Fate of Lunar Gateway, China catching NASA, New Dangerous Asteroids | Q&A 367

What happened to the lunar gateway project? Is China catching up to NASA in space? Will Ver Rubin find new earththreatening asteroids? And in Q&A plus, which missions can we expect from the Canadian Space Agency? All this 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 a 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. Dr. or Uncle Phil, is the lunar gateway still a mission? That is a great question and we don't know right now. So, I need to sort of walk through alternative timelines. I need to walk the multiverse here to be able to figure out what's the state of the lunar gateway. So, lunar gateway is going to be the next big project that NASA is going to be undertaking as part of the Aremis mission. So Artemis 1, 2, and 3 are going to return humans to the moon by Artemis 3. But then Artemis 4 was going to begin the construction of the lunar gateway. And there's about five chunks of the lunar gateway that are going to be coming together, different modules, and those modules are already in varying levels of completion. Some are already pretty much ready to go and in the testing stages, others are are quite a ways away. And the goal with the lunar gateway is that you put this space station into a halo orbit around the moon, a high altitude lunar orbit. And so it's going to maintain this orbit around the moon that puts it sort of in view of the earth at all times and yet occasionally brings it close to the moon so that they can then make landing attempts on the moon. And so the way this will work is that you will launch astronauts from Earth. They'll fly to the lunar gateway. They'll dock with the lunar gateway. They'll switch to their landing system and either that'll be like a onepart lunar lander or maybe there'll be some kind of ferry system. So it takes them close to the moon and then it detaches and comes back to the lunar gateway and then they go down to the lunar surface and then they come back from the lunar surface and they meet with the ferry and it brings them back. And so every chunk of this process is going to be reusable. You'll probably have a reusable rocket that's taking you to the lunar gateway. You'll have a reusable ferry that's taking you to and from the moon, landing system, all of this will be reusable and eventually you'll just be refueling all of the parts of your of your mission. So that's the goal and that's why they're trying to do it because, you know, back in the Apollo era, you just had footprints on the moon. You had people go land on the moon and then they didn't go back for 50 years. And so it' be great if there was now this ongoing sustainable exploration, lunar base, mining for water, learning to live in the lunar environment. eventually we get some larger station on the moon. And so until this year, this was the plan. The fourth Artemis would launch the beginning part of the lunar gateway and then they could start using it for future human landings on the moon and they would just keep building it out until it was a a safe harbor on the way to the moon. So, uh, the White House put in their budgetary request, uh, a few months ago, and they slashed a lot of the budget of NASA. They cut it by about 25%. They wanted to cut about 40 missions from NASA. Either missions that were already operational like Juno, New Horizons, as well as missions that are in development, Nancy Grace Roman, as well as missions that are sort of in the planning stages right now like the Mars sample return mission and things like that. So they put in that budget request and and that included cancelling the lunar gateway as well as sort of scaling back parts of Artemis while growing other parts of Artemis and trying to accelerate the exploration towards Mars. Um and then Congress pushed back against the budget that had been put together by the White House and wanted to have pretty much the exact same funding. and for most of the missions that were going on with NASA to be sort of continued. And that was so that was a relief because it meant that we were going to get the lunar gateway. We were going to not get a cancellations of all of these missions. And then the government shutdown happened. And so where we are now today, the time that I'm recording this, we are 20 days into the government shutdown. And a lot of the cuts and changes that the White House wanted to make are just kind of happening by default. So, uh, like 10% of the workforce at NASA JPL has has been let go. Um, you're seeing a lot of missions that are being shut down right now. And depending on how long the shutdown lasts, we don't know sort of what the results are going to be. In the best case scenario, the shutdown ends. There's a compromise. People come back. It follows the Congress funding. There's smaller teams because people have left, but they're able to put it all together and hire new people and continue on. Worst case scenario, the shutdown lasts for months. People have to go get new jobs. The brain drain is sort of decays huge chunks of NASA expertise and NASA is a shattered version of what it was before. So, so right now the time that I'm recording this, there's there's so much uncertainty, which has just been the case for the entire year. There's just been so much uncertainty, and that's just going to continue. We're going to just get unc certainty on top of uncertainty on top of uncertainty. And I'm sure for certain kinds of fields, that's super fun. Everyone loves uncertainty. But for long-term sustained exploration, science projects, things that require slow and steady achievement towards the goals, that's anathema. That is uh very very bad. And so I think right now, unfortunately, um sort of US space exploration, space science is in shambles. And we're going to have to sort of wait and see what's going to happen and whether all these pieces can be put back together again. Santiago T. Is it possible that three Atlas came from the or cloud and not another star system? How are we so sure is an interstellar object? So objects falling from the or cloud follow a uh elliptical orbit. So they are following this giant ellipse where they go around the sun and they go back out into the or cloud and then theoretically they do the same thing. And all you have to do is calculate the shape of the trajectory by the comet and you can tell whether or not it's going to be captured by the solar system or not. While the interstellar objects are following a hyperbolic orbit. So they brought them in from outside the solar system and they're going to continue on an escape trajectory out of the solar system. Right now uh 3 atlas is going 58 kilometers/s and so that is much beyond well beyond the escape velocity of the sun. And so uh we know that it's going to pass through and then just keep going. And it's going very fast like it's going faster than Borosov or Omu. and you just calculate the orbit and you know and so if it is on an escape trajectory back out of the solar system it'd be very weird that it um well so like think of a swing right you take a swing and you take it back to your face and then you let go and the swing goes all the way out then it comes all the way back and then it just stops right at your face and doesn't touch you and then goes all the way back and then all the way back. Right? It can't go faster than just coming back to where its starting point was. And so any comet that is dropping down from the or cloud can't go any farther than where it started. But the interstellar objects there, they could go much much faster because they started with a velocity that is moving them outside of the solar system. It's time to shout out all the new $5 patrons and above. Hol, Mark S. Elellanar Durant, Deorbital Mechanic, Platypus 42, Steve Hall, Cologne, Taz, David Falner, Kavaz, and Mikuel. Join the club at patreon.com/universeto today. ISIM, how much is China's space program creating a feeling of competition with NASA. NASA seems far ahead of China, but is the feeling that China could catch up with NASA helping it get more funding? So, right now, NASA is very much ahead of China. um in terms of technology, in terms of knowledge, in terms of missions, right? There are multiple space telescopes operated by NASA, they're building a giant moon rocket. There's like a lot of technology that NASA has worked on and a lot of institutional knowledge and expertise. And then they have a partner with SpaceX that has a lot of experience as well in launching rockets and now is building a completely reusable rocket platform. So there's a lot of momentum going on at NASA, but China's catching up quickly. And so their budget is about half of NASA's budget, maybe a third of NASA's budget, but they have like 35 year plans for everything. And they're sort of following their plan beat by beat. You know, they've they've sent a mission to Mars and they put a rover on the surface of Mars. They've retrieved multiple samples from the moon and brought them back. They've also retrieved a sample from the far side of the moon for the first time. They're on their way to retrieve a sample from an asteroid and they're preparing to send humans to the moon by 2030. Now, they may make it, may not make it. Um, and I think up until this point with the development of the Aremis mission, everyone just kind of assumed NASA was still going to get back to the moon before the Chinese make it to the moon. But there was a meeting a couple of months ago where people are seriously saying, "Okay, actually, if there's any more problems, any more delays with Starship, any more delays with the Aremis 3 mission, NASA might not actually get to the moon faster than the Chinese." And so then, right, the Chinese will be operating the only space station at this point after 2030 when the International Space Station comes down. They'll have the Chinese space station. uh they'll be the sort of not only the first people to return to the moon in 50 years, but they will be returning to the moon on a regular basis. They've got a whole plan eventually leading to a a like a permanently inhabited base on the moon. Uh they're building international partnerships with a lot of other nations who aren't flying with NASA groups of the Middle East, uh India, uh Pakistan, like a bunch of other countries. They're building these partnerships with them. like India's got a really good space exploration uh sort of system and they're getting better and better and better and they're probably going to send humans to the moon in the 2030s. So I think it's one of these these things that is right now NASA is still vastly more capable than the Chinese space agency but it's distracted. It's having its funding cut. Like this is it is not healthy right now. It is not operating on all of the cylinders that it can operate on, which is heartbreaking because NASA is the best. NASA is the greatest space exploration culture and technology and system that the world has ever seen and it's being dismantled right now and who knows what's going to survive, what's going to be left. So I think that there will be this sort of constant pressure coming from the Chinese and that you will possibly see a resurgence of NASA or you will just sort of see this slide towards smaller and smaller projects and less and less involvement over time. But right now we do it does feel like we're approaching this turning point for for both nations. But like China has problems of its own. They have demographic issues. They have economic issues. Like, you know, I think people feel like China is like just this monolithic inevitable success story, right? And they've got all kinds of problems that they're having to deal with. And so, I think that we're going to find it's going to still be very interesting with a lot of players. It's a lot more vibrant. Europe has got a lot of stuff that's really interesting and happening. And like I said, the Indians have one of the most dynamic uh space exploration uh groups out there. They're able to talk about punching way above their weight. You know, they produced a mission to Mars. They've got a lot of really interesting work in and and are pl, you know, they're planning their own space station and eventually to send humans to the moon. So, I think it's just like it's going to go from, you know, back in the 70s, right? It was there was NASA and there was the Soviets. And now you've just got this sort of weird collection of all these different countries, private agencies within various countries. You know, there's something like 70 rocket companies in China. Uh you've got SpaceX, which is, you know, developing a fully reusable two-state rocket. So I don't think it's really easy to just give it this like US is going to win or China's going to win. It's going to look very different in a few decades from now. Silus Miller, will Ver Rubin find a bunch of new Earth colliding asteroids? Yes, Ver Rubin will be the perfect instrument to find asteroids moments before they hit us. And this is a thing that's fairly new. In about the last 10 years or so, astronomers have developed these all sky surveys, things that are scanning the sky every night. That's how you get Atlas. Atlas is one of these sky scanning telescopes. It's kind of like a precursor to Ver Rubin. and it finds a lot of objects like Atlas is the object that we're all familiar with, but there are a lot of other objects that have Atlas in their name because they were found by this telescope. Every night it's scanning the sky. It's identifying new objects and turning them up. And so now there is this asteroid early warning system that's come online in the last couple of years where one of these telescopes finds an object, submits the trajectory to the minor planet center. The Minop Planet Center calculates the trajectory and if it turns out that it's going to hit the Earth or come extremely close to the Earth, this alerts a whole bunch of other telescopes, people get notifications. They take more images of it, and they're able to now predict the impact of one of these asteroids to like the place on Earth where it's going to hit, the time that it's going to hit, and people have gotten an announcement that one of these asteroids is going to hit their area. They can go outside. They can look up and then right on time they can see the fireball going through the sky as the asteroid is is on its way. And so Ver Rubin is the kind of instrument that is designed to scan the night sky night after night after night at a level of depth that gives it more of a warning. And so instead of it being something that's found the night before it hits, it's going to be finding things that are a few days, a few weeks before it hits. Small objects. Like it's key to, you know, it's really important to say these are all small objects, right? These are objects that are 1 meter across, maybe 5 m across. They don't do any damage. They just explode in the sky or they leave a really cool trails. They pass through the atmosphere. And hopefully we'll get to this place where every fireball that you could see has been predicted. And so, you know, you'll check your calendar. You're like, "Oh, we've got two fireballs that are coming tonight. One is going to be at 3:15 a.m. It's going to go from the east to the west and it's going to start off in the constellation of Orion. And you go outside, you look in the right direction, you check your watch and then there it is. Big bright fireball. And so I've talked in previous uh episodes how fireballs are these objects that are very very rare. You know, I've seen one in my life. Most of you have seen one, maybe two fireballs in your life. Imagine if we could see these all the time because they're happening all the time. It's just that we don't get any kind of prediction on when they're going to happen. And now we're turning the universe into this kind of clockwork machine where telescopes like Ver Rubin are giving us all the warning that we that we could want. So it's a pretty exciting time for a lot of fields. It still hasn't like sunk in with me on how dramatic a change V Rubin is going to be for our understanding of the cosmos. And we are just like a month away from it kicking up into high gear. Did you know that you can watch the same video with no ads and get a bonus question over on Patreon completely for free? And we call that Q&A plus. And this week's bonus question, which missions can we expect from the Canadian Space Agency? And I'll put a link in the show notes. All right, those were all the questions that we had this week. Thank everyone who joined me for the live stream, everybody who put your comments into the YouTube comments. Uh now we do the live show every Monday at uh in the evening somewhere around the world rotates. Uh the next show is going to be on Monday, November 3rd at 5:00 p.m. Pacific time. So if you want to watch that live, uh we'll have an event here on the calendar. You can go and check that out. Now I'm going to talk about Comet Lemon, not three Atlas. But first, I'd like to thank our patrons. Thanks to Abe Kingson, Barley Griffin, Brian Bow, Carwin, Chuck Hawkins, Commander Block, Syson, Darkfinga, Dave Verb, David Guilton, David Mass, Evan Pro, Greg Phy, James Clark, Jeremy Madden, Jim Burke, Jordan Young, Josh Schultz, Marcel Smiths, Michael Purcell, One Stepep for Animals.org, Porowak, Ranky, Richard Williams, Sean Sergeant, Steven Father, Munley, Team 49, Telescopes Canada, 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, all eyes are on Comet Drialis, but we can't have our eyes on it right now because it is behind the sun. Um, but there is another comet that is gracing our skies right now and I would argue is sort of more accessible to regular folks. And that is comet C2025 A6 Lemon. And this is a comet that has been getting brighter and brighter and actually made its closest approach to the Earth uh around October 21st. And so now it's actually starting to get a little bit farther away from us, but it's still very bright. Its tail is quite long and pronounced, and it is visible with the unaded eye, and that is always an amazing opportunity. And so if you want to see Comet Lemon, you have to look to the west after sunset, after it starts to get dark. And you do need dark skies. It currently has a between magnitude 4 and magnitude 5. And you know, I was able to see it last night with my eyes. And I live in a Bortal 3 sky, so it's fairly dark skies, but but not uh perfectly dark. And and then in binoculars, you absolutely see it. You see the tail. It's pretty cool. And then I was able to take a picture of it with the sea star um last night. And it's, you know, looks even better in a in a in a small telescope when you take a picture like that. So I would recommend that you hurry if you want to be able to see a comet with your own eyes. This isn't a great one. you know, there have been better comets. Um, but you know, the universe clearly doesn't want to give us a bright comet. And so, if you've never seen a comet before with your own eyes, this is a chance to see one. And I would say it's about another week or so, 2 weeks that you'll be able to see it. Now, I can't tell you the position because the position is constantly moving. And so, you're going to need to uh sort of find out the current location. And there's a lot of great sites that'll help you find the current location. Uh, I recommend the skylive.com. they've got current location, but there's lots of other sites that'll do that and you can then go out and then if you know your constellations, you can star hop to be able to find where it is. But just like in general, if you have a pair of binoculars or even if it is dark enough, you can just scan the sky with your eyes off to the west and you should see it and then you can look at it with a telescope and look at it with your binoculars. And you know, if you aren't that experienced, then maybe it's going to take you a couple of nights to be able to find it. But it's sort of a great challenge. And this is one of the wonderful things about u amateur astronomy is that you can go out and see these objects with your own eyes. All right. Uh let me know if you've had a chance to see it or if you would like more advice on how to see it or other comments in general because I, you know, it's one of those things that we should all uh get into our eyeballs at least once. All right, we'll see you next time.