FFP EP. 24 | Artemis II, Apollo, and the Physics of Going Back to the Moon

Hello, Internet. This is your captain speaking, Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD, Krishna Chowdhury. We are traveling this week, and so we're going to have a special deep dive episode. If you couldn't already tell, it's about the Artemis II mission that's coming up. This should be coming up right before the launch window, which starts on February 6th. We're going to talk about the Artemis II program, the Artemis program generally, why it's different from Apollo. We're going to do some debunking of moon landing myths and maybe a little potpourri of other stuff in there as well. You are going to learn something today because this is from First Principles. so it's been more than half a century 50 years since we've gone to the moon the final apollo mission was apollo 17 we had a moon buggy we had a car on the moon that we were driving around it was amazing and now the united states through the nasa national aeronautics and space administration we have chosen to go back right so i wanted to take this opportunity because artemis 2 is coming up the launch window is february 2nd sorry february 6th is when it opens up i wanted to take this opportunity to talk about some of the differences between the artemis missions and the apollo missions and then you know towards the end of the episode maybe we'll go into something that i never wanted to do but i guess we're doing is debunking these absurd moon conspiracy myths let's get started with 1961 president jfk john f kennedy commits the united states to go to the moon in a congressional address and in 1962 he actually gives a speech at rice university which is arguably more famous because he is the one who say he's the one who says you know but why some say the moon and they may well ask why climb the highest mountain why 35 years ago fly the atlantic and he's talking about charles lindberg who flew the atlantic from the united states all the way to paris and then he inserts a joke on his own he says why does rice play texas and he's at rice stadium and that gives a that gets a huge uproar and he uses that uproar to he was a brilliant orator you know and he uses that sort of momentum to be like we choose to go to the moon we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard that's my best uh boston accent that was quite good but in that yeah but in that like statement there i mean it's incredibly inspirational inspirational yeah but in that statement he actually gives a clue as to why we're doing that in the first place which is we want to make it so hard that the Soviets can't catch up. At the time, there was a Cold War sprint, right? The Soviets had already beaten us with Sputnik. Yuri Gagarin was on the cover of Time magazine with a hammer and sickle. And we wanted to make the finish line so far away that everyone who was playing this race, the space race, had to start over from scratch. And so we're like, we're going to go to the moon now yuri gagarin and the mercury astronauts they just went into earth orbit right that's about like 100 kilometers to like 200 300 500 kilometers now we're doing hundreds of thousands of kilometers the moon is 380 kilometers away that's requires a whole new set of technology yes a whole new paradigm shift in how we even approach the space problem we got to land someone we got to bring them back we got to do all these things right and so the idea was we just make this the finish line in classic american fashion if we lost yes we're just like no it's not over it's over there yeah yeah what are you talking about it's over there like like we're still running right and that's sort of the crucible in which apollo was born right right now Now, Apollo was a unilateral U.S. effort. U.S. astronauts, U.S. technology, U.S. money. Everything was American. And I think an important point just to punctuate that is in an effort to win the Cold War race, we were willing at the time to do everything. Yeah. Put the money, recruit the resources, the talent to execute on it. Yeah. We don't live in that world anymore. Exactly. Exactly. And so Apollo was this just American, all-American model. Artemis is very different. It's an international effort. There's this thing called the Artemis Accord. 60 countries have signed it. It's a peaceful, transparent, and sustainable space exploration treaty that's saying, you know, we're not going to just expend resources. It's going to be sustainable. It's going to be cooperative. But all of these countries are sort of on the Western block. it's nato plus allies right and there is still kind of a space race there is kind of a multipolar competition yes china is talking about landing taikonauts that's what they call their astronauts they're planning to land their taikonauts by the 2030s russia is colluding with china if that's what you can call collusion yeah yeah so just like we're colluding with like 60 other countries The two of them are, you know, colluding with themselves. And it's a very different ballgame now, right? One of our crew that's going on Artemis 2 is Canadian. That just shows just how different Artemis is from Apollo. Apollo is just all American astronauts that are like Air Force pilots or Navy pilots. Now we've got a literal Canadian who's on the mission. I what's interesting the timing which they could never have expected because Artemis has been planning this for such a long period of time the geopolitical context in which the launch is happening is interesting. because the prime minister of Canada just came out at the World Economic Forum and gave a speech effectively, you know, calling it the great divorce. Yeah. You know, from a political social context in terms of Canada, no longer viewing the United States as a reliable partner. Right. And sort of encouraging the EU as a bloc to think about what the future looks like with an unreliable partner in the U.S. Yeah. And I just bring this up to sort of differentiate that space has always been this arena historically. There's some things that are changing that in recent memory, but historically that has been apolitical. Yeah. And everyone recognizes the value of all of us working together because the fruits of that are just so beneficial to everybody. Yeah. But this is happening in a geopolitical environment that is becoming more contentious, very not similar to the Cold War era, but it's just very, it is not a stable geopolitical context in which this is happening. But it is great that the collaboration in this is still going forth despite the geopolitical tensions. Yeah, yeah. I think you make a very good point. You know, space is off Earth by definition, right? And it makes you think, okay, Earth is like this rock. And then there's another rock that very few humans have been on. Fine. It's all been American. But we're just on this rock. Yes. Right? And the great thing about the Artemis Accords and the Artemis program to me is that it's one part of American geopolitical policy that has kept that philosophy. You know, I really like that. So Apollo, it was this flag in the dust model, not like Artemis, right? Flag in the dust, meaning like you just put a you plant of American flag on the moon and it's designed to demonstrate the superiority of our liberal democracy. Right. That's embedded in capitalism over Soviet communism. It's an ideological battle that we're trying to win. It's technological at the end of the day. But the reason why we're spending all that money is because of ideology. Right. Right. And that's very important. And Artemis is really a paradigm shift towards permanence and sustainability. Apollo was we get there, we plant the flag, we come back. No repeatability necessarily. Like it wasn't the core function. It's the destination was the goal, not the journey. Yes. Yeah. And in Artemis, we're trying to get there and we're trying to really establish a permanent presence. Right. President Donald Trump issued an executive order that called to begin construction of a base in 2030 and also have a nuclear reactor be ready to launch towards the lunar surface by 2030. And NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman purported that sentiment, right? And this is all to prepare us to go to Mars, because we want a permanent base on the moon, and that way from moon we can sort of piggyback and go to Mars. We can establish a permanent base on the moon. We can understand what it is like to live on another celestial body without oxygen, without all of the comforts of the Earth's atmosphere, and all of the hard things. If we can do that in our local neighborhood, then we can go to Mars, which is a year away. Best case scenario. It becomes this way station. It's like a training ground and a way station. Yes. Or a waypoint, rather. Yeah. Where you can do a whole... Especially, I'm not saying that we're there yet, but there are a bunch of TV shows that talk about how there's all the H3 that's below the surface of the moon, and that's very fuel efficient. and if we can figure out how to mine that, then again, it becomes basically a refueling point on the journey to Mars. Yeah, exactly. And in the Apollo paradigm, it was urgency-driven, as you said, right? We got to win. And so 2.3% of the total federal budget was given to NASA to make this happen. That's so crazy. That's a lot. That's a lot. That's a lot. Okay, I love science and I love technology, But 2.3% is a lot. Now, if you put that in the context of how much we spend on the military, perhaps it's not a lot. But I would say 2.3% is quite a bit, right? But it's a totally different paradigm. With Artemis, you've got this space economy, and the goal is to have a sustained presence, right? So you've got this lunar getaway, you've got in-situ resource utilization, that thing that you were talking about where we utilize the resources of the moon, and we're partnering with agencies that are commercial. For example, SpaceX, the Starship human landing system, the way we're going to land on the moon is currently contracted to SpaceX, right? Now, this is the same as before Grumman, which is the predecessor of Northrop Grumman, was actually involved in creating the lunar lander. So this is not different, but now with Artemis, it's a completely different scale. I will just make a quick note. If you are a fan of Elon Musk and you are not a believer in the moon landing, you should talk to Elon Musk because he's clearly a believer in the moon landing and he got the contract to do it again. Yeah. And so I'm just trying to put two and two together here. The math needs to equal. Yeah. And if we were to stay on the topic of SpaceX and Elon Musk, there's a side note. So NASA Administrator Sean Duffy last year actually reopened the human landing system contract because the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel is warning that SpaceX's Starship human landing system is going to be years late. Okay? He was then fired, and then he was replaced by Jared Isaacman, who's a billionaire commercial astronaut. Neither the demonstration nor the design certification review, which was supposed to happen in the summer of this past year, has happened. And there's not really any information about what the status of that human landing system is. But it's quite urgent because China says they're going to get there by 2030. Right. Right. We're cutting it quite close. Yes. You know, and we know that they are putting all the resources to bear to accomplish the goal. Yeah. Given their system and how it's structured, it's top, you know, they can they want something to happen. It happens. It happens. Right. Because they just say what happens. And then and then it happens. Right. so with all that in mind now we're here with Artemis 2 right this is the critical crude validation flight the Artemis 2 rocket which we have here that Lester has painstakingly made with Lego blocks shout out Lego if you want to sponsor the show you know we're here yeah yeah well he made this thing and this thing is now currently sitting on the launch pad at kennedy space flight center in florida which we touched on in our rundown on the last episode yep yeah yeah and so now as of the publishing of this episode it should still be there february 6th is when the window opens up and fingers crossed and just just before we get to the rundown we're going to break this up into two parts i want to just zoom in on this launch window concept because you know some of the reactions would be oh this this are the studios not ready for the production or like oh of course that it's going to get delayed you know and i think helping understand the idea that when we have a launch window right like we are both you know we're spinning and in orbit of the sun and so is everything else and so when you talk about launch windows it's about how your flight trajectory is going to align with the normal movement of the planetary bodies around us such that we you know we have a certain amount of fuel we have everything is very precise everything is very precise yeah there's there's only like a few paths to getting there based on what we've built to get there exactly and it depends on what we want to do with the moon right we're not landing on the moon with artemis 2 but if we want certain spaces on the moon to be lit up we need to time it with the phases of the moon right right and so that's why the launch window is like early February and then it's late February and March because the lunar month is 29 days and we need to, you can't just go at a random time. Yes. Right. Yes. It's not, it's not the subway where it's just like, it's constantly running. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There are the dynamics that, and I just wanted to make sure we touched on that briefly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Good folks who might not understand the concept of launch window. That's kind of where it comes from. Before we get back to continuing coverage of the main story, Many of you have loved the rundown. It's a quick overview of other stories we can't go so much into depth on because there's only so much time in a day. So we just hit some highlights of what's going on that's current, recent, breaking, and frontier research. Our first story in the rundown today is rock art from at least 67,000 years ago in Sulawesi, which is now a combination of multiple organizations. We have Griffith University, Southern Cross University, and others published in Nature. And this is about the outline of a hand made with red pigment on a cave in Indonesia that's at least 67,000 years old and may be the world's oldest rock art, according to recent studies. Yeah, this is incredible. It's supposed to be on the lost continent of Sulawesi. Okay, so back before the ice ages, or during the ice ages, I guess, when all of the water of the world was sequestered into glaciers, the sea level was lower. And so Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and Australia were a continuous landmass called Sulawesi. It's a lost continent, so to speak. And to date, what they've done is they've dated the mineral crusts that form on top of these paintings. Because, you know, you could ask, like, how do you know that this thing is 68,000 years old? Well, what you can do is you can take the cave paintings. And what ends up happening is there this stuff called cave popcorn that shows up on top of the cave paintings that is at least as old as the cave paintings Right Because the cave paintings formed and then this mineral deposit formed So we can date the mineral deposit and using radiocarbon and other kinds of radioactive dating, we can say that this stuff was at least 60,000, 67,000 years old. And this puts it as older than the cave paintings in, what's it called? Laskauks. Yeah. Laskauks. France, which we mentioned in the previous episode. Again, I'm pretty sure that's how it's pronounced. In the previous episode, we did an ancient math story from Mesopotamia. Yeah, and we were talking about art in the ancient past. Last Gauks came up. That's all I'm saying. Okay, so jokes aside, though, one of the coolest things that I found about this story was that in the same cave, They also had recent paintings from about 3,000 to 4,000 years ago, which I find kind of incredible. Like, imagine, you know, you're going back to a cave as human beings. You're going back to a cave that has been this repository of art for 60,000 years. Isn't that kind of cool? To be those human beings, to be like, I go back and like those handprints were 60,000 years ago. I don't know. I think that's really cool. The human story is so beautiful. Yeah, it really is. I like that. Our story number two is about climate change and this concept of elevation-dependent climate change in mountain environments. This is coming out of the University of Portsmouth in the UK, Montana Technological University, Montana State University, and the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate National Research Council in Torino, Italy, published in Nature, Earth, and Environment. The summary here is that mountain regions show rapid environmental change under anthropogenic warming. The rates of these changes are often stratified by elevation, leading to elevation-dependent climate change, or EDCC. Yeah, and this is something that I've noticed. I go to the Himalayas almost every year, maybe every other year, and you can literally kind of see the snow line decreasing, okay? They analyzed data from 1980 to 2020, and they found that the mountains are actually warming 0.2 degrees Celsius faster than the lowland plains. And snowfall is increasingly being replaced by rain. I mean, anecdotally, you saw this when you went to Big Bear right outside Los Angeles. I literally just experienced this, which is like it's January. And normally there's plenty of snow on the ground. And it was I'd never see I'd never seen the ground. Yeah. Yeah. And for context, there was a lot of precipitation in Southern California. Now, obviously, this is anecdotal and we don't want to conflate weather versus climate. But if you look at the gradual trend, this is what they're arguing. from 1980 to 2020 snowfall is being replaced by rain okay and that means more flooding pakistan had some really bad flooding that killed 1000 people this past summer it's only going to get worse and mountain regions are really critical for a lot of human population billions of people rely on mountains for their source of water and if it's just going to rain instead of being sequestered into ice that then gradually right becomes water that's going to be huge for climate catastrophe you know it does like just into it it does make sense if you have the whole concept you have like heat rises when you're in a house and your attic is hotter than the basement it's like okay well like at higher elevations yeah it make it yeah the difference is going to be bigger yes at those higher elevations so it that that does make sense yeah um for a lighter story that is not as existential as elevation dependent climate change yeah is a story that was actually published in the new york times we love to see when science makes it to the front pages of mainstream media in this case it's about dogs building their vocabulary like toddlers and so this is something that like makes total sense yeah anyone who's out a dog and so the the summary on this this was in science children as young as 18 months can acquire novel words by overhearing third-party interactions don't be nosy demonstrating similar learning processes in non-human species would indicate that social cognitive skills supporting this process are not exclusively exclusively human but may have evolved or can develop in other species offering valuable insights into the origin of language related cognition we're not so special after all yeah and what i really like this about this story is like how they did that experiment so what they looked at was particular types of dogs they actually found that herding dogs have a particular knack for this border cal border collies australian shepherds what they did was they said okay we're going to have the human owners toss a toy back and forth while the dog is just monitoring the situation. Okay. So there's no reward based learning. There's no like, oh, here's a treat when you associate this toy with a certain name. Instead, the humans are going back and forth with this toy and they refer to it multiple times in the conversation. So they're like, this is Stingray. Give me the Stingray. Oh, do you want the Stingray? I'll take the Stingray. And the dog is just sort of passively observing and then later on they test the the dog they're like bring me stingray 80 of the time these dogs they they tested 10 dogs 80 of the time it came back with the correct toy which is way out of yeah statistical noise you know and they had a control with 10 other dogs that i guess didn't show this kind of aptitude and they were at baseline and i particularly like this because i had my family dog she was a corgi she would be able to do exactly this and we never taught her with reward-based learning because my dad is like philosophically against reward-based learning um so you know we would just like be talking in oria and hindi and english and she understood all three languages and when i i remember once i was like really surprised i would tell her like bring me this toy in ordea and she would bring it and exactly that toy and once she actually brought the wrong toy and i said no no not that one i said this one she went back and then she brought the right one it was like i was like wow but it's all passive learning right you know yes very cool yes as uh someone who has three dogs uh my lived experience yeah maps onto this except for one dog who doesn't have all the marbles upstairs. He's part of the control group. He's part of the control group. Yeah. Correct. He's part of the control group. I always love a dog story. All the animal stories, you guys seem to love the animal stories, and so we will continue trying to touch on them as we can. The last story in the rundown is about life's chemistry, the beginnings of life's chemistry, and how it may have began in the cold darkness of space. This is out of Aarhus University in Denmark, published in Nature Astronomy. New experiments reveal that protein precursors can form naturally in deep space under extreme cold and radiation. Scientists found that simple amino acid bonds and peptides on interstellar dust long before stars and planets exist. This challenges the idea that complex life and chemistry only happens on planets. It also boosts the odds that life-friendly ingredients are widespread across the universe. And for those of you who know me, you know my reaction to that is them aliens, and they are out there. They are out there, and apparently they're out in deep space. In deep space. Right? This is a pretty cool study. They recreated the conditions of the interstellar medium in the lab. Now that's, first of all, incredibly hard to do. You have to maintain a very low vacuum. you have to have extremely high energy particles because you know in the interstellar dust you've got low density but you also have like particles that are like whizzing back and forth at near the speed of light so what they did was they simulated cosmic rays using particles from an accelerator hun ren atomki in hungary and they had a little compartment that was close to the conditions of interstellar media. And we already know that amino acids like glycine can form in the interstellar medium. But what these guys wanted to do was figure out, can we have complex peptide bonds, meaning amino acid with another amino acid with another amino acid together to create a kind of, you know, protein, but a smaller version of a protein. So they could form these peptides and the implications are immense right because this means that this is a process that can happen anywhere yes in the interstellar medium yes right so if you have exoplanets all over the place yes when the exoplanet forms you could have stuff in the interstellar medium that has already created complex molecules that are the precursors for life that then get deposited on the exoplanets and then perhaps life is even more abundant than we thought i mean right now we think it's just on earth but this kind of research lends credibility to the idea that maybe life just simple life is not all that rare the the ingredients necessary for simple life previously it's like it has to be water rich oxygen rich all these variables needed to be true yeah in order for us to see the the ingredients not even life like yeah yeah yeah just the ingredients ingredients yeah now it's like okay well actually these ingredients can formulate in a much much larger larger surface area than before yeah so who knows i thought that was a pretty cool story very good very good and we're going to space with artemis 2 which we will go back to our main story to continue so getting back into the artemis 2 mission i want to talk about the mission architecture some of the orbital mechanics and the flight profile okay so the space launch system which we have beautifully recreated here in legos it uses a lot of spare shuttle parts and there's a photo of me in huntsville alabama actually when i first moved from india to america i settled in huntsville alabama with my family for about a year because my dad was working at marshall space flight center as a solar physicist. And what you notice immediately is that the space shuttle's architecture is very similar to the Artemis II architecture. It's got this orange central part and then these solid rocket boosters on the two sides. And that is not a mistake. What they really did was use a lot of the spare shuttle parts to make the space launch system, this SLS. right the launch vehicle is something called the sls block one it's got a liftoff thrust of about 8.8 million lbf pounds per i don't know what the f is actually i should probably know that but it exceeds the saturn 5 really by 15 the saturn 5's thrust was only 7.5 million pounds yeah yes this thing is 8.8 million yes okay so it's it's exceeding it by 15 now you might be asking like why is the rocket still so big that's something that i asked because it's like it's like we've had 50 years yeah and the rocket is still so big yes what gives and why more thrust it actually has less payload it's got more thrust but it's got less payload meaning it can carry less stuff it can carry less stuff so i i was i was quite confused perplexed one would say perplexed yes by that by that um by that number so here's the idea first of all the reason why the rocket is so big is because of the rocket equation okay at the end of the day if you want to like leave the earth you gotta push on something newton's third law newton's laws are the laws of the universe right inertia is a thing and so in order to you can't just like create electricity really efficiently and then leave you literally have to expend material in one direction to push away in order for your rocket to leave and the amount of material is kind of a non-negotiable thing if you want to put a giant electronic spacecraft into higher earth orbit and then go all the way to the moon okay so that's one of the reasons why it's about the same scale as the saturn 5 rocket and why the starship the big starships are about the same size right it's because you gotta you gotta leave enough material to get out there and the idea is the space is being taken up by primarily fuel because that fuel is the thing you're pushing using to expend to give you the thrust to counteract earth's gravity to be able to leave yeah you know to be able to have enough momentum to get out to get out yeah exactly and so so that's the reason why it's about the same size okay now let's get into the why the less payload the short answer is that the saturn 5 was actually a three-stage rocket There were stage one, stage two, stage three. And with the three-stage rocket, what you can do is you can get out, and then you can throw away the heavy things and keep going. Because you have that second stage. Yeah, that second stage is not propelling the third stage's mass. You know what I mean? But the SLS is a two-stage rocket. Got it. Okay, there's the first stage, which is from here to here, and the solid rocket boosters. and then the second stage is all the way here right and what that means is with with the saturn five the first stage only took about 2.5 minutes gets out of the earth's atmosphere and then it leaves this thing sticks around for 8.5 minutes oh that's significantly longer right yeah so the whole time it's hauling all of the yes sort of mass that isn't really doing anything right right right right now the saturn 5 dropped its dead weight its empty tanks early and often right while the sls carries its massive empty orange core stage which is this guy yes all the way to the top that makes sense right that makes sense now when it comes to engines the engines on the bottom here right the saturn 5 used kerosene which is our hydrocarbon so carbon with a bunch of hydrogen bonds those bonds are very energetic meaning that per gram kerosene has a lot more chemical energy the sls uses hydrogen and oxygen i see okay it's just h2 and o2 now hydrogen is lighter which means that it'll have a higher exhaust velocity when it gets out of the rocket it's going to be moving faster because it's lighter but at the same time it's lighter so you need more of it the density is lower right so you need a massive sort of thing to hold all that hydrogen and when you have a two-stage rocket and you're going all the way up that's a lot of drag that's a lot of friction that you have to account for yes so all of that accounts for this lower weight that i can put on earth orbit and all the way to the moon the idea is because you need more space for the fuel, which is this hydrogen oxygen mix as opposed to kerosene and liquid O2. And because you need more of that fuel and you're not dropping stages, like it's not a three stage system. So you're not able to let go of that dead weight earlier. Yeah. You fundamentally have more space taken up by fuel, which means less space for payload, even though you're accomplishing the same objective. and it's because of these architectural structural choices exactly yeah and and then one could ask like okay why are we doing this architectural choice yes well um there's something called the senate launch system okay okay and that basically the idea that like you got to get through the u senate which is two senators per state so all the states got to be happy So you got the NASA centers all over the country There three in California the Ames Research Center the Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards Air Force Base. Yes. Up in the high desert. And then you've got JPL in Pasadena. You've also got in Louisiana the assembly that actually makes that orange part. You've got the Kennedy Space Flight Center. You've got Goddard and all these other things in the eastern seaboard. On top of that, all 50 states are actually partners with Artemis in the sense that there is a component on Artemis that comes from each of the 50 states. The nuts and bolts come from Delaware. And there's like tubing that comes from some random company in California and all this other stuff. But they've done a really good job to sort of like make this like an American. Yes. Like, cause you know, Artemis is, as we said with the Artemis Accords, it's like this international collaboration, but we're in America. You got to make everyone happy. And the Senate launch system has made sure that all 50 States have a stake in this mission, which I thought, I thought that was, that was kind of funny. So this is, this is actually an interesting point, which is that there is this social political dynamic. This is not a purely whatever is technologically most efficient and X, Y, and Z is how we're going to do it. It is necessarily having to negotiate so that everyone gets their chunk of flesh, their piece of meat to be able to say, oh, like we're supporting NASA because the factory that's in the harbor does X and Y. So again, it's not operating in a vacuum. It has to get appropriations from somewhere. and those appropriations meaning money yeah and support come with strings attached in some cases and this is kind of part of like again when we're no longer having the specter of cold war justifying the spend yeah you kind of need to get everybody to sit at the table exactly yeah and and what i love what i loved about that abbreviation is like the senate launch system SLS is the same as the Space Launch System, which is the acronym that is used by NASA to get us to orbit, right? Okay. So now that's going to get us to orbit. Yes. Okay. Now, once we get us to orbit, so that's this first part, which is the solid rocket boosters. Yes. And this first part all the way up to here. Yes. That's going to get us all the way into earth orbit. Yes. Okay. Now from there, we want to get to high earth orbit. Now in Apollo, only after two to three hours you just straight up go to the moon okay okay you do like one or two rounds on earth make sure everything is checked out and then you're like all right we're going to the moon we go we're not it's a race you're not hanging out yeah yeah these guys are all about risk mitigation okay so in artemis what's end up what ends up happening is we actually go into in high earth orbit before we go to the moon the idea here is we want to go into high earth orbit because we want to fire the rocket boosters up here and make sure that nothing is wrong. If something is wrong, you get back in about, I think it's 45 hours, and you can get back. Yeah. Okay, you don't have to wait days all the way to go to the moon and back like in Apollo 13, right? So what they do is something called the apogee rays burn. Apogee is the idea that you have this elliptical orbit. Kepler's laws comes back here. Yes. whenever you have gravity, the orbits are actually going to be ellipses. So what you do is you have a first orbit that is circular, and then you do a burn, which adds velocity, and then you go into an elliptical orbit where you go far away from the Earth and then you come back. And that elliptical orbit is anywhere from 68,000 miles, which is about like a fifth of the weight of the moon, all the way back to 235 miles over a 42-hour period. So you're doing this really highly elliptical orbit to sort of just gauge the systems. Make sure everything is working. Now, in the Apollo missions, they were gauging these systems with intermediate Apollo missions. You had Apollo 8, you had Apollo 6, 7, and so on and so forth. You had all the Gemini missions that were going in to make sure that everything was working. Here, you're doing it all at once because we want to save money. I was actually going to say the reason why we don't just get all these incremental missions, because we're not the military industrial complex and that geopolitical sort of nexus is not funding this yes and so we have to scrape every dollar we can everywhere i mean literally there's funding getting canceled actively right now yeah for nasa that literally supports this mission yeah and we don't have 2.3 percent of gdp going towards this going towards this right this is very different So the analogy is, imagine you're a sports team, you're an owner of a sports team, and you have to compete with a program, the program from the past when you had $10 billion, and now you have $500 million. Yeah. You can't recruit the best players for $500 million. And so anyway. Yeah. So there's a risk mitigation strategy here, right? Yes. But during that high Earth orbit, what they're going to do is they're going to check out everything that's happening at this very top. Yes. Okay. One of the things that they're going to do is manually fly Orion. Orion is this upper part right here. Yes. Right? What they're going to do is detach that from the rest of the spaceship, and they're going to just do maneuvering. They're going to get out. They're going to turn it around. They're going to approach. They're going to go back. They're going to have this thing autonomously move, and then they're going to have it go back and forth. What you want to do is really nitty-gritty get into the details of, are all of the controls working? Right? Like when I move this joystick this way, is it responding the way that I want it to? All of these things Apollo was already doing with Gemini and things like that. They had separate missions. This we're all doing in one. That's a really important distinction. And also, the way you describe that too, it's kind of crazy. Oh, yeah, we're just going to fly up. We're just going to detach. And then it's just going to, you know, move around. And then eventually it'll come. Like that's pretty. It's pretty insane. that's pretty insane and it's even more insane that we did it like 50 years ago yeah i mean with a lot more money but still also true very very cool um and then finally if everything works out right the crew manually flies orion relative to the rest of the spacecraft then we're going to do the translunar injection which is this hybrid free return what we're going to do is when the spacecraft reaches perigee, which is when it's closer to the Earth. When it's closest to the Earth, that's when it has the least potential energy in terms of gravity, because it's close to the Earth. But that means it's moving faster. That's actually Kepler's second law, that the closer you get, the faster you move. When it's moving faster, that's when we want to do the burn to go to lunar orbit. This is something called the Oberth effect, which basically says that if you want to change your trajectory the fastest way to change your trajectory is to do it when your velocity is highest because then your delta v actually has the most effect okay so that's what they're doing they're going to do this hybrid free return which means they're going to go all the way to the moon and back and they're going to do it in such a way that they're farthest away from the moon they can see the moon and the earth they're going to swing around the moon is going to slingshot them back and then if everything goes well then the return the total mission is going to be about 10 days there's going to be a direct earth entry and the orion is capable of doing a skip entry where it like sort of slows down with the earth's atmosphere once and then it comes back and it lands somewhere in the pacific ocean right off the coast of california where we have our navy our beautiful american navy with the warships and the and the helicopters they go and they you know pick them up that's where the military comes back yes yes after we've done all the hard stuff yeah then they come and you know do a little quick uber ride back home exactly this is not a shot like we the men and women who support it's great it's fantastic it's just it's an appropriations problem yeah it's not a armed services service members problem yeah and i mean we're going to get into the armed services when we talk about the crew because the crew a lot of them are from the armed services So let's talk about the crew. We've got four astronauts. They've been selected for the NASA Artemis 2 mission. Commander Reed Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen. And can I just say, quite a good-looking crew. Good-looking crew. This is a good-looking crew. This is a good-looking crew, dude. And I am sure there was someone on NASA that... Look, I don't know. I don't know, but like the photogenic-ness of the crew, I'm sure there was someone who was like, this is going to be good on Twitter. This is going to be good on Instagram. I have seen actually that almost all the posts about Artemis, it's going very viral with the crew backgrounds. It looks like a Hollywood movie. Dude, they look good. Yeah. Okay? Yeah. It's not weird, guys. I'm just saying they look good. You're just using your observational skills. Yeah, I'm just, yeah, yeah. Symmetric faces, that kind of thing, you know. It's very scientific. Okay. Anyways. Okay, so let's start with Commander Reed Wiseman. He spent 165 days in space. He's a graduate of the Renesler Polytechnic Institute in Troy. RPI, we did a paper from them. That was the string theory paper from two episodes ago. He did a bachelor's in computer engineering, and then he did a master's in engineering at Johns Hopkins. It's engineering, but we'll give him. He's a captain in the U.S. Navy, and he is going to be the commander of this mission. And that photo you saw, he's proudly wearing the U.S. Navy sort of insignia on the ISS when he was there. Yes. All right. Next, we've got pilot Victor Glover. He spent 167 days in space. He's a high school quarterback from Ontario, California, Southern California boy. This guy's from SoCal. He went to Cal Poly Slow in San Luis Obispo. Yes. BS in engineering, master's from Air University, which I didn't know was a thing. So apparently the Air Force just has a university that is, it doesn't have a campus, but you can take courses as part of the Air Force. And he took it on campus at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California, and he got his master's. And that was a photo of him working on some hydroponics plant experiment in the ISS. Next, we've got Christina Koch. She has spent 328 days in space. Oh, gee. She's going to be the first woman on the moon. She's actually the longest. Not on. Just to be. Yeah, and not as of yet, but she's also going to be on Artemis 3 to get on the moon. But she'll be the first woman to. Knock on wood. Knock on wood. Yeah, I don't want to do commentator's curse or anything. But she's going to at least be the first woman, if everything goes well, to round the moon. Yes. You know, and be the furthest woman in outer space. she's actually quite cool because she had an electrical engineering and a physics bachelor's we love to see it we love to see a physics bachelor's from nc state in raleigh yeah which it's pronounced raleigh oh whatever and then an ms in electrical engineering from the same place yes um she's got the longest single continuous stay in space for a woman and part of her paradigm was, you know, her extended mission is being used to study the physical, biological, and mental effects of long-term space travel on women. Because we have a ton of data of long-term space travel on men. But, you know, moving forward, we need all the data from everywhere, right? So her 328 days is going to be crucial for that understanding. She's worked in Antarctica, Goddard Space Flight Center, and the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins. The Applied Physics lab is like kind of like the jpl of maryland um you know how jpl is associated with caltech applied physics lab is associated with john's hopkins it's kind of this independent research entity that does crazy good stuff okay okay okay um the photo actually shows her with the cold atom lab this is really cool so what they did on the iss was create a quantum experiment they're cooling rubidium atoms down to near absolute zero billionth of a degree near absolute zero and they're creating a Bose-Einstein condensate which is this fifth form of matter on the international space station so they can do like quantum physics experiments on the international space station this is like science fiction stuff yeah dude i mean the iss is crazy because you have like a you have like a university physics lab but in outer space in zero g it's one of the craziest things that we've made as human beings and she was she was doing that in that photo that was that was incredible and then finally we've got jeremy hansen the squid yeah and you know he's canadian so we don't have to talk about it no i'm just kidding i mean toronto lost to you know the dodgers we will never forget you know i'm sorry it's just how it goes it's okay everyone i was born in montreal so i am also canadian by at least birth we support our maybe current slash former allies yeah i don't know anymore right you don't know how it's going anyways okay so jokes aside one thing that struck me about him is he's had zero days in space yes this is going to be his first time in space yes he's going around the moon it's pretty it's pretty what a lucky lucky individual yes yes um he got his bachelor's from the royal military college in space science yep and then a master's in physics another physics yeah and i checked out his master's thesis by the way um i scrolled through his master's thesis the first thing was the abstract was written in french and i was already ticked off yes yes by the whole thing i was like whoa what the hell yeah but then actually he wrote in english because of course science is done in english um the master's thesis was wide field of wide field view of satellite tracking very cool because what he ended up doing was basically creating a really cheap CCD camera that could track satellites very accurately. And then from that, figure out what satellites were doing what. It was a really cool master's thesis, to be honest. He's got the rank of colonel in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and now he's going to be going to the moon. And I have to say, the crew has a great sense of humor. They were on the Colbert Report for an interview last year, and it's one of the funniest interviews. just a little tidbit that I want to share from that interview. Jeremy Hansen was seated at the end because he's the tallest of them, but Colbert made a joke about how you're Canadian, so you're seated at the end. But the funniest thing was, you know, he acknowledged that the U.S. could do this on its own, but it's an incredible testament to what NASA is doing as an international entity to bring together someone from the Canadian Air Force to go into space. The funniest thing that he said was, there was a joke about, Colbert asked, so who's going to turn the oxygen tanks? That's a reference to Apollo 13 because the explosion on Apollo 13 happened because the pilot on Apollo 13 was asked to turn on the oxygen tank stirring thing. And that oxygen tank stirring is what created the explosion that became Apollo 13. So it's sort of this taboo in NASA. Because somebody's got to stir the oxygen tanks, so who's it going to be? And Jeremy, very funny, he was like, actually, I've been asking to throw one switch, and they've told me that I can do that. It was so funny, dude. Because everybody else was just laughing their ass off. Yeah, well done. He understood the assignment. Yeah, dude, I thought it was just so funny. And the chemistry in the crew is just so great. Like I'm really looking forward to this being a success. You know? That's so good. Oh, it's so good. Yeah. So I think we've covered structure of the mission. Yeah. What it's aiming to do. Artemis 2 is a part of a long-term project that will ultimately end with having a semi-permanent slash the goal of having a semi-permanent slash permanent presence on the moon. Yeah. And so for folks who are saying, oh, they're going to the moon but not landing, why? I come back to my sports analogy, which was like, imagine you're the GM or the head coach or the manager of an English Premier League soccer team, right, in the 90s. Let's say I'm Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United. I have Beckham. I have Paul Scholes I have Gary Neville Roy Keane I have all these great players We win five champions we have five Premier Leagues most winningest team ever It amazing What made that team work? We had the money, we had the talent, and then all of the je ne sais quoi that makes teams work. Now fast forward 25 years, and same Manchester United, we don't have any of those players the players we now have meh not comparable the money we now have meh not as effective because the qataris have come in with money the americans have come in with money okay and so now all the best players all the talent all the info you've let carrington where we do training it's run down now none of the people that were there in the 90s that knew how we built a championship winning team yeah none of them are here anymore it's a bunch of new people who've never done it before that analogy is exactly why you can't just rinse repeat going to the moon you can't just go to the moon all of the different component parts that make a super bowl winning team a premiership winning team it's hard to go back to back to do just winning sports yeah right and back-to-back years with the same everything imagine right trying to do the most impossible task in humanity with like almost none of the muscle memory from the first time i just bring that analogy to try to help people reframe how they think about this because it's it's just not it's it's it's not the same anything yeah and so of course we're gonna have to again we don't have two percent of the gdp to go forward like money is really a big driver of us being able to do stuff exactly and we just there's just not the money there but we're going to with that entry point talk about a couple of the myths that arise as it relates to any conversation about the moon yeah and so the first myth which is one that always comes up immediately i was shocked in our video last video about artemis which was in the rundown and it was barely anything and everyone was just going crazy yeah and i didn't expect it myth number one is about Van Allen belt radiation or Van Allen radiation belts being impassable. Yes. This is myth number one. Yes. So what are the Van Allen radiation belts? Well, the Earth has a magnetic field, and so it traps radiation from the cosmic background, from the sun, from all over the place, into these sort of donuts around the Earth. There's an inner belt, which is mostly high-energy protons, and then there's an outer belt that's mostly high energy electrons. And the myth is that you can't go through without killing yourself. That is totally false because the transit time, you can actually calculate the transit time. We're going at about 11 kilometers per second. Let's say even slower, 6 kilometers per second, which the escape velocity of the earth is 11 kilometers per second. If you were to calculate how big that belt is, you spend about 8 minutes through the core and about an hour through the whole thing. Now, the Apollo missions had shielding. They had aluminum blocks that would block alpha radiation, which is helium nuclei going through and beta particles. And it's effective against most particles, but you still have to be concerned about bremstrahlung radiation, which is when electrons come through and they slow down. And if the electrons slow down, then because of electromagnetism, they're going to release light. And that light is usually in the form of x-rays, right? So there's going to be some X-ray radiation. Well, the result is that the Apollo 11 dose was about 0.18, 0.18 rads, which is comparable to a CT scan, right? It's far below the lethal dose of 400 rads. So if you have had a CT scan, you've had as much radiation exposure as going through the NLM belt. Yes. And with Artemis, actually, what I found was really funny was the Artemis 1, which is the mission that preceded Artemis 2, They had mannequins called Helga and Zohar that had active dosimeters, which are, you know, radiation meters that track the amount of radiation that they're getting. If you've watched Chernobyl, it's the thing that goes click. Yeah, yeah. 3.6 runkin. Yeah. You know? Yeah. So the preliminary data from those dosimeters show that while the environment is harsh, the shielding and the short transit time is enough to keep that dose well within safety limits. And it looks like the lethal dose is 400 rats. Yes. And so we're talking about 0.18 at the Apollo times. Yeah. And so we're not even... Yeah. And, I mean, you do it so that the trajectory of the mission actually, like, avoids the big part of that radiation belt, right? You know where the donut is. Yes. And you can figure out how to avoid it. And this is why launch windows are a thing. Yes, exactly. Yeah. So the second one. Yes. flags are waved in a vacuum right this was the flag that was waving and it's like oh how is it waving if it's in a vacuum and then there's no air actually i would actually like to suggest that the flag waving is actually a characteristic of the vacuum and here's why so in a vacuum there's no atmosphere correct so with a flag that's waving if the air is very still like it is in the studio then the friction from the air is going to stop the waving so that the flag is going to be still if there's no air and i give the flag a certain amount of momentum it's kind of like a pendulum it's a sling swinging back and forth it's going to keep waving the only friction is coming from the internal friction of the fiber in the flag itself right and so the fact that it kept sort of going in the simple harmonic motion is a feature of the fact that there's nothing there to slow it down the point being if you go like imagine like heroes of iwo jima putting the flag down on the ground and then you like try to adjust it for the camera and whatever you're going to introduce some momentum there's no way you can place the flag without introducing momentum yes exactly and the fact that it kept sort of swinging a little bit is because there's nothing else to slow it down and the the damping effect of the fiber itself is actually too small over a few oscillations it does slow down yes which you see yes but you know it's not enough these are just like layups yeah yeah next one next one is this non-parallel shadows imply multiple light sources so it happened in a studio because the shadows are not pointing in the same direction this one's like the most dumb to me because like anyone who's taking a photograph has seen that the lights point towards a common center yes like just go outside when the sun is out and then look at take a photo with your phone of two light poles and they'll they'll be pointing to some source they're not going to be parallel just because of the nature of photography and the idea that you've got a single source that is capturing this guys that one's so dumb guys okay the next one is the no stars in the sky there's no stars in the sky in any of the photographs well the reason for that is the optical dynamic range right if you want if you want to take photographs the surface of the moon is 30 times brighter than the stars so anyone who's done photography knows that if you want to if you want to f-stop of like f11 and uh exposure time of 1 250th of a second you're not going to get anything i mean right i deal with this trying to set up our cameras and i'm trying to make us look beautiful but i'm like slightly darker than yeah yeah it's this whole thing right and actually i wanted to show that photograph because we actually installed in apollo 16 we installed a far ultraviolet camera yes and on the right we see that far ultraviolet camera and there you can actually see stars there's a photo of the earth in far uv and the stars around the earth yes jokes aside that's an incredible photograph it's the earth with the stars in the background yes yes look at that and it has a sort of crescent you know yeah glow it's it's amazing it puts our place among the stars in the cosmos i think that's really cool yes debunked yes yes okay and now let's look for direct evidence okay so proving the landings there was this thing called a lunar laser ranging, Apollo 11, 14, and 15, they left retro reflector arrays on the moon. And so you can point lasers to the specific points on the moon where Apollo 11, 14, and 15 were there. I mean, we know the coordinates of where the moon are. And nowadays, the laser can be localized to just that part of the moon. And if you point it at other parts of the moon, you're not going to get the laser to bounce back. But if you point it where Apollo 11, 14, and 15 were, you will get the laser to point back and you can actually measure the round trip time it's going to be about 2.5 seconds and nowadays our clocks are so good yeah that you can measure the distance moving away because the moon is moving away at about 3.8 centimeters per year and so every year if you were to do this experiment you would actually see the time delay increasing yep by a tiny tiny margin because the moon is moving away yes this is very dear to me because um there was this thing called the bronze dickie theory out of princeton there was a new theory for gravity what they said was perhaps the gravitational constant which is g is not actually constant but it's actually a scalar field yes that varies across the cosmos in space and time yes and one of the ways to do this was to measure the distance to the moon very very precisely and that's actually one of the reasons why the Apollo astronauts left these retro-reflective mirrors because the Princeton team pitched this idea to NASA and were like, hey, this would be a cool way to measure G. It's like a fundamental test of general relativity. Yes, because we're now on a rocky body off-planet. And that's really far away, so it's maybe perhaps outside of the friction of the Earth if there's like some scalar field that like the earth is dragging or some kind of thing like that you know yes so so i thought that was really cool yes the second thing is the lunar reconnaissance orbiter which is like a satellite that goes around the moon and takes photos of the moon can actually see tracks of apollo 17's car rides right you get you literally see the car rides and then and then you can you can go and see apollo 17 and look at their footage and be like oh they went here and then you can check the tracks and be like oh they went here they spent some time there and then they went here and they spent some time there on their moon buggy and they've been taking photos since 2009 the resolution is about um half a meter per pixel so you can literally see the tracks right the verification also comes with other nation states the japanese with selene and kaguya and the indian isro they made chandarayan one they've taken photographs of the Apollo 11 and Apollo 2 lunar modules that are left on the moon I just don't get it right so you can literally like what so what you're telling me that the the Japanese and the Indians and the European Space Agency everyone is colluding and and then also that the Chinese Russians aren't calling this out and yeah making a big whole stink about yeah and actually that that takes me to my final point which is the Russians why did they say anything in 1969 when we went to the moon they could have easily been like no they didn't you know what they did instead they denied that there was ever a race in the first place okay this is archival photographs of their saturn 5 their version of the saturn 5 it was actually bigger it failed of course it did but look at it look at it i mean it failed jokes aside the fact that they even got this far is insane given the amount of technology that they were behind on in terms of computing and things like that but back to the jokes of course it failed because it's the russians but at the end of the day you know what they did they were like we weren't even trying to go to the moon i don't know what you guys are talking about i mean yeah you guys went to i mean good for you i guess but like we were never even trying that was their retort their retort was not they never went to the moon their retort was we didn't even know we were in a race whether you look at it geopolitically whether you look at it from what you can reproduce with current instruments like again you can you can it's visible you have a laser pointer if you have a high-powered telescope multiple other countries have verified this to be true guys the flag it's like the vacuum it everything is it just doesn't i'm just i was really surprised at how many people it's not even a minority of the american no no no it's actually really it's a really significant number of people and i was unfamiliar with their game yeah um but it's not good game guys it's it's it's everything is anyway um i it's this it's this is so what we do in space is so cool and so incredible and is standing on the shoulders of an unbelievable amount of math, physics, biology, chemistry work that has been going on now for a very long time. And it's important to me that like all of those people who have sacrificed and done this work to like make this happen. And like ultimately as a species we will i believe and i i have to believe from my own spirit that we will be traveling the stars one day yeah maybe not in our lifetime maybe the aliens can help us a little bit with getting getting a little bit get that interstellar thing going yeah but regardless like this is like such an important aspect of i think our identity as a species of being explorers and having curiosity and wisdom and it's like the perfect distillation of all of those aspects and to just minimize the work and the efforts and the blood sweat and tears that so many people put in you know to all efforts related to space um it just it's just a huge disservice to a huge number of people also for all the elon bros again elon knows we went to the moon yeah so you like to believe everything he says why don't you believe him about this yeah you know he's your man no he's part of the you know it's part of the thingy um huge shout out to all the countries that are in the Artemis Accords uh NASA Canadian Space Agency uh ESA um to the crew that is going to get ready to go out there the launch window works you know hopefully we do they're doing a lot on this mission all at the same time yeah there are a lot of great there's a lot of moving parts and so you know best of luck and godspeed to the crew um this is just going back to the moon is awesome yeah um there's not it's just awesome yeah uh and i can't wait to see where this goes uh uh apple tv plug because for all mankind season five is coming out in march if you haven't watched it before the idea i love that show it's the it's the revisionist history of what would happen if the u.s got to basically the moon for like basically if we were second and they got to the moon first and we were second and how that would have changed the entire architecture of history. It's quite good. And so this is we're not living in that timeline. I guess thankfully. Thankfully. Yeah. Well before we end we should do a what should they comment. Yes. And so I propose I didn't know what LBF meant when the lift off thrust 8.8 million LBF. It's pound something. Why don't you guys tell us or come up with your favorite acronym, LBF. That's a good one. If you've made it this far, type in what you think LBF means when it comes to thrust. Don't make some random crap up. Make it like a thrust thing. As you know, my name is Lester Nare. Here is your host. Joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD and moon landing debunker, Krishna Chowdhury. Again, this was our off weeks. We just did the one story deep dive. We'll be back next week. We may have some teasers of a secret project we're working on, but if not then soon, as always, we really appreciate you all and our commitment to staying curious. This is from First Principles. Outro Music