SpaceX's Falcon 9 Will Be Killed Off - Deep Space Updates September 18th Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:04 Hello, it's Scott Manley here. It's September 18th. We are now 10 days away from flight number 14 of Starship. Uh until this morning, we were 4 days away, but uh you know, they changed the date on us again. But yeah, it is time for a bunch of deep space updates for me. We are going back to September 1st to talk about a new rocket launching out of China.

00:23 The Palace 1 made its maiden flight. Now this is by Galactic Energy who also fly the series 1 which is made of solid rocket motors derived from ballistic missiles. Now the uh the palace one on the other hand is a proper liquidfueled rocket with seven CQ50 kerosene liquid oxygen engines and this first stage is designed for reusability. It has grid fins for steering landing legs.

00:48 It's supposed to demonstrate recovery at some future juncture but this mission was not going to do that. The whole structure is 52 meters tall, three and a half meters in diameter and about 283 tons at liftoff aiming to offer at 7 tons to low earth orbit. So yeah, this launched and we saw video of a successful stage separation procedure proceeding towards orbit.

01:09 There were mentions made of it getting to its predetermined orbit and lots of images of the team um you know celebrating success and yet you know almost 3 weeks later we have not actually seen any orbital elements or any information on what orbit it actually achieved. So it's possible this was intentionally suborbital and nobody thought to mention that.

01:33 Regardless, it seems to have been a success as far as they're concerned, even if it never actually reached orbit. If you want to know more about all the new Chinese launch vehicles, I did actually make a video about that a few days ago. It goes through all of the new ones, and there's a lot of them. 2nd of September, we had a Falcon 9 launching Starlinks out of Vandenberg.

01:55 Uh on the 2nd of September, we also saw Electron launching Owl around the world out of Mahia in New Zealand. So this was carrying the stricks 9 for sinspective that's the Japanese xband synthetic aperture radar satellite now this is the 94th launch of electron and the 11th launch for stricks into a 575 km low earth orbit 3rd of September we had a gslv mark I2 launching out of satish dwan carrying EOS 5 which is like a 2.4 4 ton satellite that's supposed to go to geostationary orbit.

02:30 Now, this is actually the heaviest payload launched by GSLV and it doesn't quite actually get to geostationary transfer orbit. They come up a little bit short and then they make further uh burns with the satellite propulsion to actually raise it into its target geostationary orbit. So, this is a replacement from an older satellite EOS 3 which uh failed in 2021 when the cryogenic upper stage didn't light.

02:56 So now uh this it's a geostationary earth orbit imaging satellite looks at India from you know sitting at its position over it and uh just basically does like every 5 minutes full imaging of uh India to do look at things like weather and stuff like that and on the 5th of September we had another successful new launch vehicle. Uh so aerospace's spectrum launch vehicle flew to orbit out of Norway.

03:20 The mission was called onward and upward. This was the second attempt from this. The first one, if you remember, failed soon after uh back in 2025 and you know, smashed into the water and made a lot of um well made a lot of splashy water and stuff. But yeah, this one launched successfully. It has nine first stage engines, Achila engines, uh second stage with vacuum engine, and it uses liquid oxygen and liquid propane.

03:46 So, this is actually the first orbit to successfully reach orbit using propane as a propeller. And um you know it's sort of part way between being kerosene liquid oxygen and u you know methane and liquid oxygen. It's not quite as cryogenic. It can be uh kept liquid with a bit more pre or a bit more pressure than methane or whatever. Look, it's a halfway point, right?

04:09 So if you don't want to go full methane, but you think that kerosene is too old school, you go with propane. Anyway, this launched successfully to a parking orbit and then performed a circularization burn 50 minutes later. So success on relight during the launch. There was some onboard footage which at one point showed a lot of cables flapping around like wacky waving inflatable arm flailing chan.

04:29 Um yeah the stage successfully deorbited after deploying five cubat. So yeah, uh these were mostly like small like university platforms and stuff, but this was a uh great for the first privately funded European company to reach orbit and the first actual successful launch from Europe. If we ignore all those launches from the Soviet Union, from Western Europe, right?

04:56 Uh we also got like it was a jellyfish at twilight because it launched over the pole and it was still uh you know sort of illuminated. So this was great. They are going to scale up. They think that they're going to be building like 40 launch vehicles a year. Uh they look they think that they're going to be uh super cost effective compared to Arian and they're going to get a bunch of customers and I wish them well.

05:17 Congratulations on your debut. At 6th of September, Falcon 9 launched Starlink out of Vandenberg. 9th of September, we have a long march 4B in China launching out of Jookuan. Uh the mission was called uh was carrying Yaoan 531 2 and 3 and uh and also one called Yogan 56123 recon. Basically all six satellites all secret reconnaissance satellites we don't know very much about.

05:46 10th of September we have Falcon 9 launching USSF 153 out of Vandenberg. This is a classified space force launch. Public documents call it R2. It's probably like another batch of Star Shield class spacecraft. Um, it matches previous launches. So again, we're presuming this is like another Star Shield launch. And then on September 11th, there was a big surprise of the kind that we want, right?

06:15 It was an Electron launch carrying a hap a mission called Happily Ever Faster out of Maha. So, this was uh again a surprise launch that hadn't really been advertised. Uh officially, Rocket Lab said it was for an undisclosed Earth observation customer and um we figure out that it's probably Black Sky Global 36 imaging satellite, but yeah, they they launched their 95th mission and uh deployed a single mission satellite into a 500 kilometer orbit.

06:47 13th of September, Falcon 9 out of Slick 40 in Florida launched the 03BM power 11,12 and 13. These are communication satellites that are going to uh you know medium orbit for SCES. Uh and it's the final three of the original 13 that have been contracted. Uh they these are actually ones that were rebuilt after the original satellites had issues and needed to be replaced.

07:12 uh 15th of September launched out of Keru in uh South America, the Vega C. And uh this was the first dual manifest Vega Sea launch vehicle. It had an adapter called Vespa that allowed you place two satellites on there. This is very similar to what we saw on the Aran 5, but we'd never really seen this with Vega because it's a smaller rocket. So the upper stage apparently had to make five different maneuvers on orbit, which is kind of interesting.

07:40 First of all, they launched into orbit. They dropped the satellite Sentinel 3C. Then they had to slow down into a same sort of suborbital trajectory, drop the Vesta stage adapter so it would then de-orbit. And then they had to accelerate up again, drop the second satellite, flex, and then they had to de-orbit again, slow down again. So the AOAM stage would de-orbit.

08:03 Uh right. So the satellites launched were Sentinel 3. It's the again another sentinel spacecraft doing uh ocean observation joining 3A and 3B and then flex that was the one that was sitting underneath. So this is called this is the fluoresence explorer. Um it's like a 400 kg satellite. It sits in suns synchronous orbit and what it does is it has a device called the flores spectrometer and it's specifically looking for fluoresence from chlorophyll.

08:34 So when apparently when plants are soda photosynthesizing they can give off a particular you know band of light which can be detected and so you can show that there is like photosynthetic activity going beyond just seeing that it's green you can actually see that they are fixing you know carbon into water and converting it into you know sugars and stuff kind of a cool mission 15th of September in China we have a uh 2E out So Jichuan uh launching uh 10 space sail or kanfan orbits that's the thousand sales constellation

09:10 uh this is again the land spaces methylox two stage it's the first time a private rocket has actually flown the thousand sales or kanfan you know satellites and then hours later in East China Sea for Orian space the gravity one launched off a barge and it too carried a bunch of satellites for the Chianfan uh thousand sales constellation. So this was the first maritime launch of an LEO broadband constellation if you're paying attention to those kind of like sport statistics.

09:44 Again u this is the heaviest solid rocket motor rocket in the world apparently. Again you would know that if you watch my video on the subject 16th of September we have a Suyuse 2.1B launching progress MS35 out of Bonor. Uh so this was actually supposed to fly on the 9th but there were some technical issues with the third stage. So uh they rolled the entire rocket back to the integration hall did some stuff on it and it eventually launched on the 16th.

10:15 So uh yeah it's got a couple 2 and a half tons of cargo. It is currently on its way to the international space station. expected to get there on the 19th. 17th we had a long march 12 out of Wang Shang carrying a bunch of Gow Wang low earth orbit communication satellites and this is the long march 12 that is the only payload this thing has launched. It has only ever launched the Gowang uh satellites.

10:37 17th September, we had Falcon 9 out of Vandenberg launching USSF uh 259, which is probably another batch of Star Shield satellites in one of the constellations that it supported. Uh 17th of September, Quaiou 11 out of Juan carrying Tani 51 and 52. This is again a pair of commercial C-band interferometry satellites. These things work as pair as pairs where you know one is transmitting, the other is receiving and there's like a baseline to them.

11:07 So, these are built by Space Ty and they're they've got a whole constellation of these things going up. And then finally, another secret launch which wasn't announced ahead of time. Uh, so use launched a GLONAS satellite out of Placets just a few hours ago. And again, there was no announcements of airspace enclosures or anything, but some people downrange from it did get alerts saying that there was going to be potentially rocket stages falling in their area.

11:31 And that meant that people were ready to like get out and look for it. And sure enough, it produced a very distinctive soyuse style launch, you know, twilight jellyfish. And so that is the launches. And yeah, now the big news that we're looking forward to is Starship flight 14. And we've had a quite a few updates. First of all, we did have an update on what happened on 13 or we had an update on one of the questions about 13.

11:55 Very specifically, the booster, if you remember, it did not successfully relight its engines correctly. uh only eight of 13 engines lit for landing. And they believe that this is beau cause uh due to like ice in the tanks again. And once again, we did say that if you're just going to blow your pre-burner exhaust into the tanks, then you might have some concerns about ice forming in there.

12:21 And once again, we're starting to see this. So, they're going to add more filtering. They're going to add some software changes that might actually help it. At this point, they're not going to attempt a catch of the booster on flight 14 and they are not going to attempt a catch of the Starship on flight 14 either. Um, at this point, uh, basically going wrong is too expensive and too unlikely.

12:44 They can't get licensed for it. So, at this, so flight 14 is however going to orbit. And now we have details. We know that it's going to be orbiting the earth six times. If everything goes correct, the stage will um you know basically take up this orbit. It'll follow the you know the 110 I think bearing out of uh Bokh Chica south of the Caribbean islands and after six orbits 9 hours it will deorbit into an area in the Pacific just west of South America.

13:16 And I'm gonna I was interested to point out that this is going to be the first time that Starship actually flies over Hawaii. If you remember when the very first Starship launch we were getting close to, there was a lot of people saying that they were planning to go to Hawaii hoping that they would see Starship re-entering and then of course Starship launch one didn't even get as far as orbit or near orbit so it didn't matter.

13:41 But eventually they moved the re-entry zone to be west of Australia and so all those Hawaii plans never happened. But now, yeah, it's going to fly over. I'm not sure it's going to be visible. That'll all really depend on uh what the visibility is like. So, it is also going to launch early in the morning. So, it's going to launch um you know, just after sunrise and it's going to head westward.

14:02 So when it's coming from if you're west of Texas, there's a chance that you can possibly see it just before dawn and similarly 180° orbit if you might you might see on the other side of the planet. There's a few opportunities to to catch this. The launch into orbit is also interesting because they are clearly working from the point of view that they are still trying to mitigate as much risk as possible.

14:27 So the remember the main risk is that this thing gets into orbit and then the engine fails and we have a 200 300 ton piece of space junk which won't burn up smashing into the surface somewhere. So the initial launch is going to boost it into a suborbital trajectory rather like the similar ones. They're going to perform a bunch of checkouts. 20 minutes later they will perform a circularization burn.

14:54 If the engine if there's something wrong, if they have attitude issues, if there's anything that's marginal, they can cancel that orbit insertion prior to that point. After that, they then can take up to six orbits and that will be, you know, uh 9 hoursish. During that time, they will deploy Starlinks. They will get photographs with the Starlinks. Uh you know, it will take photographs of the spacecraft.

15:17 These Starlinks, however, will be operational Starlinks. They will be able to remain in orbit. They will contribute to the cluster. And if you think about it, this thing is going to launch a lot more than a single Falcon 9 will carry. So it's going to contribute a big time to the constellation. Uh, also, by the way, they're taking two of the tiles that were recovered from Starship 40 and they're going to be flying them again on Starship 41.

15:40 And if you if you're interested in how the recovery of Starship 40 went, they published another like halfhour long documentary on reusability and we get some amazing views of the recovery story. It's actually one of my favorites so far. They published three of these and this is the one where I spent the most time pausing and rewinding and looking in close.

16:04 I can see one one thing I really liked was seeing the automation at play inside their tile factory or the bakery. Uh if you remember I made the video where I went to NASA heat you know materials facility and they have this whole manual process for creating the tiles. It one of the things that stood out was the whole automated process of making these tiles in the right shape and dimension.

16:24 And you're going to need that when you have such a large area to protect. But yeah, there was also a lot of like uh you know close-ups of people actually working on Starship, getting samples, being super excited at getting close to their work after it had gone through this flight. So yeah, that that is a big thing. We are looking forward to it. Starship 40 at this point, by the way, is still at sea.

16:46 It's sailing south around the Cape of Good Hope because of course, yeah, now all the all the straits are closed in the Middle East. Then go figure. Uh but also what's possibly closing up or what we know is closing up is SpaceX. Uh they've pretty much made it clear that they are backing away from Falcon 9. And so this story had been building for a while, but we heard it out loud in the last couple of weeks that um people try or companies that are trying to book launches after 2028 are getting told, "Yeah, we're not

17:19 interested in flying Falcon 9." Um so that is going to be interesting. There's no possibly no transporter or bandwagon missions after that date. Now, there are some ride share flights that have been booked by other companies. Exoplan, Exolaunch, and Seops, they both published or sorry, purchase dedicated Falcon 9 to run their own ride shares. And I presume that they are going to be able to charge a whole lot for those slots because they're going to have room.

17:47 But, um, it does seem that SpaceX is very much moving away from the Falcon 9 and making Starship their main thing. Now the biggest question is what that means for Dragon because of course Dragon is kind of essential to a lot of operations and that is going to continue to operate. SpaceX is very much going to continue to satisfy its requirements. But just this morning, Eric Burgerer broke a story where NASA is now sending a lot of money to Boeing for Starlininer.

18:16 It does sound like Boeing are finally getting that cost plus contract that they always wanted. Now, Starlininer is obviously in a sorry state and it's not going to launch vehicle. NASA is going to pay to have um you know have this thing verified and certified for a new launch vehicle. We don't know what launch vehicle. It's most likely going to be either Vulcan or New Glenn.

18:35 Either of which might work, although I think New Glenn is probably the safer bet. I think it's probably, you know, got closer bet with um you NASA, but it could it could easily definitely integrate well with uh Vulcan. Uh and you know, you know what else would integrate well with Vulcan would be uh Orion since, you know, the upper stage on Vulcan is being used for um for new for for um SLS.

19:04 Uh but yeah, you know, Starlink is the main thing that Falcon 9 has been launching and they've been working with a ridiculously high cadence and everything else has sort of been like bonus points for them. But now that Starlink is moving over to Starship, the cost of Falcon 9 starts to get more expensive per unit if you think about it because the cost of maintaining the program is, you know, relative constant.

19:28 And then you have the per unit cost. So if you're launching fewer times and you're not launching all this Starlink, suddenly the cost per launch is going to start creeping up. And I can see why SpaceX is like, you know, happy to back away from this old technology and move forward with a new one. And of course, all the competitors, yeah, they're kind of celebrating.

19:46 In fact, to the point that uh Aio, you know, the the guy that runs European Space Ay's um you know, this Italian company that builds these rockets, he was practically celebrating like, "Oh, finally we can get some of those contracts that kept on going to SpaceX." I'm sure Rocket Lab will be happy. You know, they lost a lot of potential market share to the ride share that SpaceX was offering.

20:08 And uh with that out the way, yeah, they're going to potentially pick up a lot. There's also like Stoke, Firefly, ESAR, other small tomedium launch vehicles that stand to benefit from this. Um, but yeah, that's a that's a whole interesting way things are changing going forwards. Okay, let's let's go elsewhere. Let's go out towards the Lrange point. If you remember, Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched.

20:35 Well, now it is waking up. They uh performed their first correction burn. They uh did the math on how accurately it was injected by Falcon Heavy and they performed their trim maneuvers and they now say that they have 22 years worth of station keeping fuel on it which is absolutely fantastic. That's double the design life. Now granted we always expect more than that but you know you you don't want to count your chickens before they're hatched.

20:59 But it's now opened the like the covers and we're starting to get images in. We have seen images from the imaging system and what they show is a lot of rings, a lot of defocused stars and you might think, "Oh no, the lens is wrong or the optics are wrong." No, you tune the optics by starting with defocused stars and then you focus them. So, it's fine for now.

21:22 Maybe if they can't get them in focus, that's when you start worrying. So, that's looking good. Uh Stoke Space, yeah, I mentioned them. They announced uh they're getting another billion dollars and they're developing the Block 2 version of their launch vehicle and um well so Nova Block 2 is going to have a bigger longer second stage. It's going to get rid of the taper.

21:44 This the first stage is going to be bigger. I think it's going to have like 14 engines on that first stage. So this is going to massively increase the amount of mass to orbit that they can offer per launch and it's going to increase the amount of volume. Now, they still have questions about I still have questions about how they actually solve the re-entry problem with this.

22:04 Remember, they have this uh heat shield that doubles as an engine. It's actively cooled. There's a lot of cool stuff going on here, but they've, you know, they've suggested that there's some interesting solutions, but they haven't actually been very specific. Uh I did a whole video on this. You can go and watch it. Uh on the 1 of September uh the founders of the orbital data center startup StarCloud, they stood up a nonprofit uh mission called Fermy Explorer.

22:32 And this mission has one goal and that is to reach Alpha Centuri about 80,000 years from now. Yeah, this is thinking long term. It will be dead by the time it gets there. This is they're talking about like a one kilogram cubat that they're going to throw across the void. It's not gonna fly at a, you know, fraction of the speed of light. It's not going to be propelled by a sail or anything.

23:00 Um they they used like they literally used Claude and CH GPT to create this this mission design, but they uh they they do like a apparently there's like a 12-year inner solar system cycle where where they you pump up the energy and then use the electric propulsion to get out the way they they want. Now they don't claim that they'll be the first people to get get there.

23:26 Their whole goal is symbolic. They want to send something there so that if humanity dies out there'll be something left and if we don't then we will be able to meet this thing there and have a big celebration day. I you know this is a whole interesting thing. I'm not sure it's even the best solution to the high energy velocity requirements. I think I can think of better ways to do this.

23:49 Regardless u those might need bigger rockets. Now I mentioned earlier about a launch of a bunch of Yogan satellites. We don't know what they do. What we do know is that one that was launched back in March has now fragmented. It's exploded and um this one is particularly problematic because it's in a retrograde orbit. It's going the wrong direction which means it encounters other satellites more often and faster.

24:12 Uh it's probably like a satellite which underwent a battery explosion or impact by existing debris. We don't honestly know. This is again another space debris generating event and it's not great when we have lots of these things. And this space breakup came at a perfect time because the European Space Agency had just released its uh space environment report and they had said that there's now more than three intact satellites or stages re-entering per day on average.

24:40 in the 100redyear debris projection is got worse since the last uh time even after they shortened the horizon to from 200 years. This is um this is not great that we are getting closer and closer to high levels of debris. But yeah, this also happened around the same time as was a couple of big events in Paris, right? There was like two week two different events and there was one the international space summit which was you know it was made basically like France was really running the show.

25:10 Um it wasn't really clear what the full purpose was of this mission. China was definitely invited. But interestingly, the White House actually got in touch with a number of US firms and strongly suggested that attendance would like look like endorsing certain European policies that the administration the US administration is fighting, namely the European Space Act.

25:33 Uh plus there's things like, you know, Spectrum control. Um but yeah, a bunch of companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Stoke Space, and StarCloud, they cancelled on the Thursday and did not end up going to this. Now, uh the same four companies did go back later in the week for World Space Business Week from 14th to the 17th September, and that's like a big industry trade show.

25:57 Um and you know, yet they were on the speaker list and all that. So, they were just basically doing all the space business stuff. Uh but it's interesting that this um request by the White House was very clearly aimed at like Emanuel Maccron's photo op. Now in the middle of all this, the European Space Agency did take the opportunity to announce a significant contract with the exploration company.

26:21 So they're the ones building the Nyx spacecraft which is supposed to be a you know cargo shuttle to the International Space Station. uh and they have signed like a €760 million euro deal so that the exploration company can use Nyx to deliver cargo to the International Space Station. They'll also do a demonstrator called Aladdin Autonomous LEO accelerated demo docking to the ISS node.

26:45 Um so yeah, they're going to get money for the demo flight and then potentially future options for actually flying and delivering cargo to the space station. So this is the first actual space capsule like transportation contract that the issa has ever given to a European startup. So this is like a pretty big deal. It's also worth noting that Nyx is a reusable cargo vehicle.

27:06 So it can actually return cargo. This is a capability that Europe never had with their previous uh ATV, the transport vehicle. So uh Europe will have a way to go to and from the station. And of course, we've seen with SpaceX, it's not a long, you know, big stretch to turn a cargo capsule into a human capsule if it's big enough. Uh, okay. NASA now, 1st of September, they uh announced that they were giving the contract for the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter constellation to Blue Origin.

27:37 This would be a firm fixed price, you know, $700 million contract to deliver uh the orbiter to NASA no later than December uh in 2028. So then the operational the network would have to be operational at Mars by 2030. So you know you've got a pretty tight contract on this. This was money that was originally included in the July like reconciliation bill like last year.

28:02 Uh the requirements came out in February earlier this year and the two main companies bidding were Blue Origin and um uh Rocket Lab. Now there were other companies that may have bid on this but the ones that were clearly making a lot of noise and were favorites were these two. And so interestingly then if about a week or so later uh Rocket Lab basically challenged the whole awards in court saying that they felt that there was the better deal and NASA you know has perhaps made a poor choice.

28:35 There may be some sort of something going on here. So, that's going to be interesting because, you know, previously, if you remember, Blue Origin tried to get work on uh the the human landing system stopped while it was protesting it. Well, now Rocket Lab is potentially slowing down work on a Mars telecommunications orbiter. And the schedule on that is pretty tight.

28:58 Of course, at this point, the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter, when it's going to get to Mars, um it's not going to have many things to work with. It's going to have two rovers on the surface, right? Curiosity and Perseverance. Maven is just dead. Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter at this point are practically museum pieces. And you know, US may send is still planning to send of course the Skyfall spacecraft, the helicopters.

29:24 Those will benefit, but it's not like a major exploration program like we used to have in the old days. Uh, of course, this orbiter constellation may well help with Europe spa, you know, spacecraft that's going out there. the Rosland Franklin rover. But um yeah, it's not clear what this Mars constellation is going to be helping with. 14th of September was a big news for Space War because uh Air Force Secretary Troy Mink basically said that the US United States has onorbit space control weapons capable of defending the

29:59 joint force against hostile adversary action. And he basically said this during like a Q&A. Uh, and the phrasing was apparently very deliberate, right? He refused to add anything. There are no clues as to what it is. But look, first of all, we always pretty knew knew that there was potentially offensive capabilities in orbit. After all, when you're moving at orbital speeds, anything that can be steered with sufficient precision becomes a weapon.

30:24 But I would say that it's actually highly unlikely that the weapons they're describing are kinetic kill devices. These are more likely to be electronic warfare. Uh, but there's a lot of other things that can go on once you're in space. Like you can fly close to a reconnaissance satellite and like just spray paint its optics, right? There's a bunch of things you can do in space warfare that just barely makes sense on Earth.

30:49 Uh, so yeah, there's probably not kinetic kill devices up there. And the US of course has actually stepped back from direct ascent um, you know, anti-satellite weapons. Now, uh, the debris argument basically it's only gotten worse over the years. So, I would like to think that they don't want to continue on that. Uh, it's better to deal with the satellites in orbit without creating debris in the process.

31:14 Um, but yeah, I think electronic warfare feels like a much better bet. You know, you can use directed radio signals to saturate systems. You can burn out amplifiers that way. You can uh damage sensors with lasers. All of these are very much the kind of thing that would would be very good at dealing with assets that an adversary might actually use to direct stuff on the ground.

31:36 But anyways, speaking of getting up close and personal with uh other spacecraft, uh the Australian company HO has now demonstrated rendevous and proximity operations to take photographs of a satellite, specifically uh a dead uh long march 2C upper stage. Now, this is a non-ooperative spacecraft. There's no lights. There's no help. This satellite had to maneuver on its own.

32:00 And this satellite was not actually built for this. This is originally an imaging satellite, a satellic uh earth observation spacecraft. They bought it back in like Christmas 2025. It was their Christmas present, right? It literally was. And they renamed it to Continuum 1. Now the camera is designed to image earth from 500 km but if they carefully maneuver in the right way they can put the satellite that they're targeting in the right place and they can use their various algorithms to clean up the image and they were

32:27 getting like a 7 cm per pixel imaging off this spacecraft and this is different. Ho have been publishing images of flybys of satellites from existing earth observation constellations high-speed flybys. This is much more much slower more like loitering the vicinity and getting up close. So this is this is interesting that they're able to be doing that.

32:49 Okay. So now late in August the US government said it was interested in setting up a space academy and this is not like the Air Force Academy or the Navy Academy or the Maritimemies. This was something for NASA to train people for to work in public service to work at on NASA facilities and give the US the edge. And I think hey you know I would have done it if I was if it was the an option when I was a kid.

33:13 Um, so yeah, on September 10th they released like some initial like requests for information from various states making proposals and so we've already had noise from states like Florida, Texas, um, like Alabama potentially they have like space camp already. So it sort of like fits in. You want space camp, now is the real space camp. Uh, Colorado Springs, you know, they have uh space command the space the air force academy next door.

33:40 um that might be an argument against it. So there's all these states basically making sort of moves, some of them more public than others. And then in parallel, somebody pointed out that you know the University of Berkeley and NASA as are setting up the Berkeley Space Center which is a large facility on as in Mountain View which is going to have housing, offices, academic space, you know, teaching spaces so that they can have students work through this.

34:09 So, this feels like the University of Berkeley is already getting in on the Space Academy, but I'm not sure that NASA would actually necessarily buy into that. Although, it would be pretty cool because it would be very close to where actual Starfleet Academy is, or not actual, but where Starfleet Academy is supposed to be, at least in the good Star Trek shows.

34:29 Now, while NASA is currently talking about doing big things on the moon, scientists revealed that some big stuff happened on the moon between 11th April and 22nd May in 2024. A new crater was formed 222 m wide, 43 m deep. That is three times the previous uh crater size that's been created. So, this was found using the lunar reconnaissance orbiter. They basically looked at variations you over the global map and they found this thing had changed during that time period.

34:58 This is a big deal uh because this kind of impact is only supposed to happen like maybe once per century. The minimum object size to create this is probably about 30 ft 10 m but it was very likely potentially bigger. They say the size of an office block which could mean a whole lot of things. Regardless, the math suggests that you would need a 15 kiloton energy event to make that.

35:21 And so it's impressive or sorry, it's unusual that this was not actually observed when it was happening since it is on the near side. So it was very likely happened at a time near New Moon. That's the only thing I can get. Uh regardless, yeah, this is a very cool paper. And you'll notice interestingly that the the data is published by Intuitive Machines, which now own Lunar Reconstates Orbiter, right?

35:45 They're basically running the surf the groundside processing because of course being able to do reconnaissance on the moon is very much part of the kind of business of exploring the moon. Finally, uh Impulse, they got another $300 million in funding. Worth mentioning that Impulse of course is Tom Miller's venture. You know, SpaceX employee number one.

36:07 He's the guy that built the Merlin. And they are now selling, of course, the bits for the rest of the rocket, which is interesting since they're talking about, you know, SpaceX sort of backing off and developing the Falcon 9. But hey, their spacecraft will fly on any rocket. They are providing high energy upper stages to satellites that will fly on somebody else's spacecraft.

36:28 So yeah, this is supposed to um this is another 300 million on top of 500 million to expand their capability. Looks like they're getting valued at about 4.2 2 billion dollars. But yeah, we are now already uh they've already sold out ride share launches that they are planning to fly in 2028. And they are interestingly on the national security space launch like uh you know they're eligible to bid even although they don't actually have a rocket.

36:56 They only have an upper stage. Anyway, I thought that was interesting. Good guys there. So yeah, uh what are we looking forward to now? Well, we had been looking forward to Starship in a few days. Now, we're looking forward to Starship in 10 days. That's the one. It's going to be exciting. I again, I not sure where I'm going to be, but I won't be able be able to get there, unfortunately.

37:16 Uh, and then later, you know, in August, we're expecting Crew 13 to finally fly. There was a bit of delay due to an oxidizer leak, but, uh, we'll we'll keep following that. I'm Scott Manley. Fly safe.