Best Possible Space Mission, Sea Launches, Sun's Siblings | Q&A 337

What would be the best possible space mission if there were no budget restrictions? Why do we launch all our rockets from ships in the ocean? What are the stars that formed with our sun and where are they? And in Q&A plus, where is the center of the universe? Answering all these questions and more in this question show. It's time for the question show. Your questions, my answers as always wherever you are across my channel. If question pops in your brain, just write it down. I'll gather them up and I will answer them here. All right, let's get into the questions. John Hoy, given no budget restraints in hypothetical world and limited to utilizing existing technology, which space mission would you sanction? I mean, it's kind of a tricky question because I get there's no budgetary constraints, but I have to use existing technology. I mean, I think, you know, anytime you want to take on a new mission, you have to have some technological risks. you've got to be attempting some new technologies that have never been done before. So, I'm going to sort of assume that what you mean is like no magical technologies, no no fusion drives that that don't exist and no warp drives and and things like that. So the thing that I would like to see most in my lifetime is a mission to the solar gravitational lens where we can actually set up a telescope uh where we use the the gravity of the sun as a natural telescope and then we get a megapixel image of a exoplanet that would just allow us to see mountains and forests and oceans and cities on another planet that is hundreds of light years away. That would be mind-blowing. So that would be one of the greatest things that we could do. But I think, you know, our current technology right now, we don't have any way that we know to get out to that kind of distance within a reasonable amount of time. Uh, you know, we're talking about getting much farther than the Voyagers are right now in in a decade, and we don't know how to do that yet. So, I would say, you know, I'm going to be kind of boring, but, you know, in terms of telescopes, I want to see an a space-based intererometer. I want to see you know two telescopes maybe in a different wavelength like near infrared but that are operating on a distance you know they are 100 m apart they are uh a kilometer apart and they are in such perfect alignment that they can act as a telescope that is the size of the gap between the telescopes and so it would be as if you had a telescope that is a 100 meters across or a thousand meters across or whatever. Um, and there's some great ideas that you could deploy these on the surface of the moon and you could sort of dial in their distances so they're absolutely perfect. And that would be uh just a huge leap beyond Hubble, web, anything that anybody is planning. Uh, and I think that is that is feasible. That is a you know it would cost in the tens of billions of dollars um and would require a lot of engineering challenges to build a proper space-based intererometer. But if we could do that then we would be able to leapfrog to the next big questions right you know now we're wondering about you know are those volcanoes on that planet or are those mountains right those are the kinds of questions we could be asking when right now we're still at the point where we can't even necessarily observe um any specific exoplanet and we definitely can't directly image earthsized worlds orbiting around sunlike stars. So so that would be great. Um, and then I think in terms of planetary exploration, I think I want to go to Enceladus and I want to have a lander drop right at the Tiger Stripes at the South Pole of Enceladus. This is where water is being hurled out into space. And so you could actually go and and sample that water and search for some kind of evidence, you know, uh, organic molecules, evidence that life exists under the ocean in Enceladus. And maybe even send a probe down, right? You could actually go down into those tiger stripes against the flow of material that's coming out and try to get down to the ocean down beneath and explore it directly. And you know that kind of technology, all the bits and pieces have been worked out, but it's just too complicated, too expensive to actually pull that off. So, so I think those would be two of the most interesting things that we could do here in the solar system in the sort of feasible future. Adam Red wine, launching near the equator saves some energy, but what if you want a circumpolar orbit? Would you want to launch from a higher or lower latitude? So, as you said, when you launch from the equator and you're moving in the same direction as the equator, uh, then you get to take advantage of the orbital rotation of the Earth, and that allows you to save a certain amount of fuel or be able to launch a heavier payload. I mentioned, you know, the speed, the Earth's rotation is 1,600 km per hour. And so if you launch a rocket, uh, you get a free boost of 1,600 km/h, as long as you want to go into orbit in the same direction around the equator. But if you want to launch any circumpolar orbit, then you're going to want to uh cancel out that sideways uh orbital velocity and then be able to launch more north south. And yeah, the farther north or south you are, then the less of that uh sideways orbital velocity you have to cancel out. And there are several launch facilities that are, you know, the Russians do a lot of polar orbits. Um there are US facilities and actually they're planning on building one here in Canada that will be able ideal for doing uh polar orbits, but you can still do a polar orbit from uh you know from the equator as well. It just requires you have to cancel out that that sideways or maybe you want it right. Um so that you're, you know, the Earth is going to rotate underneath you and you're going to be able to then orbit around from pole to pole and be able to see all of the Earth. There's a lot of other like really interesting orbits that people have have come up with. There's like suns synchronous orbits. There's thing called Mona orbits. Uh ways that you can actually just go around the Earth, retrograde orbits, uh ways that you can get uh geostationary orbits. So there's a lot of really cool orbits you can use depending on what you want to accomplish with your spacecraft and there are different places to launch depending on what you want to do. Chris Nelson, what efforts are being made to discover stars similar to our sun or stars that were created alongside the sun in such a hypothetical stellar nursery? Plenty of work is being done to try to find these stellar siblings of the sun. And there's sort of like two main things that you're looking for. The first thing is that you're looking for stars that have a similar path that they're taking around the Milky Way to the sun. Sort of similar distance from the center of the Milky Way, similar orbital trajectory going around the Milky Way. And thanks to Gaia, right, the Gaia mission is the one that is has mapped out all of these stars and they found many stars that have very similar trajectories to the sun and so could very well have been stellar siblings of of the sun, you know, 4 and a half billion years ago. And then the second thing is to analyze the chemical composition of various stars. And so there are other surveys that are looking at the chemical fingerprint of various stars. And they're looking for stars that are very similar to the sun. And there have been several candidates, at least one for sure, that has almost the exact same chemical characteristics as the sun and has a very similar orbital trajectory as the sun. And so it's believed that that is one stellar sibling of the sun. But there would probably be hundreds of other stars, if not thousands, just moving around the Milky Way that were once part of the same stellar nebula that the sun was. Mouse destruction. Sterling engines in space. Yes, sterling engines in space. Um, so like a sterling engine and I'm I don't like 100% understand exactly how they work, but um that when you have spacecraft that are attempting to use heat to produce electricity uh like the radioisotope thermmoelectric generators, they use this thermalouple to extract the heat from this decaying chunk of plutonium that can turn into electricity that the spacecraft can then use. you know, spacecraft can get a couple hundred watts out of this decaying chunk of plutonium. But another method that you can extract electricity from a system is to use this thing called a sterling engine. And like I don't know the exact operation, I apologize, but but the Chinese have tested out a sterling engine on board their space station and demonstrated that in zero gravity, the sterling engine works. And so it could be a replacement for a radioisotopic thermmoelectric generator. Instead, you have a dang chunk of plutonium that is producing heat and it's extracting heat through the sterling engine to produce electricity. But there's also another idea that I that I really like, which is that on Venus, you could land a rover onto the surface of Venus and have its internal parts remain as cold as possible. and the outside of the of the rover is very very hot. And then it uses this temperature difference between the outside of the rover and the inside of the rover as a sterling engine to try to to extend the length of the life of the rover while it's crawling around on the surface of Venus for potentially several months. There was a paper that came out a couple of years ago that I reported on where, yeah, they proposed that you could you could have a rover survive for a couple of months on the surface of Venus and not have its electronics fried by taking advantage of that difference. You know, it came into the atmosphere of Venus incredibly cold and it's still cold inside in this pressure vessel and then you just slowly let the heat in and you use that heat to generate electricity to move the rover around. So, Sterling engines are an alternative to generating electricity when you have a heat differential. It's time to shout out all the new $5 patrons and above. Brian Miller, Ian Holzsworth, Betsy Iring, Jasper Roest, Owen Dystra, Connie Klene, James Fley, Philip Lilies, and Cogy Flecter. Join the club at patreon.com/universe today. Ivan M. Is the density of a black hole the same in the center of the black hole compared to the edges? So we can describe a black hole in two major uh numbers. We can describe the black hole in terms of its mass and we can describe it in terms of its rotation, its spin. Now you can also theoretically measure its charge but anyway its mass and its spin and from the mass you can calculate the event horizon. This is the point where the escape velocity to get away from the black hole is the speed of light. And so as you get closer within the event horizon, then the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light. And if you are outside of the event horizon, then the escape velocity is a little bit less than the speed of light. And so light can escape. But we don't actually know what is inside the event horizon of the black hole. Mathematically you can describe the black hole like the ma the entire mass of the black hole you know 10 times the mass of the sun a million times the mass of the sun a billion times the mass of the sun. You can consider it in a single point a singularity in space and then you get from that singularity you get the event horizon forming as a size around that. But you know, if you could actually look inside through the event horizon and understand what it is that you were looking at, what would you see? We don't know. We don't know. So like there's a range of possibilities. One possibility is that the that the black hole is just right underneath the surface like whatever is you know so like think about go this way. So if you imagine say a neutron star neutron star is a ball of neutrons. It is the degenerate remnant left over when a star that is much more massive than the sun detonates as a supernova collapses in its interior and the protons and the electrons are smashed together to create these neutrons. And this gives you the neutron star. Neutron star is like the size of a city. They're like 10 kilometers across. Like they're very small and yet they have an enormous gravity. you know, you would have to be going close to the speed of light to be able to escape from the surface of a neutron star. But if you are going the speed of light, you can get off and that's why we can see them because they can shine in radiation. And so imagine, right, you've got this spinning ball in space of neutrons from a neutron star and you feed it material and you feed it material and you feed it and it gains in mass and it gains in mass. It becomes more massive and then eventually you hit this and and at the same time the escape velocity off the surface of the neutron star is going up and eventually it will get to the point that the escape velocity meets the speed of light and you now have a black hole. And so like an event horizon will form around this neutron star that is rapidly spinning. And so is what's inside the event horizon still in there? But now you just can't see it because the mass has exceeded the speed of light. Maybe. But maybe when it reaches that point, then maybe it continues to collapse. That in fact the pressure that is holding the neutrons together is overwhelmed. And you now maybe it turns into a ball of quarks or maybe the quarks are overwhelmed and it turns into something even smaller. And maybe it actually does turn into a singularity that the that the forces of physics can't withstand this amount of material that is crunched into a density that is this high. And so you can imagine it actually does compress down into an infantessimally small thing. And so in fact inside you know the there is the black hole that has all of the mass of the entire black hole that is down into this one single point and then the rest of the interior of the event horizon is empty space. But it doesn't matter because we'll never you know we may never know there just may be no practical way that we can ever probe what isn't in the interior of the event horizon of a black hole. We might just have to be okay with that. XX Phillip XXX6541. What are the potential pros and cons of launching rockets from a mobile launch ship like the Chinese are experimenting with? Would it have to be a solid fuel rocket? Right. So, the Chinese are experimenting with launching rockets from the ocean. And the advantage is that if you can launch directly from the equator, you get to take advantage of the Earth's rotation. gives you that bonus 1,600 kilometers per hour of of orbital velocity that allows you to either launch with less propellant or carry a heavier payload to the same orbit. And you know, most of the time rocket launch sites are as close to the equator as you can get, but still be reasonably accessible on your land. And so for example in the US they launch from Florida or they launch from Bokh Chica. Those are places that are quite far south in the US but they're still pretty far away from the equator but you still get most of the advantage. You know you don't get the full velocity advantage but you get a lot of it. Uh China isn't as far south as places like the US are. Um, and so they have to launch, you know, they launch from as far south as they can, but they've been experimenting with this idea of of sending a ship down to the equator. And this isn't the first time this idea has been tried. Uh, there was a company called Sea Launch that used to operate out of Los Angeles. And actually, they would they would launch with Ukrainian rockets. They'd have a ship that would control the launch and then they would have this platform that the rockets would launch from and then they would tow the launcher down to the equator and then they would raise the rocket and they would launch it from the equator and then they would tow the the launch platform back to uh Los Angeles and they operated for a while but then SpaceX kind of you know pushed a lot of people out of the market and see launch sort of shut down several years ago and I guess the Chinese are are experimenting menting and I think yeah the the rocket that is launched from their launch platform there is a solid rocket booster but it doesn't have to be uh you know you can have a liquid fuel rocket whatever it's just that uh you know it's just if you want to take advantage of it but you have all of that hassle of getting your platform down to the equator. Uh the other way that people have tried is you launch from an airplane and we saw this with Virgin Orbit. They had a 747 able to carry an orbital rocket. It would fly down to the equator and then it would fly along. And then you get the advantage of the velocity of the airplane plus the velocity of the Earth as a way to decrease the amount of propellant that's required to get into orbit. But Virgin Orbit went out of business. Um because still it's just like it's just the cheapest to go with SpaceX, go with a reusable first stage rocket booster. It's tried and true. It's inexpensive. It's reliable. It's easy to get your payload to the launch site. It just seems to be the the most successful launch platform until fully reusable two-stage rockets come out like like Starship. Aaron Ball, do you know about the ISS replacement? Currently, there is no replacement for the International Space Station. Uh there is a potential space station that's being built for the moon called the lunar gateway which is expected to launch you know in the late 2020s and into the 2030s. There are some private companies that are planning on building stations in low earth orbit. Bast there's a couple of others and you know who knows if they're going to work out or if they're going to go out of business. We don't really know. And so right now really when the International Space Station is deorbited in 2030, the only game in lower Earth orbit will be the Chinese space station. Hopefully someone will come with a private station. My reporting experience over 25 years tells me that private companies that are attempting to do space tourism and things like that aren't very successful and have a high rate of going out of business. So, I will be watching and reporting as various people are attempting to build private space stations, and I will also be reporting as many of them go out of business. So, stay tuned for that. Did you know that you can watch the same video with no ads and get a bonus question over on Patreon completely for free? We call Q&A Plus. And this week's bonus question, where is the center of the universe? And I'll put a link in the show notes. All right, those are all the questions that we had this episode. Thank everyone who asked your questions in the YouTube comments as well as everybody who joined us when we did the live show from which these questions were pulled from. Now I'm going to talk about uh one of our space friends who is going through a very difficult time. But first I'd like to thank our patrons. Thanks to Abe Kingson, Andrew Gross, Bailey Griffin, Brian Bod, Keredwin, Chuck Hawkins, Commander Block, Sin Nelson, David Gilton, David Mats, Dustin Cable, Evan Pro, Greg Phy, Hudson Ward, James Clark, Jeremy Madden, Jim Burke, Jordan Young, Marcel Smiths, Michael Purcell, Monzo, Paul Robuck, Frank Rank Heidi, Rob, Sean Sergeant, Steven Filer, Munley, Vlad Chiplin, and Wolf Gang Clots who support us at the master of the universe level, and all our patrons. All your support means the universe to us. So, I don't know if you've heard the news, but Dr. Becky has been diagnosed with uh breast cancer and this is a probably a very private diagnosis and yet she went on and announced it on her channel and various outlets and I you know had sort of explained a lot of good reasons why she did that and this is a terrifying diagnosis. uh you know it's a it's a tricky disease and uh I've had friends close friends die of this and so I just I can't imagine what she's going through right now but she is a very strong very brave lady caught it very quickly and is sort of doing all the right steps to get it treated. Uh but I highly recommend you go and watch the explainer on her channel and I think the more important thing is what we can do to support her. Unfortunately, uh, she doesn't have a Patreon, doesn't have the membership accounts on YouTube. I'm going to reach out and recommend that she gets her her Patreon set up cuz I know people will support her. Um, but maybe the best thing that you can do is to buy her book, which is a brief history of black holes and that will go and definitely go and support her. So, uh, send her love and I will figure out ways that, you know, our community can help get involved and and help with, uh, with help covering her cost and her recovery. But, uh, Dr. Becky, uh, we love you and get over this. All right, we'll see you next