1,010 words · auto-generated from the episode video
34:28taking up taken up by fuel which means less space for a payload even though you're accomplishing the same objective and it's because of these architectural structural choices. >> Exly. Yeah. And and then one could ask like okay why are we doing this architectural choice? >> Yes. >> Well um there's something called the Senate launch system. >> Okay. >> Okay. And that's basically the idea that like you got to get through the US Senate, which is two senators per state. So all the states got to be happy. So you've got the NASA centers all over the country. There's three in California, the Ames Research Center, the Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards Air Force Base. Yes. >> Up in the high desert. And then you've
35:10got JPL in Pasadena. You've also got in Louisiana the >> assembly that actually makes that orange part. You've got the Kennedy Space Flight Center. You've got Goddard and all these other things in the eastern seabboard. On top of that, all 50 states are actually partners with Artemis in the sense that there is a component on Artemis that comes from each of the 50 states. >> The nuts and bolts come from Delaware and there's like tubing that comes from some random company in California and all this other stuff. But they they've done a really good job to sort of like make this like an American. Yes. >> Like because you know Artemis is as we said with the Artemis Accords, it's like
35:51this international collaboration. But >> it's >> we're in America. You got to make everyone happy. And the Senate launch system has made sure that all 50 states have a stake >> in this mission. >> Which I thought I thought that was that was kind of funny. >> So this is this is actually an interesting point which is that there is this social political dynamic. This is not a purely whatever is technologically most efficient and and X Y and Z is how we're going to do it. It is necessarily a having to negotiate so that everyone gets their their p their chunk of flesh, their piece of meat to be able to say, oh like we're supporting NASA by because
36:32you know the factory that's in the harbor does X and Y. So the again it's not operating in a vacuum. Yeah. It has to get appropriations from somewhere and those appropriations meaning money. >> Yeah. >> And support come with strings attached in some cases. >> And this is kind of part of like again when we're no longer having the spectre of cold war >> justifying the spend. >> Yeah. >> You kind of need to get everybody to sit at the table. >> Exactly. Yeah. And and what I what I loved about that abbreviation is like the Senate launch system SLS is the same as the space launch system which is the acronym that is used by NASA to >> get us to orbit. >> Right. Okay. So now that's going to get
37:13us to orbit. Yes. >> Okay. Now once we get us to orbit so that's this first part which is the solid rocket boosters and this first part all the way up to here. That's going to get us all the way into earth orbit. Okay. Now from there we want to get to high earth orbit. Now, in Apollo, only after two to three hours, you just straight up go to the moon. >> Okay. >> Okay. You do like one or two rounds on Earth, make sure everything is checked out, and you're like, "All right, we're go to the moon. We go. >> We're not It's a race. You're not hanging out." >> Yeah. Yeah. These guys are all about risk mitigation. Okay. So, in Artemis, what's end what what ends up happening is we actually go into an high Earth orbit >> before [clears throat] we go to the moon. M
37:53>> the idea here is >> we want to go into high earth orbit because we want to fire the rocket boosters up here [clears throat] >> and make sure that nothing is wrong. If something is wrong, you get back in about >> I think it's 45 hours and you can get back. >> Okay. You don't have to wait days all the way to go to the moon and back like in Apollo 13, right? >> So what they do is something called the apogee rays burn. Apogee is the idea that you have this elliptical orbit. Kepler's laws comes back here. >> Yes. >> Um, whenever you have gravity, the orbits are actually going to be ellipses. So what you do is you have a first orbit that is circular >> and then you do a burn >> which adds velocity and then you go into
38:35an elliptical orbit where you go far away from the earth and then you come back and that elliptical orbit is anywhere from 68,000 m which is about like a fifth of the way to the moon all the way back to 235 miles over a 42h hour period. So you're doing this really highly elliptical orbit to to sort of just gauge the systems. >> Yes. >> Make sure everything is working. Now in the Apollo missions, they were gauging these systems with intermediate Apollo missions. You had Apollo 8, you had Apollo 6, 7, and so so on and so forth. You had all the Gemini missions that were going in to make sure that everything was working. Here, you're doing it all at once because we want to
39:16save money. I was I was actually going to say the reason why we don't just get all these incremental missions because we're not the military-industrial complex and that geopolitical sort of nexus is not funding this. >> Yes. >> And so we have to scrape every dollar we can for everywhere. I mean literally there's funding getting cancelled