Main Engine Cut Off - T+293: Jonathan’s Space Report Library Transition (with Jonathan McDowell)

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

Jonathan McDowell—astrophysicist at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the namesake of the McDowell Line at 80 kilometers—joins me to talk about his fundraiser to move his epic space library to a new, permanent home. Let’s help him out!This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 32 executive producers—Frank, Lee, Joel, Theo and Violet, Harrison, Josh from Impulse, Matt, Warren, Will and Lars from Agile, Donald, Russell, Kris, Fred, Better Every Day Studios, Pat from KC, Joakim, Steve, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Ryan, Pat, David, Stealth Julian, Bob, The Astrogators at SEE, Jan, Joonas, and four anonymous—and hundreds of supporters.TopicsFundraiser by Jonathan McDowell : Fund Jonathan's Space Report Library TransitionJonathan's Space ReportJonathan McDowell (@planet4589.bsky.social) — BlueskyJonathan McDowell (@planet4589) / XThe edge of space: Revisiting the Karman Line - ScienceDirectT+105: Jonathan McDowell - Main Engine Cut OffThe ShowLike the show? Support the show on Patreon or Substack!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen to MECO HeadlinesListen to Off-NominalJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterArtwork photo by SpaceXWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello, welcome to a little special mini episode of Made Engine Cut Off. I wanted to jump on this fast because Jonathan McDowell, you've got an amazing project going on right now that you're fundraising for and I wanted you to be able to tell everyone in the audience about it. So give us the give us the rundown. Right. So for 50 years, I have been accumulating documents on the history of spaceflight, and especially the technical history. What happened after the launch? What did the satellite actually do?

What did the rockets? When did the rocket stages fire? All that kind of stuff. And so this until recently occupied about 1200 square feet in my condo, bedroom, hallways, everything. And you know, despite being sort of crowded and this is formed you know the a lot of the backdrop and basis for all the information I've put out on the website and in the newsletter and You know if you go to Wikipedia and look up a satellite and follow the reference chain It usually eventually goes back to my library in some form or other and So that's great and And I have had, you know, some people have often visited

to do research in the library. So I've made it available to other space history researchers. But I've made the decision that I have to move back to England. But I've made the decision that I have to move back to England. And, you know, they're going to pry this library from my cold dead hands. I am taking the library with me with all the 200 bookcases. That's cheap.

Right? That's that. Yeah, I mean, it's it's gonna be tens of thousands of dollars just to ship it alone Uh, and the trouble is that typical houses particularly in england don't have An extra thousand square feet of open plan space Um, so i'm probably gonna have to take a commercial property and convert it It's gonna take a while. So I'm lying myself the year. And even there, it's very hard to find a suitably large property for a price that I can afford. And you know, I have I have enough space here. I don't have enough space really here in, in the US, some of my stuff

is in storage already. And once you put in capital gains tax, you put in exchange rates, you put in all the other sort of expenses, I can't afford a comparable place in the UK right now. And so that's why I'm asking for help from the community. For decades, I've been giving free space information on the internet and answering followers' questions and generally putting, you know, putting my passion for space into educating the community for free. And so I feel like it's okay for me to ask for a little help now. You could have been paying a subscription to Jonathan's Space Report

for the last 35 years instead. I would argue you should have been. I would argue. But you know, the thing is that I wanted it to be available to everyone. Right. And I wanted it to be. I didn't want to take funding for the report so that it would remain independent. And so I can feel uncomflicted about calling out when I see, you know, something that I think should be more transparent typically, or is not good for space safety. I don't have to worry about whether having a boss that will, you know, tell me not to do that. Yeah, be grumpy about what you're putting out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so the I think the

independence and objectivity of the report has been one of the things that make people appreciate it and make people trust it. And so I want to keep that. And and so I think this go fund me as a way of, of, you know, letting people contribute and feel that they're preserving the spaceflight history. And what I hope the result will be is a new, better home for the space library in somewhere reasonably accessible in England that people can come visit and do research in. England, that people can come visit and do research in. And so we're in a time when you know, NASA just announced they're closing the library at the libraries at the NASA centers.

Harvard Observatory, where I work has closed its library and fired the staff. MIT aero astro threw most of its stuff away. MIT AeroAstro threw most of its stuff away about five or six years ago, and I dumpster dived it and saved a lot of it, and that's part of what's in my collection. And so, you know, I've been, when McDonnell Douglas was absorbed by Boeing in the 90s, I visited just beforehand and dumpster dived a bunch of laughs and you know, amazing. I've been all over I've raided the basements of the French space agency in Toulouse. Sounds like international incidents, which I love. Yes, absolutely. You know, I've tried to interrogate people at the Indian Satellite and Satellite

Rocket Launch Center in Kerala. So I've been all over the world, me and my spies, collecting obscure documents about here's the post-launch report from this mission and preserving them. Ultimately, of course, a lot of this needs to be scanned and put on the internet for free. And that's part of the plan. But I haven't had time to do that at this stage. I think it's amazing that as I as a I think you just posted yesterday or something that the issue of the space where you just put out as 36 years since the first issue of that report. So myself, I will not tell you how many years

into the space report I was born, but it was a couple. So I am a recent McDowell convert, right, where I'm kind of like internet era McDowell. And so it's interesting to know that there's a whole like physical world that, cause I'm of the era of like, you're trying to find a panel that, yeah yeah you're like searching tweets for the panel that came off of this spacecraft on the way to the moon and where did that actually

go should I catalog that as separate you're arguing about who is an astronaut or a mesonaut or all these various things of the modern era but thinking back you know the fact that you've cataloged everything that has happened you have to have all of these old mission reports that are from you know know, yellowing pages of a book. It's cool to see. And I know there's a video I saw that you put on YouTube, I think last year, of the tour of the library that I had watched at some point. That's right. The Foresight Institute kindly did a sort of interview with me where they made me do a tour of the library. There's been a few people who've, I've had a number of film crews come and visit the library

and so it's, which I cannot now show you because the library is now in boxes. This is actively happening. So I mean- This is really happening guys. It's, yeah, yeah. I love this from Just I feel like your site in particular is is so a like

Of the spirit of the original internet and what the internet was meant to be I love that like as somebody you know who's into the internet of things not IOT is like a You know a proper noun, but I love that era of the internet, which is open access to information that is spread widely. You also have the retro vibe to your website. It looks like the same website you launched way back in the day. It isn't because back in the day it was even more primitive. I use CSS now.

Come on, that's modern. I just love that aspect of it all. I'm, I don't know what you expected in terms of the reaction to GoFundMe, but I feel like it has been a very excited spread through the web. I had no idea. I thought, you know, my colleague Martin said, oh, you know, you should try GoFundMe. People will, you know, it's not unreasonable to ask for community support for this. And I went, huh, you mean you can just ask people for money

and they might give it to you? You have given information and entertainment over the years. And, but you know, the more I thought about it, the more it made sense that this is a way that people can show their appreciation. And it's not, you know, no pressure, right? If you can't afford can't afford it don't give but if you can if you have a little extra and you believe in this stuff and you want to help me out and and make sure that

there's another hopefully 30 years of Jonathan's face report and and documents to back it up that people can come visit and consult, then yeah, drop me a few dimes. And some people have been extremely generous. And I know who you are and I know you don't want to be named publicly, but thank you so much. And even those of you who've just dropped 10 you know, 10 or 20 bucks is is that I mean, it just means a lot to me that you care enough to do that.

So so yeah, and and and that money, you know, is is I have, you know, I'm selling my condo, so I will have some money, but it's not going to be enough to buy the square footage I need for the library. And so, and even with the, you know, with the GoFundMe, I mean, I won't warn people, it may end up, but one of the places I'm looking at now is like a basement in South London. And it was a big basement and it'll be pretty cool

once I refurbish it. But I'm trying to decide, you know, there's that there's a there's a much larger, fancier looking building in the north of England near the coast. But it's, you know, it's like three or four hours from heathrow. It's really it'd be really hard for visitors to come visit. Whereas if I can, if I can, the closer I get to London, the easier it is for the people who've go funded me

to come and see what they fund it. And so I think I'm leaning towards, you know, a less fancy place, nearer, more central, where I will have more access and people will have more access to it. If you have to go outside of London, I would suggest that you pick a place that is exactly 80 kilometers from Heathrow. You know, that's, yes, I get that.

Make people drive 80 kilometers and then they'll understand. I'm going to have to draw that circle. Yeah, you got to figure that out. Oxford's another possibility because that's kind of now the center of the British space industry is Harwell near Oxford. Leicester is very strong in space. So there are some other possibilities. And so I just have to find one. I only need one place

It's kind of like dating, you know, it's like There you only need one person to say yes right And and you only need the one right property to move into but finding that one is Yeah, it's not easy challenge Well, this would be really fun to watch the the progress the project. It's I'm sure it's gonna be a ton of work. So It'll be cool to just follow along and see what you're working on with it Next week as we record this it's Thursday January 23rd next week. You're coming on my other show off nominal

We'll do a whole hour diving in because I want to I want to like dig in on Some of the modern stuff that you draw out of all of the historical data that you have, right? I mean, that's where the 80 kilometer research came from all of this collective data that you've had of what orbits were maintained and where they were stable. Yeah, and I think one of my trademarks is, I try it, I do the mass data nitty-gritty of you know this obscure launch in

1974 and what did it exactly what happened and I do all of that, but I also stand back then and go okay What can we learn from this and and so yeah, we can certainly talk about that Awesome Jonathan. thanks so much. I will put a link to the GoFundMe in the show notes and then also to Twitter and Blue Sky accounts, everything else. Anything else in particular that people should go check out

other than the classic space report and the general catalog of artificial space objects? Right, planet4589.org is the website. It has everything is there. And yeah, otherwise, if you know any suitable properties in the UK, drop me a note. But yeah and thank you thank you thank you again all of you who have done it. Thanks for watching!