There are many lessons to be learned in the rapidly changing Space Industry, and one of the most important is that no matter how successful you have been, tomorrow might be the end if you don't innovate fast enough. Starship Integrated Flight Test 4 should launch in May, and Elon Musk has given us a preview of Raptor 4 and Starship 3. SpaceX plans to use these innovations to dominate the space industry, but can they make it possible to colonize the Moon and Mars within our lifetime? Shop the Academy store at... https://shop.spreadshirt.com/terran-space-academy Please help support our channel at... https://www.patreon.com/terranspaceacademy Thank you so much for watching! Ad Astra Pro Terra Artists https://twitter.com/C_Bass3d https://twitter.com/LabPadre https://twitter.com/Neopork85 https://twitter.com/hazegrayart https://twitter.com/AlexSvanArt https://twitter.com/_fragomatik_ https://twitter.com/nickhenning3d https://twitter.com/RGVaerialphotos Companies https://twitter.com/NASA https://twitter.com/SpaceX https://www.cochranex.com https://twitter.com/blueorigin https://twitter.com/Space_Ryde https://twitter.com/VirginGalactic https://twitter.com/relativityspace https://twitter.com/NeutronStarSys Credits ULA NASA SpaceX ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JIm7PXaC4A

To feed, house and educate our growing population humanity must develop a better way to produce energy. In last week’s lesson on the Astrophysics of Fusion we learned that the strong nuclear force holds nuclei together but is very short range. Since all nuclei in regular matter have a positive charge from their protons… and the electromagnetic force is long range… like charges repel and the nuclei are pushed apart. The core of a star has enough pressure and heat to overcome this repulsion and the strong nuclear force takes over. This is how stars produce energy… through the fusion of lighter elements into heavier ones. These reactions produce a LOT of energy. Stars can do this because their incredible mass creates extremely high pressure and temperature in their core. We can’t reproduce this method of fusion energy here on Earth. We can’t accumulate that much mass… and it would be hard to fit it into our cars and spaceships. We need a better way. Fusion energy has been the dream of humanity since we figured out that our sun was not a giant ball of gasoline around the turn of the 20th century. We described how protons fuse to diprotons with on of the protons sometimes decaying into a neutron creating deuterium. The deuterium will fuse with another proton making helium 3 which combines with another helium 3 to produce helium 4 and eject two protons. This is the only method of fusion readily available to the sun and all stars early in their lives… because they are made mostly of protons with a little helium 4. Nuclear scientists learned early on that if they wanted to produce fusion, they would have to do it another way. But understand that fusion is not that hard to accomplish in the laboratory. In many ways fusion was easier than fission. The first particle accelerators were really charged energy particle beams. Strip electrons from an atom, put a large negative charge behind them and watch them speed away. Put a large positive charge behind your target and have everything in a vacuum and you have an effective particle gun. These early guns became the first vacuum tubes and were used in televisions and computer displays for almost half a century. Now let’s do the same thing with protons…as Professor Ernest Walton did in April 1932 at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge University. We should all know this man’s name since he was the first to accomplish artificial fission. He used this device to slam protons into lithium atoms producing fission and causing helium 4, also known as alpha particles, to be produced. Think about this…he artificially turned one element into another. Something alchemists had been trying to do for millennia and thought by many scientists at that time to be impossible. But that ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks3WGZF9GBQ