SpaceX Reveals EVA Suit - China Launches Moon Mission - Deep Space Updates May 4th

hello it's Scott Manley here and it's May the fourth be with you as a big Star Wars fan I had to get that in there it is time for another batch of deep space updates and we have some news hot off the presses or hot off the Twitter spaces so to speak but we are going to start with the launches from the last couple of weeks going back to the 20th of April 420 we did not have a Starship launch no that was a year ago but we did have a long march 2D launching out of chuch Chang and China carrying a Yan 42 military reconnaissance satellite 23rd of April Falcon 9 carrying 23 starlink satellites out of Florida 23rd also saw rocket lab launching a mission called the beginning of the Swarm carrying a spacecraft called neon Sat one for Korea this is going to be the first of 10 Earth observation satellites these are 100 kg small satellites providing 1 m resolution imagery in 500 km orbits but after dumping off that satellite the uh spacecraft kickstage the photon uh transferred itself to a higher orbit to 1,000 km orbit and deployed a spacecraft called acs3 This is a solar sale satellite for NASA so this is a 12 U Cube sat uh and it has 47 m long carbon fiber composite booms carrying out a solar sale so this provides 8 80 square m of polymer sail with aluminium on one side Chrome on the other for like reflectivity and thermal management the booms are a bit like they're very similar to the type of booms we see on the Rosa solar panels so they are like flat pieces of you know Carbon Fiber tape that when they get extruded they roll into a uh Rod shape and this means they can roll it in like a tape measure and roll it all out now they have not yet deployed this sale but uh the real aim of this mission is to verify this deployment procedure I'm not sure what the plans is how far it's expected to go but people are paying attention to it and we hope to see a successful sale deployment in the next few days also we got a really cool image of the stage the kick stage from electro second stage that's kind of cool to see the stages in orbit moving forward 25th of April shenzo 18 launched on a long march to FG so this is of course three new Chinese astronauts headed to their space station yuang Fu who is on his second mission he first flew on sheno 13 Leong and Li guansu uh so they're going to be there for 6 months uh they docked to the station they have taken command they transfer you know control of the station through a key transfer ceremony which is largely symbolic but hey you know tradition and all that and uh the previous crew F sheno 17 Tang hongbo Tong tang shangi and Jang Jin Lin they have all landed on April 30th and their Landing was a whole lot smoother and less rly than the previous landing of sheno 16 28th of April Falcon 9 launched a pair of satellites for Europe the Galileo navigation satellites now these are going to Mid altitude orbits right that's around 22,000 km you know halfway between geocentric so geostationary and low earth orbit these are very similar to the US GPS system or Russian glonass the satellites I believe are called Patrick and Juliana and originally this mission was planned to launch on a suu St you know B right out of Karu but obviously that was scrapped for political reasons then they moved it over to an Aran 6 and that plan was dropped because it was taking its damn time and of course it finally launched on SpaceX Falcon 9 except that in their press release about the successful launch uh the European uh Space Program group or whatever failed to mention this uh and indeed when some journalists asked them what launch vehicle it was launched on the statement that they were given again sort of failed to mention this was launched on an American Falcon 9 rocket very funny and amusing I honestly I just find it kind of funny that there embarrassed uh because yes it is kind of embarrassing that Europe has basically launched all its big launch vehicles for now but yeah also notably this was used Falcon 9 booster 1060 and uh this began its career launching gps3 satellites and it was expended on this flight uh flight 20 and you know understandable because these are two satellites that had to go into a fairly High orbit and notably during the launch stream if you look carefully you can see one of the controllers saluting the booster as it signs off for the last time good job 28th of April Falon 9 starlink carrying another 23 satellites out of Florida second of May a falcon 9 out of vandenbberg carrying a pair of satellites into sun synchronous orbits these are the maxr legion worldview satellites they're basically you know Earth Imaging Satellites with 30 cm resolution this is a very low mass payload for the falcon which is why they were able to perform a return to launch site Landing with and have the stubby nozzle on the second stage where they don't make the really long nozzle and save a bit of money on that so they have planned to launch six of these satellites and presumably they could launch all six on a falcon 9 if Mass to orbit was important but I they all have to go to a slightly different orbital plane so they can only launch two at a time and if you look carefully in the background to some of my videos you'll see that I do actually have a Lego model of the Legion worldview satellite this was sent to me by one of the you know you design people PR people at uh maxar and unfortunately apparently they get laid off soon after making this thing but uh it's very cool to have a model of these satellites going forward moving onward 3rd of May we have another Falcon 9 out of cap canaval launching 23 starlink satellites and just a few hours ago May the 4th China launched changa C on a Long March 5 this is a spacecraft which is going to land on the far side of the moon and return a sample to the surface of the Earth this is going to be the first landing and Recovery or return from The Far Side of the Moon it's going to take a couple of months and because it's operating on the far side of the moon it's going to need the chicha relay satellite which was recently launched uh so they're Landing in a location called Apollo Basin and I don't know if that is a nod to the fact that there seems to be something of a space race developing for returning humans to the surface of the Moon China think that they are going to be on schedule to do this in 2030 and while NASA has currently got 2026 as their Landing date I won't be surprised if that gets delayed for all sorts of reasons also this Mission carried a right along satellite called I Cube Q it's a 7 kg Cube satellite built by Pakistan and it is their for first lunar Mission it's just going to be doing some basic science in the around the moon so yeah the hot news from earlier today and as I said I just got out of the press conference that they had on X uh SpaceX revealed their Eva space suit for the Polaris Dawn Mission and this is new has new capabilities over the standard SpaceX Iva suit so the Iva suit is designed to be used inside the spacecraft if there was a pressure failure it would keep the crew alive and it wouldn't let them do a whole bunch more an Eva suit is supposed to let them step outside so yeah what do we do for this well when you have a pressure suit it tends to pressurize into you know a configuration that keeps them rigid it's very hard to move the arms because that requires bending and changing the volume and the pressure causes this to resist so they've added rotating bearings at the shoulder so there's this rotary bearing that allows them to move the arm up and down there is a rotating cuff joint that has been added to it the helmet is upgraded it now includes a heads up display so they can see suit parameters and things like that there's going to be a camera for a couple of the suits so that uh they can actually see try you know show what they are sending back to Earth so there's a few other interesting things that this is going to operate on a pure oxygen environment at 5.1 PSI so that's roughly 1/3 of an atmosphere and when you're going from one atmosphere down to 1/3 of an atmosphere you have to worry about the bends right depressurization problems the protocol is going to be they're going to launch into space initially starting at one atmosphere pressure and as they spend time in orbit they're going to slowly drop the pressure down increase the proportion of oxygen until they are close to the the Eva conditions because you have four people in this spacecraft and there's no air lock everybody is going to have to be part of this Eva everybody is going to need to be depressurized and cleaned out so they're just going to do this for the entire spacecraft uh there's a bunch of other things like uh they're not going to have the Capa this time they're going to have a structure with supports out there which they call the Skywalker I guess that's why they did this announcement on May the 4th uh yeah so there's a few other things that the they're going to have temperature controls on their umbilical this this is not like a NASA space suit so we have the suits that are being developed by Collins and um you know uh David Clark all that stuff this is not going to be at that level it's not going to let them walk there is no articulation in those legs it's probably going to have a much higher rate of gas loss because they still have that big entry zipper and along the legs these are still going to be have to be custom made for each and in individual astronaut rather than you know built out of a set of common components for all the astronauts but yeah we're looking SpaceX is now looking at the next launch with dragon and a crew on board as being Polaris Dawn this summer um so yeah still L lot of questions but it's definitely getting closer to to this and uh you know we're definitely looking forward to the first of the three Polaris Dawn missions okay moving on onwards going back to Mid April the FAA have basically set a rule in place that they will not authorize launch licenses for vehicles which are designed to return to Earth unless they have already figured out the landing license and this will avoid the problem that happened last year with vaarda space that launched assuming that they would get a return to Earth authorized and in fact no it spent six months in orbit before they could actually make that happen uh in Scotland we've had some development yes orex has raised about $20 million to help them continue building their Prime rocket and while we haven't seen a production version of the Prime rocket there is another rocket company rocket rocket Factory alburg from Germany they have shipped their RFA one rocket to First Stage to sax vard space port in uh Shetland in north of Scotland they're going to be performing engine fire firing tests up there so we're going to be seeing rocket engines firing in Scotland uh on a rocket stage firing in Scotland moving towards a launch ver sometime you know at sometime in the future yes it's real launches from Scotland are going to be a thing NASA announced that the dragonfly mission is officially moving forward this is a mission to Titan which will send it's more or less a large drone instead of driving across the surface this thing will charge up it batteries using a ra radioisotope thermal generator and be able to fly from one spot to another land and do some science on the surface before moving on somewhere else Titan is of course the moon with the thickest atmosphere it has pretty low gravity and I've been looking forward to this Mission but I will still have to look forward because it's going to launch in 2028 with a landing something like 2036 or something like that yes I will be an older man but I will still be excited I remember hearing about this and immediately building it in kbal Space Program when the this story happened but yeah big part of the delay in approving this is that as they studied it and did their pre preliminary their V various design reviews the cost ended up getting bigger and bigger and bigger and it's now looking like the whole mission is going to cost something like $3.3 billion but it's as far as I'm concerned that is well spent on a very unique groundbreaking mission that is going to really push the limits of engineering and Science in a very good way of course in the last few weeks we also saw Bill Nelson testifying before Congress about NASA's funding and you know it was just frustrating to watch this because you have all these politicians saying why aren't you spending money on this great project that benefits my district to which bill says well you guys are the ones cutting the funding why don't you give us more money yeah you know this this just kept on going back and forth but Bill is really one thing he was really stressing is that they need to start funding uh either the ISS deorbit vehicle or they need to come up with some other way to continue supporting the ISS beyond that this is a big deal you can't have the ISS just falling back to Earth after all the current plan uh is built around using suu spacecraft and we all know that that is our progress spacecraft and that may not be available after you know by the time it's ready to deorbit the space station another important sort of NASA meeting in the last few days has been uh like The Advisory Council human exploration meeting where we finally got to see some statements about Starship flight propellent transfer test where uh the deputy associate administrator went on the record and said that on flight three they did in fact do the intertank transfer of crin and it was successful by all accounts that is NASA's words so for all the people that have been saying it didn't work they couldn't prove it worked well NASA has gone on the record and says that it did work having said that they are still analyzing the data and it is a long way to go from that simple intank test to actually docking Starships in orbit and transferring them and we are still a long way of knowing just how many many you know op how many launches will be needed to get Starship to the surface of the Moon and back to space with humans on board um in Europe uh SC is going to acquire a rival satellite operator Intel sat for a $3.1 billion doll price tag that is a deal that would bring together two of the biggest geo satellite Communications operators these are the ones that provide satellite internet in the you know days before of course starlink started taking over the world so these two companies are merging together to you know defend themselves against the threat of starlink they together they control over a 100 uh go satellites and a few Like mid-altitude Satellites the the 03b constellation that was has been starting to build out uh We've also seen like in recent years similar mergers between like viaat but acquired inm Marat and itat acquired one web so you know we we've seen a lot of this going on and this is just the next step in this very big set of corporate Acquisitions in the space Communications Market in Japan Astros scale has announced that they're going to go public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and around the same time they also showed off this really awesome image of this uh h2a upper stage which their spacecraft address has been Rend dooing with and Performing proximity operations now this is part of a debris removal test program at this time they're not going to actually Rendevous and deorbit this thing what they've really been doing is just demonstrating the capability to operate close to this spacecraft and remain close to this spacecraft without actually damaging it um elsewhere by the way Teran orbital a few weeks ago if you remember they were up for being acquired by Lockheed Martin which had been a major investor in Teran or well in the last few days that deal has been cancelled and Teran orbital stock has dropped precipitously it's not clear what's going to happen next whether they are going to continue operations whether they can get money from elsewhere but uh that is a that is a developing story at this time we don't really know what's going to happen to Teran orbital and yeah the other really big space deal story there's been a lot of this in the last few weeks is uh Kerbal Space Program 2 they are owned by private division right they're being developed by intercept Studios and private division just had a bit of a cost cutting exercise because they acquired Gearbox Software they've run running low on cash so they're closing down a bunch of Studios firing a bunch of people and we don't know exactly what's going on with Kerbal Space Program 2 what we do know is that they had to notify like local authorities that they are laying off 90 people in Seattle and the only Studio we know of in Seattle is intercept games which are developing Kerbal Space Program 2 so putting two and two together and the fact that a number of people known to work on the game are looking for new work it doesn't look good let's just say that now they've of course said oh no no we're we're not going to like cancel your Early Access game but they haven't also said much else and significantly a few days before this announcement there was like an interal there's a kbal space program coming soon article which showed some amazing volumetric clouds that developed by a guy called Black Rack which has been doing an amazing job developing these for the original game as a mod via his you know patreon right but it sounds like he's been laid off so yeah we don't know if we'll see those in the game we don't know what's going on and yeah you know if you're want to buy a game buy the original right now moving moving onwards let's let's get away from this and talk about uh Orion so the NASA office of Inspector General they published their report on the Orion program and they found a few problems but you sure the main problem with Orion is it's just been taking too long but the real like thing that made people stop and look was the state of the heat shield because uh we we'd seen that the heat shield was a bit rough we've now seen some real close-ups of things like the bolts that join it to the uh to the second stage to the service module you know those were pretty badly beat up they melted a lot more than they should have been there's a lot of chunks missing out of the shield and all the same the scientists have said look if this was with humans it would have been fine and it wouldn't worry us but what really worries them is they haven't truly understand what is causing all these bits of The Shield to fall off rather than just to blate away gently and protect the spacecraft not understanding the physics means that they can't for sure know that it's going to be good in the future and this is going to be important for emus 2 which is going to have people on it and it's going to be coming back from the moon at higher velocities they use this avot material which is the same stuff that was used on the Apollo program but a lot has changed in the intervening years and they now going to have to like re-understand all this stuff yeah another thing that came out by the way was that the damage to the launch platform was a bit more than expected $25 million worth including the fact that uh the doors were blown off the elevator and the engineers who had studied this or whatever had thought that these doors were blast doors that should have protected against the powerful blast of the Rockets when in fact they were made of fiberglass they blew right off and the elevators got damaged and one of them was out of commission for like four months so uh yeah they're going to have to fix that and finally after what seems like an incredible Odyssey we have boing Starliner actually going to the space station in the next couple of days uh yeah boen originally I think said that they would be ready in 2015 uh that's only 9 years late maybe I'm misquoting them on this but it has taken an incredibly long time um and obviously SpaceX soundly beat them to it but it will be nice to have some redundancy on this we're going to see Sita Williams but Wilmore launching they're going to go to the International Space Station they're going to hang out for a week or so and then come home land on land in the Utah I think the Utah test range so there's a chance that we actually see this on the west coast if you get high enough if you get clear line of sight you might be able to see this but I just want to see this happen and boing could use a bit of a win even although I think they're now potentially losing money on this whole deal but for me there was one thing that you know stood out that has me finally rooting for them and that is they published this photo of the astronauts training in the simulator in all their like space gear and that included their headsets they're David Clark headsets now David Clark headset is what I use because when I was buying an aviation headset I knew that David Clark also made space suits so I was like oh totally going to get that now I'm seeing simil this this logo and this color on astronauts I am super proud to be wearing this in the cockpit so I I really hope this Mission goes off as planned and that we finally have some redundancy in the human space flight program in the US I'm Scott Manley fly safe [Music] [Music]

Channel: Scott Manley

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Length: 23min 41sec (1421 seconds)

Published: Sun May 05 2024