Outer space

It is the ultimate vision of the end times, a gargantuan, roiling column of orange flame and black smoke towering into the sky, with its top a massive ball forming something of a mushroom shape.

But have you ever wondered why atomic bombs produce such distinctively shaped explosions, or what a nuclear detonation would look like underwater, underground, or even in outer space or the surface of the moon? It turns out, in each environment the result of the explosion is extremely different, in some surprising ways, especially when it comes to what happens when a nuke explodes in space, with this result being almost certainly not what most think, and definitely not what Hollywood ever depicts.

So grab your Geiger counter, radiation suit, and a tasty survival ration as we dive into the fascinating physics of nuclear explosions, and then use all that knowledge to definitively answer the question, just what would a nuclear blast in space, and on the moon, look like? To begin with, while mushroom clouds are most often associated with nuclear explosions, they can be produced by any sufficiently powerful explosion.

Indeed, the largest recorded volcanic eruptions of the modern age, Tambora in 1815 and Krakatoa in 1883, both produced enormous mushroom clouds of ash and debris stretching up into the stratosphere.

Large masses of conventional explosives produce a similar effect, as observed during the 1917 Halifax explosion, the 1945 destruction of the Japanese battleship Yamato, and the 2020 Beirut explosion.

The mushroom cap and stem continue to rise until the gas and dust within them are no longer less dense than the surrounding atmosphere, whereupon the cap halts and begins to spread out.

The altitude at which this occurs depends strongly on local atmospheric conditions such as temperature and dew point at various altitudes, with clouds from smaller detonations usually halting at the top of the tropopause approximately 17 kilometers or 11 miles up.

More energetic detonations, however, may rise even higher into the stratosphere, and indeed the most powerful nuclear weapon ever tested, the 50 megaton Soviet Tsar Bomba, detonated on October 30, 1961, created a mushroom cloud that rose to an incredible altitude of 67 kilometers or 42 miles, approximately two-thirds of the way to outer space.

However, there are real legally binding regulations.

the United Nations developed the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, or the Outer Space Treaty, which the United States has ratified.

It restricts the use of space for peaceful purposes, but otherwise grants free access to nation states.

That doesn't mean a nation state can't impose legal restrictions on its own citizens.

We're getting ready for the 250th birthday of the USA.

It is time for another batch of Deep Space updates.

And we have had five different Starlink launches in the last couple of weeks.

Four from Vandenberg on the 21st, the 25th, the 28th, and July 1st.

We are seeing a whole bunch of photographs of it being integrated.

It looks like an absolute monster.

This is gonna fly on a Falcon Heavy, potentially by the last day of this month, more likely next month, but we are very excited to see this thing head out into deep space and start discovering some new stuff.

So now, Leo Labs, again, the company that tracks stuff in space with space radars that they build, they observed that the Chinese Shenlong reusable space plane had deployed a payload.

I'm like, all you need is air molecules, pressure, light, sound.

What are we doing here? Optical parallel processing for the Internet of Space things.

What's that? Free space optical.

That's that grid I'm referring to with all those little sensors in between us and everything around us all the time.

Yeah.

I think I heard in your show that, no, I may have heard this in the news somewhere, that Eli have more, going to own more space in outer Spain than China and Russia.

Nice.

Because

It lands in the Sea of Japan.

Under what acts of the Outer Space Treaty does Japan not have to give it back?

wait does it does it land in like territorial waters like exclusive economic zone uh

it's right to recovery oh okay they can just choose not to recover uh ara which is like the arrangement on return to rescue astronauts and hardware okay they can just refuse to acknowledge that and be like all right ours now awesome sorry

It gets weird.

Okay.

So Article 5 of the Outer Space Treaty is all about you can only receive or grant help if you're asked for it.

You have to acknowledge the thing.

So listeners, last night Connie and I both watched the movie Lifeforce.

It's a 1985 horror, thriller, space, alien, vampire, zombie movie-

Mm-hmm

... directed by Tobe Hooper, who is known...

He's, like, a British director known for his horror stuff.

So this, uh, does seem to have kind of a, a cult following.

I was looking up horror movies that are set in space or that are space related, and this was one of the more interesting ones that was also available on platforms that Connie and I both had.

Um, so-

Hi, thanks for joining me today.

We are picking up where we left off in last week's episode, talking about recent executive orders relating to space cybersecurity and how they are shaping U.S. national priorities.

Welcome back, everybody.

Thank you for joining me on this fine day.

Good to be back.

Yes.

We are diving back into our chat about executive orders from the second Trump administration relating to space and space cybersecurity.

We went through, I think, two executive orders in the first part.