OK, we know what you’re thinking, and we’re sorry.
A couple of weeks ago, humanity reached a new milestone in space-flight awesomeness,
and we’re just now bringing it up.
But, bear with us!
On December 21st -- for the very first time -- the private space-flight company SpaceX
managed to land one of its rockets after boosting 11 satellites into orbit.
It’s the first time in history that a booster landed successfully after delivering its payload
into orbit, and I’m pretty sure you could hear the entire Internet cheering.
We were cheering too!
And we really wanted to tell you all about it!
But it was right around the holidays, so we decided to wait until this week, because on
January 17th, SpaceX is going to try it again-- this time, landing one of its Falcon 9 rockets
on a ship in the ocean.
The basic idea behind making rockets reusable is pretty simple: Rockets are expensive, so
it’d be nice if we didn’t have to keep building them from scratch.
The Space Shuttle program had its own solution to this problem: solid rocket boosters that
parachuted safely into the ocean once they were done boosting.
They were later refurbished and reused.
But for the Falcon 9, landing is a lot more complicated than attaching a couple of parachutes.
Instead, SpaceX uses the rocket’s engines to slow it down, stabilize it, and gently
land it vertically in a particular spot -- the kind of landing that could someday be used
on the Moon or Mars, too.
And that might sound simple enough, but it turns out to be incredibly difficult.
The Falcon 9 is heavy, for one thing, and it’s hard to control something that massive
when it’s moving hundreds of meters per second, and you’re fighting gravity at the
same time.
So the reusable rocket is designed to save some of its fuel to help it slow down and
position itself for landing.
Plus, it has stabilizing legs to land on, and a whole lot of software to keep everything
coordinated.
But the landing on the 17th is going to be even trickier than last month’s.
The mission for Falcon 9 is to launch Jason-3, a satellite that’ll monitor Earth’s oceans.
And once that’s on its way, SpaceX will try to land the Falcon on what it calls a
drone ship -- basically a platform floating in the middle of the ocean.
Trouble is, if you’ve ever been on a boat, you know that the ocean … wobbles.
So this flight will show us if the rocket can account for all the extra swaying.
If it can, then we’re well on our way to having a reusable launch system.
And if it can’t, well … we can always try again next time.
There’s a lot riding on this landing, so we’re all rootin’ for you, SpaceX!
Now, that’s what’s happening with spaceflight in our solar system.
But what about space travelers in other star systems?
Even though we haven’t found any aliens yet, according to a team of astronomers from
Harvard and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, there’s a new place
we should be looking.
Their idea, which they presented last week at the meeting of the American Astronomical
Society, is that alien civilizations could be living inside globular clusters -- clusters
of very old stars at the outer edges of our galaxy.
Why hasn’t anyone thought to look there before?
Because we’ve barely found any planets in those clusters.
There are more than 150 globular clusters in our galaxy, and we’ve only ever found
one planet in any of them, known as Messier 4.
The astronomers propose that there could be plenty of planets out there in those clusters
-- but we just haven’t spotted them because all the light from other stars is making it
hard to see them.
When the team modeled how the planets might form within a cluster, they found that lots
of them would probably end up in their stars’ habitable zones -- areas where life as we
know it could survive.
Still, there are planets in habitable zones all over the galaxy.
So why should we look for signs of extraterrestrial life in globular clusters?
Well, if planets formed within these old star clusters, and if life happened to evolve on
one of them, it would have billions of years to develop space travel -- and have plenty
of nearby stars to visit.
Alien civilizations might even be sending messages between different systems -- which
is exactly what we’d be listening for.
So in our search for alien life, globular clusters are back on the map.
Thanks for watching this episode of SciShow Space News, and thanks to everyone who commented
‘Falcon 9, Falcon 9!
Don’t forget about Falcon 9!’
We didn’t forget, and we heard you.
We’re so excited that you’re as excited as we are.
If you want to help us keep making episodes like this, just go to patreon.com/scishow.
And don’t forget to go to youtube.com/scishowspace and subscribe!