Doomed to Fail - Ep 116 - Off by a Milli-something: How Tiny Mistakes Doomed Space Exploration

Episode Date: June 24, 2024

Ready to get nervous about our place in the universe? Farz tells the story of the Mars Climate Orbiter - lost on the dark side of Mars forever - & other stories of near misses and lost billions of research dollars from one very very tiny mistake. We also discuss the Hubble Telescope and ask the eternal question: how do cameras work?If you're worried that you're messing up at work remember at least you're not a NASA Scientist (unless you ARE and in that case, WOAH you're listening to our podcast?!?! Thank you, we are honored).  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Hi, Taylor. Hello. Did we decide that I'm no longer qualified to do the intro? Um, sure. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Doom to Fail. My name is Taylor, joined here by FARS. We're the podcast that brings you history's most notorious disasters and epic failures two times a week. And Fars, I think you go first today. But let's banter a little bit first.

Let's banter a little bit. So tell me about your weekend. My friend Agnes is here, a listener and friend, Agnes. So we've been hanging out yesterday. I was exhausted. So they let me sleep and they all went to the pool. And I'm baking some bread, just a good hang. What kind of bread?

it's like this it's like a fake holla because like a halla takes like nine hours so it's like similar to a hollow but it takes like two hours the poor man's holla or at least the efficient cookers hollow yeah i went earlier and next time you visit taylor i got to take you to this pastrami shop next to my house or well it's a deli but i got the pastrami sandwich it is actually you know what you're from new york or you lived in new york so you probably wouldn't like it i was in a pastrami club in L.A. We went to like a bunch of different Jewish delis and stuff. It was great. I would say that it is the best pastrami sandwich I've had since leaving L.A. and not being able to get canters. But Cantors was still better. And even at that level, I think that your experience with New York

Jewish delis is probably leaps and bounds above canters. Is that fair? Yeah. That's fair. But still, if it's a good one, it's a good one. It's not, you know. We're not precious about our sandwiches. So Taylor, I'm going to go first today. And, you know, I don't actually even know where my notes are. There's so many, so many monitors up at this moment. There we go. I know. I have so many monitors.

So I'm going to do two stories today, but they're kind of abbreviated. It's still going to be kind of long, but it's going to, it's like, I cut the content down quite a bit. So I started out by the most doomed to fail thing I can think of that sounds innocuous. innocuous but isn't that innocuous, which is units of measurement, but if you confuse units of measurement, bad things happen. Okay. But then I got into my second topic, or actually the first topic in order here. And I thought it was a units of measurement issue. And I started researching it and I was like 90% done. And I was like, shit, this was not a unit of measurement issue. It was just to goof them up. So I'm going to do.

the, you know what, I'll start with the unit of measurement problem first. I'll go into the second, the second non-one that is not part of the topic later. Okay. So the first one I want to get into has to do with NASA. You know what? Actually, they both have to do with NASA. Whatever. NASA has a huge issue when it comes to units of measurement and not screwing them up.

Have you, wait, are you going to talk about the people that are stuck on the space station right now? no so they flew a well it was boeing though wasn't it exactly like you have to be brave to get on a Boeing airplane if you're getting on a Boeing spaceship you have to be unbelievably brave because they like canceled a little bunch of times and now I think they can't get back yeah those people spouses took out trillion dollar life insurance policies

when they sign up oh you want to take a Boeing fucking spaceship to space cool you I'm gonna start giving your clothes away as soon as you leave no kidding no kidding so coming home i um it's funny i started doing this research and i was focusing on this one one uh one mission and it just segued into mission after mission after mission i was like this thing doesn't just happen as a fluke it's like mission after mission like all very nervous happens all the time and i think i kind of know why so i there's two things i'm going to attribute it to one i'll i'll actually discuss in this in this issue which is bureaucracy so i think that when things get

It's super bureaucratic. Your capacity to make any change with like an individual person within that organization is limited. And as cool as I think NASA is in the mission and the people that are how smart there that work there, it also feels like a really weird, stupid, gross bureaucratic government entity that like is just like very bleak and gray. And it's like, did you follow your TPS report? It just feels really crappy. Something else that I happen to know that I love is that when NASA was first started, it was called the N-A.

So dorky. Isn't that fun? I guess it's fun, sort of. Also, all you have to do is watch Paul 13 and look at Ed Harris wearing, like, a buttoned-up white shirt with, like, no sleeves, but like a black tie on with his, like, crew cut. And you're like, why are we doing this? Like, we don't have to look like this. We can actually be, like, cool and fun and edgy.

But, like, they're not like that. And that's part of the problem. It was 60s, though. Everyone looked at them. I guess nobody was edgy then. That's good point. Everyone wore it. That's, like, the 60s outfit.

I'm thinking about the moon rover guy Remember the moon rover guy Who had like his Part of his head was shaved Or he colored his hair red white and blue Remember that? He's an Iranian guy That's why he stood out to me I don't remember

But that's fun So that's one of the reasons The other reason is that it sounds like NASA Has to hire a ton of different companies To get anything done Like one company builds this thing One company builds that thing They all kind of come together

And assemble it somehow And that seems to cause issues as well because you're dealing with units of measurement that they might be interpreting differently. So we're going to get into a 1998-1999 failed mission, one of many, that is called the Mars Climate Orbiter, which was part of NASA's Mars Global Survey Program,

which the entire point of was to survey the climate and atmosphere around Mars. Because even back in 98, we were talking about potentially one day having, to populate Mars. So this is not a new, new thing that we just kind of cooked up. This has been going on.

Actually, this was devised in the late 80s, and this launched in 98, so. That's, um, do you think we're ever going to actually live on Mars? My,

my guess is absolutely not. We have to. We have to, because I research it. Space is incredible, Taylor. Like, you could really,

you should really get into space. I'm into space. I've researched space. I learned a lot about space volcanoes. But I'm just saying, know if we're going to really ever go in four billion years our galaxy in the indromeda galaxy collide we're like everything that's that we know of actually mars will be a part of that so yeah yeah getting to mars and having to live there is like i think it's like v1 of learning

how to just be intergalactial or whatever i don't know i i don't think um i think that's the great filter i don't think we're going to get there you can we're all going to die yeah well you heard you hear from first from taylor um anyways that was the entire point of this climate orbiter so it was um also supposed to serve as a communication relay for a thing called the mars polar lander i've already kind of foreshadowed this a little bit i'll get to what happened of that mission in the moment but we'll move on it was it was designed off of another device called the mars Observer, which it was very similar in kind of design,

the launching mechanism, all that stuff. And that thing, the Mars Observer, it launched five years earlier. That was also lost by NASA in Mars's orbit. This goes on. I mean, it seems easy to lose things in space.

No, it shouldn't be this easy. I mean, if you have like a 50% failure rate, if 50% of planes you got on crash, you wouldn't fly. If 1% of the planes crash, you wouldn't fly. No, I know.

I don't think you would. So it was... Go ahead. I mean, no, you're totally right. I definitely wouldn't. But space is like incomprehensibly huge. Continue. I know, but just don't do it then.

Like, don't do it until you know... Whatever. Who might have to talk? I didn't even know what we're hearing about. I literally have trouble changing the filter on my... on my little water filter thing that's attached to my hip faucet. I bought a new one recently, so I'm really excited about it.

I'll tell you about it later. Please, we can do another episode on that. Perfect. So this thing, the orbiter, it was developed and engineered by JPL, the Jep Fulsion Lab, and built by Lockheed Martin and launched on December 11th, 1998. That's not the eventful part. Because once it launches, it takes forever to get to where it's going, and that's when you realize everything's wrong.

so it launches in December 11th of 1998 on September 23rd 1999 so 3rd 286 days after it launched it started to approach Mars the way they do this I had to do a ton of research into how things are launched into orbit which is like this stuff is so incredible Taylor so the way the way it works is that when you launch something and you're trying to line up with its orbit you basically are slingshoting yourself around it and then the gravity is pulling you closer to the orbit. The thing is, the trick shot is you need to match the velocity at which that orbit is rotating. You can't overshoot it. You can't undershoot it. So what that essentially means in this case is that this thing was in outer space flying towards Mars at 194,000 miles per

hour. Crazy number, right? That's terrifying. It had to break, apply reverse thrusters to get it down to 52,000 miles per hour as it's approaching Mars's orbit line up parallel to the orbit and then slowly just merge into it like traffic. Like traffic, right? Like the fastest traffic humanly

or they can ever possibly imagine. So crazy. And that's the thing. You look at stuff like Daniel like, okay, these people, it's got to be really hard to do what they're doing. So maybe it's fine. Oh no, we're not saying the people at Nessa aren't smart. Dumbasses.

they start i could i could do what they do um so on this day in september things are looking fine as the orbiter was slowly starting to align itself with mars's orbit and for a brief period of time it was planning on losing communication with the earth as it goes behind mars this is like naturally when that ends up happening so at this point is when they realized that something went wrong. So imagine this thing has been flying at 194,000 miles per hour for 286 days. They figured out, this is about a precision these guys have. They figured out that they lost communication 49 seconds earlier than they should have. After this thing traveled 14 billion miles or whatever that comes out to. I'm so nervous. And I like, like I'm sweating. I'm so nervous. I hate

this. Well, that's where the story on this. piece ends because it lost, it went behind Mars 49 seconds earlier than it should have, never to be heard from again. Nope. What? Done. It's gone. So it's got to be so, can you imagine dedicating so much of your life to this thing. And then all of a sudden, that's it's gone. What do you do? I know. I want to throw up. And I think that, um, because like when you watch NASA, when like something goes well and everybody's so excited, you're like, I wish I was ever that happy at work, you know? But, but you're like, I guess like, The lows are low.

Also, that was a trick question, Taylor. What you do if you're that guy or gal is you go to Chili's and get a margarita. I love Chili's. There you go. Exactly what you do. So an investigation was launched to figure out how on Earth a $193 million project, the equivalent of nearly $400 million today was lost. This is like a consistent theme.

Anytime you research these things, the Congress does not like funding NASA. like consistently across its entire history they've not been pro-funding NASA and so when they lose money to this degree it's always like what just happened first off I don't even know why you were spending this point to begin with now I know that even the thing that you thought was viable out of it you're not going to get out of it so explain to us what happens they did

what they found out was that Lockheed Martin had used US customary units as its calculation for the total impulse produced by thrusters. I'm going to talk about that in more in a minute. Okay. Versus what NASA used,

which was the metric unit. That's when NASA always uses the metric unit. So an impulse unit is the change in momentum of an object. So when you slam like a tennis ball

or a golf ball, the momentum shift one way or the other is an impulse unit. And if you measure it differently than it has obviously different ramifications. So the outcome was that the

orbiter ended up applying a lot more propulsion to insert itself into that orbit. Like I said, it has to kind of slow itself down and then starts, you know, what would you call merging? It had to merge into the orbit traffic and it applied a lot more of that sideways thrust than it should have because of that miscalculation based on what's called U.S. customary, imperial system is called U.S. customer unit versus metric units. Okay. Makes sense? Yeah.

ish yeah i actually i've been thinking about doing like an episode on like why things are different like why do we do this and like why do sometimes people drive on the left side of the road and like why does paper different sizes in europe like all those kind of things i would love to brainstorm things to cover yeah why is i such a luxury in europe why do you why do you only get one packet of ketchup at the McDonald's in Germany. Yeah. These things we need to figure out. 100%.

So what they think ended up happening is that as this thing went behind Mars, it propelled itself through the orbit and then just started running itself into the ground. They assume that it basically imploded or exploded about 35 miles above Mars's surface, where it would have, it's assumed that that's where you would have impacted the thick atmosphere of Mars and probably caused it to disintegrate. So ultimately, NASA actually blamed itself for not double checking the math.

And again, so stupid. They had two engineers who were like, the math is wrong. The math is obviously wrong. And they're like, no, no. You didn't follow the form. So it doesn't fucking matter the math is wrong. Go follow

form and then maybe we'll consider this. Like everyone should be in trouble. And I mentioned earlier, the Mars Pole lander. So this thing actually launched two months after. This was all part of this Exploratory program that NASA was launching. So there's a bunch of these things being launched in succession. And so they launched this thing, the Mars Polar Lander, two months after.

So around November of that same year. So this thing destroyed itself in September of 99. In November of 99, it had arrived in that same area. And that was also lost. And would they assume happen to that one around the same place that, around the same place that it was supposed to enter into orbit is it went through to land on it was supposed to land on the surface

there was a known vibration that would happen when this thing was entering into Mars's orbit and that vibration would cause a computer software to think that it was actually touching down and landing on the surface when it wasn't and so what happened was they think

that this thing went through the orbit it and the vibration happened causing a software bug to present itself and it didn't descend to the ground the way it was supposed to. It assumed it was already on the ground. So there was no arresting mechanism to slow its descent and it just crash into the ground.

So there goes another about $400 million. Jesus. So that's two pretty fun events. One thing I didn't mention is that we got our, the imperial system is actually based off the UK

weight. and measures act and we just call it something different than they do but it's the exact same thing so the UK still uses that that says the UK doesn't use the metric system no I mean not according to what I research you know what the most wild thing is is that they use stone for like a measurement of weight but it means 14 pounds so they'll be like oh I gained two stone and you're like why would you have to add by 14 anyway so they so the UK adopted the metric system in the 60s and 70s but they still use okay it's one of this you can add this to your list of things of why do they do things the way they do things because some things some units of measurement

are metrics some are not some are imperial so um just wildly confusing also the UK uses dry weight measurements called bushels and pecks that's what I'm talking about like the fuck is that what is something from a goddamn nursery rhyme UK yeah get with the program UK I do tell the children all the time I love them a bushel and a peck and two kisses on the neck do you really say that

yeah I don't know where they came from by I say they tell them all the time and I like especially when they're babies and they would like be like kissing them on the neck that is very cute actually yeah so the other story I have it's also NASA related and this one's probably a little bit more well known and this is the one where I researched I got to the very end of the research

was like shit that's not why it went wrong so let me explain real quick so I'm going to talk about the Hubble's telescope so again everybody knows what the Hubble telescope is basically it's just a very very large telescope that's in outer space it's in Earth's orbit so it's about 340 miles or so above the surface of the Earth originally did you think it was further out so I thought it was on Earth no no it's I had the guess I would have been like it's on Earth not that it's on Earth yeah no so there's a reason

why it's in outer space. So basically there was an astronomer in 1946 called Lyman Spitzer who was like, hey, we're never going to actually be able to understand and see what's outside of what's in outer space if we don't get off Earth. And the reason for

that is because there's a thing called atmospheric turbulence on Earth. And so that causes issues with our visibility into outer space. So for example, when you see a star twinkling, that's atmospheric turbulence. That sort of is not actually

twinkling. Right. That's just because the light getting to us and like things going and being in the way. Being refracted by our atmosphere. So in this thing you can't see it, but I'm doing a little wavy thing. So basically like I said before, like when anytime NASA seems to do something

like Congress doesn't like approving this stuff. So a ton of energy and effort went into trying to get the Hubble Space Telescope up on running. Like there was astronomy associations, lobbying groups. There's different countries that were involved in it to help fund part of it. Ultimately, they ended up securing about 36 million from Congress in 1978 to start building the telescope, which is like a drop in the bucket of what it actually

ends up costing. But that being said, I pulled some schematics on how this thing works. And I'm just going to admit to you and anyone listening, I don't understand how cameras work. I'm laughing because I like the idea that you understand how schematics work of anything. And then I don't either. I have no fucking idea. So please. What is it capturing my soul? What does it do?

How does it freeze me? I did. Do you ever make a pinhole camera in school? No. You like get like a piece of like photographic paper and like a pinhole and then like it makes an image. But like I don't know. We had a dark room in in seventh grade. and I remember being in there a couple times,

but no, I don't know, I don't get it either. Yeah, okay, so people, if anybody understands how cameras work, please tell us. That's one, one thing I thought was like, I was like, if you sent me back to like the 1500s, I would know nothing. I couldn't invent a car. I couldn't create a match.

I don't know what any of this stuff works. Like the thing, like, oh, I'm going to go back and invent things. I'm not going to fucking get anything. I'm going to invent the telephone. I'm going to be like, I swear to God, you guys, there's something we could do we could talk to each

and the people would be like, you're a witch or you're crazy and put me in a dungeon and like that would be it. I could totally see us like doing this like going back to the 1500s. It's like we're going to invent a telescope and then it eventually whittles its way down

so like we just like invent scissors and even those barely work. I know exactly. Oh, you guys already have wheels. Okay, what else? What else? What else? Can we work on?

A dog leash. Our dogs pets yet. They are not pets. Okay. No. So the original launch day for Hubble was October of 1986. but NASA was having some other challenges in 1986,

namely that the space shuttle challenger was destroyed and killed all the pilots on it or astronauts on it in January of that year. So basically everything NASA related, all their operations came to a halt so you could explain to Congress what went wrong in that situation. As a result, Hubble basically sat in storage for about four years where it would be basically tested, powered on and off to make sure its systems were in good working order.

it would have updates added to it throughout the process ultimately it would cost around $6 million a month to store this thing which yeah goes back to like what I spent earlier the $32 million they budgeted allocated for this was really really cute in 1978 so in April 24th of 1990 it was launched in the cargo hold of the Discovery Space Shuttle so it launched like I mentioned earlier it launched in Earth's orbit so not that far out um I said 340 miles above the surface, actually 336 miles above the surface. And over its first few weeks, they basically just like turned it on and off and will run test, calibrated stuff. There's a lot of stuff that goes into it. Again, science, science, cameras, science.

So on May 20th, it sent back its first image. Immediately scientists noticed a problem. And it wasn't hard to observe the problem. So if you ever look up Hubble's first images, you'll see that it's basically refracting light in a very obvious way. It's like if I'm trying to think like a way

to this. So if you like move your, if you're trying to take a picture and you move your camera around while you're taking a picture, it kind of like reflects light in that way. That's kind of what they look like. So basically what they realized looking at these images was that there was an issue with the mirrors within the

camera on Hubble that they had to address given the level of precision we're talking here, it is imperceivable what might have, it is imperceptive to humanize what was wrong with the camera but basically what it meant is the mirror that was responsible for refracting the light out of the light

source was off by 2,200 nanometers for context a human hair is 1,000 nanometers thick Jesus a red blood cell 7,000 nanometers thick so this is like a third

of it's so it's crazy I think the perception precision these guys seen So anyways, that's the skill we're talking about. What they discovered during the inquiry was that they're, again, they outsource all this stuff. So they hired a manufacturer called Perkin Elmer, which is still around today. And they were the manufacturer responsible for creating the mirror. So they had used a device called a reflective null corrector to measure and ensure the surface air of the mirror was smooth within the appropriate intolerance levels that NASA had defined for them.

So let's figure out what a reflective neural corrector is. Let me go ahead and put my science hand on. I already know that it. I didn't have to explain it. Okay, we'll skip it. We'll skip it. So basically, what you do is you put the mirror on the ground, probably not on the ground. It's a very expensive mirror.

You do something with you. This thing, this null corrector, is a device that is positioned on top of the mirror. And there's a pinhole on the top of it. and there is... I said pinhole. You did. You did.

That was related to something totally different, but we're going to bypass that. Whatever, it's round. Within this device are all kinds of lenses that reflect light back and forth amongst each other until they deposit that light source back out into the side, called a deflector, which is the observable place you would look at to see if this thing is correctly smooth enough. So at the top, you have a laser that shows.

shoots through that pinhole and then does this reflection and then pass it back to the deflector. So if everything is great, what you see is just a normal way of light. If you're looking at the deflector, all you see is a normal ray of light. If it's not okay, if it's off by the tension levels that are being defined by the designers, then you get that wavy look you know like when you were a kid you would see like channels that you weren't supposed to be watching on on tv like it would just be like kind of up and down uh it would it would show up like that and so that would be the clear indicator that you were off on your smoothness level so the thing that happened was that they used multiple null connect um sorry multiple null correctors

while they're measuring this thing so upon final inspection they decided to use a totally different new untested reflector that they built themselves so throughout construction they were using these like pre-made prefab whatever reflectors and then when it gets the final thing like we need to be the best we can possibly be this is NASA we got to do the top work we can possibly do we're going to create our own to be as perfect as possible would they realize that the lenses inside that thing were off by 1.3 millimeters so if you were looking at the reflector you saw a straight beam of light but you didn't know that inside the thing that was displaying that beam of light there was this malady right so NASA set to trying to find a solution

and the problems were to replace the same mirror in space would be impossible literally just logistically would be impossible to do it yeah bringing the telescope back to earth to replace it was cost prohibitive so what they decided to do was we know how off we are on the mirror itself so why don't we just install another mirror that just counters that imbalance that aberration yeah but they devised was this thing called a corrective optics space telescope axial replacement cool called co-star which is really cool and so and so that was built and devised to compensate for the aberration in the existing mirror so on the 1993, the mission was

mounted to fix the mirror. This was super risky. Right. Does someone have to go, someone has to go do it? Someone has to go do it. So in orbit maintenance was not the standard for NASA. The risk associated with it were crazy. And as I described, they've already lost like a space shuttle

14 different Marsland or a lot of things have gone wrong. So they don't want to risk this, especially because risky it means you can lose a human being or a equipment to deep space and there's no recovery mechanism but you don't get that person back yeah i hate it i hate it i was thinking teller is that would you rather did i ask you this movie would you rather die that way or in like that uh titanic um submarine i feel like maybe in a titanic submarine

because it just happens so fast like what do you do you just drift away until you starve to death or you run out of oxygen i would assume run out of oxygen or die of thirst that's really scary. I mean, maybe it's beautiful and you like get really introspective when you're out there, but no, I hate it. They have to give those guys like cyanide capsules, right? Oh, yeah. Actually, that's a really good point. They have to. There's no way they're like, Bill, I need you to go walk into outer space. And if you're knocked off, there was one story I read where they had to repair a satellite and the ways they were trying to catch it wasn't working. So an astronaut literally just held on to the space shuttle with one arm and then grabbed the satellite.

with his other arm and pulled them together. I was like, it's insane. What a job. That is insane. So, okay, well, there we go. Listeners, let us know how you'd rather die in deep space or under the ocean. So.

Oh, my God. Since they needed to basically do this mission anyways, they decided they were going to upgrade some components with the Hubble. And ultimately, the mission was a success because on January 13th, the first incredibly high quality images of the Hubble, will come back. And so yeah, 1999, January 13th. I mean, we were kids back then, but it was a momentous kind of human accomplishment that this ended up happening. From there on out, several other missions to maintain Hubble were undertaken until again the 2003 Columbia disaster where the space shuttle burned up on reentry. By that point, plans were already in place to eventually replace Hubble with will later become known as the James Webb Telescope. Um, it was predicted to be a gap in, uh, observable science through telescopes between the decommissioning of one and the commissioning of the other, but, uh, that's not the case. So the operational life cycle of Hubble was supposed to be 15 years. That's it. It's still functioning. It's 30 years on and it's still sending back images. And it is, it's pretty incredible. It sent us some incredible stuff. It is the reason why we now know that there is a black hole in the middle of our galaxy. it is where we have learned

about how galaxies are born and collapsed it took the first document a picture of a star being essentially born that's called the Pillars of Life if you've ever seen that image and one of the thing I learned is that this stuff is so crazy Taylor so I think we've all heard that the images

that we see from Hubble or James Webb or whatever that's actually not the real images that NASA has to kind of colorize them and make them kind of look in a certain way. So that's sort of true.

Were you going to say something? Well, I looked at a bunch of the Hubble telescope pictures while you were talking and they're beautiful. They're crazy beautiful. Oh, my God. So here's actually what's going on.

So I learned, I didn't write any of this down, so I'm going off memory here and you know how good my memory is. So I learned that human eyes can only perceive 0.4. percent of visible color. So there's so many things going on around us that we can't actually see.

Sorry, I say visible color. I should have said visible white, which is equivalent to color. So when we say that NASA has to kind of colorize these things, like this isn't what it really looks like, half true. So what happens is both with Hubble pictures and with James Webb. so in Hubble's case Hubble only captures pictures in black and white

and the reason for that is that if you apply gradients to black and white images you actually picture you can pick up a lot more contrast than you can if you capture them like in full color

as perceived by humans right and so what they do is they take black and white pictures and colorize them as they actually would be observed by human eyes if you were to view them so you would

when you look at a Hubble picture it is true that that picture isn't authentically the picture Hubble took but if you saw the thing that Hubble saw you would see it with your own eyes as it is produced by NASA Say that again So the pictures Hubble takes always from black and white Okay

What NASA then does is they apply gradients to the level of black and white in the shades of gray that are on the image and then overlay them with visible light colors. So if you were to see that object, like pillar of light, have you seen pillar of life yet?

No. Okay, Google pillar of life. Is that a picture? Yeah. Ooh. Yeah, it's one of the most famous pictures that Hubble ever took. That's the birth of a star

as it's being captured in real time. And if you would have, see that with your own eyes, that's what it would look like. But if you were to see the Hubble picture of it, it would actually be all black and white. Got it. I think I see one.

So another example of that is James Webb. So James Webb is I want to say 1.9 million miles away from Earth. It is way further out in deep space. It is different than Hubble because it actually is

set to capture light on the ultraviolet band wavelengths and so what it can do is it can see through clouds so where Hubble can't see through clouds you can kind of see what's directly in front of it um james web can and so again everything we see from james webb is run through the similar filter because our eyes can't see ultraviolet so that's crazy yeah it's nuts how do you just like wild i just don't even understand i don't understand i know you said it like twice but it's like it's so crazy to think that there's like other things happening that i am not seeing yeah so one of the other things that hubbill told us hubble is the reason why we're so confident now in gray matter being all around us so we know that sorry dark matter

uh so we know that like it is presumed that like everything that like when is around us like there's dark matter like there's another entity or property that exists all around us at all times that we just don't perceive there's always here and Hubble is part of the reason why we know that as well so wow that's crazy yeah I mean I feel like just like what I just there's just so much out there but that's the thing that okay so here's what I was thinking I was thinking like okay if we have to be off this galaxy in four billion years a pretty good way to figure out how to do that is get to Mars and then let's go a little further and then let's get yeah in like in like a thousand years we probably will have figured out how to like leap onto

another galaxy or something I don't know but um our problem is time time's the problem the problem is that you can't it just takes too long mm-hmm and like the like do people really get has anyone ever actually been frozen in space to go far no it's never really happened that's just like sci-fi. Are you asking? Has anybody been cryogenically frozen and then revived in outer space? Yeah. The answer's no, right? I think the answer is no. So, I mean, like, is that really what we would have to do like in the movies? But no, man, event horizon. Do you even know how to do that? Event horizon got it right. What you do is you bend space time until a certain point and then you cross through, except every now and then you go to hell. You just got to be careful not to do

that everyone's like having an orgy and eating each other at the same time really strange really strange scene that's a great movie though right oh my god watch event horizon friends if you haven't it's really good classic um so that's my story i'm sticking to it i don't know what nass is up to lately i think they mostly seeded outer space stuff to space x like it feels like space x is super involved i don't know how but let's see who are those people who are bowing apparently is in outer space now I mean they shouldn't be they should be worrying about

their problems at home before they worry about their problems in space Boeing spaceship I mean if those people die in outer space the stock's got a tank right I mean

yeah it looks like they're stuck in space due to multiple issues with Boeing Starliner the window for a return flight is closing I don't know what that means Like, there's a sticky valve. It left them stuck in space, multiple issues.

I mean. So it's the sticky valve? It says it's been delayed for the third time on Friday, June 21st or this Friday. They have no new return date. I mean, these two. Can you imagine being like the astronaut up there and you FaceTime your like wife and like, what are you doing? honey it's like nothing it's like what's what's that behind you and like she's at like actively

trying to buy a funeral plot for you mm-hmm actually it's pointless because you're not going to come back so what does it matter oh 100% you're not going to get buried anywhere yeah exactly no mind i also like the kids we talk about all the time about how many just like dead dogs are in space you know because like the russians were like we did it with like a but you're like no you didn't you did it with like a thousand of the dogs first poor things for babies you have no idea they're just like anything like floating forever i mean the good news is they have no idea that nothing is going to happen so like they're never going to understand how bad their situation is that's the problem if you're at an

outer space like you know how bad it is yeah you know you're not going to get back yeah these two are they're together Barry Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams I hope you're listening. Do you get the internet up there? Download our podcast. It'll take a lot of your time. It'll distract you from the back there. We have a ton of content.

We have so much content, you guys. You only have 45 days, but at least two of those days can be constant doomed to fail episodes. I mean, your auction is going to run out way before our content will. We're sorry, because you are very, you are very brave. No, I don't, brave. I mean, there's a fine line between brave. even stupid. I mean, Stockton Rush was also great, right?

Yeah, I know. Anyway, that's my episode. That's my story. I'm sticking with it. Please write to us at doom to falpate at gmail.com if you have other fun topics about space because it is, man, once I started learning about the telescope and what it took pictures, I was like, it's, there's one picture, Taylor. There's a picture of it. It's like a tiny picture.

And it's from Hubble. And they say it captures 250,000. thousand galaxies. What does that mean? What does that even mean? God, I told you that one time we saw Starlink in the sky and we thought that it was end of the world. Yeah, I saw,

I was in L.A. I was in L.A. and I went to this one grocery store. And I saw it and was like, oh, like, everybody just stopped. All traffic stopped. Everybody just looking into the sky. It was one of the first times they launched it was in 2016 or something.

No, no, no. I've seen the launch, but I also saw the satellites. So you can see the satellite that's like 15 dots in a row just like going across the sky at night. And the first time we saw it. we were like this is it they're here thank god because i'm fucking ready for change and um but but no it was it was starling satellites so you can like see them in a row which is pretty cool do you see when they're supposed to launch uh probably my dad always sees he lives by he lives in florida

and he can see like cape canaveral from his house no what's not the one whatever the one in florida and he um will take videos of it launching which is super cool Taylor they're literally launching at 847 Pacific today. Oh, well, I'll go outside. Yeah, from Vanderburg Air Force. Wait, Vanderburg is called the Space Force Base. That's so much cooler. I know.

They changed, like, a lot of things to Space Force recently, which also sounds cool. I met someone in Japan whose son works for Space Force, and I was like, that's cool. I mean, I will, I will admit, when, when Trump was, announcing space force at first i was like oh my god what what next what we know which war on dolphins next like i don't get it and then now it's like you're seeing like russia's planning nuclear bombs and shit and space like okay like maybe there's a point i don't we we're not getting to mars is another it's another another check on the not getting to mars side of the pros and cons of space we're going back to six and stones um yeah if you want spaceflight now dot com it'll give you all the

log schedules for SpaceX. And also one other fun fact, you can go on a website, which I'm going to tell you the name up in one second. Hold, hold, hold, hold, hold, please. Hold.

Keep holding. Okay, there it is. So if you go on Space TelescopeLive.org, you can actually see what the Hubble and Webb telescopes are looking at in that moment Whoa Space Telescope

Live Live.org Amazing Cool I want to show this to my children Hold on, let me write this time Like right now Web is fixated on a super massive black hole

I am scared Yeah Hubble's looking at stars cool so anyways that's my story taylor is there anything you would like to say um our website is up by the grace of god i'm super stoked thank you jesus i know i'm so excited so the website is up you can go to it and find all of our links to things so we're very excited uh what's the website doomed to fill oh right doom to fill pod dot com we're a great emotion correct awesome well thanks taylor we'll go ahead and show this off and rejoin you all in a few days cool thanks far as that was scary

thanks for your time thanks for your time