Why Won't NASA Just Buy Falcon 9 from SpaceX? | Q&A 466

If SpaceX no longer wants Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon, why won't NASA just buy them for themselves? What would be a perfect space station? What is being done to improve the deep space network? And in Q&A Plus, finally, a Lagrange Point question. 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 into 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. Karen, if you could design a new space station, what features would you like to see in it? Or what up and coming ideas do you like that you've seen that others have? Yeah, so we're at this time where the United States is planning on wrapping up its support for the International Space Station, the Russians are wrapping up their support for the station, and it will most likely be deorbited at the end of the decade 2030. And then we will not have a space station. And so, you know, the question that you're asking is a really good one, which is that, you know, could there be another station launch? You know, the Chinese are going to have their station, but what will the West have? And the answer seems to be currently that the West will have a commercial space station. And there's a bunch of companies that are well on their way to doing this. You know, the one that feels sort of ahead of the pack is Vast, but there's a bunch of these companies. and how exactly this is going to roll out, we still don't really know. VAST or some other commercial space station company will attach to the International Space Station and then, you know, go through all of their testing and support. And then when the station is removed, maybe part of it will remain in orbit. Maybe the whole thing will be removed and deorbited. We don't know. And I think that's a big shame that there will not be a International Space Station in operation in orbit around the earth, because we still have a lot of questions about what space flight does on the human body. Now, the plan had been that, that you would see the deep space gateway, and that would be this new station out in a lunar halo orbit. And then that would be able to answer a lot of similar questions about what it's like to be in space, but not just be in space, but to be in deep space. When you're away from the protective magnetosphere of the Earth. You'd be out closer to the moon. And that is, you know, there was a bunch of new questions and that's a great next step, which is incrementally improve our ability to survive and thrive off planet. Let's go from living in low Earth orbit to now let's try living out at a halo orbit where you're hundreds of thousands of kilometers away from the Earth and that you're experiencing the kind of cosmic radiation that you just don't get when you're in low Earth orbit. So there's a lot of good reasons to build a station that's that far out. And so, you know, I think, you know, if I was to like, think about the kinds of things that I would want, that is, you know, you want to be able to have a lab that allows you to test out the ideas that you're going to need to prove to be able to have long-term habitation in space, habitation on the moon missions that are going to go to Mars maybe missions that are going to go beyond Mars places to ask the asteroid belt a mission to Titan that would be cool and and that we just don't know there's all of these questions that we have about this so that's like a big thing and there's no like specific features and functionality i would want to see in a station i just want it to exist and then the various space agencies would come up with research ideas and grants and then they would run experiments on the station, and that would carry us very far into the next era of human space exploration. But the big question, the one that has just not been answered, is can we generate artificial gravity in space? One of the big challenges of humanity flying in space is that there is no gravity that we experience. We experience this weightlessness and the human body starts to have a bunch of changes when you're in weightlessness. Your bones weaken, your muscles weaken, fluids redistribute around your body, you have problems with your eyesight and then there's even other long-term issues that are still being worked out about your heart, about your brain, your organs. We still kind of don't know everything about this and that you know, we know that being in one G in gravity is what we evolved into. And so then is there some in between, right? So the moon has one sixth gravity. Mars has one third earth gravity. We don't know if being on the moon for a long period of time is going to be sustainable. We don't know if being on Mars is going to be sustainable. And we don't know if there's some even minimum like maybe 1 10th gravity is okay maybe 1 100th gravity is okay we don't know we don't really answer these questions we want to live on an asteroid then we need to know what is the minimum where gravity like 90% gravity is probably fine you know being on the surface of venus apart from being under the horrible crushing pressure and temperature but uh and being on mars at one third we don't know so we need artificial gravity and you know obviously you can't just have the the grav plates from you know star wars or star trek you need some kind of rotating structure that gives you this artificial gravity you know the math for that has been worked out and there have been proposals to be able to implement these on stations but nobody has ever actually done this and there's a there's a bunch of kind of different ideas like one idea is do you just need to have a giant rotating space station that gives you enough gravity and you just live and work and that's your day. You pour liquids, you run, lift weights, and you're just in what feels like almost earth gravity or maybe 50% earth gravity. We don't know. And that's one possibility. And maybe that's the necessity. That's a requirement. But the other possibility is that you just need time in gravity. And so you can have a much smaller thing, kind of like a gym that will rotate and put an astronaut on a spin cycle, you know, a salad spinner, and have them rotate in that for a couple of hours. And maybe they do the workout while they're in that earth gravity. And that there's gonna be this minimum amount of time spent under load that totally counteracts the time spent being in weightlessness. Like when you think about how you swim in the ocean or you are scuba diving, you know, obviously your, your internal organs are still feeling gravity, but you are not having to carry the weight of your body in this environment. And yet you don't experience muscle loss and so on. People who have bedrest do experience muscle loss and, and, and bone loss and other problems. So there's just like a combination of these factors that we just don't know. And we just need to get to the bottom of that. And so, yeah, artificial gravity is the, is the top choice. then i'm really interested in what place solar sails have on spacecraft and you know we're still just in a new age of of solar sails we've seen a couple of tests but imagine if you just attached a solar sail to a space station and use that for station keeping maybe you wouldn't need to send up propellant every couple of months to be able to keep raising the altitude of your space station maybe you just have a solar sail on board and it's able to use that to just keep raising its altitude forever because you don't have to make a lot of movements it just has to be constant and so i think solar sails would be something that'd be really cool to test out on stations it's time to shout out all the new five dollar patrons and above canadian space dude matthew dowdy barnes jim best laurie hunter drunk marston eric knapp rich walker and dave swanson join the up at patreon.com slash universe today indigo 2007 canessa buy the remaining falcon nines and operate them to send dragon to iss so this is a weird piece of news and some of you probably haven't heard this yet but uh in the last couple of weeks there's some great reporting from eric berger over at ars technica we learned that spacex is planning on sunsetting the falcon nine because of the rise of Starship, and that they're going to be retiring the Crew Dragon, I think, 2028, 2030. So at around the time that the International Space Station is due for being decommissioned and deorbited, SpaceX is going to stop launching Crew Dragons. And that's weird to me, because they're sort of going all in on Starship, but Starship is currently not as safe a vehicle as Crew Dragon is, and that they have paying customers who have been flying on Crew Dragons. There are other targets, other destinations. There will eventually be private space stations that they can provide services to and charge whatever it costs. And so the plan is, unfortunately, that NASA is going to have to rely on the Boeing Starliner. This is the capsule that has only been tested to carry astronauts to the space station once. And when we had the two astronauts go to the station, there was enough problems with the capsule that NASA didn't want to have them return on it. And so instead, they had to wait on the station for several months until another Crew Dragon come back up and rescue them. So in theory, Boeing will be able to work through the various issues and make this a dependable spacecraft. But it's weird to me that having made this very dependable spacecraft, now SpaceX is planning on sunsetting it and not providing these services anymore. And is the expectation that people are going to get into Starship? I mean, maybe in 10 years after this rocket has proven that it's very safe and people have been flying on it for a while but we're back to this place where there is no way to get humans to the International Space Station except for to use Russia or to use Boeing and you know we're not at the place where Boeing is absolutely kind of guaranteed flying these things on a regular basis hammered out all the problems and so it's sort of like a it's like we're gonna be back where the space shuttle was and for me i just find that baffling uh but you know, maybe the economics just didn't make sense to SpaceX. Music cover. Is there work being done to increase the bandwidth of the deep space network? Yes and no. So there are no new major satellite dishes that are being developed, but people are always working on new algorithms, new ways to try and compress the data. But the biggest discovery or the biggest advancement that's happened in the last couple of years is using an infrared laser as a way to communicate back to Earth. And so the Psyche mission was launched with a prototype, new sort of next generation laser communication system on board. And that the Psyche mission was able to communicate a cat video back to Earth at broadband speeds, like thousands of times faster than they would try to transmit it with radio waves and the receiver is a telescope you know is a is a is an infrared telescope that is that is watching the laser that is being fired at the earth and is able to to pull in all of those data and that the plan is to augment existing radio dishes with infrared telescopes so that you can kind of have this hybrid you can have a spacecraft that is that is communicating with radio and also communicating with laser at the same time. And so we could see a significant decrease in the amount of bandwidth that needs to be dedicated to radio waves. And instead we use visible light or infrared or things like that. So that's the revolution. And, you know, like I've been going on and on about this is like one of the greatest improvements to space exploration that has been developed in like the last decade. And it's the same thing, they actually have a version of this on the International Space Station. So there's a relay satellite that is at a higher altitude than the International Space Station, and they have one of these same kind of lasers on board, and that they're now able to communicate with Earth at broadband speeds. So for the longest time, the internet on the International Space Station sucked. And now it's actually pretty good. And this is sort of the same new technique. So we will eventually inevitably see this kind of communication system bolted on to every single mission. Now, you'll always still want to have radio waves, you know, you're still going to want to have radio telescopes, you're going to have emitters, and so on. But this is going to be another way to get the big data home. And a lot of the big ideas, you know, we talk about things like James Webb, we talk about Gaia, but next generation telescopes above and beyond that, like they're going to produce enormous amounts of data. Think about how much data Vera Rubin is sending. And I forget the number, right? It's in the petabytes, right? Five terabytes a day or some ludicrous amount of data. Well, that's too much to transmit from space. But if you have an array of lasers on the satellite that is communicating this information back home, suddenly you can transmit this kind of data back home. So there's a lot of really good ideas. So hopefully uh we will see the rise in our ability to communicate with the spacecraft match the rise in the number of spacecraft and the number of missions that are going on because there's like a lot of missions out there right now from all the different nations did you know you can watch the same video with no ads and get a bonus question over on Patreon completely for free we call it Q&A plus this week's bonus question finally a Lagrange point question i'll put a link down in the show notes all right those are all the questions that we had this episode. Thank you everyone who asked your questions in the YouTube comments. Everybody join me for the live show when I recorded this. I'm going to thank you specifically. But first, I'd like to thank our patrons. 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