high-resolution satellite imagery.Check out this GPT we trained on the conversation!Timestamps00:00 Introduction to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast00:05 Gabe's Background and Umbra's Mission00:34 The Story Behind 'Come and Take It'01:32 Space Technology and Cost Plus Contracts03:28 The Impact of Elon Musk and SpaceX05:16 Umbra's Business Model and Profitability07:28 Challenges in the Satellite Business11:45 Investors and Funding Journey19:31 Space Business Landscape and Future Prospects23:09 Defense and Regulatory Challenges in Space31:06 Practical Applications of Satellite Data33:16 Unexpected Wealth and Autistic Curiosity33:49 Beet Farming and Data Insights35:09 Philosophy in Business Strategy38:56 Empathy and Investor Relations43:00 Raising Capital: Strategies and Challenges44:56 The Sovereignty Game vs. Venture Game51:12 Concluding Thoughts and Contact Information52:57 The Treasure Hunt and AI DependenciesKey InsightsThe Shift from Cost-Plus to Cost-Minus in Government Contracting – Historically, aerospace and defense contracts operated under a cost-plus model, where companies were reimbursed for expenses with a guaranteed profit. Gabe explains how the shift toward cost-minus (firm-fixed pricing) is driving efficiency and competition in the industry, much like how SpaceX drastically reduced launch costs by offering services instead of relying on bloated government contracts.Satellite Imagery Has Become a Crucial Tool for Businesses – Beyond traditional defense and intelligence applications, high-resolution satellite imagery is now a critical asset for hedge funds, investors, and commercial enterprises. Gabe describes how firms use satellite data to analyze parking lots, monitor supply chains, and even track cryptocurrency mining activity based on power line sagging and cooling fan usage on data centers.Space Technology is More Business-Driven Than Space-Driven – While many assume space startups are driven by a passion for exploration, Umbra's success is rooted in strong business fundamentals. Gabe emphasizes that their focus is on unit economics, supply-demand balance, and creating a profitable company rather than simply innovating for the sake of technology.China's Growing Presence in Space and Regulatory Challenges – Gabe raises concerns about China's aggressive approach to space, noting that they often ignore international agreements and regulations. Meanwhile, American companies face significant bureaucratic hurdles, sometimes spending millions just to navigate licensing and compliance. He argues that unleashing American innovation by reducing regulatory friction is essential to maintaining leadership in the space industry.Profitability is the Ultimate Measure of Success – Unlike many venture-backed space startups that focus on hype, Umbra has prioritized profitability, making it one of the few successful Earth observation companies. Gabe contrasts this with competitors who raised massive sums, spent excessively, and ultimately failed because they weren't built on sustainable business models.Satellite Technology is Revolutionizing Disaster Response – One of the most impactful uses of Umbra's satellite imagery has been in wildfire response. By capturing images through smoke and clouds, their data was instrumental in mapping wildfires in Los Angeles. They even made this data freely available, helping emergency responders and news organizations better understand the crisis.Philosophy and Business Strategy Go Hand in Hand – Gabe highlights how strategic thinking and philosophical principles guide decision-making in business. Whether it's understanding investor motivations, handling conflicts with empathy, or ensuring a company can sustain itself for decades rather than chasing short-term wins, having a strong philosophical foundation is key to long-term success.

Matthew Weinzierl and Brendan Rosseau are the authors of Space to Grow: Unlocking the Final Economic Frontier.  The new book explains the business side of space. I interview both authors.  Here's my interview with Matthew Weinzierl. Watch the Video Timeline 00:00 Intro 02:00 Low-hanging fruit 07:00 Surprises 09:30 Space is vast and crowded 11:30 Kessler Syndrome 16:30 What won't happen in space? 21:45 Moon and Mars predictions 25:21 Advice for Entrepreneurs 28:00 New news 30:00 Co-authoring advice          About Matt Weinzierl Matt Weinzierl is Senior Associate Dean and Chair of the MBA Program at Harvard Business School, where he is the Joseph and Jacqueline Elbling Professor of Business Administration in the Business, Government, and the International Economy Unit and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses on the optimal design of economic policy, particularly taxation, emphasizing a better understanding of the philosophical principles underlying policy choices. Recently, he has launched a set of research projects focused on commercializing the space sector and its economic implications, viewable at www.economicsofspace.com. He has served on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Tax Expenditure Commission, the board of the National Tax Association, and on the editorial boards of Social Choice and Welfare and National Tax Journal. Before completing his PhD in economics at Harvard University in 2008, Professor Weinzierl served as the Staff Economist for Macroeconomics on the President's Council of Economic Advisers and worked in the New York office of McKinsey & Company.  My Questions In these podcasts, I ask them the following questions: 1. If you were an entrepreneur, what space-related startup idea would you pursue? 2. What are some of the most surprising findings from your research? 3. How do you envision the future of human habitation in space? 4. In what ways can space exploration contribute to solving Earth's economic challenges? 5. What ethical considerations arise from expanding economic activities into space? For example, can we colonize Mars or Europa if we find non-DNA-based bacteria there? 6. What were the challenges you faced during your research? 7. How do you foresee international relations evolving as nations compete for resources in space? 8. What are your predictions for the next decade in space exploration? 9. What are your thoughts on space tourism? 10. Who is the primary audience for this book? 11. What do you hope readers take away from "Space to Grow"? 12. What's a popular vision of space exploration that probably won't happen? 13. What narratives or myths about space need to be challenged? 14. What's the percentage chance that the Kessler Syndrome catastrophe will occur in the 2020s, 2030, and beyond? 15. How can public awareness be raised regarding the importance of investing in space? 16. What advice would you give entrepreneurs looking to enter the space industry? 17. In what ways might our values shift as we become a multi-planetary species? 18. What is a rarely discussed consequence of expanding into outer space? 19. If there was one message you want readers to remember, what would it be? 20. Do you want to clarify any misconceptions about the space economy? 21. What do you wish you had mentioned in the book? Perhaps some breaking news? 22. Lastly, how can interested individuals get involved or contribute to discussions around space economics?  23. What tips do you have for co-writing a book? 24. Did you change your mind about something during your writing process? 25. Do you have action items for the audience? More info You can post comments, ask questions, and sign up for my newsletter at http://wanderlearn.com. If you like this podcast, subscribe and share!  On social media, my username is always FTapon. Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram TikTok LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr My Patrons sponsored this show! Claim your monthly reward by becoming a patron at http://Patreon.com/FTapon Rewards start at just $2/month! Affiliate links Get 25% off when you sign up to Trusted Housesitters, a site that helps you find sitters or homes to sit in. Start your podcast with my company, Podbean, and get one month free! In the USA, I recommend trading crypto with Kraken.  Outside the USA, trade crypto with Binance and get 5% off your trading fees! For backpacking gear, buy from Gossamer Gear.

Listen as we discuss Kessler Syndrome, a salty spoon, AI, Carrie Underwood, Wegmans and more!linktree.com/uwc4life

This is our weekly ad-free compilation of science news 00:00 - New Theory: Dark Energy Might Be Black Holes 5:16 - This New Energy Storage Idea Makes A Lot Of Sense 10:22 - AI Scaling Hits Wall, Rumours Say. How Serious is it? 16:38 - New Calculation Finds we are close to the Kessler Syndrome

If you saw the movie "Gravity," you have a sense of the dangers of orbital debris—and the risk is very real. More than 25,000 objects over four inches in diameter are tracked by the US Space Force, and millions of others are smaller or untracked—everything from derelict satellites to dead rocket stages to bits of shrapnel and even just chunks of frozen rocket fuel is there. And even something the size and mass of a paint chip, traveling at orbital speeds, can take out a window of a spacecraft. We're joined by Dr. John Crassidis from the University of Buffalo, an expert in orbital debris and its dangers. Look out below; this is going to be a hot one! Headlines: SpaceX Falcon 9 launch failure investigation underway after engine explosion during upper stage relight James Webb Space Telescope celebrates 2nd anniversary with new "Cosmic Penguin" image Boeing Starliner return date still uncertain as NASA and Boeing review data Mailbag: Zaheer Mohammed congratulates the National Space Society's Ad Astra magazine on winning the Marcom Awards in 2023 Main Topic: Orbital Debris Discussion with Dr. John Crassidis Orbital debris defined as anything in space that is no longer useful, ranging from paint flakes to rocket bodies Debris moves at extremely high speeds (17,500 mph), making collisions highly destructive Kessler Syndrome: cascading collisions could render low Earth orbit unusable within 50 years if debris growth is not slowed Approximately 47,000 tracked objects softball-size or larger, with millions more smaller pieces Challenges in tracking debris due to limited coverage, object tumbling, and modeling uncertainties Ownership and responsibility for debris removal complicated by lack of international agreements Current remediation techniques not feasible due to cost and technological limitations Urgent need for debris mitigation through international cooperation and improved satellite design Future threats extend beyond low Earth orbit, with debris already accumulating around the Moon Importance of investing in research to develop effective debris removal technologies Hosts: Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik Guest: Dr. John Crassidis Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit

If you saw the movie "Gravity," you have a sense of the dangers of orbital debris—and the risk is very real. More than 25,000 objects over four inches in diameter are tracked by the US Space Force, and millions of others are smaller or untracked—everything from derelict satellites to dead rocket stages to bits of shrapnel and even just chunks of frozen rocket fuel is there. And even something the size and mass of a paint chip, traveling at orbital speeds, can take out a window of a spacecraft. We're joined by Dr. John Crassidis from the University of Buffalo, an expert in orbital debris and its dangers. Look out below; this is going to be a hot one! Headlines: SpaceX Falcon 9 launch failure investigation underway after engine explosion during upper stage relight James Webb Space Telescope celebrates 2nd anniversary with new "Cosmic Penguin" image Boeing Starliner return date still uncertain as NASA and Boeing review data Mailbag: Zaheer Mohammed congratulates the National Space Society's Ad Astra magazine on winning the Marcom Awards in 2023 Main Topic: Orbital Debris Discussion with Dr. John Crassidis Orbital debris defined as anything in space that is no longer useful, ranging from paint flakes to rocket bodies Debris moves at extremely high speeds (17,500 mph), making collisions highly destructive Kessler Syndrome: cascading collisions could render low Earth orbit unusable within 50 years if debris growth is not slowed Approximately 47,000 tracked objects softball-size or larger, with millions more smaller pieces Challenges in tracking debris due to limited coverage, object tumbling, and modeling uncertainties Ownership and responsibility for debris removal complicated by lack of international agreements Current remediation techniques not feasible due to cost and technological limitations Urgent need for debris mitigation through international cooperation and improved satellite design Future threats extend beyond low Earth orbit, with debris already accumulating around the Moon Importance of investing in research to develop effective debris removal technologies Hosts: Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik Guest: Dr. John Crassidis Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit

If you saw the movie "Gravity," you have a sense of the dangers of orbital debris—and the risk is very real. More than 25,000 objects over four inches in diameter are tracked by the US Space Force, and millions of others are smaller or untracked—everything from derelict satellites to dead rocket stages to bits of shrapnel and even just chunks of frozen rocket fuel is there. And even something the size and mass of a paint chip, traveling at orbital speeds, can take out a window of a spacecraft. We're joined by Dr. John Crassidis from the University of Buffalo, an expert in orbital debris and its dangers. Look out below; this is going to be a hot one! Headlines: SpaceX Falcon 9 launch failure investigation underway after engine explosion during upper stage relight James Webb Space Telescope celebrates 2nd anniversary with new "Cosmic Penguin" image Boeing Starliner return date still uncertain as NASA and Boeing review data Mailbag: Zaheer Mohammed congratulates the National Space Society's Ad Astra magazine on winning the Marcom Awards in 2023 Main Topic: Orbital Debris Discussion with Dr. John Crassidis Orbital debris defined as anything in space that is no longer useful, ranging from paint flakes to rocket bodies Debris moves at extremely high speeds (17,500 mph), making collisions highly destructive Kessler Syndrome: cascading collisions could render low Earth orbit unusable within 50 years if debris growth is not slowed Approximately 47,000 tracked objects softball-size or larger, with millions more smaller pieces Challenges in tracking debris due to limited coverage, object tumbling, and modeling uncertainties Ownership and responsibility for debris removal complicated by lack of international agreements Current remediation techniques not feasible due to cost and technological limitations Urgent need for debris mitigation through international cooperation and improved satellite design Future threats extend beyond low Earth orbit, with debris already accumulating around the Moon Importance of investing in research to develop effective debris removal technologies Hosts: Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik Guest: Dr. John Crassidis Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit

If you saw the movie "Gravity," you have a sense of the dangers of orbital debris—and the risk is very real. More than 25,000 objects over four inches in diameter are tracked by the US Space Force, and millions of others are smaller or untracked—everything from derelict satellites to dead rocket stages to bits of shrapnel and even just chunks of frozen rocket fuel is there. And even something the size and mass of a paint chip, traveling at orbital speeds, can take out a window of a spacecraft. We're joined by Dr. John Crassidis from the University of Buffalo, an expert in orbital debris and its dangers. Look out below; this is going to be a hot one! Headlines: SpaceX Falcon 9 launch failure investigation underway after engine explosion during upper stage relight James Webb Space Telescope celebrates 2nd anniversary with new "Cosmic Penguin" image Boeing Starliner return date still uncertain as NASA and Boeing review data Mailbag: Zaheer Mohammed congratulates the National Space Society's Ad Astra magazine on winning the Marcom Awards in 2023 Main Topic: Orbital Debris Discussion with Dr. John Crassidis Orbital debris defined as anything in space that is no longer useful, ranging from paint flakes to rocket bodies Debris moves at extremely high speeds (17,500 mph), making collisions highly destructive Kessler Syndrome: cascading collisions could render low Earth orbit unusable within 50 years if debris growth is not slowed Approximately 47,000 tracked objects softball-size or larger, with millions more smaller pieces Challenges in tracking debris due to limited coverage, object tumbling, and modeling uncertainties Ownership and responsibility for debris removal complicated by lack of international agreements Current remediation techniques not feasible due to cost and technological limitations Urgent need for debris mitigation through international cooperation and improved satellite design Future threats extend beyond low Earth orbit, with debris already accumulating around the Moon Importance of investing in research to develop effective debris removal technologies Hosts: Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik Guest: Dr. John Crassidis Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit

Does life exist outside our planet? Are we alone in the universe? Seth Shostak joins Vasant Dhar in episode 85 of Brave New World to describe his search for the answers. Useful resources: 1. Seth Shostak at The Seti Institute, Wikipedia, TED, Amazon and his own website. 2. Life in the Universe -- Jeffrey Bennett, Seth Shostak, Nicholas Schneider and Meredith MacGregor. 3. Sharing the Universe: Perspectives on Extraterrestrial Life -- Seth Shostak. 4. Confessions of an Alien Hunter -- Seth Shostak. 5. The Copernican Revolution -- Thomas Kuhn. 6. Peter Ward on Life on Earth -- Episode 76 of Brave New World. 7. Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe -- Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee. 8. The Drake Equation. 9. The Gaia Hypothesis. 10. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth -- James Lovelock. 11. Kevin Mitchell Makes a Case for Free Will -- Episode 80 of Brave New World. 12. The Kessler Syndrome. Check out Vasant Dhar's newsletter on Substack. Subscription is free!

Professor Giorgio Savini is an astrophysicist at University College London, specialising in instrumentation for space exploration. As a key figure at UCL's Department of Physics and Astronomy, his work bridges the gap between astrophysics and engineering, focusing on the development of cutting-edge technologies for space telescopes and satellite systems. He has been involved in major international consortiums, including working on the Planck Probe's High Frequency Instrument and currently serving as Payload Scientist on the European Space Agency ARIEL mission. In this conversation, we delve into the practical implications of space governance on the work of scientists and technicians tasked with pushing the frontiers of space exploration, why the 1967 Outer Space Treaty is not fit for purposes, the very real dangers posed by Kessler Syndrome (space debris), and what global governance should have to do with it. Giorgio's official profile can be found here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/physics-astronomy/people/professor-giorgio-savini We discussed: The Outer Space Treaty, 1967: https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/introouterspacetreaty.html The Moon Agreement, 1984: https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/intromoon-agreement.html The Artemis Accords, 2020: https://www.nasa.gov/artemis-accords/

In this episode of Discover Daily, we explore the incredible legacy of Akira Toriyama, the visionary creator of the Dragon Ball series, whose work transcended the boundaries of manga and anime. We also dive into a historic move in the video game industry, as around 600 quality assurance workers at Activision Publishing form the largest video game union in the United States. Finally, we shift our focus to the skies above, where the issue of space debris has once again captured our attention, as an equipment pallet from the ISS made an uncontrolled reentry over the Pacific Ocean.For more visit perplexity.ai/discoverPerplexity is the fastest and most powerful way to search the web. Perplexity crawls the web and curates the most relevant and up-to-date sources (from academic papers to Reddit threads) to create the perfect response to any question or topic you're interested in. Take the world's knowledge with you anywhere. Available on iOS and Android Join our growing Discord community for the latest updates and exclusive content. Follow us on: Instagram Threads X (Twitter) YouTube Linkedin

How far away are things in space? A parsec is a measurement of distance - not time - unless you're Han Solo. Eight Taylor Swifts flew by Earth the other day - or were those alpacas? Kovi and Benjamin make their way through all that madness just to talk about the Kessler Syndrome - aka space junk.

The US Space Force, the newest branch of the American military, takes national defense to a new frontier. Here on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I sit down with AEI senior fellow Todd Harrison to discuss the state of the Space Force and its evolving mission.Harrison has served as senior vice president and head of research at Metrea, a defense consulting firm, been a senior fellow for defense budget strategies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, directed the Defense Budget Analysis and Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and served as a captain in the US Air Force Reserve.In This Episode* Creating the Space Force (0:53)* A New Kind of Warfare (9:15)* Defining the Mission (11:40)* Conflict and Competition in Space (15:34)* The Danger of Space Debris (20:11)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversationCreating the Space Force (0:53)Pethokoukis: I was recently looking at an image that showed the increase in the number of satellites around the earth, and it's been a massive increase; I imagine a lot of it has to do with SpaceX putting up satellites, and it's really almost like—I think to an extent that most people don't understand; between  government, military, and a lot of commercial satellites—it's really like the earth is surrounded by this information shell. And when looking at that, I couldn't help but think, “Yeah, it kind of seems like we would need a Space Force or something to keep an eye on that and protect that.” And I know there was a lot of controversy, if I'm not mistaken, like, “Why do we need this extra branch of government?” Is that controversy about why we need a Space Force, is that still an active issue and what are your thoughts?Harrison: To start with where you started, yes. The number of satellites in space has been growing literally exponentially in the past few years. I'll just throw a few numbers out there:  In 2023 alone, about 2,800 new satellites were launched, and in that one year it increased the total number of satellites on the orbit by 22 percent, just in one year. And all the projections are that the number of satellites, number of launches, are going to keep growing at a pace like that for the foreseeable future, for the next several years. A lot is going into space, and we know from all other domains that where commerce goes conflict will follow. And we are seeing that in space as well.Like the Navy protecting the shipping lanes. Yeah, exactly. So we know that to a certain extent that's inevitable. There will be points of contention, points of conflict, but we've already seen that in space just with the military dimension of our space. Back in 2007, I think a lot of the world woke up to the fact that space is a contested environment when the Chinese tested an anti-satellite weapon, which, by the way, produced thousands of pieces of space debris that are still in orbit today. More than 2,600 pieces of debris are still in orbit from that one Chinese ASAT test. And, of course, that was just one demonstration of counter-space capabilities. Space has been a contested war fighting domain, really, since the beginning of the Space Age. The first anti-satellite test was in 1959, and so it has become increasingly important for economic reasons, but also for military reasons. Now, when the Space Force debate kicked into high gear, I think it took a lot of people who weren't involved in military space, I think it took a lot of people by surprise that we were having this debate.Yeah, it really seemed like it came out of nowhere, I think probably for 99 percent of people who aren't professionals tracking the issue.In reality, that debate, it started in the 1990s, and there was a senator from up in New Hampshire who had written a journal article basically talking about, “Hey, we need to separate space into its own military service.” You had the Air Force chief of staff at the time in the mid-1990s, General Ron Fogleman. He said that the Air Force should eventually become an Air and Space Force, and then one day a Space and Air Force. So you had the seeds of it happening in the '90s. Then you had Congress wanting to look at, “Okay, how do we do this? How do we reorganize military space?” They created a commission that was led by Donald Rumsfeld before he became Secretary of Defense for the second time. That commission issued its report in 2001, and it recommended a bunch of reforms, but it said in the midterm, in five to 10 years we should create a separate military service for space, something like a Space Corps.Nothing happened, even though Rumsfeld then became Secretary of Defense. We kind of took our focus off of it for a while, there were a few other studies that went on, and then in 2016, two members of Congress, a Republican and a Democrat, Mike Rogers and Jim Cooper, who were on the House Armed Services Committee, they took this issue up. They got so fed up with the oversight of looking at how the Air Force was shortchanging space in many ways in terms of personnel and training and funding and modernization, that they then put a provision into the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act that would've created a Space Corps, they called it: a separate military service for space. And that bill actually passed the full House of Representatives.The Senate did not have a similar provision in their bill, so it died. It didn't make it into law—but then, all of a sudden, a couple of years later, President Trump, pretty much out of the blue floats this idea of creating a Space Force, and he did it at a rally that was at a Marine Corps base out in California, and, for some reason, it caught on with Trump. And then you already had the votes, a bipartisan group in the House of Representatives who had already pushed this, and so it started to gain momentum.It was very controversial at the time. The secretary of the Air Force at that time was adamantly opposed to it. Eventually, Trump forced it on the civilian establishment at DoD, and Congress ultimately enacted it, and the Space Force became a military service in December… I think December 20th, 2019. Now, there was some question, will the Biden administration keep it?Is this here to stay?It is written into law, so a president cannot unilaterally take it away, and, at this point, it's got its own roots in the ground and the Space Force is not going anywhere.A little bit off topic, but was there a similar debate when they separated the Air Force out of the Army?There was, yeah, and it lasted for a long time. So you had folks like Billy Mitchell who were in the Army Air Corps way back before World War II—I think in the late '20s, early '30s—they were advocating for a separate military service for Air. And I believe Billy Mitchell actually got court marshaled because he disobeyed orders from a superior about advocating for this with Congress.And so the idea of a separate service for Air pretty much died out until World War II hit. And, of course, that was a war that we were brought into it by an attack that came from the air, and that really brought air power into full effect in terms of a major component of military power. So then, at the end of World War II, the Air Power advocates got together, they created the Air Force Association to advocate for a separate military service and they got it in the National Security Reform Act in 1947, I think the Air Force actually stood up in 1948.It took longer, I would argue, a lot more advocacy and it took a World War, a crisis, to show us how important Air was to the military in order for us to actually create an Air Force. Now, I think, thankfully, we did that in advance of a crisis in terms of creating the Space Force.Right now, what the Space Force does, is it tracking satellites, tracking and space debris, is it a monitoring and tracking service? It's not a fighting service yet?Well, yes and no. A lot of what the Space Force does on a day-to-day basis is they provide space-enabling capabilities to the other military services. So if you want to get intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance from space, you can go to the Space Force. Separately, we have intel space that's run through the National Reconnaissance Office—that has not changed its organization. If you want to get GPS, the Space Force runs our GPS constellation of satellites, and they're responsible for defending it against all forms of attack, which it is attacked daily. If you want satellite communications, the Space Force delivers that. If you want missile warning… So the Space Force delivers lots of enabling capabilities for other parts of the military. At the same time, it is tasked with defending those capabilities, and it's not just against kinetic forms of attack where an adversary is literally trying to shoot a satellite out of the sky.A New Kind of Warfare (9:15)I guess that's the first thing that popped in my mind. Too much science fiction maybe, but…Well, that is real, that's a real threat. The truth is there's not a lot you can do to actively protect against that—at least, we don't have a lot of capabilities right now—but the forms of attack we see on a daily basis are cyber, electromagnetic, and other forms of non-kinetic attack like lazing the sensors on a satellite. You could temporarily, or even permanently, blind the sensors on a satellite with a laser from an aircraft or from a ground station.I'll give you an example: When Russia invaded Ukraine, at the very beginning of the invasion, one of the first attacks they launched was a space attack. It was cyber, and it was against a commercial space capability. What they did is they exploited a vulnerability, previously unknown, in ViaSat modems. ViaSat's, a commercial satellite communications company, they had some sort of a vulnerability in their modems. The Russians, through a cyber attack, basically bricked all those modems. They locked them out. The Ukrainian military relied on ViaSat for satellite communications, so it locked up all of their terminals right at the beginning. They could not communicate using Satcom. Incidentally, it locked up lots of ViaSat terminals across Europe in that same attack. So we see this happening all the time. Russian forces are constantly jamming GPS signals. That makes weapons and drones much less effective. They can't use GPS for targeting once they go into a GPS-denied environment.But the Space Force has ways to overcome that. We have protected military GPS signals, we have ways of increasing the strength of those signals to overcome jamming. There's lots of things you can do with counter-space and then counter to the counter-space.The problem is that we kind of sat on our laurels and admired our advantage in space for a couple of decades and did not make a concerted effort to improve the protection of our space systems and develop our own capability to deny others the advantage of space because others didn't have that same advantage for a long time.Well, that has changed, and the creation of the Space Force, I think, has really set us in a positive new direction to get serious about space defense and to get serious about denying others the advantage of space if we need to.Defining the Mission (11:40)The Chief of Space Operation at the Space Force recently published a short white paper, which I guess begins to lay out kind of a doctrine, like, “What is the mission? How do we accomplish this mission?” Probably the first sort of Big Think piece maybe since Space Force became a branch. What did that white paper say? What do you make of it?Yeah, so I think one of the criticisms of military space for a while has been that we didn't really have space strategy, space doctrine, we didn't have a theory of space power that was well developed. I would argue we had some of those, but it's fair to say that they have not been that well developed. Well, one of the reasons you need a military service is to actually get the expertise that is dedicated to this domain to think through those things and really develop them and flesh them out, and so that's what this white paper did, and I think it did a pretty good job of it, developing a theory of space power. He calls it a “theory of success for competitive endurance in the space domain.”And one of the things I thought was really great that they highlight in the paper, that a lot of US government officials in the past have been reluctant to talk about, is the fact that we are under attack on a daily basis—gray zone-type aggression in the space domain—and we've got to start pushing back against that. And we've got to actually be willing and able to exercise our own defensive and counter-space capabilities, even in the competition phase before we actually get to overt conflict, because our adversaries are doing it already. They're doing it to us. We need to be able to brush them back. We're not talking about escalating and starting a conflict or anything like that, but when someone jams our satellite communication systems or GPS, they need to feel some consequences. Maybe something similar happens to their own space capabilities, or maybe we employ capabilities that show them we can overcome what you're doing. So I thought that was a good part of the theory of success is you can't just sit by and let an adversary degrade your space capabilities in the competition phase.How much of the focus of Space Force currently, and maybe as that paper discussed what the department's mission is, focused on the military capabilities, protecting military capabilities, the military capabilities of other nations, versus what you mentioned earlier was this really expanding commercial element which is only going to grow in importance?Today, the vast majority of the Space Force's focus is on the military side of providing that enabling military capability that makes all of our forces more effective, protecting that capability, and then, to a lesser extent, being able to interfere with our adversaries' ability to use space for their own advantage.They are just now starting to really grapple with, “Okay, is there a role for the Space Force in protecting space commerce, protecting commercial space capabilities that may be economically important, that may be strategically important to us and our allies, but are not directly part of a military capability?” They're starting to think through that now, and it really is the Space Force taking on a role in the future that is more like the Navy. The Navy does fight and win wars, of course, but the Navy also has a role in patrolling the seas and ensuring the free flow of commerce like we see the US Navy doing right now over in the Red Sea: They're helping protect ships that need to transit through that area when Houthi Rebels are targeting them. Do we need that kind of capability and space? Yeah, I think we do. It is not a huge priority now, but it is going to be a growing priority in the future.Conflict and Competition in Space (15:34)I don't know if such things even currently exist, but if you have satellites that can kill other satellites, do those exist and does the Space Force run them?Satellites that can kill other satellites, absolutely. That is a thing that exists. A lot of stuff is kept classified. What we know that's unclassified is, back in the 1960s and early '70s, the Soviets conducted many tests—a couple of dozen tests—of what they call a co-orbital anti-satellite system, that is a satellite that can kill another satellite, and there's still debris in space from some of those tests back in the '60s and '70s.We also know, unclassified, that China and Russia have on-orbit systems that appear to be able to rendezvous with other satellites, get very close. We've seen the Russians deploy a satellite that appeared to fire a projectile at another Russian satellite—looks like a test of some sort of a co-orbital weapon. So yes, those capabilities are out there. They do exist. We've never seen a capability like that used in conflict, though, not yet, but we know they existLooking forward a decade… One can imagine a lot more satellites, multiple space platforms, maybe some run by the private sector, maybe others not. One could imagine permanent or semi-permanent installations on the moon from different countries. Are plans being made to protect those things, and would the Space Force be the one protecting them? If you have a conflict between the Chinese military installation on the moon and the American, would that be in the Space Force domain? Again, it seems like science fiction, but I don't think it's going to seem like science fiction before too long.Well, that's right. We're not at that point today, but are we going to be at that point in 10, 20, 30 years? Perhaps. There are folks in the Space Force, like in the chief scientist's office that have thought about these things; they publish some papers on it. There's no real effort going into that right now other than thinking about it from an academic perspective. Should that be in the mandate of the Space Force? Well, I think it already is, it's just there's not a need for it yet, and so it's something to keep an eye on.Now, there are some rules, if you will, international agreements that would suggest, “Okay, some of these things should not happen.” Doesn't mean they won't; but, for example, the main treaty that governs how nations operate in space is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. The Outer Space Treaty specifically says that you can't claim territory in space or on any celestial body like the moon or Mars, and it specifically says you cannot put a military installation on any celestial body.So, should China put a military base on the moon, they would be clearly violating the Outer Space Treaty. If China puts a scientific installation that happens to have some military capabilities on it, but they don't call it that, well, you know, what are we going to do? Are we going to call them before the United Nations and complain? Or if China says, “Hey, we've put a military installation in this key part of the lunar South Pole where we all believe that there is ice water, and if anyone tries to land anywhere near us, you're going to interfere with our operations, you might kick up dust on us, so we are establishing a keep-out zone of some very large area around this installation.”I think that there are some concerns that we could be headed in that direction, and that's one of the reasons NASA is pushing forward with the Artemis program to return humans to the moon and a set of international agreements called the Artemis Accords, where we've gotten, I think, more than 20 nations now to agree to a way of operating in the lunar environment and, to a certain extent, in Earth orbit as well, which will help make sure that the norms that develop in space, especially in deep space operating on the moon, are norms that are conducive to free and open societies and free markets. And so I give credit to former NASA administrator, Jim Breidenstein and the Trump administration; he came up with the Artemis Accords. I think it was wonderful. I would love to see us go even further, but NASA is still pursuing that and still signing up more countries to the Artemis Accords, and when they sign up to that, they can be part of our effort to go back to moon and the Artemis program, and right now we are on track to get there and put humans back on the moon before China. I just hope we keep it that way.The Danger of Space Debris (20:11)Let me finish up with a question based on something you've mentioned several times during our conversation, which is space debris and space junk. I see more and more articles about the concerns. How concerned are you about this? How should I think about that issue?Yeah, it is a concern, and, I mean, the physics of the space domain are just fundamentally different than what we see in other domains. So, in space, depending on what orbit you're in, if something breaks up into pieces, those pieces keep orbiting Earth indefinitely. If you are below about 600 kilometers, those pieces of debris, there's a tiny amount of atmospheric drag, and, depending on your mass and your surface area and solar weather and stuff, eventually things 600 kilometers and below are going to reenter the Earth atmosphere and burn up in weeks, months, years.Once you get above about 600 kilometers, things start staying up there much longer. And when you get out to geostationary orbit, which is 36,000 kilometers above the surface of the earth, those things aren't coming down, ever, not on their own. They're staying up there. So the problem is, imagine every time there was a shipwreck, or a car wreck, or a plane crash, that all of the debris kept moving around the earth forever. Eventually it adds up. And space, it's a very large volume, yes, but this stuff is whizzing by, if you're in low-earth orbit, you're going around 17,000 miles per hour constantly. And so you've got close approach after close approach, day after day, and then you run the risk of debris hitting debris, or debris hitting other satellites, and then creating more debris, and then increasing the odds that this happens again and again, the movie Gravity gave a dramatic effect to this.I was thinking about that scene as you're explaining this.Yeah. The timeline was very compressed in that movie, but something like that, the Kessler Syndrome, is theoretically possible in the space domain, so we do have to watch out for it. Debris is collecting, particularly in low Earth orbit above 600 kilometers, and ASAT tests are not helpful at all to that. So one of the things the Biden administration did is they instituted a unilateral moratorium on antisatellite testing by the United States. Well, it's easy for us to do. We didn't need to do any anti-satellite tests anymore because we already know we can do that. We have effective capabilities and we wouldn't want to use kinetic anti-satellite attacks anyway, 'cause it would hurt our own systems.We have been going around trying to get other countries to sign up to that as well, to a moratorium on ASAT testing. It's a good first step, but really you need Russia and China. They need to sign up to not do that anymore. And India, India conducted a kinetic ASAT test back in, I think, 2019. So those are the countries we really need to get on board with that.But there's a lot of accidental debris production that happens as well. When countries leave a spent rocket body up in orbit and then something happens. You know, a lot of times they leave their fuel tanks pressurized or they leave batteries on there, after five, 10 years in orbit, sometimes these things explode randomly, and then that creates a debris field. So there's more that we can do to kind of reach international agreements about just being smart stewards of the space domain. There are companies out there that are trying to work on technologies to clean up space debris. It's very hard. That is not something that's on the immediate horizon, but those are all efforts that should be ongoing. It is something to be concerned about.And actually, to circle back to the chief of space operations and his theory of success in his white paper, that's one of the tensions that he highlights in there, is that we want to use space for military advantage, including being able to deny other countries the ability to use space. But at the same time, we want to be good stewards of the space domain and so there's an inherent tension in between those two objectives, and that's the needle that the Space Force is trying to thread.I have one final question, and you may have no answer for it: If we were to track a large space object headed toward Earth, whose job would it be to stop it?So it would be NASA's job to spot it, to find objects like near-Earth orbit asteroids. Whose job is it to stop it? I think we would be figuring that out on the fly. First of all, we would have to figure out, can we stop it? Is there a way to stop it? And it would probably require some sort of an international effort, because we all have a common stake in that, but yeah, it is not in anyone's job jar.Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. 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How do we find black holes? And how can we tell whether it's a small black hole “eating” really fast or a large black hole that's eating very slowly? To find out, Dr. Charles Liu and co-host Allen Liu welcome astrophysicist Dr. Vivienne Baldassare, a professor of astronomy and physics at Washington State University. As always, though, we start off with the day's joyfully cool cosmic thing, the recently published composite photo of the X-ray Binary System in nearby starburst galaxy NGC_4214. Vivienne explains how X-ray Binaries, which are relatively rare, are created by a stellar mass black hole or a neutron star being fed by a star. Chuck and Vivienne discuss the differences between using the new James Webb Space Telescope and “old tech” like the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and how she uses Chandra to find black holes. Professor Baldassare explains how she uses x-ray observations, optical spectroscopy, and variability data to find intermediate-mass black holes, which she is one of the first astronomers to find. You'll hear about the differences between stellar mass black holes, supermassive black holes, and the intermediate-mass back holes that fit somewhere between. Then it's time for our first student question, from Lorenzo, who asks, “Are stars only found in galaxies, and if not, where else?” Vivienne explains that most stars are found in galaxies, but they can also be found in globular clusters. There are also hyper-velocity stars, which can be found in the halo of our galaxy on their way to escape our galaxy entirely. A discussion of the Chandra X-ray Observatory, which spends about 80% of its time outside the Van Allen belts, turns into a discussion about all the manmade objects orbiting the Earth, including Chandra, Hubble, satellites... and lots of space junk, too. We've currently got about 8,000 satellites orbiting Earth – a surprising amount of which are SpaceX Starlink satellites, with more “satellite constellations” planned by SpaceX and others. You'll find out about the risk of chain-reaction debris collisions due to solar storms and other disruptive events, Kessler Syndrome, the environmental consequences of mostly-aluminum satellites burning up in our atmosphere, and the first fine every levied for space junk, against Dish Network. For our next student question, Adrian wants to know how tiny black holes can swallow super giant stars? Vivienne explains how tidal disruption, when the gravity on one side of an object is greater than on the other side, can pull a star apart in months or even weeks! Finally, Vivienne talks about being an ultra-marathon runner and a trail runner, hiking with her dog, and the importance of being able to go out to wild spaces in nature. Chuck gets here to share a favorite hiking memory – a 7-day, long distance solo hike around Mt. Blanc after presenting her work at a conference in France. If you'd like to know more about Dr. Baldassare, you can follow her on Twitter @vbaldassare, Instagram @vbaldassare, or her website which includes her email for you to reach out to her and ask her more questions. We hope you enjoy this episode of The LIUniverse, and, if you do, please support us on Patreon. Credits for Images Used in this Episode: – NGC_4214 (X-ray binary circled) –NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration, Public Doman – Artist's impression of an X-ray Binary – Dana Berry/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Public domain – Launch of Hubble on shuttle flight STS-31 – NASA, Public Domain – Illustration of the Chandra X-ray Observatory – NASA/CXC/NGST, Public Domain – Our Milky Way's central black hole – EHT Collaboration, CC BY 4.0 – Globular cluster NGC 1466 – ESA/NASA (Hubble), Public Domain – Orbit of the Chandra X-ray Observatory – NASA, Public Domain – Starlink trails on a CTIO telescope image – NSF's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory/CTIO/AURA/DELVE, CC BY 4.0 – Diagram of tides in Earth's oceans – Orion 8 on Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain #TheLIUniverse #CharlesLiu #AllenLiu #SciencePodcast #AstronomyPodcast  #blackhole #globularclusters #hypervelocitystars #XrayBinary #starburstgalaxy #NGC4214 #stellarmassblackhole #neutronstar #MilkyWayGalaxy #HubbleSpaceTelescope #ChandraXrayObservatory #supermassiveblackholes #intermediatemassbackholes #VanAllenbelts #SpaceX #Starlink #satelliteconstellations #spacejunk #satellites #KesslerSyndrome #tidaldisruption 

Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.Note: I'll be on the road, delivering my girlfriend to her next artist residency (in Wausau, Wisconsin) through the end of the week, so there won't be OSN emails or pods Thursday or Friday. Sorry about that! But we'll be back to the usual schedule on Monday.US government issues first-ever space debris penalty to Dish NetworkSummary: Satellite television company Dish Network has been issued the first-ever fine for failing to de-orbit an aging satellite, the EchoStar-7, which has been lingering in orbit after its useful lifespan rather than being nudged onto a trajectory that would allow it to safely burn up in the atmosphere.Context: This is an issue because the orbit into which it was guided puts it squarely in a orbital debris risk zone—it was too low on propellant to make it all the way to the safe burn-up target orbit, so now it's in a highly populated region, equivalent to being stuck in the middle of a high-traffic highway, rather than having been delivered to the dump; in 2022 the FCC adopted a new rule that said satellite operators would need to dispose of their own aging satellite infrastructure within five years of a satellite completing its mission, and this was implemented because of the ever-increasing risk of collisions between all the satellites that are now hurling around the planet, faster than bullets, and the possibility that one collision could create so much debris that it sparks a cascade of collisions, destroying a bunch of in-orbit assets, and also, potentially, leading to what's called Kessler Syndrome, wherein the planet is surrounded by so much fast-moving debris that it becomes nearly impossible to launch anything new, or to safely maintain functional satellites.—The GuardianOne Sentence News is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Hundreds seek compensation over J-pop agency founder's abuseSummary: More than 300 people have accused Japan's top music talent agent, Johnny Kitagawa, of sexual abuse, and are now seeking compensation from the company that manages his assets, following his death in 2019.Context: An independent inquiry concluded in September that Kitagawa had abused hundreds of young men and boys over the course of his career, during which he launched the careers of some of the country's most successful and well-known J-pop boy bands (this widespread abuse was an open secret in the industry); about 150 of the 325 people who are seeking compensation as victims were former talents that he managed, and the tycoon's former agency has since converted itself into an entity that will solely exist to identify and compensate victims, while a new company will be established to manage their docket of talent; Kitagawa's niece stepped down from her role leading the agency following the aforementioned investigation, and she's been replaced by a television star and singer named Noriyuki Higashiyama, though he has also been accused of sexual misconduct, so it's anyone's guess as to how long he'll maintain that position.—BBC NewsBiden administration offers fewest offshore oil and gas leases in historySummary: The US government announced late last week that it would lease territory in only three new portions of the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas drilling between 2024 and 2029, representing the smallest-ever number of lease offerings since the federal drilling program began several decades ago.Context: This is a notable decision in part because it seems almost perfectly calibrated to upset everyone, as environmentalist groups are still irked that the Biden administration has backtracked on its election-era promise to issue no new drilling leases on federal land, while the oil companies and their supporters are pissed that the administration isn't giving them wider access; it's also notable because a new law requires that the US government issue drilling leases if it wants to make new territory available for wind farms, and the Biden administration is keen to see more offshore wind farms get the go-ahead, so this would seem to forward that ambition, while also limiting the country's capacity to do a lot more drilling in the next five years, which suggests the government is nudging things toward renewables, even if not as rapidly and ambitiously as most environmental groups would prefer.—The New York TimesThe speed at which solar energy infrastructure is being deployed, globally, cannot be overstated—it surpasses even the most optimistic estimates every single year, and 2023 is looking to be no different; the pace is increasing even faster in the US, right now, as businesses with a lot of real estate (like self-storage companies) are beginning to slather their holdings with solar panels, as are timber companies and the owners of outlet malls. —The Wall Street Journal$150 millionAverage annual value—for football/soccer governing body Fifa—of its partnership with video game-maker EA to produce the Fifa video game series, which was recently rebranded as EA Sports FC.That rebrand is the consequence of EA's decision to cut ties with Fifa, sacrificing name-recognition and accumulated brand-value in the hopes of pocketing some of that $150 million-ish a year that would otherwise go to Fifa.EA has said interest is high in this year's entry in the series, which bears the new title and has seen a 25% increase in pre-sale signups (though it also has a longer early access window than previous offerings).This is being seen as one of the most important decisions in EA's history, and it represents a significant loss of revenue for Fifa, as this licensing deal was their second-largest commercial effort, outside the World Cup. —Financial TimesTrust Click Get full access to One Sentence News at onesentencenews.substack.com/subscribe

What do a baseball enthusiast, a craft beer podcast host, and a space journalist have in common? A role at Payload! Today's Pathfinder podcast features a very special guest: Payload's very own Managing Editor, Jacqueline Feldscher. Fresh out of college, Jacqueline aspired to become a sports reporter, but D.C. soon drew her into the worlds of policy, national security, and, fortuitously for us, space. After stints at renowned media organizations such as Politico and Defense One, she felt the irresistible pull of the startup world. Answering that call, she took the leap and joined Payload as a Senior Reporter to only quickly be promoted to Managing Editor. A sneak peek… Jacqueline joins Mo today to discuss a variety of key policy trends that will shape the space industry over the next few years including: The Upcoming Presidential Election Space Debris RegulationCommercial Spaceflight RegulationsThe Artemis AccordsThe Future of Space Command HQ Be sure to check out more of Jacqueline's work by signing up for her weekly newsletter, Polaris.• Chapters • 00:00 - Introduction 00:34 - Who is Jacqueline and what do you do at Payload? 02:20 - What drove your interest in journalism? 03:38 - From sports to government & national security 06:14 - Your background prior to Payload 08:57 - Why go from established media to a fledgling startup? 10:24 - Insight into your craft 12:50 - Role of media in the space industry 14:22 - What is Polaris? 16:14 - Trends shaping space policy 18:36 - Debris removal regulation roadblocks 22:57 - Artemis Accords, more bark than bite? 26:00 - What happens if SpaceX lands on Mars? 28:15 - Commercial spaceflight moratorium 31:48 - 2024 Presidential Elections 37:08 - Do you think the battle for Huntsville is over? 38:22 - Aliens?! 39:27 - Investigative journalism in the industry 41:20 - Challenges transitioning from a senior writer to an editor of a publication? 43:14 - Favorite space topic to cover? 44:23 - Views on the Kessler Syndrome 45:35 - What do you enjoy most about Payload? 46:24 - Who's the bigger baby? 46:56 - Jacqueline's beer podcast 48:34 - Advice for aspiring space journalists • Show notes • Sign up for Polaris! — https://polaris.payloadspace.com/ Jacqueline's socials — https://twitter.com/zeno_power Mo's socials — https://twitter.com/itsmoislam Payload's socials — https://twitter.com/payloadspace / https://www.linkedin.com/company/payloadspace Pathfinder archive — Watch: https://www.youtube.com/@payloadspace Pathfinder archive — Listen: https://pod.payloadspace.com/episodes • About us • Pathfinder is brought to you by Payload, a modern space media brand built from the ground up for a new age of space exploration and commercialization. We deliver need-to-know news and insights daily to 15,000+ commercial, civil, and military space leaders. Payload is read by decision-makers at every leading new space company, along with c-suite leaders at all of the aerospace & defense primes. We're also read on Capitol Hill, in the Pentagon, and at space agencies around the world. Payload began as a weekly email sent to a few friends and coworkers. Today, we're a team distributed across four time zones and two continents, publishing three media properties across multiple platforms: 1) Payload, our flagship daily newsletter, sends M-F @ 9am Eastern (https://newsletter.payloadspace.com/) 2) Pathfinder publishes weekly on Tuesday mornings (pod.payloadspace.com) 3) Polaris, our weekly policy publication, hits inboxes Tuesday (https://polaris.payloadspace.com/) 4) Parallax, our weekly space science briefing, hits inboxes Thursday (https://parallax.payloadspace.com/)

Over the past 15 years, the cost to launch a rocket into orbit has declined dramatically thanks to SpaceX. Today, we're witnessing the launch of a new Space Age — one built around billionaires like Elon Musk, but also a flowering of smaller private ventures. To discuss the state of play in the emerging orbital economy, I've brought Ashlee Vance on this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast.Vance is the author of the new book, When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach. He previous wrote, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future in 2015.Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.In This Episode* How SpaceX launched a new Space Age (1:13)* The companies building a “computing shell” around the planet (8:37)* The proliferation of satellites (15:07)* The downsides of the emerging space economy (24:07)Below is an edited transcript of our conversationHow SpaceX launched a new Space AgeJames Pethokoukis: The book begins with a story of the first successful orbital launch of a SpaceX Falcon 1. There were three failed attempts, the whole thing is looking pretty dicey about the future of the company in this effort, and on the fourth attempt, September, 2008, they're able to get to orbit and release a payload. Before September, 2008, what does the space economy/space industry look like? Where are we starting?Ashlee Vance: The starting point: sort of sadly, it looked a lot the same for many, many decades. We had this nation-backed space program, [which was] dominant. There were just a handful of nations, really, that were the major players in all this. Some wealthy people at various stages had come along and tried to commercialize space and make their own rockets, and had varying degrees of success, but no staying power. It ended up that it always takes longer and costs more than you think. And NASA was always sitting there really as your main competitor and undermining your business. With the Falcon 1, it really was this watershed-type moment where finally somebody had succeeded. Yes, SpaceX had people from traditional aerospace, but Elon [Musk] certainly was not from the aerospace world. He had a lot of 20-somethings on his team who had never done this before. It just signaled this new era, or the possibility of a new era, because you had people just who hadn't been part of the old guard doing this thing.The goal here was to get a rocket into space and get it there way cheaper than what NASA was doing. What was the key breakthrough that allowed that decline in costs? And why didn't NASA just do this?NASA, and in particular the Department of Defense, had desired this type of thing for a long time: a low-cost rocket that could get to space quickly and often. It seems like this should be doable, but they had really struggled to make it happen. The DOD had funded various efforts. There's a couple things going on. SpaceX had this huge advantage, I think, of this clean slate to this. They came at this without the usual baggage. And in this case, the baggage means a lot of military government contractors who are pricing things quite expensively. They're doing things the way they've always done them, which means you probably don't want to see any sort of failure so you're building it in a ton of redundancy and spending all this extra money to make sure you look good when this thing goes.SpaceX comes in with this clean slate. The original pitch deck for SpaceX described it as like the Southwest for space. Cost was like at the top of [Elon Musk's] mind and he wanted to make this cheap. They did have some breakthroughs. The physics around a rocket are the physics, and we've known this for decades. There's not much room for huge breakthroughs in engineering that nobody has thought of yet. But they did come in with this modern, Silicon Valley–style approach to software, particularly to electronics—although this kind of comes in later in SpaceX's history—where SpaceX was going to build a lot of the electronics themselves, often turning to consumer-grade electronics instead of what people call space-grade, which means it's built by a military contractor, it probably costs a thousand times what it should cost, but it's guaranteed to work in space. They had this clean slate. They did things as cheap as possible. The team was small. It wasn't this bloated contractor. That was their primary advantage at the beginning, I would argue. Over time, as they've gotten much bigger and much more money is coming in, there's a whole host of technological advantages. But on the Falcon 1, it really was that clean slate, this low-cost approach.Obviously if you're beginning your book, which is not a history of SpaceX, but you're beginning with SpaceX, then that must have marked an important inflection point where you could sort of imagine two paths. One path: the 2010s look a lot like the 2000s, which look a lot like the ‘90s. Versus this very different path.Why is SpaceX important in creating this new path, and what do things look like now?Yeah. I'm so glad you called that out and you phrased it the way you did with these two paths, because a lot of people—my editors were giving me grief for, “Why are you spending so much time talking about SpaceX in the prologue of this book that's not going to be about SpaceX?” But as you pointed out…By the way, having dealt with book editors, I can imagine that conversation quite easily.I wanted people to know how fragile this was, and where it did it come from? You mentioned it: Three of the previous rockets had failed, SpaceX was running out of money, they were running out of credibility, people had been on this island, Kwajalein, for six years, basically losing their minds. If this rocket does not go, I think we do end up in that scenario that you were just talking about, where the 2010s look pretty much like they always had. It was important to me just to give people this history, how hard this is. I see this as this inciting incident. It's funny, because you kind of go from governments and then there were like honest-to-God billionaires. When Elon started SpaceX, he was rich, but he wasn't rich like he is now. We're talking about like a hundred million dollars he put into SpaceX. So the bar had come down quite a bit. But in that moment when this rocket flies and then in the years that follow, when SpaceX really starts to hit its stride, this unlocks all of this.There was so much enthusiasm for space and young kids who wanted to get into this industry, and it had been slow and boring and the excitement had sort of come out of it. You had the generation of people who had grown up watching Apollo. Those people were getting older, and there wasn't something new to look at for a lot of people who were much younger. And here it is. Here's this company that's making commercial space real. And this guy, Elon, is quite eccentric and interesting, and some people sort of want to be like him. I write about it in the book: It was sort of like the four-minute mile to me. It's like, once somebody does it, then all of a sudden you see lots of people now are breaking the four-minute mile. This thing that seemed impossible, it turns out is possible. You have this unlocking in your head of what people can do. And so I just think across the world, it unlocked this passion, this latent engineering smarts and energy, and made this seem real. So you end up with startups all over the world chasing rockets and satellites.The companies building a “computing shell” around the planetIn the book, you write, “The future that all these space buffs have already started building is one in which many rockets blast off every day. These rockets will be carrying thousands of satellites that will be placed not all that far above our heads. The satellites will change the way communications work on Earth by, for one, making the internet an inescapable presence with all the good and bad that entails. The satellites will also watch and analyze the earth in previously unfathomable ways. The data centers that have reshaped life on our planet will be transported into orbit. We are, in effect, building a computing shell around the planet.” Other than SpaceX, who are the companies building that computer shell?The one that comes to mind is the next sort of central actor in the book, which is this company called Planet Labs, which is based in San Francisco. For people who don't know, they already surround the Earth with about 250 imaging satellites. They can take, and they do take, pictures of every spot on the Earth's landmass every day. Multiple pictures. Unlike even the world's biggest governments, China, Russia, the US, which have spice satellites obviously, but they only have a handful of spy satellites. And they tend to only look where interesting things might be happening. Planet sees everything that's happening all the time. And this is not some far-off concept. They had this full constellation up and running in 2018 and have just been adding to it ever since.At the time they launched, in low-Earth orbit there were about [2,000] satellites. And Planet had put up about 250. They were about 10 percent of all the satellites in space, just from this small private company in California that grew out of NASA Ames, the Silicon Valley center. And so they're indicative of, today, we have many, many, several companies trying to build these space internet constellations, each of which require on the order of 10,000 to 20,000 satellites. You've got more imaging satellites along the lines of Planet that do all kinds of different things. And then you got a ton of scientific satellites. The whole premise is that there are many more ideas yet to come.When you watch a spy movie, they're always talking about "retasking the satellite,” like there's only one satellite over all of Asia or something. But what we're talking about now is satellites everywhere, looking everywhere, any time you want.Yeah. That movie stuff is true. That's usually what had to happen. Just as like SpaceX brought the cost of rocket launches down and created this revolution in rocketry, I argue Planet had an attendant effect satellites. I didn't mention before: A traditional satellite is like the size of a school bus, costs $500 million to $2 billion to make. People sit there working on it for like six years. It's supposed to go into space and stay there for 20 years. You can imagine the electronics on a 20-year-old satellite that's trying to do its job…I can also imagine the tension of that launch going wrong.Like, that can't go wrong for many reasons. And once the satellite gets up in space, it also has to work, right? That's why you're spending $2 billion, because if that thing doesn't work, a lot of people are losing their jobs at a company or a military outfit is in dire straits. Planet rethought this whole thing. They're like, “Let's make them much smaller. Let's put them closer to Earth.” Almost like a disposable sort of thing. They're sending up dozens at a time. They've had rocket launches — a couple, they had bad luck at the beginning — that blew up and they lost all their satellites on those. But it wasn't a make-or-break moment for the company, because these satellites are relatively cheap: $100,000 each.They rethought the whole thing, and then they were able to surround the Earth. It basically like a line scanner, and the Earth just turns under these satellites, and it's just photographing all the time. It sounds a lot like what we were talking about before, espionage and spy stuff, and there are uses for that. Although the resolution on these, you can't see somebody's face or anything like that. You mostly look at something like the size of a car. These satellites are geared to what I call monitoring the real-time activity of humans on Earth. Where are we building stuff? Where is our oil being stored? Where is it going? How are our forests? How many trees are in the Amazon? Is somebody cutting them down? The sort of movement of economic activity and environmental activity on Earth.It reminds me of, if you're trying to determine like the GDP of a country that may not be particularly honest with its government statistics, you could either accept the statistics and try to figure it out, or you could just look at it from space. How many lights are going on? Is there more activity? And try to gauge it in a more visual way. Are there companies doing that for more private-sector reasons?This happens today. China will say, “We have this much oil in our reserves.” Well, it turns out these satellites can spot all your oil storage systems. Because of the way the oil storage systems work, where they have these floating lids that can go up and down depending on how much oil is in there, the satellites can actually measure the shadow that's being reflected on the side of this tanker. And you could calculate, people argue, very accurately how much oil is being stored. We do this with places like Saudi Arabia. China comes out with its official economic metrics, and now we have a version of the truth where people come back and say, “No, you have way more oil stored up than you've been letting on.” I think this is going to be a big deal. Not to go on a huge tangent, but China's economy appears to be slowing. I'm quite certain the government will put the best possible spin on things and how they're performing. You can look not only at oil, you can look at construction — how many buildings are going up, how many houses are going up — all kinds of economic indicators.We are now on an exponential curve, and almost all of those satellites are commercial satellites, not military or government satellites that have been added. We're going to go from 10,000, if you look at all the launch manifests for the rocket companies, we get to 100,000 in the next decade. And quite likely 200,000 the decade after that, or maybe sooner. This is a totally new era of what it looks like right above our heads.The proliferation of satellitesWhat has the growth in the number of satellites looked like in recent years? And do you have a sense of how that growth will continue over the next decade?I can do that one. Easy. From like 1960 to 2020, in low-Earth orbit, we had managed to put up about 2,500 satellites. And it was not on an exponential curve. We kind of got a whole bunch up, and then every year you would add maybe 20 to 50 depending on what was going on. It was this very slow, steady march the last few years. So that's 2020: 2,500. Already, as we're sitting here today, there's now about 10,000. So that number has almost quadrupled. It's getting close to quadrupling by the end of this year. We are now on an exponential curve, and almost all of those satellites are commercial satellites, not military or government satellites that have been added. We're going to go from 10,000, if you look at all the launch manifests for the rocket companies, we get to 100,000 in the next decade. And quite likely 200,000 the decade after that, or maybe sooner. This is a totally new era of what it looks like right above our heads.The astronomers can't be happy.No. I'm sort of baffled by some of this, because SpaceX and Starlink have been the major driver of this huge increase as they're trying to build out their space internet system. Spacex is now the world's largest satellite manufacturer by several orders of magnitude. And this was no secret. They had to apply for all these licenses to put these satellites up years in advance. There were other people trying to build a space internet. The astronomers never complained until the second SpaceX did its first launch and put the satellites up and everyone could see this kind of string of pearls flying above them as the satellites start to spread out. I was amused and sort of baffled, I guess, that they waited until this was already underway to really start kind of complaining about this. But the die is cast as far as I can tell. You could argue for the Earth-bound telescopes, this is not great. On the other hand, if rocket launches are coming way down, if we're finally putting Moore's Law in space, the opportunity to put scientific instruments above this low-Earth orbit field and do a whole bunch of interesting things increases quite dramatically. If you had to build up $300 million for a rocket launch in the past just to have a go at putting your scientific instrument up, and now you can do it for anywhere from call it like $6 million to $60 million, it's a new era where more people really should get a chance.Earlier, you talked about SpaceX as the Southwest Airlines of space. But that's really not what it is anymore. Today, it's the high-end company. And other entrepreneurs have filled that space below it. Is that right?Exactly. SpaceX built that Falcon 1, which was meant to cost just a few million dollars to launch, and then quickly abandoned it. The second it worked, it moved to the much larger Falcon 9, in part because we didn't quite yet have companies like Planet Labs. Planet Labs came around 2012, a few years after the Falcon 1 launch, and really was the first to start thinking about all sending up thousands or hundreds of satellites. And so SpaceX retired the Falcon 1, you had kind of this gap, and then all of a sudden — some of these companies are real, some of them aren't — there's about a hundred rocket startups trying to make a rocket. Even SpaceX today, the Falcon 9 runs about $60 to $70 million a launch. Now you have dozens of companies trying to do launches starting at, if you believe these numbers, like $2 million a launch. Probably like somewhere between $5 and $12 million is a realistic figure. The leader in this category is in the book, this company Rocket Lab founded by Peter Beck. And they have made a rocket called Electron, which has flown now dozens of times and is really sort of like a perfectly engineered small rocket.If we can have the internet everywhere for everybody, what does that enable? What do these satellites enable?I think starting with space internet is a good one. Even though we often feel like we're connected to the internet all the time and we have our cell phones, the truth of it is there are these huge gaps all around the planet. And it probably means more on an infrastructure sense than it does on an individual not being able to check their email for a few hours. What we are creating now is a blanket of internet that will have the Earth always connected. This part makes a lot of sense to me. It's very obvious. I just think this is the next step of our technology build out. Just like in the ‘90s, we had to put data centers and fiber everywhere to sort of get the internet going; now, you want this persistent internet that can connect people and all sorts of devices all the time. And that's what we're building in space: This internet heartbeat that's washing over. Everything you've ever heard about, like Internet of Things, sensors on container ships reporting back, or things out in the farm checking the soil moisture: None of this really has worked. And the reason why, is because we haven't had this sort of persistent internet connection. If you think about like a world full of drones and flying cars and self-driving cars — all these things that have to be talking in remote spots to have all this work. It's just this glue that needs to be there. That's like case number one that I think does check out.And then of course, you have three-and-a-half billion people that just cannot be reached by fiber optic cables today, and they're not allowed to participate in the modern economy. There's such obvious evidence that the second high-speed internet arrives in a country, education levels go up, economic levels go up. This is just like a fairness thing in letting the whole world participate in what's going on.That's fantastic because sometimes I think people are unaware of what's going on. Maybe they're kind of aware of SpaceX, but that's pretty much it. And when they think of SpaceX, they're probably mostly thinking of, Elon Musk wants to take us to Mars. I don't think they understand very much about the satellites, unless they've heard astronomers complain about it. I don't think they understand the economic and business case and just that it's all happening.This is why everyone focuses on the Moon and Mars. And it's all cool and everything, and it is still just very far out. This is why I wrote the book. I was like, you people do not understand that we are building a legit economy right over our heads. And this thing is pretty well underway and I think it is going to change life here on Earth quite quickly.Are any of the companies that you're looking at involved with creating like new space stations? There's been a lot of talk about creating new space platforms. What they'll do up there, I'm not sure exactly. There's talk about creating different kinds of products and shooting movies and doing biotechnology research. Are any of the companies cover involved with those efforts?Yeah. In the book, I spend less time on things like space habitats and some of these other businesses. But yes, I do talk about them briefly. But more importantly, I suppose for this conversation, all this is happening. In the past, you've had the International Space Station, this multinational, huge, bureaucratic thing that actually works pretty well. But that's who's driving it. And now we have a handful of startups making space habitats. We've got SpaceX leading the way with, I guess you could call it tourism: being able to send people to these things, private citizens. This is already happening. We've had private astronauts now going to space on SpaceX rockets. And so they'll go to those habitats. A fascinating startup called Varda launched just a couple months ago. They have put what you could argue is the first manufacturing system in space. It's making medicines. You can do things without gravity pushing on molecules in space that you can't do on Earth. They're trying to make a whole new class of pharmaceuticals and bring them back to Earth. I think that's just the earliest example. There are things like asteroid mining that I thought were total jokes and are still quite far off, but there's a startup, Astro Forge. Same thing: They set up their first test earlier this year. All this stuff is actually happening now. The business cases on these things, I think some will work and some won't, but we're going to find out.The downsides of the emerging space economyWhat's the unnerving aspect? I write about this a lot: We immediately jump to the downsides. What are the costs? So I didn't want to certainly lead with that, but are there things about this that people should be concerned about? Space junk, other things?I am optimistic on the whole. History would tell us that when humans find a new territory in which to conquer, usually mistakes are made. It doesn't always go really well. We have a reality setting up right now where you had this handful of governments moving very slowly, launching a rocket once a month. Now we're moving to like every day and thousands of satellites, and it really is a bit of ‘whoever gets their first wins' sort of scenario. Once you start adding a race to these things, that often that doesn't go well.The thing that everybody is worried about is these satellites crashing into each other and creating a debris field in low-Earth orbit. And obviously none of these companies want that to happen. They're the ones spending hundreds of millions, billions of dollars to build these things. And we do have systems in place to track this stuff, but that becomes a nightmare. There is a scenario called the Kessler Syndrome, where one of these things breaks apart and it just starts ripping into everything else, and then low-Earth orbit becomes essentially unusable. That's not only bad for this new stuff that we're talking about, but there's things like GPS that make the modern world work that would no longer work if that happens. That's a huge issue I think we're going to have.If you think about, these were nation states that had a lot of control. The rockets are essentially ICBMs more or less. You had a select group of space-faring nations. I think that's all going to change quite soon. Whoever wants a rocket blasting off from their country can have one. Almost anywhere can afford a satellite. You're talking about like a hundred grand just to kind of get going. You're going to have nation states that no longer can really be controlled the way they were or that now have access to space. Are they going to follow all the same rules that everybody else has been following for decades? Probably not.And then I think the real wild card is Russia. This is a country whose space program was already flagging. SpaceX has eaten up a ton of their business. It's rife with corruption. The war in Ukraine has made them unusable for many, many countries as far as sending up satellites and people. And they are a wild card. Space is not just some flight of fancy for Russia. It's something that's baked deep into the national pride and is near and dear to their hearts. They have no commercial space companies, startups at all. Are they a rational actor in this new world as they see there being this dominant superpower that's going to go away?I'm going to finish by asking you the Mars question about SpaceX: Is that going to happen? Do you think that is a serious goal for that company that you can see happening on some sort of timeline that Elon Musk has talked about?I'm pretty sure it will. I mean, for Elon, you've always got to take everything he says with a grain of salt on timelines and ambition and all that. He tends to set these goals. They usually don't happen anywhere close to what he said, but they usually do happen. And in this case, it's not just Elon, right? I know enough of the SpaceX top engineers. They are very convinced Starship is real, that it can get to Mars, I think for sure. You're going to see years of just sending industrial equipment and things like that to Mars long before you send a human. The human question is still…things have to get better. That's a long ride to Mars. And you better be sure you can come back if you want to. A lot of stuff has to happen between here and there. But will SpaceX start putting stuff on Mars in actually sort of the relatively near-ish future? Yes. I'm quite convinced of that. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

Space junk is a problem and it's only set to get worse. In 2018, there were over 2,000 satellites in orbit. Now, thanks to mega-constellations like Starlink, there are 9,000 satellites, and by the end of the decade, this number is expected to reach 60,000. A crowded space environment runs the risk of Kessler Syndrome, where there is so much pollution in orbit that collisions between objects become inevitable, and produce even more space junk. Host Dr Alfredo Carpineti spoke with space environmentalist Professor Moriba Jah from the University of Texas at Austin to discuss why space junk is such a big deal and how we can make space safe, secure, and sustainable.

Ready to embark on a cosmic journey that will reshape your understanding of the universe? Prepare to be captivated by our latest Space Week episode where we're exploring some of the most recent and eye-opening developments in our solar system and beyond. From SpaceX's record-breaking launches and the Hack-a-Sat 4 event, to the mind-boggling concept of using melanin as a radiation shield in space, we've got it all covered.Picture this: A lunar base in the 2030s. Sounds like a science fiction novel, right? But, it's a real ambition of the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). We'll navigate through the labyrinth of challenges and requirements that this mission entails, and unpack the potential of nuclear reactors and small modular reactors (SMRs) in powering this endeavor. Transitioning, we'll discuss a fascinating startup called AstroScale, whose mission is aimed at solving the Kessler Syndrome - a potential threat to space orbits. But, our cosmic journey wouldn't end there. We'll traverse through the mysteries of the gas giant WASP 76B, the infant protostar Fu-Ori, and six speed-racing stars that are rewriting our knowledge of the Milky Way. Wrapping up, we'll discuss the need for innovative propulsion systems to further our cosmic explorations, and revisit the life cycle of galaxies. Get ready, fellow space enthusiasts, for a thrilling ride across the cosmos! 

Has our show gotten worse? A guy named Jim thinks so. We don't know if he's right, but his email sent us to outer space.

Trillions of pieces of plastic, trillions of pieces of metal. It's easy to think the space above our planet could become a 'tragedy of the commons' like our oceans. It doesn't have to.

Mapping out all the space objects and understanding their orbits is the key to avoiding problems in orbit. What are the technical challenges and what's the current state of affairs? We're discussing it with Dr. Moriba Jah.

Mapping out all the space objects and understanding their orbits is the key to avoiding problems in orbit. What are the technical challenges and what's the current state of affairs? We're discussing it with Dr. Moriba Jah.

Does the Black Knight satellite really exist? Can JWST explore the Oort cloud? Did we hopelessly contaminate Mars with life? Would I fly on the dearMoon mission without the abort system? Should we do crewed missions to near-earth asteroids? Answers to all these questions and more in this week's Q&A with Fraser Cain!

Does the Black Knight satellite really exist? Can JWST explore the Oort cloud? Did we hopelessly contaminate Mars with life? Would I fly on the dearMoon mission without the abort system? Should we do crewed missions to near-earth asteroids? Answers to all these questions and more in this week's Q&A with Fraser Cain!

Satellites have held a special place in military planning and in spy fiction alike for more than half a century. Both domains ended up devoting much attention to satellite-based weapons and anti-satellite weaponry; both have also dealt with the problem of space debris related to the latter.In this chat, David Priess and George Washington University historian Aaron Bateman talk about Bateman's early interest in satellites, early satellite technology and attempts at anti-satellite activity, the Outer Space Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, actions by presidents from Eisenhower through Biden related to the testing of satellite and/or anti-satellite weapons, the Strategic Defense Initiative (commonly called the "Star Wars program"), the problem of space debris, the Kessler Syndrome, other countries' satellite and anti-satellite activities, the Space Force, and on-screen portrayals of satellite warfare and space debris from the James Bond movies to Gravity.Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Satellites have held a special place in military planning and in spy fiction alike for more than half a century. Both domains ended up devoting much attention to satellite-based weapons and anti-satellite weaponry; both have also dealt with the problem of space debris related to the latter. In this chat, David Priess and George Washington University historian Aaron Bateman talk about Bateman's early interest in satellites, early satellite technology and attempts at anti-satellite activity, the Outer Space Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, actions by presidents from Eisenhower through Biden related to the testing of satellite and/or anti-satellite weapons, the Strategic Defense Initiative (commonly called the "Star Wars program"), the problem of space debris, the Kessler Syndrome, other countries' satellite and anti-satellite activities, the Space Force, and on-screen portrayals of satellite warfare and space debris from the James Bond movies to Gravity.Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad. Among the works mentioned in this episode:The book The Hunt for Red October by Tom ClancyAaron Bateman's article, "Anti-Satellite Weapons Are Creating Space Hazards. Here's a Way To Limit the Damage," in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (January 21, 2022)The film You Only Live TwiceThe film MoonrakerThe film GoldenEyeThe film GravityThe Star Wars franchise Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

1:49 How worried should we be about the “Kessler Syndrome”? 7:46 The nightmare scenario for anti-satellite weapons anarchy13:34 How an attack in space could trigger WWIII25:13 International law is way behind the curve in outer space40:45 Why isn't the grave threat of space anarchy getting attention?54:10 How the new Cold War makes conflict in space more likelyRobert Wright (Bloggingheads.tv, The Evolution of God, Nonzero, Why Buddhism Is True) and Douglas Ligor (Rand Corporation). Recorded October 12, 2022. Comments on BhTV: http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/65094Twitter: https://twitter.com/nonzeroPodsFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/bloggingheads/Podcasts: https://bloggingheads.tv/subscribe This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nonzero.substack.com/subscribe

How worried should we be about the “Kessler Syndrome”? ... The nightmare scenario for anti-satellite weapons anarchy ... How an attack in space could trigger WWIII ... International law is way behind the curve in outer space ... Why isn't the grave threat of space anarchy getting attention? ... How the new Cold War makes conflict in space more likely ...

As humans have evolved, so has our ability to drastically alter the planet we call home. In this collection of talks from the CARTA symposium, "Humans: The Planet-Altering Apes" you will learn about specific examples on how humans have changed Earth and what can be done to prevent its cataclysmic demise. Rob Knight will talk about how all microbiomes that have been studies are impacted by human activity. Alice Goramn discusses how accumulating space debris surrounding our planet that may prevent us from leaving the Earth in the future. Asher Rosinger addresses the global water challenges that humans may face as climate change begins to affect water supplies. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 38206]

As humans have evolved, so has our ability to drastically alter the planet we call home. In this collection of talks from the CARTA symposium, "Humans: The Planet-Altering Apes" you will learn about specific examples on how humans have changed Earth and what can be done to prevent its cataclysmic demise. Rob Knight will talk about how all microbiomes that have been studies are impacted by human activity. Alice Goramn discusses how accumulating space debris surrounding our planet that may prevent us from leaving the Earth in the future. Asher Rosinger addresses the global water challenges that humans may face as climate change begins to affect water supplies. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 38206]

As humans have evolved, so has our ability to drastically alter the planet we call home. In this collection of talks from the CARTA symposium, "Humans: The Planet-Altering Apes" you will learn about specific examples on how humans have changed Earth and what can be done to prevent its cataclysmic demise. Rob Knight will talk about how all microbiomes that have been studies are impacted by human activity. Alice Goramn discusses how accumulating space debris surrounding our planet that may prevent us from leaving the Earth in the future. Asher Rosinger addresses the global water challenges that humans may face as climate change begins to affect water supplies. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 38206]

As humans have evolved, so has our ability to drastically alter the planet we call home. In this collection of talks from the CARTA symposium, "Humans: The Planet-Altering Apes" you will learn about specific examples on how humans have changed Earth and what can be done to prevent its cataclysmic demise. Rob Knight will talk about how all microbiomes that have been studies are impacted by human activity. Alice Goramn discusses how accumulating space debris surrounding our planet that may prevent us from leaving the Earth in the future. Asher Rosinger addresses the global water challenges that humans may face as climate change begins to affect water supplies. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 38206]

As humans have evolved, so has our ability to drastically alter the planet we call home. In this collection of talks from the CARTA symposium, "Humans: The Planet-Altering Apes" you will learn about specific examples on how humans have changed Earth and what can be done to prevent its cataclysmic demise. Rob Knight will talk about how all microbiomes that have been studies are impacted by human activity. Alice Goramn discusses how accumulating space debris surrounding our planet that may prevent us from leaving the Earth in the future. Asher Rosinger addresses the global water challenges that humans may face as climate change begins to affect water supplies. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 38206]

In 1957, the USSR launched Sputnik 1, the first human object to leave Earth. In the 65 years since then the region of Earth orbit has become filled with satellites and space junk. The proliferation of debris has led to the prediction of Kessler Syndrome, a state where a never-ending cascade of collisions between orbital objects renders parts of space unusable for human purposes. However, there are many different ways to look at the space junk surrounding Earth. For example, it is also an archaeological record of humanity's first steps into outer space, a cultural landscape created by the combined effects of natural and cultural processes, and a technological signature of the same kind that SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researchers are looking for around exoplanets in other solar systems. It's unclear when or whether the tipping point into Kessler Syndrome might be reached, but if humanity is confined to Earth in the future, what will this mean? Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 37913]

In 1957, the USSR launched Sputnik 1, the first human object to leave Earth. In the 65 years since then the region of Earth orbit has become filled with satellites and space junk. The proliferation of debris has led to the prediction of Kessler Syndrome, a state where a never-ending cascade of collisions between orbital objects renders parts of space unusable for human purposes. However, there are many different ways to look at the space junk surrounding Earth. For example, it is also an archaeological record of humanity's first steps into outer space, a cultural landscape created by the combined effects of natural and cultural processes, and a technological signature of the same kind that SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researchers are looking for around exoplanets in other solar systems. It's unclear when or whether the tipping point into Kessler Syndrome might be reached, but if humanity is confined to Earth in the future, what will this mean? Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 37913]

In 1957, the USSR launched Sputnik 1, the first human object to leave Earth. In the 65 years since then the region of Earth orbit has become filled with satellites and space junk. The proliferation of debris has led to the prediction of Kessler Syndrome, a state where a never-ending cascade of collisions between orbital objects renders parts of space unusable for human purposes. However, there are many different ways to look at the space junk surrounding Earth. For example, it is also an archaeological record of humanity's first steps into outer space, a cultural landscape created by the combined effects of natural and cultural processes, and a technological signature of the same kind that SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researchers are looking for around exoplanets in other solar systems. It's unclear when or whether the tipping point into Kessler Syndrome might be reached, but if humanity is confined to Earth in the future, what will this mean? Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 37913]

In 1957, the USSR launched Sputnik 1, the first human object to leave Earth. In the 65 years since then the region of Earth orbit has become filled with satellites and space junk. The proliferation of debris has led to the prediction of Kessler Syndrome, a state where a never-ending cascade of collisions between orbital objects renders parts of space unusable for human purposes. However, there are many different ways to look at the space junk surrounding Earth. For example, it is also an archaeological record of humanity's first steps into outer space, a cultural landscape created by the combined effects of natural and cultural processes, and a technological signature of the same kind that SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researchers are looking for around exoplanets in other solar systems. It's unclear when or whether the tipping point into Kessler Syndrome might be reached, but if humanity is confined to Earth in the future, what will this mean? Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 37913]

More than one hundred million pieces of human-made space debris currently orbit our planet, most moving at more than 10,000 mph. Every year their number increases, creating a progressively more dangerous environment for working spacecraft. In order to operate in space, we track most of this debris through a patchwork of private efforts and government defense networks. Creon Levit spent over three decades at NASA, and is now the Director of R&D at Planet, a company that is imaging the earth everyday with one of the largest swarms of micro-satellites in the world. Creon will discuss the history of space debris, the way the debris is currently tracked, and how we might work to reduce it before we see a cascading effect of ballistic interactions that could render low orbit all but unusable.

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/10025/space-debris-and-the-kessler-syndrome/ The following essay was contributed by space systems engineer Kostas Konstantinidis  

In this year-end episode of The DownLink, Laura Winter unravels a space threat story through three key interviews with Donald Kessler, the now-retired NASA astrophysicist who first theorized what is now known as the “Kessler Syndrome”; Brian Weeden a space policy analyst and advocate from the Secure World Foundation; and Robin Dickey, a space policy and strategy analyst with the Aerospace Corporation. But first, Laura first gives us her top three 2021 data points with effects that she believes will punch through into 2022 and beyond.

In this week's episode, I answer questions about the speed of supernovae, if a black hole can pull itself apart, is there really no way to repair James Webb, and more... 00:00 Start 00:41 What are the timescales for a supernova? 02:59 Could a black hole spin itself apart? 05:37 Will James Webb launch on time? 07:10 What do I think about Apophis? 09:24 Can a magnetar collapse into a black hole? 12:43 When will we reach the Kessler Syndrome/ 16:26 Would we try to fix James Webb? 19:27 Will there be a permanent Moon base in our lifetime? 21:28 What do I think about Spin Launch? 24:06 What's the temperature on the night side of Venus? 26:01 What's the point of sending humans to Mars? 29:56 Does a supermassive black hole's gravity pull on its galaxy? 31:35 Will the Moon get a magnetic field? Want to be part of the questions show? Ask a short question on any video on my channel. I gather a bunch up each week and answer them here.

Back from the ramparts of Beijing in the last episode, Sean and Cody blast off for another trip to outer space as they set a course for this epic 2013 survival drama directed by Alfonso Cuarón. In Gravity, chatty astronauts Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) are busy giving the Hubble Telescope a once-over when a wave of supercharged space junk turns their space shuttle into confetti. Drifting off in opposite directions and with the oxygen in their suits running out, the two have to think fast to figure out not only to survive the next 90 minutes, but how to get back on terra firma now that their spaceship is a glitter bomb. Environmental issues discussed include the real-life environment of space, the pollution of Earth orbit with too many satellites and space junk, the scenario of “Kessler Syndrome” which provides the basis of the premise of the film, and the impact back on Earth of the space shuttle program, including pollution and habitat loss from launch facilities. What exactly is Kessler Syndrome, how common are satellite collisions, and could a scenario like the one shown in this film really occur in real life? How many operational satellites are currently in orbit around the Earth? What was the space shuttle really built to do, and how come NASA didn't end up doing very much of it despite 30 years and billions of dollars? Why did NASA have to build a manatee sanctuary in Florida? What did Sandra Bullock go through in order to film this movie? Why does Cuarón use so many fewer shots and cuts than most other directors? What did real astronauts think of the film? Is the Sandra Bullock character a strong female lead, or a damsel in distress? Can you believe how much she made from this picture? What other film, yet to be done on the Green Screen list, is Gravity most like, structurally? All these questions are heating up for fiery re-entry in this tropospheric episode of Green Screen. Gravity (2013) on IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1454468/ Gravity (2013) on Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/gravity-2013/ Next Movie Up: Frogs (1972) Additional Materials About This Episode

In this week's QA, I talk about what's driving the expansion of the Universe, how big the observable Universe is to the actual Universe, and what will happen to dogs in gravity. 00:00 Start 00:26 What's driving the expansion of the Universe? 04:01 How big is the observable Universe compared to the actual Universe? 07:25 Do people watch videos or listen to my podcasts? 10:37 Will dogs enjoy lunar gravity? 12:59 Why aren't we looking deeper in the Kuiper Belt? 15:54 What would be some good ways to explore lava tubes? 19:36 What happened to the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope? 22:48 Would space LIGO be more sensitive? 27:56 What's the most like Great Filter? 31:07 Why do we talk about distance in form of time? 35:14 Any future collaborations with Isaac Arthur? 35:58 How long will the Mars helicopter survive? 40:07 When will NASA incorporate Starship into its plans? 42:15 How dangerous is the Kessler Syndrome?