Ep. 802: Mission Tech Series: Rocket & Spacecraft 411

Welcome to the show

0:00Welcome to the show.

0:30Welcome to AstronomyCast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I'm Professor Cain. I'm the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of CosmoQuest.

1:09Hey, Pamela. How are you doing? I am well. I'm not okay with your temporary mic, but I know that you are recording off to the side into perfection, and I will deal with the slightly robotic sound while you are on the other side of the planet. Yeah, we're in the Cotswolds. We are hiking the Cotswolds Way, and we are day five into the walk. Today was a big one, 13 miles, 21-kilometer day, but beautiful views, just incredible landscapes.

1:41And then you stay in a pub, a different inn every night. It's a very civilized way to hike. A guy could get used to this. It sounds excellent, and I look forward to seeing pictures. Thank you, everybody, who heard the call and joined our Patreon to help us remove all the ads and not have to continue polluting our beautiful podcast with advertisements. And we are still sort of figuring out where we stand today, how much we can spend on the staff to be able to kind of go back and start to clean things up.

2:15But we are in this new era no matter what, and we really appreciate all of your support. And if you were, like, on the fence, you're not sure, maybe you didn't hear the call, go to patreon.astronomycast.com and support our work and allow us to be completely ad-free. And we're just doing this work for you, provided by you. It's a beautiful thing. We are currently at 1,056 patrons. We crossed the 1,000 mark at the end of last week.

2:46Our goal is to get to 1,500 people and clean up that back catalog. And we know there's over 1,000 of you for free who are on our Patreon and another 29,000 of you out there listening. So please join us.

Introduction to rockets and spacecraft

3:03Yeah. Today, we begin a new series on rockets and spacecraft, dealing with each of their components. It's a big job, so it'll take us a bunch of episodes to get through. Today, let's do an introduction about what we're going to talk about in this series, rockets from tip to tail, soup to nuts. All right, Pamela, you have a sort of a plan. You have like a Battlestar Galactica Cylon-level plan for what you intend to do over the coming episodes. And I am just a passenger here.

3:34I sent you the schedule. I sent the audience the schedule. So I am deeply amused. We are going to start today by doing that introduction to this is the stuff that it takes for a rocket to get to space and a spacecraft to survive there. But along the way, we're going to stop and pause to look at like what actually is a fairing and why do we care? What all does an engine need to do?

4:04So we're going to go through in individual episodes and talk about how do these things work? We're finally going to answer the question, what is a gyroscope? What is a servo? And why are they different? Or the reaction wheel. Like what is the difference between a gyro and a reaction wheel? Yeah, yeah. So all of that is coming in the future. Today is just the overview of what we need to get to space and stay there healthy. Excellent. All right. So then I guess, you know, this episode you were planning to sort of give us the overview, the big overview, the big, you know, all of the big pieces.

4:41We will then come back around and deal with them one by one. So what can our listeners expect as we sort of make our way through this series? How have you logically broken up the essential components of a rocket and a spacecraft so that we can tackle them? Well, I have to admit, I can be extremely lazy. And so the way I looked at it was, let's start at basically the butt of the rocket and work our way up, doing that tip to tail, just like you suggested.

5:16Except I, being me, apparently decided to start closer to the ground. So we're going to look at engines and stages next week. From there, we're going on to fairings, docking airlocks and gyroscopes and servos, thrusters, ion drives, nuclear rockets, light sails. Wow. All of this is coming in the future. Right. Going all the way to starshades and chronographs. And then finally, space debris and reboost missions.

5:48Right. You might have bitten off more than you can chew.

5:54But why? You've got four episodes planned for this? No, no, no, no. We're going all the way through December 14th on this. Oh, okay, okay. All right, all right, all right. So we, okay, fine. Yes. Then we've got lots of time. Yeah. Yeah. And it's funny because I, like, I pitched a bunch of episode ideas at you. You're like, okay, we need to plot out the next schedule. I'm like, let's do nuclear rockets and let's do ion engines and let's do solar sails. And let's talk about, let's talk about the reaction wheels, the gyros and all this. And you're like, I see a structure here. I did. I did.

6:25And so you're going to then collect that all together into said structure. Yeah. And so, you know, I think this all sounds great and I'm so excited about this because, like, I will admit that my rocketry is less of my reporting beat. And, you know, we, I really try with the universe today to cover both what's happening in astronomy and also what's happening in space exploration and rockets and missions.

6:56But, like, if a rocket isn't launching a telescope for a mission that I care about, I kind of have trouble paying attention. And, and I think, you know, for a lot of people, you know, you think about the Scott Manley channels, the Marcus House, right? Like, they're focused on the actual technology of the rockets. They're interested in the, in the intakes of the hydrogen, oxygen engine system. I'm just making stuff up here.

7:27I know more about the technology than I probably am letting up. But anyway, that, that this, you know, I, I spend most of my time thinking about the telescopes and the, and the science and less time thinking about the actual hardware that got us there, the engineering. And, and so this is going to be great. I think we are genuinely going back to a place where I could definitely use a refresher on a lot of the topics that we're going to be looking at today. And, and the thing that really got me thinking about rockets this summer is the realization that as we're looking at a future with more and more human spaceflight, as we're looking at a future that is going to require space telescopes to get above all the satellites out there, we need rockets for all of that to happen.

8:16And at the time that we need rockets for all of that to happen, we're also in this awkward moment of the Falcon 9 is getting discontinued. It is. The Soyuz factory got hit by a flamingo missile, which just sounds silly. And, and we don't know when Starliner is going to, not Starliner, when Starship is going to be available for something other than Starlink. Or Starliner. You know, we don't know when Starliner is going to fly either.

8:46Or, you know, what's going to happen with New Glenn. So there's a lot of, yeah. And so we currently have here in the U.S. nine crewed launches possible outside of the Artemis program. There's only three available certified Dragon crew launches possible. There are six Atlas Vs available to launch Starliners. Now, Starliner should be able to launch on the Vulcan if they can build an adapter for it, but they have to build the adapter first.

9:20And so I'm having that feeling I had when I knew that the space shuttle program was coming to an end of anxiety about being able to launch things. Right. It is a very funny time. And I guess, you know, you said, oh, the Falcon nine is going to be wound down. And that will assume that Starship will be functioning and performing the same purpose as, as Falcon nine. And I am skeptical that that is going to happen as soon as people think it's going to happen. And even if we can have Starships launching satellites, we're probably not going to see Starship launching people in the way that the Falcon nine does.

9:59So I would be, I would be shocked if 10 years from now, there are not still Falcon nines launching in some capacity. Well, they're turning off the factory, so that's going to make it hard. No, I know. I know. I think they're going to turn it back on again. I think they're going to, they're going to find that that was maybe the wrong move and they'll go back to building them again. But we'll see. We'll see. Yes. And, and it's funny because like we have talked about this, like maybe not in the main podcast and we've sort of talked about this in, in the, the after show, which is that we are in this very strange limbo with regards to all of the launch platforms that are out there.

10:38And you, you mentioned space launch system, right? Like, like another gigantic rocket designed to carry humans to the moon. And yet, or how many of those are going to get built? Where are we going to stand in, in all of this? It's a, it's a really weird, weird time. And the, that resolution that we've been hoping for just is not showing up. Yeah. So the, the Ariane 6 is delayed, but we're seeing JAXA getting better. We're seeing India getting better. We're seeing China has two different reusable rockets that have both nailed their landings.

11:11And so we're at a point where we're seeing global opportunities rise in the absence of where NASA in the past always had something going on. And this is particularly apparent in this year's Mars launch window. This year is one of those times when we should be launching things on their way to Mars on that wonderful transfer orbit.

11:42And JAXA is going to do it. They are sending their moon explorer, Mars moon explorer, MMX, which is going to go explore the moons of, of Mars. Obvious name is obvious. But there isn't a NASA mission. And, and so the world is changing and there are new opportunities, but there's a lot of catch up going on. And, and yeah, it's a complicated time.

Changes in rocket technology

12:14So has the, you know, like, is the overall, like the rocket technology remained roughly the same for the age of like for the entire age of space exploration? So where we've seen the most changes is in what kinds of fuels are getting used. Those tend to migrate all over the map. Solid rocket boosters are something we are finally moving away from more and more. The problem with solid rocket boosters is once you ignite them, they are staying ignited.

12:46And you can't reuse them quite the same way because they're not coming back gently. So we're seeing more liquid rocket fuel being used. There is a movement towards methane, which is leading to a lot of research into just how much does an uncontained methane explosion explode. There was an accidental experiment done by both SpaceX and Blue Origin. So we, we are migrating between fuels as we go, but we're seeing hydrazine is getting slowly phased out kind of globally.

13:26Even China's using it less, which is a highly toxic fuel. Methane is essentially processed natural gas, which when you look at where are they building spaceports, Texas and Louisiana, we have the, the oil ports and SpaceX is actually looking to start putting in its own essentially pipelines to get all of the fuel they need. Yeah. And like, theoretically, the, the methane can be produced, like literally just pulling carbon dioxide out of the air, mixing with water chemically.

14:03They're not doing that though. No, they're not doing that. But this, this is a thing that SpaceX has said they might be able to do someday is use solar panels to, to draw the carbon dioxide and make the methane. And so, you know, it is, it can be, it is not, but it can be a, uh, climate carbon neutral fuel if you do actually make it chemically. So, you know, that is a possibility, which, you know, would be exciting. But, but at the same time, like right now the fuel is just so cheap to just, you know, it's a byproduct of, of the oil industry.

14:38There's plenty of people there have natural gas to sell you and it just makes sense to just, you know, set up a pipeline and have that stuff show up. Do you think that as we sort of look into the future, will the future of space exploration continue to look the same as it did for the last couple of decades? I don't know. Yeah. So the reason I say that is there are things like Dreamliner, which is a tiny space plane in the background. We are seeing Virgin Galactic starting to do more and more launches on commercial space.

15:13At the same time, we're seeing that Blue Origin isn't doing their New Shepard commercial launches. And there's this big commercial demand from wealthy people wanting to fly. We've even seen a few people like Sarah Hagel who've launched multiple times on these commercial flights. So that is going to be an interesting driver. We're also seeing better and better reliability from small sats. So we have companies like Rocket Lab that have their small sats.

15:47What is going to happen at the large spacecraft end, I think, is a whole lot of head scratching right now. But on the small sats end, I think we're seeing a lot of growth. And at the suborbital commercial space, we're seeing growth with the remaining hope that maybe we'll eventually get that tiny space plane that can make it all the way to the ISS. I'd love to see that before they deorbid the ISS. I'm not sure we're going to get that. But a girl can dream.

16:19Right. Yeah. So it's a dream chaser. So we're all hoping to see the dream chaser actually chase its dream, make it to the ISS before they deorbit it. Yeah. Yeah. That time is running short. We're now, what, three years away? But, I mean, I think you're talking about stuff that's really on the margin, where you're looking at, say, suborbital flights. Like, you've got a couple of launches coming from New Shepard, from Blue Origin, and they've even shut that down so they can focus their work on New Glenn. You've got a launch every couple of years from Virgin Galactic.

16:52Like, they're not launching all the time. And as you said, yeah, there's the dream chaser, which is kind of a version of, say, the X-38, which is this experimental rocket that is flown by the Space Force, I believe you call them. You know, it's like a mini space shuttle that is flown. And then the rest, it's just, it's Falcon 9s and it's Chinese rockets. It's Falcon 9s and Chinese rockets. They just launch and launch and launch. The Vulcans are starting to catch up.

17:23How many Vulcans have launched? One? They're starting to be about one a month. One Vulcan launch a month? They have a huge warehouse of them. I know. It's a slow catch up. They do have, like, a whole bunch of them ready to go. You have to give the young rockets a chance to catch up. But, yeah. Vulcans have launched five times total. They have a huge warehouse of them.

17:54Yeah, but they're not launching, right? There's one scheduled for October. Sure. Yeah. Six. There will be four Falcon 9s launch this week. I know. Right? I know. Like, it's really hard to understand how far SpaceX has just run away with the whole industry at this point. And this is with the technology. You say they're shutting down the rocket factory. I think that's madness. They're going to wish they didn't if that's a thing they're actually going to do. But if they can actually pull off with Starship, which we are obviously all watching and waiting

18:28with Beta Breath to watch them actually catch the upper stage of Starship back at the launch facility. And then, I mean, the Chinese are launching 50 to 60 rockets a year, more. And they are, as you said, there are two companies have. Actually, one is just the Chinese Space Agency. And the other is this other company called Landspace. And they have been able to successfully test the first stage reusability.

19:02And the ideas are kind of different. So with Landspace, with the Zhuchue, they're landing that in the desert at a launch facility, which is really cool. But with the one from the Chinese Space Agency, they've got these cables that sit on top of this. They're wild. Yeah, yeah. And then as the rocket slows itself down to land on this drone ship, on this barge. Pull them tight. They pull them tight and then cinch in and hold the rocket so it doesn't have to have landing legs,

19:33which saves you fuel and maybe provides more scalability. It's less terrifying. Yeah, than you try to land on a boat that is rocking back and forth in the ocean. But they're scaling up. So they're working on their larger version of the rocket, which is going to be for their moon missions. And then there are a bunch of companies that are making various spacecraft fully reusable two-stage rockets look similar to Starship. So I think if Starship works or even if two-stage reusable rockets actually works,

20:08then in a couple of years, we're just going to see Chinese rockets and SpaceX and the occasional Valken and the occasional Arion and the occasional New Glenn. So by the numbers, China has so far – we're recording this on September 21st – they have so far had 68 launch attempts, four failures, which is really kind of good considering all the experiments they've been doing. The United States has had 134 launch attempts, one failure since the Starships are not orbital.

20:43Their failures don't count against the statistics that I'm looking at in rocketlaunch.live. Yeah. And Russia's only at 14. Russia's only at 14 launches this year. Right. Yeah. Yeah. They're at war. And Arion Space is at six, and Arion Space used to use the Soyuz, so they're now relying on only the Arions. And the Japanese, I think, are at two or three? The Japanese are at three. Yeah. India's at three.

21:13Yeah. Germany's sitting over there at one. I didn't know there was a German rocket. Huh. What was that? I didn't even know there was a German rocket. That was relatively new. That was an ISAR space. It was the first launch from the EU, so yeah, it was cool.

Evolution of spacecraft components

21:30So then what about the technology? So we've talked about the rockets. What about the spacecraft? Are the spacecraft that we see today kind of the same thing that people have been working on for the last 40 years? No, that's where we've started to see remarkable change, where we are seeing the number of engines going up as technology allows much more fine control on how they're steered. It used to be that, like, you just couldn't control all those things with a light enough weight computer that used little enough electricity, because all of that stuff matters, to be able to have more than, like, the three engines the space shuttle had.

22:16Now we're getting up to dozens when you look at Starship that are fully steerable, and this is allowing us to start considering reusability a lot more. It's allowing much better control over launches. We saw with both the JWST and the Roman launch that they had such accurate control that they were able to conserve massive amounts of fuel and extend both space telescopes beyond their expected lifetime, which is limited by their ability to hold position and steer.

22:56So, as technology advances, we are allowed to use smaller engines with greater capacity to do more and do it more fuel efficiently. So, yay for miniaturization? Right, but you're essentially defining the computers that are in the rockets, and we talked about the rockets. I'm talking about just, like, the spacecraft. It's not like thermodynamics changes. No, no, no, no, but, like, I'm talking about, like, CubeSats and the kinds of technology, the components that are going into the spacecraft.

23:29Is that still kind of, you know, roughly the same or the same large-scale components present in spacecraft the way they were back in the day? Yeah, so spacecraft are pretty much the same set of things. You need to have something that is spinning that you use to maintain your stability and something that you use to transfer momentum around so that you can turn your spacecraft around. This is where we start looking at things like servos and gyroscopes and flywheels.

24:00You still have to have communications equipment. We are starting to test using laser communications instead of old-fashioned radio technology, but we're still using radio because the laser is still in testing, so that hasn't really changed. The solar panels are still solar panels, although the technology has been improving. We are using new molecular structures to get increased efficiency at lower weight, better origami is going into launching things.

24:33I love how much being able to fold things plays a role in spacecraft design. But in general, the big ideas are the exact same big ideas, and the new ideas are all still considered experimental. So light sales are a thing. They're still experimental. They're just now actually being tested. So 10 years from now, hopefully we'll have new technology being regularly used. Yeah, and we're going to be talking about these technologies in these future episodes, but I think there have been very few fundamental new technologies that have been sort of tried out, tested, and are now mainstream in my time as a space journalist.

25:23And again, 27 years of space journalism, and I can count on one hand. The really big technologies, and I would say the big one are the ion engines, right? We went from people imagining ion engines back in the 1960s. There was always a NASA paper from the 1960s about every single good idea. To, like, the deployment on Deep Space One, as, like, in the late 1990s, as the first time an ion engine was ever tested in space on an actual mission.

26:00Yeah. And then we see it on Dawn, and we see it on the Japanese spacecraft. And now all of those Starlinks are running. Beppe Colombo. Yeah, Beppe Colombo. But all of those Starlinks are running ion engines. Like, there are now more ion engine-driven satellites in orbit than there are anything else. So that is, like, a technological revolution that is taking over. And for many missions, the ion engine is the right way to go. And then I would say the other one, and you just sort of hinted at this, is the laser communicator versus the radio communication system.

26:32That for the longest time, again, you think about NASA communicating with its spacecraft. You think about these giant radio dishes in the desert that are communicating at just, like, kilobits per second. It's terrible. And NASA finally put an infrared laser system on—they put this on the International Space Station, and they put this on the Psyche mission. Artemis II, yeah. And they were able to communicate back at broadband bandwidth.

27:03So they're looking at megabits per second. They were able to transfer this hundred—I forget what it was, hundred megabyte—no, gigabyte? Anyway, a massive cat video back from the spacecraft, back to Earth. And now you're going to see these sort of hybrid communication systems where you're going to have, like, a radio dish with an infrared telescope on the radio dish. So it can either receive the radio signals from the spacecraft or it can receive the laser signals.

27:37And the telescope doesn't have to be very big. So it's a revolution. But a lot of it, as you say, is kind of back—you need a communication system. You need a—you need some way to kind of reorient the spacecraft, spinny wheels, propulsion. You need batteries. You need power. You need, you know, the main bus, like the actual intelligence of the thing. You need scientific instruments. These were all present in the 1970s, 1960s, right?

28:09And the basic idea of a multi-stage rocket goes back to the early 1900s. The using a fairing to protect your spacecraft goes back to the 1950s and 60s. It turns out that we've had the good ideas for a long time. It just took a while for the technology to catch up to make it more efficient. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, you know, that was us just ranting.

28:40Introducing the series. Introducing. Us just chatting, chit-chatting about some of the topics in space exploration and the kinds of technologies that we're going to be focusing on. And we will come back around, and we will be doing this all the way through September, October, November, and into December. So it is going to be probably the biggest series we have ever done, except for maybe the solar system one. The solar system was just as big. Yeah, they're going to be comparable anyway. And we will go deep into each one of these technologies.

29:14So next week, we are going to take on typical rocket engines and stages, why stages are important, how they work. So stay tuned. And my question for you, leave a comment. I used the title, rockets and spacecraft 411, because to me, 411 means get information. Is that just a U.S. thing? Did I screw up? So let us know if 411 means anything to you, because I want to know.

Patron updates and closing

29:46Okay.

Patron updates and closing

29:47This month, we'd like to thank the following patrons for all of their support here at AstronomyCast. Now, if you notice that list is a whole lot shorter than it was last year, this is because we have updated our Patreon tiers, moving around some benefits to reflect the effort it takes our team to do things.

30:20Believe it or not, reading your names is one of the most stressful things I do, because I really struggle with pronouncing things and feel bad when I screw up. We've moved Read Your Name to the $50 and up tiers, meeting with you once a year to the $20 and up tiers, adding your name to the end of videos to $10, with lower and higher tiers remaining unchanged. Thank you. You are what makes this show possible, all of you, in all of the tiers.

30:51All right. Well, thanks, Pamela. And we will see you all next week. Bye-bye, everyone.

31:04AstronomyCast is a joint product of Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. AstronomyCast is released under a Creative Commons attribution license. So love it, share it, and remix it, but please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today's show topic on our website, AstronomyCast.com. This episode was brought to you thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep this show going, please consider joining our community at Patreon.com slash AstronomyCast.

31:37Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been AstronomyCast. AstronomyCast. AstronomyCast. AstronomyCast. AstronomyCast. AstronomyCast. AstronomyCast. AstronomyCast.