This is Spacetime Series twenty nine, Episode eighty nine, for broadcast on the twenty seventh of July twenty twenty six. Coming up on Spacetime, a lucky thirteenth test flight for the world's biggest rocket. Scientists identified the type of asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, and a SpaceX rocket about to crash into the Moon. All that and more coming up on space Time. Welcome to space Time with Stuart Gary. The world's largest and most powerful rocket has successfully launched on its latest test flight, bringing it a step closer to NASA's Artemis program returning astronauts to the lunar surface and eventually onto Mars and beyond. The massive one hundred and twenty four made a tall starship super Heavy, was on its thirteenth test flight from SpaceX's star base on the Texas Gulf Coast, some sixty three days after its last test flight. A launch attempt a week earlier had been spectacularly aborted immediately after engine ignition due to technical engine problems that resulted in mission managers eventually deciding to swap several Raptor engines on the Super Heavy first stage. A second launch attempt several days later was also scrubbed, this time due to bad weather nine. Eight seven, six five four three two one Cope people was pitching down rape chooster Raptor chamber. Pressus nominal thirty seconds in to flight, thirty three out of thirty three Raptor engines lit on the super heavy booster arcing away from us. Here at Starbase, the. Lucky third teen hlawunch tested new hardware and software changes designed to improve Raptor engine relight reliability. It saw the first st ignition sequence changed from that employed on test flight twelve. These more powerful Version three engines also meant Starship rich max Q, the point of maximum dynamic pressure on the vehicle, but sooner than on previous flights, at just T plus fifty eight seconds and at a higher altitude. Coming up on maxque maximum aerodynamic pressure, which again for this flight is going to be higher than it has been on any of our previous Starship flights. Either we're passing through that dynamic maximum aerodynamic pressure over a minute. Now into flight, I'm still seeing thirty three out of thirty three Raptor engines lit and burning. Our next major moment is going to be coming up in just a little over a minute from now, when we're going to get to hot staging, we're going to shut down all but five of those engines on the booster. It's our version of MIKO most engines cut off, and then we're going to ignite the six engines on the ship to while it is still attached. To do that separation as a reminder, we try to do a directional flip for the booster itself. It's like doing a flip up, and we do that by lighting the engines in a slightly staggered sequence standing by for hot staging, all but five engines down, six igniting, and the booster now doing its boost back burn. It looks like we lit all thirty three initially. Now we're down to thirteen. We're seeing six out of six raptors lit on the ship, burn shut down and boost backburn shut down. So it looks like we were able to get through the boostback burn this time around. It was one of the key objectives we didn't have on the last flight. And we've got six engines lit on the ship all right, So that's the first of two burns that the Booster is going to be doing to kind of send it back towards us. It's going to be landing a couple of miles offshore from star Base. Hopefully we're going to try and get it all the way down to do a landing burn where we're going to use those thirteen center engines. They're going to ignite. That's what's going to really bleed off all that velocity that it's built up and will eventually hopefully transition to five engines to kind of fine tune its path in and then all the way down to three for the remaining bit. So booster is going to coast for a little bit. This booster is not planning to come back to the tower or to launch site. For this particular launch, we are going to be planning to do an ocean splash down just off the coast of star Base, just like on tower catches. We are going to be doing a thirteen engine landing burn to slow the booster down. So right now, the booster is using their three hypersonic griffins to guide itself through the atmosphere toward its landing site five kilometers above the sea. Right here, however, as the super heavy descended towards the blue waters of the Gulf of America. Only ten of the program thirteen engines lit up for the landing burn, but then two engines suddenly shut down seconds later. That was followed by three more unplanned engines shut down shortly after that. That left just five engines burning, resulting in a faster rated descent and a much harder splash down than planned. Just heard the call out for a landing burn startup for the booster. Just looking at the booster real quick, it didn't look like we lit all thirteen engines that we were planning for that initial landing burn. We were targeting a softer splash down, and BOT came in with quite a bit of velocity still, so landing velocity did look a little bit high. Meanwhile, the Starship upper stage continued on its plan trajectory to a suborbital altitude with the three sea level and three vacuum engines all operating nominally. Ship still seeing six out of six raptor engines lit. Ship's got about four minutes left. Still following the planned flight path as well to a nominal trajectory. Everything continues to go well with ship. Yeah, we've got about a minute left with the ship engines on, all eyes on ship. We are just a little ways away from getting those engines turn off. We expected to burn about eight minutes and change. Then eight minutes into the flight, Starship six Raptor engines was shut down as planned, with mission managers calling a nominal orbit insertion. And engine shut down. All right, Starship six Raptor engines have successfully shut down nominal orbit insertion, and there's our call out for nominal orbit insertion. So we got a ship in space. We've got a booster in the Gulf where we were planning to send it. This is the second flight of Starship Version three. This is flight thirteen. A quarter of an hour later, Starship's payload bay was opened and the PiZZ dispenser began releasing its twenty Styling Version three. We've got twenty of these Starlink Fee three satellites. This is the first time we've got Starlink Feed three satellites getting ready to go into space. These next generations Starling Vision three Internet satellites logau flata and equipped with laser communications links and expansive solar arrays that will eventually replace SpaceX's current Stylink Internet Mega constellation. And I mean, these things are really just kind of crazy upgrades that they're going to bring to the network, where you start talking about just symmetric gigabit speeds through the Starlink network pretty much anywhere on the planet that this is going to unlock, so really exciting. These will only be in space for about twenty minutes, as they're on the same Cebordal trajectory as Starship itself. This is essentially just giving us a chance to try and run as many tests as possible, deploy the solar arrays, antennas, whatever we can on these vehicles. We are intentionally being a little scrappy with it. They might be playing some bumper cars once they're out of the door, but we are looking to get these deployed over the next couple of minutes. First Starling V three getting deployed out of Starship, huge milestone for the team out here. For fifty three, Starlink V three is continuing to pop out with deployment assisted by the pez dispenser. Now, this version of Starship is built to deploy up to sixty of these more advanced Starlink Version three satellites. Each V three is designed to offer one tear a bit per second of DOWLNK capacity. Now, let's put that into Falcon nine terms real quick. A starship launch with V three satellites will launch twenty times the capacity into the constellation as a single launch of V two satellites On Falcon nine. We've got about three and a half minutes still left of our payload deploy sequence. It looks like we've got sixteen satellites deployed, so four more to go, seventeen out the door, three more to go, and eighteen. Just at twenty five minutes into our flight. It's crazy to think that we're already screaming at twenty seven thousand kilometers an hour, two hundred kilometers above the ocean surface. These are fully like, These are real satellites. They're not just demonstration SATs like we had last time. These are going to basically have a twenty minute lifespan where our Storelink engineering team will attempt to perform a number of tests and really speed run those tests during that time. Right, and in. Terms of satellite life spans, twenty minutes is it's the shortest you could possibly get. But hopefully in that twenty minute timeframe we can really try and ink out as many tests as we can. Nineteen out the door or more. That marks if I'm not mistaken our twentieth. So our payload deploy singlets is now complete. Starship will now close its payload bay door and continue to coast around Earth to the Indian Ocean. Can also confirm that we would manage to make contact with all twenty of those V three sets, so it's a massive day for us. Thirty nine minutes into the flight, mission manages be ignited one of the Raptor engines for a thirteen second burn, the longest Raptor orbital ReLit undertaken so far. This is a critical test designed to allow future starships to enter and leave orbit. We are going to be lighting one of our C level Raptor engines. This is essentially just a demonstration that you can relight an engine after it's already done its ass unburned, and this is going to be really important when we do maneuvers for orbital missions, whether we're relighting to go into orbit or if you're already in orbit and you're getting ready to do a deorbit burn. We did hear our Raptor team is go for the engine relight, so not going to be skipping it on this one. Again, this is not a deorbit burn for this ship. We are on a suborbital trajectory, So this starship is coming back over the Indian Ocean no matter what. But this is going to be a pretty critical test for what we'll eventually need to do when we do orbital missions. When you've got to relight those engines, do a burn to get yourself out of a bit. One thing that is unique on this one is we're going to be lighting it for a little bit longer of a time, and we've only done about three seconds previously. You like demost start. And confirmation over the net, we like shutdown. Laburn has ended. Ta plus forty seven minutes and thirty seconds into the flight, starship began its atmosphere re entry above the Indian Ocean. Starship is starting entry good attitude for entry. The ship is currently re entering the Earth's atmosphere. So re entry it's a critical phase of flight and we need information on how the ship's systems before. We'll collect valuable data on the spacecraft flying through the Earth's atmosphere, and it's doing so at hypersonic speeds or more than five times the speed of sound. Re entry is typically a portion of flight where we don't have communications with spacecraft because it's re entering at or around orbital velocity, which is roughly eight kilometers per second or about five miles per second. So at those speeds, the space craft is moving through the atmosphere so fast that it creates a plasma field around the vehicle. That blanket of plasma distorts communication frequencies, so it's not uncommon to experience brief blackouts in communication. Starship is designed to land on Mars where there are no runways or other humans to help out, which is exactly why we're testing this landing procedure that we're doing today, and we're doing these propulsive landings instead of more traditional means like parachutes, because landing vehicle, you hear that call out flaps do have control of the vehicle. Now, when we hear something called entry max heating as well as entry max Q, that means that the ship has made it through the maximum heating and aerodynamic loads that it experiences as it returns. So safe to say that if it makes it through those specific points, we're doing pretty well. That's right. So we'll continue to hear multiple callouts. As we go through this phase. One of those callouts will be that the ship is transsonic. Also will hear another one when it's subsonic. Trans Sonic will be referring to the period of flight where velocities of airflows surrounding and flowing past the vehicle are current concurrently below at and above the speed of sound, so somewhere in the range of mock zero point eight to one point two for reference. Commercial jets have a range of cruising speeds, but most fly at roughly mock point seventy four point eight five just for reference. That's between four hundred and eighty miles per hour to five hundred and seventy five miles per hour, or seven hundred and seventy to nine hundred and thirty kilometers. In more, subsnic will refer to speeds that are much less than the speed of sounds, so at this point in flight, the ship's velocity will be slowing down drastically. It quickly became wrapped in the cloak of glowing superheated plasma as it plummeted back towards the Earth. As with the previous flights, SpaceX use this mission to test various options, including different hah hilt attachment methods. Other experiments test a different materials and used special load sensing tiles on the heat shield. It's generally thought the tiles all seemed to hold up well with either a handful of missing or damaged and no signs of any burning through on the flaps or leading. Edges Starship's heat shield, which from one of our initial looks it did pretty well on the flight uphill, but we'll continue to dig through all the visual data. Starship is leaving the peak heating phase of entry. External temperatures are coming down. Control flaps guided the spacecraft's orientation as it plunged through the atmosphere, helping to plead off orbital velocity. These independent front rear flaps actively moved to maintain aerodynamic stability and roll and pitch control during the superheated plasma phase of re entry. Starship is a maximum pantry dynamic pressure. We made it through max heating and max dynamic pressure, meaning that the vehicle temperature and speeds and pressure are all coming down. As it descended, Starship began executing a specialized banking turn known as the Swishman of on future missions, that'll help position the spacecraft for its final approach to its landing side. Starship, who is executing the Swish maneuver. Dynamic pressure is coming down. We're doing the swoosh maneuver. This is kind of the final maneuver that we plan to have starships returning to starba'sed do that will essentially hook them out over the gulf before coming in and over Tower two. Starship then reconfigured itself into a horizontal belly flop position in order to bleed off more speed in preparaction for the landing burn. Cold gas thrust has then fired. It pitched the spacecraft from its horizontal belly flop position into its vertical attitude landing position. We're coming up to the ship landing burn. We're going to try and light all three raptor sea level engines for this burn. As it reached the lower atmosphere, Starship reignited its three sea level raptor engines for the landing burn, eventually shutting down one then a second as it slowed its redded descent and suftly splashed down into the Indian Ocean off the Western Australian coast. Three sea level flip. Seeing help the chamber proctors on did our flood down to two starship descending into the Indian Ocean down to one and we're in the water and it's a soft splashdown in the water. As it splashed down, it cut off its remaining engine and then gently tipped over, floating fully intact on the surface, bobbing up and down in the crystal blue waters. And that was different to previous splashdowns with a vehicle exploded and sank on landing. That is the first. That is the softest flashdown we have ever had with the Starship there in the Indian Ocean. It's bound to be an exciting day for our recovery team. I mean, that's a huge milestone to even get the soft splashdown, much less have the vehicle stay afloat floating so serenely in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX bos Elon Musk says the successful flight meant all of its mission milestones, as this now moves the program a step closer to full orbit entry and future catch attempts back at the launch site rather than the Indian Ocean. This is space time still to come. Scientists identified the type of asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, and a SpaceX rocket about to crash into the Moon. All that and more still to come on space time. A new study is determined that the asteroid which slammed into the Earth sixty six million years ago, wiping out some seventy five percent of all life on the planet, including all the non avian dinosaurs, was most likely a rare cootype carbonaceous chondrite. The findings reported in the journal Science Advances, based on a new advanced nickel isotob analysis of samples narrowing down the composition of the dead ten to fifteen kilometre wide KT boundary event asteroid which struck the Chi Salou Bridge of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. This mountain sized space rock hit at an estimated sixty four thousand kilometers an hour, creating a one hundred and eighty kilometre wide crater and triggering planet wide violent volcanic eruptions, global earthquakes, and massive tsunamis in all directions in the process, sending a huge cloud of dust and burning debris high into the atmosphere, blocking out the sunlight for months, if not years, and sending the entire planet into an impact winter Carbonesous chondrites make up just five percent of all the mediaorites so far sampled on Earth, and carbonaco's chondrites are the Ornans class. The Coeo chondrites make up only a tiny fraction of that group. They're some of the most primitive and untouched materials in the Solar System. One of the sturdies authors, Philip Claes from the University of British Columbia, says, harbernaceous chondrites of the Onance class are not like the typical meteorites that you find in museum collections. These COO class rocks contain far less volatile elements like carbon, zinc, waterrant sulfur compared to other classes of meteorites discovered on Earth so far. Clee says, while it doesn't alder our current theory of what caused the extinction event, it makes it less likely that sulfur contained in the impactor was the smoking gun. Based on this new data, the fine debris thrown up into the atmosphere would have been the primary factor. The authors reached their conclusions by conducting high precision nickel isotode measurements of samples collected over many years from a thin layer of iridium rich cla likeketted right across the planet and created by the impact event. This iridium rich Lawyer is known as the Cretaceous tertiary or KT boundary. All over the planet. Below this boundary you'll find Ninavian dinosaurs, and above it have all ceased to exist. Cli says the research this was challenging. That's because only a minute fraction of the projectiles preserved in the boundary layer, most of the parent asteroid having vaporized on impact. Still, many questions remain about the origins of this world changing asteroid. Potential sources include giant debris rich regions of the outer Solar System, or even the outer area of the main asteroid built near Jupiter. Clay says being impacted by such a red giant projectile underscores just how unlucky the non avian dinosaurs were. This is space time still to come. A SpaceX rocket about the crash into the Moon, and later in the science report a you warning that a third of all heart related deaths could be due to ultra process foods. All that and more still to come up space time. The upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon nine rockets about to slam into the Moon. The impact on August the fifth will be visible from Earth and provide sighters with a new method of pinpointy exactly where objects strike the Moon, data that could or prepare for future lunar seismic experiments. The abandoned upper stage will crashed down onto the lunar near Sid's Einstein Crater at an estimated velocity of around eighty seven hundred and fifty kilometers an hour. The booster, cataloged as twenty twenty five zero one zero D, began its journey in January twenty twenty five, carrying two private robotic landers towards the Moon. After successfully deploying its payloads, the twelve meter long four ton rocket had depleted its fuel supply. Therefore couldn't propel itself safely into deep space or back to Earth to burn up in the atmosphere, and so it was left drifting in the darkness of space. Now, a report in the pre whereas physics website archive dot org has tracked the booster's flypath. The study's author, astronomer Bill Gray, says computer simulations suggest that because the rocket's really nothing more than a hollow metal shell, it's unlikely to penetrate deeply into the lunar's surface, as say a solid asteroid would. Instead, it'll be crushed on impact, creating a new roughly twenty to thirty meter white crater on the lunar landscape, and sending a large cloud of debris and lunar dust several kilometers into the black and sky. And this dust cloud is exactly what Gray and colleagues will be looking for. It's called on professional astronomers and citizen scientists around the world to also get involved. Potential observables from the event will include the flash of impact and the ejector plume as it rises from the surface. Now for those interested in joining in, the impact will happen at six point thirty five in the morning Greenwich meantime, That sixteen thirty five in the afternoon Australian Eastern Standard time and two thirty five in the morning US easternummertime. This is space time, and time now to take a brief look at some of the other stories making using science this week With a science report. A new study warns that around a third of all heart related deaths may be due to the consumption of ultra process foods ultra processed foods include things like soft drinks, chips, candies, mass process packaged bread and sweet breakfast cereals, as well as already made frozen mills, hotdogs, chicken nuggets, and dilimeats. A report to the International Congress on Obesity suggests that between twenty three and thirty eight percent of all cardiovascular deaths and between twenty three and thirty seven percent of all cases of cardiovascular disease, including coronary heart disease and stroke, are attributable to consuming ultra sess foods. The study looked at the diets of Canadian adults in twenty fifteen, fighting ultra processed foods made up forty three percent of their daily energy intake. The authors then calculated that between fifty eight thousand, two hundred and ninety six thousand new cardiovascular disease cases and between ten thousand, six hundred and seventeen thousand, four hundred cardiovascular disease related deaths were attributable to ultra process food consumption by twenty nineteen. Their modelings suggest that cutting ultra process food consumption by fifty percent could have prevented around half of all new cardio vaccular disease cases as well as cardiovacual disease related deaths. A new study suggest that fewer people in Australia are now smoking. The data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare shows rates have steadily fallen over the past two decades. In twenty twenty five, five point six percent of the population aged fourteen and over were daily smokers. That's down from eight point three percent in twenty twenty two and twenty three and nineteen point five percent in two thousand and one, and this equates to around one point three million people smoking daily compared to three million smokers in twenty twenty one. On the other hand, daily e cigarette use has gone up slightly. Vaping now stands at three point six percent compared to three point five percent in twenty twenty two. Twenty three scientists have identified high levels of vehicle tire dust on local Brisbane apartment building balconies. The findings, reported in the journal Acses and Tair, are based on the identification of tire particles and potentially toxic tire chemical additives found in dust collected from residential balconies. The research by the University of Queensland examined balcony dust from homes across the inner city is, all suburban areas, and especially near road settings, in order to see how traffic related pollution traveled from streets to residential environments. Israeli intelligence has confirmed that Iran has transferred thousands of advanced uranium enrichment centrifugias, as well as some of it's already enriched uranium stockpile to a new subterraneum complex buried in granite deep under Pickaxe Mountain to kilom it Is, south of the Tans. The moves suggest that the Islamic Republic is using the fortified underground site to continue its nuclear weapons program by further enriching uranium the full weapons grade. Tehran currently has enough weapons grade uranium to make between nine and twelve nuclear weapons based on estimates from the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran currently holds a stockpile of roughly four hundred and forty kilograms of enriched uranium up to sixty percent purity. The weapons grade enrichment threshold is ninety percent. Satellite observations indicate the Pickax Mountain facility could support advanced centrifuge assembly, meaning further enrichment as well as other nuclear weapons programs. The complex under Pickax is accessed by a network of concealed tunnels. Analysis suggests the new complex is at least one hundred meters below ground, making it deeper and far more fortified than for Dure or anywhere else the United States has struck so far. Construction at Pickaxe first began after the twenty twenty sabotage of the Natanz complex as a hardened four back site. Neutralizing Pickaxe Mountain would require multiple B two bombers dropping GBU fifty seven massive ordnance penetrators in coordinated waves, along with electronic warfare, suppression of enemy air defenses, real time intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance, and repeated strikes on tunnel entrances, ventilation shafts, and others supporting infrastructure. However, analysis suggest that this mountain complex may simply be too deep for conventional bunker busting bombs to fully destroy, making access denial and operational paralysis a more realistic objective, that is, other than a targeted nuclear strike by either the United States or Israel. We already get plenty of fate news stories from so called legitimate sources like CNN, The New York Times, the BBC, and of course Australia's own ABC, all of which openly pushed their own lives and political narratives in the guise of real journalism. And now it seems like shanky commercial companies are following their lead, with dozens of fake news pages on Facebook cropping up, claiming to be reputable news distributors. Skeptics. Timendum says the personing fake scandals, alleged cover ups, dodgy rarts, and rumored fractures within government, all in the bid to mislead thousands of readers in order to get more clicks. Report they came out recently looking at a few phony news pages looking like websites of news out Let's lee in Australia, and I'm sure they're everywhere as well, having fake news stories, some of them with videos, and I've seen some of these. There's some teed Australia, there's something in the UK. There was a classic one of Nigel Ferrari ahead of the Reform Party attacking an interviewer on screen with the aerias of the angry looking face totally made up be fake. And there's news reports so and so dead this person, this person has attacked this person, whatever, major scandal, whatever. What they're doing is their clickbait, trying to get you to click on from take it to another website. It says, by the way, would you like to buy this product? Whatever? Who are just getting traffic as much as anything else through sensationalism, and this is false sensationalism as opposed to pure exaggeration. Interestingly, some of the pages that you go through are actually themselves fakes with them take you to somewhere else. It's a sad indictment of what happens with social media that any of these things can get attraction. People's critical thinking of papanies are not prosure. I mean I see them every day. I get spam messages every day by phone or by email, and sometimes you see them on a newser online video. It's well whether call engagement driven advertising model. So basically they want what we refer to kindly as bums on seats numbers of people, and that's the way they maximize their profit or their income. And an article reasoning about these particular news sites, there's the appearance of a marketing platform or domain linked to these pages does not necessarily men that company is behind the activity. In other words, someone is hijacking someone else's site to then create a fake site. It means that the public has to be constantly aware of fake information that they're getting. And because the AI systems, the video systems that are getting more and more sophisticated, it's getting harder to assess this, which means the eventually going to reach the stage where you don't trust anything either you read or see or hear. That's probably not a great place to be. I remember when I was a kid, there was this thing called the Sydney Morning Herald, which was a brilliant and their lead story was Queen Abdicates and I was reading it on the train. People were milling around because I thought it was real. It was very amusing. That's the skeptics timendum, and this is space Time, and that's the show for now. Space Time is available every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through at fytes dot com, SoundCloud, YouTube, your favorite podcast download provider, and from space Time with Stewart Gary dot com. Space Time's also broadcast through the National Science Foundation on Science Own Radio and on both iHeartRadio and tune In Radio. And you can help to support our show by visiting the Spacetime Store for a range of promotional merchandising goodies, or by becoming a Spacetime Patron, which gives you access to triple episode commercial free versions of the show, as well as lots of burnus audio content which doesn't go to weir, access to our exclusive Facebook group, and other rewards. Just go to space Time with Steward Gary dot com for full details. You've been listening to space Time with Steward Gary. This has been another quality podcast production from bytes dot com.
