Take a look at the image above. Can you determine where this image originated? Take a guess and then check your answer by going to the “Where is This? The Answer Sheet” page.
Where is This? May 8, 2023 Quiz
Podcast: Launch Fast and Break Things
If you are still pondering the Starship mess in Texas, I recommend you listen to a discussion about the incident in The Planetary Society’s podcast Planetary Radio. In the episode, Space Policy Edition: SpaceX’s Starship vs. the Environment, With Eric Roesch, podcast host Casey Dreier, who is Chief of Space Policy for The Planetary Society, interviews Eric Roesch, who is an environmental expert and publisher of the ESG Hound blog.
To understand Mr. Roesch’s concerns, you may want to start with his April 16 article, “SpaceX’s Texas Rocket is Going To Cause A Lot More Damage Than Anyone Thinks.” He predicted:
The harm from the full launches will undoubtedly be greater than what was disclosed to the public. These damages may show up as shattered windows and the corpses of hundreds of dead shorebirds; immediate and obvious. Or they may not be entirely clear until years from now when SpaceX eventually closes shop on the Texas coast for greener pastures. The scars on the land, the people, and the wildlife won’t just disappear. They’ll linger, and hopefully, by then people will be willing to listen to the story.
He was right on the mark considering the mess left behind by the Starship after its test launch. While Elon Musk wanted to downplay the damage, the launch debris has led to a lawsuit against the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for allowing the launch to take place at all. The issue seems to be an FAA that probably trusted SpaceX too much on the Texas launch facility, which was initially procured for the smaller Falcon 9 rocket launches rather than the Starship monster that is tearing up the pad.
This is not good for SpaceX, nor is it good for the commercial space industry. Mr. Musk has already caused enough problems in other industries without tarnishing the commercial space industry with a “devil may care” attitude.
As the podcast story notes, he stands to divide the public on space programs. The choice does not need to be protecting the environment or traveling to space. We can do both, and we need some grown-ups at SpaceX to understand this.
Happy Black Hole Week!
Yes, I know. This is too many celebrations over an eight-day period, starting with Astronomy Day last Saturday. But who cannot be excited by Black Hole Week?
If you missed the various NASA-sponsored events over the past week, you can find them here.
Check out the presentation of the largest black holes from Monday’s presentation. It puts it all into very scary perspective.
And you can learn plenty more about black holes by visiting this NASA page.
Video: Cool Worlds and the Fermi Paradox
A recent video from the YouTube channel Cool Worlds titled “The Fermi Paradox Has An Incredibly Simple Solution” is a fun review of the Fermi Paradox, which asks “Where are they?” in reference to alien visitors. The video goes into the meaning of the question as well as possible interpretations of the paradox itself.
Professor David Kipping from the Department of Astronomy at Columbia University does a nice job of explaining some of the “answers” to the so-called paradox, and even introduces one of his own called the “Weak Anthropic Principle.” I do not want to spoil the story, so I recommend you view the short video on your own. It is enlightening.
The scariest bit of the presentation involves “self-replicating universal constructors” that could colonize the galaxy with present-day rocket technology. Moreover, such constructors may be in development by businesses today with programs such as ChatGPT, as warned by many parties today. Under this scenario, the colonization of our galaxy would start in a Microsoft or Google lab, with humans playing no part in that eventual future because we will not be needed.
Sweet dreams as you ponder that.
Check out the Cool Worlds YouTube page for other fascinating videos.
Note: The creators of the YouTube channel Cool Worlds is also planning a podcast in the near future. That should be a nice addition to the group’s educational material.
Pic of the Week: Solar Eclipse from a Ship
This week’s image is from NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD). Here is the full story of the solar eclipse from the NASA site:
Along a narrow path that mostly avoided landfall, the shadow of the New Moon raced across planet Earth’s southern hemisphere on April 20 to create a rare annular-total or hybrid solar eclipse. From the Indian Ocean off the coast of western Australia, ship-borne eclipse chasers were able to witness 62 seconds of totality though while anchored near the centerline of the total eclipse track. This ship-borne image of the eclipse captures the active Sun’s magnificent outer atmosphere or solar corona streaming into space. A composite of 11 exposures ranging from 1/2000 to 1/2 second, it records an extended range of brightness to follow details of the corona not quite visible to the eye during the total eclipse phase. Of course eclipses tend to come in pairs. On May 5, the next Full Moon will just miss the dark inner part of Earth’s shadow in a penumbral lunar eclipse.
Our Awesome Universe 