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When Gene Cernan and Harrison “Jack” Schmitt climbed into their lunar module nearly 50 years ago at the end of the Apollo 17 mission, it marked the end of an era. The Apollo 17 crew would splash down in the Pacific Ocean a few days later, marking the end of humanity’s presence on the Moon for the foreseeable future. A new age of space exploration was ushered in with the launch of the first space shuttle in 1981. The shuttle program had its own set of triumphs, notably the launch and subsequent repairs of the Hubble Space Telescope. But the pursuit of so-called deep space exploration via crewed missions — including a return to the Moon — did not seem imminent, replaced instead with a series of missions involving uncrewed probes in deep space and crewed missions closer to Earth.

The idea of returning humankind to the Moon dawned again in 2,017 with the official unveiling of NASA’s Artemis program. In mythology, Artemis is the twin sister of Apollo. As the program’s namesake implies, a chief goal of Artemis is to see humans once again on the surface of the Moon, including the first woman and first person of color. NASA believes Artemis is a monumental shift in deep space exploration that, along with subsequent missions, will culminate with an achievement well beyond the lunar surface: landing humans on the surface of Mars.

But first, the Moon, and to get back there, NASA is developing an ambitious series of components designed to expand exploration of the lunar surface. It’s called the Gateway, and a Notre Dame alumnus is helping to get the lunar outpost — literally — off the ground.

When SpaceX deploy batches of Starlink satellites they drop them off in lower orbits and expect the satellites themselves to navigate towards their final operational orbits. This is quite a complex process and one that’s worth discussing, the satellites need to be able to reach the target orbital plane, raise the orbit to operational altitude, and then finally maneuver to a specific slot within that plane before they become operational.

Satellite Orbital Maps by Celestrak.
https://celestrak.com/

Starlink Map by Mike Puchol.
https://starlink.sx/

Deployment plots by Elias Eccli.

Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg was one of the world’s foremost theoretical physicists and a passionate advocate for science. Among his many influential contributions is the co-discovery of the electroweak theory that unifies electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, a central pillar in the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Join Brian Greene and physicist John Preskill as they pay tribute to Steven Weinberg and his profound contributions to science.

This program is part of the Big Ideas Series, made possible with support from the John Templeton Foundation.

Join me as I take a tour of SpaceX’s Starbase facility with Elon Musk as our tour guide! This is part 2 of 3 so stay tuned, there’s another one coming!

If you need some notes on this video with key points, check out our article — https://everydayastronaut.com/starbase-tour-and-interview-with-elon-musk/

Need a rundown on Starship? I’ve got you covered with our “Complete Guide to Starship“
https://youtu.be/-8p2JDTd13k.

00:00 — Intro.

According to Musk, “Starbase is moving at Warp 9” as SpaceX prepare for the first orbital demonstration of the Starship/Super Heavy stack. It is going to be an absolute monster topping out at 120 meters, almost 10 meters taller than the mighty Saturn V.

Although largely a demonstration mission, Musk has said that it will carry a “wheel of cheese.” This was also the first payload of the company’s Dragon spacecraft. It was chosen because it was the silliest thing they could imagine.