#395: Origins Reversed: Black Holes Lead the Dance of Galaxies & SpaceX's Defense Dreams
Space Nuts: Exploring the CosmosFebruary 29, 2024
395
00:28:1725.94 MB

#395: Origins Reversed: Black Holes Lead the Dance of Galaxies & SpaceX's Defense Dreams

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Prepare to thrust into a celestial debate that flips conventional wisdom on its head! In this thought-provoking episode of Space Nuts, join Andrew Dunkley and the ever-astute Professor Fred Watson as they unravel a cosmic chicken-or-egg scenario: Did supermassive black holes or galaxies come first? With the James Webb Space Telescope peering back in time, new findings suggest a revolutionary twist in our understanding of the early universe. Could black holes have been the catalysts for star formation, predating the galaxies they inhabit?
But the intrigue doesn't end at the edge of the cosmos. Closer to home, SpaceX's Starship is making waves, not just with its plans for Mars colonization, but also with its potential military applications. Discover how this behemoth of a rocket could redefine rapid global transport, delivering cargo—or perhaps one day troops—across the planet in a mere hour. With suborbital flights on the horizon, we're on the cusp of a new era in logistics and space travel.
As always, Andrew and Fred expertly guide us through these cosmic conundrums with insights that challenge our perceptions and expand our understanding of the universe. So, space enthusiasts, buckle up for another episode that promises to take you on a journey beyond the stars.
For the latest updates in space discovery and answers to the universe's most perplexing questions, subscribe to Space Nuts on your preferred podcast platform. Join us as we continue to explore the wonders of space and science. Until our next celestial sojourn, keep your gaze skyward and your curiosity boundless!
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📋 Episode Chapters
(00:00) Andrew Dunkley hosts Space nuts, the astronomy and space science podcast
(01:16) Fred says he thought it was a tick bite, but it wasn't
(03:14) New research suggests black holes came first in the early universe
(13:30) Andrew Dunkley: I was going to ask how you feel about this theory
(14:35) Space company SpaceX is working on something that has the military intrigued
(22:52) Spaceplane system could be used to take passengers from London to Sydney
(24:49) Fred Watson: China is heading in same direction as the US in space

00:00:00
Hello again. Thank you for joining us on Space Nuts, the

00:00:03
Astronomy and Space Science Podcast. My name is Andrew

00:00:07
Dunley, your host. And we'll be chatting about, oh, a lot of

00:00:11
things today. What came first, the chicken or the egg or? Let's

00:00:15
be more specific, the black hole or the star.

00:00:18
That is the question and it looks like the answer might be a

00:00:23
little bit of a flip on what we've always believed. We'll

00:00:26
also be looking at SpaceX.

00:00:28
Of course, they've been working on their latest set of rockets,

00:00:32
the SpaceX rockets, they've got one called Starship that's in

00:00:36
the testing phase, but they've got plans for an even bigger one

00:00:40
and the news is, it could have military applications. What does

00:00:45
that mean? I wonder that's all coming up on this edition of

00:00:49
Space Nuts.

00:00:50
15 seconds guidance is internal 10 9 ignition sequence. Space

00:00:57
Nuts. 543234554321. Space N as its good.

00:01:06
And joining me as always, Professor Fred, what's an

00:01:09
astronomer at large? Hi, Fred.

00:01:11
Hello, Andrew. Very good to see you again.

00:01:14
Good to see you too. Up and about, you've been, in the wars

00:01:17
lately. You, you f, you found out what bit you the other day?

00:01:23
Yeah. So, well, yes, that's right. It was a tick. But, tick,

00:01:28
a little tiny insects and we know, that ticks are, they are

00:01:32
bound in this district. People sometimes say that northern

00:01:35
beaches of Sydney are the tick capital of New, New South Wales.

00:01:39
I knew that.

00:01:40
And in fact, I thought it was a tick bite but then when I

00:01:44
started getting other lumps appearing and getting fevers and

00:01:47
starting to get really, really crook. I thought I can't have

00:01:51
been a tick, but that's what it was. I've had something called

00:01:55
Riet here.

00:01:57
That doesn't sound nice at all.

00:02:00
O otherwise nervous spotty fever.

00:02:03
How horrible. At least they've, at least they've figured it out.

00:02:07
Fred. That's the main thing.

00:02:09
Yep.

00:02:09
They didn't took a couple of people about half an hour to

00:02:13
work it out. Yeah.

00:02:14
I, I remember when I was a kid we went on holidays, up to a

00:02:17
place called Blackhead, which is a beautiful little beach area.

00:02:20
Used to be a sleepy village now it's probably now been

00:02:23
commercialized beyond help.

00:02:25
But we used to go down to the lagoon and catch fish and, you

00:02:29
know, go in and out of the bush and the mangroves and all that.

00:02:32
And one night, my, my friend, we were staying at his place,

00:02:36
lifted his shirt up and there was a tick buried deep into his

00:02:39
abdomen. I mean, it was right in there. Oh, horrible, horrible

00:02:44
things. They are.

00:02:46
They got it out with, what is it? Methylated spirits?

00:02:49
They, yeah, that's right to cool it. You try to freeze it. So, so

00:02:54
it becomes inactive.

00:02:57
It backed out in an awful hurry once that stuff was on it.

00:03:00
But, yeah, so that was meth. Yeah. Ok. That's something to

00:03:03
bear in mind.

00:03:05
I do have some.

00:03:06
Yeah. Anyway, I glad you are on the mend. That's the, that's the

00:03:10
good news. Now, let's.

00:03:12
Hopefully I am.

00:03:13
Yeah, let's get on to our first story. This, this is big news

00:03:17
and not surprisingly comes from data collected by the James Webb

00:03:20
Space Telescope and it's looking into the early universe and, and

00:03:26
we've been getting, we, we've been getting questions about

00:03:28
this from our audience because a couple of people have, have come

00:03:31
in and said, look, it doesn't add up the age of the universe

00:03:35
doesn't correlate with those early Galaxies.

00:03:37
It do, it doesn't make sense. Something else must have

00:03:40
happened. And now they've been, they've actually been looking

00:03:43
into this and it looks like our audience members who have

00:03:48
brought this up, are on the money. It looks, it, it hasn't

00:03:52
been absolutely utterly confirmed yet. But if they're

00:03:57
right, this really turns things around in terms of the early

00:04:00
universe, doesn't it?

00:04:02
Absolutely. And I think it's a great credit to our listeners

00:04:07
and viewers that they do ask questions that are, are also

00:04:13
occupying you know, the the, the scientists who are really

00:04:18
looking at the history of the early universe and what's done?

00:04:21
This is the James Webb telescope, the fact that yes, we

00:04:24
have observed Galaxies which are, you know, we see them as

00:04:29
they were when the universe was less than 400 b sorry, 400

00:04:32
million years old, remembering that it's 3, 13.8 billion years

00:04:37
is the age of the universe that comes from really reliable

00:04:42
observations and theoretical background.

00:04:45
It's very hard to, to push it back any further. Even though as

00:04:49
you and I have spoken about, some scientists have tried to do

00:04:51
that. And say, well, the universe must be older, but that

00:04:54
's not what the majority of scientists believe we are pretty

00:04:59
hooked on the 13.8 billion year age of the universe.

00:05:03
So the problem then is you see these Galaxies which are they've

00:05:09
got supermassive black holes at their centers and are relatively

00:05:13
mature. And so how are these, you know, we we didn't think we

00:05:18
could get Galaxies looking like that with a supermassive black

00:05:21
hole in the middle within the first few 100 million years of

00:05:24
the universe.

00:05:24
So how do you reconcile these and I, I think the bottom line

00:05:29
is sort of what you've already hinted at. We have tended to

00:05:35
draw the inference that black holes generally and particularly

00:05:40
supermassive black holes are products of the centers of

00:05:46
Galaxies where there's a, a richness of stars.

00:05:49
And because there are all those stars there, the black holes

00:05:52
gobble them up and they become super massive. But that takes

00:05:56
time and what this new work is doing.

00:06:00
And it's being led by some people I know actually Johns

00:06:03
Hopkins University and in in the Sorbonne in, in France, John

00:06:09
Hopkins, Johns Hopkins, of course, in Baltimore, they what

00:06:13
they've done is they've turned that picture on, on its head

00:06:16
which is to say, well, maybe the black holes came first. And so

00:06:24
what they're suggesting is that black holes and probably big

00:06:31
black holes as well really were formed with the Big Bang itself.

00:06:39
So, rather than black holes not being there when you know, when

00:06:46
Galaxies form and then accumulating their, the, their

00:06:51
mass by gobbling up stars. A after stars are formed. Sorry,

00:06:55
after, yeah, after Galaxies have been formed rather than that,

00:06:58
they're turning it on its head.

00:06:59
So, what he says, he says, actually, quite subtle facts

00:07:06
though. So what you've got to, what you gotta imagine is a

00:07:09
universe that creates black holes now, even people like

00:07:14
Hawking were talking about the possibility of primordial black

00:07:18
holes, black holes that are created within the aftermath of

00:07:22
the Big Bang.

00:07:23
And maybe we're seeing this, this theory carried a bit

00:07:27
further forward because nobody's ever observed what a primordial

00:07:31
black hole might look like. But the argument that that Joe Silk

00:07:36
and his colleagues that he's a principal author of this work, a

00:07:39
very, very eminent cosmologist.

00:07:41
What he's saying is that rather than black holes and Galaxies

00:07:49
are being formed in the reverse order, there Galaxies are

00:07:53
formed, first black holes inside them are formed afterwards

00:07:57
rather than that. It's, it's the other way round, but the

00:08:02
subtlety is, and I'm gonna quote Joe Silk here.

00:08:05
We're arguing that black hole outflows. And by that, he means

00:08:10
the the winds that we know that black holes generate when

00:08:14
they're accreting material. You get these relativistic that

00:08:19
means very high speed winds of material and radiation too

00:08:23
coming from the the poles of the, of the black hole and by

00:08:28
the poles, I mean direction perpendicular to the accretion

00:08:31
disc, the disc of material surrounding where all the stuff

00:08:34
's going in.

00:08:34
So they, they're saying we're arguing that black hole

00:08:37
outflows, crushed gas clouds, turning them into stars and

00:08:42
greatly accelerating the star formation.

00:08:46
Otherwise, it's very hard to understand where these bright

00:08:49
Galaxies came from because they're typically smaller in the

00:08:52
early universe, why on earth should they be making stars so

00:08:56
rapidly? So, yeah, so the, the idea is the black holes are

00:09:00
driving this rapid star formation by these, these

00:09:04
violent winds.

00:09:05
It, it, it's quite extraordinary because it, it, it and as I said

00:09:10
earlier, it tips all the previous theories upside down.

00:09:13
So what, what they're basically saying is that the Big Bang

00:09:16
happened and very, very quickly after that these huge black

00:09:22
holes formed and then they caused the, the, the stars to be

00:09:29
created at a great number very quickly which then formed the

00:09:33
Galaxies. Is that what we're saying?

00:09:35
Yeah. Yeah, that's right. So, what, what, you know, you the

00:09:40
some a kind of counter argument you might throw at this is that

00:09:45
well, even with the James Webb telescope, we can't see any

00:09:48
evidence of these violent winds, the jets of material that are

00:09:52
coming out of the black holes. But what is what Silk says is

00:09:56
that they're too far away?

00:09:59
I, in fact to quote him, we can't quite see these violent

00:10:02
winds or jets far, far away, but we know they must be present

00:10:05
because they, because we see many black holes early on in the

00:10:08
universe, these enormous winds coming from the black holes

00:10:12
crush nearby gas clouds to turn them into stars. That's the

00:10:14
missing link, that explains why these first Galaxies are so much

00:10:18
brighter than we expected.

00:10:21
And the article that I've been reading about this, which is on

00:10:25
the Fist.Org page comments that the young universe as seen by

00:10:33
Joe Silk and his team, the young universe had two phases in which

00:10:38
the first phase was this kind of how high speed jets and outflows

00:10:42
from the black holes accelerating the star formation.

00:10:46
But then in the second phase, the outflows slowed down.

00:10:51
And so, you've, you've got another phase where the gas

00:10:56
clouds are collapsing again, still forming stars. But he's

00:11:01
actually pointing to magnetic storms in the supermassive black

00:11:05
holes as being a a cause for that. So you've got two diff

00:11:08
distinct phases of star birth in the very, very early universe.

00:11:14
And maybe that, you know, that will account for why they are,

00:11:20
why they are brighter than we expected them to be. It.

00:11:22
It this again underlines how amazing the James Webb Space

00:11:28
Telescope has been because we've, we've said all along once

00:11:31
it got up there, it would start opening up areas that we've,

00:11:36
we've been wondering about for a long, long time and, and

00:11:39
potentially coming up with answers. I, I suppose we should

00:11:42
qualify this by saying this isn't, this isn't absolute.

00:11:45
They've got to do more work to prove a theory which they also

00:11:50
have to do through the James Webb Space Telescope. But it is

00:11:53
starting to look like they've come up with a, a new beginning

00:11:59
to the universe which is a, it's pretty astounding, isn't it? If,

00:12:03
if, if, if it's true, that's, that's a major achievement.

00:12:06
Yeah, absolutely. It's, it'll be really interesting to see how,

00:12:11
how the, you, you know, just how, the astronomical community

00:12:18
and the cosmology community takes this paper, how they,

00:12:21
react to it. It's only just come out the paper by the way is

00:12:25
which came first supermassive black holes or Galaxies insights

00:12:29
from the JWST. There you go. Ii I sorry, go ahead.

00:12:34
Yeah, I'm just saying, and they're saying supermassive

00:12:36
black holes came first.

00:12:38
Yeah, they are. Yeah. I, one of the authors is somebody I know

00:12:42
pretty well because I've worked in a collaboration with Rosie

00:12:45
Wise. She was one of the leading members of the Rave project that

00:12:50
I was very deeply involved with in the first decade of this

00:12:54
century.

00:12:55
Rosie is not somebody who pulls things out of the air or

00:12:59
anything. She has her feet very firmly on the ground in terms of

00:13:03
as you know, the astrophysics and the physics that go into

00:13:06
these things. So I think this is likely to be an important or

00:13:12
seen as a very important paper, maybe pivotal in its in its

00:13:16
importance.

00:13:17
And by, by the way, I'm not suggesting that Joe Silk, the

00:13:19
lead author is in any way, doesn't have his feet on the

00:13:23
ground. He certainly does too. It's just that I know Rosie a

00:13:26
lot better and, yeah, I know what she's like. She's very,

00:13:29
very thorough.

00:13:30
Makes, makes my next question mood. But, yeah, I was gonna ask

00:13:35
how you feel about this theory. Did, do you think it has legs?

00:13:38
But, if they're as astute as you say, yeah, obviously it does.

00:13:42
Yeah, these are people with far bigger brains than mine and Drew

00:13:46
and they're, yeah, they're not ones to, to, you know, to go off

00:13:50
half cock or anything like that. They would, they would have made

00:13:53
sure that the, all their observations and theory play up,

00:13:58
play it together.

00:13:59
Yeah. Got the brains, the size of a planet by the sound of it.

00:14:03
Indeed. Indeed. Alright. If you want to read that story and it's

00:14:06
well worth reading. It is on the Fizz.Org website. And, yeah, it

00:14:11
's just, it's quite mind blowing and I know quite a few people

00:14:16
who have sent us in questions will be really keen to, to read

00:14:19
about that because they've been saying this all along something

00:14:22
else happened and it looks like you were right.

00:14:26
This is Space Night's Andrew Dunkley here with Professor Fred

00:14:30
Watson Space Nuts. Now, Fred to another story that has

00:14:39
applications or implications that could have a few people

00:14:43
going. Oh, you, you're kidding? Me this, they're not going to do

00:14:47
this, are they?

00:14:48
And that is, of course, we've heard of NASA, we've heard of

00:14:52
SpaceX. They're working together and they're going to try and

00:14:54
send people back to the moon in the very near future. But,

00:14:58
SpaceX is working on something else that has got the military

00:15:01
intrigued. Fred. What's happening here?

00:15:06
Yeah, it, it's, as you've said, it's the SpaceX work on the, the

00:15:13
next big thing if I can put it that way, which has already had

00:15:16
two test flights. None of which were successful. And the second

00:15:23
one was nearly successful. It was basically during the

00:15:27
separation of the first stage from the second stage that

00:15:30
things went wrong.

00:15:31
It's called Starship. And the the I should say that the

00:15:38
organization Space X is planning a third test flight. I might

00:15:44
even be this month. It's gonna be very soon. So we might be

00:15:47
reporting on that at some point down the track.

00:15:50
Yeah, the, the other two last year ended in explosions, but

00:15:54
what you, what you've got with this gino spacecraft is

00:15:59
something that can lift up to 115 tons to low earth orbit. So,

00:16:11
and, and you know, the, the, the real reason for this work being

00:16:16
done is because of Elon Musk's vision to send people to Mars,

00:16:23
that's why he's built this spacecraft. It's an enormous

00:16:26
thing, Starship.

00:16:28
And he's focused on getting people to Mars NASA. Meanwhile

00:16:33
is also focused on Starship, but that's because the upper stage

00:16:37
of Starship is destined to be the landing vehicle to put

00:16:43
astronauts on the moon for the Artemis three space mission.

00:16:49
Which is, I think it's still scheduled for 2020. I think it's

00:16:53
2026 that it's slipped back to now.

00:16:56
Cos it will, they, they, they need a vehicle that will a large

00:17:00
vehicle that will set down astronauts and equipment on the

00:17:04
moon surface. NASA has chosen SpaceX's Starship to do that. So

00:17:10
that's the focus there. But what we're hearing about now, and

00:17:14
this is another news item once again, actually from pfi.org.

00:17:18
It's it is a news item that suggests that the US military

00:17:26
namely the Department Of Defense with se at the end rather than

00:17:29
ce which is what we have that the there has been the, they,

00:17:35
they presented some work at the Space Mobility Conference held

00:17:43
at the Orange County Convention Center apparently that was

00:17:46
earlier this month.

00:17:48
What the defense department wants to wants to use it for is

00:17:55
point to point cargo transfer on the earth. So, not necessarily,

00:18:02
you know, well, not necessarily humans but at least getting if

00:18:09
you need to get a lot of kit from one place to another very

00:18:12
quickly. You can do it in an hour if you've got a Starship at

00:18:16
your disposal.

00:18:19
So I, I might quote, actually, there's a, one of, SpaceX's

00:18:24
senior advisors, Gary Henry, he says, rocket cargo point to

00:18:29
point is not the reason we're building Starship, we're

00:18:32
building Starship to get to Mars. But what we're finding is

00:18:36
it's a system we're putting together that has profound

00:18:39
impact for national security.

00:18:42
And one of them just happens to be rocket point to point, which

00:18:47
just means using a rocket to get from one place to another. So,

00:18:50
yeah, so supplies, possibly, maybe troops one day down the

00:18:56
track. But, I believe that the defense department is very, very

00:19:01
interested. In fact, we hear that they began looking at the

00:19:04
idea 20 years ago.

00:19:06
But because now we've got this spacecraft that is almost ready

00:19:10
to go. I wouldn't mind betting that there's a good chance, that

00:19:14
the next test flight of Starship actually is completely

00:19:17
successful. It's the way Elon Musk and his colleagues learn,

00:19:21
by breaking things and work out, working out what they need to do

00:19:25
to stop them breaking, he breaks a lot of things he does. Yeah.

00:19:31
But there's an interesting quote here from, somebody called,

00:19:35
Gregory Spanger, who's the, chief scientist for the US Air

00:19:40
Force research lab. And he says, envi envision a number of

00:19:44
containers sitting in a warehouse down in Cape

00:19:47
Canaveral. We go to an alert level. We pull them up. You

00:19:52
start putting them on the rocket at each successive alert level.

00:19:55
Your time to launch shrinks and shrinks and sh and shrinks until

00:19:59
we can get it down to one hour. And apparently the, the teams

00:20:04
that work with, with spans, they've, they've already been

00:20:08
making mock ups of the cargo bay for, for Starship trying to work

00:20:13
out how you can do that. To me.

00:20:17
To me the thing that is interesting about this, because,

00:20:22
well, we're all lovers, not fighters in the world of

00:20:25
astronomy. But do you know, I think you could imagine this

00:20:29
having enormous humanitarian benefits as well. You had to get

00:20:34
stuff in large quantities very quickly from one place on the

00:20:38
earth to the other.

00:20:40
It, it, it would, it would probably be a very good way of

00:20:44
doing it if you could afford it. That's the thing, but that's the

00:20:48
whole, you know, the nub of the matter with Starship is that it

00:20:54
's cheaper because of it's all a matter of scale.

00:20:58
I mean, the, the Space X is reusable Falcon Nine rockets

00:21:02
have brought the cost down typically of getting something

00:21:06
into orbit from $20 a kilo kilogram to $2000 a kilogram.

00:21:11
That's a factor of 10, but Starship will bring it down even

00:21:15
more. And so it's really very, very interesting to to look at

00:21:21
the kind of possibilities.

00:21:24
In fact, the figure I've seen and this is pounds rather than

00:21:30
kilograms, $90 a pound to get into orbit. What's that per

00:21:35
kilogram? 2.2 times nine is about 20 sorry, about 200 then 2

00:21:41
$200 per kilogram. So it's 1/10 again, it's come down by

00:21:45
another, another factor of 10.

00:21:47
I think they're talking about it becoming even cheaper in the

00:21:52
long term when they, when they, these bigger rockets and, and

00:21:56
have more of them operating and they're talking about dropping

00:22:00
the price to what about $18 a kilo, $20 a kilo, $9 a pound.

00:22:06
Yeah.

00:22:06
So like you said, but the point I'm getting at is that, that is

00:22:11
equivalent to what it costs them now to transport this thing by

00:22:14
plane, the military transports are about $20 a kilo. And so if

00:22:21
they can do it in a rocket, the advantage is time, they do it in

00:22:25
minutes to an hour rather than hours to days, which sometimes

00:22:30
is the case with, with standard aircraft transport.

00:22:34
We basically, we're basically talking suborbital flight,

00:22:37
aren't we?

00:22:39
Well, that's right. Sorry, we didn't really make that point.

00:22:43
It's yeah, subur whistle flight is what it's about. It's about

00:22:46
putting the thing up into a, a para parabolic trajectory, a

00:22:49
ballistic trajectory, and bringing it down with Starship,

00:22:53
you'd have to bring it down in a pretty specialized space port.

00:22:57
Because that's a very, very big machine. And it's not something

00:23:02
you can just dump down anywhere. One way of doing it might be to

00:23:05
have offshore platforms, things of that sort. Andrew that are,

00:23:08
which is what of course they do with, with the Falcons. But

00:23:12
just, take it one step further. This is also in the, I guess the

00:23:18
game plan of virgin Galactic.

00:23:21
They are very keen to use the virgin Galactic, you know, the

00:23:28
mothership and space plane system, not just for up and down

00:23:33
joy flights, which is kind of what it's doing at the moment,

00:23:36
but to do suborbital flight that will take you from London to

00:23:40
Sydney in about an hour or there about less than an hour.

00:23:44
That's just, yeah. How bad is the jet, jet lag gonna be then?

00:23:49
Oh, my goodness.

00:23:51
Yeah, it would be very interesting because, yes. Well,

00:23:55
if you.

00:23:55
Let's say, let's say you leave London at midday, it takes one

00:24:00
hour to get to Australia. The time here would be, let me think

00:24:05
it'd be about around midnight or 10 pm or something like that.

00:24:11
So you're wide awake, you've landed, there's no way you're

00:24:16
gonna go to bed.

00:24:18
That's true. That's true. You might have to go into suspended

00:24:21
animation or something.

00:24:23
But anyway, yeah, it's, it is very, very interesting,

00:24:27
technology and something that I think we might see getting more

00:24:32
of an look.

00:24:33
I think it's going to become stock standard in, in the

00:24:36
future. I think this is just going to be normal. They're

00:24:38
talking about it, as a potential at the moment. But I think the

00:24:42
time will come where we're just going to see rockets taking off

00:24:46
every day for one reason or another.

00:24:48
The the other part to this story though. And people were probably

00:24:52
saying, oh why is the military getting involved? Why do they

00:24:55
have to do this? Well, they have to do this because there's

00:24:58
another player in the mix and that's China indeed.

00:25:02
Yeah, which is, you know, China is very much heading in the same

00:25:10
direction, I guess as the US, in terms of its, it's capabilities

00:25:15
in space. It's got its own space station. It's landed several

00:25:19
spacecraft on the moon. The first the first robotic

00:25:22
spacecraft to be landed on the far side of the moon is Chinese.

00:25:25
And so they will be doing the same kind of thing then.

00:25:30
Well, I believe they are, I think they are working on this,

00:25:34
this is part of their plan. So yeah, the US would probably be

00:25:39
very naive to just say it'll never work with. We won't do

00:25:43
that because they'll get left behind. In fact, there are some

00:25:46
that are saying China is very fast going to take over as the

00:25:51
absolute superpower in space if other countries don't get the

00:25:56
lead out and at the.

00:26:01
The race is on. That's right. It 's their Long March Series which

00:26:04
is is really, they've got something called Long March 9,

00:26:09
which I don't know too much about, I have to say which is

00:26:12
doing the same sort of thing because the idea is to reuse it

00:26:14
to make it reusable.

00:26:16
Which is the breakthrough it occurred in 2015 when Elon Musk

00:26:21
was the first one to make a relaunch booster rocket. But now

00:26:26
a lot of players in the space industry are working in the same

00:26:30
direction.

00:26:34
Sorry, Jeff bezos' Company Blue Origin. That's, that's already

00:26:38
doing that with, you know, with their, with their, again, with

00:26:42
our space tourism floats.

00:26:44
Yes, indeed. And, and this is all going to happen in years,

00:26:46
not, not decades, this multiple rocket, multiple launches,

00:26:51
multiple payloads being shot all over the world, probably not far

00:26:55
away at all.

00:26:57
So, it, it shouldn't come as a surprise but they've got to get

00:27:01
the, they've got to get the, the hardware working properly yet.

00:27:05
They, they're still working on Space X and, and, and the

00:27:08
Starship rockets, but they'll get it, they'll figure it out.

00:27:11
There's no, I don't doubt that.

00:27:13
Alright, if you wanna read that story, I believe that one's on

00:27:17
Fizz.Org as well. That wraps it up, Fred. Just a reminder too.

00:27:23
If you want to listen to Space Nuts Q and A that will be coming

00:27:27
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button below.

00:27:40
Thanks, Fred. We will catch up with you real real soon. Fred

00:27:44
Watts, an astronomer at large and he joins us every week on

00:27:48
Space Nuts and I hope you'll join us again very, very soon.

00:27:52
We'll catch you then from me, Andrew Dunkley. Bye. Bye.

00:28:00
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00:28:10
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