 Hello, and welcome to TomorrowOrbit12.23. Today, we have got so much to talk about before we do that. Just a quick little introductions for all of us that are going to be talking to you here today. I'm Jared. Yeah, all two of us that are talking to you today. I'm Jared, and I'm also joined by my co-host, Jade, today. And we are going to be looking at what has happened so far in 2019, because we're a little more than halfway through 2019. And it's always good to just look back and see here. Self-reflect. Yeah, just how am I doing? How's space doing? Exactly, and we're going to take a look at what humanity has been doing with all these things. And we're just going to go right out to the asteroid belt to get things started with one of my personal favorite missions, which has been busy, busy, busy, busy, busy this year, which is Hayabusa 2. This is a mission from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency out to asteroid Ryugu. And it launched back in 2014. It arrived last year. And you could see it right there, taking a sample from the surface of asteroid Ryugu. Hayabusa 2 is a follow-on to their first Hayabusa mission, which was rife with problems. It was quite literally the robotic spacecraft equivalent of Apollo 13. And this has been sped up significantly, by the way. Here's the real-time version of what Hayabusa 2 did. Amazing. But back in February and just a couple of weeks ago in July, on July 11, Hayabusa 2 descended down to the surface of Ryugu. And when it detected that it was close enough, it fired a bullet made out of tantalum, which is an element that we do not expect to find in asteroids. And it ends up shooting that debris up into a horn that kind of like scoops it up. Because Hayabusa 2 is a sample return mission. It's going to be bringing this back to us here on Earth to study. And this is pretty exciting to me, at least. Yeah, I mean, it's the first of its kind, really. Yeah. I mean, Hayabusa originally did do sample return from an asteroid called Itokawa, but it had problems. Exactly. It only brought back a couple grams. Exactly. A couple grains of dust, basically, is what it brought back. Which is great dust. The dust was fine. I think this is where it's going to fire the bullet right into the surface of Ryugu here. And I just love that you could see all these rocks here, too, that tells us that Ryugu is not a solid rock. It's what we call a rubble pile. So it's a bunch of rocks all gravitationally bound to each other. There we go. We fired the bullet in. And there goes all the debris out. Escape velocity, by the way, from the surface of Ryugu is about a 10th of a meter per second. So you could get up out of bed and fly off of the surface for Ryugu there. So look at this absolute mess that we've made here. Gosh darn it. Yeah. Leave it to us. Yeah. And the neat thing about this, we'll get these samples back in December of 2020. And that should allow us to really get a up-close look at what these asteroids are made of. Which is good, because asteroids can hit the Earth. So if you know what an asteroid's made out of, it's like know your enemy. Yeah. You could figure out how to distribute it. Yeah, you could figure out how hard do I have to kick the asteroid. Exactly. Armageddon it, you know? Exactly. How do we get Aerosmith to come sing a song while we destroy it? But this has huge implications, too, for commercial mining, potentially, of these different solar system objects and whatnot. And then once we discover what it's actually made of in what quantities, and it's like, OK, well, how commercially viable is this to go out there and whatnot? So I see this opening up some crazy doors. Absolutely. Yeah, we can look at the metal content of this asteroid here. And then also Ryugu is a very interesting kind of asteroid. It's a CG-type asteroid. So C means that it's rich in carbon, which basically three out of every four asteroids are a C-type. And then it's also a G-type, which means that it may have lots of clays and micas in it, which are formed in typically wet environments. So what's another word for wet that you like saying? Moist. Moist. Moist. A moist environment. Moist. The thing about that is is that you can use that carbon for development of materials and other things you may have out there. You can also use those clays and micas to actually extract water out of it. And voila, you can build your spaceship and fuel it up right at an asteroid. And actually, we've had a couple of guests on. Momentus is one of them that I can think of that talked about actually pulling water out of asteroids and comets and using it as fuel. So fucking them dry. Yeah, and literally not like we're going to remove the hydrogen and the oxygen from each other just like hitting water with a little microwave beam and then sending that excited water out of a nozzle. I gotta go. There, yeah. And just to let you know, this specific story was suggested to us by Fitterion on community.tmro.tv. Thank you, Fitterion. We put a little post up there. And we're basically like, hey, what would you like to see us talk about on that there? And people replied. And you were very much in agreement with what we were thinking. So that means that we got it there. That is rubbly. Yeah, look at that. That is just absolutely beautiful. There you go. Take a look at this. And this right here, this crater was specifically caused by a vehicle that they had that, or not a vehicle, excuse me, a kinetic system. I really don't know how to describe it other than that way, a kinetic system that fired a shape charge that sent a bit of copper down and it made a 10 meter crater on the surface. Intentionally? Yeah, and this is two weeks ago when Hayabusa dipped down into that crater and grabbed that material. So this is not surface material it's grabbing. This is material below the surface. So then we can actually study even deeper. Exactly. So we're no longer looking at stuff that's influenced by the sun. We're looking at stuff that's been relatively covered up. Like legit. Buy it there. Yeah. And a couple of you were saying that this is some amazing footage you've never seen before. Yeah, this is fantastic. I just found out this morning, too, I was looking on Twitter and talking to some folks, this camera was publicly funded. Like, this camera was not going to be here, but then Jaxa was like, hey, who would want to pay to have a camera there? And just a ton of people took the money to make it happen. That's amazing. So yeah. Oh, I love that. What an awesome story. And I can't wait to see samples. Can't wait to see samples. Can't wait to see samples. So because why look at the universe when you can go out and touch it? So disturb it. Taste it. Make a mess of it. Yeah, eat it. Put holes in it. Shoot it. Yeah, we shot first. So that's what's up. There it is. That's the shirt, earth shot first. So yeah. That's our reputation in the cosmos now. Yeah, unfortunately. Well, there it is. All right. Well, that was lovely. Yes. So yeah, speaking of rocky bodies in the solar system, there is one called Mars. And it happens to be a friend of ours. It's a neighbor planet, of course. And you can't talk about Mars without its amazing rovers. And you can't talk about the rovers without mentioning good ol' opportunity. Oppy. OK, Oppy. Now, in terms of, I mean, every single rover we've ever sent to Mars is absolutely magnificent. But this one, I feel like truly touched the hearts of people because it was, well, the reason we bring it up, it says in 2019, it was February 13th, I believe. We officially called it an end. We officially said goodbye after a giant dust storm the previous year had basically kind of rendered it unresponsive. The worst dust storm in, at least, human-recorded history that we've ever seen on Mars. So it was like a killer storm, essentially. Exactly. Literally. And so it was a 2004 mission. It was only supposed to last for 90 days. It lasted for 15 years. I'll tell you something, if I get an assignment and I'm only supposed to do it for three months, I'm not going to continue on for 15 years. But this guy totally did. But I'm just saying. I'm going to go to college for a semester, 15 years later. OK, that wilder. And also, we can't understate the science that opportunity returned to us because some of my favorite discoveries about Mars were basically opportunities' fault. So for instance, we talk a lot about the habitability, potential habitability of Mars. And opportunity was one of the machines that truly opened our eyes to the fact that Mars was once pretty Earth-like. It was once very juicy, or shall I say, moist. And it was once pretty supple. It was able to potentially support life. And so specifically, I want to bring up the discovery of hematite. Opportunity took some photos of these cute little blueberry things on the surface. Who left those snacks? Oh, yes, here they are. Who at JPL left the snacks in the rover? Those snozzberries are these. And essentially, hematite only forms this globular shape when under the presence of constant flowing liquid water and fresh water at that. Yeah, absolutely. And it's little globs of iron oxide that kind of bond together like that. And when you hear about iron oxide, a lot of us think basically like, rust, oh no, it's been ruined. But no, iron oxide indicates that chemistry is occurring in chemistry kind of important for life. Just a little bit. Yeah, and a neat thing about API is that API was a part of a dual mission with two rovers, spirit and opportunity. Spirit landed first. Spirit was targeted to an area that was expected to have water and ended up basically landing in the middle of a volcanic rock plane. Luckily, later on, in its mission a couple years later, spirit did find evidence of geothermal springs, like hot springs and stuff on the surface, which now I want to go back in time and sit on some hot springs as far as. Right, it's like a spa on Mars. Is that what it would be like? Ooh, yeah, this is for. I mean, Washington. It dies immediately. But opportunity literally landed on the surface. First of all, opportunity, they use that airbag system. Opportunity and spirit are right on the limit of the weight that you can use for the airbag system. So that's it. That's why Curiosity moved to the Sky Crane and why Mars 2020 will use Sky Crane improved, I guess. So it bounced on the surface and it literally rolled into a crater. We just hit this huge, this massive golf swing towards Mars and we got a hole in one by doing that. Oh my gosh, how good was that? And then spirit had to battle, it had to fight for everything it did and opportunity just opened up the pedals and took photos and there was bedrock with the hematite right next to it. Oh, beautiful. And it was just like you overachiever, you. You poetic machine. Both of them, they're good rovers, Brent, but I swear there's just something about opportunity and. Yeah, I love that theory and actually says, and it's why I really wanted to talk about this is Oppy is the Rover, which made robots alive for me. And the thing about, especially this show in general, but this particular episode, we wanna talk about the technical and the cool science behind it, but really what we wanna talk about is the heart of these stories and the heart, I think, with opportunity is the fact that it really did. People were cheering Oppy on. Oppy became this character and the whole hashtag farewell Oppy thing that started to happen on Twitter like following the farewell was like tear inducing, you know? It's like what Wally did for robots in Pixar, but anyways. Well, I mean, I cried a little bit hearing that Oppy was done. So that was like a really. And then the last update was my battery is low and it's getting dark. Like come on, you know how to get us. It's just, that's like the line, like the robot sidekick in a movie says as they're dying, you know, and then they're shut down. Daisy. Right before it ends. Exactly. It did all. I can't do this anymore. So thank you, Oppy, once again. And we actually do have an episode where we did do like a nice comprehensive farewell to Opportunity. Yeah, I think it was the Space News segment earlier this year, right? Yeah, you just dig through those archives. Goodbye, Oppy. And then we also need to have someone who drove one of the rovers as well. That's right. Last year in orbit 11, so feel free to dig in through orbit 11 and look at that as well. Absolutely. So and in something in orbit 11 that we talked about actually was the test flight of Falcon Heavy, which happened back in February of 2018. But this year, you know, it only took 14 months. Granted, it is rockets. But this year, Falcon Heavy finally went operational. So we're no longer just talking about how great would it be to have this big old triple core barrel. Heavy Falcon. Sorry. You're heavy Falcon. Oh my gosh. You know, we're no longer just gonna have this really great, you know, animation of all this stuff. We're gonna have like fully operational. IRL. Here we are. It's fully operational now. It's been officially approved. This is the ArabSat 6A launch that happened on April 11th this year, which was the first successful triple core landing, by the way, although the center core did end up falling over and getting very badly damaged with that there, so sort of, you know, I love that meme that I saw on the internet that had a, what's his face? Ralph Wiggum sitting in the back of the bus saying, you know, chuckles, I'm in danger. And the tagline for it at the top was when you realize you're the center core of Falcon Heavy. So, because it's just, it's a curse so far. So, yeah. Thanks for that, a little note, I see how many right there, that's pretty good. So, Falcon Heavy has, or Falcon 9, just itself has really lowered the cost dramatically. That was the goal of Falcon 9, lower the costs, will reusability work. I still stand by my thing that they're not reusable yet until you have rapid turnaround, then it'll be officially reusable. Got it. They, refurbishable is what I would call them right now because, you know, Space Shuttle was refurbishable. It also had very long turnarounds. But I mean, SpaceX is just speeding so fast that, I mean, at this point, it's almost becoming semantics to just talk about it. Look at that beautiful tracking footage. My gosh. Who's the genius behind that gorgeous, gorgeous, oh my God. So, it's like a triple, I always call this the octoploom, but now it's like the tri-octoploom or something at this point. And I love the onboard shots here too. It's just like, that is so gorgeous. And yeah, I just, I can never get enough of watching these. And I can never get enough of watching people watch these. Yeah, there you go. Because it's just always so mesmerizing. It never gets old. That's the thing, is I feel like your heart never stops skipping a beat when you see footage like this because it's like, I mean, as much as we're doing in space and as many advancements as we're making, it's still crazy to think about like, just how far we've come and how much we're gonna be doing. Yeah. And to see something like this, it's like, oh yeah, we're humans, we did that, that's right. And this is, you know, and just to remind myself too, that we're relatively, we're still crawling at this point in terms of our abilities in space life. Absolutely. So like, and to think, oh, there we go. And to think, this is crawling, you know, like holy moly, that's pretty wild with that there. And you know, Falcon Heavy just is, I mean, you could chuck 64,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit. It can send 17,000 kilograms to Mars, which is more than we have the ability to land on Mars right now. Okay, we can just barely do a ton on Mars. This is like 17 of them capable of doing that. That's incredible. One thing I'd really like to see it used to are, maybe for Pluto. Oh yeah. It could do about 3,500 kilograms to Pluto. Exactly. We're gonna get that Pluto orbiter, that Pluto super orbiter. And maybe we'll be talking about something a little cold like that a little bit later today. Yeah, most definitely. Of course we now know that Falcon Heavy is not going to be crew rated and also it's going to eventually be replaced by Starship, it's super heavy. So Falcon Heavy, even though it is here, it's days are numbered, if you will. But I mean, it's still gonna most certainly be used for quite a while. I mean, there's just a lot of ability in Falcon Heavy and in some cases for some payloads, it's actually cheaper to fly it on a Falcon Heavy than it is to fly it on a Falcon 9. So I guess we'll have to see what the future holds for Falcon Heavy and definitely looking forward to more launches and definitely looking forward to the curse of the center core being overcome eventually with that. That's one heavy Falcon. Yes, that is heavy. I had to put it in. That's heavy, Doc. All right, and okay, so going from rockets to something more cosmological. Oh, cosmos. So actually another pretty amazing thing that happened this year was the first direct imaging of a black hole. Oh my gosh! So okay, I'm gonna start with this. I'm gonna start with this. So before we had this beautiful image, which we will see shortly, when we thought of black holes and the different artistic renditions, this is the type of imagery we were given. It's like, okay. So the black hole, obviously, you can't see it because the light does not bounce back off. It's completely absorbed. But what you do see is this basic, sorry, TV, this gravitational disturbance around it. You see gravitational lensing. This is literally the light being bent by the just insane gravity and mass of this object. Oh, look, there's Matthew McConaughey. Oh, hey, Matt. Oh, there's Roddy McDowell right behind there. There she is. So essentially, this is kind of like, so we did have to finesse our imaginations. And again, the thing is, is that the black hole, the definition of it in and of itself is that you can't technically see it because the only reason you could see us is because there's light waves bouncing off of us, going straight into your eye holes. Or to the CCDs that they have, which turns it into magic, magic particles. And then the magic particles go from here through the air. We're going to table that discussion. To people's computers. Then they come in right into the eye holes. What can we say? Our producer said he wanted us to be ourselves today, so this is what you get next. Don't tell them that. Yeah, just kidding. And so, and then I believe we have the image of the actual, yeah, there it is. So, look at that thing. This is actually way more impressive. Like if you actually know what you're incredibly looking at, first of all, the amount of data and the amount of, this was taken with the Event Horizon Telescope Array. Which is 11 telescopes. Which is a bunch of telescopes. Exactly. And it's a gigantic interferometer. Exactly. Which basically means that you take all the data from these telescopes. It's like five million terabytes. Yeah, 5,000 trillion bytes of data. Five petabytes. So, it was actually so much data. Five petabytes. Five petabytes. It was so, I just want to say this. It was so much data that they literally could not transfer it via internet or anything like it. They just basically grabbed the hard drives right out of the telescopes. And flew them into the data center where they were going to be crunching. And they use supercomputers though. Like generate this image. And goodness, look what we're looking at here. So what you're actually seeing is this like super heated, glowy gas that is basically falling into this black hole. And this was taken in X-rays. Like just different forms of basically X-rays, microwaves, in combinations they're out with them. And so not only was it a huge technological effort and accomplishment, but also black holes, I feel like are one of the more intriguing things in science, especially astronomy. Like whenever some, oh yeah, it comes from the gap. By the way, I'm so sorry. This is the galactic core of M87, right? Yes. Exactly. So this is essentially what we're looking at right here. And M87 in the Virgo cluster, about 55 million light years away from us. Pretty far. Not necessarily a walk in the park. But essentially, black holes are, I feel like one of the most popular things to talk about in pop science. Because they're so gnarly, they're often represented in sci-fi. And it's true, like they're probably one of the most interesting things that exist in the universe. And now we have an actual direct image of them. And that's just kind of like mind boggling. Cause like 10, 15, 20 years ago, to think that we could capture an image like this, have the capability to gather all this data, use 11 telescopes across the world to do that, I mean. Even 30 years ago, people were still doubting the existence of black holes. It wasn't until that team at UCLA in the late 80s and early 90s, basically stared at the center of the Milky Way for an incredibly long time. Real hard. And over years, literally just mapped the positions of all those stars, figured out that one of those stars ends up getting around the galactic center, moving at like single digit percentages of the speed of light. And basically was like, there's something with a lot of mass sitting there. And that was big with it. And then obviously observational evidence built upon that as well. But in science, you always have to be open so it wasn't like 100% confirmed. And then LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, came along and basically put the feather in the cap and detected two gravitational waves, two black holes combining together. And that was basically like, yep, there a thing confirmed, you know, officially official. And now we've gone and taken an actual, like, resolvable image of a black hole as well. And I kinda wanna, can we go back to that image real quick because I wanna talk about this image and what you're actually looking at here in terms of what you can see in here. So everybody's looking at this dark bit right here and going, whoa, that's a gnarly event horizon, but this actually isn't technically the event horizon. This is a shadow that's being cast by the event horizon. The event horizon's still deep within there. And also this right here, you know, the black hole here, we're not looking straight down or straight at it, M87's black hole is kinda tilted towards us here in the Milky Way. So this is material that's actually in front of the black hole to us. And then this up here is actually material that's directly behind the black hole, but the gravity here is bending that light so much that we're able to look behind the black hole just by the light bending around it like that. So this is actually, this right here is behind the black hole. This is in front. So we can see this directly. We're only seeing this because of the, just the gravity that's there. It's absurd. And then this right here is like three times the size of our solar system from out to the orbit to Neptune, so. It was an absolutely fascinating video of somebody doing a modeled visualization of what that actually looks like and where all the data comes from. We should put a link to that in the notes, show notes. Yeah, we certainly will. And what was so cool about this too is that they modeled what the image should look like based upon our understanding of physics with everything with that. So we did that and we ran it through super computers and we're basically like, this is what it should look like and this is what that image that we get should look like and bam, it was almost a perfect match. So basically physics as we understand it presently is pretty good. Still working. Still working. Obviously problems, dark matter, dark energy, but we're working on it. We're getting there, we're getting there. And one last thing I want to say about this, again, tying it back into kind of its like public, the impact on the public in society, the memes that were generated following this photo's release on the internet did not disappoint. You have some memes? I don't. My favorite one happens to be incredibly inappropriate, but there are some, look them up, just Google it. They're all really good, so. My favorite one was like somebody had like a box of Krispy Kreme's and there was like 12 of the black hole images. One of my favorite is like, there's like a hand like secretly like this. Oh my god. It's like, I get it, you internet, you're funny. I just want to say one more thing about that image just because of how amazing it is. And just it's kind of one of those things that's like, this is the best of humanity. Like when we all come together, this is the amazing stuff that we can end up doing. Taking an image of this black hole and resolving it with as much detail as we did, basically it's the equivalent of pointing a optical telescope from Los Angeles to New York. So across the entire United States, which is big. So. I've been told. Yes, so compared to places like Europe and stuff, it actually does take a while to get across the United States. West's purchase. Yeah, you know, just for everything like that. We easy on a purchase really. Yeah, what can we say? Hey man, it's big. So it's like looking from LA to New York, seeing that somebody's reading a newspaper and being able to discern the period at the end of the sentence. I can't even do that with a newspaper in front of my face. It's amazing. It's just mind. Exactly. Boggling. The implications of just, yeah, that. And Prismara has a really good comment right here, which is if we can do this with a radio dish the size of the Earth, imagine what we could do with hundreds of radio telescopes and orbit around the sun, a dish the size of a solar system. That would be absolutely absurd. So. And the best way to stop that. Yeah, that would, I just, yeah, holy smokes. That would just blow me away with that there. Yes. And, you know, earlier in the show we talked about cold, dark places, right? My favorite. Yeah, some good stuff. All the fun happens in cold, dark moist places. Swampy. So, that's also a word I don't ever want to hear. This one though, we're going to go all the way back to the beginning of the year, like literally the beginning of the year as in like the opening minutes of 2019 because the New Horizons spacecraft on January 1st when all of us were partying, there was a bunch of scientists that were busy having it fly by this thing. Having a science party. Right here, yeah, 2014 MU69, also known as Ultimatuli right here. And this is sort of one of the better images that we have of it so far. Composite of all the different images that New Horizons took in true color as well. So it really is sort of this, this like reddish brown with it there. So pretty cool place. It's what we call a classical cold Kuiper Belt object. So what does that mean? What is that? Well, it's not like Pluto. Pluto is a Kuiper Belt object. Regardless of what you think it's a planet or a dwarf planet, Pluto is a Kuiper Belt object. So it is close enough to the sun that the influence, or the sun has influenced it. It has chemically changed portions of its surface and other things like that. So we would expect to find very complex things on Pluto. Not essentially like what we would expect to find our universe started out with. Oh. If just to let you know here, this is Ultimatuli in the flesh right here. Yes, so this was a sample return mission. Yes, a sample. It came back within a day. Hayabusa three, new Hayabusa, or Hayabusa horizon, anyways. So I guess since I'm holding this, I should talk a little bit about this. Oh no, pretend it's not even there. Yeah, so yeah, so my therapist told me that was not nice. Anyways, sorry, I'm sorry, Altima. So it looks like it's, it looks, the jokingly called it the snowman. Yeah. It looks like a snowman, you know, everything with that there. So with this snowman, they flew behind new horizons and then they looked at Ultimatuli as they went past. And there's an amazing GIF that comes from that. Go on. So, and that GIF, or GIF, or whatever you want to call it, actually ends up showing us that Ultimatuli is not the spherical things. Oh. It's slender. Oh my gosh, it's slimmed down so much more than we were expecting it to. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah. So that is such an interesting shape. The one thing that always fascinates me is the shapes that these objects take on out there because consider, I mean, so what's the main composition of Ultimatuli? What's it mainly comprised of? So it is mostly water ice. Exactly. It's also got methanol on the surface. And there's also complex organics on there. So basically stuff with carbon in it. So what's so cool about that is water at those distances away from the sun in those temperatures, it's really like harder than rock. That's why those mountains on Pluto are able to get so huge. They're made of water ice and they're essentially indestructible at those temperatures. Yeah, those mountains on Pluto are like five kilometers tall. Insane, yeah. And it's all water ice. It's not like... That's like, okay. It's not rock. And on something the size of Pluto, that's like a one foot tall person with like 18 inch biceps. Like it's just weird and very interesting. But essentially, yeah. Like going back to the general shape of it. I mean, there it is. There we go. Oh, little duck. So when we were approaching with New Horizons, there was no real light curve with Ultimate Tully. It was just basically a flat brightness. And they were kind of worried about that as in like what's going on? Is there lots of debris in this area? Things like that. Nope, it just turns out that it's literally rotating just at the spacecraft. We happen to fly right at the pole of it that it rotates on. So, just our luck, right? That we ended up getting this rotation that we're just like steering right down the barrel. And also just our luck too, that it was a relatively debris free ride going forwards. Because that was a big concern was, we need to have a clear path or else by spacecraft. You run into it, yeah. I mean, seriously, New Horizons went past at like 14 kilometers per second. Exactly. I mean, you don't want to hit a snowflake at that speed. So, oh. You mean one of us? I'm just kidding. Millennials. Here is that amazing shot that New Horizons took as it went past Ultimate Tully. And that is what allowed us to basically figure out that it really does have this very slim pancake-like shape with it there. And what that tells us is that first of all, we were pretty confident that these are two separate objects. So, this was all by itself at one point. This was all by itself at one point. They were orbiting independently. And then they kind of came together and they stuck or they got, they sticked or they stuck it or whatever you want to call it. And seeing it like this, you know, flat on like this ends up telling us that they did not collide, they did not combine at a tremendous velocity. It was not an energetic combination. Or else it would be more like a cohesive. It would be more cohesive, more deformed in this area as well. So when you- It's like they kissed and then- Yeah, not kissed. Got stuck. So, like when you see the comet that Rosetta orbited, Churruyama of Gerasimenko, or 67P, whichever you prefer, this, that comet was a very, that was a impact that had some good energy behind it. Because it squished in here. But ultimately did not have that. They think, scientists think that they actually combined at about a couple of feet per second. Or as they said at the press conference- Like slow motion like- At the press conference they said that it was probably about the speed that a cat walks that they came together. I love, can we only measure speeds by the speeds that cat walk? Yeah, sure, we sure could. So, yeah, so the fly by was at roughly 33,000 times the speed of a cat walking. There we go. And what I love about this is that ultimately it's very far away, it's too far away to have been greatly influenced by the sun. Exactly, it's a time capsule. So, it is a time capsule. So, this is not the foundation of what we are made out of. This is what the foundation itself is made out of. So, this is not us. This is before us. This is beyond primordial. It does not get much older than this in our solar system. And that's what's so exciting about it. Absolutely, completely. New Horizons is very far away. This fly by occurred at 6.6 billion kilometers from the Earth. New Horizons transmitter is only 15 watts of power. So, imagine trying to listen to that from that far away. It means we're only getting about one to two kilobits per second of data. So, even though it took all that data in on basically what was a several hour long fly by on January 1st of this year, that data's gonna take till September of next year to finally all get downloaded. But, they're working with it. I'm excited to see what comes out of it though. I am too. I'm also very excited because they're supposed to be starting very soon a survey with the imaging systems on New Horizons to see if there are any targets beyond that New Horizons may be able to maneuver to. And I'm very excited about that. Because I would love to see an even further out and see what that looks like. How much more classical can you get? How much more classical? How much more cold? How much more kuiper can you get? It's very kuipery. So, can you handle this? You better loosen your belt because there's so much kuiper in this. With all these objects happening in there. Oh, it spun away. So, that was pretty good. So, yeah. So, we also had quite a large number of honorable mentions that we wanna give off as well with this. And basically the vast majority of these were suggested by a multitude of members on our community at community.tmro.tv. We're gonna talk about Chang'e Four, which was China's second lunar lander on the surface of the moon. And specifically it was the first anything to land on the far side of the moon. It was suggested by our community to talk about that a little bit. Had a little rover called U2-2, which moved out and also had an experiment on board, which you talked about a little bit. Oh, yeah, exactly. So, this is the first time anything's been grown on the moon. And while it's not being grown directly on the moon, it's definitely in its own little biosphere. But this is organics being grown in the environment of the moon. And that is huge, especially because we love to talk about the potential for going to the moon and all the cool things we can do once we're there. Yeah, and you would like to have a system that allows you to make food. Yeah, growing organics has so many benefits, whether it's generating oxygen. Wastewater cleanup, oxygen, carbon dioxide scrubbing. Sanity for the humans who want to see something alive. Really, honestly, it is psychologically beneficial for you to actually see something like a plant. And I would love to take some orchids or something to the moon. That would be pretty cool, some lunar orchids with it. Also, a little bit from Perry on our community.tmro.tv. Talked about the Bear Sheet Lander, which was Israel's attempt to land on the moon by space I.L. Unfortunately, they had a problem with the gyroscope, which caused a shutdown of the main engine and it ended up, it did technically reach the surface of the moon just at about one kilometer per second, so which is usually, it's not a good speed with that there, but hot's off. I mean, no private entity had done that before with that. So that was impressive. Yeah, and yeah. I was just gonna say, and it's so cool to see such a global effort to all of a sudden be accomplishing all of these things. It's no longer just too big place. Yeah, it really is. Couldn't have said it better myself. Also, a big shout out to Space I.L. as well. They had a lot of problems with their optical navigation cameras and they worked through those problems and got it to the moon and got it in orbit and got it actually close to where they wanted to land it on the moon, even with those problems. So that's impressive. Incredibly impressive. I got to say. Very proud of yourselves. One of my favorite stories of the year, which is the VFO1 flight of VSS Unity, this flight from Virgin Galactic. Yes. Didn't just have two pilots on board. It also had Beth Moses, who is the astronaut trainer on board. So there you go, the two pilots and Beth got their commercial astronaut wings from the FAA because we're soon going to be ditching the is Pluto a planet debate and start the is 80 kilometers space debate with this here, which we can definitely have a fisticuffs some day on this show about. Do it right now. Yeah, but just it's really great to see Virgin Galactic moving head with everything. Absolutely. Especially after the problems they've had and just seen them, I want to say soar, literally into the skies with the work that they're doing. But I'm very excited. I definitely would love to ride on that. So Richard, if you're listening, hook me up. Yo, Branson. I'll make it happen. Also Blue Origin too with New Shepherd is making advancements as well. They're actually carrying payloads on their microgravity flights with their capsule and their booster. And that's very exciting too, because now you don't have to pay a couple million to put your experiment on a CubeSat. If you need a couple minutes of weightlessness, you just toss some money at Blue Origin. A couple tens of thousands of dollars to make it happen. And Hanny's War Rip was correct, yes. This is a beautiful, beautiful machine, gorgeous. I mean, I know that space planes are inherently more dangerous than capsules, but I also just don't care about that either, because they're just, not only are they inherently more dangerous, they're also inherently more beautiful. So just want to throw it out there. Hey, there's us. Like people? That's us. That's Los Angeles right there. We're actually, the studio is behind the boom right there. So, what do you know? So, that's pretty cool. So, and then, oh my gosh. Yes, can you believe it? Finally, the demonstration mission one from SpaceX. Oh, I know, right? Crew Dragon, look at it, there it goes. There it goes. Oh my gosh, this was so exciting, because we've been talking about the commercial, CCDev, you know, commercial crew development for gosh years now. So, it's just been going on. And here we are. So, we are officially not that far away now. Months, maybe a year, I don't know, till we officially start carrying crew. And this was the first flight of a Crew Dragon. And it, from all accounts, did very, very well. Obviously, there's things that you have to contend with. That's why you do test flights. And there's Ripley with the, did they give the earth a name? I don't think they gave the earth a name. Did they give the earth a name? I don't think so. They just call it, we'll just call it earth. There's Ripley in the earth in there. And then here it is on approach. Oh my gosh, that is such a cool head. Little earth. Little earth, okay, thank you very much. There it is on approach. I can hear the blue Danube in my head right now with it there. But this is so exciting to watch this happening. Because soon people are gonna be riding in that. Although, not that specific capsule, because unfortunately on April 20th this year, during a test of their Super Draco, thrusters for the launch escape system for it exploded. And it exploded. They didn't even have to reach out and grab this one. It just came right up and booped them on the nose. Yeah, look at that. It just did that very, very nicely. With a docking adapter that a cargo dragon took up, by the way, as well. So just in case you wanna know. So very, very cool that we're back and doing that again. So bam. And then of course we gotta talk about Starlink because astronomers have been freaking out. Yeah. Just a little bit about Starlink, but a lot of us are still very excited about it because this is gonna be satellite internet. This is gonna be opening up access to the internet to anybody on this planet who can. Exactly, democratizing access to literally the largest hub of information in the world. Yeah, I can't think of a better thing to do for humanity. Absolutely, in the 21st century that is the best thing you can do. Because as has been often talked about off air here, is that there are places where it is very difficult to get knowledge. Yeah, exactly. So, and this is gonna hopefully open up that ability to allow anyone to get whatever kind of knowledge they need. And all it takes is a kid to watch the right YouTube video of a rocket launch. And all of a sudden you have just inspired just the next generation of people who are gonna get us to the farthest reaches in space. And this is the first, I guess, Slavo, first launch of what will be a very large number of satellites in excess, I think of 11,000 now, just from SpaceX alone. So, getting ready to test that and work with that. This has often been cited as a critical part of the revenue stream in order to make Mars happen at SpaceX. So, we'll see what happens because no satellite internet provider has succeeded ever. So, we'll have to see how it goes with that. And, hey, Zorro Rope on Twitch is asking how many years will it take to deploy all these satellites, and I actually do not know. I am unaware of that, and I'm not going to. Is there a schedule? I'm not gonna try to pull people over your eyes about that either. Yeah, I don't know. So, that's, but, hey, it will take a while. But they can launch 60 at a time. So, 11,000 divided by 60, that's a number. So, yeah. And then, Artemis. Yeah. Artemis. Well. Are you excited about Artemis? I mean, of course I am. I'm pretty excited about Artemis, too. Also excited about Clips, the commercial lunar payload services program that NASA is doing. They already have three that they have contracts with to basically send small payloads for NASA or other commercial partners to the surface of the moon with. So, very, very excited to see them doing that and moving ahead with that. And the moon, it's so hot right now. Yeah, speaking of the moon, we also had the amazing 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. Yes. We just actually wrapped that up. We're in the month of it. And, I mean, self-explanatory, really. I don't think we have to go too in depth as to, gosh, that's cool. Just the relevance. And again, just to see everybody so excited about it and to see all the amazing programming, in fact, BBC America featured some of us turkeys from tomorrow. Yeah, I can't believe that. I'm still in shock over that. Pretty wild. Anyways, so. Yeah. Did you watch the NASA do the stream of this in real time? I did, yeah. I watched it, too. And my internet froze right as Neil was taking the step. And I was literally like, this is the future we get to look forward to with that Mars mission. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, but oh my gosh, it was so exciting. There was so much good stuff and also so amazing to hear from Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin. I know, right? Michael Collins is like the guy that you never hear from. And he is so eloquent. He is so poetic. So classy. And his Twitter feed is so funny as well. He's hilarious. He's great. I love them all. They're amazing. And then we're going to go over to India, because I mean, moon, moon, moon, moon, moon. So why don't we talk a little bit about India, who is going to be going to the moon with their second mission, to the moon called Shandron 2, which launched just earlier this week. This is going to be an orbiter with a lander. And that lander has a rover on it. And they will actually be doing the first landing at the Lunar South Pole, which is exactly where we are looking at sending humans for Artemis. Because if there's water ice there, you can use that water ice there for things like water, oxygen, rocket fuel, a whole bunch of other things that you could do with that. So super excited that landing will happen in early September. So we're still a little bit of a time away from it. But if they do that, India will become the fourth country to land on the moon. And aren't you a little short for a rocket? Let me tell you, that launch vehicle from India has got some pep to it. So it's pretty tough. And also, this is so cool that now all across the Earth, it's not just the United States. It's not just Russia. It's not just China. India's getting in on it. And Japan's also talking about getting in on this now as well. So it's just so exciting. And I think when we, and like you said, this is all space is such a collaborative effort to see all these nations participate. And then to imagine the future where we all just kind of like, I hate to use the word. It's a buzzword, synergize. Imagine the amazing things we can accomplish. And it doesn't just bring out the best of the United States. It doesn't just bring out the best of Russia or China. It brings out the best in all of us. Exactly. And that's one of the reasons why I adore space with that. Also, talking a little bit about China, they also had their hyperbole of one launch, which was the first private orbital launch vehicle success outside of the US from China. And this was suggested by Wicked. And there it goes. It is made out of a bunch of solid motors that have been bought. So the company iSpace that did this, not entirely their design. But I still don't want to detract from what they did because launching a vehicle into space is not easy. So if it was easy, everybody would be doing it, right? So and there's only a handful of people that end up doing that. And yeah, so congratulations. I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens in the future with this. And competition's good. Competition's healthy. Absolutely. Everybody wins when we have competition for stuff like this. So very exciting. And Robert Allen from YouTube is saying, now we must discuss Hopper and Starship. And you know, I mean, come on. We got a, that was basically what everybody wanted to talk about in the community post. There it is, the flying water tank. Oh my god. Exterminate. Exterminate. Exterminate. Watch as Methilox. Yeah, that's all I'm going to do, get that there. Yep, so Star Hopper took its jump. And actually, Ben and I have a bet. Is it a dollar bet or are we, no, we're still sticking with it? OK, so we took a bet back in, oh my gosh, what was it, like March of 2018, I think, where I said that Star Hopper flies over 96 meters, if it flies higher than 96 meters by the end of 2019, so December 31st, 2019. I will eat an entire Rocketdyne RS-25D with mustard. So what is, what? It's a space shuttle main engine. No, but you're going to eat an entire. I'm going to eat a rocket engine. Yeah. Yeah. With mustard. Can't. So, OK. Yeah, so. We're looking up information on Elon's Twitter account to see if we can comment further. I'm going to just go ahead and say that I'm going to be there to see that. That was a 20 meter jump. That was not the actual hop. No, it was not. You're right. You're right. That was a 20 meter jump. Actual. We're looking up, we're looking up some more information, so stand by. OK, all right. I mean, close out the show, and then maybe we'll something. Yeah, sure. All right. Basically, I'm going to end up eating an engine by the end of this year. Probably within a couple weeks, so which will be fine because I'll be really hungry when I get back from a trip, so that'll be fun. And I just want to say, these kinds of bets and stuff, they're always for fun. And also, these are the kinds of things that I have zero issues being wrong about because I love seeing stuff like this moving forward. I'm not trying to make fun of them or anything. The other day, somebody got mad at me on Twitter because I said that the firetruck at Bolsa Chica's traveled a longer distance than Star Hopper has, but you know, that's a whole other story. So that was just a joke, people. It was a joke. All right, so. All right. Let's go on. Let's wrap this up. Yeah. You want to wrap it? I want to. Thank you guys so much for joining us. As you can see, 2019 has already been epically amazing and it's gonna be way amazing. There's so much more stuff to happen this year. There's so many activities. I don't even know how we're gonna record on all of them. I don't know either. Just kidding, we're stoked about it. So thank you so much for joining. And of course, you folks are the ones that make the show possible. Of course, we have different tiers of citizens who support us, such as the escape velocity, the orbital citizens, and of course, the suborbital. Suborbital. And then you also have ground support, too. Exactly. You can't be flying stuff without ground support. No, you can't. No, you can't eat rocket engines without ground support. That's right. And these are all folks who contribute a monthly amount via Patreon, patreon.com. And they literally make this show run. They make it possible. They are. Also now, you can go to youtube.com. slash tmro slash join. And you can actually fund us directly through YouTube now. And on the YouTube version, so on Patreon, there's a certain amount that you have to give. On YouTube, you can literally do, like, what is it? A dollar? One dollar for the entire month. So if you get something out of this and you feel like it's worth $1 for the entire month, feel free. We appreciate anything and everything that you can do. It all counts. And even non-monetarily, smash that like button, share this with your bestest friends, send it in your work email, to all your coworkers. Like notifications. Exactly. All that good stuff. Community.tmro.tv. Get active back on there as well. Yeah, absolutely. And our Twitter at tmro as well. So feel free to contact us however you need to. And I believe on that, that pretty much wraps it up for the show. So we hope that you enjoyed your review of 2019 so far. I have a feeling we're going to be doing another review at the end of the year. Absolutely. And there's probably going to be a rocket engine there for me to eat. So thanks for watching 12.23, everybody. And we'll see you next time.