¿Ha muerto el desarrollador Junior? ¿Ya no hay trabajo como programadores? ¿La IA nos remplazó?

[MUSIC] [MUSIC] Astronomicalist, episode 804, rocket tech, part three, docking, air locks, fairings. Welcome to Astronomicalist, 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 Fraser Kane. I'm the publisher of University Day with me as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the planetary science institute and the Director of Cosmicquest. Hey Pamela, how are you? I am staying at a friend's house that has a coffee maker that's like an espresso maker that is far superior to anything I have ever owned and sometimes being in a house with a superior coffee maker is all it takes to bring me joy. Yes, I missed my coffee maker. I have like one of those really fancy brevel ones that both grinds your beans and not just grinds my beans. Yeah, yeah, and then makes me Americanos all day. Which of course we've been trying to push as Canadianos while we're in Europe. Yeah, I said I'll take a Canadiano please and they're like what? I'm like it's an Americano, but for Canadians. So I guess I just need to make the pitch again because we're in this campaign to try and encourage everybody to become our patrons. We made the dramatic decision a couple of weeks ago to shut off all of the ads on astronomy cast. We are now flying completely on the support of our patrons and that is both wonderful and scary. It's wonderful because advertisers are just difficult. It's like they pay less money, they want you to put longer, they want you to interrupt for people listening to ads there and ruin the experience like it's obviously we don't love ads, you don't love ads and yet ads are required to pay the bills unless they're not and that's because we're supported by the patrons and we by cutting off that entire source of revenue had to rely on you guys the patrons and you guys have responded incredibly well and we're at 1200 patrons. 1500 is like our safe zone that's when we reach orbit and will not be on a sub-orbitable trajectory which you know intersects with the earth at some point and so if you can help us reach that goal 1500 patrons and then we'll just shut up about this we just like we'll bring it up anymore you just we're just like hey this is just astronomy cast dad free and that's great. And and we Fraser started this doing it over at universe today. We did it with astronomy cast and then one week later we did it with CosmoQuest and so this is across everything the two of us are producing. We we want to focus on the content not on the advertisers. Yes. So instead of sending up an entire space station for every mission you can just set up a tiny can fill with astronauts but that takes docking and today we're going to talk about what it takes to connect two spacecraft together how to keep a cargo safe to get into orbit and how to get in and out of your spacecraft without killing everyone. All right so where do you smash these three topics together yeah which I understand because you know each one maybe isn't an entire episode you need all three or you die what sure but it's also not necessarily you know enough content for an episode each. Although we know we probably could but still so where do you want to start with this one you want to talk about docking because docking is is surprisingly unintuitive we can do that docking spacecraft together talking about orbits talking about being able to maneuver your spacecraft so that you can dock in orbit. Yeah so the problem that you run into is like we're children in the 80s so we watched Knight Rider at least I watched Knight Rider as a kid and I bring this up because Knight Rider in his kit car David Hasselhoff who's apparently well loved in Germany would drive into the semi-truck with just the right combination of matching velocity going a little bit faster and then stopping which is terrifying by the way um and and docked into it and so to do that it's fairly intuitive you just increase your velocity to overcome and you're going in the same direction and like there's been various movies and I don't watch enough of this variety where like people are somehow getting out of moving car carriers and this is what we've seen and seen in video games is you accelerate to catch up you decelerate to not die um but in space the problem is if you accelerate you're actually changing your path if you're on an orbit. Right yes yeah yeah it does you can imagine like say you want to dock two cars together maybe a big magnet to the front and back of your cars and there's a car driving down the highway and you're driving behind that car and you speed up and you speed up until you match the velocity of that car and set out your relative velocity of that car is not that much different and you get a little bit closer and you get a little closer and then the magnets connect and now you are connected together but imagine if you it's a five litre accelerator yeah imagine you turned on the accelerator and now your car lifted up above the car that was in front of you imagine you put on the brakes and your car went underground to the car that was behind you right like it's just it's super counter intuitive because of the orbits and and the best example for this is if you've ever watched a Olympic cycling or some other cycle racing or lucky enough to live someplace with cycle drum um when when you speed up the bicycle you go up the wall and and that's kind of the same idea so you you increase your orbit and you end up circling around so right and speed up the spacecraft enough and you just head off into deep space exactly right so so they have to think through we are going to create our ISS is on a roughly international space station is on a roughly circular orbit we are going to create an elliptical orbit that at the moment of docking puts both spacecraft in the same place but not at the same velocity yes not at the same velocity so again imagine those two cars that are driving down the highway you know one is floating up above the other one yeah and so you are you know sort of like what is the speed that those two could get close to each other without tearing each other apart you organize that maneuver yeah yeah so it's it's one of these things where they have to put the pilots through a whole lot of flight simulators and the poor Gemini astronauts in the days before flight simulators they they had to just get someone who was like really good at doing orbital dynamics in their head and that is not like yeah normal thinking um the the the wonderful sort of story about the Apollo program was that balls all buzz Aldrin the you know the second person on the moon he wrote his was it his doctoral thesis on orbital docking or mechanics and docking so he literally helped design the strategies for doing orbital docking and then had to carry them out yeah spacecraft yeah with Neil Armstrong which is which is just a Michael Collins which is just amazing that that was the that was the thing that that got him on that spacecraft was that he had in addition to just being all of the other things the test pilot you know the ability to fly all this was he also had had helped do the math for orbital maneuvers yeah I knew how to make this work astronauts are something special because they're physically fit intellectually there and you have to be a polymath so yes just while we're totally good and rabbit holy now but have you like sat and talked to an astronaut oh many times yeah they're so great yeah you're like I get it right you talk to these astronauts they're like oh I get it no I understand now yeah I see why you're I see why they chose you yeah because you are the warmest kindest human being I've ever met and they can't wake up ready to murder the world which is a reason I probably should never be an astronaut ridiculous shape yeah well educated Super ambitious, but also a total team player. - Right. - Yeah, the overall package. And then they get to walk on the moon. So, you know, so, okay, so you've got this idea of oral mechanics, so then what, but then you have the actual, the hardware, the mating between these vehicles, how does that work? - So what I love about this is they refer to them as androgynous and non-androgynous. So, you either have something with a male part and a female part, and, or I don't know, I actually have to make hand gestures about that. So, I'm gonna just stop. - Yeah. - So, as long as I wasn't watching your actual video screen at this point, yeah. We're just gonna pretend the last 30 seconds to not exist on video. - Yeah, think about, think about network plugs going into adapters, think about, yeah. - And one of the things I worked very hard to do is have systems where if you start out slightly unaligned, all the edges are rounded, and they funnel you into where you belong. And, and the idea is you approach, you start to get the couplers together, and it's not like a USB. If you're a little bit off, it's okay. And, as you apply pressure, it fixes your direction, and then essentially does the moral equivalent of clicking into place so that you're locked there. - You remember the time when I told you that you were unintentionally filthy? - Yeah. - Yeah, anyway. - I know. - I know. - Yeah, anyway, please continue. - Yeah, this is, who I-- - How could we know? How could this not be double entendre city as we talk about docking spacecraft, male and female docking components? As they have to be guided together to achieve a docking maneuver? - Yeah. So, one of the unfortunate things is, there's been a lot of debate on how to do this effectively over the past 50-some years since Apollo Soyuz. And so, even on the International Space Station, there are two different sets of docks. There's actually three. There's the docks that are used between modules that are US modules, then there's the docking ports that are good for Russian and European spacecraft, and then there's the docks that are good for American spacecraft. And for the longest time, the Americans insisted on humans on the pilots doing these docking maneuvers. - And Russia has always been-- - Always been automated. Yeah, it has always been, yeah, they are spamming a can that the cosmonauts are not responsible for docking the spacecraft. Yeah. - The Soviets really started that, and like even Buron, their space plane was fully autonomous, which is wild to think about when you consider the power of 1980s computers. The idea of flying a space shuttle as a drone in the '80s is way more impressive to look back on than it was in the moment. - Yeah, but with the Falcon, with the Crew Dragon, we're back to a very high level of automation at this point. Yeah. I mean, it really is a complicated maneuver, and that one misstep, one bad rocket firing, and you tear. Your spacecraft apart, you tear the thing that you're trying to dock with apart. Everything's made of aluminum foil. The chance of destruction is very high. - And one of the things that's been really cool is there have been a fair number of cases where they grab something with a Canada arm and then dock it. And so I appreciate that old school way of doing it. - Right, have it be nearby, reach out with the arm, grab it, and then pull it in, and now it's a more straightforward docking maneuver, as opposed to trying to match the velocities and think about how you're gonna raise on your orbit as you change your velocity. - Okay, so how do air locks work? - So why do air locks? Why do air locks come out of the work? - You have two different problems that you need to solve. One is you have the air inside, the capsule, and then you have the air inside the spacecraft, sorry, the space station, or if it's too specific, you have two different objects with air in them. We'll just go with that. And that air may not be at the exact same pressure. And so ideally what you want to do is dock to a contained unit and you also don't wanna lose air anywhere 'cause it's a valuable commodity. So you have your air lock, you have thing A and thing B that are pressurized, you fill air lock to match thing A so driving a capsule, whatever, match the pressures, then match the pressure to the other place. And so it's kind of like a ship going through a lock where you lower and raise it between different parts of a river, except in this case, you're lowering and raising the air pressure to get between different vessels without blowing anything out. Now the other side of the air lock is, while they're absolutely necessary to bring to spacecraft, a space station, a spacecraft, whatever combination of pressurized things you have together, you also need them to exit. - Like you're gonna wanna spacewalk? - Yeah, so if you wanna go into spacewalk, you go into the air lock and then it's the same idea you have to match pressures. So in this case, you close the door to your spaceship, you pull all the air out to match the pressure outside. - Which is vacuum. - Yeah, but you're gonna need the exact same thing on Mars, except on Mars, you are swapping it out to be the same pressure as outside. If you don't match the pressure, you're gonna either get pressure pushing you in if you're too low and slamming you against the wall behind you, or if it's too high inside the air lock and get flung outwards. So when you're in an air lock, in outer space, you open the door, well, brace to something in case something has gone wrong, so you don't get exited at high velocity, which we've all seen in movies as how they kill people. We don't do that by accident. So there's a great episode of - Expand. - Star City, no, Star City, which is the, yeah, so this is the follow on to For All Man kind. - Yeah. - And air locks play a big role in this TV show for some of the episodes, and you get a lot of, just how life and death these things are, that you are, you know, like just a human body, it's just not meant to exist in vacuum. And that we need this cushion, this middle stage that you, you know, you're in your spacecraft, you go into the air lock, you pump out all the, you know, you're in your space suit, you build out all the atmosphere of that air lock. Now you're at the same pressure as the vacuum of space, you can go out into your space lock. And then you come back in, you start off at the vacuum of space, you close off the air lock, you fill it back up with the atmosphere, so it's the same atmosphere. The pressure is the rest of your spacecraft open up the door, and now you can take off your space suit. And that this process is, it just takes a long time. And, you know, when the astronauts are doing say spacewalks outside the space station, it's so laborious. - Yeah. - To go through this process of getting themselves into their spacesuits, getting in, you know, while they're floating around in the station, getting into the air lock, depressurizing it, going on their space. They make their spacewalks really long. Like, they don't just pop outside, it is an event. - It's grueling because, yeah. - I mean, imagine you get something on your face inside your helmet, or like, I've never seen this in a book, but it is one of my personal, that would be horrifying. Imagine an eyelash falls into your eye while you have a helmet on. There is nothing you can do, and now you're outside for eight hours. Or your water tube goes wrong, and yeah. - Yeah, there's no way to pull your arm inside. Reach up, you know, fix your eye, get your arm back down into your, into your, into your suit, and keep working, yeah, you're stuck. Oh-ho-ho. - Yeah, things I worry about. - Yeah, totally. - I have no reason to, and yet, here we are. - So let's talk about the third piece of this conversation that you included, which is pharynx. - So. Probably should have done this in a different order, but that's okay. So when you're taking off, there is this mismatch between the shape of whatever you're trying to launch unless you're launching your capsule and the shape that is necessary to get through an atmosphere without things going terribly, terribly, frictionally wrong. So you have the nose cone, which is shaping how air flows over your rocket. And then you have the shape of the body of the rocket. And those can take on different shapes. Some of them have that weird, they're extra large at the top and some of them are just like straight down the sides, so more like a hydroflash, coffee cup with like a nice rounded cone on top. A spacecraft is going to be shaped more like a box with solar panels attached to it and the solar panels are completely folded up, so you basically have a box with boxes attached to it. That's not an aerodynamic shape. Right. A box with flaps attached to it. And if you're doing a rideshare, you have a box and then you have 30 other boxes and they're all in something that looks like a piece of jungle gym equipment. That is a really not aerodynamic shape. A metal rack and really, I mean, escaping the gravity of the planet is the hard part. But the aerodynamics are definitely a factor and you want to be as streamlined as you can. And if you're not aerodynamic, you tear yourself apart. This is unfortunately something an airplane learned last week, we're not going to go into this, but an airplane that dropped about 15,000 feet in 30 seconds, it's rather tore off. No more rudder, rudder gone. That was aerodynamics. So we don't want to do that in general, that idea. So what they do instead is they enclose in, and there's a variety of different ways that they've done this over the decades, they enclose that jungle gym of equipment inside nice, smooth panels that fit together. And sometimes they open up like a flower, sometimes they explode themselves apart and fly away. Whatever the mechanism is, these beautifully fit together panels release the inside cargo so that they can fly free. And they don't always do all of this at the same time, especially when there's that jungle gym of additional satellites, a transporter of some sort inside. So they'll release the fairings, and now you have a new enclosure that often has some of its own engines that's just releasing things as it goes. So fairing serve one purpose, and that is to keep your thing safe from air pressure and to make your rocket more aerodynamic. And what's cool is the need to have fairings is driven by the atmosphere. So in the Martian, they actually had to reduce the weight to get off of Mars, and so instead of having full-on fairings, they used a tarp, and I think it was a tarp if I remember correctly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a tarp. And that was because that was all they needed with Martian thinner air. But it was still scary, yeah, it's terrifying. And you know, one of the things that's fairly interesting is that SpaceX has been trying to, we'll try to reuse the rocket fairings. And they're getting a lot of reuse out of those. Yeah, and so originally they were trying to capture them before they even touched the water. Yeah, they would have them like with a parachute, and then they would fly down, and then they could try to sort of chase underneath them, and then try to catch them. And then when it turns out, you just let them hit the water, and then you just retrieve them out of the ocean, and clean them up, and they're fine. And you can use them again, with Starship, the plan is that the, like right now Starship is deploying its star links out of this pes dispenser slot. But eventually they're hoping to have a big old chomp chomp, Pac-Man, Ma, that opens up on Starship. I have not read that yet. Yeah, so I think of like a whale, like a whale feeding on krill, right? So the thing will open up this huge, fairing spit out whatever stuff is inside of it, and then close it back up, and then return. And so you don't always have to ditch the, the fairing. But normally in the old, in the olden days, you would ditch your first age, you ditch your second age, you ditch your fairing. Yeah. Really, the only thing that, that made it to space and survived was the actual payload. What else was, was fine to be disposed of? To be clear, there is a whole lot of empty second stages in space. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But what's cool is a lot of the ideas from how do you build a small low cost observatory that opens up to reveal your telescope, and how do you build low cost fairings? A lot of the same mechanical ideas get reflected in both, and that just amuses me. And I can't tell you why it amuses me, but it does. I wonder though, you think about, say, arrow shells, and we're probably going to talk about this at some point, but there's sort of like fairings in reverse. Yes. Right. That essentially needed a fairing to get you up out of the atmosphere where, where you are starting off at zero, and then accelerating up to get yourself out to orbital velocity, and then you can ditch your fairing. And then in reverse, with the arrow shell, with heat shield, you are hitting the atmosphere. Instead of you trying to make yourself aerodynamic, you're just trying to spread the heat coming from the actual, the atmosphere around, and that the shape of the fairing, the shape of the heat shield changes depending on where you're going. If you're going to Mars, if you're going to go to Titan, different shapes, go to Venus, different shapes. So it's totally different, totally different world. You know, we'll talk about that later on, I'm sure. Very cool. Was there anything else you want to talk about at this episode? No, that was it. That was it. Okay. Alright. Well, thank you, Pamela. Thank you, Fraser. And next time we record, you're going to be in yet another country. Or back in Canada. Oh. Okay. For some reason, in my head, you're tripped to. I will be very long. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. This one is just a little over a week. Okay. 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