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Astrometcast Episode 685 Manufacturing in Space

Welcome to Astronomycast, a weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos where we help you understand not only what we know, but

how we know what we know. I'm Fr. Cain, I'm the publisher of the universe today with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the planetary science institute and the Director of Cosmic Quest.

Hey Pam, how are you doing? I'm doing mostly well. I have hit the time of the year where the dogs are out exploring in the yard and bringing in new and interesting things.

Hunting, ever hunting. Yeah, and so we've gone through the poison ivy phase, we've gone through the bird's phase, we've hit the skunk and strangely the most toxic thing they have found so far is an orange rubber ball because I'm allergic to latex and rubber.

I picked the ball up and I was like, oh, put it back down. And apparent, yeah, and I had rubbed my face as well. And so now like half of my face is just sort of like you are more on this half of my face is calling me names.

Yeah, it's like when you chop peppers and you forget and then you like go close your eyes and I said, oh, what was I thinking? Yeah, yeah, we have something similar. Our dog has, it's allergic to something. And so we took her for a walk the other day and she came back and then one of her paws puffed up. So she's got like this great big doughy paw. Oh, yeah, it's and so she's on steroids and letting it shrink back down. But yeah, it's sort of like it's comedically large.

One of her feet and you're just like, oh, poor pop. Yeah, yeah.

Launching satellites from earth is counterproductive. I mean, you got to make a satellite that can handle earth gravity and then the brutal flight to space and then deployment and orbit. What if you could build your spacecraft in space?

I am absolutely obsessed by this topic. So I just like want to warn people in advance that I am a little maybe too obsessed. I have a pants.

The normal post show rant might make its way into the show. So just keep that in mind. All right. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, so this is this is great. So let's talk about like go through St. J W's T old school launching a satellite.

Oh, man. So starting in the 1990s, probably actually starting in the 80s, people are like, we need this thing in space. And you proposed to NASA. And I'm just going to skip ahead and assume you eventually get the funding 10 years later.

Right. You then start contracting out this company and that company and they start sub awarding and stuff has to get shipped all over the place.

So you have mirrors getting shipped from one place where they get mounted in the support brackets that get shipped to another place where everything gets shaken and tested and get shipped to another place for basically JVB ST probably got a

platinum frequent flyer card over the course of all of its adventures. Yeah. And then ultimately it got shipped through the Panama Canal all the way to French Giana where it was shipped into space many years later.

And had the bejesus shaken out of it in the process, which is by far I think the scariest process to a lot of us because the first time they shook at bolts fell off. Right.

And then ultimately you end up with something in space that had to be super lightweight because every pound costs a whole lot of money to ship into space.

Yeah. I was talking to one of the project managers at JVC and they were saying like most of the expanse came from them shaving weight off of the satellite that every bolt every strut every component they had to redesign and redesign and redesign and keep knocking weight off.

It's kind of like if you've ever done any hiking as an ultra light hiker and you take every piece of your gear and you put it on the scale and then you look at it again you go what if I cut off all the labels and you cut off all the labels and now you've saved yourself 30 grams you know you if you cut the grams the kilograms will take care of themselves is the way the same goes.

And so they have to do that process with tells us like the D. A. C. I think has to fit within the fairing size of the rocket. And so that's why you've got this gigantic space telescope fitting within the smaller fairing.

It's got to handle like Earth gravity. But it's also going to handle space flight which is not easy. No, no. And it has to survive all of the various changes in direction.

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