*Europe’s JUICE mission bound for Jupiter
*Russia backs down on space station threat
*The Science Report
*Skeptics guide to Ivermectin
This week’s guests includes: Alex Zaharov-Reutt from iTWire.com Tim Mendham from Australian Skeptics Jonathan Nally the editor of Australian Sky and Telescope Magazine
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AI Transcript
STUART GARY: This is Space Time series 26 episode 49 for broadcast on the 24th of April 2023. Coming up on Space Time, the first Starship launch ends in a massive explosion. Europe's JUICE mission blasts off bound for the Jovian system and Russia backs down on its space station threat. All that and more coming up on Space Time.
STUART GARY: Welcome to Space Time with Stuart Garry, the world's largest and most powerful rocket has exploded in M air in the skies above Texas during its maiden test flight. SpaceX's massive 120 m tall Starship sundered off its launch pad blasting off with twice the power of NASA's new Artemus sls moon rocket.
So yeah, zero operations chamber pressure three seconds into the test flight of the inaugural vehicle tower. Linda picks over the Paulson reports first stages. Nominal. What a flying at twice. The thrust of the Saturn.
STUART GARY: The gleaming stainless steel launch vehicle reflected the Texas morning sun as it rose effortlessly from SpaceX's star base at Boca Chica on the Gulf Of Mexico coast, climbing high into the blue Texas sky on what looked like a golden pillar of fire and smoke Starship passed through Max Q.
The point of maximum dynamic pressure on the spacecraft nominally throttled down and throttled back up through the period of maximum aerodynamic pressure. And as the velocity increases the density of the atmosphere is decreasing, less stress on the vehicle to call out.
Max. Now continuing to watch the first stage as we head down 100 seconds into flight. Our next major activity is the first stage, the Houston tracking station now acquiring the vehicle.
STUART GARY: However, just four minutes into the mission, as the 5000 ton monster climbed through 39 kilometers, it became clear that a number of the 33 wrapped. The first stage rocket engines had shut down unexpectedly.
STUART GARY: The flight plan called for the booster stage to peel away from the Starship upper stage following main engine cut off or Miko and stage separation. However, instead the two stages remain connected as the stack began to tumble out of control and plummet back towards the Earth.
Starship separates, we light up six engines in a staggered sequence and if all goes well, those six engines will burn for almost 6.5 minutes. After stage separation, the first stage will flip and begin a boost back maneuver for landing in the Gulf continuing to fly two minutes. 40 seconds. Let's get ready for main engine cut off, cut off.
As of right now, we are awaiting stage separation where a Starship should separate from the super heavy booster, the entire Starship stack continuing to rotate, we should have had separation by now.
STUART GARY: Obviously, this does not appear to be a nominal situation that forced mission managers to issue a self destruct order blowing up the spacecraft in a massive explosion.
I do want to remind every one that everything after clearing the tower was icing on the cake as we said before. Obviously, we wanted to make it all the way through. But to get this far, honestly, is amazing.
Starship just experienced what we call a rapid unscheduled disassembly or a during ascent. But now this was a development test. It is the first test flight to Starship. And the goal was to gather the data and as we said, clear the and get ready to go again. So you never know exactly what's going to happen.
But as we promised, excitement is guaranteed and Starship gave us a rather spectacular and what was truly an incredible test thus far, any and all the data that we collected during the test is going to help us with further development of Starship. And it's going to improve the vehicle's reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multi planetary.
It's really worth noting that the flight path was designed to be over water and all the air and sea space along with that flight path and the surrounding areas were cleared in advance of the test. And of course, we're going to be coordinating with local authorities for the recovery operation.
We had a successful lift off from star base Texas at 8 28 AM central time. We cleared the tower, which honestly was our only hope. We cleared the tower and all the data that we collected all the way through.
We got all that data and we got so far as to hoping to see the Starship, the second stage separate from the first stage to super heavy booster. And unfortunately, we didn't make that happen, but that's ok. It was the first integrated launch. And honestly, today was amazing.
We made it through a number of those initial test objectives with getting booster as set, getting all the way through the countdown, working some issues at the and got through the gate of T minus 40 seconds on the second try, everything released the hold down quick disconnect arms, everything moves out of the way.
And then we got the vehicle off the pad through a Max Q all the way after stage separation, even starting into the pre stage up.
STUART GARY: And then as we say, a lot of the launch vehicle for this test flight included Starship prototype 24 super heavy boost seven. These were the same two stages that had successfully performed static fire tests on the launch pad. Earlier in the year, the orbital test flight was meant to see the super heavy booster carry star ship to an altitude of 65 kilometers following main engine cut off.
STUART GARY: And stage separation. The booster should have returned to Earth splashing down off the Texas coast in the Gulf Of Mexico. However, the ultimate plan will see the super heavy undertake an orientation flip and boost back burn, guided by nitrogen jets and aerodynamic fins back towards the launch site.
STUART GARY: Then a re-entry burn would have slowed the super heavy down to a controlled descent before a landing bird would see the booster touched down vertically on the launch pad caught and secured in place by a pair of mechanical arms.
STUART GARY: Meanwhile, for this test run, the Starship upper stage was meant to complete a full orbit of the planet before reentering the atmosphere and splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the Hawaiian coast. Eventually the starships would land vertically back on the ground. The 120 to 50 m tall Starship is nine m in diameter and constructed out of stainless steel.
STUART GARY: The reusable spacecraft is powered by six liquid methane and oxygen fueled raptor rocket engines, three configured for atmospheric operations. The other three for the vacuum of space starships, 70 m long nine m diameter, 230 ton super heavy booster also constructed out of stainless steel is equipped with 33 raptor atmospheric engines.
STUART GARY: Starship isn't just a way of getting into space. Musk see Starship as an interplanetary colonial transport system designed to establish and supply human settlements on the moon Mars and eventually across the entire solar system.
STUART GARY: Starship is fully equipped with a belly heat shield, its own retractable vertical landing gear and it can be refueled in space using unmanned versions of Starship. Another version would be equipped with a large payload bay designed for the deployment of satellites. Further in the future Starship could also be used for point to point flights around the Earth allowing you to reach any destination in under 90 minutes.
STUART GARY: The entire system is designed to be fully reusable starships. First mission for NASA will be to provide the Starship human landing system or H L S. It's a reasonable shuttle for NASA to transport people and up to 100 tons of cargo between the lunar surface and orbiting Orion capsules.
STUART GARY: And later the lunar gateway space station, SpaceX also plans on eventually using Starship to replace the company's existing dragon spacecraft as well as its Falcon nine and Falcon heavy launch systems. SpaceX spy Elon Musk says investigations are already underway to determine what went wrong with this first test flight and he expects a quick turnaround with preparations already underway for another launch attempt.
STUART GARY: This Space Time still to come. Europe's JUICE mission blasts off bound for the Jovian system and Russia backs down on its threat to leave the International Space Station. All that and more still to come on Space Time.
STUART GARY: The European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons explorer or JUICE mission has successfully blasted into space on a 10 year journey to the Jovian system. When it arrives in 2031 JUICE will study the gas giant focusing on its three big icy moons, Europa, Calisto and Ganymede, each of which are thought to contain more water than all the Earth's oceans combined.
STUART GARY: The mission will determine whether these icy moons are capable of hosting extraterrestrial life in their vast subsurface oceans. The 6070 kg spacecraft was launched aboard an Ariane five rocket from the European Space Agency's K spaceport in French Guiana. A launch attempt the previous day had been called off due to the risk of lightning.
STUART GARY: But have you measured with the in Peru?
SPEAKER 3: There are many places from which to watch these launches. Rafael, it's an amazing sensation for you as well.
STUART GARY: I'm sure even with the crowds, it's just, it's really, really always impressive and it's an emotion to see it. This was the second last launch for the Ariane five before its replacement. The next generation Ariane Six takes over half an hour after lift off at an altitude of 1500 kilometers.
STUART GARY: The probe separated from its launch vehicle and began its journey into deep space. JUICE will take a long and winding path to reach the solar system's largest planet which is some 628 million kilometers from Earth.
STUART GARY: It'll use several gravitational assists along the way. The first by doing a fly by of the Earth and the moon, then by slings shotting around Venus in 2025 before swinging past the Earth again. In 2029 the €1.6 billion mission marks the first time that Europe has sent a spacecraft into the outer solar system beyond Mars.
STUART GARY: When the probe finally enters Jovian orbit in 2031 its 10 scientific instruments will analyze the solar system's king of planets as well as its three largest moons. Calisto Europa and Ganymede.
STUART GARY: The three ice moons together with the volcanic inner moon IO were first discovered by astronomer Galileo Galilei more than 400 years ago, but they were long ignored as potential candidates for hosting life.
STUART GARY: However, the discovery of huge oceans of liquid water, the main ingredient for life as we know it kilometers beneath their icy crusts has made Ganymede and Europa prime candidates to potentially host life in our celestial backyard.
STUART GARY: In 2034 JUICE will slide into orbit around Ganymede the first time a spacecraft has done so around the moon, other than the Earth, Ganymede's, the solar system's largest moon and the only one with its own magnetic field which protects it from radiation. NASA's Europa Clipper mission which is scheduled to launch in October 2024 will focus on Ganymede's sibling Europa.
SPEAKER 4: This report from ESA TV, the giant planet Jupiter is a place of intrigue and mystery, a special environment within our own solar system.
SPEAKER 4: When Galileo first raised his telescope to the planet, he discovered four moons, Io, Europa, Gana and Calisto early space probes raised more questions than answers about this fascinating gas giant planet and it's intriguing moons.
SPEAKER 4: Now those answers are within our grasp. The Jupiter Icy Moons, Explorer JUICE JUICE is equipped with the most powerful science payload ever sent to the outer solar system.
SPEAKER 4: 10 instruments will conduct the most comprehensive remote sensing geophysical and insitu measurements ever performed at Jupiter to bring JUICE to life is a, has led a consortium of more than 2000 people in 23 countries working in 18 institutions and 83 companies, NASA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and the Israel Space Agency have all supplied hardware for eight years.
SPEAKER 4: JUICE will cruise through space before beginning a complex series of maneuvers in the Jupiter system. During this time, JUICE will face many dangers. Radiation near Jupiter can fry the spacecraft's electronic brain.
SPEAKER 4: The planet's gravitational pull is so large, it could threaten derailment. Nevertheless, ESA's expert spacecraft operators will guide JUICE through 35 flybys of Europa gnome and chole before orbiting gnome.
SPEAKER 4: But the dangers will be worth it for the science that JUICE will uncover Europa and Gimme are thought to contain subsurface oceans that could hold more water than Earth's oceans. JUICE will explore these moons to study whether life could arise in different environments across the cosmos. JUICE will also study Jupiter's complex weather chemistry and climate in detail.
SPEAKER 4: It will turn Jupiter into a standard reference for us to compare against other gas giant planets throughout the cosmos.
STUART GARY: This Space Time still to come. Russia backs down on its threat to leave the International Space Station. And later in the science report, a new study shows the cost of transition to renewable energies will cost Australia trillions of dollars. All that are more still to come on Space Time.
STUART GARY: Russia says it will now continue working on the International Space Station until at least 2028. The move is a reversal of the announcement back in July last year, when Moscow claimed it would be leaving the orbiting outpost next year in order to set up its own space station. That threat was made in the wake of the growing rift over the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
STUART GARY: The International Space Station's other partners, the United States, Europe, Canada and Japan tried to keep the space station flying until 2030 last year. The Russian Federal Space Agency at Oz Cosmos claimed maintenance was becoming a problem for the Russian ISS modules, some of which nearly 25 years old air leaks and equipment failures have become a constant problem.
STUART GARY: The Russian segment of the space station Russia claimed construction was already underway at R C in A on a core module for the planned new Russian orbital space station or Ross Russian state media suggested it would be launched around 2025 or 2026 it would include an initial four modules.
STUART GARY: Speculation also centered on the new space station's orbit and may be placed in an orbit of 51.6 degrees which is similar to that the is or it could be in a near polar orbit of 97 degrees which would be more favorable for Russian launch sites.
STUART GARY: And unlike the ISS, it may not be manned full time but only visited by cosmonauts a couple of times a year. However, despite all the early bluster talk of the project is going completely silent in recent months, Moscow has however struck an agreement with Beijing to partner in a new Chinese Lunar Space Station which will be built sometime around 2028.
STUART GARY: We'll keep you informed. This is Space Time and time now to take a brief look at some of the other stories making news in science this week with the science report, a new study warns that the cost of transition to renewable energy will cost Australians not millions or billions but trillions of dollars.
STUART GARY: The dramatic increase in cost was forecast in a new study by top research institutions including the Universities Of Melbourne, Queensland and Princeton and the United States. It follows on from a 2017 CSIRO report which warned that transition to renewables would cost Australian taxpayers at least a trillion dollars.
STUART GARY: The new study found Australia's biggest power grid on the east coast would need to be tripled in size within eight years. That's if we hope to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. The new research also found the amount of gas fired generation capacity would need to be doubled in size.
STUART GARY: In order to keep the lights on. The authors say to achieve the targets, there would need to be a far more rapid rollout of renewable energy transmission lines, storage facilities such as batteries, electric vehicles and heat pumps in homes and businesses.
STUART GARY: One of the study's authors, Professor Michael Breer, director of the Melbourne Energy Institute at the University Of Melbourne says the scale of the job ahead defied easy comprehension. Breer says gas fired electricity will play a limited but crucial role in keeping the power system stable while the transition to renewable energy goes on.
STUART GARY: A new report claims now might be the time to stop mandating masks in health care settings. Health care experts writing in the journal annals of internal medicine say the burden of SARS COV two has been mitigated by testing population level immunity, less virulence of current variants and widespread availability of vaccines and treatments.
STUART GARY: The report says the time has come to manage COVID-19 in the same way as other endemic respiratory viruses using correct and consistent application of standard and transmission based precautions.
STUART GARY: These include healthcare personnel's ongoing use of masks and eye protection when engaging in activities that generate splashes or sprays in the face regardless of patients symptoms and the masking of patients when symptoms are present.
STUART GARY: Almost 6.9 million people have now been killed by the COVID-19 Coronavirus since it was first detected near Wuhan's Institute Of Virology around September 2019. The World Health Organization estimates the true death toll is likely to be around 16 million with some 686 million confirmed cases globally.
STUART GARY: Meanwhile, a new study claims COVID-19 infection is associated with a higher risk of developing diabetes. The findings reported in the journal of the American Medical Association are based on research involving a cohort of over 600,000 people. Scientists use COVID-19 surveillance studies in Canada to compare rates of previously healthy people being diagnosed with diabetes.
STUART GARY: Among those who both had and hadn't tested positive for COVID-19, they say the rate of new diabetes diagnoses was 672.2 per 100,000 people for those exposed to COVID-19 as opposed to 508.7 people per 100,000. For those who hadn't been exposed, the authors calculated about a 3 to 5 per cent excess burden of diabetes at a population level that could have been influenced by COVID-19.
STUART GARY: And while we're on the subject, a new study has shown that even longer, higher doses of Ivermectin will still be useless in treating COVID-19. Regardless of what the conspiracy theorists tell you.
STUART GARY: The findings reported in the journal of the American Medical Association are the latest in a long line of clinical trials showing that Ivermectin which is best used as a horse de wormer does not affect COVID-19. Tim Mendham from Australian Skeptics says it's the latest in a string of scientific research all showing the same conclusion.
TIM MENDHAM: Ivermectin is a treatment for parasites. And initially it was a treatment for parasites and horses, mainly worms, but it also has a use with humans. You can use it to treat infestations, right? You're talking about things that are not nice on you head. Lice, scabies, lymphatic phyle.
TIM MENDHAM: Sorry, I can't even pronounce that there are various things that can be treated on humans with fair enough, but it's nothing to indicate that it can treat viruses. And that's what COVID is with the virus. So it's infestations and parasites and things not a virus.
TIM MENDHAM: There have been various tests done to suggest certainly since COVID appeared that it could be used to treat COVID and the initial tests to prove it were extremely chunky and dodgy and used evidence that might not have ever been found or might have been created evidence if you like and then it's gone on and on and on being promoted. And people have done tests.
TIM MENDHAM: I mean, sometimes we've got to do these tests but are still being promoted, especially by the anti vaccine. People, including politicians in Australia and all over the place claiming that Ivermectin has worked. So people say, ok, let's see if it's worked and they've done various tests and a lot of the tests are of small bunches of people, et cetera.
TIM MENDHAM: Well, this was a big test done fairly recently reported only I think in February, in the journal of the American Medical Association, which did a study of about, I think it was 1200 people of those who had COVID during February 22 to July 22. And what they did was they studied them and they gave a certain number of Ivermectin treatment and a certain number placebos.
TIM MENDHAM: And what they found was that looking at hospitalization, medical emergency department care or death. And that came up to 5.7 of the people with Ivermectin and six per cent of the people with placebos. So basically, no difference between the people taking Ivermectin and the people taking nothing, right?
TIM MENDHAM: A sugar pill or whatever. They found that the median time for the sustained recovery, how long it would take you to get over? It was 11 days for the people in the Ivermectin group and 11 days in the placebo group. So absolutely no evidence that it takes COVID away faster.
TIM MENDHAM: So it's not effective, if not faster, it's perceived placebo. And this was quite a decent test. But now it's also being used to Ivermectin for flu and RV, which is a condition I can't pronounce the results also match other Cochrane studies as well, don't they?
TIM MENDHAM: There are Cochrane studies which have looked at meta studies which have looked at, they amalgamate all different sorts of studies and say what have we found across all the board and they found the same thing, but there is no evidence that Ivermectin does anything that won't stop people claiming it because a lot of the people who are claiming it are just anti vaccine and trying to find something to beat the vaccine.
STUART GARY: People over the head with, that's Tim Mendham from Australian Skeptics.
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