Neil deGrasse Tyson
speaker
1,246 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard yesterday
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
a few things maybe it's not obvious to people that there's a reason why launches
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All right.
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With great effort, launches are are made as close to the Earth's equator as you can.
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Uh in fact, there is a a a sea launch company that would launch your satellite from the exact equator because they've just moved their boat to the equator and then launch it there.
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But uh think about where we launch in the United States.
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It's not in Maine, it's not in Alaska, it's in Florida.
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And Florida is closer to the
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Equator than most any place else in the continental United States.
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The reason for that, of course, is as Earth rotates, the equator is moving faster than any other latitude.
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It's going about a thousand miles an hour.
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So that's an easy number to remember because the circumference of the Earth is about 25,000 miles, and we rotate once in 24 hours.
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You divide the two, you get about a thousand miles.
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miles an hour.
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If you're anywhere else, you're traveling less fast.
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Well, if you launch east,
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something into orbit, you need less fuel because you're already going a thousand miles an hour.
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And so, if you need less fuel, you have more payload.
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So nearly all things ever launched in the history of the space program were launched near the equator, due east.
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If you can launch in any other kind of orbit, it takes way more fuel to accomplish this.
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And what's cool about polar orbits, however, which is many spy satellites have those orbits, because you get to spy over Russia.
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Showing 181–200 of 1,246 · page 10 of 63
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