Hello!

Thesis: Captured by the magicalness of space, human exploration and utilization of space will continually exponentially expand, creating valuable opportunities for innovation. To effectively expand our space capabilities, we must first understand what we’re dealing with and consider the entity interactions that make the universe work.

Welcome to the Insights, Innovation, and Economics blog. If you’re new here, feel free to read my general Introduction to the Blog to understand more about the blog. If you’re returning, thank you, and hope you have a great read!

Credit Reddit

Space 101

For many millennia, humans had no means of understanding the universe. Several centuries ago, however, humans began to apply mathematics and new investigative principles to the search for knowledge. As these tools began to be refined over time, the nature of the universe began to be revealed.

Only around a century ago, astronomers first observed galaxies beyond our own. 50 years later humans first began sending spacecraft to other worlds. In the grand scheme of things, we’re brand new to the concept of space.

NASA writes:

In the span of a single human lifetime, space probes have voyaged to the outer solar system and sent back the first up-close images of the four giant outermost planets and their countless moons; rovers wheeled along the surface on Mars for the first time; humans constructed a permanently crewed, Earth-orbiting space station; and the first large space telescopes delivered jaw-dropping views of more distant parts of the cosmos than ever before. In the early 21st century alone, astronomers discovered thousands of planets around other stars, detected gravitational waves for the first time, and produced the first image of a black hole.

To quote my thesis:

“Captured by the magicalness of space, human exploration and utilization of space will continually exponentially expand, creating valuable opportunities for innovation.”

But, the beauty of innovation only happens once you understand the problem or situation you are innovating for or within. So, let's learn!

Credit The Kennedy Center

What is space?

Space, simply, is everything in the universe beyond the Earth’s atmosphere – the Moon, satellites, planets, the Sun, the Milky Way, black holes, etc.

Space also means what’s between planets, moons, stars, etc. – it’s the near-vacuum (known as the interstellar medium) of low-density gas or plasma.

In fact, you’re technically in space right now.

What’s the difference between space and the universe?

Space and the universe are often used interchangeably, but in reality, they do relate to different aspects of the cosmos.

The universe refers to everything in existence. It includes all of space and all of the matter and energy that space contains (including time).

In other words, space is actually just the vast regions between celestial bodies. Space is where everything in the universe is located and moves within. It’s often depicted as the “emptiness” or the “void” between objects. In reality, space can contain various forms of matter, radiation, and energy (e.g., interstellar gas, dust, electromagnetic radiation).

The universe refers to all matter, energy, galaxies, stars, planets, and even space itself. It is the totality of everything in existence, both observable and beyond our current observational capabilities.

The example commonly used is a pool table, where the universe is the entire pool table, the balls are the celestial objects contained within, and the area on the tabletop that the balls move between is space.

As you can see, “space” makes up around 95% of the universe, with various forms of atomic matter making up the remaining 5%.

Credit NPR

How big is the universe? How do we know?

Humans continue to discover more and more things in the universe. We haven’t even explored all the worlds in our solar system. In other words, most of the universe that can be known remains unknown.

No one knows exactly how big the universe is. Humans measure it in light years (the distance that light can travel in a year - roughly 5.8 trillion miles). From the light visible to our best telescopes, we have found galaxies reaching almost as far back as the Big Bang, which is thought to have started our universe about 13.8 billion years ago. That means we can see into space almost 13.8 billion light years.

To explain easily, that’s 80,040,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles. In other words, very large.

But the universe continues to expand, making measuring it even more challenging.

Credit Discover Magazine

What are all of the different entities in space (making up the 5% of atomic matter)?

Humans have categorized various clumps of matter in space based on their attributes. Galaxies, stars, planets, moons, comets, meteoroids, asteroids, black holes — they’re all collections of matter exhibiting characteristics different from one another but all existing in the universe.

Stars

Stars are the most widely recognized cosmic objects (simply look up at the nighttime sky).

Stars are born within clouds of dust. These clouds slowly form into larger masses of gas and dust, eventually collapsing under their gravitational attraction, forcing the material at the center to heat up. This center is known as the protostar, it is the hot core at the heart of the collapsing cloud that will one day become a star.

As the cloud continues to collapse, a dense, hot core forms and begins gathering dust and gas. Granted, not all of this material ends up as part of the star (see sections on planets, asteroids, and comets below).

In general, the larger the star, the shorter its life (we’re still talking about billions of years here people so it’s not a huge deal, but interesting to note).

When a star has no more fuel, the core begins to collapse into itself and becomes much hotter. This increasingly hot core pushes the outer layers of the star outward, transforming the star into a red giant.

If the star is sufficiently massive, the collapsing core may become hot enough to support other forms of cosmic objects, which I’ll detail below:

Option 1: The average star becomes a white dwarf (all outer layers have been ejected and the hot code is exposed). White dwarfs, roughly the size of Earth, gradually fade into oblivion as they cool down.

Option 2: If a white dwarf forms in a multiple-star system, it may become a nova. What happens is the white dwarf draws fuel from a nearby star and creates a large momentary reaction (think big explosion). In a nova, only the star’s surface explodes.

Option 3: Sometimes, very massive white dwarfs may have so much mass that when undergoing the nova process listed above, they collapse and explode completely, becoming a supernova. In a supernova, the entire core explodes, releasing an enormous amount of energy which is thrown violently outward.

Supernovas are so violent that for a period, a supernova may produce enough energy to outshine an entire galaxy. NASA cites that on average, a supernova occurs once every hundred years in a typical galaxy.

Option 4: If the collapsing core at the center of a supernova is smaller, the energy combines to form a neutron star. Neutron stars are very intriguing as they are the densest objects known in the universe (essentially taking the mass of a star squished down to the size of a city). One 1-cm cube would weigh around 1 trillion kilograms on Earth (roughly the weight of a mountain).

Option 5: If the collapsing core at the center of a supernova is massive, the energy collapses completely to form a black hole.

As you can see, many options and variations of stars exist throughout space.

NASA cites the following:

Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, contains at least 100 billion stars, and the observable universe contains at least 100 billion galaxies. If galaxies were all the same size, that would give us 10 thousand billion billion (or 10 sextillion) stars in the observable universe.

Credit USA Today

Planets

Planets (post the 2006 Pluto definition scandal) have the following characteristics. Planets are any celestial body that orbits a sun, are massive enough to have a nearly round shape, and have cleared its orbit of debris.

Dwarf planets are smaller objects similar to a planet, but not exhibiting all characteristics of a planet. They generally are large enough to be shaped by gravity into a round (or nearly round) shape. But, they don’t have enough gravitational impact to clear their path of other objects as they orbit a star.

Credit Country Living Magazine

Moons

Moons are naturally formed bodies that orbit planets. The best example is, of course, Earth’s Moon (known as “the Moon” - yes it’s ironic there are more of them, but we named it before we knew that).

Many moons formed at the same time as their orbiting body, but some formed in other ways. Scientists hypothesize that Earth’s moon may have formed when an object around the size of Mars crashed into Earth, spraying huge amounts of material into orbit around Earth (when eventually accumulated into one large body - the Moon).

Most moons are made of rock, but many also contain large amounts of ice, gas, and other chemicals.

National Geographic cites that moons can circle dwarf planets, large asteroids, and other bodies.

Credit National Geographic

Asteroids

Asteroids are rocks that are not big enough to be dwarf planets (although we have found asteroids with rings around them, e.g., 10199 Charilko). The general hypothesis behind asteroids is that they were remnants from when the solar system was formed.

Asteroids tend to follow behind or ahead of planets, or can even cross in a planet’s path. Unlike commonly seen in the movies, there is a great deal of space in between each asteroid.

NASA (and other space-focused entities across the world) have programs in place to scan for potentially dangerous objects in space and monitor their interactions with our planet carefully. These programs track near-Earth objects or NEOs, track asteroids we have discovered, and predict where they are headed.

Credit Science News

Comets

Comets, similar to asteroids, are objects believed to have originated from a vast collection of icy bodies. Each comet is more like a giant snowball than a space rock. Comets have a center called a nucleus that contains icy chunks of frozen gasses, along with some small bits of rock and dust,

Most comets traditionally orbit a star. As a comet approaches a star, the heat of the star causes ice to melt and stream away from the comment.

While there are likely billions of comets in the solar system, NASA has confirmed around 4,000 comets to date.

Credit Encyclopedia Britannica

Meteoroids

Meteoroids are small fragments and debris in space that are the result of collisions among asteroids, comets, moons, and planets. They are among the smallest “space rocks.”

Meteors

Meteors are meteoroids. Meteors are meteoroids that fall through Earth’s atmosphere at extremely high speeds. The pressure and heat they generate as they push through the atmosphere causes them to glow and create streams of light in the sky.

Meteor showers (many meteors at a time) occur when the Earth passes through a trail of particles left by a comet (or comets) – remember, this occurs when the comet gets closer to the star and starts “melting.”

Meteorites

Most meteors burn up completely before touching the ground. These are often referred to as “shooting stars.” But, if a meteor successfully makes it to the Earth’s surface, it becomes a meteorite.

To be clear, here’s the breakdown of singular space rock. When it’s outside our atmosphere, it’s considered a meteoroid. When it is inside our atmosphere, but not yet on the surface, it is a meteor. And when it is on the surface, it is a meteorite.

Credit The Independent

Galaxies

Galaxies are one of the biggest cosmic structures we can see. The best way to describe a galaxy is that it is a vast collection.

Galaxies contain forms of matter (stars, planets, asteroids, etc.), but they also contain sprawling systems of dust, gas, and dark matter.

But wait. This is where it starts to get really cool.

Nearly all large galaxies are thought to contain supermassive black holes at their centers.

Even crazier, galaxies can form in clusters (large groups of galaxies) as large as hundreds or thousands of galaxies bound together by gravity, becoming almost a “supergalaxy” (yes I just made that term up but I feel like it fits).

A 2016 study estimated the observable universe contains over two trillion galaxies.

Credit Earth.com

What else is out there in space?

Dark Matter and Dark Energy

About 27% of the universe is dark matter and 68% is dark energy, neither of which are even remotely understood. What we do know is that the universe as we understand it wouldn’t work if dark matter and dark energy didn’t exist, and they’re labeled “dark” because scientists can’t seem to directly observe them. At least not yet.

Dark matter is thought to make up around 80% of the matter in the universe, but it’s not known what it actually is, or even if it is actually “matter.”

Dark energy is a mysterious and unknown force or entity that scientists hypothesize is responsible for the universe’s ongoing expansion. We know how much dark energy there is because we know how it affects the universe’s expansion, but other than that, it’s a complete mystery.

One explanation for dark energy is that it is a property of space. Albert Einstein was the first person to realize that empty space is not nothing. Space has amazing properties, many of which are just beginning to be understood.

Credit SciTechDaily

Black Holes

A black hole is an astronomical object with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape it. A black hole forms when a star exhausts the fuel in its core and collapses (see section above for more details), creating a supernova explosion and a subsequent black hole.

Once formed, black holes can grow through matter that falls into them, including gas from neighboring stars and even other black holes.

Credit Wikipedia

Imminent Space

All of this space is cool, but it’s thousands to millions of light-years away. 99% of space is not anywhere near close enough we could have a direct impact on it (or it have an impact on us).

So, let’s chat about imminent space (for my purposes this will be anything within the Milky Way).

What is currently in the space of our galaxy?

Credit Conceptdraw

Satellites

A vague definition of a satellite is anything that moves around a larger object. Earth is a satellite because it moves around the Sun. The Moon is a satellite because it moves around Earth. These are considered “natural” satellites.

Yet, usually when someone says “satellite”, they are talking about a “man-made” satellite – a machine made by people (this is the definition I will use when I discuss “satellites”).

These satellites fly high in the sky so that they can see large areas of Earth at one time. In addition, they also have a clear view of space (uncrowded by clouds or air).

Within our solar system, satellites are launched into space and orbit Earth (or another body in space). There are over 8,000 man-made satellites in various Earth orbits that serve many purposes.

Satellite functions:

• Communication: Used for telecommunications, radio, television, internet, and wireless signals.
• Navigation: Used for geographic location data (e.g., GPS).
• Weather: Used to monitor weather and climate data.
• Earth Observation: Used to observe and monitor the Earth’s surface, oceans, atmosphere, and environment.
• Space Telescopes: Used to view and explore the rest of space.
• Military: Used for military, defense, and surveillance applications.
• Research/Science: Used for specialized scientific research missions and/or experiments.

Credit NASA

Space Stations

Space stations are artificial structures placed into orbit that can support human habitation for extended periods. The most well-known orbital space station currently is the International Space Station.

The International Space Station is a partnership of five space agencies from 15 countries and has been continuously occupied since 2000. The space station orbits Earth about every 90 minutes.

Space stations generally don’t have major propulsion or landing systems but contain docking ports to allow other spacecraft to dock to transfer crew and supplies.

Smaller space stations are launched fully assembled, but large stations are sent up in parts and assembled in orbit.

Credit PBS

Debris

Contrary to the proper saying, what goes up doesn’t always come down. Space debris (commonly called “space junk”) refers to fragments left behind in space.

In 1961, McKinsey cites that before the Soviet Union sent the first person into space, fewer than 1,000 pieces of debris had accumulated. Now, there are thousands (maybe even millions).

Most space junk is debris from rocket-launching material and disused satellites, but it can be debris from missiles, and other objects left by astronauts.

The reason that this space junk is important is that it is potentially dangerous. This debris travels at roughly 10 kilometers per second. A collision with a large object going that fast is dangerous, but even junk as tiny as a paint fleck can be a problem.

McKinsey cites the following:

Since 2000, the ISS has moved 32 times to avoid coming too close to an object.

Credit UNSW Sydney

Why do I care about Space? (And why I think you should care too)

Reason #1: Understanding space gives us more context into the world we live in, where we come from, and where we’re ultimately going. Yes, this reason is a more big-picture view, but I think it’s interesting to understand more about the natural world and how we fit into it (however small our impact actually is in the grand scheme of things).

Reason #2: Space and aerospace innovation (for discovery, tourism, voyages, colonization, etc.) has positive externalities for many other entities.

Reason #3: Space is like real estate. There is only so much usable space, either in orbit around the Earth or on the Moon (or other planets - Mars, for instance). So, as we continue to explore space and launch more technology into orbit, space will become increasingly crowded, which, as we’ve seen above, can pose extremely dangerous for other objects in space.

We’ll talk further in the future about these reasons (and many more), but for now, I’ll leave you with the following:

“It takes a planet to explore the universe.” - Dylan Taylor

Anywho, that’s all for today.

-Drew Jackson