The stars above us
One of the recurrent patterns with the Recurrent Patterns newsletter is the summer write up about space, stars, and astronomy. It’s a small break from tech, AI, strategy or anything which is dominating headlines. I think we all deserve a break.
Do you remember that just a few weeks ago, July 20 was the anniversary of the first man on the Moon? Neil Armstrong with Buzz Aldrin took the first ‘walk in the park’ to pick up a few rocks. While Michael Collins stayed in orbit in the main module. He became the first man to be the furthest in space alone. They were the crew of Apollo 11 in 1969.
It was the culmination of the NASA effort to land man on the Moon, which started as a proclamation by president John F. Kennedy in 1961. Hard to imagine that it took only 8 years to do that.
The very cool thing is that you can go to the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and see with your own eyes the Lunar Module Trainer LM-16 which the astronauts used for training. When you see the module in its actual size, you wonder how these men even fit in. The one thing I found funny was the ladder attached to one of the module legs. You fly hundreds of thousands of miles or kilometers to the Moon, you land there and then you have to get down to the surface climbing a ladder. Next time you do any work at home and use a ladder, you’ll feel the importance of that equipment!
The rocket which got the crew to orbit and sent them to the moon was Saturn V which till this day holds the record for the largest payload capacity to the Low Earth Orbit (LEO).
NASA since then built the Space Shuttle and most recently the replacement for Saturn V, the Space Launch System (SLS). The SLS sent astronauts back around the Moon in April for the Artemis II mission. Speaking of funny moments, seven hours into the flight, the Commander reported that he has “two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those was working.” What did you expect when using Microsoft products? I’m not sure if he had to ‘turn it off and on’ the laptop/tablet or the whole ship?
In the meantime, SpaceX is trying to get its Starship to a place where it can fly people to the Moon. Given the progress, we are about 5 years from that goal. The 13th test flight results are still a mixed bag. A few things worked, and a few things didn’t. The main selling point for Starship is the re-usability of its components. It has two stages — the Super Heavy booster and the Starship spacecraft — both of which should land back where the Starship took off reliably.
That on its own is still work in progress. But the other technical challenges are still ahead, still not solved. In order for the Starship to fly towards the Moon, it has to refuel in space. So before you can fly to the Moon, you have to send fuel into orbit and once you have enough fuel there, you send the main ship, refuel and continue on its journey. Sounds easy but it’s not.
First you have to send 10 to 16 fuel tanks to orbit and quickly. Why quickly? The tanks will contain cooled liquid methane and oxygen. Once in space, the sun will shine on the tanks, warm up the tanks, turning the liquid into gas, it will increase the pressure and you have to vent the tank otherwise it will explode. In order to stay ahead and mitigate the loss, you have to send a tank every day or two. Add to the mix you have to move the liquid fuel from the supply tank to the main ship in zero gravity and connect them in an environment where the equipment surface can reach temperatures (based on the Sun exposure) between +150C (+302F) and -170C (-274F).
I think NASA will be using its SLS for a while.
In the meantime, August 12 will be the peak for the Perseids Meteor Shower and there will be the solar eclipse! An excuse for a last minute trip to Greenland, Iceland, Spain or Portugal. Then on August 27 and 28, we’ll see the partial lunar eclipse — in North and South America. Can we call it the Ecliptic August? Apparently not. It is either called an eclipse month or an eclipse season month.
The recurrent pattern? Summer is here, enjoy the stars.