How India Is About To Take Over The Moon!

[Music] on today's episode we are getting into the latest space news including India joins the Space Race To The Moon SpaceX upgrades their launch pad with a steel shower head and one American company wants to build a space cannon this is the space race on July 14th the Indian space research organization launched their third mission to the Moon shandrian 3. sitting in the payload section of their launch vehicle Mark III is a vcrom Lander which houses several scientific experiments and a second attempt at the pragyon Rover a duplicate of the original that was lost during the failed moon landing of the chandrayan-2 mission back in September of 2019. the previous Mission had the same goals as the new one to land the pragyon Rover and have it study the Topography of their South Pole Landing site perhaps even searching for water ice before lunar night kills the Rover which isn't designed to last without heat and sunlight the chandrian 2 mission was almost perfect a textbook launch with a safe and efficient approach to lunar orbit that involved slowly increasing the vehicles for this distance from Earth orbit using a series of short Burns this type of burn takes advantage of the o-birth effect burning a vehicle's engines while Falling Towards a gravity well in order to raise the apogee and fly further and further out with each burn while using minimal fuel both Shanghai and 2 and 3 used 5 total Burns to increase the distance until being gently captured by the moon's gravity it's very efficient if you are patient enough and it all went amazingly smooth for shandrian to right up until the landing on its descent to the surface the Lander began to skew off course and just before Telemetry cut out it was seen going far too fast to survive a landing afterwards an investigation determined that a software glitch caused the Landers programming to become overwhelmed and fail which is almost exactly what happened during the Apollo 11 Landing except the Shenron 2 Lander didn't have Neil Armstrong there to manually guide it to the surface the problem with this failure wasn't just that India would have to try again if they wanted to become the fourth country ever to land a vehicle on the moon is that the shandrian missions were supposed to be demonstrating India's ability to get clients payloads to the Moon they had already signed deals independently with NASA and Japan Space Administration jaxa before signing the Artemis Accords on June 24th so they didn't really need to make a tough Rover all they needed to do was prove they could be useful to their Partners that's why the landing zone for these missions is at the South Pole of the Moon and also why the Rover itself isn't designed to last more than the 14-day lunar light cycle the ISRO are testing their ability to get Hardware safely and cheaply to the moon and Gathering some useful data for Artemis while they do it the shandrian 3 mission only cost about 73 million US Dollars ridiculously affordable for a medium lift rocket that can get a Rover to the Moon not to mention the other experiments that can be loaded onto the Lander itself so the third mission was drawn up funded and built with the necessary fixes being made as well as some minor changes from the second mission's design where chandrian 3 differs from the previous missions aside from fixes to the Landers software is the construction of the vehicle the Lander and Rover are both the same but where chandrayan 2 had an Orbiter vehicle number three does not this isn't because three doesn't need one in fact a stripped down propulsion stage took the orbiter's place for this Mission and is ferrying the Lander and Rover into a lunar parking orbit as we speak but the second mission's Orbiter was also an experiment in its own right with measuring devices and high resolution cameras to monitor The Landing site since that vehicle is still in place shendrian 3 didn't need to bring another one this lowered the cost of the third mission slightly but not much else has changed because India's approach to these missions has been so reliable again chendrion 2 almost went off without a hitch and that was only their second ever attempt to get to the moon there's not many other countries who can make that boast every single flight of their lvm-3 rocket has been successful and before Shen dry and 2 2. India space research organization had never lost a payload from an lvm-3 launched Mission and while using slow orbit raising Burns means that getting to the Moon takes over 37 days it's an extremely safe and efficient way to get there but more importantly the ISRO took their only failure and immediately did what good Engineers do they learned from it and adapted to solve the problem that's what really makes their space program so successful they have a solid plan a reliable vehicle and the benefit of some extra experience which will hopefully make this Mission a success where the last one failed it has been a few weeks since we checked in with the construction work at the SpaceX launch site in Boca Chica Texas and the work that has been completed in the meantime has been dramatic the biggest Milestone hit recently has been the installation of the massive steel plate that forms the business end of the new water Deluge system underneath the orbital launch mount on June 29th the folks at what about it caught the SpaceX team uncovering the huge main plate from their workshop in one of the production tents in the weeks leading up to this several other large parts of the Deluge system were spotted at Boca Chica just waiting to be installed the hole under the olm was being filled with concrete still and attachment points were being put in place so no one was really sure how much longer it would be until we saw the big plate itself but once it was taken out of the production tent the whole thing was maneuvered together in just a few hours the manifolds and their protective covers those larger pieces with the huge water tubes attached under underneath were brought in and assembled on July 6 all along one side of the plate the other three parts don't have any attached pipes likely because there was no need they will likely just cap off the system on the opposite side to the water inlets to keep the pressure in the center plate where it should be they were seen nearby and will be attached soon if they haven't already been by now the whole setup went together quickly if you don't count the weeks spent fabricating the plates and laying the literal groundwork before they went in SpaceX Engineers even built custom scaffolding and counterweight systems to allow for easier installation of the massive plate and manifold system so the planning for these Maneuvers had to have been a long time in the making that said it might still be a couple weeks before we see a proper Deluge test looking over the site we can see a lot of exposed rebar still and the concrete that is intended to fill that up will need to fully dry before a major water test can go forward in the meantime SpaceX will likely busy itself with smaller tests like checking the Deluge system's water piping for leaks after they've hooked it all up as well as continuing to make adjustments to other parts of the site for instance the launch Tower itself finally got an emergency stairway in case the elevator suffers damage again but far more importantly the ship quick disconnect arm was reattached the upper arm used to fill the Starship vehicle with fuel and Link Telemetry while preparing to launch was removed just after the April 20th test flight it wasn't exactly clear why but now that it's been reattached we can see that it's been raised a little bit confirming elon's hints that Starship would be getting a hot staging system the addition of event which would allow the upper stage of super heavy to activate before separation would also cause Starship to be a few feet taller and so the quick disconnect would have to be raised as well if it was going to still do its job everyone was fairly sure this change was going to be happening at some point especially after elon's comments about it but for the modification to go up so soon is pretty wild we know the SpaceX production team is very well practiced by now but the installation of a new system would normally take a bit longer than this of course it's more than likely that SpaceX leadership is just anticipating another month or so before they can do anything they still have to do all the testing for their new Deluge system wait for the concrete to fully Harden test the olm with a full stack and possibly a fueling test for good measure and then finally clear both the FCC investigation and the lawsuit from local environmental groups which still hasn't been cleared up yet once that's all over they'll need another launch license and then finally prepare for their next test so I'd say SpaceX has enough time to complete their modifications Longshot space is one of the newest launch companies in the commercial space race and CEO Mike Grace has a plan to come out on top he wants to make space flight Dumber Mike and his team believe that Rockets are too expensive and complicated to be effective and have designed a launch system that is more or less out of the mind of Jules Verne they're going to shoot a payload into orbit using a cannon well really it's a kinetic launch system since it doesn't involve any ignition but the principle is the same a fitted projectile is loaded into a slim tube causing a vacuum seal to form behind the object then compressed gas will build the pressure until the projectile is fired out of the tube at incredibly high speeds how fast exactly depends on the length of the barrel and that Barrel has to be basically pointed horizontally in order to work some of you might remember spin launch another team with a kinetic launch system spin launch's idea was to create a catapult spinning a payload inside a vacuum sealed chamber and hucking it into the atmosphere at Mach speeds but even at its largest spin launches catapults wouldn't get much bigger than 300 feet or 91 meters in diameter according to Longshots maths hitting a flight speed of Mach 5 would need an 80 foot or 24 meter long tube pretty reasonable but in order to reach escape velocity of Mach 33 and get a payload all the way to space well that would need a launch tube several kilometers in length and the installation would require a dedicated solar farm to power its mechanisms as well as a huge compressed gas pumping station and infrastructure that's a lot of land to use and then there's the noise launching from a straight tube that size means the projectile would exit going anywhere from Mach 25 to Mach 30 and the sonic boom that goes with it would be devastating to anyone nearby long shots launch Hardware will need to be in remote areas CEO Mike gray says you would want it to be somewhere where an atomic bomb could go off and nobody would notice so if they're still getting funding that must mean the trade-off is pretty good right long shot says that if they can get their system working their price per kilogram sent to orbit could be as low as 10 dollars for reference sending a payload on a falcon 9 is about 6 500 dollars per kilo so yeah it makes sense that the US military is very interested in this technology sure it can't put people into orbit accelerating to Mach 30 in one second would turn a person into goo but it could launch Hardware at Hypersonic speeds which is exactly what the military has been testing lately with projects like haste which uses rocket Labs electron vehicle to make sub-orbital Hops at extreme speeds they actually don't even need to make it to orbital speeds for the military and potentially other partners interested in moving products around the world very quickly just firing a payload off at mach 10 or so could be enough for them to get some contracts which is good because with their first 1.5 million dollars of starting Investments Mike reports that his team has been able to hit Mach 2.2 already and could demonstrate Mach 5 by mid-august it may not have been possible for Jules Verne to shoot a man to the Moon with a cannon in 1865 but with today's Tech we just might manage to achieve the dumbest way to get to space meet us back here every week for more updates on everything Aerospace industry and Interstellar exploration related make sure to give the video a thumbs up today if you liked it that really helps us out for real and subscribe to the Space Race for more videos just like this we do one long form essay and one news update every week and if you'd like more we've got two more on the screen for you right now

Channel: The Space Race

Views: 47,960

Keywords: india space program, ISRO, chandrayaan 3, vikram lander, india moon, india moon mission, india moon landing, isro, chandrayaan 3 launch date, space news, indian space research organisation

Id: u14zkHTI5WQ

Length: 12min 51sec (771 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 19 2023