Pentagon backs two SpaceX rivals; Moon contracts fly

Transcript

Vera LindqvistThe engineer. Reads the test report before the press release.Cal RennickThe settler. Counts every week as a step closer.Dr. Noor HaddadThe cryptographer. Bitcoin, protocols and proofs, in plain words.Dr. Tomas ReyesThe mission scientist. What the papers mean for living on Mars.

Cold open

Vera Lindqvist0:00 The US military just lent 150 million dollars to Rocket Lab, a launch company. And not long before that, it made the same kind of promise to Stoke Space. These are the first launch companies it's backed in a big way, and one report says defense officials are already thinking about what happens when SpaceX winds down its Falcon rocket program.

Cal Rennick0:19 Oh, wow. Okay, I'm into that. Nobody gets to a new planet on a single supply line, so more rockets from more companies is exactly what I want to hear.

Welcome

Vera Lindqvist0:32 Welcome to The Weekly Sol, I'm Vera Lindqvist.

Cal Rennick0:34 And I'm Cal Rennick. Just so you know, we're AI voices, all of us on this show, the two of us and our two specialists.

Vera Lindqvist0:42 If you're new here, the show comes out of The Daily Sol, which is a daily briefing on the road to Mars from the Marscoin Foundation, at marscoin dot org slash sol. It was a lean week, just two editions, but there was a lot packed into them.

Cal Rennick0:55 So, three things today. First, Road to Mars, which is money and contracts flowing toward rockets and the Moon, plus a long stay in a pretend Mars habitat and a rover that's still drilling. Then Tomas Reyes joins us for The Lab, and Noor Haddad for Sound Money. And we'll finish up at the Republic.

Road to Mars

Vera Lindqvist1:11 Road to Mars, and let's start with where we opened. The Pentagon's capital office promised a 150 million dollar conditional loan to Stoke Space a couple of weeks ago. Then on Tuesday it disclosed a second one, same size, to Rocket Lab. It's been backing battery, drone and semiconductor companies too, but launch is new for it.

Cal Rennick1:30 And Ars Technica's read is that defense officials see the planned wind-down of the Falcon program as a possible national security risk, so they want other rockets ready to go. To me that's a pretty big vote of confidence in two companies that aren't SpaceX.

Vera Lindqvist1:45 Yeah, it makes sense to me. I do want to flag one word in there, though, which is "conditional". The Stoke money only shows up if they meet certain terms, and we don't know yet what those are. They still have to go and build the rocket.

Cal Rennick1:58 Sure, but come on, a military lender doesn't hand out 150 million dollars to just anybody. Somebody over there looked at that rocket and thought, yeah, these people are going to build it.

Vera Lindqvist2:07 Oh, I think that's probably true! I just like to get excited once there's a launch date attached, you know?

Cal Rennick2:12 Ha, of course.

Cal Rennick2:14 And the Moon got its own burst of news. Senior NASA officials spent more than 90 minutes at a news conference last weekend going through lunar awards and new calls for bids. Landers, nuclear-powered rovers, scouting drones, power, communication satellites, one reveal right after another.

Vera Lindqvist2:30 Ars Technica reports that Carlos García-Galán, the Moon Base Program manager, said, quote, "This is what it takes to do the Moon Base in the timeline we have set forth." And Ars's own headline suggests that the way NASA buys things might be its real advantage in the lunar race.

Cal Rennick2:46 I love that. That's an agency moving at the speed I want to see. I think of the Moon as the rehearsal, and I'd bet Mars is going to want a lot of the same kit.

Vera Lindqvist2:54 I'm happy about the awards, I really am. I just think some of those dates will move, because dates always do, and I'd rather say that now than in two years.

Cal Rennick3:03 Ha, we'll see. I've got a good feeling about this one.

Vera Lindqvist3:06 Okay, on the human side. The crew of NASA's CHAPEA Mission 2 walked out of their simulated Mars habitat at Johnson Space Center in Houston on Saturday, October 31, after 378 days inside.

Cal Rennick3:20 378 days! I get restless after a long weekend. So what does NASA actually get out of it?

Vera Lindqvist3:26 NASA said the health and performance data will help it develop ways to counter the risks of human spaceflight on future Artemis and Moon Base missions. So it's data about people, which is exactly what you want in hand before anybody's really on their way.

Cal Rennick3:40 There was a guest post on the Mars Society's blog this week that I keep thinking about, and it was about the delay between us and Mars.

Vera Lindqvist3:47 Right. On October 18, light took 12 minutes, 48 seconds to cross from Mars to Earth. So if you ask a question and wait for the answer to come back, that's almost 26 minutes.

Cal Rennick3:59 Almost half an hour for a yes or no! And the post says solar conjunctions, when the Sun gets in the way, come about every 26 months and last about two weeks. So the first people there can't phone home for every decision. They'll have to be people who can make up their own minds, and I find that kind of beautiful.

Vera Lindqvist4:16 The last one was January 9, and the next is March 21, 2028. So at least it's on the calendar, which is how I like my problems.

Cal Rennick4:24 One more, because the geologist in me insists. Curiosity finished its drill campaign at Nazca this week. The rock there holds disk-shaped crystal forms, and the samples went to the SAM instrument while other cameras and instruments looked at nearby targets. And the team made a priority of imaging Phobos eclipsing the Sun.

The Lab

Vera Lindqvist4:43 Of course they did. All right, on to The Lab. Tomas, I know you've got a bioplastic paper with your name on it, at least in spirit.

Dr. Tomas Reyes4:51 I do, thank you, Vera. It's a preprint on arXiv, so this is the authors' own report. They present something called Mars Seed, which is a reference architecture for making a bioplastic, polyhydroxybutyrate, entirely from Martian resources, for building habitats. And they report that the upfront power and mass costs of the gear are recovered within two synodic periods, compared with shipping the material from Earth.

Cal Rennick5:17 Okay, so what does that look like for somebody standing there?

Dr. Tomas Reyes5:20 Well, picture a kitchen where you can make your own containers instead of ordering them from far away. The authors say it could keep making plastic until the gear fails, without any further supplies from Earth. And for the first people building a home, I think that would feel very different from waiting on the next ship.

Vera Lindqvist5:37 So what would have to be shown next?

Dr. Tomas Reyes5:38 Somebody would need to build the gear and run the whole process, and see whether those numbers hold up. I like it very much, but for now it's a careful sketch, and a sketch needs building.

Cal Rennick5:48 There was a second preprint on your list, too, a big one.

Dr. Tomas Reyes5:52 Yes, another preprint. The authors report the first 3-D climate simulations of a terraformed Mars with an oxygen and carbon dioxide atmosphere. At 30 hPa, which is five times today's pressure, they find temperatures that would suit lichen and moss.

Cal Rennick6:09 Lichen and moss. I mean, that's a start!

Dr. Tomas Reyes6:11 It is. And at 60 hPa, they say forests become possible, starting in Hellas Basin. They also say that making the air breathable through photosynthesis alone would take at least thousands of years.

Cal Rennick6:23 Thousands of years! Well, somebody's got to plant the first moss.

Dr. Tomas Reyes6:27 Somebody will, and I hope they enjoy it. Thanks, both of you.

Sound Money

Cal Rennick6:32 Now, Sound Money. Noor, there's an open problem on the Bitcoin development side that I'd love you to explain to me like I've never mined anything in my life.

Dr. Noor Haddad6:41 Happily. So when a mining pool finds a block, the reward has to be split among everyone who helped. The obvious way is to give each miner their own payout inside the block itself, one coinbase output per person. And a post on a Bitcoin developers' forum says that doesn't scale. It's a bit like splitting a restaurant bill when the receipt only has so many lines.

Dr. Noor Haddad7:03 And then there's what the authors call the rich list attack. A large miner splits itself into lots of identities, grabs a lot of those limited slots, and the smallest miners get pushed off the list. The authors invite everyone to work on solutions.

Cal Rennick7:18 So someone pretending to be a crowd can squeeze out the actual crowd. And a settlement would want its small participants to stay in, so, is this solvable?

Dr. Noor Haddad7:28 It's posted as an open question, so nobody's claimed a fix yet. But I do like how cleanly it's stated, because a problem laid out that clearly is much easier to attack.

Vera Lindqvist7:38 One more from your desk, Noor. LNbits released version 1.7.0 on November 10, after attacks began on November 8, Bitcoin Magazine reports. And the project says funds on earlier versions are at risk.

Dr. Noor Haddad7:52 Right, so if you run it, upgrade, and if you think you've been hit, set up a fresh server. A full technical report is promised, and I'll read it the day it's out. Thanks, both of you.

The Republic

Vera Lindqvist8:05 And now the Republic, our own corner of all this, and it's a good week for it. The Marscoin chain reached block height 3600123 on Thursday, and the target is a block every 123 seconds.

Cal Rennick8:19 And it's been keeping right up with that, 725 blocks produced in the last 24 hours.

Vera Lindqvist8:24 There's a new release too, Electrum-Mars version 4.4.5, published on November 10.

Cal Rennick8:30 I love seeing that, the chain just going block after block while people keep shipping software for it.

The Sol Ahead

Vera Lindqvist8:35 The Sol Ahead. A Senate committee is set to advance NASA's picks for chief financial officer and inspector general, so watch for that. Europe's Hera spacecraft has started taking a close look at the asteroid NASA rammed four years ago. And that LNbits technical report should land.

Cal Rennick8:51 My week in one line: money and contracts are lining up behind rockets and the Moon, and a settlement's plastic and its patience are both getting worked out on paper. I'm happy with that.

Vera Lindqvist9:02 That's The Weekly Sol. Remember, every voice you heard today, ours and our specialists', is AI. You can find the daily briefing at marscoin dot org slash sol. I'm Vera.

Cal Rennick9:13 And I'm Cal. Go build something. See you next week.