Future Missions and Scientific Potential

Before we had AT and T business wireless coverage, our delivery GPS wasn't the most reliable. Once our driver had to do a fourteen point turn to get back on route, a fourteen point turn , an influencer even live streamed the whole thing. Not good for business. Now with AT and T Business Wireless, routes are updating on the flight and deliveries are on time. And the influencer didn't get us fifty three new followers though. AT and T Business Wireless. Connecting changes Astronomy Cast Episode seven ninety nine Heavy Lift Rockets. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts based journey through the cosmos where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I'm Frisker Kane. I'm the publisher of University with me as always is Dr. Pamela Gay, senior scientist for the planetary science institute and the Director of Cloudmo Quest. Hey, Pamela, how are you ? I am itchy and tired . Right. We have We have a one two punch going on of never ending streams of tornadoes. We've actually hit our twenty twenty six expected total already in June. Yeah . And the poison Ivy decided to join the Virginia Creeper in growing everywhere in my yard. And yeah , next is a tornado of poison ivy, like a shark native poison ivy. Exactly. Yeah, this is absolutely possible at this point. So just a little bit of housekeeping before we move on . This is going to be the last regular episode season nineteen . This is episode seven ninety nine . And normally we would probably have done one more show, but that would make it the season episode eight hundred and we'll be doing season twenty and the numerology of that makes Pamela's brain happy . So we've decided to not do a regular episode week . We may do something so there's like some bonus nonsense that shows up in your feed , but it will not be an official so that the numbering remains pristine and we will negotiate or this will be the last episode that you hear of season nineteen and you'll hear back from us again in two months when we return from the summer hiatus. So if you've got questions , drop them in the comments . Sure. Yeah, or it'll just be us ranting about something. Who knows what it's going to be? Or it will just be silence. We haven't decided yet anything . You know, we need a break, you need a break . So yeah, yeah. All right, let's get into it. The Saturn Five was a monster capable of taking humans any lander to the moon and bringing them back again. But the number of heavy lift rock ets since then has gotten pretty sparse. Now with tens, if not hundreds of thousands of satellites in the works, giant new space telescopes, and multi tonne lunar landers in development, there are heavy lift solutions to match. So let's talk about them . But first, it's time for a break . And we're back . Can you the stage and just give us I think for most people they think rockets are rockets. You see one rocket, you see a rocket look at that rocket, that rocket space is taking off and it's carrying a bunch of satellites. It's a rocket. And then you say, and then there's Saturn Five and it took people to the Moon . But to really like it's really tricky to communicate the scale a heavy lift rocket compared to the kind of just you know, the teeny tiny falcon falcon nines . So the best way to think about it is to compare it to cars . You can stick a little tiny trailer capable of holding like four bales of hay, a couple hundred pounds on the back of your Honda Civic . It's probably not great. So someone's horse experience is coming into focus here. This is how these things happen. Yeah. But you really can't tow your fourteen hundred pound horse behind your Honda Civic . You need to have a pickup truck for that. Right. And if you have one of those big four h orse trailers, you need a duly pickup trail to that. Yeah. And if you want to have fourteen horses , that's where semi trucks start to become a thing. Got it. Yeah, yeah. And you know, and I think for me we could put this in terms of sailboats and I, think we could probably reach a very similar mental calculation. So it all comes down to what are you trying to put into orbit? And a lot of the stuff we put into orbit is fairly tiny . The electron rockets, which are fairly huggable, you can reach out and get your arms a good halfway around them . Electrons huggable rockets are out there launching suit case size satellites, no big deal. Yeah, so just like it's funny, this is a number that's actually in my head, which is that it's about three hundred fifty kilograms . Yeah. So it is less than the weight of your car. It is it is not it is not a heavy payload that is going into these electrons . Yeah. No. And it just can't do more than that. Like you try to you try to put a larger payload , he aavier payload into the electron, and it's not going to be able to make an orbit with all of the rockets, all of the motors that it has on board. And there's about two thousand pounds to a ton or a thousand kilograms to a metric ton , pick your units . We're weird . And so you're not even approaching one ton with those cute little huggable electrons . I really find electrons to be too cute for their own good. Yeah . Now so cool fortunately it's true . Okay sometimes you want to launch like an entire space station in one go and the Saturn V could do that skylap missions. Sometimes you want to launch to the Moon with your lander, your command module, and everything else in a single go. And the Saturn Fives, which disposed of absolutely every part of the rocket , they could launch one hundred and forty tons to lower Earth orbit. one hundred forty tons. There is nothing else that comes right close. So if an electron can launch, say three hundred and fifty kilograms , so it's like three to the tonne . So it could launch the equivalent of, I don't know, five hundred ish times as much as an electron can . Yeah. And currently, like Starship hopes to eventually get to a hundred tons to orbit. New Glen plans to be able to get to seventy Fal,con Heavy is at seventy . So Falcon Heavy and New Glen can launch half the mass to lower Earth orbit of what Saturn V s were capable of. Now, both New Glen and Falcon Heavy are looking to have reusable core modules. The Falcon Heavy has reusable boosters . That changes how you use them . So you have to have a lot more computing skills. Computers are heavy and dense . And you need fuel to come back. Yeah, so I want to break this up into a bunch of kind of subcategories. So I think the first way to approach the super heavy lift category is disposable all the way down . Okay . So let's talk about some examples of rockets that are disposable all the way down. All right, so the Saturn five me classic, right? The Saturn five, the Inertia is another one. It was a hundred tons to orbit. It only flew twice, only once of those times was successful . And then Russia decided to sorry, the Soviet Union decided to become Russia and Renursia and Bahron were no more. Right, right, right. That's that so worry Bron, that's that space shuttle. Yeah. Yeah, that that sort of the Soviet version of the of the space shuttle and it launched, you know, the Energia looked very similar to the space shuttle stack. But it could fly solo. The space shuttle stack did not fly on its own. It flew with the space shuttle because it was using the space shuttle's main engines. Right. Inner zia had everything built into that trio of central core and two side boosters Right, right . So yeah, Inertia was another one of those great rockets . And today we're looking at a whole lot of things in the twenty to twenty five tons to Leo category . And then the big three heavy lift are new Glen, Falcon Heavy . Both functional rockets. Newglen's having a struggle bust moment . And then Starship , which still hasn't done full orbital testing yet, so it's still in the planned stage. And space launch system . So space launch system, you're right. That one's at ninety five. It's at the very top, so I missed it in my spreadsheet My spreadsheet Saturn five. Rocket. Yeah. Inertia . Right. SLS skipped right over it. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, the point being here that with when you consider the Saturn five rocket , it had three main stages that it launched. It disposed of the first stage, it disposed of the second stage, it disposed of the third stage, it flew to the Moon with its command module , went down to the surface of the moon, had the ascend module, come back up, then it comes back. And all that's left when you sort of look at this entire skyscraper rocket is this one single little capital. That is all that comes back to Earth . You look at the and the Nergia , the whole thing is used up. You look at the at the space launch system . Now the boosters on that were supposed to be recyclable. Okay, okay, yeah. You look at the space launch system. It's kind of like someone stretched out of the space shuttle. Yeah , and gave engines to the core stage. Right. Yes, yeah, move the engines off. Yeah. So it's actually closer to inertia using space shuttle technology. Right. But the thing launches, the solid rocket boosters are now disposed of, right? They're no longer they were recovered during the space shuttle era and now they're disposed of , the core module is disposed of. And then whatever upper stage is on board this thing, it is also disposed of . And so we've got this sort of collection capsule comes back again. Yeah. Once again, all you get is the capsule. You get the Iranian capsule back to Earth. And so that is the that is the plan. And then I think the Chinese are working on their version of a heavy lift . Yeah, long march ten and it's sort of again, it's the same kind of stick where you're gonna you're going to lose all of your parts . So actually long march ten is seventy tons to orbit reusable long march nine is one hundred and fifty tons to orbit, all dead. All dead. Oh, right, right. Yeah, that thing kind of looks like a dragon. Like a sea dragon. Yeah , yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. So that's so that is the sort of the state of we'll talk about future rockets in a second, but yeah, the state of the art here is that we have a bunch a class of totally expendable heavy lift vehicles that have been tested and tried and tested in the past or are operating right now . And India and Russia are still in the game. They're just not as far along. So you have Russia working on their DON rocket, which is theoretically one hundred and thirty tons to orbit. It's not there yet . And then you have India working on and I'm going to destroy this Soria, their NGLV . It is seventy tons to lower Earth orbit. So let's talk about then the kind of the hybrid partially reusable rockets that are that have either flown or are in development. So where it gets tricky is what you put into the rockets changes how easy it is to reuse them. So for instance, a solid rocket booster is not something you can turn on and off. So the only way you're recycling any of a solid rocket booster is to scoop it out of the ocean and refurbish the bejizas out of it. And salt water is really hard on things. So that is not a cheap process. Right . Now liquid fuel ed rockets , and this is the majority of where we're going in development around the world, which is actually really good because the particulate matter from solid rocket boosters is particularly bad for the atmosphere. We do not need solid rocket boosters No . So with the liquid fueled rockets that you can turn on and off, it starts to become a whole lot easier to literally turn them on and off. So you go up to the height you need, you let it fall down to the altitude where you need to restart it, restart it, come in for a gentle landing . This is the great hope that is enabled by computational power. It also adds a level of complexity because you need to be able to steer and having just three engines doesn't let you steer sufficiently . And so they have to have significantly more engines on these systems to enable the kinds of steering you want to do. So this is where we're suddenly seeing everything going from like three nozzles to thirty three nozzles. Right. It's all about the steering. So which are the rockets right now that are capable of reusing at least the heavy lift they're capable of using at least part of their rocket? So New Glen can reuse their first stage and it's only a core. There are no side boosters, no anything else attached. It's just that core. Second stage is in orbit, it's gone. Right. But this is tested We have seen a new Glen launch . The core stage landed back at the launch power out of the out on the drone ship, they brought it back in, refurbished it and launch it a second time. We've also seen a new gland explode and the pad on the pad and during a hot fire test and destroy the , you know, a lot of the facilities at the pad. It's going to require , you know, more than just a buffing it out . Well, Starship did the same thing to their test stand . So that was a year ago. Yeah, yeah, but I'm just saying like we're not we're not fully in the age of reusable rockets yet. No , no, no. So we've seen both Starship and New Glen are part of a new era of using methane as a fuel . Methane a lot more energy per unit volume , but it also explodes with a lot more energy per volume. Those two are the exact same thing phrased differently . And it's a lot more difficult to work with in some ways because you're processing liquid natural gas. You have to transport the liquid natural gas , you have to refine it into the methane , a lot of the other fuels, they're using liquid oxygen, pull that out of the air . So this new era of using methane fuel has now dramatically exploded both a starship and a new Glen. So yeah SLS hasn't done this yet. Yeah . So you've got in the sort of partial reusable category you talked about New G inlen and so, that they're reusing the first stage, but they're disposing of the upper stage. Yeah . And then of course we also have Falcon Heavy. And then we've got Falcon Heavy from SpaceX. And so in that case, you know, we've all seen it. It's mind blowing to watch the synchronized ballet of this, but it can reuse the three boosters on the bottom, the core booster, which has to land at sea and then the two side boosters, they can land on the ground near the launch site . And then the upper stage is disposable . Yes . The Vulcan Centaur, which is down at the twenty five tons scale, so it's that high lift, not necessarily heavy, definitely not super heavy lift. Yeah . They're also planning to make that one reusable for the core stage. They use solid rocket add ons. So it's a thing in progress. Yes, this is what we're adding. And then of course the big super heavy lift that we have all been watching them go through stage after stage after stage and most recently now they hit the third iteration of Starship , which is designed to be fully reusable. And this is one of the hundred tons to lower Earth orbit planned. I think they've only done forty tons so far to lower Earth orbit . They haven't completed an orbit yet. This is liquid oxygen, liquid methane fueled . They've managed to bring back boosters multiple times. The booster seems to be good . They haven't had a lot of success yet with the V three engines . They've only tried one launch, but they've blown up a whole bunch of stuff on the test stand. It's kind of spectacular to watch what happens in the test stand . They're planning to have still this year one more test and then a once around the planet. So we'll see if we get both of those this year . We're hoping to see another they're going to require another attempt before they get permission to do orbit . The last launch they had a casc ading engine failure at separation between Starship Booster . They then weren't able to re ignite all of the engines on Starship , so they came in kind of on the inner barely inside their landing region and then blew up spectacularly when they hit the ocean. It was really kind of spectacular like big booms. Right . All right, we're going to take another break . We're back. So now we sort of talked about the landscape of all of the sort of the current rockets. And I want to talk about like what that gets us Yeah, that you know why is there such demand now for the development of these heavy lift rockets ? So we have three different things that we like them for. One is you can get huge things to low earth orbits. So like Skylab was a Saturn rocket. That's kind of awesome. An entire space station. . One launch. So yeah, so we're looking at as we move into a future with data centers, with commercial space stations , all of these things below Earth orbit, you can launch giant things. It also starts to be possible to launch less giant things to middle orbits. So you start to see here I'm including cis lunar space , lunar orbit out to the Grange points as that middling distance. So James Webb Space Telescope was big, is big , but isn't huge amount of mass compared to some of the stuff that we'd like to stick in low earth orbit. Yeah, it was like in the ten ton range. Yeah , and we would launch on an Aria on five and it was at the kind of the very limits of what the Area on five do and a totally disposable rocket to get all the way out to the L two Lagrange point. It's funny I was talking with the engineers who designed James Webb and talked about this limitation. We talked about how they had to come with all this crazy folding technology to get the thing to fit inside the five meter fairing. And they said, actually, that was not our biggest challenge. Our biggest challenge was to shave the weight down. Right. And that's always the case. Yeah. And so they had to find , you know, new composites for every screw, every little bit and piece of this entire thing to try and shave the weight down to get it into something that the Aerion five could actually launch. And so when you look at, I mean, I don't know the exact numbers of what a Starship could carry to L two, but it's probably more than ten tons, right? You know, maybe it's in the dozens of tons at this point. And so you could get sloppy with the weight engineering of a big mega telescope and still and so because like that was burning up time budget, money, testing . You know, will these materials still do the same work under the same load, but they're a quart of the weight . Sort of. So one of the things that gets thrown around a lot is Starship could just launch Verubin in a single go. Yeah, yeah. And it can't, it really can't. So these big old telescopes we build on the surface of our planet, they're actually just a little bit bigger than will fit inside Starship , and they do way too much . But that's because the mirrors are built using this is Fine Under Earth Gravity Technology . And so we have techniques to build sign ificantly lower weight craft , but we do have to design different even for Starship . And so it all comes down to yes, it's going to be a whole easier once New Glen , Falcon Heavy, Starship Long March nine and all these other vehicles are out there. And if we can get more SLS, we all want more SLS, please. But four billion dollars map. Yeah. Well, okay, yeah, but they work. Yes. Yeah, they work. Yeah, they work great. Yeah. Can we have more until they perfect Nucleen and Starship? So that weight requirement is one part of the puzzle . And the other is speed. Well , the other part is just the size of the fairing. Yeah. So the area on five has a five meter fairing while Starship and some of the other planned well Sarci,a for example, has a nine meter fairing . So you've just got so much more space. It's an eighteen meter tall , you know, cavern that you can stick things into. And so again , you when you go back to that idea of the web design problem, you don't have to spend so much time shaving down the weight and you don't have to spend so much time shaving down the size that maybe instead of you having a telescope that does this crazy folding maneuver , you just go with a much simpler design, like say what Hubble looks like or I always sort of think about Herschel. Herschel is like this perfect it's this tube that is the size of the fairing and then the tube has the telescope, it has the primary mirror inside of it. So you just make a tube that's maybe an eight meter telescope that'll fit within a starship . You don't need to have any kind of complicated folding stuff. It's just a big tube inside a bigger tube and New Glen is out at seven meters . We have Falcon Heavy. Is it about the same size? Yes, is why they can start considering moving one Mark over to a falcon heavy for launch. Yep. The long march nine has a huge fairing , you know, probably in the same class as Starship. So I think we're yeah. Yeah. So these are like you get this one, two punch of more weight . You're no longer school bus size. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you are whatever , whatever is nine meters by eighteen meters. I don't know, what is that? Is that semi truck was like twenty seven feet . So it's an airplane. I don't know it was a seven was a seven twenty seven thirty seven. I don't even know what the what now I need to look that up. Yeah, what could you what could you jam inside of inside of a starship fairy? But anyway, it's a whole lot smaller than a C. I forgot the number galaxy cargo, but like it is starting to be seven seventy seven category. Yeah, yeah, totally. So who got this gigantic chasm cavernous thing you put the space into, you can carry a heavy weight. So that ists many of the design constraints, which makes the instrument manufacturer quite excited . And then also you get these economies of scale. You're dumping potentially dozens of satellites into the same fairing, and then you're just deploying them all in one go at the same orbit. Concerned face. Have concerned face. Oh yeah, with so many mega constellations planned and it is terrifying. I'm like , hopefully people do not hear us and going like, I can't wait to see two hundred thousand satellites orbiting the Earth polluting our view of the night sky. We are we are not for that I want to live in a world where the number of fireflies I see exceeds the number of satellites I see . And that is not currently the case. Yes. So the other thing and this is more of an issue of that reusability really only starts to be feasible at scale and that you know these smaller rockets, although electron or they're trying to come or rocket lab is trying to come up with a version of their rocket, the neutron that should have a higher level of reusability. But yeah, really you need these heavier lift rockets where you're essentially more is dedicated to fuel and less is dedicated to all of the parts. And that gets you to this place of reusability. And so weirdly, the economics of launching rockets flips upside down as these things get bigger in, fact then now you've got a fuller reasonability, the cost of launching things can come back down. I think, you know, yeah, Elon Musk said, Oh, we're going to get down to seventy five bucks a kilogram . And I am , you know, this is my skeptical face. But yeah , but I can see them saying, hey, we'll launch , we'll give you a ten percent discount on the launch price because of a reason it's fully reasonable. Like they're going to be able to be cost competitive in literally market that's out there right now. They're looking at order of seventy million for an entire Falcon nine launch . But so there's this weird thing that happens that I just want to point out. So tiny rockets, model rockets , missile sized rockets , they can flip back on a parachute . Once you start to get to the electr on size , the parachute alone isn't quite enough to get it safely to the ground unharmed . So this is where with the electron they were looking to have helicopter capture and they haven't perfected that yet . But once you get big enough, parachutes are absolutely no good whatsoever . But this is where you can carry the computing, you can carry the engines , and bring yourself down safely . And these are all things that we have perfected at lower masses in Mars atmosphere where the thinner atmosphere causes these problems at lower masses . So it's really interesting to see how what we've had to learn trying to land on Mars has played a role in figuring out how to reuse things here on Earth . So landing on Mars, reusing things on Earth, that's actually a very similar problem if you think about it. It's just in one case, you're taking off on one planet and coming down on the other. Yeah, it's kind of interesting that that whole idea, we've talked about this in the past, just how the atmosphere gives you this free ride, this free lunch. Yeah, it's really useful. free lunch starts to get harder and harder to accept because of just the way the physics works as the rockets get bigger , the free lunches that you can try and get out there become harder and harder to acquire. So yeah, all right. We're going to talk about this more, but it's time for another break . And we're back . So give people a sense then of what we can expect . What is the plan for the super heavy lift rockets that are in the pipeline right now and sort of coming in the next couple of years? So people can look for some interesting milestones. I am nervous to say there's any plan given how much everything radically changes every three weeks coming out . But what's going to be able to do? Let's discuss So there was no plan. There was no plan. There's no plan. Nothing's gonna happen. Who knows? It could be, you know, it could just be rain cats, dogs. We don't know madness. Chaos reigns. No. So I can discuss what's going to be possible. Right. So we're looking at scientists being super helpful that we're going to be able to get things at a much easier wait time to get through to the outer solar system. So for instance, the New Horizons little eighty bitty tiny tiny spacecraft , it launched on an Atlas five and zoom out towards the outer solar system . So when you launch small mass on big rocket, you go fast. This is a good thing. Yeah . So when you have a super heavy rocket, you go even faster with a tiny mass. So a lot of us are dreaming of urinus and Neptune missions. In theory, you also have a maybe a kick stage that goes with the mission that you can then turn it around and decelerate. Has to have. Yeah, yeah. And so you launch fast, short transit time, but then you also have the ability to turn around and decelerate yourself before you arrive. And that's the challenge is that any the lowest energy routes that you want to try and take require the longest times. If you want to shorten the time, you've got to have go faster and then slow down. And that requires more propellant and that requires a heavier lift vehicle. So we get to shorten our travel times to the outer solar system. Yes, please The other two big things that we're looking at are literally Moon and Mars. Everyone right now is racing to get samples. Well, okay, we stopped racing. China is racing to get samples. Yeah samples back from Mars. Yeah . China is a one nation race to get samples back from Mars. Yeah. We were there. We were there . You could have been a contender . We could have been. We're not . There's the commercial lunar payload service program has all been renamed Moon Base because that's not confusing . So we're going to have a whole bunch of Moon based missions that are actually like rovers and landers and science instruments . Relativity space is there's another rocket coming out of relativity space. They've only had one launch so far of a low mass rocket. It blew up. We're looking to see if they successfully do their higher mass one later this year and this will be the first commercial mission to Mars in the twenty twenty eight launch window if they get everything going . And so we're starting to see commercial missions in the planning Moon and Mars is the two big destinations and then so many data centers and there's a lot of thermodynamics. We're not going to we're not going to sort of try to figure out whether or not data centers in space is even a viable idea or not a crazy idea. But we know that satellite constellations are absolutely a growing concern that SpaceX went public is worth trillions of dollars , mostly on the back. Worth less today than they were when they launched. Yeah , but mostly on the back of its highly successful Falcon series . Starlight, Starlink that too. Yeah. Starlink is what makes money. They lose money. They lose money in the rockets, they lose money in the AI. They lose money on everything except for Starlink. Yeah, that's what they make their money on. And there is a race. I mean, the Chinese are building them, the Russians are building them. There are many nations building them. There are many different catella constellations in the U. S. And so someone's going to need to launch that one hundred thousand satellites. It's going to block our view to the night sky and that's going to require heavy lift rockets. And I think, you know h,opefully I can't , you know what? I can't even imagine a scenario where any of my hopes and dreams come true. So I'm not even going to say them. Instead that is the incentive, that is the financial incentive to race to heavy lift rockets is to get those satellites up. So the size thing to think about is the space station brings in about , I'm hoping I get the units right, one hundred kilowatts of power . And if you look at images of the space station and it's solar rays and radiators that are at a right angle to each other , the space station is the same power as what SpaceX is planning to do for its data centers. So if you imagine that amount of solar array and that amount of radiator for every single data center that XAI wants to build, that's what we're looking at in terms of size. Wait, so when I said that we're not going to legislate the viability of data centers in space, we're now legislating the viability of data sets. The viability. I said the size of solar panels and radiation. Yeah, it's like the horror horrific nightmarish brightness of solar panels and radiators. The International Space Station is the brightest object in the sky apart from the sun and the moon when it goes over. It can outshine Venus. It's crazy how bright it is. Yeah . And so imagine hundreds , if not thousands, if not tens of thousands of those in the sky at all times making AI better. Yeah, please put those on the far side of the moon. I don't want to see them. Yeah. Anyway, book, you know what ? I'm sure cooler heads will prevail and that dark future. I'm sure the laws of physics will intervene. The laws of physics will I believe in physics and will make that unviable. And we don't have to imagine that that terrifying future . But heavy lift rockets are coming and I think we can imagine all kinds of really useful scientific purposes for them. Ice giants. Let's go to the Ice s. Yeah, let's get an interestellar mission. Let's go to the solar gravitational lens. Let's put a base on the moon. Let's put it. Let's return samples from Mars. Let's return samples from Europa. We need super heavy lift rockets for those and nothing else . Thanks Pamela. Thank you, Fraser. And thank you so much to all of at our prons. We would not be here without you. Some of you have realized you can get me to say truly ridiculous things by having a truly ridiculous username. To those of you who make me laugh, I salute you . To those of you whose names I'm about to mispronounce , I'm just really sorry. This week, we would like to thank Abraham Catrell, Alex Rain, Andrew Stevenson, Arnold De Grout, Balky, Benjamin Davies, Bougie Net, Brian Kilby, Cami Rassian, Conrad Haling, Daniel Schecter , David Gates , Disastrina, Dwight Ilk, Eric Le af, Flower Guy , Galactic President Scooper Star McScoopslot, Gold, Gregory Singleton, J. Alex Anderson, Jarvis Earl Jeff Wilson, Jim of Everett, John Esset , John Vayes, JP Sullivan, Kate Sandretto, Kenneth Ryan, Kinsaya Penflanco , Lee Harbourne, Marco Irasi, Mark Stephen Razneck, Matthew Crampton, Michael Persha,ad Michelle Cullen , Olgar, Paul Jarman, Peter, Redbar is watching. RJ Bask, Ron Thorsen, Sat aba, Chersom, Sean Marion , Shobana , Stephen Miller, the lonely Zan person , Tishar Nakini, Will Hamilton. Thank you all so very much . All right , so thank you everybody We will see all of you when we are back from our hiatus in two months or early September . Pamela, as always, it has been a total pleasure working with you week after week, year after year, nineteen seasons in the Can Virtual Hot Five , the journey through the cosmos goes on. Thank you. It has been an amazing almost two dec ades . All right, we'll see you in we'll see you in two months . Bye bye . Astronomy Cast is a joint product of Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute . Astronomy Cast is released under a Creative Commons attribution license. So love it, share it, and remix it. But please, credit it to our hosts, Fraser Kane and D r. Pamela Gay . You can get more information on today's show topic on our website astronomycast. com . This episode was brought to you thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep this show