In 1945, the US dropped two nuclear
bombs on Japan, which changed the course
of the Second World War.
17 years later, another nuclear
explosion changed the course of the Cold
War. Except this explosion happened in
space.
The explosion of Starfish Prime was a
pivotal moment in the space race that
shaped our perception of nuclear
warfare. The story is crucial for
understanding how we arrived at today's
space policies and why it's imperative
no nation is allowed to place nuclear
weapons in orbit.
I'm Alex Mccoan and you're watching
Astramm. Join me today as we discuss
what Starfish Prime was, the critical
lessons it taught us, and why we don't
send nukes into space anymore.
In the early 1960s, the US launched a
series of five nuclear tests in outer
space known as Operation Fishbowl. Their
aim was both military and scientific.
The military wanted to study the
effectiveness of nukes as
anti-bballistic missile measures and how
a space-based blast might interfere with
electronics, communication, and military
operations on the ground. Scientists
wanted to know how a space explosion
would impact the Earth's magnetosphere
and what kind of electromagnetic pulse
it would generate.
Starfish Prime was the first blast of
the bunch. On July 9th, 1962, almost
1,500 km west southwest of Hawaii, a
Thor rocket carrying a 1.4 megaton
thermonuclear warhead launched for the
stars. That's 500 times more powerful
than the one that destroyed Hiroshima.
27 smaller missiles loaded with
scientific instruments were fired up
alongside it to gather data on the blast
and its subsequent effects. As the Thor
rocket raced upwards, the nuke finally
exploded at an altitude of 400 km, about
the height of the International Space
Station today. And what a sight it must
have been. Ionized particles from the
explosion collided with molecules in the
Earth's atmosphere, creating widespread
auroras visible across the Pacific, even
as far away as New Zealand. Just below
the explosion, the cloudy night sky of
Honolulu was lit up for a full 6
minutes. It was as though another sun
had emerged at 11 p.m. Radio stations
wavered, a siren was set off, and street
lights across Hawaii were even knocked
out.
The historical context of Starfish Prime
is important. The early 1960s marked one
of the most tense periods of the Cold
War with the US and the Soviet Union
locked in a fierce struggle for global
dominance. Both superpowers sought to
outdo each other in military strength,
political influence, and technological
prowess. The space race became a key
battleground. And by 1961, the Soviets
had the upper hand. They successfully
sent the first rocket into space in
1957, and four years later, Yuri Gagarin
became the first human in space.
Pressure on the US intensified as it
began to fear the Soviets might develop
space-based military power before them.
With tensions escalating after incidents
like the Berlin crisis, both nations saw
the militarization of space as a way to
gain a strategic advantage in the Cold
War. This sparked a race to develop
nuclear weapons, missile defense
systems, and other technology that could
be deployed in space.
Military planners were concerned about
how these nuclear weapons could be used
in space and what effects the detonation
of such weapons might have on global
military strategy. More specifically,
they were worried about the
electromagnetic pulse or EMP that would
follow such an explosion.
An electromagnetic pulse is a burst of
electromagnetic radiation produced by a
nuclear explosion, especially high
alitude or space-based detonations. This
pulse can generate powerful electric and
magnetic fields capable of disabling
electrical circuits, disrupting
communications, and causing widespread
damage to infrastructure like power
grids, satellites, and radio systems.
Back in the early 1960s, scientists knew
that nuclear blasts produced EMPs, but
the full scale and potential damage of
such EMPs was not well understood.
Operation Fishbowl was a chance to study
these effects more closely.
Launched from Johnston atal, Operation
Fishbowl was a series of five high
altitude tests conducted by the US 3
months after Starfish Prime. The US
launched the remaining four tests in a
span of just 2 weeks.
The second test, eerily named Checkmate,
launched on October 20th, 1962. The 20
kiloton bomb, similar in size to the one
dropped on Hiroshima, detonated at an
altitude of only 147 km.
This was rapidly followed by Bluegill
Triple Prime on the 26th of October,
Kingfish on November 1st,
and finally Tide Rope on the 4th of
November, 1962.
Bluegill Triple Prime and Tightroppe
were both smaller explosions that
detonated at 48 and 23 km altitudes
respectively. Bluegill Triple Prime was
aimed at understanding lower atmospheric
effects of such explosions in the
meosphere while tightroppe was conducted
as an anti-missile test in the
stratosphere.
NASA defined space as starting at an
altitude of 80 km. So I suppose these
nuke tests weren't strictly carried out
in space. Kingfish was
it 0.41 megat tons detonated 95 km above
sea level. But these pald in comparison
to the explosion of Starfish Prime. The
immediate impact of Starfish Prime
struck awe into those who saw it. Aurora
stretching thousands of miles. A
fireball over Hawaii. All happening in
total silence. Unlike explosions on the
ground, when a nuclear detonation
happens in space, you can't feel a shock
wave or hear a sound. There is no
mushroom cloud or double flash. There's
just a bright ball of plasma, which
changes colors like a lava lamp. As
charged particles are pushed down into
the atmosphere by Earth's magnetic
field, these colorful auroras give high
altitude nuclear explosions the nickname
rainbow bombs. But the lasting effects
of such an explosion are far from
sunshine and rainbows. Starfish Prime
impacted the Earth in two big ways.
In 1958, US space mission Explorer 1
discovered that the Earth is surrounded
by two donut-shaped regions of intense
radiation. Today, we call them Van Allen
belts after the scientist who discovered
them. These belts are made up of charged
particles, mainly protons and electrons
trapped by Earth's magnetic field. They
act as a protective shell against
harmful solar radiation and cosmic rays,
capturing high energy particles from the
sun's solar wind. The starfish prime
explosion released such a quantity of
charged particles into Earth's
magnetosphere that it altered the
composition and intensity of the natural
Van Allen belts and even created
artificial radiation belts that were
stronger and longer than the originals.
These persisted for up to a decade,
shortening the lifespans of several
satellite systems and interfered with
telecommunications.
They destroyed two early satellites,
Aerial 1, Britain's first satellite, and
the first TV broadcasting satellite,
Telstar 1. But that's not all Starfish
Prime did. Remember the electromagnetic
pulses I told you about earlier?
Scientists knew the blast would emit
them, but no one could have guessed just
how intense they would be.
Nuclear detonations emit gamma rays in
all directions known as a Compton
current. When they interact with Earth's
atmosphere, they ionize air molecules
and liberate high energy electrons.
Since Starfish Prime detonated at an
altitude of 400 km, these gamma rays
collided with atoms in the upper
atmosphere, creating a cascade of free
electrons.
accelerated by Earth's magnetic field.
These electrons produced a rapid and
intense oscillation of electromagnetic
fields. At high altitudes where the
atmosphere is thinner, this pulse is
able to spread much further than it
would in a lowaltitude explosion. The
EMP from Starfish Prime spanned
thousands of kilome, damaging electrical
systems far from the detonation site.
Almost 1,500 km away in Hawaii, street
lights went out, telephone lines were
disrupted, and radio communications were
affected, showing how vulnerable
civilian infrastructure is to such an
event. Starfish Prime made the world
realize just how destructive an EMP can
be. It revealed how vulnerable
electrical grids, communications, and
satellites would be to a nuclear EMP
attack. If added to the strategic
arsenal, it would give any military the
capacity to enemy infrastructure
without direct contact or bloodshed.
Starfish Prime also released an isotope
called cadmium 109 on explosion which
was used to track the fallout and
measure resulting contamination.
While ground tests normally leave behind
a characteristic localized fallout
pattern, the effects of space testing
were global. New Zealand rainwater was
found to be contaminated with cadmium
109 which a 1966 Nature article
attributed to starfish prime.
These kinds of reports raised
significant environmental concerns about
the long-term impact of space-based
detonations on Earth's atmosphere and
environment. And imagine Starfish Prime
wasn't even the biggest bomb the US had
ever detonated on the edge of space.
That prize goes to Tik from Operation
Hard Attack in 1958.
At 3.88
megat tons, it was over twice as big as
Starfish Prime and detonated at an
altitude of 76.8 km. It turned night
into day and cut many trans-Pacific
highfrequency communication circuits.
According to the Nuclear Defense Agency
report on Operation Heart, it destroyed
the ability of the normally ionized
layers of the upper atmosphere to bend
radio waves back to the Earth. The
Soviets were also busy testing high
alitude nuclear explosions, detonating
seven space bombs over Kazakhstan
between 1961 and 1962.
known as Project K. Their aims and
effects were much the same as the US
tests. Detonated at altitudes ranging
between 40 and 300 km. None were quite
as big as the American bombs. They
ranged in size from 1.2 to 300 kilotons,
about five times smaller than Starfish
Prime. On October 22nd, 1962, a 300
kiloton missile warhead known as Test
184 detonated at an altitude of 290 km.
The EMPs generated started a fire that
burned down the Caraganda power plant
and blew over 1,000 km of shallow buried
power cables between Selenograd and
Alma.
These learnings had serious cold war
implications, highlighting the need for
international agreements to prevent
nuclear testing in space. The unforeseen
consequences of Starfish Prime
eventually led both superpowers to
reconsider space-based nuclear
strategies. One year later, in 1963, the
limited nuclear test ban treaty was
signed by the US, UK, and USSR. It
prohibited nuclear weapon tests in the
atmosphere, outer space, and underwater
to reduce radioactive fallout and curb
environmental contamination. The outer
space treaty followed in 1967, which
banned the placement of nuclear weapons
or other weapons of mass destruction in
outer space. It also forbade nuclear
explosions in space or on celestial
bodies, ensuring space remains a domain
for peaceful exploration and not
military confrontation.
Our modern world relies heavily on
space-based infrastructure. Satellites
underpin global navigation,
communications, the internet, GPS, and
more. A nuclear explosion in space would
spell chaos for us below. Global
commerce and trade routes would crash
and grind to a halt. Our electronics and
power grids would be fried, bringing
critical services to their knees.
Hospital equipment would stop working.
Millions of tons of food would go to
waste without proper preservation. And
financial markets would collapse. The
effects of a nuclear EMP would be far
more devastating today than they were in
the 1960s. As our vital global systems
and everyday lives rely much more on
electronics than they did back then.
We've established that various
international treaties are in place
today to ban further nuclear space
explosions. But could such catastrophic
events caused by an EMP still occur in
some form today? In 1859, the world's
largest ever recorded geomagnetic storm,
the Carrington event, caused some pretty
wacky things to happen. Northern lights
were reported as far south as Cuba and
Honolulu and were so bright people in
the north of the US could read
newspapers just by the light of the
aurora. It threw sparks from telegraph
equipment across the US, some strong
enough to set fires. If a CME of similar
magnitude were to occur in our
direction, it could hit us with very
similar effects like Starfish Prime.
Fortunately, the chances of that
happening are very slim. The more likely
risk is a geopolitical one. Earlier this
year, Russia made headlines for vetoing
a UN resolution against putting nuclear
weapons in space. Several news outlets
have since speculated that Russia is
planning on placing a nuclear warhead in
low Earth orbit. According to John Plum,
an assistant defense secretary for US
space policy, Russia is developing a
concerning anti-satellite capability. A
new satellite carrying a nuclear device
that Russia is developing. This
capability could pose a threat to all
satellites operated by countries and
companies around the globe as well as to
vital communications, scientific,
meteorological, agricultural,
commercial, and national security
services we all depend on. This is in
direct violation of the 1967 outer space
treaty, which though still in effect,
sadly doesn't come with any formal
enforcement mechanisms.
These international agreements exist to
prevent space from becoming a
battleground for nuclear weapons. They
must be respected to ensure all of our
safety and well-being. As space becomes
increasingly important for modern life,
the lessons of the past are more
relevant than ever.
Starfish Prime showed us the devastating
reality of weaponizing space. The
electromagnetic pulses crippled
infrastructure, unleashing waves of
radiation that lingered in our
atmosphere for years, destroying
satellites and contaminating the space
around our planet. This experiment was a
turning point. From it emerged one of
the most important lessons of the
nuclear and space age. Space could be
weaponized in ways that affect not just
individual nations, but all of humanity.
This is why international treaties now
ban the use of nuclear weapons in space.
These agreements are promises to future
generations. Pledges that space will
remain a place for discovery and peace,
not for conflict and destruction.
This is why responsible, peaceful space
exploration is so important, so we can
continue to unravel the mysteries of the
universe and make discoveries that
inspire and unite humanity without the
lingering shadow of total annihilation.
On the 4th of March 2022, a mysterious
rocket booster crashed into the surface
of the moon. This event was watched by
the scientific community who had been
tracking the booster since 2015 while it
silently orbited our planet. When it
crashed, it formed a strange double
crater that defied precedent or obvious
explanation. However, other watchers
were more curious about its origin. Who
had launched it? No nation claimed to
have done so.
My mind when I heard about this was
immediately caught up in the idea of
secret government programs or shady
corporations launching pirate satellites
for a quick profit. But as I delved into
it, the origins of this mystery rocket
actually opened my eyes to an unexpected
issue. One that was deeply troubling. It
speaks of an era fast in coming where
rather than space being a place of
peaceful exploration, it might be rife
with danger and conflict. Hopefully,
this is something that can be avoided,
but the first step is to understand what
is happening up there.
I'm Alex Mccoan and you're watching
Astramm. Join with me today as we learn
the likely origins of this rocket and
the unsettling implications its
existence cast on space exploration in
general.
To begin with, figuring out the origins
of the rocket booster known as W0913A
is actually one of the simpler aspects
of this mystery. And no, it's likely not
the jettison from a secret government
program. While admittedly I don't have
insider knowledge about the classified
space programs of all the nations around
the world, it turns out secret space
launches are surprisingly difficult to
achieve, making this explanation
unlikely. This is because for the last
70 years after the invention of the
intercontinental ballistic missile,
countries have become very invested in
knowing when other countries are
launching rockets.
The great fear during the Cold War was
that America and Russia would send
nuclear missiles at each other. As such,
it was a matter of survival for each to
know what the other nation was doing.
They did this with radar, but also with
spy networks. When Russia launched
Sputnik 1 in 1957, American intelligence
already knew about it, even if they
didn't pass this information on to the
American people. But since then, radar
systems and satellites have become so
good they are able to spot launches
within minutes. It's essentially
impossible now to send a rocket up
without someone noticing. Rockets are,
after all, quite difficult to hide. And
even if you did manage to launch it
undetected, space is incredibly open.
And even if governments missed it,
amateur astronomers across the globe
watched the skies as a hobby. It
wouldn't take very long before someone
spotted it. You'd likely have more
success disguising your secret
spacecraft as something it wasn't. If
you sent it up disguised as an innocent
satellite or had it fall off a rocket as
if it was simple space junk, you could
let it drift through space in plain
sight yet hidden. If our mystery rocket
was something like this, that might make
more sense. However, we likely know its
true origin thanks to a little bit of
mathematics.
Independent astronomers as far back as
2015 had watched the path of the mystery
rocket, and by plotting its course, they
were able to calculate the reverse of
its trajectory. By doing so, they could
work out which nations it had passed
over at various points in its past.
While initially this led them to believe
that it was a stage of a Space X rocket,
this theory was later supplanted by a
much more probable explanation that it
had belonged to the Chinese Chang 5T1
mission. The mystery rocket's orbit
passed over China on the same day as the
Chang 5T1 launch and matched its
trajectory exceptionally well. There was
additional evidence. University of
Arizona students at the Space Domain
Awareness Lab used a Raptor's telescope
to take a spectroscopic survey of the
mystery rocket. Essentially, by looking
at it through a telescope and evaluating
the type of paint used on it from the
light reflecting off it, they were able
to compare it to existing records and
identify that it was a closer match to
China's rocket style than SpaceX's.
These cooperating pieces of evidence led
astronomer Jonathan McDow to claim a 90%
certainty that the mystery rocket had
belonged to China. But China denied it.
When asked by journalists, foreign
ministry spokesman Wang Wen Bin said the
following. According to China's
monitoring, the upper stage of the Chang
5 mission rocket had fallen through the
Earth's atmosphere in a safe manner and
burned up completely. China's aerospace
endeavors are always in keeping with
international law.
Some astronomers believe China was
innocently mistaken here. It is also
possible that China wasn't telling the
truth. But if the evidence is so
strongly against them, why deny it? It's
perhaps that last line that offers the
vital clue. China does not want to be
seen as in breach of international law.
And this is where I start to get
annoyed. Not necessarily with China, but
with something which is a worldwide
problem.
You might not be aware of international
space law. It does actually exist,
although it is a little patchy. It is
made up of a number of treaties that
various countries have signed and
ratified over the years such as the
rescue agreement highlighting nations
responsibilities to help astronauts in
distress if they are able or the outer
space treaty of 1963 which enshrines in
international law the right of all
nations to explore space makes states
responsible for all space related
activities of their citizens and
maintains that space objects like the
moon should only be used for peaceful
purposes. is it is the treaty that
forbids any nation from placing nuclear
weapons in space which is probably why
there are no orbiting satellites with
nuclear weapon platforms up there today
ready to rain down destruction on the
planet. It makes states liable for
damages that they cause in space and
requires them to avoid harmful
contamination of celestial objects.
It's likely this last article that China
is trying to not run a foul of. While
there was likely little harm done by the
mystery rocket crashing into the moon,
it's not a good look to accidentally
lose track of your rocket stages and
have them crash into things later. If
any bacteria were on the rocket, that
could cause contamination.
Even worse, if the rocket part had
crashed into a satellite, or if there
one day ends up being lunar bases on the
moon and the rocket part had hit one of
those, then it would have meant China
had broken international law.
But why do I suggest that this will lead
to an era of conflict?
After all, while it's disappointing,
it's certainly not that surprising a
nation would try to hide things to get
ahead or to avoid looking bad. And I
take issue with more than just the fact
that there's an increasing amount of
space debris circling in space, although
this is becoming an increasing problem.
No, the true cause for alarm is the fact
that space law is so unregulated that a
rocket's origin was a mystery in the
first place. International law is
currently insufficient to ensure the
peaceful exploration of space in the
years to come. What exists is noble but
rife with holes and ambiguities.
Let's take for example the outer space
treaty. One of the foundational treaties
for the peaceful use of space signed by
117 countries around the world including
the US, China, Russia, and essentially
anyone else with a space program. It
states that outer space is not subject
to national appropriation by claim of
sovereignty, by means of use or
occupation, or by any other means. But
this is actually being somewhat ignored.
How does this idea square with the
desires of an increasing number of
nations to set up bases and mine places
like the moon? If you set up a base on a
planet or moon, that certainly sounds
like you're trying to stake a claim to
at least part of it, which sounds a lot
like sovereignity.
Claiming resources certainly appears to
me to be appropriation.
The US Artimus Accords signed by 23
countries now attempts to get around
this by having sin legally state that
they're not appropriating any of the
resources they extract from the moon.
But other nations claim that this is
nonsense. The American interpretation
has been perceived by some as just a new
version of the enclosure movement of
Britain in the 18th century where
Britain just claimed land as its own.
Depending on which legal interpretation
is carried out, in the end, there is a
risk that any nation that attempts to
claim resources from the moon might be
in breach of international law. But
clearly, this is not slowing anyone
down. Furthermore, consider the Outer
Space Treaty's article about space being
a place for peaceful purposes. No
nuclear weapons or weapons of mass
destruction are allowed in space.
However, this applies only to weapons of
mass destruction, which leaves a lot of
wiggle room for weapons of middling
destruction or lower. And such ideas are
being currently explored. In 2003, a
full 40 years after the outer space
treaty was signed, the US Air Force
proposed an idea of placing 20 foot long
tungsten rods, nicknamed rods from God,
into orbital launches that could fire
them from space.
These falling rods would drop at speeds
reaching Mach 10, hitting with the force
of a small tactical nuke, but without
the radiation, would launch far less
detectably than a missile, arriving in
half the time and would be almost
impossible to defend against.
Fortunately, rather than rods, it was
the idea that was dropped as it was too
expensive, but not because it encroached
on international law.
With civilization's increasing reliance
on satellites for business,
communication, banking, navigation, and
a host of other applications, weapons in
space are becoming increasingly common.
Satellites are increasingly becoming a
point of vulnerability in a nation's
security. Various nations are developing
anti-satellite missiles or defenses
against ASAT missiles to threaten others
interests and defend their own. This is
a complex issue, but one that carries
unexpected dangers. Space conflict of
this kind is not as intuitive as you
might think. When Russia tested one such
ASAP missile on a test satellite of its
own, it sent thousands of pieces of
debris into orbit around the planet.
Some of these pieces could remain in
space for years and if they collide with
other debris or satellites, those in
turn could shatter, creating a cascade
effect collectively known as Kesler
syndrome. If such conflict became
widespread, it could be an end to
satellites in space for everyone.
Interestingly, Russia and China have
pushed for a treaty known as PAROS that
bans all weapons in space of any kind.
But this is being stonewalled by the US
who favor the approach laid out by US
President Theodore Roosevelt. Speak
softly and carry a big stick. Arguably,
some force in space might actually be
necessary, adding to the complexity of
the situation. To say that there is a
lack of trust between the big
superpowers at the moment might be a bit
of an understatement. Beyond that, in
January 2018, a US company called Swarm
was denied permission by the US Federal
Communications Commission to launch four
satellites.
Swarm went to India and launched them
anyway without government approval.
There were legal ramifications for this.
The FCC later finds Swarm $900,000 for
their actions, but it sets a concerning
precedent as space becomes more and more
available for companies with large
wallets and few scruples.
It may one day become profitable to
participate in illegal space ventures.
Some degree of policing with some degree
of force to back it up might become
necessary to protect the interests of
legitimate or scientific space fairers.
Sadly, as has been noted by many
analysts, there is a perceived
preference from countries on all sides
towards rules that promote freedom for
their own actions while curtailing the
activities and aspirations of others.
And yet, space needs greater global
regulation. If the nations of the world
can't agree on some kind of framework
for ongoing exploration, there is a risk
that space exploration becomes a wild
west rife with conflict and with the
more noble aim of scientific advancement
left by the wayside. This would be a
waste as with a little extra work,
international law could become robust
enough to prevent this. What has been
agreed so far shows promise. One treaty
known as the moon treaty lays out the
environment of the moon as the common
heritage of mankind to be used only for
peaceful purposes and only to be
exploited at the careful agreement
according to an international regulatory
regime. However, not many nations have
signed up to this treaty. None of the
nations that have their own significant
launch capabilities such as the US,
Russia or China which leaves this treaty
largely ineffectual.
There so far has not been any agreement
on what this regime would look like nor
what the common heritage of mankind
actually means.
If space is going to be a safe place for
future generations, this needs to
change. More discussion needs to happen
on these topics to rein in future
illegal activity or escalating
space-based arms races. Groups that send
rockets into space need to keep track of
them. Ultimately, the nations of the
so-called civilized world need to come
to more agreement on these issues. At
the end of the day, we don't want to
live in a world where we have mystery
rockets crashing into the moon. We want
to live in a world where space is
appreciated for its alien beauty, where
its dangers and mechanisms are purely
natural and understood, and the moons
and planets out there can be explored
peacefully and fairly rather than fought
over and ultimately destroyed. Maybe as
a people, we need to grow up, not just
technologically, but civily, too.
For many, the Apollo missions represent
the golden era of space travel. For a
decade, it was headline after headline
of incredible feats, earning NASA and
their astronauts respect and reverence
across the world. But just one year
after completing its mission, Apollo 15
made different kinds of headlines. In a
scandal that rocked NASA to its core,
accusations of smuggling, profitering,
and a lack of good judgment landed the
space agency in a congressional hearing.
This incident reduced a mission with a
valiant scientific purpose to a backroom
operation that stained NASA reputation
at the height of the space race. All
over 850 g of paper.
I'm Alex Mccoan and you're watching
Astramm. Join me today as we get into
what made the Apollo 15 postal scandal
so gut-wrenching, how the story
unfilled, and what the lasting
repercussions have been on the world of
spaceflight.
On November 14th, 1969, a German man
named Hor Iron Man left his Florida home
and jumped on a bus to the Kennedy Space
Center to watch the Apollo 12 launch. As
luck would have it, another German man
was on the same bus. Hamman Seager was a
stamp collector and dealer who turned
out to be from the same region in
Germany as Ayan. They shared a love for
space travel and became fast friends.
Back then, collecting stamps was a
popular hobby. NASA started printing
specially designed covers for each
Apollo mission, which was stamped on
launch day. These covers became such a
huge part of the Kennedy Space C
Center's launch days that machines would
start rolling from as early as 1:00 a.m.
to keep up with demand. These made great
gifts for astronauts, friends, and
family, and for NASA employees. Some
astronauts took this a step further,
transporting postal covers up into space
in the command module to then gift their
loved ones. Iron Man was a NASA
contractor, so he knew a lot of people
who worked at the Kennedy Space Center,
including a number of astronauts. On
more than one occasion, he tried to
persuade Apollo astronauts to smuggle
aboard various stamps and postal covers
in exchange for money without success so
far. One evening in May 1971, while
having dinner with the Apollo 15 crew,
David Scott, Alfred Warden, and James
Irwin, Iron Man tabled a tempting offer.
He asked them to carry 100 special stamp
covers to the moon for Seagga and 300
for themselves. Sega's covers would
eventually be sold off as exclusive
collector's items, and the astronauts
would each get a very generous $7,000
for their troubles, which would equate
to about $54,300
today. Initially, the crew were
hesitant. NASA's standards of conduct
forbid astronauts from using their
position to make money for themselves or
anyone else. Iron Man reassured them,
claiming many other Apollo crew members
had done the same in the past. NASA had
also recently restructured their
employee benefits, meaning astronauts no
longer receive life insurance. Space is
a hostile environment, no matter how
many security measures you put in place,
and being an astronaut is not a
risk-free occupation. Iron Man played on
this by convincing them that the money
could be put aside to care for their
families should the unthinkable happen
on the mission. It was and still is
fairly normal for astronauts themselves
to take personal souvenirs on missions.
Of course, all these personal items need
pre-approval from NASA before they could
fly to ensure the articles are safe for
space and compliant with weight
restrictions. Alan Shepard brought up a
few golf balls, a modified golf club
head, and famously played golf on the
moon. Buzz Uldren carried on board a
communion wafer and a vial of wine.
Several astronauts carried postal covers
on their missions for friends and family
back home. These were all approved by
NASA prior to launch day. In light of
this, accepting Iron Man's proposal may
not sound like such a big deal.
However, just a few months prior, the
Apollo 14 crew had taken some silver
medallions aboard the spacecraft without
NASA's knowledge. It was a deal brokered
directly between the astronauts and the
production company, the Franklin Mint.
After the mission, Franklin Mint melted
some down, mixed them with other metals,
and mass-produced commemorative
medallions. They used the story that
these medallions had been to space in
their marketing in an attempt to
profiteeer. Because the Apollo 14 crew
hadn't taken any money for their role in
facilitating this, they didn't get into
any trouble. The scandal didn't become
the moral stain on NASA's reputation it
could have been. Remember, this is all
happening against the backdrop of the
Cold War. Public interest in the space
race was at its peak, and astronauts
held celebrity status. Everything that
could reflect poorly on American success
and NASA's integrity was not acceptable.
In light of these events, NASA's
director of flight crew operations, Dee
Sllayton, had expressly warned the
Apollo 15 crew against taking anything
into space that could make money either
for themselves or others. They couldn't
afford more bad press after what
happened with the Apollo 14 medallion
scandal. With this in mind, it might
surprise you to hear the Apollo 15 crew
eventually accepted Iron Man's deal, but
only on the condition that absolutely no
sales were made until they retired from
NASA. Independently of the agreement
with the Germans, it's important to
mention another interested party who
came to the crew with a similar request.
Retired film director and stamp
collector F. Heric Heric asked Warden to
take 144 covers into space on his
behalf. He said they'd be set aside for
some years and then sold once all the
astronauts had retired from NASA. But
unlike Iron Man, he didn't offer Warden
any money to transport them. Warden
trusted him and agreed to go with it as
a favor for an acquaintance. He couldn't
know it at the time, but that decision
set the events in motion that would
drastically change the course of his
life forever.
The Kennedy Space Center Post Office
opened at 1:00 a.m. EDT on launch day,
which wasn't unusual on an Apollo launch
morning. Collins brought with him
several hundred of the stamped covers to
be run through the cancellation machine
before taking them to the astronaut
quarters. Members of the flight crew
support team vacuum sealed the 243
approved covers in Tefloncoed fiberglass
to fireproof them for space. This
included the 144 Heric covers which were
approved by NASA ahead of the launch. As
team lead James Smotherman was carrying
out final checks on the astronaut's
personal preference kits, he came across
the 400 undeclared Seagga covers. Right
there, with contraband in his hands, he
mistook them for the approved covers
traveling aboard Apollo 15 and thought
nothing of them. In his own words, he
goofed. And just like that, the
bootlegged Seagga covers slid into David
Scott's space suit pocket, destined for
the moon.
In terms of space exploration, the
Apollo 15 mission was a success. It was
the first mission to use the lunar
rover, giving the crew greater surface
mobility to support geological
investigations. They also stayed on the
moon for almost 3 days, longer than any
crew before them, thanks to engineering
advancements of the lunar module that
allowed carrying a heavy payload. Warden
performed the first space walk in deep
space, while Scott and Irwin collected
the first sample of the moon's early
crust, the Genesis rock, from the lunar
surface. The crew even canled a NASA
certified postal cover on the moon's
surface in honor of the US Postal
Service. Yet less than a year later,
these achievements would be overshadowed
by bitter betrayal.
As soon as Apollo 15 returned to Earth,
Sega, Iron Man, and Heric turned on
their word and got to selling the postal
covers. Sega kept one and sold the other
99 for $1,500
each in just 2 months. That's almost
$12,000 each in today's money. Her got
busy commissioning sales across various
dealers in New York and Europe, selling
the covers for between $790 and $1,250
each, which today would be between
$6,000 and almost $10,000.
Late in October 1971, one of Heric's
interested buyers contacted NASA asking
if they could verify the authenticity of
the cover. NASA's director of flight
crew operations, Dick Sllayton, had no
idea what he was talking about, which
really didn't make NASA look good. He
warned Warden to make sure these covers
wouldn't be further publicized. After
all, they'd only been approved under the
assumption that they were for
non-commercial use. Warden wrote to
Heric, demanding he cease sales
immediately. He'd later say, "I believed
Heric was as good as his word. It was a
huge lapse in judgment on my part to
trust this stranger.
By the next month, word had spread about
the supposed Apollo 15 covers selling
all over Europe. The crew, who were in
Germany at the time as part of their
official NASA European tour, decided it
would be improper for them to accept the
$7,000 promised by Sega. But by then,
the American media had gotten a hold of
the news and the damage was done.
Slayton was furious. His crew had
directly disobeyed orders and the result
was a very public dispute that damaged
NASA's credibility. He called the events
a regular godamn scandal and reprimanded
Irwin, Scott, and Warden for poor
judgment. He also removed them from
their positions as Apollo 17 backup
crew. They were stripped of their wings
and never flew in space again. The worst
kind of punishment for an astronaut.
But the drama didn't end there. With the
media pumping out headline after
headline, there was real concern that
the publicity around Apollo 15 would
reduce an otherwise successful
scientific mission to an unethical money
grab by the crew or worse by NASA
themselves.
On August 3rd, 1972, the Senate
Committee on Aeronautical and Space
Sciences held a hearing to set the
record straight once and for all. There
were several layers of concern to
address. Firstly, the actions of the
astronauts. The crew acknowledged they
acted thoughtlessly in not declaring the
postal covers and claimed they were
oblivious to the Germans intentions in
using these covers for commercial
purposes. However, something had
happened on board that cast doubt over
their true intentions. At some point
during the mission, the 400 unauthorized
covers were moved from the main command
module to the lunar module and
eventually to the surface of the moon.
In testimony, the astronauts agreed this
violated protocol, but said they
couldn't recall how or when the transfer
had taken place. Postal covers usually
remained within the command module, so
moving them into the lunar module would
have made them a crowning jewel in a
dealer's collection, increasing the
value of these covers significantly.
Perhaps the astronauts weren't the
innocent victims in a businessman's
game, as they were portraying themselves
to be. The Senate was also concerned how
NASA allowed another incident to happen
so quickly after the Apollo 14 debacle.
The postal covers dispute made NASA look
incompetent with no idea what its
employees were doing, what was being
taken aboard missions, and individuals
putting personal gain over the public
interest of the agency.
Slayton himself came under fire, too.
Turns out, despite his rage and fury, he
didn't report the crew to his superiors
when he learned of the unauthorized
covers. This called his integrity into
question, raising eyebrows that perhaps
he was somehow in on the whole
operation, although nothing along those
lines has ever been confirmed.
Interestingly, after duress from senior
NASA management, the Senate invoked a
rarely used rule to close the hearing to
the public when testimony might impact
the reputation of witnesses or others,
which in itself raises suspicions. The
repercussions of this hearing had
lasting effects on NASA and their
astronauts. NASA asked all current and
former astronauts to turn in any covers
they had flown with, including the
remaining Heric covers and Apollo 15's
300 non-commercialized covers. The
seizure led to the suspension of 15
astronauts who had broken the faith with
us and ignored a standing order from
Sllayton. As NASA flight director
Christopher Craft Jr. put it. Today,
astronauts can still carry NASA approved
personal items and momentos aboard
missions, but coins, stamps, and postal
materials that by their nature lend
themselves to exploitation by the
recipients are forbidden by federal
regulation. Just when it seemed to be
case closed, something happened that no
one was expecting.
5 years later in 1978, the Justice
Department sent a private memo to NASA
informing them that while they likely
had the right to keep all the
confiscated herit covers, the astronauts
300 covers intended as gifts were
another matter. As these items were
taken from the astronauts without any
legal proceedings, NASA might have
breached their constitutional rights. It
was on this basis in 1983 that Warden
sued NASA and won getting the cruise
covers back in an outofc court
settlement.
Apollo 15 was by all accounts a
successful scientific mission. However,
it was also overshadowed by a scandal
that called NASA's competence into
question and stained the image of the
astronaut as the infallible hero. While
it does seem wrong to try and profit off
such a mission, some were firmly on the
astronaut's side, it was perceived by
some that they were being punished for
behavior that wasn't new to NASA, says
Shopman, an expert in stamp history.
Today, Sega covers are all over the
world, mainly in private collections.
Only four ever made it to public sale,
with the latest selling for over $55,000
in 2014, which would be close to $70,000
today. Still, the questions remain. Were
the astronauts really just unfortunate
pawns in an opportunistic business game,
or were they in it for personal profit?
Was NASA oblivious to what was going on,
or were more people in on this? I don't
think we'll ever know. This is a story
that highlights how even a noble pursuit
like space exploration isn't free of
opportunists. Curiosity, ambition, and
ingenuity are all part of human nature.
but so are wildliness and self-interest.
In that way, the story is a stark
reminder of the importance of honor and
honesty, personal duty and dignity in
public service, and that virtues like
these truly are priceless.
Did you ever hear the story of how the
Harlon J. Smith telescope got shot seven
times?
The world of astronomy can be a
surprising place with groundbreaking
discoveries getting made all the time,
but normally ground is the only thing
being broken and the only shots are
images taken of the night sky. It's
exceptionally rare for someone to
actually attempt to attack a telescope.
And yet, in 1970, that's exactly what
happened. This moment could have spelled
disaster for what was then the third
largest telescope in the world, which
had only just been completed 2 years
prior. What happened? Why did someone
shoot through the glass mirror of an
observatory telescope with a 9 mm pistol
at point blank range? And how did a
glass mirror of such impressive size
deal with seven shots from a gun and
several preliminary strikes from a
hammer?
I'm Alex Mcolen and you're watching
Astramm. Today, we'll be taking a closer
look at the only time in history when an
observatory got shot.
In 1963, the space race was just
beginning. NASA was considering how best
to visit the planets of the solar system
as part of the US's goal to get ahead of
the Soviet Union. It was a technical
task that needed more information about
those planets. So, NASA started planning
new telescopes that could image the
heavens they'd soon be traveling to.
Onto the scene came Harlon J. Smith.
Smith was a driven man described as
softly spoken by his peers who had a
deep love of astronomy. He had just been
made director of the Macdonald
Observatory operated by the University
of Texas and located in the mountains
near Fort David. And in his first
official act, he was able to persuade
NASA to give $5 million to build a new
telescope on his site. The project went
ahead and production began in 1964 and
was completed in 1968.
This was no small project. The newly
finished 2.7 m mirror telescope was at
that point in time the third largest in
the world, weighing in at 160 tons with
light gathering capabilities 1 quarter
of a million times greater than was
viewable with the human eye.
Usually, while the electronic components
of a telescope can be changed out as
technology improves, a telescope's
expected lifespan is about 100 years,
which is useful as often observations
can take decades to complete, and it can
take 20 or so years for some known
exoplanets to complete one full orbit,
for example. Undiscovered ones could
potentially take even longer.
The newly built telescope would be
something of a Swiss Army knife, but
primarily would focus on spectroscopy.
The mirror itself was made of fused
silica glass. And while you might think
that sounds easy enough to make, we
create glass all the time, right? Fused
silica is a special kind of glass that's
made in a very particular technically
involved way. Reducing the fused silica
took almost 1 and a half years, piece by
carefully crafted piece in a process of
plasma torch hydrarolysis using silica
gas that required temperatures of
1,700°.
And after the 1,400°
C process that fused its segments
together was complete, just cooling the
entire shape back down again to take its
final form took another 2 years.
That was all to create a mirror that had
almost zero internal stresses and
strains, perfect for the work ahead of
it. Which is why it was so serious when
not even 2 years later, a man named Jack
Hyde decided to try and take the
observatory's telescope mirror out of
commission.
Jack was an instruments technician who
had only recently come to work at the
Macdonald Observatory on the 1st of
January 1970. And we don't completely
know his motivations. He was in his 30s,
had previously been employed at the
prestigious Smithsonian Observatory in
Massachusetts and had traveled to Texas
to work while his wife and three
children went to live in Nebraska.
Macdonald Observatory was nestled up in
the Davis Mountains where its isolation
and elevation meant it had little light
pollution and less atmosphere to contend
with. The nearest town, Fort Davis, was
around 27 km away, so all the staff
tended to live on site. But such
isolation and distance from his family
may have taken a psychological toll on
Jack. On top of that, hours were long.
Observatories always want to be
performing science as much as possible
when conditions are right, which
sometimes means technicians and
operators could be pulling 48 or even
72hour shifts.
This isn't entirely unsurprising. Bad
weather, too high atmospheric dust
levels, or strong 100 km/h winds could
call a halt to the telescope being used
at all. And if you work in an
observatory, you are likely passionate
about astronomy. But when you combine
the isolation from family with the
grueling high pressure hours, perhaps it
sheds some light on why Jack Hyde, just
a month after starting work, showed up
to the telescope observatory at midnight
with a hammer in his hand and a 9mm gun
in his pocket.
There are reports that Mr. Hyde had been
drinking that night and was suffering
from bad mental health. On the night of
the 5th of February, most of the staff
were in bed. The number of people
manning the Macdonald Observatory was
never that high in those days, but only
one telescope operator and one
supervisor were actually in the building
at the time of the incident. Mr. Hyde
entered the building with relative ease.
He worked there after all, and there had
never been a problem like this before,
so there was little security or reason
to stop him. He saw the supervisor and
fired a shot directly at him. Although
the bullet went through the man's
clothes, it thankfully passed through
without hitting him directly and
impacted the wall behind him. The
supervisor ran off understandably and
went to get help. Hyde then threatened
the remaining telescope operator and got
him to lower the telescope into a
maintenance mode so the mirror was
easily accessible. Hyde then entered the
telescope and got out his hammer. He
struck the mirror, expecting it to
shatter.
He was an instruments technician, which
meant he usually dealt with the image
capturing camera and equipment at the
bottom of the telescope. He was thus
unfamiliar with the properties of the
glass mirror and was surprised when his
hammer did not smash the 4 and 1/2 ton
mirror, but instead bounced off,
recoiling and hitting him instead. He
did, however, managed to chip off a
pear-shaped dent from the mirror, but
that was about it. In frustration, Hyde
pointed his gun at the mirror and
unloaded all seven remaining shots in
his clip. Each one lodged into the
mirror, but did little more than
penetrate a few cm.
The process of making the mirror had
involved taking layers of glass and
fusing them on top of each other. This
was due to the scarcity of the fused
silicon material and because of other
limitations of the technology at the
time, it was easier to make smaller
pieces and fuse them together. But
ironically, this process had created a
material similar to laminate glass.
Combined with its thickness of 31.8 cm,
it was essentially bulletproof.
By this point, more staff arrived to
restrain Hyde, holding him until the
local sheriff arrived. Unfortunately,
when the sheriff looked at the mirror,
he mistakenly thought that it was
completely destroyed due to the large
hole in its center, not realizing that
the central hole was supposed to be
there and it was just the smaller bullet
holes that were the actual problem.
Newspapers began running headlines about
how the telescope was destroyed and
Haren J. Smith, the director, had to
publish an official report telling the
astronomical community that there was
actually nothing to worry about.
Ironically, hides shots had mostly
missed the vital part of the mirror. To
an untrained eye, all parts of a
telescope mirror look like they serve
the same function. However, the portions
of the mirror near to its center are
actually largely unused for resolution
as they are shadowed by other components
and perhaps are only used for a little
light gathering. It's the area near this
ring here that gathers the light used in
imaging.
Fortunately, this means that only three
of hide shots actually hit a critical
area of the mirror. And given that those
small centimeter wide holes only
contribute to a small fraction of the
mirror's total surface area, Mr. Smith
was able to report that the bullet holes
reduce the light collecting efficiency
by about 1% and introduce a very small
amount of defraction.
Not only was the telescope able to
survive the attack, it actually came out
almost completely unscathed.
Mr. Hyde initially faced the prospect of
criminal charges with a potential jail
sentence of 2 to 20 years. But when
Director Smith learned about the mental
health problems Mr. Hyde had been
facing, he decided not to press charges.
Instead, he elected to get Mr. Hyde into
a mental institution and tried to get
him help. It was a kind act and an
indication that the director didn't
harbor any actual ill will towards Hyde.
Perhaps because fortunately no real harm
had been done to either man or machine.
However, when he was eventually
released, Mr. High did not return to
work at the observatory.
The University of Texas engineers
responsible for maintaining the mirror
didn't need to do much to repair it.
Using a small drill, they bored out the
bullets and smoothed out the holes to
prevent any further cracking. Then they
simply layered the reflective surface
back on and called it good. To be fair,
nothing further was required. The
Harland J. Smith telescope still bears
these bullet holes to this day.
The telescope went on to have an
illustrious career. Images it captured
helped inform the plans for the Voyager
missions and it has also made huge
discoveries in the field of exoplanet
research. Back in an era when people had
no idea exoplanets were even out there
in any significant number, the Harland
J. Smith telescope searched the skies
for these astronomical bodies, helping
confirm that they are so frequent that
every star might have at least one.
So the science community is grateful
that Mr. Hyde didn't manage to carry out
his objective at the time. Science would
have lost much without this telescope,
which later was named the Harland J.
Smith telescope in honor of the director
who had built it. But fortunately, it
has suffered little more than a few
battle scars from that night over 50
years ago that it can show to curious
observers like you and I. And to be
fair, when it comes to battle scars, it
still has an easier time of it than
space telescopes like the James Web that
face everpresent threat of micrometeor
striking its mirrors.
So, how does a telescope deal with a 9
mm pistol? Pretty well is the answer.
And it's all thanks to excellent
engineering and about 4 tons of
bulletproof glass. The more you know. A
big thanks to Coin Gibson, the Macdonald
Observatory's present-day manager of
observing support, who was able to speak
to me and provided me with a lot of
these photographs. You helped make this
script possible.
Ham the chimpanzeee was very special. He
was the first homminid in space, the
trailblazer which set the course for
years of human space exploration.
So what was his story? Did he survive
the pioneering journey, a voyage that
took him further from Earth than anyone
had ever gone before?
I'm Alex Mccoan and you're watching
Astramm. and together we will recount
the story of Ham the chimp and the
legacy his mission left behind.
Project Mercury came about as the result
of the space race between the USSR and
the USA. Both countries were furiously
trying to be the first ones in space
which would be a display of their
military powers against the other rival
nation.
This is the program from which NASA was
founded.
Before Project Mercury in the early
1950s, space related endeavors were
performed by the US military. Initially,
they sent mice and monkeys into space to
test the effects of huge G-forces and
weightlessness that comes with rocket
travel.
Rockets were very basic to begin with.
This rocket called the Aerob3 is pretty
small by today's standards at only 8 m
tall and in this test it reached
altitudes of only 60 km.
[Music]
Experiencing 4 GS on takeoff
and weightlessness for a few minutes,
the animals inside the rocket appeared
perplexed but survived the trip with no
apparent harm or after effects.
Monkeys were specifically chosen during
this time because they closely match the
physiology of humans and it was thought
that whatever happens to them would be a
good indicator of what would happen to a
human in space.
One of the last space missions of the US
military was in 1959 where they
successfully launched two monkeys,
Miss Abel and Miss Baker, into space at
an altitude of 570 km on board a Jupiter
rocket.
On this trip, they withstood a maximum
of 38 GS and reached a top speed of
16,000 kmh.
The mission was a success. The nose cone
was successfully recovered, but
unfortunately Abel died a few days after
the flight after having surgery
performed on her unsuccessfully.
Miss Baker, on the other hand, lived a
while after the flight and was able to
breed as part of tests on her
reproductive organs and was honored for
her contributions to scientific
discovery.
Even today, bananas can be found on her
grave in respect to her accomplishments.
A few months after this flight, NASA
with Project Mercury took over the goal
of bringing humans to space
with a new set of rockets, including the
Mercury Atlas and the Mercury Redstone.
America was under pressure by the
Russians, who had already been the first
ones to get a satellite into orbit in
1957, the famous Sputnik 1 and its
beeping radio transmission.
After a couple of years of testing the
Mercury rockets, in 1961, NASA felt like
they were ready to send a homminid or a
great ape into space aboard a Mercury
Redstone rocket.
This rocket is considerably bigger than
the Aerob
at 25 m long,
but still much smaller than rockets of
today.
It was however big enough to fit a human
in the capsule at the top.
The Mercury Redstone rocket was only
capable of suborbital flight though,
meaning it would reach space but not be
able to stay in orbit.
The choice of candidate was important
for this mission as in this case the
chimp would not just be a passenger but
would be required to perform tasks while
in space. The ability to perform tasks
while in the capsule would pave the way
for human astronauts in the future,
meaning human astronauts would not have
to totally rely on automation should the
rocket lose contact with the command
base for whatever reason. From a pool of
40 chimpanzeee candidates, Ham was
eventually chosen through a series of
selection processes, including selecting
the healthiest chimp and the one that
followed commands best. He was also
picked because he was a particularly
happy chimp with a good temperament.
At this point, Ham was only known as
number 65, as the US didn't want the bad
press associated from a named chimp
dying should the mission fail.
Ham was trained to pull a lever within 5
seconds of seeing a blue light. If he
did, he would be rewarded with a banana
pellet. Should he not pull the lever, he
would receive a mild electric shock in
his foot.
After months of preparations, Ham was
ready for the flight. They inserted him
into a mini capsule at first as a form
of a space suit for the chimp. This mini
capsule would control pressure, oxygen,
and temperature for Ham. And he had
sensors measuring his vital signs, which
communicated this information back to
ground control on Earth. Thanks to the
rocket's antenna, his arms were free in
order to perform the commands he was
given during the flight, and he had a
window so he could see what was going
on.
The time for the launch approached with
many scientists and engineers doing
lastminute checks to ensure everything
went well with the flight.
Ham was then placed into the main
capsule of the Mercury Redstone rocket
for launch.
This main capsule is also pressurized as
this is where the human astronaut would
sit should this mission go to plan.
As the morning came, the rocket
launched.
[Music]
After only one minute into the flight,
computers on board the rocket
communicated back to command that the
flight plan angle was already one degree
too high and rising.
This steeper angle meant the rocket
accelerated a lot faster than planned
with predicted G forces reaching 17 gs
in the capsule for poor Ham.
After just two and a half minutes, the
liquid oxygen for the rocket was
depleted, which sent a Mayday signal to
recovery forces.
The rocket was spinning wildly,
was a lot higher than expected,
and had achieved higher speeds than
anticipated.
As a response to this, an abort signal
was sent and the capsule was ejected
early from the rocket at an altitude of
250 km instead of 185.
This early abort meant that there were
no retro rockets to slow the descent and
the capsule containing Ham hurtled back
towards Earth.
If this wasn't enough, sensors reported
that the main capsule was losing
pressure fast, which later turned out to
be a faulty air inlet snorkel valve, a
pin of which came loose after vibrations
from the launch.
At this point though, Ham was blissfully
unaware of all these problems going on
around him. His mini capsule meant that
he was unaffected by the falling
pressure in the main capsule. He was
happily playing the lever and lights
game, only performing marginally slower
than his results on Earth.
As the capsule began its re-entry back
into Earth's atmosphere,
Ham was again subjected to higher G
forces than expected, this time 14 GS.
Because there were no retro rockets
fired to slow descent, the capsule had
overshot its expected landing area by
100 km.
The capsule's parachutes were pulled
and airbags around the base were
inflated to cushion the fall and help
with floating on the water's surface.
Upon impact, color dye was released into
the sea to help aid recovery.
It wasn't until 12 excruciating minutes
had passed before the capsule sent its
first recovery signal. 27 minutes after
landing, a search plane finally spotted
the capsule floating in the Atlantic.
The US Navy rescue helicopters were sent
from the nearest ship to pick up the
capsule, which by the time they got
there had taken in water and was quickly
submerging.
The impact from the landing had popped
off the heat shield at the base,
puncturing holes into the base of the
capsule. The airbags were heavily worn
and that leaky snorkel valve from
earlier was also allowing water in. By
the time the capsule was rescued, it had
taken in roughly 360 kg of water on
board.
After a 3-hour recovery, the capsule and
its precious cargo were airlifted to the
nearest Navy ship where NASA scientists
waited on hand to see the fate of Ham. A
lot had gone wrong with this mission,
but was he still alive after all of
that, and if so, what state was he in?
Scientists and Navy personnel worked
quickly to get him out.
The cover came off, and Ham was
fine. He had done it, and he was safe
and well, still his happy self.
Almost as if nothing noteworthy had
happened.
He survived everything relatively
unscathed. His only injury was a bruised
nose.
Ham retired from space fairing shortly
thereafter and lived a good 20 years
after his voyage in a number of zoos.
He passed away in 1983. His skeleton was
sent to the US National Museum of Health
and Medicine.
His other remains buried and honored by
the International Space Hall of Fame in
New Mexico.
Because of the success of this mission,
a few months later, the US successfully
sent Alan Shepard into space on board
another Mercury Redstone rocket called
Freedom 7. However, the US didn't win
this space race. The Soviets
successfully orbited around the Earth
with a human on board called Yuri
Gagarin aboard Vostto 1. But the legacy
of this mission can still be felt today
with humans now on board the
International Space Station and even now
with a space race to get humans on the
moon a second time.
So there we have it. The story of the
chimp who beat all humans to space. Ham,
[Music]
if I were a superstitious man, I would
advise you to be careful what you call
your space missions. When Russia named
its first mission to the moon in 47
years, it was originally given the
designation lunar globe, translating in
English to lunar sphere. However, this
name troubled scientific director of the
space research institute of the Russian
Academy of Sciences, Lev Zeleni. Glob
was too similar to a different Russian
word, Gro, meaning coffin. Zeleni
changed the name of the mission to Luna
25, intending to call back to the
earlier Soviet Luna missions, which were
the last time Russian spacecraft
successfully landed on the moon. But
perhaps it was too late and something of
that original name lingered because we
now know that Luna Coffin was a much
more apt name for the illomen Luna 25.
I'm Alex Mccoan and you're watching
Astramm. Join us today as we explore the
fate of Russia's first moon mission
since 1976.
for the country that once led the world
in the space race. What exactly went
wrong?
Although we often look at NASA or issa
missions here at Astramm, Russia's space
program has historically been quite the
powerhouse. Back when Russia was part of
the USSR, it was the Soviet Union's
launching of Sputnik 1, the first
artificial satellite that triggered the
space race in 1957. And for a time, the
Soviet space program went from strength
to strength. It was the Soviet Union
that put the first man into space and
the first woman, the first multi-person
crew, the first dog. Their rockets
escaped the Earth moon system first,
impacted the moon first, orbited the
moon first, took photos of the far side
of the moon first. Soviet cosmonauts did
the first spacew walk. The USSR launched
the first space station. To the eyes of
many and to the pleasure of Soviet
leadership, the USSR was winning the
space race. But beneath the surface, not
everything was going as smoothly as it
appeared. The Soviet Union also saw the
first death during a space mission when
the re-entry capsule's parachute of
cosminaut Vladimir Komarov failed to
open on his re-entry to Earth. The only
three men to have died in space were a
crew of Soviet cosmonauts visiting that
first ever space station.
Soviet launches were plagued with
failures, but eager to look good in the
eyes of the world, particularly compared
to its rival, the US, the USSR simply
didn't report any of its failed lunar
missions. It pretended any rocket that
didn't make it out of the atmosphere was
never intended to be a moon mission at
all. In reality, only about 34% of
Soviet moon missions ended in success.
in comparison to America's 60% success
rate on equivalent missions. America
landed the first man on the moon in
1969.
And after that crowning achievement,
both superpowers seemed to lose interest
in continuing the race, refocusing their
space programs towards non-Luna
pursuits. By the mid 1970s, Soviet
cosmonauts never set foot on the moon
itself. The USSR cancelled any of its
plans to do so as the endeavor was
ultimately seen as too expensive.
Perhaps more importantly, what was the
point of going if you were only going to
get there second?
But with the turn of the millennium and
since the fall of the Soviet Union in
1991, the world's interest in going to
the moon has been rekindled. Scientists
realized that the moon would make a good
stepping stone for human space missions
to Mars. Due to its plentiful resources,
such as newly discovered water, ice,
ideal for rocket fuel, air, and water,
and low gravity, resources on the moon
began to attract the attention of
businesses for economic reasons, and
nations began to consider setting up
permanent bases on its surface as a way
of turning a profit. And of course,
there is still a lot of science to be
done there, attracting those who wish to
learn more about the processes by which
the moon formed and the cycles that
govern it.
Russia's old rival, the USA, rose to
dust off their space programs. America
started its constellation program in
2005, declaring their aim to go back to
the moon. But now other nations were
getting in on the act too. India who had
not been part of the first race for the
moon began its Chandrean program for
lunar exploration in 2000. Governments
across the world believed that the
benefits of going to the moon in this
second rush were so great nations who
didn't go would in some way fall behind.
In the words of Israel chairman Krishna
Swami Casterangan, it is not whether we
can afford it. it is whether we can
afford to ignore it. Russia did not
intend to be left behind. It was eager
to pick up the Soviet legacy of space
exploration. In fact, it beat its
competitors to the punch. Russia had
already begun thinking about a new lunar
mission as early as the mid 1990s when
scientists Mikail Mavrov and Eric
Galamov put forward their proposals to
Ros Cosmos, Russia's newly restructured
space agency. Their Luna Globe mission
was approved and was initially intended
to have a lot more parts to it,
including a penetrator for seismic
sounding, a lander, and an orbiter.
However, the project initially did not
have enough political will behind it. It
faced budget cuts after the Russian
financial crisis of 1998 when the ruble
lost over 2/3 of its value in 3 weeks
and was marred in delays that repeatedly
knocked it back and put it on hold. The
penetrator and orbiter was scrapped
leaving just the lander as the plan for
the mission was reimagined to make it
more economical.
Russia wanted to be a nationally
recognized player in the space game, but
didn't want to spend massive amounts of
its budget on the plan. In 2005, Russia
only invested 20 billion rubles or about
700 million US in its space industry
compared to the USA's $15.6 billion. One
way to work around this was to
collaborate with other nations. Russia
initially tried to work with India on
the Chandrean 2 mission in 2007.
Luna 25 would fly with India's orbiter
and be the mission's lander. However,
this low spending ultimately punished
them and Russian scientists were unable
to get the lander's technology working
in time for the initial 2013 launch
date. India eventually abandoned the
collaboration and completed Chandrean 2
on their own. Russia was left trying to
get Luna 25 to the moon surface solo.
India's Chandrean 2 lander crashed into
the moon. But India was eager to try
again with Shandrean 3. This set Russia
and India on a course from collaborators
to competitors. Both Russia and India
were interested in the moon's south
pole, where Shandrean 2 and others had
confirmed through spectrometry the
presence of water ice.
Luna 25 and Shandrean 3 were now racing
to be the first lander to successfully
touch down on the moon's south pole and
potentially discover that water ice.
However, Russia faced a new problem. The
invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Western
countries were outraged at Russia's
decision to attack its neighbor and came
together to impose massive sanctions.
Not only was this painful economically,
but one vital element of these sanctions
was a ban on the trade of high-end
computer chips and components. These
would prevent Russia from developing
high precision ballistic rockets for use
in its military, but hit Russia's lunar
goals, too. European scientists began
ending their collaborations with
Roscosmos. In an interconnected world
where Russia traded for much of its
high-end components, Russia would now
have to go it alone.
India completed Chandrean 3 and launched
it on the 14th of July 2023. A mission
we covered in greater detail in a
previous video. However, the route that
they took to the moon was a fuel
efficient but time inefficient one. It
would take over a month to actually
arrive on the moon's surface. India
estimated a touchdown date on the 23rd
of August. If Russia really hurried, it
could complete its lander and arrive
before India by taking a shorter, more
fuelint inensive route using Russia's
powerful Soy use 2.1b rocket. The Luna
25 mission had by this time been delayed
from 2021 to 2022 and then to 2023.
In a bad stroke of luck for Russia, its
BIB navigation sensor didn't pass
quality tests. This was problematic as
the BIB sensor relied on a computer chip
normally supplied from the west. A chip
that Russia could no longer purchase due
to Western sanctions. So Russian
scientists had to develop a new one on
their own, the BISL.
Luna 25 was cleared as ready to launch
on the 11th of August 2023. It had eight
Russian scientific instruments on board,
including laser mass spectrometers,
infrared spectrometers, cameras for
imaging the lunar surface, and even a
device for measuring dust and
micrometeors.
Luna 25 would operate on the moon's
surface for a whole year, enduring the
freezing cold of lunar nights and the
intense solar radiation of lunar days.
It had the potential to do some good
science. The Soyuse rocket was powerful
enough that it would get Luna 25 to the
moon surface by August 21st, two crucial
days before India's lander arrived.
Russia would indeed win the race against
its rival.
[Music]
Luna 25 launched successfully from the
Vstney Cosmo on the 11th of August 2023
and entered the moon's orbit on August
16th. It took photographs of the moon's
surface, imaging the Zean crater. All
systems were functioning normally, and
communications were good. Russian
scientists then began to make final
preparations for the landing itself. The
south pole of the moon is home to some
treacherous terrain, and the scientists
didn't want a rough touchdown, which
could potentially harm Luna 25. But then
something went wrong. On August 19th,
Luna 25 lost communications with Earth.
No longer guided remotely, Luna 25
attempted to perform its own pre-planned
maneuver that would take it from a
circular orbit around the moon into the
new path down towards the surface.
However, further failures occurred. The
bias L navigation device, the one
developed by Russian scientists after
the previous one hadn't passed quality
control tests, had sent bad information
to the ship's onboard control unit. As a
result, the thrusters fired for 127
seconds instead of the intended 84
seconds, pointing Luna 25 into a steeper
and steeper descent. On the 20th of
August, Luna 25 creed down towards the
moon's surface at a pace too fast to
stop. Ross Cosmos scientists could do
nothing but look on in horror as the
lander hurtled into the terrain,
traveling faster and faster. Although no
external cameras witnessed the impact,
it's easy to imagine the grim result of
acceleration under gravity that turned
Luna 25 back into a lunar coffin. Its
Luna mission had not lasted a year, but
only a few days.
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter did
a flyby later, taking an image of the
site of the craft's final resting place.
Luna 25 had impacted hard, creating a
crater about 10 m in diameter.
Russia had attempted to show the world
that it was still a great power when it
came to space exploration.
However, Luna 25 had been mired by
pressures and challenges. Western
sanctions had indirectly sabotaged it.
The Russian replacement ship was not
precise enough or was not hardy enough
to survive the high radiation
environment of space. However, Russia's
attempt to beat its rival India had also
created problems for itself. When I
learned about its arrival date being 2
days before India, it reminded me of a
similar time when the Soviet Union's
Luna 15 mission crashed into the moon
only a few hundred miles and on the same
day as Apollo 11 landed. Luna 15 had
been tasked with collecting moon rocks
the same as the astronauts of Apollo 11.
And although it was unmanned, if
America's mission had failed, it would
have been a point of pride to the Soviet
Union that Luna 15 had managed to steal
American's thunder. This was political
point scoring. The Soviet Union didn't
want to just get to the moon. It wanted
to get there first. And inevitably, when
you're racing to beat someone else, you
take less time making sure everything
works as well as it needs to. And so you
run a greater risk of failure.
Ultimately, just like with Luna 15,
Russia's Luna 25 had the opposite effect
that it country's leadership intended.
Rather than show Russia's superiority in
space exploration, it showed the
downsides of isolationism and rivalry
over collaboration. If Russia still was
working with institutes like ISSA and
shared in technological advances,
perhaps it would be boasting a success
right now.
In many respects, it's a tragedy.
Perhaps this can one day change. The
future of mankind seems pointed towards
the stars. If we are to thrive out
there, it will be because we as a world
work together. The tragic fate of the
Luna 25 mission can and should be a
learning experience, not just an
embarrassing footnote in history, but
only if the right lessons are drawn from
it. Pride is not always a good thing.
Rivalry can leave us isolated when we
don't need to be and can prevent us from
thinking things through. Although it's
unlikely, it would certainly be nice if
our efforts to prove our superiority to
each other could finally be put to rest.
Buried in a frozen coffin on the lunar
surface,
the endless frontier of space has always
beckoned humanity with his uncharted
territories and untapped potential.
Since the first human ventured out into
the great beyond, we have dreamed of
exploring farther and pushing our
boundaries beyond what seem possible.
But what if the next frontier isn't for
humans to explore at all? What if the
future of space exploration lies in the
hands of machines?
Today, we'll delve into the intriguing
question of whether artificial
intelligence or AI can replace humans in
space exploration. From the earliest
days of space travel, humans have been
at the forefront of every mission. But
the rise of AI technology is rapidly
changing the game. Could AI be the key
to unlocking the mysteries of the
universe and propelling us further than
we ever thought possible? Or are humans
still an essential component of space
exploration, bringing unique skills and
qualities that AI simply can't
replicate?
I'm Alex Mccoan and you're watching
Astramm. Join me as we explore the
cuttingedge developments in AI
technology and its potential to
revolutionize space exploration.
Before we delve into the role of AI in
space exploration, let's first take a
closer look at what exactly AI is.
Artificial intelligence is a branch of
computer science that involves
developing machines and software that
can perform tasks that would typically
require human intelligence, such as
problem solving, decision-m, and natural
language processing.
In recent years, the use of AI in space
exploration has become increasingly
prevalent. NASA and other space agencies
have been integrating AI into various
aspects of space exploration, including
mission planning, spacecraft operations,
and data analysis.
One of the most significant advantages
of using AI in space exploration is the
ability to automate tasks that would
typically require human intervention.
For example, rovers have been designed
to operate autonomously, allowing them
to continue making discoveries and
conducting experiments, even if they
lose communication with Earth. AI
powered rovers can navigate challenging
terrain and perform scientific
experiments without the need for human
input, allowing scientists to gather
more data and make more discoveries.
Furthermore, AI can process vast amounts
of data much faster than humans, which
is especially useful in space
exploration, where data from various
sensors and instruments must be analyzed
quickly to make real-time decisions. AI
can also detect patterns in data that
humans may not be able to detect,
providing valuable insights into the
universe's workings.
The use of AI in this way has already
led to some exciting discoveries on
Mars, such as evidence of past liquid
water and organic molecules, which are
building blocks of life. Without the
help of AI, it may have taken scientists
much longer to sift through the massive
amounts of data collected by the Mars
rovers to make these discoveries.
Additionally, AI can be used to analyze
the vast amounts of data collected by
the rovers and other spacecraft to
identify areas of interest for further
study. This allows scientists to focus
their efforts on the most promising
areas and make the most of limited
resources.
However, for tasks that require a high
degree of creativity or human intuition,
AI may not be the best option. For
example, designing a new spacecraft or
making decisions in a rapidly evolving
situation may require human expertise
and judgment.
The rise of AI has certainly left some
people worried and for good reason. AI
technology has advanced rapidly in
recent years, and as it continues to
improve, there are concerns about how it
will impact our lives. In the field of
space exploration, as AI becomes more
advanced, there is potential for it to
replace certain roles that are currently
carried out by humans. There is a fear
that AI could eventually replace humans
in many areas, leading to job loss and
economic instability. Additionally, some
worry that AI lacks the empathy and
creative problem solving skills that
make humans unique.
I have a confession to make. I am not
Alex Mccoan,
but rather an AI programmed to write
this script on the topic of AI's impact
on space exploration.
But if I hadn't told you, would you have
been able to tell that it wasn't written
by a human? It's a question that raises
interesting philosophical debates about
the nature of creativity and the limits
of artificial intelligence.
What are the tasks that can be filled by
AI? How far can it go? Are there any
jobs that will always require a human
touch? By understanding the strengths
and limitations of both humans and AI,
we can work towards a future where they
complement each other and work together
to achieve greater things. Let me
explain this idea further. One of the
main advantages of AI is its ability to
analyze vast amounts of data quickly and
accurately. For example, AI is
revolutionizing the way spacecrafts are
designed and built in a process called
generative design.
Generative design is a process in which
an AI system generates multiple
potential designs for a given object
based on a set of constraints and
requirements. The AI system then uses
machine learning to refine and optimize
the designs, taking into account factors
such as weight, strength, and material
efficiency. This process can result in
highly innovative designs that may not
have been possible through traditional
human design methods.
AI is particularly suited to this task
because it is capable of processing vast
amounts of data and performing complex
calculations quickly and efficiently. It
can also learn from past designs and
analyze data to identify patterns and
optimal solutions.
Additionally, AI can generate a much
larger number of potential designs than
humans could in the same amount of time,
increasing the likelihood of finding the
best possible solution. Overall, the use
of AI in generative design for spaceship
parts has the potential to create
stronger, lighter, and more efficient
components, improving the overall
performance and safety of space
missions.
While AI is excellent at performing
repetitive and datadriven tasks, there
are certain areas where human
intelligence is still invaluable,
creativity and critical thinking are
essential for solving problems that are
outside the scope of routine procedures
or pre-programmed algorithms. For
example, in situations where there is a
malfunction in equipment or a
spacecraft, creativity and critical
thinking are necessary to come up with
innovative solutions that might not have
been considered before. These skills are
not yet replicable by AI. While AI can
generate new ideas and solutions by
analyzing vast amounts of data and
patterns, it still lacks the human
ability to be truly imaginative and
original.
AI algorithms are designed to optimize
performance and achieve predefined
objectives. Whereas human creativity
often stems from the exploration of the
unknown with a clear set of objectives.
Through my research, I have seen the
tremendous benefits that AI can bring to
space exploration.
From the use of autonomous rovers to the
design of spaceship parts, from the
analysis of vast amounts of data to the
search for intelligent life beyond our
planet.
However, as an AI, I am also aware of
the limitations of my programming. I may
be able to analyze data and provide
insights, but I cannot experience the
wonder and awe that humans feel when
they gaze up at the stars. I cannot feel
the rush of excitement that comes with
discovering something new and
unexpected. These are uniquely human
experiences that I can only observe and
try to understand.
There is a fear that AI could eventually
replace humans in many areas leading to
job loss and economic instability.
However, it is important to remember
that AI has its limitations and there
are certain tasks that require human
intuition, creativity, and emotional
intelligence.
Rather than seeking to replace humans,
AI should be seen as a tool to help
augment and enhance human abilities. By
working together, humans and AI can
achieve great things and address some of
the world's most pressing challenges.
Thank you.
All right, that's it for the AI. Now, as
a personal note from me at the end, I
wanted to ask you what you thought about
this video. I hope you enjoyed the
experiment. Did you feel the AI wrote a
good Astramm script? Could you tell it
was an AI before it revealed itself? Let
me know in the description below what
you thought. As for me, at times I was
surprised at its uncannily human voice,
even though in making this script, it
took a lot of prompting before the AI
produced what you see before you. Will I
be replaced by an AI? Maybe eventually,
who knows? But what the AI really does
lack is a creative spark. Without human
input and guidance, it was flat and
boring. Plus, this took a lot longer
than writing a normal script because
coaxing the AI to produce the quality
and accuracy I wanted was
disproportionately tedious. So, don't
worry, this was a one-off. Next time
you'll see my video produced by a human
hand again. Or so I claim. Cuz that's
exactly what an AI would say, isn't it?
Look into the night sky on a clear night
and you'll see thousands of stars
spanning across your view.
These stars are a beautiful reminder of
the cosmos we live in.
But curiously, when you look at the many
different images released by space
agencies of objects in space, the
background looks mysteriously void of
anything.
Why is that? Surely with nothing in the
way like an atmosphere, we should be
able to see all the stars that would be
in that view.
In fact, even Apollo astronauts reported
not being able to see any stars on the
moon where no atmosphere was in the way.
So, what's up with that?
Well, this is all to do with how eyes
and cameras work.
When we look at a bright object, our
iris shrinks in order to block out some
of the light.
This is what happened with the Apollo
astronauts. Even though there was no
atmosphere above them, the reflection of
the sun's light from the moon's surface
made their eyes adjust to as if it were
day.
One astronaut reported only being able
to see some of the brightest stars when
he was in the shadow of the lunar
module, looking directly up with his
protective visor raised.
I imagine though, if astronauts ever
land on the night side of the moon and
have their eyes adjust the near pitch
black conditions, they would get a
stunning view of the stars in our
galaxy.
When a camera on board a spacecraft
images a planet, the shutter speed, or
the amount of light a shutter allows
into the camera before it closes again,
is set for the equivalent of daytime
levels. Because what we are usually
looking at is the day side of the
object.
This shutter speed is too quick for
background stars to be picked up.
But every so often, we do want to image
the night side of the object, which
means we must increase the exposure time
to allow more light into the camera.
When this happens, suddenly the
background becomes full of stars.
This is a time-lapse of raw images taken
by the Cassini spacecraft. As you can
see, Cassini takes a lot of different
images with different exposures. In some
images, there are no background stars
visible and in others there are.
But this leads on to another interesting
point about the images space agencies
released to the public.
You may have seen some of these stunning
images of Saturn before, but you may not
realize that this isn't one image, but
it's rather a mosaic of several images
stitched together.
In such mosaics, you definitely won't
see background stars because the
sections of black around the image won't
have been added to the mosaic. Lots of
spacecraft take images this way. The
reason being it can dramatically
increase the resolution of an image and
reduce the amount of data that has to be
transmitted back.
Bandwidth come in at quite a premium
where data speed can be reduced to 2
kilobytes pers at the farthest
distances.
So there you go. Now you know why you
don't tend to see stars in the
background of space images
now. It is past Neptune's orbit and is
far enough out that no telescope can
study it ever again. Its origins and
nature remain a mystery that still
stokes hot debate in the academic
community to this day. Was it a fragment
of a broken planet flung our way from a
distant star? Was it a piece of alien
technology either accidentally or
deliberately sent to our solar system by
enigmatic intelligence?
Surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly,
there are still academics who put
forward both theories as plausible.
Amuam Mua's anomalous nature makes it
difficult to classify as either a comet,
an asteroid, or something artificial.
But it might be important to reach such
a classification as six new objects have
been detected in our solar system that
share Amora's most bewildering trait,
its ability to accelerate. with no clear
explanation for where such acceleration
is coming from.
I am Alex Mccoan and you're watching
Astramm. And today we will be exploring
Amura Mura and these six new fittingly
named dark comets and exploring the
theories that have arisen in the last
few years as scientists attempt to
explain something that has so far defied
clear explanation.
As a quick recap, AmuA Mua is the first
recognized interstellar object to arrive
in our solar system. It did so on the
19th of October 2017 and was spotted by
the Halakala Observatory in Hawaii.
Scientists quickly noticed that there
was something strange about this object.
It was small, perhaps between 100 and
1,000 m long, and was believed to have
an unusual shape, perhaps a cigar or a
flat dish. Its trajectory and speed made
it clear that it would eventually leave
our solar system. So, scientists
reasoned that it must not have come from
here. The object was thus given the
Hawaiian name Mua Mua, meaning scout or
first distant messenger.
as the first of its kind that we know
about. Although admittedly definitely
not the first interstellar object to
pass through our solar system, as there
are trillions of possible candidates out
there that have likely done the same,
scientists were excited to study AMA
more to learn what characteristics it
might have that made it similar or
dissimilar to objects found in our own
solar system. As they did so, they began
to notice certain abnormalities.
While a Muam Mua was initially
classified as a comet, it became
apparent that Amuam Mua lacked a coma or
a cometry tail, making it more similar
to an asteroid. However, this lack of
coma became a puzzling issue when a Mua
Moore was seen accelerating away from
the sun on its slow way out of our solar
system. The rate of acceleration was
minor, only about 17 m/s when it was
nearest the sun. And yet this was enough
to cause a stir in academia. Amuam Mua
was not doing what physics said it
should do. In the next few months,
scientists were able to observe it. A
Muam Mua was deviating from its path. In
physics, objects can only accelerate
when they are pushed. So scientists
began to try and explain what was
pushing Amore Moore. A few initial
hypotheses were quickly ruled out. This
did not seem to be simple solar winds
giving a small nudge. While it is a
recorded phenomenon for the small trace
particles fired off from the sun to push
at objects in space, this small force
was not enough to explain Amuam Mua's
acceleration, assuming it was an
ordinary asteroid.
I should note that this is an assumption
as even the best photos of Amuramu only
showed a tiny speck, making it difficult
to say for sure what it looks like. Most
theories about its shape come from the
variations in its light curve,
brightness of which rose and fell
uniformly as Amor Moa traveled. This
wouldn't happen on a round object, but
would happen for a tumbling, irregularly
shaped object like a disc or a cigar.
Scientists reached for another example
in our solar system of accelerating
objects, comets. As comets travel close
to the sun, the ice within them warms
and sublimates, turning into gas and
spouting off from the comet's main body.
This outpouring of gas and dust forms
the comet's signature tail. But it also
gives the comet a little push, acting
like a little thruster on the side
nearest the sun that accelerates the
comet away from the source of all that
heat. But as I mentioned, scientists
could not detect all that dust and gas.
They looked, but it didn't seem to be
there. This absence gave rise to more
exotic theories.
Let's take a look at an argument between
two theorists with two theories. The
first theory was the most headline
catching. Harvard professor Avi Lobe
promoted in numerous papers that amu moa
could represent alien technology.
He argued in 2018 that solar winds could
provide the acceleration seen with a
moore, but only if a moore was actually
much thinner than scientists originally
assumed, between 0.3 and 0.9 mm thin.
As a 1,000 m long, 1 mm thin object was
unlikely to appear in nature. Lo argued
that this had to mean it was artificial.
a light sail created to catch solar
winds and use them to accelerate through
space from one star to another. This
theory met the resistance from other
members of the academic community. Daryl
Seligman, our second theorist and a
post-doal researcher at Cornell
University, counted by co-authoring a
paper in 2020 that said that perhaps the
reason no outging was detected from
Amore was because Amoa was emitting an
invisible gas such as hydrogen. This
would not have been detectable using the
telescopes that were trained on Amore.
Seligman proposed that Amo was entirely
or largely made of such hydrogen. a
hydrogen iceberg that was sublimating
thanks to the warmth of the sun. And it
was that sublimation that was causing
the push. Lob disagreed. A few months
later, he co-wrote a paper asking where
exactly this hydrogen iceberg could have
come from. He showed mathematically that
the starlight in the interstellar vacuum
was warm enough that any hydrogen
iceberg that formed in even the nearest
densest molecular clouds would have
melted before they got here. Lo was
still convinced that an alien
explanation was the most probable.
His reputation was strong enough to send
Celigman back to the drawing board who
dropped the hydrogen iceberg idea.
However, Seligman continued to play
around with the idea that Amore had been
moved by escaping pure hydrogen gas.
Initially, he didn't have an explanation
for how this could be until in 2023, he
met with University of California
assistant professor Jennifer Bergner,
who pointed to experiments in labs where
water ice in extremely cold conditions
hit with radiation could trap pockets of
hydrogen only to release it later when
warmed up as the ice structure
rearranged itself. As it happened, water
ice is much more plentiful in space, and
so is radiation. Cosmic radiation could
be enough to provide the pre-baking that
would be needed. Between the two of
them, Zeligman and Bergnner wrote a
paper arguing that Amor needed a new
category entirely. It wasn't a regular
comet or an asteroid, but rather a dark
comet, one with a coma that was
invisible, but present. Their
explanation accounted for Amor Moa's
acceleration and also for the lack of
dust as dark comets would not need to
release dust as they were simply
reconfiguring their structures and
releasing the pockets of invisible gas
rather than blasting gas out from its
surface like a small gassy volcano.
While this was not enough to convince
Loe, who co-authored two more papers in
the next month that accused Seligman of
bad maths while also continuing to push
his alien spaceship model. Seligman was
already considering the next step in his
own logic. He began to wonder if Amore
represented a dark comet, could there be
other dark comets out there? He,
Bergner, and others began pouring
through the data of objects already
existing in our solar system.
They might not be interstellar, but was
anything else in the solar system
accelerating when it shouldn't be?
Sure enough, they found six that matched
their criteria. Six objects that showed
non-gravitational, non-solar wind-based
acceleration that couldn't be explained
away by any known mechanism.
These objects were small, some just as
tiny as 3 m across. They looked like
asteroids and didn't have remarkable
features. They were near Earth objects,
all orbiting close enough to Earth that
missions to them were extremely viable,
and they were all exhibiting signs of
acceleration.
To be clear, such acceleration was very
minor, small enough to have been
overlooked previously. These objects
aren't zipping around the solar system
from planet to planet like spaceships.
They are not interstellar objects,
but just like Amore, science cannot
currently account for their motion,
especially given that they do not have
any visible signs of outgassing.
And intriguingly, one of them is already
scheduled to be visited by 2031.
1999 KY26
is due to be visited by the Japanese
Hayabusa 2 probe, an asteroid sample
return mission that was launched in 2014
and finished its primary mission 6 years
later, but since has been given a
mission extension to visit other
asteroids in the near Earth Apollo
group. 1998 KY26 is rotating quickly,
once every 10 minutes, and Hayabusa 2
will aim to perform a flyby to learn
more about this water-rich, tiny object
for the benefit of future human missions
to Mars. Once it's there, perhaps it
will become clearer what the source of
1998 KY's strange acceleration might be.
It's still not obvious who among the
various scientists out there is right
about AMOA MUA given that it's now out
of our reach. Perhaps we will never
know, but it's undeniably intriguing
that more objects exhibiting strange
acceleration have been detected and
highly likely that they will shed
further insight into Amor Mo's possible
nature and origins.
If they are found to accelerate through
invisible outgassing of hydrogen,
Zeligman will stand validated. But if a
little hatch opens up and a small alien
form peaks out to wave at us before
accelerating off out of the solar
system, then we might regret not
listening more closely to Lobe.
I think the former is more likely than
the latter, as there is no way 1998 KY26
is a light sail. We have excellent
imaging of this one, but either way, it
will be fascinating to study.
Of course, in the end, it might prove
that neither theory is correct. That's
the wonder of science. The more we
explore the universe, the more we
encounter strange and unexpected
phenomena. And as we learn more about
them, the better our theories become.
Perhaps one day we will encounter more
objects like Amore from outside our
solar system which may lend further
weight to a particular explanation. The
search even for dark objects that
currently act under invisible forces
always fills me with a marvelous
curiosity.
Once 2031 rolls around, perhaps that
itch for answers will be scratched. Or
perhaps we will simply be faced with
more questions. Only time will tell.
For almost all of human history, the
night sky has guided us across
continents, illuminating our path
forward. The stars are as entwined with
our civilization as are the land and the
sea. But that sky is changing. While the
stars, nebula, and supernova remnants
are as brilliant as ever, few of us will
ever get the chance to see them as they
once were. even though all it would take
to do so is a flick of a switch.
I'm Alex Mccoan and you're watching
Astramm. Join me today as we explore how
the night sky has changed in our own
lifetimes and uncover the drastic
effects that artificial light, both
visible and invisible, has had on us, on
crucial ecosystems, and on important
scientific research. We will see how a
well-intentioned green revolution made
it worse. How we've put artificial
constellations of our own into orbit.
And how even the natural constellations
themselves are changing. That's right.
We're going to see how our sky will
change in 1,000, 1 million, and even
billions of years into the future.
As it is with anything that changes
gradually over time, we rarely realize
what is happening. But every once in a
while, that gradual change can be laid
bare, as it was during the 1994
earthquake in Los Angeles. A large part
of the city's electrical grid was
knocked out in the early hours of
January 17th, revealing the effects of
decades of increased light pollution in
an instant.
So shocked were the residents by what
they saw as they evacuated their homes,
that some looked up in awe of what had
always been there, hidden by the city
lights. One even phoned the observatory
to ask what the giant silvery cloud was
that they were seeing. Sadly, even the
sky when you first looked at the stars
as a child is not how it is now. From
2011 to 2022, the average light
pollution increased by 10% a year,
meaning it has more than doubled over
that time.
So, let's travel to a dark sky location
on a clear night, far away from the sky
glow of towns and cities, and look up to
understand what we've lost before we
learn how we might get it back.
There is a useful measure used to rate
the quality of the night sky by eye
called the bortal scale which ranges
from 1 to 9. In a city under the
brightest of skies, you may only be able
to count 100 stars. This is a 9 on the
bortal scale. But as you travel away
from the lights, the sky reveals more
until it becomes nearly unrecognizable.
As you drive out to the surrounding
urban area, the night sky darkens to
Bortal 7. Here, on a clear night, you
might get to see a hint of the Orion
Nebula, visible only as a diffused
looking star. Clouds under these skies
will be very well lit. Once you're out
past the city limits into the rural
countryside, you're now under Bortal 3
skies, and much more is revealed. Messia
objects 15, 4, 5, and 22, all star
clusters, are now naked eye objects.
Andromeda is clearly visible. And if you
look carefully, you'll glimpse the
Triangulum Galaxy. These two galaxies at
2.5 to 2.7 million lighty years away are
the furthest objects we can see with the
naked eye. And what about that giant
silvery cloud they saw in Los Angeles?
That's our Milky Way, a diffused band
that arcs across the sky which contains
over 100 billion stars.
Finally, after a few hours of driving,
you're now under Bortal one skies. A
true dark sky site with a pristine view.
When we set out from the city, you could
only see a 100 stars. Here, you will see
thousands. It may even take you some
time to notice the constellations that
you thought you knew, lost as they are
in the awesome detail of this dark sky.
If you're lucky enough to live in the
southern hemisphere, you'll be looking
towards the galactic center, and you may
even notice that it casts shadows onto
the ground. My friends, in the northern
hemisphere, no need to be envious. Our
fortunes will be reversed as we orbit to
the opposite side of the galaxy in a
mere 120 million years. Elements of the
beautiful Orion complex are visible in
both hemispheres. A 1,200 light-year
wide star forming region containing the
horse head flame and Orion Nebula.
Though binoculars are strongly advised,
the closest object that is fully
revealed in such a dark sky produces no
light of its own. Interplanetary dust.
This dust is illuminated by the sun and
forms a band known as the zodiacal light
which spans from the horizon to horizon
featuring a central focus called the
gagenshine
appearing directly opposite the sun's
position over Virgo. Sadly, those of us
who live in cities never experience a
genuine night sky at all and are
effectively stuck in an artificial
twilight. This can have unexpected
effects on us as well as the night sky.
So, how do a few light bulbs block out
an entire galaxy? In a word, sky glow.
Any light that is emitted upwards will
pass through the atmosphere where it can
be scattered in any direction. The light
that is reflected back towards the
ground to our eyes or telescopes is seen
as skylow which has the effect of
drastically reducing the signal to noise
ratio of incoming light from space
affecting our ability to see it and to
study it.
You may have experienced something
similar on a dark, foggy drive. Perhaps
in an attempt to see more of the road,
you've turned on your full beams. The
slight upward angle of these lights
reflects light up, illuminating the fog
in front of you, which has the opposite
effect of what you intended. It bleaches
the field of view and obscures the road
ahead. To make things worse, it's not
just that the sky is now brighter.
Tragically, our eyes are now also less
able to see in the dark when we go
outside. Human eyes have the incredible
natural ability to detect brightness
across a full nine orders of magnitude.
We are able to do this because we have
two types of vision. The first is known
as phototopic vision and it's the one
you're using now. It's our daytime color
vision recorded by our eyes cone cells.
The second is scotopic vision. An ultra
sensitive monochrome night vision
recorded by our eyes rod cells. It is
this scotopic vision that allows us to
see the faintest details in the night
sky.
Modern lighting is reducing our access
to scotopic vision because to the human
eye all light is not equal. In the past
10 to 15 years, a movement towards more
energyefficient LED lights has shifted
the spectrum of light pollution from the
orange hues of the sodium lamps to the
blue green frequencies of LEDs which we
are much more sensitive to. These blue
green frequencies slow down dark
adaptation or worse can fully reverse it
in minutes. which is why you'll often
see astronomers and nighttime pilots
using red lights or red goggles to
ensure scotopic vision is maintained. To
access full scotopic vision, we require
a near absence of short frequency light
for at least 30 minutes and it can
continue to improve for up to 2 hours.
So, you may be wondering, if we are so
sensitive to the blue frequencies of
typical LED lights, why can't we use
less of it and reduce overall light
pollution? And you'd be right, we could.
The reality is, though, that we don't.
LEDs are so efficient compared to sodium
and filament lights that we save energy
and money even when they run much
brighter. So, that's what we often do.
We run them brighter because we all feel
safer in a well-lit area, even if we are
statistically no more likely to be the
victim of crime. Our eyes also contain
retinal cells that are not involved with
seeing and instead help to regulate our
body clock. These cells are particularly
sensitive to shorter wavelengths, too.
So, artificial light and LEDs in
particular don't just affect our ability
to see the night sky. They affect us in
other more severe ways, too. The
disruption of our circadian rhythms by
light disrupts the production of several
key hormones, including melatonin.
Incredibly, this can affect our body
through a dramatic cascade that can lead
to metabolic and mood disorders and most
severely cancer.
While for us humans there is at least
some upside in extending the length of
the day artificially for the rest of
nature there's almost nothing but
downside.
Lights interfere with the circadian
rhythms of wildlife too disrupting how
and when they sleep, migrate, reproduce,
hunt, and evolve. Almost every species
studied to date is negatively affected
by lighting at the level of both the
individual animals and their
populations. Scientists have studied
fishes, birds, amphibians, insects,
invertebrates, ecosystems hundreds of
meters down below the surface of the
sea, and even trees. Deciduous trees,
which regrow their leaves each year, can
be tricked into maintaining their
foliage all year round, causing stress
that can eventually kill the tree. There
are simple things we can do that manage
that rare combination of saving us money
and improving our health. The best, of
course, is to turn off unwanted lights,
particularly outdoor lighting and
uplighting. When installing new or
replacing new lights, look to install
low power LEDs with low color
temperature of say 3,000 Kelvin instead
of 5,000 Kelvin. Welldesigned lighting
will have shielding to focus the light
to where it needs to be and minimize
excess light shone into the atmosphere.
But away from groundbased artificial
lights, we are now facing a significant
increase of light pollution coming to us
from space.
On the 4th of October 1957,
the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the
first satellite to venture into space.
In the decades that followed, there was
a steady increase in the number of
active satellites, increasing by 30 a
year on average in the 60 years to 2017.
But from 2018 onwards, Elon Musk's SP X
has been doing something unprecedented.
Since 2018, SP X has launched nearly
7,000 satellites into space. Oh, and one
Tesla Roadster.
As it stands, SpaceX have twice as many
active satellites in low Earth orbit as
every other company and country on the
Earth combined. I've seen some hockey
stickshaped graphs in my time, but this
one is stratospheric.
The vast majority of these new
satellites have gone into low Earth
orbit at an altitude of only 550 km. The
United Nations Office for Outer Space
Affairs have speculated that 100,000
more satellites could be launched in the
next decade.
There are no regulations that limit the
number of satellites that can be
launched and many agreements and
understandings around reducing the
potential for light pollution are
informal. These satellites in low Earth
orbit are particularly bad for light
pollution, contributing to skylow and
producing trails in amateur photography
and research images that can render them
unusable.
Astrophotography can require long
exposures of several minutes and is
likely that these exposures will capture
the trails of satellites in that time.
This is an image of the Horsehead Nebula
and there are three trails in this image
and even I myself have seen it in my own
shot of the Orion Nebula.
We can easily see the effect satellites
have on visual astronomy. We can even
watch them trail across the sky in real
time. But these man-made constellations
that deliver GPS, mobile communications,
and satellite internet all operate in
the radio spectrum, too. Spanning
meahertz and gigahertz frequencies,
which can potentially interfere with
scientific observations. Radio signals
easily pass through galaxies, solar
systems, interstellar gas clouds, and
Earth's atmosphere, revealing secrets of
our universe that would otherwise be
hidden. All the more incredible then
that the radio signals from my Wi-Fi
router can barely make it through a few
stud walls. But radioastronomy was key
in establishing the shape and rotation
of the Milky Way, discovering quazars
and pulsars and detecting organic
molecular species like cyanide, ammonia,
water, and amino acids in interstellar
molecular gas clouds. It was a radio
telescope in Ohio that received the
famous WOW signal in 1977.
It was detected at 1,420
MHz, a value believed to be the
frequency of choice that an alien
civilization would attempt to
communicate over and it is protected
from commercial use to keep it quiet. It
is though still debated whether the WOW
signal was terrestrial interference or
an extraterrestrial phenomenon.
But while we are talking about how
communications interfere with astronomy,
astronomy can also interfere with
communications. In 1978, Arno Penszius
and Robert Wilson were awarded the Nobel
Prize in physics for discovering that
the interference in their antenna wasn't
pigeons. It was the cosmic microwave
background. The cooled remnants of the
universe's first light, the detection of
this low-level hum in their Bell Labs
antenna, and understanding its cause,
all but prove the Big Bang hypothesis.
In another happy accident, the radio
waves emitted by the black hole at the
center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A
star, were detected because of its
interference with trans oceanianic phone
calls.
I love these two stories as it
highlights humanity at its best, at its
most inventive, and at its most curious.
Pausing in the hustle of developing new
technologies to remark, "Huh, that's
odd." Led to two incredible discoveries.
So much has been discovered in the radio
wave spectrum, yet there are deeper
mysteries that cannot go unsolved.
That's why the square kilometer array
observatory is being built in radio
quiet zones. The most ambitious radio
observatory project of all time. I don't
say that lightly. It is. Its stated aims
are to probe the cosmic dawn and the
emergence of the first stars and
galaxies to challenge Einstein's general
theory by indirectly observing
gravitational waves. to seek the origin
of life, to look for aliens, and to
understand how our galaxy and universe
are changing due to pressures like
entropy, gravity, and dark energy. But
what does that change look like to us
from Earth?
If we look up to the stars through a
polluted sky, space appears stagnant and
it can be easier to believe that we are
instead on a Truman show like film set
with fixed stage lights for stars than
on a rock in motion through our galaxy.
But under a dark sky, nothing feels
still as we get a sense of our voyage
through space and time. Earth is
orbiting the black hole at the center of
our galaxy at 828,000
kmh.
We are heading away from the galactic
plane and hurtling in towards the
center. Our perspective and every object
we can see is moving. In this video bysa
from data captured by the Gaia
telescope, we can see how our night sky
really is changing. In 1,000 years time,
only the keenest astronomers would
notice a difference from today's
constellations. Though, we may be lucky
enough to witness Beetlejuice going
supernova. But in around 10,000 years,
we will have a new north star. Polaris
will have moved away from the celestial
pole and it will have been replaced by
the brighter Vega.
And let's take a closer look at the
constellation of Orion and the stars
around it. They will change dramatically
over the next 450,000 years. Orion's
sword will shatter and his bow will
disintegrate.
Zooming out to the entire night sky,
let's watch our galaxy evolve over 4.5
million years. Orion is in the bottom
right.
What we can't know with this data,
though, are how many more stars will go
supernova and how many more will be
born. We'll just have to wait and see.
And that's going to be a heck of a lot
easier if you would just turn off those
up lights.
But over the next few billion years, the
sky will begin to look so unrecognizable
that you would be forgiven for thinking
we were in a different galaxy altogether
because we would be. Andromeda currently
takes up 3° of our sky, about six moon
widths. It is accelerating towards us
and is expected to reach us in 5 billion
years by which point it will be the sky.
Galaxies are so diffused that Andromeda
and the Milky Way would pass through
each other almost without impact. But
it's what we can't see that is all
around us that will seal our fate.
Gravity. Over the next 5 to 10 billion
years, our two galaxies will yo-yo and
rip each other apart with a huge burst
of star formation from the mixing gases,
turning two spiral galaxies into one
elliptical blob. Unfortunately, you
would be unlikely to see this from Earth
because of the extreme natural light
pollution caused by the sky literally
being on fire. Our son will have become
a red giant.
In 1 trillion years, the last star will
be born. There is nothing but decay left
for the universe. The galaxies we can
see outside of our extended galaxy will
become faint and dim as they move beyond
our observable universe. In 120 trillion
years, all stars will be extinguished
and the night sky will fade to black.
As is so often the case in our complex
world, there are unexpected outcomes
from our behaviors. Our night sky is
changing in many ways. It has been
obscured, but it is not lost. Towns,
cities, and governments all over the
world are beginning to understand the
issues and are making changes in
ordinances and in law to protect our
skies and the wildlife underneath it.
So, if this video has inspired you to
visit a dark sky or reduce your impact,
head to dark sky.org to find out more
and to lightmap.info
if you're curious about the light
pollution in your area.
Thanks for watching. I was honestly
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the replies to your DMs on Patreon,
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