You got to handful of things I wanted to just kind of talk about. Some fun things like, of course, the total solar eclipse that as I'm recording this happened yesterday, was super fun, super cool.

We also had the last launch of Delta IV Heavy, which I was unable to stream, which makes me really sad, but we'll talk a little bit about some fun things there.

Also last week, we had the NASA LTV contracts, which was really, I just wanted to touch on that quick. Again, not really trying to do news, but then lastly, we've got some really fun questions all revolving around one exciting topic, which is cameras on spacecraft.

Alright, let's get started.

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Okay, Spacewalk, episode three, exciting stuff. Alright, so first off, last week, as in recordness, again, NASA announced the LTVs, which is the Lunar Trained Vehicles.

It's a huge contract with a potential 4.6 billion throughout a 10-year period. It's a little bit confusing, and I probably need to just watch the entire press conference. I watched a good amount of it.

Yeah, we're preparing for the eclipse livestream, so I wasn't able to totally tune in as closely as I would have liked, but at the end of the day, we did have three awardees for the first phase of this, which was Intuitive Machines Lunar Outposts and Venturi Astrolab.

They basically were doing one-year feasibility task order, and as far as I understand it, only one will likely be awarded a full contract going forward for the actual thing, but 4.6 billion is a lot.

That's more than SpaceX has been paid so far for the Lunar Lander, so the Lunar Rovers, that's a big contract, but it is obviously something that's really exciting because they are required to be able to operate for 10 years. That's pretty massive. That's a pretty tall order.

What's fun is there's just no real requirements. NASA didn't say, "Hey, it has to operate for 10 years continually," or "it has to operate for," or "it has to look like this and be this heavy and do this thing."

They basically are letting the companies completely make up their own designs and kind of fit within a certain realm. They have some considerations.

What's cool is they basically are saying if a company wanted to do 10 Rovers one every year, that last of each one had a lifespan of one year, and if that fit their budget, 10 cheap Rovers is one super expensive long-term Rovers that was going to last 10 years, that's up to the companies to design and with this task order, what they're going to end up being able to design their plans around.

I love when NASA does stuff like this. Again, this is the beauty of commercial programs as opposed to doing a fixed price contract, where NASA is the top down.

They come up with a design, it has to be perfect. It has to be able to, like when JPL designs are over, they go all out because it's like, "Okay, if we mess this up, it's a lot more expensive to mess up a $2 billion Rovers."

We just really got to nail it on the get-go. They come up with this master plan that's amazing. Then they basically say, "Well, what's he going to cost? We'll just send us the bill and try to fit it within this budget."

Often, as we know, those budgets, the time in the budget slip, and NASA just has to foot the bill. This is the other way around.

Instead, they're like, "All right, here's kind of what we want. You put some effort into the design process. You put some effort into what this actually will look like and do and the consideration is there."

Then, yeah, you tell us how much it's going to cost and we will pay you exactly that much. If you come in under budget, then you make a profit. If you go in over budget, then you lose money. That was your skin in the game.

It's obviously a lot better way to do things. I'll be following along with this as the kid's a little bit more involved, but it's super exciting. Big congratulations to those three companies. Very excited to hear that.

I thought that was awesome. The other big news. Again, I'm saying news. Trying not to necessarily do news things, but these were three really big things that happened.

I wanted to talk about it quick because I thought they were really fun. The other big one, obviously, as you may know, if you don't know this, I was actually wondering, is there anyone out there in the world that had no idea there was going to be a total solar eclipse that just hanging out on their farm in the middle of Texas or something and all of a sudden they're like, "Wait, what on Earth?"

Or someone just driving a semi truck or something that has no idea and then is trying very, very confused. The rest of us, I'm sure, listening to this, are fully aware of the fact that there was a total solar eclipse across the vast majority of good swath of the United States.

I had the pleasure of co-hosting a livestream with the Planetary Society and they're awesome cast of people, including Bill Nye, which is a kid that was a high bar set for scientific literacy and scientific education.

I've always looked at his original when I was a kid, what he did. That's always kind of in the back of my mind, it's a backbone of, "How do you make this stuff fun?"

I think nowadays, everyone's gone their own way and I do things differently than I think he does things now. That's great.

I think that's important to have different styles and different voices for different things and I'm excited to stick to my niche and I'm excited to really always just talk about the hardware.

I try to avoid even talk about contraction things because it just always riles up feathers. I'm trying my hardest to never really rile up any feathers for anybody and just stick to the fun, exciting things that bond us and bring us together because I just don't think there's enough of that.

The point is that we had an awesome time. I had an amazing time at the Eclipse Arama Fesset, the Planetary Society, through on.

The reason I'm saying all this is because it was one of those moments where I felt like everyone was united, everyone was having a great time together.

I don't know if it came across in our livestream or not, but we really just, the community aspect of an event like that is so fun for me.

It's so cool to see everyone having these same emotions, even when I remember at one point on the stage right during the totality.

I don't remember who set up with it.

I think it's Matt Kaplan of Planetary Radio.

All right, let's try and be quiet now and listen for nature and that lasted all but literally six seconds before everyone started hooting hollering because we were getting a little bit more of a whole in the clouds and could see the totality with their own eyes really clearly.

That was amazing. That was so fun.

I don't know, I had a great time.

I hope that again our livestream was awesome. I was so proud of our team. We pulled together. We brought Loona down.

I guess up from the Southern tip of Texas, we drove the team of Loona up to Fredericksburg, which is a gorgeous little town.

We set up this awesome livestream. I was really proud of everyone. The team worked really hard to set up and do an awesome job.

I was a lot more passive on this one. Mary Liz took all the production management roles over which the whole reason she's like working is because that's the thing that I hate the most is all the planning and coordinating of things.

I'm not very good at it. A lot of things slip me and I fall behind on those things and just don't think about certain things.

I was very task oriented and did just such a good job bringing the team together. Everyone knew exactly what they had to do.

We set up and so little time and it was so smooth and general. Yeah, just so proud of that team.

It's becoming a lot more well-oiled compared to when I think about when it went from Artemis to Firefly and Back, how stressed out and how things were just kind of thrown together because we had no choice.

Tight timescales and how if we could do that all over again now, how much easier it would be just because the team knows what they're doing.

There's so many more people, so much more familiar with our streaming system and our Luna van. Sorry I'm talking production but I'm just gushing because it was so cool and I had a great time.

It was fun to use. I think it was especially not stressful because we knew what dates this was going to happen on the calendar. For literally years you could plan this one day on happening as opposed to rocket launches which you can have in the calendar but by the time you put it in the calendar it's very likely to change and be another thing.

Speaking of, that's my last little thing that I wanted to just touch on because I didn't end up getting able to stream it today because I'm traveling back from the eclipse was the last launch of Delta 4 Heavy.

I took off today right when I'm like if it's scrubbed one more day I would have been able to stream it. Yeah so even though it was in my calendar and even though it was something I wanted to do really really bad.

I tried to stream the first attempt, the first attempt to the last launch if that makes sense. But today it just was a no go for me sadly.

Part of me really loves that rocket. The big Delta 4 Heavy with its three orange giant orange common core boosters and that big Delta crowd genic second stage it's just such an iconic rocket. It's like a rocket's rocket and I don't know.

Part of me is very very sad to see it go because that's one of my fondest memories was watching that fly with the FT1 and just the first time I really experienced a real rocket launch from like three and a half miles away like five kilometers away five and a half or whatever it was phenomenal.

And I don't know it's just it's cool it's a cool big old school rocket and sadly it's gone and it kind of marks the end of an era like there's not SLS still has those same vibes SLS will continue this big old school rocket vibe for me.

Vulcan still gives me a little bit of that because it is a little bit more old school but it has a little bit of you know new kids school skin in the game and so it doesn't quite I don't know maybe I have to see a Vulcan in person to see if it still gives me that like retro vibe that OG vibe but it is at the same time it is exciting because the next generation of rockets you know Vulcan included is substantially less expensive.

And then the Delta IV heavy and the Delta IV heavy really was not you know it was it was a very capable rocket but it was insanely expensive and you know we don't really know exactly especially with like these NRO launches we don't have exact prices but it easily looks to be over $200 million more like 300 some reports of to $500 million per launch is what they could charge.

You know it's a complicated thing because it's the US government and NRO and all that stuff but yeah that's changing Vulcan will I think almost no matter what be cheaper it has to be because it has to be able to compete with Falcon 9 and Falcon heavy launches and and they're just right now SpaceX is control that is in control of that price point just by being so competitive and by being able to undercut anybody if they want to I think they have a lot of margin.

That they can continue to go down cheaper if they need to for now why why go any lower on price for them if they can get the money they're getting the money then just pure profit for SpaceX so anyway Delta IV heavy you will be missed that was a beautiful launch I saw tons of beautiful photos from the Cape from like Adam.

And Max out there at the cave I saw handful of incredible photos and I miss it I mean I'm sad that I couldn't at least stream it I would have even like to go to that one if possible final send off such an iconic rocket so congratulations you will lay on what look like a beautiful launch and the end of an era and yeah new things to come which is Vulcan okay coming up next we're going to talk about cameras on rockets and in space and specifically during live streams and stuff like that.

As you guys have a good string of questions about some of the decisions and hardware on these rockets okay our first question comes from Tommy McCormick on Patreon and these are going to be all kind of linked but I'll start with this one talking about the camera views on IFT 3 so starships third flight test were spectacular and starlings connection exceeded expectations I was wondering since the cameras weight is insignificant for test flights.

Why doesn't space X place cameras in every nook and cranny I would assume there could be a data limitation but I would think they get at a lot more cameras and dedicate satellites during the launch to provide as much bandwidth as needed.

One each flap up and down around the thrusters more in the payload bay door the more better to collect data from improvements maybe they do have a lot more cameras and they just do not share them.

Okay so cameras I know those of us that are visual humans that have eyesight rely on our vision a lot but honestly cameras for like anomaly reports and stuff actually aren't that great of an instrument like compared to all the other forms of data that are on the rocket cameras are probably one of the weakest for most things cameras are probably the weakest source of data so when you have a pressure sensor.

On every little line and every you know valve motion sensor a you know temperature pressure and all these other things on every tank on everything you can walk backwards through the data on on any problem and pretty much figured out based on all of those other parameters.

And so it's easy to look at like well there's an anomaly now maybe okay now Starship re-entering for I mean even like inertial measurement units you know like gyros and all those things.

There are certain orientations and things that you could they could probably visually see what is starting to go wrong that might not show up on data you know if a flap started to have like a burn through or something a camera might spot that where a sensor might not give you a very accurate reading.

But for all of the main parts of a rocket launch all of and then you look at bandwidth so traditionally this is going to help answer some of these other questions here in a second but traditionally you know a rocket needs to use ground the ground satellites to be able to provide data links and they're you know there.

I don't know the uplink but will make up a number will say it's two or three megabytes per second when it's pointed at a ground like station I'm sure we'd actually find those numbers I probably should find those numbers but when you're trying to send video data even 1080 or you know 720 1080 you really need close to five megabits per second in order to push 1080 30 frames per second.

So anything less than that so if your limitation is what we'll say it is five then first you want to prioritize all of your other data every other form of data all of your you know every single like literally thousand times a second you can have data coming down from every sensor and that's going to be a tiny packet of information like you know it's just ones and zeros it's just a very small packet of information can give you hundreds or thousands of sensors information for one frame of video right.

And when you think about it that way you go oh man I'd much rather have every single sensor available all of the data on all those sensors and all those valves and all those everything then I would rather have on you know one frame of video and of course again the resolution it can actually be a lot more frequent you can have you know hundreds or thousands of snapshots a second on those numbers which can provide vital details as opposed to most camera systems are 30 to 60 frames per second.

And so so now when you start to free up bandwidth and you're using starlink that opens up a ton of possibilities they could have and they likely do actually have dozens of cameras on starship I'm surprised actually the tank watchers I haven't really ever seen a report on on people like spying and spotting every single camera but I'll bet there's tons on starship.

I don't know if there's you know more than it does and it doesn't or more but yeah it's yeah I mean there's a ton and with with the ability of starlink they do have the option of actually grabbing and downloading and sending multiple feeds of video and they probably still likely have to pick and choose like which ones or with starship what they could be doing if they have a solid enough connection.

An option would be hey instead of like sending 24 cameras you know that each need especially for doing 4k now that would each need 20 megabits per second you know I now we're talking about a lot of starlink starlink bandwidth instead of what they could do is they could have an onboard switcher all of them could be recording data and then the switcher as long as you have a good connection to the switcher they could literally see with low latency.

All the different camera feeds and punch around on internal cameras while only really sending one true down link so you have like a multi view of here's all the cameras on board that would be one like 1080 or 4k feed you know you need one of those per like 16 channels or whatever so the so the people on the ground to be able to actually choose the cameras on board and that would be one way to get around some data limitations or you choose like 4 to 6 or 8 or whatever.

So if you have the big enough vehicle like starship or you know switching camera views and manually switching and choosing for live streams and stuff like that that is potential when you have that much uplink.

So if you have a ton of uplink if that's like no limitations so you have a gig up sure encode every single camera on board send every single camera feeds down to the ground via starlink if you're limited to 20 30 40 50 you might send one or two or you could actually potentially send just like the multi view shots and then choose around on the ground and choose those views for the main feed sorry I don't know if that makes that much sense but that's kind of what they could be doing but again.

At the end of the day honestly the video is great for live streams it's great for us I'll say the word plebs I don't know I hope that's not a bad word but I have no idea but you know for those of us down here on the ground that's yeah that's that's the important to us but it's not really that important at the end of the day.

We have another question from patreon why does space x coverage of the Falcon 9 launch switch to the camera from inside the interstage during separation of the second stage the view of the two craft is much more interesting from the ground coverage.

I think it's because it's actually really hard to see from the ground for a little bit like they'll say say separation and it just doesn't look like much is happening from certain especially if it's flying more do east.

If it's really like you know if it's a 51.6 degree north or you know a southern trajectory for a starlink mission or something with a dog leg where it's where it's hugging the coast more stage separation is more obvious but if it's looking right down the hatch on a more easterly trajectory then.

Then the view from the ground is actually really hard to see what's happening and it could be confusing and it's kind of anti-climatic the view inside clearly show stage separation.

Like there is the second those stage separate the light breaks through the you know the seams and boom you know you have stage separation you see it it's very visual.

I think they just cut to that because it's the best thing to represent stage separation I agree that the ground view is awesome.

Yeah but I would like to see him kind of do it a few more times I think they've only done it a handful of times that I recall I remember that one they switched to it soon after.

I think it was a transport mission and it was just spectacular but I don't know maybe they don't rely on it and they just kind of have it default to that that would kind of be my guess.

On that note Simon Anthony also a patreon number thank you so much all three of you for your patreon support.

When every Falcon 9 launch booster stage is ejected we see a split screen of the booster stage looking up at the well they say Raptor what is a Merlin engine about to fire from behind it.

And as on the right hand side we see the Merlin I'll say we're correcting and saying the Merlin do its thing as opposed to way.

A few minutes later we see the camera view from inside the booster now showing nothing why so why do they show the empty booster that's looking up through the inner stage of where the second stage was.

That same shot they often will show that camera why I think the main reason is oftentimes like you just get the sense of space and so also during like a boost back burn and stuff you get it you sometimes do you see the ground you see a little bit of space you get a sense of where the rocket is pointing in real time and relative to its flight trajectory.

You get a sense of it slowing down if you look at cloud this crazy you can actually watch it almost go backwards sometimes in that in that view back up the upper stage and then it you know goes down sometimes they have that view looking down the grid fins and down the fuselage for the rest of the journey but most of the time they're looking up it's actually during that boost back burn sometimes they do look at the at the engines during that too but you know I don't I can't answer why they choose what they choose I do know I think this has been talked about before where there's.

Actually a little bit of bandwidth limitation on Falcon 9 so it actually cycles automatically specifically on the Maryland engine on the upper stage it's cycling automatically every five seconds from left to right or you know 180 degrees opposites sides of that stage it's switching between the two cameras and that's a limitation so they basically just programmed to say hey this way we can at least see if there's like burn through or any problems with the engine we can at least get you know

two sources of data you know another solution that would be like they had it at like 1080 60 I or something like interlaced cameras and if we didn't care about it they could just interlaced every other frame from each side and then decoded later as 210 80s or something 30 but the reality is they're dealing with very limited bandwidth from the going through the ground stations the ground tracking stations

and so they yeah they basically put it on this like carousel or just flipping between the two shots boom boom boom you know every five seconds or whatever and you'll see that and so again there's those limitations even on the booster I'm sure there's considerations of like okay during this part we can show this camera but maybe they do have it now where there's a way to switch other views when it's looking down the grid fins and stuff like that but that's those are some of the limitations again I'm not speaking specifics because I don't know the specifics of the system

but I'm pretty sure they do switch between the two what they have a few ways to do it but all some of the things are just automatic and though a lot of those limitations will be removed with starship because of its starlink bandwidth so pretty cool that the starlink that they're been developing and deploying is helping to provide even better

live streams and we've been seeing this for years now with the drone ship finally having awesome footage of landing every time thanks to starlink and they've really figured that out they've really changed that game because of starlink pretty amazing incredible engineering huge shout out there to the engineers and lastly we just have a regular question on X that we found

because the Andy Horn 79 on on X or Twitter use hashtag spacewalk podcast and ask this question which relates to all this stuff what causes the pulsing of the silver foil above the Merlin engine that we often see in space x footage so you know you'll notice like the big engine bell glowing red you see kind of that snail looking turbine exhaust manifold

and you'll see this like silver foil kind of flickering and pulsing and breathing almost during the launch and what that is is you know the rocket engine or the tanks are venting constantly as they drain propellant there you know they have helium or sometimes a nitrogen for nitrogen for roll thrusters to that provide that and there's a lot of things venting this liquid

there's oxygen vent off as oxygen is you know as used or as it boils off it's being vented out certain ports there's a lot of things actually happening that are being ejected oftentimes down the bottom of the at the bottom of the stage interact with that foil and don't forget just because the crazy thing is even if a like a little nozzle is pointing you know like 45 degrees away from that that foil because it's in the vacuum space the particles almost eject in all directions

because a nozzle unless the nozzle was infinitely long it will always end up in space basically as soon as it leaves the nozzle exit basically going in all directions because of the pressure difference so even if you have like a vacuum optimized nozzle at the nozzle exit you'll have this huge like the exhaust will just basically straight out the sides 90 degrees from the sides of the nozzle

so so even if you have ports and stuff that are facing away from that foil if it's within 90 degrees of the exit of it it will still interact with it and because and just because it's in the vacuum space and there's no atmosphere what's happening is those particles those molecules are still being ejected and still running into the foil and interacting with it

and so it might look it looks really weird it almost looks like well why is it in the wind well I mean in some ways those those pulses those those breasts of you know as that all the tanks are draining or as the roll thrusters are because don't forget a single engine it needs nitrogen cold gas thrusters to maintain roll control and orientation so they still have to have those be pulsing to maintain a perfect that's probably your mostly seeing actually is the roll thrusters and as a matter of fact I feel like I actually asked Elon this once on

Twitter way back in the day and I pretty sure he said yeah roll the roll thrusters for the upper stage mostly what's interacting but you see do see a bunch of stuff you do see you know nitrogen like build up solid chunks of nitrogen solid chunks of potentially oxygen ice you know building up on certain areas

and the yeah the roll control thrusters I think are the main thing that are interacting kind of a random intervals just to maintain proper roll and orientation during acceleration so that's that's mostly what's interacting with that that thermal foil there yeah hopefully that answers that question I feel like I went on a pretty big rant there about foil and yeah but that's one of those fun things that you do see with those cameras so

yeah again in the future I hope with these next starship launches that we see even more camera options we see even more fun and I can't wait for flight three or four oh my gosh flight four holy crap I'm losing track of time and space already but that is coming up we think already in May so hopefully we see some better views even and if the vehicle maintains orientation through reentry

which we hope it does then the starlings should be even be able to provide perfect coverage all the way down which is absolutely nuts that's the main reason why they had the blackouts is because sometimes when it's rolling over during reentry when it had no real control no orientation control during reentry of flight three

Starlink the Starlink receivers and dishes were facing the ground facing earth and away from the Starlink satellites up in space so hopefully it maintains better orientation on this next launch and as it punches a hole in the plasma wake as it has this big wake in the plasma it should still be able to communicate with one of the

6000 Starlink satellites in the sky and maintain an uplink which is amazing big big valuable asset there so again space X is kind of providing their own infrastructure which is pretty valuable so amazing we'll be working hard to get even better coverage yet for flight four

I can't wait for that we've again kind of always tweaking always upgrading got a lot of new things and even better tracking assets as always and hopefully of clear skies we're just constantly pushing on our end to provide good coverage for you guys for that next one and I hope you join us so it's going to be super fun

but yeah that's that's going to do it I think for this episode be sure and if you guys have questions use the hashtag spacewalk podcast all one word on any platform I've been searching around

like I said I'm kind of trying to stick to kind of one topic like this and just kind of get them all out there once like I said I did some new stuff a little bit here not planning to always do new stuff but

oh actually holy crap before I finish this speaking of cameras and space you guys see that starling apparently has cameras on board that we've never really seen before that showed the path of totality during the eclipse and it's absolutely incredible footage

the ISS also had a few shots of it as well but the starling one is really cool because there's so many of them like it's just crazy that they could you know get such an awesome shot like that

but that's just another one of those things that is really cool so maybe we'll have to talk a little bit more about that but that's cameras on on rockets so whatever questions you guys have

hashtag space podcast and of course for those of you that are supporters thank you so much for your support we have been prioritizing people on patreon ex subscribers and youtube members but mostly

obviously patreon we have the the biggest group there so it's the easiest to to look through there and and catch things there so patreon is still a preferred if you want to support the work that we do here at everyday astronaut and space walk

go over to patreon.com/everydayastronaut and get your questions on air but that's going to do it for me I'm Tim Dodd the Everyday Astronaut thanks for joining me on this space walk

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