InFocus featuring Kevin Kopchynski (Artemis, Space Junk, Space Travel)

From the 22 News Plus Studio, this is 22 News In Focus with Patrick Barry. Hello everyone, and welcome to this edition of In Focus. I'm your host, Patrick Barry. Today, we are going to, in my words, nerd out a little bit with one of my favorite guests, Kevin Kopchinsky. He is the STEM curator at the Springfield Science Museums, and Kevin and I are going to, we're talking about things out in space. This is why, this fascinates me to no end, and I'm so excited to have gotten to know Kevin because he helps me understand and grasp the vastness of space. So, Kevin, thank you. Thank you for joining me today. You're welcome. Great to be here. So, earlier in 2026, I saw an article, a news article about, what is it? It's Starlink, right? Starlink is a satellite, and they sent, they finally had a minimum of 10,000 objects circling the Earth, which I thought was, wow, that's a lot, until you said, that's nothing, that's a drop in the bucket. So, I want to start with that. You do the volume, and it's actually not a lot. Yeah, it's not that dense. So, Starlink has 10,000 satellites, and I want to point out, folks, if you've never seen them pass by your night sky, Google it, track down when it's going over your house, because it is the coolest thing. It's, how many of them in a row? I didn't count. There's at least, I'd say, six, eight, or 10, you know? Oh, no, there's way more than that. Maybe even more. I mean, I kind of lost count. But it's cool. They come in a perfect line, perfect line that comes over your house. Yeah, yeah. But, Kevin, let's talk about what is orbiting the Earth. We have, really, since, what, the 50s, 1950s, was when the first things got launched into space, and that stuff just sort of stays there, right? Most of it does, yeah. You can track a few of those old satellites still on these sites that do that, like Heavens Above and some of the other ones. And I know people who have sighted, you know, satellites from the 60s that are still up there. You know, some of them decay, and they burn up in the atmosphere, but they're up there. And there's tens of thousands of things still circling the Earth. So I guess, you know, when, and one of the parts of this conversation today is going to be the recent Artemis mission with manned travel to, really, to outer space. But how do we get things to, like, the International Space Station without running into these thousands, tens of thousands of things that are hurtling through space? It is pretty amazing. One thing, again, is if you start to do, you know, calculate the volume of space that they're in, it turns out to be not as awful as you think, but they track a lot of stuff, and they track even small things. And I know there's been cases where the space station has been slightly changed in its direction to miss something. Oh, interesting. So it's something that people keep track of. And this is all, I mean, when NASA and all the other companies that are sending things to outer space, you have to track everything to avoid a catastrophic collision. Right, is anything, if, you know, if they drop a bolt off of the space station, for example, that thing is in orbit, right? The space station was in orbit. 10,000 miles an hour. And it's going fast, yeah. The space station was in orbit, you let go of it, that thing is still in orbit. And it's going really fast, and it's out there, now it's out there. So like you say, a bolt, maybe a two-inch bolt, which we don't think of anything here on Earth, but that could- That would be serious to hit something. You know, a manned mission, or even a satellite launch. That could be devastating. That would be serious, because again, it's going so fast. So how do we clean all that up? Or is there no way? There's people trying to figure that out. And hopefully there's going to be a way. It seems pretty daunting. You know, how do you gather all this stuff in? What do you, you know- It's like trying to clean up the plastic in the oceans, right? Just about, just about. And I mean, the oceans, they kind of, the currents kind of concentrate stuff for you. I don't think that's happening out in space. So it's all just in this large region that you somehow have to sweep clean in some way. It's within a certain distance too, right? Because to be in orbit, things have to stay a certain distance above Earth. Not too far, not too close. So, right, they're at a certain distance, and depending on how fast they travel, that determines their altitude. Okay. So space station's going pretty fast, so it can be lower and closer to the Earth and still not get pulled in because it's going so fast. Okay. There are satellites that are geostationary. They stay, they just move just as fast as the Earth rotates. Okay. They have to be like 22,000 miles out. Oh, wow. In order to be able to move that slowly without falling in. Okay, so to put that 22,000 miles out in perspective, how far out is the International Space Station? The International Space Station is much closer. Just, I think, within 200 miles. Oh, my gosh. It's pretty close. Okay, so then how far is the moon? The moon's a quarter of a million miles. 250,000. 250,000, yeah. That's a huge distance. So, yeah, that's compared to where the space station is. Yeah, the space station is practically next door. And again, because it's so close, it has to move fast to stay up there. Okay. But a lot of this space junk you can see at night. You know, I sit in my backyard and, you know, just you can see the lights go by. And those are the big things, yeah. I mean, those are the big things. If you can see the light reflecting off of it, that, you know, that's not the bolts or the, you know, little things they got, paint chips and things like that. And you made a passing comment earlier that some of the things that you can see are from the 1960s, but they may not be functioning. They just might. Oh, correct. They just might be left there, right? Correct, they're just there. They're not functioning at all. We are up on our first commercial break. Stay with us because when we come back, we'll talk about the most recent Artemis mission and why. We're back in just a minute. This is 22 News In Focus with Patrick Berry. Welcome back, everyone, to this edition of In Focus. I'm your host, Patrick Berry. Sitting across the desk from me today is Kevin Kopchinsky. He is the STEM curator at the Springfield Science Museum. Kevin, thanks for joining me. Great to be here. We're talking about one of my favorite topics, which is what's going on in outer space. We made a passing comment earlier about the recent Artemis mission that was in the spring of 2026. I wanna pull up an image that you were kind enough to send me of the Artemis launch. And you made a comment during the break about the size. How big was this rocket? Do you recall? I don't have a number for that. I mean, if you remember some of the images, I mean, the people are really tiny things down on the ground. That thing is many, many stories high, but only the very tippity top of that is actually going into space. The rest of that is fuel. The rest of that- It's holding fuel for the rocket engines. Is that because it's traveling such a long distance? That particular mission was from here to the moon and back. That fuel is pretty much to get it off of the Earth, just into low Earth orbit. Oh, wow. What's needed to get it, the fuel needed to get it from the Earth to the moon, once it's in orbit, the fuel needed to get it from the Earth to the moon is not much. Okay. It's just getting out of gravitational pull. Yeah, you gotta get out of the gravity, the gravity well, as it's called. Once you're in orbit, really what they do is they extend the orbit. They just do it a little bit faster. They do it fast enough so that essentially the orbit is extended to where Mars is. I mean, the moon. Okay. To where the moon is. Interesting. And you can do that, if you time it right in the orbit, you do that with a relatively small boost compared to that launch. Okay. The orbit now goes out to the moon and back instead of just around the Earth. What was the point of the Artemis mission? Why did we send people around the moon? They didn't even go to the moon, they went around the moon. I warm up. So, all right, I guess there's two things. Why did this one just go around the moon? I think that's just to test things, warm up and so on. Okay. You know, does this thing really make it there? You know, things like that. And it's the same we hit with the moon landings. There was a trip that just went around and came back and, you know, didn't land. In general, the idea is to establish a moon base and establish the idea of more permanent operations on the moon. Interesting. They're targeting an area near the South Pole. And the reason is that the way the moon, we know about our Earth and it's got a tilt to the axis and that makes our poles, at least part of the year, lean in toward the sun, so to speak, and it gets warmer up there. The moon is about straight up in its axis. And so that the sun is always glancing across at the poles and there's deep shadows in the craters all the time. So it's, and by remote sensing, it looks like there's a lot of water ice in those craters. Oh. Frozen. Sort of a scientific expedition. So you have an expedition that you can now have a resource there. And also going around the moon in a polar orbit is different than what was done in Apollo. And part of this mission was to make sure that you really know how to do that. Let me throw this one out there. This is a rumor that I heard that the Artemis mission was disguised as a lunar expedition. However, the real motive was for this asteroid that's heading towards Earth in 2032, a defensive mission to possibly blow up that asteroid in 2032. I mean, this could all be conspiracy theory stuff, but it could be, it has some level of. Yeah, the chance, the calculations now of that asteroid have dropped to zero, even not even hitting the moon. Oh, really? Yeah, so there's, if we want to defend ourselves against things like that, maybe having a base on the moon where you can launch something faster with a lot smaller rocket and less fuel and all that, could be really helpful. So is we may not have a lot of time, but when we spot something to when we have to do something about it, and it takes time to get to things. And the sooner you can get to it, the less you have to do to it to nudge it out of the way. Of course. Yeah. So the Artemis, recent Artemis mission got me thinking, and you and I have had this conversation a few times about space travel. Oh, yeah. So how long did it take those astronauts from launch off of Earth to reaching the moon? Do you recall? Just exactly, I don't remember. I mean, we're talking about just a few days. Okay, so a few days, that's fair. And I think that includes a day in Earth's orbit before they went. So it took a few days just to go a quarter of a million miles. So when people talk about UFOs and aliens and space travel, I think, and I can't even grasp it enough, the distances we're talking about. You know, one of the things, the Voyager Pro, which was launched in what, 1970? In the 80s. Oh, it was in the 80s? Oh, I thought it was the 70s, or Voyager 1 or 2. Actually, they might have been launched. Okay, you know what? They were launched in the late 70s. They got, didn't hit, but they photographed the planets during the 80s, yeah. Okay, but it is now been 50 plus years or so since Voyager, and it just left our solar system? Is that the right way to say it? Not exactly. It has left the magnetic influence of the sun. It's still, there are other objects out there that are at least weakly under the influence of the sun's gravity. This is called the Oort cloud, and it actually has quite a while to go before it clears that Oort cloud. So we're now at roughly 50 years or so. And the distance between Earth and that is one light day, correct? Something like about that, yeah. So it's taken 50 years, well, let's just call it one light day. It's taken 50 years to go one light day. That's a lot of time. And if you want to get to the next star, you got to go four light years. So four times, 365 times more than, the calculation is tens of thousands of years to get to. The next nearest star. Yeah, except they're not aimed at that star. So they're actually never going to get there, but to cover that amount of distance would take tens of thousands of years. Amazing. And that's just to get to our next door neighbor four light years away. We are up on our second commercial break. More space talk to continue. Join us when we come back. This is 22 News In Focus with Patrick Berry. Welcome back, everyone, to this edition of In Focus. I'm your host, Patrick Berry, sitting across the desk from me today from the Springfield Science Museums is their STEM curator, Kevin Kopczynski. Kevin, thank you again for joining me. We were talking about space travel a moment ago and Voyager, and if you think about it, it's been gone about 50 years. So if it were to just turn around and come back, it would take another 50 years and nobody would still be on Earth alive. Who remembered it taking off. So that just puts into perspective the amount of time it takes to travel to do space travel. And I guess my question is, is there life, intelligent life out there that could be already years ahead of us in traveling through space? So, yes, so there could be. And then the question is, why maybe we don't see them? And there's a lot of reasons. They may have decided not to bother. Space is big. It's gonna take, in order to do that in a reasonably quick way, assuming that these are beings that have a lifespan, you're gonna have to have an immense amount of technology and it's gonna take an immense amount of energy. You can think that as a nation, we have the resources to get something to the moon in three days. Can a nation get something to the next star system four light years away? Probably not. You probably need to have a planet and harnessing the power of the entire sun at your command to do that. And once you can do that, it's like, maybe there's other things you wanna do instead. Right. So you sent me this, wrong photo, this photo here of, you know, here's our Earth and all these blue circles are what you call exoplanets, which are nearby Earth. They're, relatively speaking, yes, they're nearby Earth. These are places where, or locations where there's a star, where there's planets discovered around those stars. But that's what an exoplanet is. We, and I use that as Earth's human, scientific community, has not confirmed that there is life in any of those exoplanets. No, no, we don't have good ways yet of confirming, especially confirming life. We can start to suspect, in very few cases, there's roughly 6,000 of these found. And recently, I think it was at Columbia, somebody put out a study, there's maybe 40-ish or so that are really seriously, serious contenders to maybe worth more study. And those are the ones that we call in the Goldilocks zone, right? And many of them, yeah. So they're the right distance from their star to have the right temperature, among other things. You know, that's pretty important. And the star has to be of a certain type, too. So what is, I've heard a comment called the Fermi paradox. I think I've got that right. Yeah, Fermi. So Fermi, Enrico Fermi was a physicist, and there's this now-famous sort of lunch conversation where he and some other scientists were talking about the possibility of space travel, and this is quite a while ago now, the possibilities of space travel, and talking about, yeah, it's big, but somebody sufficiently advanced could have solved this, and there's been a lot of time for civilizations to develop. And Fermi just says, where is everybody? That was just his question. It's like, yeah, it seems so likely, but where are they? Where is everybody? Right, and I do want to pull up the last picture. Oh, no, this is the one. I'm all over with my pictures. That's all right. This is just the Milky Way galaxy, our solar arc, right? This is our galaxy. Our sun is just a little speck over there. And I'm gonna, hopefully, folks, you can see my cursor. That is, I'm going right around our solar system, our sun. Well, there's the location, but that grayish area is representing an area of about 1,000 light years. 1,000 light years. Just 1,000 light years out from our planet. This is where most of those little blue circles are located. Okay. Some of them, there are some that are a little further out, and just to show how small, how big the galaxy is. And, you know, again, the moon, three days away, the nearest lights, the nearest star system going at the speed of Voyager, tens of thousands of years. And the whole galaxy is 100,000 light years. That view of the galaxy, when I put that up in the planetarium, I love to joke, when you look at that view of the galaxy, in order to get far enough away to see the whole galaxy, you're so far away. They don't even do that in Star Trek. Star Trek is only in a little portion of that galaxy. So in this, this is our entire Milky Way galaxy. There's our Milky Way galaxy, and Star Trek, I think, is roughly in maybe a quarter of it or something like that. They don't even go across the whole thing. And I like to joke, Captain Picard, Captain Kirk never saw this view. Right, they were so close to the sun. They're, you know, we're all like the goldfish in the bowl. We can't get out and see. We only have a few seconds left, but I want to pull that up. So my question is, why, if I look up at the night sky, I can't see this big, glowing ball in the middle? If you get to a nice, dark place, and depending on what time it is and what time of year, you see what we call in the sky the Milky Way. Yeah, okay, I've seen that. Okay, that is basically, you're looking at that, you're looking from where we are. Remember, we're embedded in there, right? So you're looking from where we are in toward the center, and you're seeing the ball and just the whole stripe of light. So you're, we're looking in towards the center, not out towards one of the arms of the Milky Way. You're looking in toward the center of the sea, the densest part of the Milky Way. You're looking in toward the center. And our night sky looks in that direction during the summer. Okay. Especially late summer. Very good, very good. Kevin, our time is up, but I love our conversations. It's so fascinating to get a professional's perspective on, literally, on time and space. Hey, good seeing you, my friend. It was great to be here, as always. Thank you. This is 22 News In Focus with Patrick Berry.