Citation Needed - Sputnik

Episode Date: March 4, 2026

Sputnik 1 (/ˈspʌtnɪk, ˈspʊtnɪk/, Russian: Спутник-1, Satellite 1), often referred to as simply Sputnik, was the first artificial Earth satellite. It was launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957 as part of the Soviet space program. It sent a radio signal back to Earth for three weeks before its three silver-zinc batteries became depleted. Aerodynamic drag caused it to fall back into the atmosphere on 4 January 1958.

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Hello and welcome to citation needed. Podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts. Because this is the Internet, and that's how it works now. I'm Heath, and I'll be doing Mission Control for today's exploration of space travel, allegedly. And I'm joined by the engine, the fuel, the guidance, and the faulty O-ring. Cecil, Tom, Noah, and Eli. Finally, validation frame of my extensive olive oil habit.

Man. Yeah, listen, in my case, the fuel is mostly a volatile mix of coffee and beef jerky, so... Jesus Christ. Yeah, blast off. Delicious. Go for lunch is what you're supposed to fucking say, I guess. Do it right. And Eli's asshole is broken.

So, Noah, I was shunning. I was shunning. Go for lunch with such a good bit. It was such a good bit. So Noah, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event? Are we going to be talking about today? Today, we're going to be talking about Sputnik. All right.

And why Sputnik? Because you could make the argument, or more specifically, I could make the argument and am going to make the argument, that it's the single most important technological achievement of the past hundred years. So from our modern post-Spotnick vantage point, it can seem like progress, at least outside of the political realm, is just a matter of technological innovation. But in reality, it's a nexus of technology and culture. And there are very few things that had both the technological and cultural impact of Sputnik. Okay. So what was Sputnik?

Well, there were actually multiple Sputni-I, but the one that everybody just refers to as Sputnik is actually. Sputnes seams? I'm not sure. I'm sure it's not Sputney, I, but yes. It's a murder of Sputniks. Yeah, there you go. Spouse. But what we're going to be talking about is officially Sputnik 1.

It was a 184-pound metal sphere that was about two feet in diameter. That's 84 kilos and 58 centimeters in communist. And it became Earth's first artificial satellite on October 4th of 1957. It beeped its way around

It peeped its way up around the upper atmosphere for a couple of months and ultimately burned up in re-entry on January 4th of 1958. In that time, it set off the space race and would usher in the age of satellite technology that allows you to listen to this podcast and saved us all from the periodic obligation to go to a McDonald's parking lot to meet our stupidest relatives and drive them the remaining four miles to our fucking houses because they couldn't puzzle like complicated shit like make a right on Morton Avenue. Okay, but that also means we lost the fine art of giving people fake directions. And that was truly magical. I think I killed some people. Okay, but it's nice that I don't have to deal with directions like go 10 minutes on that road. Right, yeah. The unit of going 10 minutes.

I think I killed some people. I think I killed some people. Oh, I also get lost a lot. Yeah, I wasn't a lot. Now, I should note up front that Sputnik 1 is to Russian pride as Apollo 11 is to Americas, as evidenced by the fact that virtually every person with any involvement whatsoever with the mission is named in the Wikipedia article about it. It's damn near to the point of like, and that bolt was tightened by Corporal Yeramalaiv, with 87 foot pounds of torque, right?

So just a word of warning that given the level of available detail and my obsession with Speliorabye, with space shit minutia. I'm calling upon all my willpower not to tell you how much liquid oxygen was left after main engine cut off and shit like that. Okay, well, now that's all I'm going to be thinking about. All right. Well, that was 375 kilograms.

Spoilers, Jesus Christ, man. 375. Nice. It's so fucking much. That's fucking nuts. Okay. Tell me about it. So the idea for an artificial satellite first officially enters the historical record on December 17th of 1954, when the Soviet Union's chief rocket scientist, Sergei Koroelov,

makes a formal proposal to the Minister of the Defense Industry, Dmitri Ustinov, who then forwards the report to engineer Mikhail Takonarov. See what I mean about the level of detail? Anyway, I'm going to spare you the next 11 steps in this chain and summarize that eventually it was approved. It was well understood by educated laypeople at the time that an orbiting satellite was the next scientific step towards space travel. this was after we decided that throwing an anvil on the other side of the seesaw wasn't to kind of cut it anymore that was it well cecil you know what archimedes said give me an an anvil and a lever long enough and i'll catch that road run he was wrong by the way he never did catch you yeah died without catching now of course we should be clear the soviet union wasn't just in this for advancing space travel and ushering in a new technological age right the two biggest weapon technologies that came out of world war two where the atomic bomb and the V2 rocket. And it didn't take a hell of a lot of imagination

to put those two things together and imagine the terrifying hellscape we now live in where a city annihilating bomb could be launched from anywhere to anywhere. The moment's notice on the whims of such famously stable and circumspect men as Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump. Okay.

Kim Jong-un's are kind of like the anvil and the seesaw. It's not great that he has anything. Yeah, you can still bomb a lot of shit. And, of course, launching a satellite, though, is great practice for launching a nuke. And a very public way of demonstrating to one's nuclear-armed enemies that one has the capability of putting those nukes

wherever the fuck they want. Yeah, like right now, you wouldn't know it, but we're showing off how well we do in a land war by invading Minneapolis. Sure are. And they fell on the ice, like, so fucking hard. I still watch them falling, like, a few times a day. It's the best.

It's like how cancer patients have that big medicine box. He's like the Nazi getting punched. Ben Shapiro saying a wet of a vagina is a disease. And then a nice guy being like, uh, uh, winds out of me. Delightful.

Delightful Derek knocking the shit out of that bootlicker kid in Minneapolis. That that was, okay. That's another good one. Okay. So the next. Can we get some ice guys up onto like a wine press? I feel like that's what.

We should just be tried to do that all the time. All right. So the next big milestone in this story actually comes out of the United States. In July at 1955, then President Dwight Eisenhower announces that the U.S. was planning to launch the world's first artificial satellite in 1957. Now, up to this point, Coralov's proposal was still kicking around the USSR's labyrinthine bureaucracy with a sort of fucking urgency that one generally applies to the novel they've been working on.

But once the U.S. said they were going to do it, the Soviet efforts were quick. quickly pushed to the front of the line. Four days later, Soviet physicist Leonid Setoff announced that actually they were going to build the world's first satellite and the race was on. We have to move the space vodka down one notch to

number two for a few months. I'm very sorry, Sergei. I know you were very, very... He's absolute disaster. I wanted to call it Sky vodka. Well, that's what they had to settle for, because they couldn't get to space. So they had to knock it down to number two. Now, so initially, the Russians went to work on a thing that was way more ambitious than Sputnik.

The original design, which was called, I shit you not, object D at the time, would have weighed between 1,1,400 kilos. That's like 2 to 3,000 pounds, and would carry 2 to 300 kilos of scientific instruments. That's like 440 to 660 pounds. And those scientific instruments, they would measure the density of the atmosphere, it's iron, composition, solar winds, magnetic fields, cosmic rays, all that nerdy shit that scientists get excited about. But once they got to work on it, they learned the first rule of launching shit into space, which is that everything always takes longer and costs more. Huh. I guess artists and scientists aren't that different after all.

Big difference, Eli, is the scientists actually finish their projects. Sometimes. Sometimes. Now, ultimately, it became clear. You know from NASA that their munchausen suspect? No, ultimately, it became clear that there was no way in hell that they were going to launch Object D by their self-imposed deadline of 1957. And if they waited long enough to actually get this thing working, there was a very real possibility that the Americans were going to beat them to space. Now, they didn't abandon the original project. It would still be launched at a later date as Sputnik 3, but they did stick it on a back burner long enough to develop a much less ambitious project that would ultimately. win them the first key victory in the space race.

Okay, that shit shouldn't count. Like, basically they just threw a two-foot ball into space and called shotgun with it. We're inside of the space now. Yeah. I totally agree, Heath. So this project would be the first to wear the Sputnik name. Apparently Putnik means traveler and the S prefix means fellow. So Sputnik means fellow traveler.

It can also mean spouse in the right context. And it's also just the generic term for satellite. as well. And I know that might seem like a little bit of a boaty make boat face kind of thing. Just call your satellite. Satellite 1, which is what they did. But it was also a common term for like a communist sympathizer, a fellow traveler. So the name takes a lot of boxes. Language doesn't change much. A young probe today is called a Lutnik. It's a little different. No, of course, the whole point of the satellite to a lot of people involved the rocket that was going to carry it to orbit. That would be the R. 7 Semyorka. Now, this rocket was originally designed as an intercontinental ballistic missile, and they'd already been modifying it for the launch of the much heavier objectee. So retrofighting

this now for a smaller satellite was comparatively easy. If you want to visual of this thing, it's basically it's like a conical rocket with four smaller rockets attached to the north, southeast, and west of it. Now, these smaller rockets, as though in a gift for people trying to make dick-related podcast jokes about the subject in the future are called strapons. Yeah, fellow anal probes or slutniks, according to formulation. Cecil gave us. I'm sorry, but four at once, that's just greedy, a little distracting. Absolutely.

I don't know. It's too damn many. Disagre. Look silly. Now, so if you want to test rockets, you're going to need yourself a rocket-proving round. But, of course, the USSR had nothing, if not vast expanses of land that was scarcely populated by people. They didn't really mind dropping rockets on. And it was here that the first couple of unsuccessful launches of the R7,

would take place, forcing me to try to read sentences like a fire began in the block D strap-on almost immediately at liftoff, but I fucking picture on a rocket rising for the launch pad with a flaming silicone dick sticking out of the side of it, right? Now, it actually gets worse when a later launch has an electrical malfunction that sends the main rocket into an uncontrolled role that, quote, resulted in all the strap-ons separating 33 seconds into launch. Yeah, and it's even more funny if you picture Russian Big Bird screaming for help inside the window. Big Bird was almost on the challenger.

I know I haven't brought it up for a couple of episodes, but I think about it every day, and so should you. Yeah, actually, if it had been that weird anteater elephant character that they had launched in a space, it would have turned into a real snuffaloficus film. This is Christ. Really had to shove that snuffaloffigus in there to make that work. Really had to jam in there.

No, but he's on fire and dying now. But after three spectacular strap-on flinging failures, they got the rocket working at least well enough to launch their scale-down satellite. Now, the final iteration of this little guy literally could not be simpler. If it was any simpler, it wouldn't have worked. It was basically just a highly polished metal ball to make it more visible, and it had four antenna sticking out of the back of it. All it could do was transmit a beep. That beep could vary if the satellite lost pressure or if the temperature got too high or too low, but that was it. and that was just so that if the thing stopped transmitting,

there might be some clue as to why. Yeah, so like an air tag. Yeah, exactly. A lot like an air tag, yeah. Now, the bulk of Sputney's 184 pounds was in its power supply, which took up about 112 pounds of the payload. It had... Same girl.

It had three batteries. And yes, the Wikipedia tells us who designed those batteries and where he was working at the time, two of which would power the one watt radio transmitter, with the other powering the thermal control unit. that thermal control unit sounds real fancy, but it was a fucking fan that would kick in if it got too hot inside the metal ball. That was it.

Amazing. That was it. And as dumbed down as it was, by October of 1957, it was ready for its rendezvous with outer space. All right. So basically they had the seesaw and the anvil,

and they made the anvil into a ball and do it in reverse, got ready to shoot the space. We'll see how it goes after the break. Comrades, I have wonderful news. What is it, Georgie? We have just begun

Space race with America. What is space race? Well, we are racing them, you see. To space. Okay. But why? Well, because if we beat them to space,

they will know that if we had a war, we would win. Why? Why will they know that, Yorgie? Because we have rockets. The rockets can reach them.

Okay, so shouldn't we just build those Not your four That would start World War III Wait so let me get this clear We are building Spaceship

And the Americans are also building Spaceship Ah yes of course And we know They are just secret Practice rockets But if we build the actual rockets We have nuclear war

Exactly yes Sure Why not Let's go to space Nostrova. Is that what we're saying? I think so. And we're back.

When we left off, Soviet Wiley Coyote had a really cool schematic. Ready to go. It just might work. What's next? Fucking order from Acme. So, like, honestly, it would be hard to exaggerate just what a monumental undertaking this was at the time that they were doing it. Not only were they doing this all with 1957 technology, but they were working with most of the worldwide scientific. community locking them out to varying degrees. So, like, when it came time to calculate the orbit

and shit, they were using an early precursor to the calculator called an aerithmometer, which, by the way, looks fucking amazing. I won't know they so bad. But they did have access to a computer for some of the really complicated shit, but, like, only for the most challenging of calculations because pretty much the whole fucking country had to share the one computer. With the exception of access to intercontinental ballistic missiles, the five of us are better equipped to launch a metal basketball into space than the USSR of 1957. Narathmometer, I look this up and it's like asking the pawn stars guy, hey, you got any computers for math that no one's done before?

And he's like, best I could do is a wind-up calculator. That's the very best I can do. Wait a second. Do you guys not have access to intercontinental ballistic missiles? Or space lasers. These guys launched a satellite with a dry erase board full of math problems. And a few weeks ago, I realized I forgot how to do long division on paper. I think we're safe.

I think we're fine. Now, to be clear, there was no mechanism to steer this motherfucker or correct this orbit or whatever. Whenever they got when they hurled into this space, that's what they were going to get. Now, they were aiming for an inclination of 65 degrees, which would mean that ultimately the orbit would take the satellite over. over top of damn near every inhabited place on Earth. What they wound up with was 65.1 degrees, which was fucking close enough. Sorry, Sir, okay, did you say like 65-ish?

I'm not living the ish in our rocket science. It's not rocket. Oh, fuck it is. God damn it. So, okay, so now this was a staged rocket, meaning that the strap-ons would fire and carry it to a certain speed, and then the main engine would fire to give it the boost that would need to get into orbit.

Now, the boost was so significant that it actually launched the main stage of the rocket into orbit along with it, which leads to this weird bit of trivia where the SATCat numbering system that numbers all of the world's artificial satellites lists Sputnik 1 as SATCat 2. SatCat 1 is the main stage of the rocket, which was technically the second man-made satellite to enter orbit, but the first one to be observed from the Earth, and that's how these things are numbered.

In fact, though Sputnik was technically dimly visible to the naked eye, pretty much everybody who thought they saw it was actually seeing the much larger, much more visible rocket trailing behind it. You know, dear, that's actually the main stage of the rocket, not the actual thing. Shut the fuck up, Harold, nobody cares. You're the fucking worst.

God damn it. We're going to get a credit card without you. Jesus, we're all picturing the same meme, as you say it, too. Now, but of course, you didn't have to see the satellite to know it was there because it was beeping. and it was beeping in just such a way that anybody with a short wave radio could tune into the correct frequency

and hear it as it passed overhead. And of course the Soviet propagandist made damn sure that everybody had access to the telemetry data that told them exactly when it was going to pass overhead. And the motherfucker was traveling at the astonishing no longer inside the atmosphere speed of 18,000 miles per hour,

meaning it took about an hour and a half to orbit the planet. So if you missed it, you didn't have to wait all that long for it to come back around or you could try again. And of course, if you didn't have a short Wave Radio, no worries, because pretty much every TV and radio station in the fucking country

was playing those beeps for you constantly. Okay, guys, look, I want to do this, but are we sure we can't replace the beep with like a little, fuck America? Don't just say, no. Tell me we really tried it. Like, we tried, and then we I'm sure they did. I'm sorry,

Noah, don't have to wait that long to try again. If an app on my phone takes longer than 10 seconds to load, I will buy a new phone, get a new carrier, and commit a hate crime and frustration. And you're telling me people waited 90 minutes to hear a beep.

It was several beeps. It wasn't just one beep. They couldn't get a credit card on their own. Now, contrary to popular belief, the launch of Sputnik did not catch the Eisenhower administration off guard. We started flying U-2 spy planes over Russia the year before,

so America had been able to monitor the development of the space program pretty closely. You can't exactly throw a fucking tarp over a rocket launch after all. And look, I get that there's a ton of spin that's been applied over the decade to make Eisenhower look better over all of this. So take this with a great assault. But according to the Wiki, the U.S. was actually kind of hoping that the Soviets would launch their satellite first. They actually wanted to get voted in as homecoming jester.

I was looking forward to it. I was like what I was shooting for. In related news, so the Fox, these grapes are sour. Yeah. Very likely bullshit. And then the Fox died because dogs actually can't eat grapes. So it's a die. So stupid.

Stupid story. Okay, so here's the thing. We're coming for the water guy. We're coming for Asob. We're coming for all the Greeks today. Archimedes. Archimedes is the guy, yeah. The water wheel.

The water wheel. I was thinking like the picturing the Hinkley and Schmitti for some reason. I thought I missed the joke. Hey, fuck Aesop too. Right? Something real. Right? Yeah.

Chicken shit. Fables only. Fuck you. So, okay. So here's the thing. Pito. Before the U2 was operational, really, the U.S. had tried gathering data with these high altitude balloons that we pretended were for weather shit, right?

This is called Project Genetrix. And we used it to get aerial views of Russia and China and wherever the fuck else that we wanted an aerial view of. Now, the Russians had protested pretty loudly about this shit, and they even shot down a few of our balloons. So Eisenhower's people retroactively claimed that they actually kind of wanted Russia to test the legality of orbital overflights before they, or they waited back into this shit. Cool. Yeah, just like when CBP saw that Happy Birthday Balloon and shot it with a military laser and ended up shutting down the entire El Paso Airport

and all the airspace near it. Here's the thing, though, I heard from the administration. It actually was a drug cartel using the Happy Birthday Balloon as a fake drone. But your thing, now we know that they know that we know they know about balloon. bluffing. Well, as we're shutting an airport down.

Fuck, yeah, man. But regardless of what you believe about whether we were ever trying to win this race, one thing that's undeniable that caught Eisenhower by surprise was America's reaction to Sputnik. So since the end of World War II, the U.S. had been in its so-called fat and happy phase. Americans believed that they were the cultural and technological pinnacle of the world. We mistook being the only guys whose factories weren't bombed. shit for a natural advantage in industriousness, and we mistook

getting the best Nazis after the war for intellectual superiority. So the very idea that some other fucking country was doing a thing that we couldn't do, let alone a fucking communist country, precipitated a national identity crisis. Yeah, to be fair, the solution to

this turned out to be, destroy societal cohesiveness and shared truth so entirely that you can just announce that the satellite is yours and half the country will believe you, but also we got a Holocaust denier to win that chess game that one time. So that was cool.

That was cool. Yeah, I'm fairly well convinced that Russian trolls will lead us all into a chant of USA as 50% of the population runs outside when the bombs hit to sun their assholes and discuss high value females. Oh, God, the next day will be awesome though, right? Oh, man.

Just all those assholes burnt up like Kalamari rings out. Yeah, we're done, you know? Fuck, yeah. See, this is what went wrong in Challenger. So it didn't help matters that America had really been primed for this achievement thanks to a collaboration between Werner von Braun and Walt Disney.

Can't imagine what those two had in common to talk about. So now that led to the development of three cartoons detailing the steps between current technology and space travel and those widely viewed cartoons had cemented the idea in the American consciousness that an orbiting satellite was stouted. F-1. And fucking Russia getting a head start, meant that those bastards were going to already have all the best moon real estate taken before we even got

there. I'm not buying a condo on the moon, okay? The fees offset the value when you sell. Okay, you got to buy five though. That's where the real money kicks in. It's at five or more. I'm listening because I'm American. I don't understand.

Also golf clubs. So the public demanded action. They wanted their own beeping-ass baseball, and they wanted it now, damn it. So the Eisenhower administration swung into action and made some changes that helped to steer the national course for the next 69 years and counting. Nice.

So among the immediate changes was the creation of both the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, and the Advanced Research Project Agency, or ARPA, which would later be called DARPA. Between the two of them, they would... Do we call it Warpa now? Oh, interesting. since we switch to warp.

Don't suggest it or they'll change it. So between NASA and DARPA, they've given us now the internet. Derpa more like it. GPS, cordless tools, memory foam, the computer mouse, voice recognition software, cochlear implant, scratch-resistant lenses, and tang. Look, Bill, we already have object-D and strap-ons. There's no way we're calling that orange powder drink Wang. We're just not doing it. But it means war now.

It means war. Although that guy already invented it. We're just adopting the Wang. Well, that's true. Borrowed Wang, yeah. So now it would also lead to a renewed focus on science education in America. Whenever we fail at something as a nation, we tend to blame teachers for it. So in 1958, Congress enacted the National Defense Education Act.

It completely overhauled math and science education in the U.S. and it provided low interest loans for college tuition to students majoring in math and science. Nice. And we've been amazing at math and science. We have, yes. Okay, again, I was invited to join the Illinois Math and Science Academy as a young person. Without a calculator, I cannot do any math more complicated than estimating the restaurant. Yeah.

Estimated. Fair. Same. Now, but things would get worse for America before they got better. So unlike Russia, where there was nobody around to see their first three. rocket failures except for the people working on them and the YouTube pilots flying overhead. We fucked ours up live on camera. So when in December of 1957, a mere two months after Sputnik beeped its way into history,

America's Project Vanguard rocket only made it about four feet off the launch pad before crashing back to the ground and exploding in a giant fireball... I mean, it's kind of a compliment. It's because America's so much prettier. So pretty. That's the thing. But America... My electric cars are really good.

But Americans were devastated by this, right? So a poll at the time showed that 26% of Americans thought that Russian science and engineering was superior to that of the United States. Though a renewed focus on propaganda did get that number down to 10% within a year. Took a lot of redactions, but we did it, everybody. We did it. Right, right. So within a few years, the U.S. would successfully launch several of its own satellites

and the USSR launched several more of its own, touching off the race to pollute the skies that's fucking up astrophotography today. But regardless, the three and a half month head start, the Soviets got in launching shit into space, left a wound in the U.S. national psyche that wouldn't really be repaired until we walked on the moon a dozen years later. And then it still wouldn't be repaired because the space race, like literally everything else after World War II, has been about delaying the long overdue revolutionary cycle. In this essay, I will. And though its impact can still be felt today, Spotnik itself is like.

long gone. There are several replicas in museums and a couple of actual prototypes that were built in case the first one blew up during launch and there's a couple in private collections that I'm pretty sure Russia just made after the fact and told private collectors were prototypes that were built in case the first one blew up.

It's just a ball. Yeah, right. No, I know. I know. I'll leave it a replica. I have a replica of stuff. You know there's one space nerd in Russia being like, that's not how they bowl look he was. Yeah, right. No, it is. You got it wrong and I put all the names on the Wikipedia page and then Noel left them all out because he said it was boring.

I didn't leave them all out. Why would it be boring if the rest is not boring? Even the whole thing is boring and none of it is boring. But the actual satellite though, that they caused all the trouble, it only transmitted for 22 days. The rocket stage that was trailing behind it stayed in orbit for about two months, burned up in reentry on December 2nd of 1957. Sputnik itself would hold out for another month, but Earth's gravity would reclaim it on January 4th of 1958 after its 1,4th of 1440th, trip around the planet. While we can't know anything for certain

because this motherfucker got really hard to track once it stopped beeping, it's widely believed that the satellite broke up over the Western United States. On the morning, after its fiery death, a man in Encino, California woke up to find a piece of glowing debris in his yard that later proved to be the type of plastic

tubing used in Sputnik. Now, according to the wiki, quote, no one has ever been able to prove whether this is in fact part of the satellite, end quote. Oh. All right. And if you had to summarize

what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be? Apparently, there was a fat and happy phase that preceded the current fat and sad phase that were in.

And are you ready for the quiz? I am fat and sad, at least. All right, Noah. Forge just still seems like a lot of strap-ons. I mean, this is clearly, A, at least one too many, right? B, like visually at least. I don't know. I'm thinking about the number of holes that you could use.

Exactly, yeah. I don't know what's wrong. I feel like four is actually, I think it's a secret answer to see. That's actually exactly right. It's exactly right. You're focusing on the aesthetics a lot. Like the artistic is the Misan Sen of the fourth strap-on. It's like a feng shui with strap-ons. It's like a whole, yeah, it's like a whole thing. Okay, now, Noah, a spotnik is obviously a very important first artificial satellite for mankind. What's another famous first in orbit? A, the first dust b the first heart rate monitor the beat nick c the first bag of rhesies candies

the piece nick or d the first satellite to veer off course and go its own way the stevie nick amazing all right well i have to toss this out um neat nick beat nick and piece nick actually were all derived from sputnik that that the use of the nick is a yeah the use of nick as a as a um suffix all comes from the spot that's why I did this. That's why I did this. That's why I did this. This fucking Stevie Nick joke is so god damn. I didn't. I thought they were there I had no idea. Who am I kidding? I'm like, everybody knew this but me. What's what's going on? I didn't know that. I was

lying. You don't have to admit any they're all right. Yes, yeah. D is amazing so he correct however it works. You just say it never apologize for any of your lives. The Eli Bosnick story, baby. All right, Noah. As you mentioned, we would eventually win the space race, but our battle with Russia wasn't over.

What did they count as the end of our international feud? A, the time they convinced us not to elect Hillary Clinton. Oh, my fucking God, yeah, they can have the moon. Fuck. That's it. Damn it. Eli, you win, I guess, for that truth. That was fun.

Now, Heath has to write an essay. Perhaps about a delightful bone mo I just educated him on. Eli doesn't know what Bonne Mo means, really. Okay. For Tom, Noah, Cecil, and Eli, I'm Heath. Thank you for hanging out with us. We'll be back next week, and I will be an expert on something else. Do we now and then?

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Check out citationpod.com. And here it is, General, the first rocket that will go to space, if you know what I mean. Excellent. But can you make it go to the moon? Of course we can. Can't we? Yorgie?

I feel like you guys are losing track of the metaphor here. I mean, yep, yes, we can probably, yes, go to moon, maybe. Nostrova! I think that's wrong.