Sarah Gillis plays “Rey’s Theme” in space, with some help:
Brian
That was a beautiful (and no doubt challenging) performance.
But, but, but - I keep hearing from all the space boffins that there is no sound in space??!!!
Makes me wonder as a musician about how easy (or otherwise) it would be to play different instruments in a zero-g environment. Most stringed and wind instruments probably present no problem. Drums might be rather tricky, though?
I believe Gillis has commented on having to hold the violin down against her shoulder, rather than being able to let it rest there. Someone else pointed out a similar issue with the bow–without gravity holding it against the strings, you have to actively apply appropriate controlled pressure to it.
So there are subtle issues to adapt to in playing violin in microgravity, and you would probably find equivalent issues with other instruments. Here’s a possible one for wind instruments: liquid accumulates in convoluted wind instruments (especially brass), a combination of condensation and saliva. In Earth-gravity, the liquid runs down to the lowest point in the instrument, where it can easily be purged, but in microgravity, it would only be driven by breath, which likely means it would collect at multiple points in the instrument’s pipe. Purging it would require a different technique, and it might affect the sound in unexpected ways.
Everyday Astronaut says they’ll be talking about the violin qualification on an upcoming (maybe now released) podcast:
Not an easy problem, since it has to survive vacuum without significant outgassing, not be a fire hazard in a pure O2 atmosphere, etc.
One of my favorite John Williams tunes, beautifully played and with inspiring international participation. I actually got a little verklempt. Brava!
Meanwhile, just beyond the Solar System:
NASA assumes their transistors can survive Jupiter’s radiation until they are told that their transistors can’t survive Jupiter’s radiation.
Those darn monolith aliens, messing with our supply chains to protect Europa.
You can do all the planning, the simulations, the brainstorming of possibilities; but the other guy always gets a vote - or in this case, Jupiter’s radiation.
Hard to say whether they “assumed” versus they relied on manufacturer’s claims, or maybe an older model of the radiation severity.
Still somebody somewhere goofed up. Propagating new knowledge reliably across an entire project and forcing a re-examination of everyone’s related decisions to date is a very hard problem.
I was waiting for someone to mention this, since most of us interested have probably seen it?
Surely this requires orbital refueling though, which hasn’t been demonstrated yet?
I saw it, but I tend not to post some of the more ambitious goals. I don’t mind them setting ambitious targets but I’m not going to take them as gospel either.
It absolutely requires refueling. Starship is designed to have good payload (with reusability) to LEO, but anywhere beyond needs refueling. It’s heavy, only has two stages, and doesn’t have a hydrogen upper stage. It probably couldn’t make it to Mars even with zero payload.
So they’ll have to have regular, cheap tanker flights to make this work. Which they already need to hit their Artemis targets. But that flight rate two years from now seems very ambitious.
The FAA is currently delaying the next Starship flight test for changes in their plan that have no real safety implications (like changing the impact site of the hot staging ring from one part of the ocean to another) but for some reason added two months to the approval process. SpaceX is not happy and they’re clearly trying to get some political support. I think the announcement is probably related to that more than anything–the US is being held back (vs China) by absurd bureaucracy.
Musk has a habit of promising lots of big things in the near future, and then not accomplishing those things.
To be fair, everyone in the space business does the same, and SpaceX has achieved quite a bit, if not quite as much as planned.
What kind of refueling, i.e., what fuels and methods, are they planning, and has refueling of this kind been done in LEO before? Presumably it will be fully automated?
This seems like a non-trivial project that may take a few attempts to get right. What are the ramifications if the first few go badly?
They’ve done a very small demo so far–on a previous Starship test flight, they did a fluid transfer between internal tanks. NASA has done some small demos here and there.
They first need to dock two orbiting Starships. They think this part will be easy, because they already have automated docking with the ISS down pat, and this should be even easier since they control both vehicles. They’re probably right about that.
But the propellants are cryogenic (liquid) oxygen and methane, and 100+ tons of it. Due to the microgravity, the fluids aren’t settled and will float around in giant blobs. So as the two vehicles are docked, they’ll have to apply thrusters so that the fluids settle toward the transfer port. Then probably use internal pressure to get them to move from one ship to the other. All while maintaining stability so that the propellant doesn’t slosh around or behave in weird ways, and dealing with evaporation, and so on.
So yeah, highly non-trivial, with a zillion details I’m glossing over, but it will undoubtedly be mostly automated (automated steps interspersed by manual approval once the humans decide that things are progressing well). No people will actually be on either of the ships, of course.
If it goes badly? Well, an explosion is certainly possible. I’m sure they’ll be doing this in a very low orbit so debris don’t be an issue for long. Hopefully things don’t go that disastrously and any failures just mean they have to try again on another flight.
Thanks, I assumed it had to be pretty complicated and untested to date.
In the long-term, in-orbit refueling technologies are going to be needed. The specific mission that provides a reason for development work in the near-term isn’t terribly important in this context. We need to be able to move around more fuel up there than the relatively small amounts involved in the ISS Service Module, which is the only regular in-orbit refueling operation I’m aware of. (It gets under 1000kg of fuel via unmanned cargo vessel several times per year, along with its resupply of water and nitrogen for life support.)
It was done in 1960, but was too expensive so people just brought their own.
