50 Year Old Rocket Flies, Russia & China Announce Cooperation on Moon Base

hello it's scott manley here is still in hawaii at a place called the end of the world which well i'm sure it's pretty apocalyptic when there's some serious waves but it's pretty chill right now so yeah a few things have been going on in the space that i probably should talk about just because they're interesting first of all we had a what a launch that was actually quite a surprise it came on to our calendars only a couple of months ago the u.s department of defense launched a satellite on a pegasus xl rocket and i have previously declared the pegasus xl dead so you might think wait a second i thought you said it was dead you know there is well there is some question as to the future of pegasus xl because it is still very overpriced as it happens the department of defense got this at a bargain basement price i would some would say a going out of business price because these were pegasus that had been built for the strato launch project and of course had never flown but what's interesting is that this launch of a like a payload was put together in a very short time the payload was built inside of a year and the to demonstrate rapid relaunch capabilities they didn't tell the launch provider when it was going to be launched until like a month or so before the actual launch but apparently northrop grumman who now owns pegasus it was originally built by orbital which merged with atk to be orbital atk and now it's part of northrop grumman so it may be maybe there's a future for the pegasus since they've demonstrated this rapid launch capability having said that there is only one other pegasus sitting in storage right now now equally there was another launch which is actually somewhat related again in northrop grumman launch the department of defense and this has a really cool badge like showing like a it reminds me of parko rosso it's like a warthog with a flying moustache and stuff department of defense nro badge is always the best let me tell you almost perfect but yeah they this was launched in a minotaur one and the minotaur one if you don't know it uses the first two stages of a minuteman missile now i think this is a minuteman one and those were deployed from 1962 to 1965 right very long time ago and then they were decommissioned but the boosters are still around some of them have been kept in storage so they can be used as launch vehicles and so this booster that launched this payload a few days ago may well be the oldest rocket to ever fly as in time between it actually being built and flying obviously the r7 derived stuff that the ussr and soviet union use and sorry and russia pardon me use it is has its roots going back to the 1950s but this is actually a piece of hardware dated probably from the 60s which it just blows my mind there is like a minotaur c incidentally which uh is the commercial version that uses a first stage which is based on an icbm but not actually derived from an icbm the second or third oh by the way the the pegasus link is the second and f sorry the third and fourth stages of the minotaur are the top two stages of the pegasus now the reason why this isn't seen more often is i think in the maybe the late naughties early naughties late 90s this was developed and orbital sciences wanted to expand the capabilities and they basically congress said you can use these minuteman missiles for launching payloads into orbit but you're only allowed to do it for government payloads and congress wouldn't allow them to expand that for commercial operations so when they created the minotaur c or as it was once known the taurus they had to build their own first stages and so that kind of robbed it off its capabilities of its uh cheapness let's say anyway i'm sure we'll see minotaur consider considering continuing to fly because there's a lot of those minuteman stages in storage right anyway anyway the other sort of really big stuff that's going on right now is like the global space exploration conference it's basically a giant space exploration conference that's going on right now in st petersburg russia and the sort of big while it's had leaders from all of the major space agencies there either virtually via you're giving talks via zoom or video conferencing or actually physically there the thing that i've seen most interesting out of this has been china and russia russia's basically had dmitry rogers in on day one saying we are going to work very hard with other partners specifically china we want to launch our soyuz to the chinese space station to yangon and that's going to be an interesting one because they're going to have to get buy-in from the european arianespace who have the only soyuz launch facility which is at low enough longitude or latitude to actually reach the chinese space station chinese space station is about 42 degrees north baikonur is 45 degrees but has problems with dropping debris on mongolia and ah shoot what's it called ah vestoshni vostoshni is about 52 degrees north or 51 and something so so basically if russia wants to work with china and launch stuff to their space station they're going to have to get the european space agency in ariane space to get on their site and they might well do that because europe also wants to be involved in another space station project another side of this is the soyuz when it was being worked on for the iss they kept on using the old style soyuz docking adapter because the new apas androgenous peripheral attachment system that russia invented let's remind us it was too heavy to operate on the soyuz and have enough margin for operation but that was 20 years ago since then there's been a lot of upgrades to the soyuz so they might be able to fly these with the uh docking system which is suitable for china and fly them from kuru in you know south america and be able to be part of this project but look that's small thing the big thing is that they're actually talking big time about a china russian international lunar research base and this is a base on the surface of the moon the timeline they're talking about is for the next five years or so continue doing reconnaissance is in collaboration between both countries and then move to start actually building out structures on the surface that can eventually support landings in 2035. so the diagrams they they've got nice slides and stuff and they show you know long march rockets flying alongside so used to launch payloads initially and then it's like anger and uh long march 8 or 9 or whatever launching long march night i don't know big heavy lift vehicles along march 5 actually as well launching stuff to the surface of the moon and eventually putting people on the moon now let's be clear these timelines are highly aspirational right there's a lot of money involved here certainly they are looking for other partners to collaborate with them there would be very happy to have jaxa or european space agency also collaborate um but building something like that in this amount of time may not be possible especially since it's not even clear that the chinese heavy lift rockets will be ready for the construction phase but having said that you know the fact that they're committed they put this out there is a really really cool thing and i'd i'd like to see it eventually succeed whatever the time scale very likely that the us with artemis will return to the moon first but the question is always how long are they going to stay how much of a commitment is this to like long-term exploitation and exploration of the moon there was a few different launch sites that were shown over the surface of the moon most of them were at low latitude but one was in ammonstone crater at the south pole i believe yeah so anyway that's uh what's going on oh and also of course with uh a launch well practically hours away china have finally announced the crew for their uh for their first flight to their space station and because i'm doing this from memory i don't actually remember their name so i'm gonna like edit in a thing over the top to show you but three chinese astronauts i know they're all male and they're all two of them have previously flown to space on shenzhou well third it's going to be his first flight and they're going to spend several months on the space station their space station including an eva to demonstrate the capabilities and hopefully you know move their construction forward because you know this is a modular space station unlike tiangong one and two this is going to be require actual unpacking of materials ex deployment of stuff etc etc also today there was a spacewalk on the iss to start installing the new irosa the improved rollout solar arrays they didn't complete all their tasks they had a few problems in fact they did have a problem with one of the spacesuits and you know those spacesuits that are on the space station are starting to show their age i mean they've been they were built decades ago and they're being refurbished so it's not it's not uncommon to find problems with them hopefully by the time that uh us is landing people on the moon they will have newer spacesuits to to do that in because yeah the ones that are are used in space don't are kind of heavy they're kind of bulky they're not really the kind of things you want to walk in the legs don't actually move well enough for that so anyway yeah from the end of the world this is scott manley saying fly safe [Music] you

Channel: Scott Manley

Views: 278,383

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Id: Grkhla6CoHw

Length: 10min 44sec (644 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 17 2021