Happy New Year. It’s time for another look at space news, I reckon, so once more my special guests are space archaeologist Dr Alice Gorman aka Dr Space Junk from Flinders University, and astrophysicist and founder of SpaceAustralia.com Rami Mandow.
In this episode we talk about Mars, including its role as both a source of aliens and as a potential new home for humans. That does mean we dissect Elon Musk’s comments about colonising Mars.
We also talk about the space debris that fell on Kenya earlier this month— or was it something else? And we discuss Blue Origin’s New Glenn launch vehicle which failed to launch on Monday, the future of human civilisation, early science fiction, O’Neill cylinders, and the pronunciation of Uranus.
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Alice Gorman (born 1964) FSA is an Australian archaeologist, heritage consultant, and lecturer, who is best known for pioneering work in the field of space archaeology and her Space Age Archaeology blog.
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Astronomer, driving The Dish? to study pulsars in my PhD. Also, founded SpaceAustralia.com. Also, love a bit of astrophotography. Also, do everything with my little mate, Max. Also, Ultra-Gay. He/Him.
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[3 January 2025] A metallic object, likely space junk, crashed in Kenya's Mukuku village. The massive ring, weighing approximately 1100 lbs and about 8 feet in diameter, is believed to be from a rocket launch vehicle. The Kenya Space Agency is investigating its origin and impact.
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[12 January 2025] A massive round metal object had plummeted from above landing on farmland near a dry riverbed - and it was piping hot.
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[11 January 2025] What the hell is it?
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[6 January 2025] Well, my skepticism about the Kenya space debris may have been wrong. I reviewed the data again, concluding that Space Force estimates of the Ariane V184 upper stage reentry are unreliable; an association with this object can't be ruled out.
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[30 April 2023] On 14 May 1973, a modified Saturn V rocket launched from the Kennedy Space Center carrying Skylab, the United States’ first space station. Six years later, in the early hours of 12 July 1979, Skylab reentered Earth’s atmosphere in a fiery blaze, spreading debris across the Indian Ocean and Western Australia.
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This article lists orbital and suborbital launches planned for the second half of the year 2024, including launches planned for 2024 without a specific launch date. [That said, it does give the actual launch times down to the second.]
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[23 August 2022] It appears another piece of space debris has been found in the NSW Snowy Mountains believed to belong to SpaceX. A few pieces have been found so far, including two pieces near Dalgety and one near Jindabyne, after residents in the region heard a loud bang on July 9. The latest fragment has been discovered near Tumbarumba, which cattle farmer Jordan Hobbs encountered while feeding his livestock on August 13.
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The oceanic pole of inaccessibility, also known as Point Nemo, is located at roughly 48°52.6?S 123°23.6?W and is the place in the ocean that is farthest from land. It represents the solution to the "longest swim" problem.
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The Eve of the War · Jeff Wayne · Liam Neeson · Gary Barlow from Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of The Worlds - The New Generation (2012).
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Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds is a studio double album by American-born British musician, composer, and record producer Jeff Wayne, released on 9 June 1978 by CBS Records. It is an album musical adapted from the science-fiction novel The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells in a rock opera style with a rock band, orchestra, narrator, and leitmotifs to carry the story and lyrics that express the feelings of the various characters
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[4 January 2025] The full Wolf Moon of January 2025 occurs on Jan. 13 and will pass in front of Mars during a lunar occultation visible from North America.
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Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun. The surface of Mars is orange-red because it is covered in iron(III) oxide dust, giving it the nickname "the Red Planet.
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During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was erroneously believed that there were "canals" on the planet Mars. These were a network of long straight lines in the equatorial regions from 60° north to 60° south latitude on Mars, observed by astronomers using early telescopes without photography... They were first described by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli during the opposition of 1877, and attested to by later observers. Schiaparelli called these canali ("channels"), which was mis-translated into English as "canals"... During the 1894 opposition, the idea that Schiaparelli's canali were really irrigation canals made by intelligent beings was first hinted at, and then adopted as the only intelligible explanation, by American astronomer Percival Lowell and a few others.
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Hugo Gernsback (/????rnzbæk/; born Hugo Gernsbacher, August 16, 1884 – August 19, 1967) was a Luxembourgish American editor and magazine publisher whose publications included the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. His contributions to the genre as publisher were so significant that, along with the novelists Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, he is sometimes called "The Father of Science Fiction".
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Fireball XL5 is a 1960s British children's science-fiction puppet television series about the missions of Fireball XL5, a vessel of the World Space Patrol that polices the cosmos in the year 2062. Commanded by Colonel Steve Zodiac, XL5 defends Earth from interstellar threats while encountering a wide variety of alien civilisations.
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"A Honeymoon in Space" is a 1901 novel by George Griffith. It was originally serialized in abridged form in Pearson's Magazine in 1900 under the title "Stories of Other Worlds". The scientific romance story depicts a tour of the Solar System, a type of story that was in vogue at the time.
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[Free downloads of the full novel in various formats.]
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[20 October 2024] Mars may one day come back and save Earth, just like America came back and saved Europe and saved the rest of the world three times last century. Three times, America saved the world last century. And what a disaster would have been if America had not existed. And one day, Mars may play that same role on Earth.”
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[20 October 2024] Elon Musk participated in a town hall event in Philadelphia on Oct. 18, where he addressed various topics and answered audience questions.
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Rhawn Gabriel Joseph is an American author, internet kook, ufologist and promoter of pseudoscience known for his controversial views on the origin of life on Earth and the origin of the Universe. He has filed numerous lawsuits against NASA, Amazon.com, academic publisher Springer and the City of San Jose which have been dismissed. Joseph is involved with the pseudojournal Journal of Cosmology and is the author of "Astrobiology: The Origins of Life and the Death of Darwinism", published in 2001
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Rhawn Gabriel Joseph currently works at Cosmology.com. Their current project is Extrasterrestrial Life in the Thermosphere and Lower Atmosphere and Ocean.
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The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is a 1966 science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein about a lunar colony's revolt against absentee rule from Earth. The novel illustrates and discusses libertarian ideals. It is respected for its credible presentation of a comprehensively imagined future human society on both the Earth and the Moon.
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"A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?" is a 2023 popular science book by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. It covers the current state of knowledge of space settlement given changes in the economics of space travel in the 2010s and 2020s, with a particular focus on challenges that the authors consider unresolved or underestimated.
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[5 December 2018] On July 20, 1989, the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, President George H. W. Bush stood on the steps of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. and, backed by the Apollo 11 crew, announced his new Space Exploration Initiative (SEI). He believed that this new program would put America on a track to return to the moon and make an eventual push to Mars.
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[14 January 2004] Today we set a new course for America's space program. We will give NASA a new focus and vision for future exploration. We will build new ships to carry man forward into the universe, to gain a new foothold on the moon, and to prepare for new journeys to worlds beyond our own.
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[13 January 2015] The Trump ally wants the U.S. to forgo the lunar surface for the red planet. He faces one problem: Congress.
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[2 April 2016] A poem.
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[14 December 2025] Delays on Sydney-Johannesburg route after advice from US government over debris from SpaceX rocket re-entry in southern Indian Ocean
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[21 February 2024] Since its first modules launched at the end of 1998, the International Space Station has been orbiting 250 miles above Earth. But at the end of 2030, NASA plans to crash the ISS into the ocean after it is replaced with a new space station, a reminder that nothing within Earth's orbit can stay in space forever.
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"Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth."
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[19 December 2024] In this episode Stilkgherrian talks about his recent injuries and related hospital visits, the history of those hospitals, content warnings, dildos in Texas, and some old anti-vaxxers.
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New Glenn is a heavy-lift launch vehicle developed by the American company Blue Origin. The rocket features a partially reusable, two-stage design with a diameter of 7 meters (23 ft). The first stage is powered by seven BE-4 engines, while the second stage relies on two BE-3U engines, all designed and built in-house by Blue Origin. It is set to launch from Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 36, with future missions planned from Vandenberg Space Launch Complex 9.
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[13 January 2025] Blue Origin postpones inaugural launch of New Glenn rocket indefinitely.
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[13 January 2025] 9:07 p.m. EST / 02:07 UTC: We’re moving our NG-1 launch to no earlier than Thursday, January 16. The three-hour launch window opens at 1 a.m. EST (0600 UTC).
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New Shepard is a fully reusable sub-orbital launch vehicle developed for space tourism by Blue Origin. The vehicle is named after Alan Shepard, who became the first American to travel into space and the fifth person to walk on the Moon. The vehicle is capable of vertical takeoff and landings. Additionally, it is also capable of carrying humans and customer payloads into a sub-orbital trajectory.
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John Herschel Glenn Jr. (July 18, 1921 – December 8, 2016) was an American Marine Corps aviator, astronaut, businessman, and politician. He was the third American in space and the first American to orbit the Earth, circling it three times in 1962. Following his retirement from NASA, he served from 1974 to 1999 as a U.S. Senator from Ohio; in 1998, he flew into space again at the age of 77.
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Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. (November 18, 1923 – July 21, 1998) was an American astronaut. In 1961, he became the second person and the first American to travel into space and, in 1971, he became the fifth and oldest person to walk on the Moon, at age 47.
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[11 January 2025] Meta, fresh off announcement to end factchecking, follows McDonald’s and Walmart in rolling back diversity initiatives.
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[13 January 2025] On the most recent episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said corporate culture has become "neutered."
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[20 April 2023] Earth is the best planet. Yet, its resources are limited. In space, there are abundant resources that will help humanity preserve Earth for future generations. We can go to space for what we need, and move the most polluting industries from Earth into the solar system where they can't stress our environment. Space is the long-term solution for Earth, humanity's blue origin. Join the mission.
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The Kardashev scale (Russian: ????? ?????????, romanized: shkala Kardashyova) is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy it is capable of harnessing and using. The measure was proposed by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964, and was named after him.
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A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its power output. The concept is a thought experiment that attempts to imagine how a spacefaring civilization would meet its energy requirements once those requirements exceed what can be generated from the home planet's resources alone. Because only a tiny fraction of a star's energy emissions reaches the surface of any orbiting planet, building structures encircling a star would enable a civilization to harvest far more energy.
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An O'Neill cylinder (also called an O'Neill colony) is a space settlement concept proposed by American physicist Gerard K. O'Neill in his 1976 book "The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space". O'Neill proposed the colonization of space for the 21st century, using materials extracted from the Moon and later from asteroids.
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[19 October 2015] Forty years ago, artist Rick Guidice teamed up with NASA scientists to envision the space civilizations of the future.
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The O’Neill Cylinder, designed by Princeton physicist Gerard K. O’Neill, is considerably larger than the other two designs, and is referred to as an “Island 3” or 3rd-generation space colony. The configuration consists of a pair of cylinders, each 20 miles long and 4 miles in diameter. Each cylinder has three land areas alternating with three windows, and three mirrors that open and close to form a day-night cycle inside. The total land area inside a pair of cylinders is about 500 square miles and can house several million people. The cylinders are always in pairs which rotate in opposite directions, making it much easier to keep them aimed toward the sun. For more information see O’Neill’s original paper on The Colonization of Space (Physics Today, 1974).
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Rendezvous with Rama is a 1973 science fiction novel by British writer Arthur C. Clarke. Set in the 2130s, the story involves a 50-by-20-kilometre (31-by-12-mile) cylindrical alien starship that enters the Solar System. The story is told from the point of view of a group of human explorers who intercept the ship in an attempt to unlock its mysteries. The novel won both the Hugo and Nebula awards upon its release, and is regarded as one of the cornerstones in Clarke's bibliography.
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Passengers is a 2016 American science-fiction romantic film directed by Morten Tyldum, written by Jon Spaihts and starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. The supporting cast features Michael Sheen, Laurence Fishburne, and Andy García. The film follows two passengers on an interstellar spacecraft carrying thousands of people to a colony 120-years-traveling-distance from Earth, when the two are awakened 90 years early from their induced hibernation.
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CONVERSATION TOPICS: Andrew Best, Gay Rainbow Anarchist, Paul McElwee, and two people who choose to remain anonymous.
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