Off-Nominal - 03 - Don’t Fail Me Now, Twitter Translate!

Episode Date: December 5, 2017

Jake tells us the story of Chinese spaceflight, and Anthony gets us ready for their future in space. Beers Mad Elf (2017) - Tröegs Independent Brewing - Untappd Walt Wit - Philadelphia Brewing Company - Untappd Pennsylvania Pale Ale - Philadelphia Brewing Company - Untappd Tsingtao - Tsingtao Brewery - Untappd Topics Andrew Jones (@AJ_FI) | Twitter ChinaSpaceflight (@cnspaceflight) | Twitter Qian Xuesen documentary - YouTube Long March (rocket family) - Wikipedia China sets out long-term space transportation roadmap including a nuclear space shuttle Why China’s Long March 5 is crucial to its space ambitions China progressing with work on new medium, heavy and super-heavy Long March launch vehicles China aims for first sea launch in 2018, will develop low cost space launches and reusable space plane ESA and Chinese astronauts train together / Astronauts / Human Spaceflight / Our Activities / ESA Picks Space Shuttle Decision, 1965-1972 (History of the Space Shuttle, Volume 1) by T. A. Heppenheimer History of the Space Shuttle, Volume Two: Development of the Space Shuttle, 1972-1981 by T. A. Heppenheimer How far they'll go: Moana shows the power of Polynesian celestial navigation | The Planetary Society Journal of the Polynesian Society: Re-learning A Vanishing Art, By B. R. Finney Et Al., P 41-90 Looking for the 10 minute bonus podcast? It follows this episode in your podcast feed. Follow Jake WeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to Mars WeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | Twitter Jake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | Twitter Follow Anthony Main Engine Cut Off Main Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | Twitter Anthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | Twitter

Do you let's go for main engine, start. Can you quickly just tell the listeners how much better my closet looks? It looks really amazing, I must say. There's still some work to go. Yeah, it looks like a professional closet now. It does, yeah, yeah. It's what you can't see, though. Like, there's still some hoodies.

Still haven't developed a beverage holding system. in the closet. Can you get one of those like, like the, I don't know, like adapt like one of those, um, those vent mounts for your cars or whatever.

Like that'd be. And then just bolt it to the wall. There's got to be cop holders you can get for walls. Yeah, I've got some stuff. I don't know why anyone would want that. But there's got to be someone's got to have made it. Someone else has been in my situation.

Yeah. I do have to pull a Marco Rubio when I want to drink though. I don't know if that, if that reference transfers to the north. I think I saw a tweet with it. Okay. It looked more like he was drinking vodka or something. I'm not sure.

What are you drinking? You got your beer open? Yes. Well, I'm not open. I better open it. You start. I'm going to take you on a little journey to start. Yes.

Because I didn't get my first choice here for this episode. Oh, you'll think I'm talking about something else, but I'm not talking about that. So I was out in Hershey, PA a couple weeks ago. or unrelated space business, non-space business. And there's a brewery out there called Troegs, which is an eastern Pennsylvania, central Pennsylvania, steady, old steady. And around this time of the year, they brew one called Mad Elf.

I don't know if you've heard of Mad Elf. It is somewhat infamous in at least this region. Christmas-y kind of beer, brew it once a year, that is 14% alcohol. So I figured it would be, you know, I was there and I figured it's, you know, December, why not? But my local place, they only sell them in cases. So you really got to be committed to that much alcohol. And they were out.

So I was not able to land that one, but did want to give it a shout out because that's good. But I've got a Walt Witt here, which is a obviously local. I don't know if you know Walt Whitman, but he is an American poet. Yeah, I was saying, I think the name's on it familiar. Yeah. He was like born in New York, but he ended up, he lived down in Camden, New Jersey, towards the end of his life, and we've got like a bridge in Philly named after him or whatnot. So this is a unfiltered Belgian-style white ale, Walt Witt.

Okay. And it's pretty good. Ale brewed with grapefruit peel and chamomile, and it tastes pretty lovely. Wow, that's a full flavor. Yeah, it's pretty nice. It's like a cornucopia of flavor. I don't know if you're into like the unfiltered things but I do like them but I just have to like I can have one and then I got like not for a whole week have another one like it's on that topic my backup is a Pennsylvania pale ale

so to clear it out yeah these are both by Philadelphia Brewing Company this one's pretty tasty and it's uh you know Pennsylvania pale ale pPA which is also the acronym of the infamous parking authority here in Philadelphia so brings about good memories of that $76 parking ticket or whatever you got, you know. This is like the most local beer you could have. Yeah, absolutely. It's like you just told me a whole story and I didn't know any of it. There's three people out there, I think, that are like, oh man. That's it.

That's all I got. I love that so I love that since we live so far apart that like I just have never even heard of these things. We're going to like learn about so many new beers. but not in that vein I have something different here so I went out looking and I found a Chinese beer oh yeah I love that it's called Sing Tao I love that one you tried it it's pretty like it's pretty like widespread it's like the hymican of Chinese beers like it's yeah so because I don't really know anything about it and I have a couple friends at work who are Chinese and so I was like what do I get what do I get you know I have no idea and they were just like get the standard yeah just like

I don't want to freak you out too much so just get this like you know so there's this one there's another one I had to choose from and this is the one that came in bottles and I just like I have a thing against cans I don't I just can't do beers in a can it's like I don't know it's against my nature I'm I'm into it so yeah this is singtow it is a I don't know what kind of beer is it just a a logger, I guess. It doesn't say in the bottle. Doesn't matter. That's the point, yeah.

But yeah, it's kind of like, it's kind of like Corona. Really? It's like, just like the plainest of beers, which is just very not what I normally drink. I'm such like a craft beer like nut that this is very, very different for me. So, yeah.

But I had to get two of them here because they're not very strong. Yeah. Yeah. you don't have any mad elf out there. No, no mad elf at all. This is one third of a mad elf. But yeah, but I got Chinese beer because we're going to talk about China. Yeah, you've been pumped up about this.

Yes, I wanted to talk to someone about China. Was there any particular, I've been wondering, like, was there any particular incident that happened this month that you were like, we got to talk about China, or was it merely the fact that China has been launching a lot and there's a complete lack of anything else going on right now? Well, maybe a bit of both, I guess, because, like, I've been sort of intrigued by, like, the, what the Chinese space program, you know, because it's such a mystery, right? So, like, it's just sort of captivated me. I probably for years now.

But there's, like, nothing in, you know, our mainstream circles that's, like, always going on about China. There's, like, the one guy on Twitter who gets you the news every once about me. Yeah, totally. You know what I'm talking about. There's two people. There's Andrew Jones who writes. for G.B. Times. Yeah. But there's a, there's, I have to look up the Twitter feed and put it in the notes.

Um, I think it's like China Space Flight is like the name of it. I forget what the exact handle is, but it tweets only in Chinese, which I don't know how to read it all, but it's always got great photos. And it was like the account that had the video of the one launch from like way too freaking close to the launch site. Like basically the dude was in the launch country, like filming this launch, which is horrifying because it's like a hypergolic launch vehicle or something. But that was the account that I saw that video from. So those are the two that you kind of, yeah, it's completely impenetrable.

That's like, don't fail me now, Twitter translate. Yeah, totally. I always try that. And it's like, I get, it's like basically what I can read out of the photo anyway. Like, it's a rocket, you know? Yeah. It's not useful beyond that. There's a Japanese one like that too.

It's an account for the Martian Moons Explorer account. Oh yeah, yeah. And it's always in Japanese. I'm just like, okay, what's going on here? Cool photos, though. Yeah, yeah, really great renders. So, yeah, it's interesting that you take the impenetrability and are intrigued by it, whereas I've had people ask, like, why don't you talk about China more?

And it's like, because I can't speculate about China. Like, there's no, I feel like you can only really, you know, it might be being unfair at this point because there are some interesting things coming up, which we'll get to, but it feels so impenetrable that it's, like, not worth. trying to speculate about it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it does make for some good history. Yes, it does.

Do you want to talk letters first? We got some good emails. You want to do letters now? I don't know. Oh, like a little follow-up segment? I can do that. Yeah, let's do that. Like what's our format? Yeah, if you want to totally destroy the great segue that you had from the Chinese beard to China, sure. There's no rules here. No, no. No, I think you're right. Because like, A lot of these are your follow-up, so I feel like let's do them before we get to the new stuff. Yeah, yeah. All right, I've got all the emails here.

We were trying to be self-deprecating last time, and it turns out that milked out a lot of great emails from people. Yeah. So, first one here from Grant that I'm going to read. Hey, guys, my name is Grant. I've listened to both the shows right from beginning, but this one is something I can really get into. I'm a space cadet through and through, and my day job is building brewery equipment for the craft brewing industry. In fact, I've built components for House Sound, Mill Street, and Yard. Thanks for the Centaur book pick. I'm looking forward to it.

Centaurs are essentially beer tanks that have been optimized for weight with an RL10 on the bottom. Cheers, Grant. I don't know that there's a more perfect email for that particular show, but this show in general. Yeah, exactly. I was like, this is like, this is the show custom made for a grant. Congratulations, Grant. It's like, we sat down and we were like, Grant, what's kind of show would you like? You deserve a podcast.

next one unless you get anything else for Grant no no that's that's was he was he the official listener number two I think he was the one right is that the first one we got that was the first one

because we were like Shane you are our first last last episode like Shane you're number one and then we got kind of a flurry of emails like requesting number two status and I think Grant was was the official number two Congrats Grant Good work now let me read Jeff's email

taking you to task. This is one where I screwed up. I'm just going to be embarrassed. No, this is just like, you know, nitpicking or whatever. Not even, just corrections. Hi, guys, loving the new show. A couple little corrections from one line of episode two.

Number one, University of Colorado is CU, not UC, UC means California, and we Coloradoans take great offense to being equated with Californians. Number two, Insight Doesn't Live at CU. It was built by Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Littleton, south of Denver. Probably sound like I'm nitpicking,

but a collection of details that he may or may not want red on the air. So he's sending in the corrections. Thank you, Jeff. I always love correcting Jake. I'll just say this. I think people from Colorado and people from California are both awesome. That's fair. It's fair.

Yeah. I can't believe I screwed up CU Boulder, though. Like, ah, I feel dumb. That's right. It's a confusing name. They should have thought better about that. but they i like how like they they weren't even at all involved in this we were talking insight insight clearly doesn't live there as i've also been corrected on and i just like

pull them into this conversation for no reason and then still they say their name wrong here see you see you boulder we got one from thorbin it's german i know that he's from berlin i'm that one's a long one that i'm not going to particularly read the whole thing but um kind of awesome just to hear from people all over the place, so I wanted to say hello to him. That's all I got one there. Yeah. Good and tug. We got one from Jerry

asking about Tori Bruno. He was saying that's something that he's found interesting in our search for topics. In any case, you need an idea for any show. I'd like to learn more about Tori Bruno. While it's not possible to Alcompete Musk on Twitter, Tori does his own thing and it's accessible and has a great sense

of humor. It's unimaginable that a CEO of the military industrial complex would behave like this, but he does. And I I fully agree. He's quite awesome. He's pretty interesting kind of guy that has been around Lockheed and the like for so long, worked on so many historic launch vehicles and all sorts of different projects that it's just like crazy that he's still central to it all, which I think, you know, that to his credit, that's probably why he's been such a good CEO for ULA through this transition period. Yeah. And after today's Tesla to Mars mix up, I might be coming out and

say that he isn't getting shown up by Muscle and Twitter. I think he's doing a little bit better of a job so far this weekend. I would not disagree. We got one from Matt asking if we're going to make actual patches of the podcast logo and sell it. He said sell it as part of the Miko store, to which I say that is exactly why I created this podcast to extract all monetary value of it from Jake through some other mechanisms. But maybe we'll look into it. I think we should definitely make patches. I'm just mostly concerned about like what how do we handle the money, you know? Well, let's just make them like a thousand dollars each and then it's worth it to like do the wire transfers and stuff. I like it. Uh, Philip is our last email the day, which is the best one.

Hi guys. My name is Philip and I am your organic listener. Yes. This is something that we speculated about last week was like, I don't know, we got, or last week, last month, we were like, who's going to find this is the podcast entry form for this. But Philip did it. He said, I downloaded the podcast this week when I was looking for more space podcast to listen to. I had exhausted my audio books for the month and got all cut up on my usual podcast. I seen both of your shows and my other suggestions, but for whatever reason didn't download an episode of them. I was attracted by this here lovely logo and I saw space and beer and thought two of my loves. So thank you. I listened to it. Episode two on my two and a half hour drive for Thanksgiving. Now I'm going

to check out your other podcast. Philip. Philip, you are the best. You're awesome. But I have to say, we clearly have to step up our marketing game, though, if this guy was out there looking for more space podcasts and didn't find any of our other ones. All right. That's all our emails. So thanks everybody for writing in. That was pretty great stuff.

Yeah. And speaking of letters, so China, just segue that one back. Yeah. Okay. So, yes, I really wanted to talk about China. And it is mostly because I really, really, really, really. love the story, the historical background of the Chinese space program, which is something that I've wanted to share in a bigger, more personal format. So I'm hijacking our podcast to do it. I hope you're

not mad about it. No, I like this. But you know a lot about the other stuff, like the recent stuff, which I am not good at. So that's where you're going to jump in. But so Chinese space program is, I'm going to start with a story of a guy, and I've tried very hard to learn the pronunciation, right, so that I can at least sound somewhat smart, but I think it's Tian Chusen, which is, he's the father of the Chinese space program, but the story goes way back than that.

So he's born in 1911. He grew up in China, Beijing and Shanghai, and he came to the United States on something called a boxer indemnity scholarship, so if you know anything about, about Chinese history. There was the Boxer Rebellion in the 19th century, and the U.S. had to get involved,

and then the aggressors lost, so there was reparations in the U.S. got some money. So they made this fund, and they actually would educate Chinese students on scholarships and stuff. So Chen comes over on this scholarship. He goes to MIT, gets a degree, and then he decides that he wants to come to Caltech

and get his doctorate. Now, Caltech, is that a doctorate. the one in Colorado? Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. Caltech University in Littleton. He threw me off my game here. I had a rhythm.

Okay, so this is about 1935, okay. So he comes to Caltech and he gets to study under Theodore von Karmin, who, everyone who listens to Space Podcasts or reads about space should eventually learn that name. that's the same name as the Carmen, the Carmen line, where space starts. He's the guy that figures that out, I guess. I actually don't know the story about that.

But his name's on it, so he probably has something to do with it. I'll go out on a limb on that one. Yeah, we can't follow all these rabbit holes. No, there's only so many Wikipedia tabs I can have open at one time. So, yeah, so Von Karman was the director of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Lab. So he's like a famous aerodynamicist, right? not exactly space, but aerodynamics, which is related. And he had a bunch of students that Tian kind of fell in line with.

So there's some big names here from a long time ago, space. You got Ed Foreman, Jack Parsons, Frank Molina. And if you want rabbit holes, go look these guys up because they have some weird stories, especially Jack Parsons. If you want to read about a weird dude, Jack Parsons, it's like, the history of Jack Parsons is like interwoven between like learning how to build rockets and like weird cult religion things. Whoa. It's like it's like weird stuff. Whoa.

Yeah. Like his wife like leaves him for Elron Hubbard and stuff like that level like it. Yeah. Wow. Okay. We're not going to get down that rabbit hole. Yeah. Episode four is the story of Jack Parsons.

But anyway, so he falls in line with his crew. And these guys are just like the perfect rocket geeks. They're just like, we're going to figure out how to fly rockets. And they wanted the university to fund them, but they didn't really, you know, it's hard to do in 1935 when rockets are still kind of a weird new technology, right? But they do it anyway, and they're off in a place called Arroyo Seco, which is like this dry streambed north of Pasadena. And they just light stuff up.

And they're blowing stuff up all the time. They're so crazy that around campus, they become known as the suicide squad. So the original suicide squad. Yeah, I was going to say, is that IP still available? Because I don't think it is. I think it's been sold off for a grant money. So the official name of the group was the Guggenheim Aeronautical Lab under Caltech Institute of Technology.

So Gal Sit, maybe we'll call it that. I don't know. I won't. But Rocket Research Group, something like that. They eventually get some funding. So it's like World War II. They had a lot of weird projects, and the military really got involved because in the middle of World War II, they get news of the German V2 happening in Europe, and the United States is freaking out because they have to get their own missiles. So they like contract this group to start developing some stuff.

And at this point, they changed the name of Galsit or whatever awful acronym it is to the jet propulsion laboratory. And yes, it's that jet propulsion laboratory. So this is how it starts. It's literally just like the bunch of people blowing stuff up outside the university. Formerly the Suicide Squad, they start JPL, and they invent a bunch of wacko rocket stuff. So like those jet-assisted takeoff ones with the weird like rocket planes basically. Yeah. Like so obviously a crazy poor design that like is useful in some senses.

But I think the best one was like the B-52. Was B-52, right? that had a Jado pack. I think there was one, and it's amazing. There's some YouTube videos. We'll put them in the show notes. Yeah, yeah.

It's pretty crazy. Let me just mention, we might be trying something new in this episode of the podcast. If you look at your podcast player right now, there may be an image of the thing that I'm talking about showing up instead of the album art.

If not, this will be cut from the show. Okay. Yeah. I love the foreshadowing. Okay. Yeah. So they take the, yeah, the Jado thing is cool. They invent like those early, early rockets, the corporal or whatever,

which I think led to, what was it, like, Sergeant and all those early, early solid rockets. I think, wasn't it, the first satellite in the U.S. Explorer one, wasn't it launched, like, the upper stage, was like a bunch of those, like, corporals, like, literally just, like, duct tape together? I feel like it was, like, the top stage on it. Sounds roughly familiar, yeah. Hmm. I should know that better, but. Yeah.

Anyway, so they land some contracts. They were developing some rockets. And then actually some of these guys, so Von Karman and, like, Molina and Parsons, they actually kind of not split off, but they actually started a company to start building these rockets for the military. And it was called Aerojet,

which is also the Aerojet we know today. So this is like ground, this is like breeding ground for like all this space stuff is happening right this time. So, yeah. Anyway, so, Tian takes this time to learn all about rockets.

And he even got to go at the end of the war. He went to Germany with Von Korn. Carmen to like, you know, look at all the rocket stuff and try and learn what they could. There's this great story of, you know, Von Karman found his doctoral advisor who was working for the Nazis. And the two of them like interrogated him together. So you have like the Nazi guy who taught Von Karman and von Karman who's teaching Qian. And it's like, you know, like the family tree of science right there. And they like had this whole interrogation thing, which is pretty cool.

such a weird time to be alive. Anyway, so they come back to the U.S., the war is over. Tian goes back to MIT, does some teaching, he has a couple kids there, comes back to Caltech, does some more teaching there, and then, yeah, he went to China and got married, and then he came back. So he was just kind of living his life, and it's tough to tell, but it looks like he was pretty interested in staying in the United States. but then some crazy stuff happened.

And this is where the story gets even better if it wasn't already good for you. So it's 1950 and it's the time of McCarthyism. So it was the second red scare, right? So the war is over. Communism is now the big threat. Everyone was really panicky. And, you know, like if you think about this is like that year specifically was pretty crazy because it was that time you had the, in China you had the, the,

Civil War, so that was where communism took hold in China in 1949. Soviets have their first nuclear test that year in 49. China goes into Korea in 1950, so there's more tensions there. And then, of course, in Germany, in Berlin, you have kind of ground zero for the conflict, right? Because you got Berlin divided on the wall. So it was a pretty crazy time, and everyone's panicking. And, you know, if you know where I'm going with this, you have Qian, who is a Chinese rocket. engineer in the United States. So he's a communist national in one way, and he's working right

here on American soil. So things got a little scary. So there was already allegations that he was a communist, of course, but they didn't take him too seriously. But eventually in 1950, they finally got worried enough they decided to do something. So they like revoke his security clearance, and they take him in for questioning. And it gets pretty scary in 1950, and he actually spends a little bit of time in jail under questioning. eventually he gets out of jail but he goes on like house arrest and he spends five years basically like not able to work not able to leave his home constantly being like questioning stuff by the FBI and it's not very good for him although strangely enough he did manage to like write another

whatever manifesto of physics or some it was like some cybernetics book he's just like yeah I'll just you know spit this out while I have all this time I got some time so yeah and it's apparently like a pretty good book, but I don't know anything about this system stuff. Anyway, so in 1955, he finally gets freed, I guess. Basically, there's some diplomacy going on between the U.S. and China, and they actually exchange him for prisoners from the Korean War. So they let him go, and he takes his family, gets on a boat, heads back to China, and the United States never sees him again.

It's just such, I don't want to derail your story too much, but this is the point in the story when you start running like alternate history timelines through your head and it's just so sad. Like I mean it's, I think long run like things that happen from here maybe good for the world but yada yada

like it's just sad when you think of somebody so foundational to the early aerospace programs in the world who can't work for five years is taken out of the team that they were working with like all of the stuff that they've worked on at that point and at a moment when that content is becoming like the most important knowledge in the world on a grand scale. It's just like, it's crazy the implications that just that couple of minutes of storyline really telling it. Yeah, it's bonkers. I mean, and forget the work that he maybe would have done,

but he was also a full-time teacher. So imagine the students that missed out on on his, you know, instruction. What would they have done, right? Like, it just cascades. It's crazy, crazy to think about it. Yeah, so he goes back to China, and in 1956, this is basically when Mao Zedong decides, if China wants to be a power, we need rockets, we need missiles, we need nukes. And so he builds something called...

Doesn't sound familiar at all. Yeah, it doesn't sound at all familiar. He builds something called the Fifth Academy, which is where they're going to centralize this research, and he needs someone to... run it and Guess who shows up on a boat in 1955, none other than Chen Chusen. So he puts him in charge of it. And basically, through the end of the 50s, he helps, and this is crazy, like, think about it. Like, he just builds a space program.

He takes a country, which is like, you know, it's 1955. So it's only been the Republic of China for like six years. It's an agrarian society. And he's like, we're going to have rockets now. We need all this metalworks and all this fuel production and computers and advanced. Like it's crazy where he just builds from scratch. They build the first launch site. So Ji Kuan was built in in 1958.

They start developing the early Chinese rockets, the Dong Feng. They're like ICBMs, basically. Maybe not that long, just medium range missiles or whatever. And yeah, it's really cool. And this is another place where the story kind of merges because at this time, China and the USSR are like buddies right so they're like they're both communist they signed this agreement in 1950 to be friends and so the Soviets are feeding them rocket technology so they get like an early version of the R2 and they get some of the R1 R2 and some other rocket they gave

them and they send people over there to train them and teach them all this stuff so the the Chinese are basically copying these these missiles and so the Dong Feng kind of ended up being kind of a copy of that but in 1960, it like all severs because there's this thing called the Sino-Soviet split. And it's basically, I don't know this history too well, but basically, from what I read, it looks like Mao Zedong thought that Khrushchev was not communist enough and said, we're done. You're a hippie communist.

He was like a revisionist Marxist. And yeah, it's like really niche kind of worries at that point. This is old school communism on this side of the border. so none of this hipster new stuff. But yeah, so in 1960, they sever with the Soviets. And from then on, it's all China, right? So it's pretty crazy. I was reading about how fast they developed after that.

And it was like, they went, when they were working on the nuclear bomb, it was like less than three years. They went from start to a nuclear test, which is about twice as fast as the U.S. or the Soviets did it. So that kind of shows you that sort of determined drive that they, that they have over there. What else? What else? Yeah, so submarine missiles they get going. Another launch site.

They actually had a human spaceflight program in the 70s, believe it or not. They didn't even have an orbital rocket quite yet, but they are in the 60s, sorry. So they actually selected astronauts, which is crazy. I don't know why they went ahead of that. They were a little ahead of the game there. But, yeah. Well, everyone was doing it. Everyone was doing it, I guess, yeah.

Come on. So they had their first successful orbital launch in 1970. So that was on the original Long March 1, that Changsang 1, the predecessor of all the current rockets they use now. And it put this little goofy orb into space that just literally circled the earth and played communist music on the radio. It's like this. I wish we had more of that.

Not communist music or whatever. Just like, you know, let's do a thing that plays music. And it's like a music box in orbit. I don't know. I don't want to get too close to our topic that we were getting heated about earlier today, about dumb things in orbit. But I'll let it go. Yeah, well, we're going to see that in January, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And then they developed some other stuff at this time, too. They actually developed, you know, they get into the whole spy satellite thing, obviously, but they actually came up with some re-entry technology. So their spy satellites, they would actually send them up, take pictures, and then bring them back to Earth and collect them, which is like the most old school way to do it ever. It's awesome.

And apparently they had like this, this like really like ghetto like reentry material, like the ablative heat shield. It was just like wood, basically. They figured out some way to like. If we put enough of this, we can just blast through as quick as possible. Cork or something or, I don't know, bamboo. I don't know what it was. But they, they figured out some sort of thing that they, They scrammed in there to have this really cheap reentry shield.

But then things kind of go dark. So 1976 is when Mao died, and there's like this whole cultural revolution thing going on. And it wasn't good for China. And so the space program suffered, and it kind of went into this dark period for quite a while. It really died to a certain extent. Like the thing that was reborn was, you know, it had heritage,

but it was a new era at that point, like a hard reset almost, you know, obviously not for certain things like launch centers and some of the hardware that they still had around, but it definitely, there's not a whole lot of continuity outside of whatever was left over at that point.

Yeah. Yeah, you know, and I think about it because, so it kind of dies around Mao's death, but it was going downhill from there before that. So if you think, say, 1973, 74, that era and it doesn't really start up again to like late 80s so it's kind of almost 15 years where there's not much going on and if you think about the talent that would have phased out by then that's something that would really you know affect and that's actually one of the one of the things

in the the few times where I'm actually defending the SLS program and people say it should just be scrapped and I say well you I wouldn't cancel it today if you put me in charge of NASA and I had ultimate authority I would not cancel it today because that's what I'd be afraid happened is that everyone would leave, you'd lose all that talent. You've got to gracefully move it into something, right? And that did not happen in China. And even for our friend, uh, Tian here, who is still working at this time, he, he tried to hang on to it, but, uh, I guess, you know, you lose all the people, you lose all the people,

which is, which is unfortunate. Funding and whatnot. Yeah. But anyway, they do get back, uh, late 80s and they actually do it in a commercial fashion, which is very interesting. It's kind of not Chinese in a way, but, but, but, uh, they do it. in another way, very, very Chinese how they do it, because Challenger blows up in 86, and they had, you know, the early shuttle had the, the, the whole plan was that they'd cram

everything on it. It was like one vehicle to rule them all, right? And so they were packing all these commercial satellites on there, but after the accident, they decided that they would not put commercial satellites on the shuttle anymore. So now you have all these satellites in the backlog and no launchers to, to fire them off. So China just has to jump in and pick up some of the stuff. Slack. And they did it with Long March 2.

2C and 2E, I think, were the ones that they were really launching around that time. So they got like, the first one they did was AsiaSat 1. I love the story. This is the raddest piece of space hardware of all time. Yeah, it really is. So it goes up on a shuttle. I think it was before Challenger, like 83, maybe 4 maybe. Yeah, because it was a STS-41-something mission.

Yeah. Which was the S-THAs. CS fiscal year 84 because that's where the four comes from and it was one dash whatever the letter was because we were scared of the number 13. That's the dumbest story. Yeah. So they launched it on shuttle and they launched, there was two like very similar satellites, those kind of like old huge satellites think they were and they launched two and both of them

had those, was it Pam, Pan B? payload assist module. Both them had these solid rocket kind of kick motors that would put it up to geo. and they both failed. And so these satellites are just stuck in low-orth orbit. They leave them up there, low-ish orbit. They bring shuttle back down. They get through Challenger and then came back after and picked him up, I think.

Yeah, it was another shuttle up. I think, like, maybe like the next calendar year. It was very quickly. This wasn't a very long time period between the two, the launch and the recovery. I guess because, yeah, they decayed pretty bad, right? they brought it down so it was left in like I think the the highest point in the orbits were like 600 miles or something like that

the operators brought it down so that shuttle could reach it to do what you're about to tell us right right right yeah okay so they send second shuttle up and they collect the satellites and they had to like invent this whole like grapple thing with the jet packs so they're like it was like the most awesome space like you gotta watch the pictures look the pictures watch the videos or whatever

they're just like drive around this like space bike and picking up satellites and they talk them back in the shuttle bring them back down and I think the insurance company because there was a photo in orbit of I forget who the astronaut was but he was holding a for sale sign with the satellite joking sort of sort of joking sort of joking um I think because it was the insurance company that funded the mission right yeah I don't think they did the full mission but like most of it yeah or something. However that works. I don't really get because shuttle flights were so expensive.

Yeah. Inflation, money. I don't know. I don't know. So they bring the satellites home. Now they have two satellites. I think insurance had paid for replacement. So they just kind of like belong to the insurance company.

And then they sell them again and refurbish them. And one of them becomes AsiaSat 1. And China launches it is their first commercial payload. So it goes back to space. At this point, this is one thing that I want to mention is the

the Intel sat 708 launch this was the one where immediately after I don't even think it cleared the tower yet

the rocket pitched way over and crashed like I think it was a mile from the launch pad into this village six people died though there was like

rumors that it was like hundreds crashed into a village of a thousand but then it sounds like the village was actually evacuated, so there may not, there may have just been like the six deaths or whatever.

That's like the most Chinese thing ever. They're like, we're going to launch a rocket. There's a village there. Just get everyone out of the village for a bit. Don't worry about it too much. It's like a mile away, not a big deal. Yeah, they're pretty fast and loose with the trajectories and all that. But this was a huge moment.

And this was, let me look up what the data this was. It was 1996. So very shortly after all of the, this. But I think it does set up a lot of where we're at today overall because it was an Intel set payload. And the, from what I hear, there was like actually substantial parts of the satellite that were still intact, so much so that satellite was built by SSL, space systems LaRalle, so much so intact that they sent people out to recover parts of the satellite because there was an encryption decryption module on board,

which they didn't want falling in Chinese hands. There was a lot of politicking that came out of this because the U.S. government, like, okayed these launches on Chinese satellites or Chinese launch vehicles. This one went poorly. They may have gotten an encryption decryption module. Defense Department says that's not that bad because of the keys that were used. technical detail that you can read if you want to hear about encryption.

Overall, the U.S. government was not happy about this and ended up expanding the ITAR international treaty of arms regulation, expanding those regulations quite a bit to effectively eliminate the ability for U.S. companies to launch on Chinese launchers. expanding ITAR so much so that the Europeans accuse the U.S. and in my view rightly so of saying, you're actually not expanding these enough, or you're not expanding these to limit technology exports to China. You're expanding it so much to hurt China by not allowing them to be used, their launchers to be used. And you're actually not that worried about technology transfer. You're worried about, you know, losing market to China and all that kind of stuff. So it was such an interesting time, you know, 86 to 96 going from all the commercial payloads on shuttle.

Challenger happens. We'll let some fly on China. This accident happens, which is a horrible accident. But it was used in kind of a like, you know, opportunistic way to limit the ability for companies to launch with China in a way that maybe at the time they did have some reason. But I think the effect of that has still lived on to this point today in a very very very important. very probably harmful way for China and arguably for the community at large. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is kind of where it all started, the whole drama between the U.S. and China, right?

Because that was ITAR. I think I wrote down was like 1990-ish. And there was like a period where like it was applicable to satellites, but then not. And then satellites again. And then when did they actually forbid NASA from working with them? It was in, it might have been right after that accident. It might have been... Yeah, and they've stepped that up like several times since.

I'm trying to look for the exact dates. I mean, like, the dates have 2,000s in front of them in some of these cases. Like, we're still, even so far as, like, last year, we've been expanding these regulations. I think there was, like, three or four different times when we just moved the bar up another notch and said, like, satellite components are now part of ITAR. And this particular satellite component is now part of ITAR. to the point where there's companies in Europe working to recreate those parts to sell them to China and things like that.

Yeah, yeah. I read that too. They were like me like they were marketing like an ITAR free satellite or whatever. Yeah, yeah, totally. Oh man, the stuff that, oh, that just boggles my mind sometimes, the things that, you know, we do to... It's a lot of politicking. Like, it really is. And it's, I brought that up not to derail us completely,

but to say that like, the, things that the trends that are in play today and the weird politics that exist between the US and China and everyone else in space industry were set up 20 years ago at this point. Yeah. And that's kind of like, it's amazing that it's gone on that long and is still being doubled down on. Getting old. Sure is.

Anyway, so let's talk a little bit about the humans before we get into future stuff. So the astronauts they picked in 1972 or no longer qualified to fly as you can imagine So in 1992 They pick a whole new Or no sorry They start the new program in 92

They don't pick astronauts till 98 But they start developing The Shenzu or Shenzhou I think you say Shenzhou spacecraft Which is completely developed from Soyuz So back in this time Now that the Soviets are gone They're a little bit more unfriendly terms with Russia again.

And they actually get a Soyuz spacecraft and they build Shenjo to match it. It's actually a little bit bigger, which is a little more advanced, believe it or not. You know, they actually had like solar panels on the orbital module and stuff, which is pretty cool. And they, so they build this new spacecraft and it flies first time in 1999, which is the 50th anniversary of the People's Republic of China. And then they fly their first astronauts in 2000. which is a pretty cool. It's a pretty brisk timeline. I think that's actually pretty confident.

I mean, start in 92 and you're flying people in 03. What's the, compare that to some of the American companies operating today, right? When did SpaceX and Boeing agree to build a spacecraft? Yeah, I think they'll beat that timeline, but not by as much as people would like. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so, I mean, Shenzhou has now made 11 launches. seven of them have had crew. They've had spacewalks. They've had space stations. So the crude spaceflight program is humming along pretty good.

And then I found a good story. So after that first flight, the first Chinese astronaut, Yang Li Wei, he returned to Earth and he went to Chen Shusin's house where he's, he's an old man at this time. He retired in 1990, I think, but he was still working from home like you do. And yeah, he went to visit him. So I watched this documentary and there's, there's, there's astronaut in this room and the guy's old and withered in the bed and it must have been a pretty cool conversation. Yeah, totally. Yeah.

That's a fly-in-the-wall moment, you know. Yeah, exactly. If you could understand it. Yeah, it would mostly be like that Twitter feed I was talking about earlier. It would be like, wow, this looks awesome. This looks like a really cool thing that I'm experiencing. From context, I think this is a good conversation. I think that might, he may have a tear in his eye at this point.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I watched this document. And of course, you know, it's a Chinese documentary. So I'm not sure how true it was because it was very like rah, rah, rah, China is the best. And that's how it goes sometimes. But it sounds like Chen was a pretty cool guy right to the end. I mean, he died in 2009, I believe. And, yeah, he got to see all this, right?

So same thing. He starts this whole space program. And by the time he dies, they're sending people to space, which is pretty cool. But yeah, so, I mean, we've got, there's some really cool stuff for human space like coming up. I don't know if you want to talk about that. I mean, it's still plans at this point, but. Yeah, let's, we'll get into like current end future stuff because I think there's a little bit of that that crosses over at this point. But really, like, there's a couple of trends to keep your eye on following China.

Number one is there is a new satellite launch center that they've been using. that is going to be very important to them for all of the future endeavors. It's the Wen Chang Satellite Launch Center. It's in the South China Sea on an island. It's at 19 degrees north. So very low latitude. That's pretty good. Which, yeah, it's lower than Canaveral.

Yeah. You know, the only things that beat it are like India's is 13-ish. Kauru is five. You know, if you count Kwajel-in is like nine degrees. north. But everything else is much higher than that. So that's just an important note when you're thinking about, you know, future architectures that you might use with staging in Leo or fuel depots or anything like that.

They are a very low latitude launch center for these larger rockets that I'll talk about in a second. And the rockets are really the biggest component that they're working on right now. And they're in the middle of this huge transition. and all of the launch vehicles that we were talking about in history and still operating today are all hypergolic fueled. So they're all using UDMH and N204. So, you know, super, super toxic stuff. That is like crazy explosive to the point where, you know,

you can pressure feed engines instead of having turbo pumps and all that kind of stuff. You know, storable, so it's very easy to use in space. Also, you know, these were developed out of, ICBMs and things like that, which typically use storable propellants in that way. But when you're looking to move into a more advanced era of space exploration and focus it on space exploration, you want to move towards different kinds of fuels. So they are in the midst of this transition to get all of these old launch vehicles

put aside, really, and moved on to a new generation of things. So the couple that you will want to listen in on, and they have some new small set launchers, like Long March 11 and things like that that you'll want to just keep up on if you're interested in launch vehicles. But the three that are really going to be important are the Long March 5, which had its first flight back in 2016 just about a year ago. This is a monster, monster rocket. It matches, it's just a little bit less than Delta 4 heavy in terms of payload capacity. So a very, very large launch vehicle. Five meter core stage burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.

so very, you know, I still don't like that as a first stage engine, engine choice, but that's what they're doing. They're doing kind of that Delta 4 heavy style where you've got like, you know, super efficient fuels. And then, yeah, they've got, they got four 3.3 meter boosters that are burning RP1 and liquid oxygen, like a very traditional launch vehicle. Those are like really, really big strap-on boosters, like three meters, like there's rockets that size, you know? Huge. Yeah, they're, I think, what, Falcon 9 is like 3.7 or something like that.

Yeah. So, you know, almost a Falcon 9. Yeah, exactly. It really is. Then this Long March 5 has like a second stage that is there for non-Leo missions. So if something's going to GTO or anything like that, interplanetary, there will be a second stage on the booster. And then there's a hypergolic upper stage that is also used to put things directly into geo. So this is a very, very advanced launch vehicle.

that, you know, you could see something like this. Obviously, different architecture looking, different look, different layout or whatever, but this thing would be useful to, like, the U.S. Department of Defense. It meets a lot of their requirements for very advanced defense missions. So I'm sure there's going to be a lot of that usage in it. The first flight took something up to GO's communication satellite. Second launch didn't go so well.

There was, like, an issue at the first stage. You could see a plume of smoke towards the end of the first stage burn. So it failed. We're waiting on the next one. The next flight was supposed to be Changi 5, which we'll talk about when we get to the lunar stuff. And it will also be used to lift the new core of their new space station. So that's going to be like the heavy lifter for the time being.

For the time being. For the time being foreshadowing. The other one that's important to talk about is Long March 7. This is designed to replace the Long March 2F, which is the crude vehicle that they have right now, yeah. First time they used this was to launch the Tianziao, which is the cargo spacecraft. They sent that up to Tian Gang 2.

This is really expected to be like the future workhorse of their lineup because it's, you know, it's a very sweet spot kind of payload capacity. It's going to launch crew to different destinations in Leo and potentially beyond depending on how their architectures are. But this is probably the one you'll see going most often in the next era of Chinese spaceflight. And then the giant one is the Long March 9. This one we still don't really know that much about. It's still in the works.

But this is going to have the payload capacity that matches the Saturn 5. So this is a big boy. It's going to be 10 meter diameter. It's a 10 meter diameter and there's going to be 5 meter boosters on it. so this thing is like you want to talk about a kerbal rocket it's it's basically long march five but instead of five meter and three and a half it's 10 meter and five meter what's s ls diameter seven uh 8.4 8.4 yeah yeah the the first block the top stage is seven right is that what it is ius yes yeah yeah uh something like that something close to that 8.4, so 10 meters. That's really big. It's huge. Yeah, I mean, that's what Saturn 5 was. So imagine putting Delta 4 cores around a Saturn 5. But obviously with like more thrust on the

Delta 4 cores. So a huge rocket, this is going to have, you know, 140 metric tons to to low Earth orbit just like Saturn 5. At least that's what they're saying now. They might just be saying that to kind of evoke that like image of in your mind. But this is the one. that's going to be, you know, 300-some feet tall, 100 meters tall. This will be the workhorse for when they do missions to the moon, missions to Mars, whatever, future stuff they have. So really, like, before we get into the stuff about what they're doing in the moon area and the moon area, that's what you call it, cis-luner space. China is kind of one of those things that they have a lot of these plans for the future, so much so that, it's hard to tell which ones are serious enough to talk about.

You know, they're saying like reusable space plane in the 2020s, reusable launch vehicles by 2030, nuclear shuttle supplied by in space resources in 2045. Like, they have these grand visions, which, you know, I think that says a lot about where they're at, where they're going. But when you're going to watch this day and day out, be watching for developments at that new launch center, be watching for any of these new generation of launch vehicles. making their way towards a pad because that's really like that's the the bread and butter of this program right now. That's like the thing that scares me most about this is that like I'm not like you know,

I'm not like yay communism, but like in this one situation, the space program, being able to like plan long term and just like execute without any debate is super advantageous. Because like they can just be like, all right, our five year plan, we're going to develop this launch vehicle and no one's going to stop us. there's no budget fighting every year. Like they just lay down and they do it. So some of these things, I always think China is going to sneak up on us. And they kind of did in some ways, right? Like the, you know, when we talk about, well, we'll get the robotic stuff, right? Like the Changa stuff, I feel like that just kind of came out of nowhere.

Yeah, they're very advanced missions. That's for sure. I just, I hesitate to be like, you know, great long-term vision because I know another large nation that once had this similar stature. you know this this didn't if it pans out yes it's good to have long-term vision like this but i just typically favor the chaotic aspect of of you know every the way everyone else is working on things that it's just like a million things trying a million different ways and one of them will hopefully work at some point but you know it is you you do want to pay attention to their long-term vision

but i think they are in such transition state right now that they just have to make it through this next part. Yeah. And get some of these other international concerns, like the I-TAR restrictions, like, really clarify where they stand on that. So the Changi stuff, Changi, how do you say it? Chang-ha? Chang-u?

I don't know. They have been some really, really cool missions. They've landed, it's all focused on the moon right now. So Changa 3 was the one that landed with a soft-lander. on the moon had a nice little rover on it. One and two were orbitors, you know, doing mapping missions. Two was very interesting

because it orbited the moon for a while. Shot out to, was it, Earth Moon L2? Yeah. And then run and then did a flyby of a near-Earth, near-Earth asteroid. That's like some dawn level stuff. Like multi-destination, that's pretty, it's impressive. You don't just stumble into that, you know, like.

And to be able to track all. of that happening at the same time. It's like, yeah, that's the thing. They had to build all of their own ground infrastructure, like all the tracking. They got ships, they got tracking stations,

they got all that kind of stuff, which is sort of the infrastructure you don't really think about nowadays, but, you know, because the U.S. has had it for so long. Right. Europe kind of has it, and they share a lot, right?

So there's a lot of help, but like China does it all by themselves, right? Yeah, totally. A couple of cool things coming up with that program. So Changa 3 was the one with the little U2 rover. There was a flight. backup for that mission, in case something went wrong. Very old school mission architecture in that way. I say old school, but also there was like plenty of Marses that had these kind of things.

So the flight backup for that, Changa 4 is going to go and land on the far side of the moon, which will be very cool. They haven't said exactly where I yet, but some people were speculating if it'll be near the South Pole, the Aitken Basin, where everyone's like intrigued by putting a base there of some sort. And with that, they're going to need some communications architecture, and they're planning on putting a communications relay in Earth Moon L2, which will be like a really,

if they are able to put it there, they are able to use that as communications relay. You could hypothetically see an instance where that becomes their foot in the door to work with the U.S. or someone on future missions. You know, just relay some communications for us. We'll dip a toe in here if we can, that kind of thing. And then Chongi 5, that's the sample return mission that they're working on.

This was supposed to be the next launch of Long March 5. It's supposed to go this year. They're having hard time with the investigation of what went wrong on the second launch. So it's just pushed until 2019 right now. But this is going to fly out there, return two kilograms of lunar soil, which will be pretty huge. That's awesome. Two kilograms is not nothing, man.

That's a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So that's pretty good stuff. I can't help but think of, so you don't know when they're landing on the far side, all you think about is that Bigelow Aerospace comic.

Oh my God. The landing strip. Again, if my new technology works out, look at your phone right now because I'm going to put some comic strips in there from this Bigelow press conference or whatever that was. They're like, waving in the American spaceship and like landing fee is this many yuan or whatever it is right? Oh man.

That's some crazy stuff. So yeah, some of the human stuff that they're working on, they have ambitions for heading out to the moon. Like I said, with Long March 9 and stuff like that. But they are working on another space station as well. This one, their first two, Chonggang one and two, have just been single modules that they send up there, visit with some crude spaceships, visit with some. some cargo spaceships, do space station things. They are planning to launch a new modular space station in 2019.

The first module is going to go up in Long March 5, and then they're going to build onto it from there. And that's kind of what their focus is for the crewed missions right now. It looks kind of like Mir. That's kind of how I see it. I think it's roughly half the size of Mir, but it is that similar shape. Center node with like all the things sticking out from it, right? Yeah.

Yeah, and it's interesting because this is where we'll get in some of the international stuff. ESA has been sending astronauts to train with China. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And ESA has not straight away from saying that, like, they would be interested in flying up to the Chinese space station. Yeah. So, you know, NASA is forbidden from talking with China about anything, with anything that has any connection to space in any way.

And ESA's like, yeah, we'll fly to that space. and, you know, there's others that are, you know, Russia's still kind of working with China in a lot of ways. And really at this point, it's just NASA that's missing out on any collaboration with China. I think I saw the story when they sent, they sent Samantha Christoph Ready over there, I think. Because she's like some sort of genius polyglot. She speaks like 15 languages or something. So they sent that. So she's just over there, you know, speaking Mandarin or whatever.

That's cool. So it's interesting because. You know, ISS has a decommissioning date at some point. Theoretically, this space station from China would be up there. If Issa goes all in on it, does Issa not extend the ISS?

Ergo, do they go all in with China and not extend past 2024? Ergo, they are not building any more Orion service modules. Because that is right now how they have anything to do with the ISS program. There is a barter deal that ESA will build service models for Orion, for SLS, and get access to the ISS through 2024.

That deal falls apart because of Chinese Space Station, and NASA is sitting out in the cold with no service model for Orion. S hits the F. You think that would actually happen? No, not at all. That's a big risk. Not at all, yeah. If you're your, you're, you're like, who do I want to please?

Yeah, totally. Okay, so that's a stupid theory of mine. Here's a less stupid but equally, maybe dangerous question to ask. Is China repeating our biggest mistake? Are collectively, meaning people that are in the ISS program. Locking up all their funding in a space station? In a space station that doesn't actually serve any. part of their future architecture.

You know, if I was China right now, seeing the way that the winds are blowing internationally, I would be going all in on getting to the moon, getting to the lunar surface and setting up a base there, not putting any effort into a low Earth orbiting space station that, you know, is there going to be a fuel depot there? Are they going to integrate it into their architecture at all? you know, it's in a lot of ways not set up to support that in any facet, you know, where it's, where it's

located in Leo, the inclination that it's located in Leo, the architecture of it. It is, you know, ISS is a great thing for international relations and for research and for being able to, you know, my thing is the greatest legacy of the ISS is the creation of

an industry in low earth orbit because it's a foothold. That is not China's goal with this. I feel like they are repeating our biggest mistake as an international community in putting so much money into this and it's going to hurt their ambitions towards the lunar surface. That's one way to look at it. But I wonder because, again, because of the way they can centrally plan everything, would they, I mean, if I'm China, what I'm doing with this is saying, I'm identifying like a list of very key objectives that I need to get out of the space station. Like I need to learn how to dock big modules. I need to learn on orbit assembly.

I need to learn how to have people in space for a long time. I need to learn. Like you just like list out all these things and then they just start knocking them off. And when they're done, they just deorbit it and move on. Like there wouldn't be any of this fuss that we had. Right. Every year it's like, what do we do now? Again, let's have the same debate over and over and have a big fight over.

And then be like, well, we can't make a decision. So we're just going to go with what's already there and continue that for another year, right? You know, that continuing resolution of the space program. basically for 20 years. I guess that's where I'm getting at, though, is like, are they setting themselves up for some cost fallacy? Because we sure are stuck in one right now. Yeah.

We had multiple different programs, we being the U.S., but also to some extent, you know, Russia with, I don't, I don't, I'm not too kind to Russia in, in the way I look at them. Yeah. And I just kind of feel like China has so far, they're operating a way that's kind of like, What is everyone else before us done?

And, you know, given where they're at, this would be the time to diverge from that and say, well, like, maybe let's not set ourselves up for a dead end that sinks a bunch of money. I don't know. Unpopular opinion maybe about the utility of Leo stations in general in this current architecture. But I feel like, to your point of, like, knocking off the to-do list, I don't know that they need to do a fully modular station that looks like MIR to do any of that. Yeah. So. Hmm. Okay. Well, maybe we should ask the listeners what they think. Yeah. Send us an email. We, the self-deprecation work, right? We don't know anything about China and we need your help. So please send us an email about what you think Chinese should do with their space station.

Or not do it. Or not do it. Tell us if they should send it into the ocean. You want to do some picks? Oh, I do want to do some picks. You know what? I was before the show, I was like, I'm forgetting something. I'm forgetting something. I meant to great. grab something or my pick. Okay. So, do you want me to grab it and then you can do yours? Or do you want me to grab it and I'll do mine? Why don't you just go grab it? There's really the only one option I gave you.

Hold on. This is fun. I'm watching like how you get out of your closet, your professional closet. Oh, I see more soundproofing on the door. Listeners. I'm getting a live view of Anthony's closet. It is white.

There is a door. And a handsome podcaster has just emerged back into it. He's hanging up his hoodies. Setting things back up. Sound happening. It's looking good. Here he is. I'm back.

Thank you for now reading. Do you want me to go first? Sure. You go first. With all that pomp and circumstance. Yeah. Yeah. I'm really curious now.

because I've never had props on a podcast before. It's just books. Don't worry about it too much. I just wanted to have some scale here. So I've been doing a lot of traveling. Still got some coming up. So I've been doing a lot of reading in said travels. And finishing off a book that I've been reading for a while,

it's just a huge book that I chip away at over time. Two books specifically. But first one is the Space Shuttle Decision. So this is by T.A. Hepenheimer. You can find this one paperback out in the wild. I think there's a version of it somewhere on the NASA history archive, but I can't necessarily find that right now, but I know it does exist in paperback.

So this is the first volume. This is like if you think you know the space shuttle and how it was ideated, is that a word? It's a word if you work in a corporate office, but not if you're a human. Got it. All right, sure. So if you think you know

like how the idea for the space shuttle came about, why it came about, how it became what it is, you don't until you've read this book. It is crazy. Like letters between the Office of Management and Budget

and the President. Letters between the Vice President and the Office Management. But like, just crazy detail. But this one runs, first volume runs from 65 to 72. So this was, while Apollo was still going on,

figuring out what is NASA going to do next. We need a shuttle. This is our plan. This is our architecture. And culminates in the go-ahead to this is the shuttle. This is what it's going to look like. These are the requirements. And let's go into it.

So this is like, I don't know, this one is particularly my favorite because it's got all of the shuttle concepts in it, which I just love. Like, there's so many weirdo concepts. They're so good. Yeah. And it's got all the original drawings from like the original North American. proposal and the original Rockwell proposal and then like rounds two and three.

It's like there's the one that I love that's like shows the shuttle on the tarmac and it's basically like if you think about the the bell airplane that that Yeager broke the sound barrier and it's like that but just bigger. It's like this like pointed nose and like yeah there's so much weird stuff

like this is one that is in there I'm showing Jake on the oh weird oh no don't do that that. So there's just like all the great concepts. If someone proposed that today, we'd be laughing them out of the industry right now. So yeah, it's a pretty thick book.

But that's the first volume. Second volume is, so that was called the Space Shuttle Decision. This one is called the Development of the Space Shuttle. This runs 72 to 81. So this is that, this is volume two. I guess there's going to be a volume three. It's not out yet. But that would like tell the story of shuttle.

But this is like, you've made the decision. You've locked it in. and then go about developing it. And those dates are a little off because it does also get into like shuttle upper stages, Centaur and all that kind of stuff that was rumored. So, again, really nice books. Encyclopedic, the text in these pages is even smaller and it's a thicker book. So it's just like really, really, you know, deep into it.

This one is also available paperback, but there is a Kindle version as well of the second one only, not the first, which sucks. And just to show you, I did switch over to. reading the Kindle. But you can find out where I left off in the paperback version before the Kindle version came out. Because my bookmark is an old school SLS, like with the Saturn 5 style painting on it. And it's got a hashtag Journey to Mars on it.

Oh, yeah. And this is a bookmark I got at EFT1 way back in the day. Journey to Mars. So that's it. Spatial Decision and the Development of Space. Space Shuttle, T.A. Heppenheimer. They are awesome. That's awesome. I haven't read the centaur book yet, and now I got to read these ones too. And like, I don't, I'm not a good reader. No, neither am I. That's why I still have an EFT1 bookmark in my book. Maybe can you just like,

can you just read aloud when you go through it and then record that and then listen to it? That's a good idea for business. That'd be really helpful, really helpful. Okay, so I have a pair of picks that are related to. as well. So you remember last month I was like, I'll always pick the pick like the day before because I'll forget it. This time I didn't. I actually saw something. I was like, I'm going to make this my pick. So I saw it first on Jason Davis's Twitter, who's from the Planetary Society, and they post this article. It was a reprint from another publication, but they reprinted it. And it was a blog post about celestial navigation. So the Polynesian people from a long, long time ago,

you know and if you watch Moana you know what I'm talking about it's a great movie yeah it's a awesome movie and she she holds her hand up with the thumb on the horizon and does the thing and finds Polaris and she's like this way is north or whatever or I know what latitude I meant so so they went through a little bit of the tricks and stuff and some of the you know the it was it's very high level it was kind of interesting a little little post but Jason tweeted a reply where he dug into one of the sources for it so just one of the diagrams had like you know source something something journal of Polynesian culture and you like found that paper and that was the treasure drawer so I opened this paper up and it's like it's I don't know 20 30 pages or whatever and it's actually

like a scientific paper on celestial navigation like Polynesian the art and in in 1980 there's this guy who his name was Nainoa Thompson I think and he was like a hobby celestial navigator or whatever and he like yeah he like learned it there's there's like this group of people that are trying to keep it alive right because you don't don't need it today um but he learned from this this guy who this old man who like learned it from his grandpa whatever and it was like it was hanging on there and he learns it again and he did like a test voyage and they like they like measured it with um instruments on the boat and so he would like every day he would like look and see where he is and say i think i'm here and they would compare it to the actual coordinates with g

GPS and this boat like followed them and recorded all the winds and everything to see how accurately was. It's fascinating. And he went from Hawaii down to Tahiti and then back, which is like not a short travel. Like it's like 4,000 kilometers each way. Like it's so, so far. It's like 40 degrees of latitude or something that he crosses or I don't know. I can't remember where it is.

But it's far. And like he was pretty close. Like there's and you could tell he would he would be able to tell you why he was like inaccurate. So like he would diverge from the path a little bit because he wasn't sure about something. And then you get to a point where he would finally figure out the correction and he would correct back, like right back on track to where it was again. It's nuts. And it's like this whole story of like, you know, because you can tell your latitude reasonably easy, um, using stars, but it's the longitude. It's difficult, right? And they would basically do this thing called like dead reckoning where they just like

watch the water and they're like, well, like went by this fast and the winds this way. So I probably went here and then they would just like mentally remember every every day where they'd been and oh like it's crazy what they would do so if you want to learn about Polynesian celestial navigation and some of the wacko stuff they do you're talking about like when they finally get close to the destination because even if you're like you know if you're accurate to like I don't know 10% or even 5% on a 4,000 kilometer jury you could still miss an island by like 100 kilometers right Yeah. So they do this thing where they like watch the clouds and like the peaks would like move the clouds, right?

Like of these islands. They could see the cloud patterns. And sometimes they would see like the shallow water near the islands would reflect up because the water was like lighter color. And they could see the reflection on the clouds. They're like, oh, there's an island that way. Well, there's an island that way. And they could see them from hundreds of kilometers away. Like just wacko stuff like that.

Whoa. It's so incredible. You know, and you think about like a culture that didn't have a written language. they had no metal works. There's like, just no instruments at all. Like they literally just like went out there and like, these are my instruments,

my hands and my star chart that I made up in my brain with rocks. Like it's just, it's nuts. So I don't know. I was like captivated. I read it and read it and read it, read it, read it.

So yeah, so we'll put the links to there. And then I kind of have, um, kind of a special bonus treat. So, uh, I just finished a class.

I was taking a class, uh, called sound design. And it was just basically like I wanted to learn, I wanted to learn, I wanted to put some credentials next to what I could, you know, what I thought I could do with podcasting. So I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything. So I just, I took a sound exam class.

And the final project was to make a podcast. And it could be whatever you wanted. So I actually chose this topic as, because since I was reading about it, I made a podcast about this. So I actually have a 10 minute short show that I don't know if we should link to it or drop it in the feed or something. We can just, we can link it somehow. And you can listen to a, well, a reasonably well, pretty good. produced 10 minutes.

And I'll tell you all about it. I'll tell you all about... More professionally produced podcast than one that happens in a closet. Definitely, yeah, because I got gradered on it. But yeah, so I'll go through all the different things that they do and some of that stuff. And I had a little fun with it because I like to do, as you can tell from this episode, I like to tell stories. So kind of told a little bit of a story with it.

And yeah, that's cool. That's awesome. Yeah. It's scary, though. I don't know how those guys do it. No, not at all. They don't get to sleep. Yeah, I guess ships, right?

Well, you have to keep watching. Well, you have to keep watching the wind. So they do these power nets. Like, yeah. Like, you can go to sleep and I could do it for a little and then switch. Apparently you couldn't, though, because you had to like, it was like a series of... You had to keep it all loaded into your head. Yeah.

Well, you're not sleep for 4,000 kilometers? You just do power naps. It's like every couple hours you took a 20 minute or you. Well, how does that count? You can't... I don't know. I don't know. I guess, yeah, okay.

I'm not going to get too mad about it, but... Let's just say it's a really hard thing. It is. You got any plugs before we're out of here? Something you've been cooking up over there? Like your podcast? Not the one that you just plugged, the main one? The main one, the real one?

Yeah. I should preface that that the bonus podcast sounds like it's a real podcast. It's a fake podcast. There are no subsequent episodes to this podcast. Yeah. It's for school. It's educational purposes only. I did a new website, I guess.

Oh, yeah, yeah, new website. Yeah. It was a lot of work, way more work than I wanted to do. But I think I don't have to migrate after those ones. I've now changed websites every year, and I think this is the last time I have to do it for a while. Yeah, for a couple years. Yeah, for two years at least, yeah. But yeah, so it's not really any different right now, but it's good in that it sets me up to do more things later.

foreshaddle. Can you tell us what the website is? www. www. Weimartians.com. What about that space? I thought there was a dot space. That one works too.

Okay. Cool. They both go to the same place. If you were an astute listener, you would have known that dot space was my dev site, so if you could have seen the development as I went. Sorry. Putting you on blast.

Cool. I've been doing podcasting two over at Managing Cudolph.com, I was recently in Houston, got to visit Nanorex, and talked a little bit about it on there, which I thought was pretty fun. That looked like an awesome trip. It was a lot of fun. I really, really, really enjoyed Houston. I'd never been there, so I very much enjoyed it. My next trip is going to be even more awesome.

Going to be out in Utah for a little bit. One of those days and nights is going to be at Bryce Canyon National Park, which is a fine desert location, 9,000 feet in the air, not in the air, but, you know, relatively in the air, in zero light pollution. So it's going to be like the most perfect skies I've ever seen. So I probably will be practicing some celestial navigation. Here's the trick. If you don't listen to anything else, the distance and degrees of Polaris above the horizon is also your latitude north of the equator. there it is

how about that see little knowledge I'm guessing that's like 35 40 degrees or is that

something like that right I'm on the border I'm 47 so I'm 49 yeah it's gotta be I don't know

okay I'd say it's yeah probably 30 35 to 40 somewhere in there something like that cool okay all right let's test it out

should be should be about halfway up almost I'll work on it yeah Tell me what the Milky Way looks like. I don't know what it looks like. Oh, man.

I live in cities. Yeah. That's all we got. That's all we got. You can follow Anthony on Twitter at Weav Miko. And his website is Managingcutoff.com. Got a great podcast. We just did this.

Not the Twitter stuff. Not the Twitter stuff. You're right. And you're at Wee underscore Martians. Yes. You can tweet at Wee Martians if you want. It's some other guy who just gets all my stuff. tweets. He doesn't post anything. I check it every couple months.

Yeah. You can file a thing for that. Can you? Yeah, I'll show you how. Okay. All right, goodbye. Thank you.