SpaceX Go All-In On Building The Biggest Spaceport In History

NASA needs help reinventing the wheel. Japan's Phobos mission is almost ready to launch. And so is Roman. Why Earth is inevitable. And on Space Bites Plus, melting diamonds to learn more about ice giant interiors. All this and more in this week's Space Bites. We've got a couple of flagship missions that are about to launch, and Roman is the one you're probably familiar with. That's going to be happening on August 30th. We'll talk about that more at the end of this episode. But the one that I'm kind of more excited about, so I want to talk about it first. And this is the Japanese Space Agency's Martian Moons Exploration Mission, or MMX. And this is a mission that's going to be launching on October 20th from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan. This is an island off the south coast of Japan. And this is going to fly to Mars. It is then going to go into orbit around Phobos and examine Phobos. It's going to send down a lander rover. It's going to retrieve a sample from Phobos. Then it's going to fly to Deimos, and it's going to take some images, gather some additional information. And then in 2031, it's going to be sending this sample back home to Earth for it to land in the Australian desert. And so we are just a few weeks away from the launch of this mission. And then we are a couple of years away from a chunk of Phobos sitting in the hands of planetary scientists on Earth. And a lot of the kinds of technology that's going into the Martian Moons Explorer mission is very similar to the kind of technology we saw in the Hayabusa mission. You've got this platform, this spacecraft capable of intercepting and going into orbit around a target. In the case of Hayabusa, it was the asteroid Ryugu. In the case of this, it's going to be the moon of Mars, Phobos. The big scientific question that planetary scientists have about Phobos and Deimos is where do they come from? Both of these Martian moons are very small, potato shaped kinds of objects. They really look like asteroids, and they are very small. Phobos is only about 21 kilometers across. Deimos is about half that size. And you look at them and you think asteroid. And for the longest time, planetary scientists assumed that these two moons were captured by Mars at some point from the asteroid belt, which is relatively close to Mars. So this is not a giant leap. But there's enough analysis of the moons that they share a lot of chemistry with Mars itself. And so the other big theory is that there was a giant collision that smashed into Mars a long time in the past. This blew out debris and maybe this debris collected into the two moons Phobos and Deimos. There's probably other material as well, but that's scattered through the solar system. And so the MMX mission is going to provide this sample that should give planetary scientists a definitive answer about where these moons came from. And either possibility is pretty exciting. You know, if Mars could have captured two asteroids, or if there was some giant impact in the past. And there's one other clue that we're just about to get to in a second. So I will move on to the next part of this news. And in fact, this science question leads us to our next piece of news this week. This is a very Mars moon oriented episode, and that is Okay With Me. And this is a story written by Evan Goff on Universe Today. And this is about the potential origin for Deimos, which is that smaller of the moons. So recently, the European Space Agency's Hera spacecraft did a flyby of Deimos and got a lot closer than any spacecraft has been gave us really amazing new images of this moon. We get to like swap out the old images and now replace them with the new Deimos images. And when you look at Phobos and you compare it to Deimos, Phobos is pockmarked with tons of craters really looks beaten up. But Deimos is kind of pillowy soft, like it's had snowfall that has smoothed out all of the various craters like there's one big crater there that you can see. But the biggest crater is the one at the South Pole that sort of gives it this distinctive peanut like look. And it's believed that there was a giant impact that hit Deimos quite a while ago, and that it was able to then throw debris up that they collected around back onto the surface of the moon. And so researchers did simulations where they tried all kinds of different impacts with Deimos. And when they got to an impact from an object that was about 300 meters across, it was moving at about 8.2 kilometers per second. Then they got the shape that you see of the modern Deimos and the ejecta from that collision rained down debris that created a regolith that's about 200 meters deep across the entire surface of Deimos. And that it's likely that that impact broke up Deimos and then cause it to reform. And so it's probably a rubble pile underneath this thick layer of regolith that kind of makes it look like a solid object. And, you know, if you live in a place that has a lot of snow like I do in Canada, you'll have small amounts of snow and everything looks very much like what has been snowed on. But you get enough snow and everything just starts to look pillowy. Like it's just it's hard to see what it is under all of that. And I think, you know, that's what you're looking at with with Deimos. And then speaking of Mars moons, we got a new transit image of Phobos captured by the Perseverance rover on Mars. And of course, most of the time, Perseverance is looking down. It's doing geology on the surface of Mars. But the mathematics works that every now and then Phobos will pass directly in front of the sun. And so Perseverance will look up, stare at the sun, which you should not do. And it will watch as Phobos passes directly in front of the sun. We got an animation of this. And so this transit was seen on August 12th. And what's really useful about this is that each time we get one of these transits, you get a different orientation of Phobos. And it allows scientists to measure perfectly the shape and size of Phobos as it's tumbling past. One of the big questions about Phobos is like, why does it happen to be at this time when it's on a collision course with Mars in the next 100 million years or so? It's going to get closer and closer to Mars and eventually get broken up and crash onto the surface of Mars. It's a weird coincidence that we happen to be at a time in the history of the solar system that we're watching this happen. Is it that this is destined to happen? Or is it maybe some kind of cycle where Phobos gets broken up, then the pieces reassemble farther away, and then it goes through this cycle over and over again. And so any new observations of Phobos that astronomers can do, it helps us understand this tiny moon better. Okay, that's all of the Mars moon news. Let's move on to the SpaceX Starship, which we've also been following for a while. And just to bring you up to speed about a month ago, the SpaceX Starship launched detached from the super heavy booster, the super heavy booster crashed into the ocean, but Starship made it to orbit and then did a soft landing in the Indian Ocean so soft that it didn't explode when it hit the ocean. It just floated there. And then SpaceX towed Starship to Christmas Island, which is off the coast of Australia. And now they've got a boat that is capable of actually carrying SpaceX Starship back to home. And so they shared photographs of a of a boat that's partially submersible. So the boat can lower itself into the water, they can put Starship onto it, then it will bring itself back out of the water. And now to be able to carry this home. And so in a few months, they should get their hands on Starship at their facility, where they can actually do some serious proper research on it. Look at what happened to the heat shield. Look at the damage to the flaps. Look at all the mechanisms. How did the engines work? This is a total boon because they actually have the hardware in their hands and they can see how every part of it performed for the launch. And I don't think they were ever expecting this. And yet this is something that they get to study. And you can actually follow the movement of this boat sort of in the way you can do flight tracking. You can actually use the marine radar website and you can see where the boat is now and where it's going and how fast it's going. And so you can watch as it makes its way back home. And speaking of SpaceX, they announced that they are setting up a new launch facility in Louisiana. You know, they have the Starbase facility in Texas at Boca Chica, and then they have a setup at Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral. But there are downsides to both of these launch facilities. And so now they've purchased a new piece of land in Louisiana. It's on the Gulf Coast, just outside of a town called Abbeville. And this offers a bunch of advantages that they don't have with their other facilities. So part of the problem with the one at Boca Chica, there's only like one road down there. They have to make sure that they can provide transit to the community while they are also trying to launch rockets and close down the roads. And so this is a pain. The orientation of the facility isn't great. If they want to be able to launch polar rockets, there isn't a nice deep port nearby. So they have to carry rockets and material by road. And so with this facility in Louisiana, they are going to be able to have a better orientation where they can more easily launch polar missions. They're going to be able to bring supplies, new rockets, material in to a deep port that is relatively nearby. And there's going to be less impact on local communities. They'll be able to sort of have a road that goes out to the facility that's just for them. And so SpaceX is hoping that this will sort of ease up a lot of the congestion that they're seeing with the facilities in Boca Chica and at Florida. They're planning to begin construction in 2027, and they're hoping to have it completed and operational by 2029. And this facility is going to be gigantic. They say they're going to spend about $100 billion on building this up. And I guess this is where their IPO money is going to go, is building this new facility in Louisiana. If you were watching Mars exploration a couple of years ago, there was a bit of nervousness about the state of the Curiosity rover's wheels, that these wheels have been going and going, and they've had more wear and tear and bits and pieces of them have fallen out. Clearly, NASA needs better wheel design. They fixed some of the issues with the Perseverance rover, but still NASA wants to cast a very wide net to see like, what are the best ideas for building rover wheels? And so they recently completed a challenge where they had sort of an open invitation to teams from around the world. They got hundreds of participants from dozens of countries, and they all showed up with their different ideas for wheel designs. And specifically, NASA was looking for wheel designs for lunar operation. And as you know, Laguna Regolith is nasty stuff. It is jagged, knife-like, glass-like sharp. The dust gets into everything and causes a tremendous amount of wear and tear on valves and seals and gaskets and human lung tissue. And so if NASA can figure out a new kind of wheel design that will give longer operations, that'll be just great. Like, like the conditions on the Moon are way worse than they are on Mars, which is like relatively smooth regolith and rounded rocks in some cases, as opposed to what you're looking at on the Moon. And so there was a bunch of ideas. There was a wheel design where they can change the stiffness of the wheel at different parts, depending on what it's rolling over top. There's like a strange tensioned cable system where instead of having spokes, it's able to sort of better absorb as it's going over different kinds of rocks and terrain. The winner was this idea, they call it scotch pad tires, and that there's this like soft material on the outside of the tires. And then a more tough surface outside of that. And so the tire will actually change its shape as it's rolling over a rock and then bounce back to its normal shape as it keeps going. And you can resist abrasion and cutting as it does this. And so you can imagine these sort of soft, deformable wheels that are allowing the rover to cross various jagged rocks. It's a pretty cool idea. And I love this idea of sort of opening up this design challenge to the entire world. If you don't know, I used to work for this offshoot of the XPRIZE Foundation called HeroX, and we actually did a lot of collaborations with NASA. NASA has been really good about this. They've done a ton of challenges in the past where they've sort of set this design constraint, and then they've allowed people from around the world to submit ideas. How to deal with poop in space, how to make a beaming system that you can crawl up a space elevator, like some really out there ideas. And so this is just part of that theme. Thanks to the Ingenuity helicopter, which flew along with the Perseverance rover, we really learned that helicopters have a place on Mars. Ingenuity flew for three years. It completed 72 flights, which was way beyond what anyone was ever expecting. And that even though the air pressure on Mars is incredibly low, if you turn your rotors fast enough, you can get lift. You know, you have almost no weight on the helicopter itself. You spin the rotors at an insanely high speed. You have a super lightweight battery. You are able to fly. And so now NASA is making this the flagship mission. And so we've been watching as they've been developing this mission called Skyfall. It's going to be three helicopters flying in formation that are going to arrive at Mars. And then the helicopters are going to have a ground penetrating radar system on board that will allow them to scan beneath the surface of Mars, looking for deposits of water ice. And water is the most important resource that any future base on Mars is going to require. It's your rocket fuel. It's your atmosphere for breathing. It is the water for drinking. It is the water you're going to use for growing your plants that without finding a source of water on Mars, any mission to Mars becomes extremely difficult. OK, any mission to Mars is going to be extremely difficult, but even more unnecessarily difficult. And so the hope is that by using this ground penetrating radar system on these helicopters, they'll be able to find where the deposits of water are under the surface. And so these helicopters will fly very close to the surface, probably within about a half meter of the surface of Mars. And then they have this weird, flexible antenna that hangs off the bottom of the helicopter. And then it scans on this very wide range of radio frequencies. At one frequency, it's able to look several meters below the surface of Mars. At another frequency, it's able to look just a few centimeters under the surface of Mars, but at very high resolution and try to really measure if there's any water mixed in with that regolith at that higher point. What's amazing about this story is that not only is NASA going to be sending helicopters back to Mars now with a science mission of their own, but they're able to miniaturize a ground penetrating radar system into these helicopters, they can fly around with them and actually deploy them. And you can think about how difficult it's going to be to get that kind of technology on such a small platform. And this ground penetrating radar, we've seen this many times before. The Chinese rovers on the moon were able to use it to look down through the regolith hundreds of meters. The Chinese rover on Mars had a ground penetrating radar, was able to discover the shoreline of an ancient ocean. And the one that I'm probably the most excited about is that the Europa Clipper has a ground penetrating radar system on board that it's going to be able to look down through the ice, searching for any evidence of pockets of water and maybe just maybe make it all the way down to the actual ocean underneath the shell of ice. And the depth that they can see just comes down to the amount of power that they have on board the size of the antenna. Tiny helicopter, tiny antenna, giant spacecraft, giant antenna. But hopefully we'll find out if there is water everywhere on Mars or we're going to need to bring our own or set up a base on the ice caps. We've got a story about this by Matt Williams. All right, let's talk about dark matter, another of my favorite topics. And dark matter is incredibly difficult for us to understand and study. And that's because, of course, it doesn't emit any radiation. It doesn't interact with regular matter, except through gravity. It is practically invisible. And yet, we can see its influence on the Universe in the way that galaxies rotate, in the way that light is bent as it moves through space, as it goes through intervening dark matter. And fortunately, the Universe has provided us some natural experiments. They've taken all of the stars and gas from a galaxy and extracted it. And you're left with just the dark matter. So these are a type of galaxy called an ultradiffuse galaxy. And one example of these is UGC 9050 DW1. So it's one of these ultradiffuse galaxies, these ultradiffuse galaxies that are like the size of the Milky Way. And yet they have almost no normal matter inside of them. But they still have a ton of mass, thanks to the dark matter. And so this one is about 115 million light years away. So astronomers use the Hubble Space Telescope and the Canada, France, Hawaii telescope to examine this galaxy. And they found a stream of material that is coming out of a globular cluster in this galaxy, like Hubble's amazing. They're seeing a stream of material coming out of a globular cluster inside a galaxy that has almost no stars 150 million light years away. But they can see it, because of the way the stream of material is moving. And because there just isn't a lot of regular matter in this galaxy, they can measure the effects on it from the dark matter. And this is going to allow them to better map out the location and the densities of the dark matter in this galaxy. And that's one really great use. As I said, there's a natural lab out there where you've got some galaxies with a lot of dark matter, some galaxies with very little dark matter. And you can see how stars inside those galaxies are influenced by this different amounts of dark matter. We're getting better and better at understanding the influence of dark matter, even if we don't know what it is. Got a story about this from Carolyn Collins Peterson. Every week we do a vote on our channel where you tell us what you thought was the best space news story of the week. And last week was such a monster episode of Space Bites that we had to actually break it into two votes. And then both of the two semifinals got a winner. And then we pitted the two winners against each other. And the winner was our Little Red Dot's Black Hole star. So thank you, everybody who voted last week. We're going to put this week's vote in the post tab here on the channel. I think there will only be one vote this week. So go ahead and go there and vote or just encourage the algorithm. Subscribe to the channel. Like this video, click on the notifications bell, obey the algorithm and be obeyed by the algorithm. What if you could go back to the beginning of the solar system, you could change a few variables, tweak some mass and spin, change a little bit. Would you still get the Earth? The assumption from a lot of planetary scientists is that the answer is no, that the Earth that we have came from the very specific starting conditions. And as you figure out the starting conditions, then you get the Earth. But if the starting conditions are different, then you get a different outcome for the planet in the solar system. So a researcher has questioned that assumption and set up a simulation of the solar system where they made the initial conditions a lot more random. And yet, after a thousand simulations of the evolution of the solar system, they found that a planet like the Earth actually forms on a very regular basis, something that is about Earth size at about one astronomical unit away from the sun. They also found that Venus's appear about 28 percent of the time. And then a small object like Mars appears on a regular basis. So there must be more to the evolution of the solar system than just you get the starting conditions exactly right and that, in fact, the kind of tendencies of planets that we have here in the solar system is more common. This is really exciting. Right now, we don't know what is a typical normal configuration of planets out there in some other star system. We know that the most common kind of planet are mini Neptunes and super Earths, and we don't have any of those. So we already know that we're kind of not normal compared to other planetary systems. But what about things like the Earth around stars like the sun? This is what we're looking for, hoping to find evidence of life. And if it turns out that these kinds of planetary systems tend towards a certain configuration that is very similar to what we have, then that could be very exciting for the search for life. It could mean there's many more habitable worlds out there for us to find. We've got a story about this from Bruce Dorman. And as I mentioned at the outset of this video, the Nancy Grace Roman is getting ready to launch as well. Of course, this is the next great flagship observatory from NASA. The Nancy Grace Roman has a mirror that is a discarded mirror from the National Reconnaissance Office. Several years ago, they called up NASA and said, we've got this spare mirror that we can't use for spying on Earth anymore. Do you need it? And NASA was like, yeah, we'll take it. We've got some ideas for this. And so the idea that they had was like, let's make a new modern space telescope that has the same kind of size as the Hubble Space Telescope, but has a much faster optic system, a much wider field of view. It will be able to image vast swaths of the universe when it would take Hubble hundreds of times as long to image the same region. Now, Hubble is able to get incredible resolution in one small object, but Nancy Grace Roman goes wide and Nancy Grace Roman has come in on budget and ahead of schedule. And now we are in the final days when it's about to launch. So if all goes well, Nancy Grace Roman will launch on August 30th on a Falcon Heavy rocket. And the latest step on August 21st, they put the spacecraft into the rocket fairing. Then if everything's ready, it's going to launch on August 30th. And then it's going to detach and head out to the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point to join James Webb, Euclid, Dead Gaia, and observe the universe. Do not make me choose between Nancy Grace Roman and the Mars Moons exploration mission. I'm so excited. And now we've got a new image of Betelgeuse. Enjoy. This is a picture taken by the Atacama Large Millimeter Submillimeter Array in Chile. They actually gathered the data for this image back in 2023. And Atacama, there's like a bunch of separate they look like radio telescopes in the high Chilean desert, and they're able to work as an interferometer. And so they took this image in their longest baseline configuration that gives them a resolution as fine as seven mil arcseconds. If you know what that is, it's a very fine resolution. And so you're seeing features on the surface of Betelgeuse. The average temperature of Betelgeuse is about 2300 Kelvin, but there are these hotspots that are about 800 Kelvin hotter. The last time these observations were made back in 2015, they saw the same hotspots. And so whatever it is, there's some kind of giant hot sunspot on the surface of Betelgeuse. And in some cases, these sunspots can be a significant portion of the size of Betelgeuse. And in fact, Betelgeuse isn't very round. It is very blobby, has variations in its smoothness by about 6%. And so if you could look at Betelgeuse, you would see that it's not this very smooth sphere, but it's actually this knobbly, blobby cloud of hot plasma with giant sunspots on its surface, which is about 800 times bigger than the sun. Like it extends out to the orbit of Jupiter, almost the way to Saturn. It's crazy. And it will explode any day now. I hope you're enjoying this week's episode of Space Bytes. And of course, we try to minimize all of the ads that we have to deliver to you across our entire platform. And that's in thanks to the patrons. They don't like ads. We don't like ads. They pay so we don't have to have any ads and you get to enjoy their contributions. You can go and watch a full version of this episode over on Patreon completely for free and without any ads. And to encourage you to do that, we've made a longer version of Space Bytes with one additional story. This story is about how physicists have figured out that you can melt diamonds with a link down in the show notes. And of course, this is just a fraction of all the stories that we're covering on Universe Today. You see eight to 10 stories here on Space Bytes. We cover 20 to 40 stories every week on Universe Today. The best thing to do, of course, is to just glue your eyeballs to the Universe Today website and just watch for changes. But if you don't have time for that, then you should just subscribe to my weekly email newsletter, which I send out every Friday, completely for free. I write every word in the newsletter. You can sign up. Go to universetoday.com slash newsletter to sign up. All right. That's all the news that we had this episode. Now our live shows are coming back just around the corner. I'm going to talk about that. But first, I'd like to thank our patrons. Thanks to Abe Kingston, Andrea Pedretti, Brian Bode, Kerwin, Chuck Hawkins, Commander Baylock, David Gilton, and David Matz, and Thrall of Reading and Math for Toddlers, Evan Dot Pro, James Clark, Jeremy Madden, Jim Burke, Marcel Smits, Michael Purcell, NASA Ocean Guy, Nordspace, OneStepForAnimals.org. Please follow my nephew at VBrick6994, Rin Kaidu, Richard Williams, Sean Sargent, Stephen Foundland on the Team49, Telescopes Canada, Vlad Sheplin, Wolfgang Klotz, and ZeldaBoard Galactic Defender, who support us at the Master of the Universe level. And all our patrons, all your support means the Universe to us. So the summer hiatus is almost over. Did you miss us? Of course you didn't. We were all here in your brain all the time. But still, the live shows are returning, both the live question show that I do here on this channel, as well as AstronomyCath. We've got some big announcements that are coming up in both of our shows. So we've scheduled the next live stream, which is going to be happening on Monday, August 31st at 5pm Pacific time. I'll be back live to answer your questions about space and astronomy. We've also just wrapped up recording what I think is our biggest patron question show, and just release that to the patrons. So if you are a patron, enjoy. If you're not a patron, you want to hear these patron only question shows, just become a patron. I've even enabled the free trial. So you can become a patron, try it out for a few days, cancel, and you can listen to those episodes. And then I'm going to put up a call for the patrons to send the next questions for the question show. And I'm sure it'll be even bigger, like they're four to five hours, each one of these things. Finally, I'd like to give a shout out to my sister who made me a James Webb beaded badge for my birthday. So she and it's cool. I don't know if you can see it's gold, but it's even got the the struts that that hold the secondary optics on James Webb. So I'm going to sew this on to my hat. Thanks, Heisler. You really get me. You might not know that I have a sister and she is a very well-renowned artist in Vancouver. So I'll put a link to her website if you want to see other examples of her art. I don't think she does any other space telescope related beading, but you can definitely check out her work. She has a mural in the Vancouver Public Library, which is really cool, as well as a lot of other places around Vancouver. All right. Thanks, everyone. And we will see you all next week.