Off-Nominal - 10 - A Cafe in Milan

Episode Date: July 10, 2018

Shannon Stirone joins Jake and Anthony for a deep dive into the history, present, and future of the Deep Space Network. Beers La Fin du Monde - Unibroue - Untappd Lemon Gin Saison - Bridge Brewing Company - Untappd HopBack Amber Ale - Tröegs Independent Brewing - Untappd Topics Welcome to the Center of the Universe Uplink-Downlink: A History of the Deep Space Network, 1957-1997 (The NASA History Series) NASA’s Management of the Deep Space Network Picks When a Mars Simulation Goes Wrong - The Atlantic Trouble On The HI-SEAS - Are We There Yet - 90.7 WMFE Surviving Mars | Paradox Interactive Surviving Mars on Steam Annihilation (2018) - IMDb SwRI scientists find evidence of complex organic molecules from Enceladus | Southwest Research Institute Follow Shannon Shannon Stirone (@shannonmstirone) | Twitter 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

TLS and go for main engine, start. Yeah, you have to do the intro because I don't want to start all the listeners with my... Like, who's this deep voice that's happening? That's a real radio voice right there. So welcome to Off Nominal, number 10. Hello. This is a new intro format that I've developed for the show where we're... Actually, how we started out, where we just pick a random spot to start, but I'm doing it again.

We've got another friend with us. Shannon is here. You also know her as Deep Space Network, Shannon. I think that's her now her Twitter handle for everything. Hello, Shannon. Welcome. Hello, guys. Thank you.

Jake, how did we come up with this concept for the show? There's not much of a concept, let's be honest. That's true. That's true. I think the concept was we don't want to talk about Space Force. And Jake was like, let's pick a different topic, Deep Space Network. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, because sometimes we do like topical stuff.

Like, this is what's happening. We need to talk about it. But sometimes we're just like, oh, it's a quiet month. Let's just pick a fun one that we can just deep dive and go nuts on. And I don't know, Deep Space Network kind of popped up in my mind. And then I thought of Shannon because she wrote a great piece called Welcome to the Center of the Universe, I think was the title of it. It was. It's on long reads.

So you need to sit down for 20 minutes and embrace it, which is always fun. Yeah, so I thought we invite you on and talk about this really cool piece of infrastructure. that I think it's probably like the unsung hero of robotic exploration of the solar system. It is absolutely. I couldn't not have said it better. It is. That's why I wanted to write that piece. And no one knows about it, which is just so frustrating.

So do you want to talk a little bit just to me about yourself? Like, you know, you're a freelance journalist. What kind of stuff do you write about? Where can we read you? Yeah, yeah. So I'm freelance journalist. I write kind of science explains. and also journalism, which is kind of different.

But I write for popular science and Atlantic and New Republic, popular mechanics, astronomy magazines, kind of all over the place. But yeah, I've written a lot about astronomy, but I love planetary science, which is what I think, how I think I found the Deep Space Network, is that they go hand in hand. One cannot exist without the other. So I've gravitated. I'm so sorry towards that. I find myself saying that and people are like,

oh, it's so funny. And it's like, I didn't say that consciously. You were just literally using the word. I'm just using the word. Yeah, planetary science. That's my, that's my love. Me too. I know we have bonded over planets.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Shannon and I met in the, very briefly, in the press room of the lunar and planetary science, conference, which is kind of an interesting place. It's like 50-50 if you're going to make new friends or if you're just going to sit quietly. I was going to say, weren't you like sheltering in there? Because I remember talking to you like, oh, I got to go take a break because I'm about to pass out. I'm going to go to the press room. Yeah. And we get free food. Yeah, yeah. I bet I mean, it's just like, it's that conference food that you can only have so much of. Yeah. And like by day five,

you're like, I'm never going to eat a muffin again in my life. I was just going to say a muffin. Yeah, you'll never eat a muffin ever again until the next LPSC. Exactly. Were there any drinks at LPSC? We skipped the drink segment. My off-kilter intro. Oh, yeah. I have, I have, I don't have space beer, but I got a beer that sold me on the title

because the name of the beer is the end of the world, but it's in French. It makes it so much cooler. La Fin du Mon, which is like kind of apt for the state of things. And also I have a Jupiter coaster that I stole. Wow. That's awesome. From a bar. Yeah.

I think that that, uh, Thainzimon, that's a Quebec beer, right? That's Canadian, isn't it? It looked like a map of Quebec on it.

And we have that here. It says, it says Belgian. Hmm. But it's from Canada. You, so you unwittingly brought a very, you brought a very Jake beer to the show.

Because it's Canadian. It's oversized. And I see that it's 9%. And this is like, exactly what Jake does every single show. So you, unwittingly stumbled directly into the crosshairs of this show. Perfect.

And it's in French. And it's in French. I just was like, at the end of the world, I have to fight it. Perfect. Cool. Take what you got up there.

Okay, so you may hear a slight change in the tone of my voice. Just a little bit. And it's not because I'm just becoming a better radio guy. This is not practice. I've picked up some sort of bug. And it hit my throat this morning. And so this is what you get. And so, you know, I was talking to some people in the Discord and they said that, you know,

sometimes when you're sick, a little bit of alcohol helps. Helps you feel a little bit better. And I was like, okay, well, maybe. I've always heard that lemon is a better thing to have. So I found the best of both worlds. And I have, this is Bridge Brewery in North Vancouver. And it's a lemon gin. Lemon gin.

So it's very summer. it's cut gin in it maybe I don't know Sounds like a lot of things going on there Yeah And it's got lemon So that's gonna be good for my throat Right it's healthy

Yeah or just whiskey Whiskey is also good for yourself He heard that So I have no idea if this is going to be good or not But we'll We'll find out I'm pouring it now That is gathering the show notes for me

In the Discord chat that we're streaming to He's like dropping them in So I don't have to collect them later Yeah he's got He's got our beers Lemon gin. So the bridge thing is that I assume there's like some sort of cool bridge up north Vancouver. Yeah, there's obviously the north shore is very like very mountainous and lots of hiking and trails and outdoorsy stuff.

And there's a one of the gorges has a huge bridge called Capilano. And it's like a massive tourist attraction. It's like not even that good because it's like $40 to cross this bridge on foot. So you just like you go up to this bridge. It's like $40. And then you're like you can look down at the river and then everyone's really happy. and I don't know, you go home. I've never even gone just because I'm like,

there's so many trails that you can just walk to. A bunch of other suspension bridges that are free, and so you're like, okay, whatever. But people love it. $40. Yeah, that's too much. Yeah. Hey, this is good.

Oh, it's very orangey too. I like the color of it. It matches the oilish cup that you're drinking out of. Yeah. Oil country. I got keeping it orange. I brought myself a little trog's hopback, amber ale. Little leftover 4th of July beer in the fridge.

A cute label. But yeah, I love their design. It's from, I actually found out that I know the person who designed all their stuff, like randomly, a random connection. It was like, oh, it was a designer. I worked for Troggs for a while. And so, yeah, it was random. But they're the, I had a trog's beer on the show before.

They're out in Hershey, PA. And so they're like pretty local, localish. And I love Hotback, Amber Elle. Nice, refreshing. But probably not as refreshing as the lemon beer. Yeah, this is like, I'm going to have more of this when it gets more hot outside. You know it's refreshing, the end of the world. That's a cool glass you got, too.

Thank you. All right, so the drinks are out of the way. We were starting to get into this a second. I would like to hear the origin story of the Deep Space Network article. Like, you had the idea to write it, and then what happened? Ooh, that is a good question. Yeah, and it didn't come together overnight either, it looks like. No, so in the article, there's like a multi-month jump and you're like, whoa, this thing was like in the works for a long time.

Yes. Maybe that's reopening the wound. No, I will summarize it into a much smaller story than the couple of years it took to build that thing. So I first discovered the Deep Space Network at a NASA Social at JPL. And they took, NASA socials are really good. If anyone ever does that, they take you places that they don't take the press, usually. And so they took us into mission control, told us about the Deep Space Network. And I, like, my mind was blown.

I just thought, oh, my God, this is a crazy thing. And everything comes through this room. And how have I never heard about this before? And why is this not on the news? And, you know, I felt, like, ripped off that I didn't know about this. That's my favorite reaction ever. How do you not tell me about this this whole time? I was like NASA tells me all sorts of things,

but how come you didn't tell me about this specific thing? Because there are antennas, right? So I became kind of like mildly obsessed and I started watching this website called DSN Now, which I talk about in the article. And just kind of randomly throughout the day I'd find myself loading it and seeing, okay, what spacecraft are we talking to you right now?

and I bought a very thick book, which is on my desk right now, called Uplink, Downlink, and it's the history of the DubeSpace network up and to Cassini. And I just started reading it. All of a sudden, Jake and I immediately started looking for devices to Google this on. We're like, what? Yeah, I will show you the book. And it's on Amazon. It's like a thousand pages and thick and absolutely amazing.

Waiting for Pat to post a link to that in the Discord. You can totally find it. There is. Boom, right there is it at it. I does that sludgeway. Brilliant. Yes, I just sort of fell in love with it. And how did I find out?

Actually, that's a really good question. I don't maybe know the answer to you or don't remember. But I know a lot of people at JPL and talk to them about the DSN. And I just did some homework and found a report from 2015, an audit report that they had done about the DSN, saying, like, oh, it's really in trouble. and it's underfunded and it's been hacked. And I said, oh, my God, like, this huge resource is actually not in a good place. And so I realized I wanted to write something very, very long about the subject.

And there's not a lot of science outlets that say, oh, sure, you want to write something that's 7,000 words, knock yourself out. Like, one. No one's going to read that. They don't have the money to pay you. So I found this, my editor at Long Reads, who's love, and said, you want to tell a story about the DSN, just five to eight thousand words, file it, and we'll do it. And so I took a couple of years just on my own. I had my own research and took about four months of doing reporting and wrote the story.

But with editing and sometimes just the way things work, by the time I filed it, the time when it was published, was about a year-ish, seven, eight months. So I started when Cassini was still alive. We had the power outage at the network, and it ended with Cassini. So it kind of worked out, actually. Yeah. It's fantastic. Anyone that's out there that's listening, I feel like should just pause, go read it, and then come back. Because it is like, I reread it again this morning, but it is absolutely fantastic.

And you're right that like it is not talked about enough. especially some of the minutia that you get into about management and work shifts and stuff like that. It is incredible that this hasn't been, for all the other stuff that has been like congressional sessions about like management of this very particular NASA program. It is amazing that this has not been one of those. Yeah, especially because like the budget. So you wrote in there, I made notes by the way. So the budget's only like. So $200 million a year is basically.

basically the DSN's budget. And that's been reduced by like $100 million over the past five years or whatever. And like that's peanuts compared to the rest of, you know, like they're, if they're fighting for a 10% increase, like, you know, the SLS program, James Webb loses that much in washers and stuff falling through the cracks. They drop that much into the space telescope. Oh, that is so true. That is painful.

But that is a, that's painful fact. Yes. It's not that much, right? And to consider that all of these really expensive assets depend on this one linchpin piece, I don't understand why, like, did you pick up on anything about that as to why that would ever get to that point? I don't know. That's a big question.

It is a big question. And I think, so it was not, there's a lot of red tape, as you can imagine, trying to write something like that. And I've gotten mixed reviews from officials. after having published this. That means you're doing it right. My best guess, I know, right? I was like, I'm a journalist.

I'm sorry, that's my job. What's that saying? If they're shooting at you, you know, you're doing something right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I was doing something right, but my best guess is, I mean, obviously NASA doesn't have a lot of money, and they really do account for every penny, and it's difficult, but I'm going to guess maybe just the way the management is run,

because NASA has money for scan, which is the organization within NASA that runs all of their communications and networking. And so they run their computer systems. They make sure that the security, all of the networks within NASA are secure. They run, so there's a near-Earth network that we use to communicate. I forget the other one. There's three. There's one that we use to communicate with satellites and things that are close to Earth. And then we use another one that communicates with the astronauts on the space station.

And then there's the deep space network, which is everything from the moon and beyond. So they manage all of those networks and make sure that they're safe. But scan is the one that dictates how the money gets distributed. So NASA says, here's your money to scan. And scan says, okay, here's how we're going to allocate it. And so, yes, the DSN's budget has been cut. And every time I speak to someone from the DSN, the budget gets cut more and more. within the year on top of those cuts.

Exactly. It's one of those things where they, yeah, when you subdivide the money kind of down layers, it limits what you can, how flexible you can be, right? Yeah. Yeah. And then is there anything that they're kind of in that mindset, do they track not just necessarily a single number about budget, but like, I'm trying to figure out how to raise the metric, but like budget per mission hour?

because missions are only going up and living longer and opportunities on there for a lot longer than they thought it would be yada yada, right? That happens a thousand times, which is great, but then all of a sudden you've got all these missions going on that you plan for. So is there some metric like that that they have? I think they do, and that's probably not public.

So every mission has to pay. Like whenever someone goes to build a mission, like opportunity, they said, okay, 90 days, maybe we get a few extra months out of it. they have to pay the network, the DSN, to use their computers. So obviously, the longer emission runs, the more money they get to keep using it. Like other space agencies like the Japanese Space Agency and ISA, they all have to lease telescope or the antenna time and the computers. So that's money that they count on, which is really nice, because they have to pay an extra

fee that NASA emissions don't have to pay. But yeah, that's all allocated for. It's just, that's still a question. that I don't have an answer to. It's very confusing, given the number of dollars of assets of spacecraft that we have. Like I almost think of like someone like the planetary sciences division would want to advocate for that, you know, like, because they've had a really good run of budgets lately and they must be thinking like, hey, you know, what's really hurting us is that we're having to do this like multi-spacecraft per aperture mode.

to like, because we got five or six Mars missions pointing us at the exact same time, maybe we could buy another dish or something. I don't know. It feels like that would be something that they would want to advocate for. How is this not like the best friend of every department in NASA, right? That's the thing as it is. And when you talk to planetary scientists or engineers or anybody that relies on the network, which is essentially literally any person who works on a planetary mission of any kind,

they understand how important to Deep Space Network is, that you don't communicate at all with your spacecraft unless that system is working, unless the antennas are working. So I think within NASA and within JPL, those people are advocating because the more problems we have with the network, if parts with the antennas malfunction or they age out, which they have and they do and they are, we lose data. And that's someone on the mission team saying,

oh, we lost the downlink or we missed a couple of data packets because we had this issue at the DSN. And that's the stuff that's scary. And that happens often. And it's happened before. And like I mentioned in the article, there's those times of contention when we have a lot of missions launching and a lot of demand for the Deep Space Network that the lines get busy and mistakes can happen. and those can be very risky. So they do advocate, but they're just completely powerless. Did you get a sense for what if, you know, the classic scenario,

if you were made, you know, NASA administrator or something for a day? Like, did you get any sense for what the next thing they would ask for in a perfect world would be to upgrade the network? Would it be refreshing all the dishes we have? Would it be changing workflow? Did you have any sense for like what that thing is? that they're after? God.

That's a really good question. I think that if someone was able to donate, if I had a few billion dollars and someone was able to donate to NASA tomorrow and the administrator was, sure, I'll take your money and I'll do exactly with it what you want.

I think the folks that work at the Deep Space Network would want more dishes because they're very expensive and to have the money to upgrade their components, all of them. And the more dishes that you have, the more you can take the older ones offline and upgrade them. Rather than dancing around actual project timelines that you've got to deal with.

Exactly. Yeah, I think that's, they would say, give me a couple. Build me, build me at least three more 70 meter dishes. Give me the big antennas. That's interesting. So I read up on the, I was just browsing the Wikipedia article and it pointed to a NASA press release about the upgrade path for, the network and they're taking the 70 meter dishes down. So they're going to move to the smaller ones and then array them in a, you know, like a group of dishes that kind of act as a bigger one. So that's kind of interesting that they, I wonder if that's a cost constraint and they're trying to, you know, solve a budget gap with software,

but it's interesting to think about that way. Yeah, the problem with the 70s is that they've been around. I mean, they started as 64s and around the time of Voyager, they were upgraded. they had to be made larger. But they're, I mean, when you talk to people from the DSN, they call them dinosaurs, and they're dying. Like, the 70 meters are not going to last forever.

And so, yeah, eventually they will, they'll be un-upgradable, which is terrifying. And, yeah, so we use the 34s now to array to talk to spacecraft. But there is an issue that's going to come with the due space now. network, and that is the more missions we have, the tired, more tired it gets, because it has not stopped running since the 60s. I mean, there's not a week where they're like, shut it down. Let's just give the computer systems a break. Let's do software update on everything. Let's make sure they've never done that because you can't. You can't, but you've got 35 spacecraft in orbit, or not in orbit, but that you need to communicate with. and every day is accounted for. The people who plan their planetary missions,

they have to submit a schedule years before their spacecraft launches that says, okay, around this time, I need three downlink or uplink days for approximately five hours each. That's going to cost us much money. I mean, around this week of July. It's wild. And there's just so many variables that go into it.

It just melts my brain when I try to consider it. It's like landing something on Mars. I've got to make sure Mars is pointing. the correct direction to, you know, to Earth, and that's pointed in the correct direction back. Then you're fighting with everybody else's mission. It's an unbelievable management item that is just, I don't know. I guess in the days where we just open up any device

and we're connected to a network somewhere, it's easy to forget that there's, like, actual stuff that has to be, actual radio signals that need to be caught correctly. Yeah, and I love that visual. I don't know, it's so alien to think about. Yeah, and the thing is, we also use the deep space network for tracking near-earth asteroids. I mean, ERACBO is used for that too, but we use the DSN for that a lot. And for radio science, there's a lot of radio astronomers out there that use it to study things.

And there's a lot of valuable science and things we've learned from it over the years. So it's not, it's not even just tracking spacecraft. It's like, oh, there's a giant asteroid. coming this way, let's watch it. And if your dishes don't work, I mean, it blows my mind. Is that the same dish that does that? Like, I feel like that would be really high on the chopping block if they're running out of like communication pathways.

Oh, you mean the 70 meters? No, I mean, like, so the radio science is sort of like an add-on to the, but we have other facilities like Erescebo that could do radio astronomy and radio science. So if the DSN is doing that and they're already congested, I feel like that would be one of the first things that they would say, okay, we're not doing this anymore. Yeah. But maybe it's a different antenna.

No, they used the 70 meters, and they only use the 70 meters as far as I know. But you don't see radio astronomy labels on there a lot. They're not using them all the time. But about once or twice a month, you see someone. Just for like high value targets? For a few hours. Yeah, I mean, they're studying something that's in, you know, Goldstone's a good location for it and the way that the types of radio waves

they're using are useful and yeah they use it for everything i mean that it's it's utilized pretty well yeah did you get any sense for that too like how close to maximum capacity they they feel they are is it is that even i think they feel they're yeah i think i think everyone i've spoken to is sort of like we are they're they're maxed it's very rare that i check and there's like oh we're testing everything's kind of quiet right now but we're We're just testing something. That'll last for 25 minutes and then picks back up. And that, I guess that sort of speaks to that workflow change that you talk of in the article

where they're basically trying to stretch the same dollars to go farther by optimizing the workforce budget. Yeah, can you walk us through that? I'd love to have you explain that. We get really into operations of this stuff. We had a whole podcast where we talked about how a team would operate a Titan drone and how it like mapped to the days and stuff like that so we get really into the schedules and stuff that's my i've got an article i'm working on that's about that subject oh we're gonna have you back because we had a whole like big thing where we acted like we were fighting about which uh new

frontiers mission we'd fund so that's uh we're gonna have to have round too for that for the for their record tight yes i'll just i'll just i'll just leave your thing but tight yeah so so the way the deep space network was working up until last November was the centers took turn. So there's a center in Goldstone, California, kind of outside of Los Angeles, one in Madrid, Spain, and one in Canberra, Australia. So they would take turns or run at the same time, whether it was a nighttime shift or daytime shift, did not matter. There would be people working in the middle of the night at Canberra who were up at Goldstone during the day. So you're having to pay multiple teams to be on site at their dishes at the same time that got expensive. And so they came up with this program called Follow the

Sun, which was whichever site is open during the daytime, sometimes they overlap. They will have control over every single one of the 13 DSN antennas around the world. So like Richard, who's the guy in the article who I focus on, he, if it's noon for him and it's a day for him that he's on operations, he will be controlling Madrid and Goldstone's antennas. So they thought, well, people can go home and we'll save money. But the trouble is, is when you run a dish, so we'll use Cassini or we'll use Voyager as an example,

because that's better. Neptune flyby, granted it's a high stakes flyby, but there's one person watching every single antenna. There's not just a team of people who are standing at the center at Canberra, DSN saying, okay, here's a screen and everything looks good and great. No, there is one person allocated to each dish, the 70 meter and then 34 meters. It's your job to sit there and you watch those radio waves. And if anything goes wrong or if it drops out of lock or your wave gets wider and you need to be,

to be thinner and more focused, you have to move your knobs, you have to type the code, you have to make sure that thing is perfect. You have to jump on the side of it and pull it down if you have to. Yeah, exactly. You have to watch that like a hawk. It's high stakes. And I think for every mission, regardless of if it's a small Mars mission or a big planetary mission, that mission means the world to somebody to a large team. So now with Follow the Sun, one center is controlling all the dishes in their daytime. They're following this on the daytime. But now you have to watch 13 antennas. Now there's a team of, you know, three or four people at each center who are watching 13 antennas. So you're not scaling up your team to have 13 people in each site at a

given time. So they're splitting their attention. Now is the idea, though, that like in the last 20 years, we've developed some new technology that will automate away some of the stuff that they were doing before and I assume that's the reasoning is that accurate? Yeah, yeah. They've definitely, they've definitely done that out of necessity and just out of ability, like our ability to do that. But like you said, some of these are probably old and haven't been fully updated to that new system yet.

I don't know. Yeah, I think it's that and I think it's just that that things happen. And like you'd mention it, there's a multiple antenna that, a system that we use for Mars now. So we can, you know, hey, MRO and Mars Odyssey and MSL and Opi, if Opi wakes up, is they're all sort of in line with each other. I know, go, Appi, please, God, wake up. They're all in line with each other. Let's point one antenna at Mars and just talk to all of them at the exact same time.

And you can go on the DSN now website, and you can see we've got one dish pointing, and there's a chunk of four different spacecraft that we're communicating with. So that saves time and money, and it's easy. But like Richards told me that the signal that we get from the Mars or Chronosin's Orbiter, for example, that is a big, powerful satellite, communication satellite and scientific instrument. Lots of bits. Lots of bits. And it's got a big high gain, big antenna. Big old dish. Speak to us. Yeah, and send high resolution images. But then you've got Maven, which has a most.

much smaller antenna, but it's orbiting Mars and sending us weather information and all this stuff. They're both transmitting right now and I'm watching it on DSN now. Are you watching? Very topical as you describe this. Bravo. That's awesome. Well, so if you click, I'm not there, but if you click and you look at the data rate for Maven versus MRO, MRO kicks Maven off of the signal all the time because MRO's signal is much more powerful. So you can be locked on to Maven and locked on to MRO, but MRO's like, I'm sending you all this information. And Maven's like, I'm trying to send you this information, but it's just, I can't send it as powerfully because my intent is much smaller.

And MRO goes, yeah, here, so very topical, six megabits per second for MRO right now. And it's, uh, oh, I just clicked something else. That's a lot. Uh, where did it go? 11 bits. Yes. So it's like magnitudes away. Yeah.

So that's just one of the issues. So that system is efficient, but things happen. So you can't just be like, oh, this is automated and yes, it's fine. Like let me just go have coffee for an hour. Someone who's ever running the station right now is that usually that's Canberra that does that. It's been dread right right. They have to go, oh my God, we lost Maven. We have to reconnect with Maven.

they have to try to do this and it's a whole thing. That is crazy when you get. So just a little note for people out there. If you go on, you got to click more details to get into it. But yeah, you see Maven 11 bits. Mars Odyssey, 142 kilobits. And then MRO is 6 megabits. So just to see the, you know, from 11 bits to 142 kilobits,

it's like this step up that's pretty amazing. Anyone's on this website right now. We're talking to Voyager 1. and 159 bits per second. It's so much more than maybe. It's not in our solar system. Not so much more. Granted, it's got a gigantic antenna,

but it is also not in the solar system anymore. It's like not, it's in the heliopause. Like, it's just, it's insane. So it's really cool. I mean, that should tell you how powerful those dishes are. But yeah, Maven gets kicked off a lot. Apparently it's a huge problem. Yeah, I love the power rating, too, is really interesting.

So you look at Voyager, 10 to the minus 22 kilowatts. Like, there's nothing getting back to us. It's the minuscule, tiny amount of wattage. Yeah, it's incredible. It's an amazing tool, and it's definitely, we all love, like, my usual Deep Space Network introduction to people is, you know what Saturn looks like? Oh, Saturn is so pretty and the rings. You know what Jupiter looks like?

Yes, it's. It's gorgeous. Do you know why you know what those things look like? From our spacecraft, yes, but you don't get those pictures without the DSN. Like, we have to have a system that takes in all this information. And without that, you don't have those pictures or science of any kind. Yeah. So can you talk about, I want to talk about the cybersecurity thing because the whole hacking story is pretty mental.

I don't know what you're allowed to say, what you know, but... I will tell you everything I know. Especially because you have a non-US citizen trader. As we've talked about, Jake, when he gets towards a NASA facility, security gets haywire. I get the dogs and I get the... Yeah, so there are a couple of things that I will tell you everything that I'm allowed to say. So in that 2015 audit of the DubeSpace Network, which this was the most alarming thing to me, it was, okay, it's a computer system. Of course, a computer system is vulnerable to being hacked. Why had I not thought about this?

So I don't have the report in front of me, and I don't have my article. But something like it was hacked in 2007, 2009, and 2011. There were a couple of hacks. So the earlier hacks, which were much smaller, were break-ins by, I think, Italy, I forget the other countries, but there were several arrests made with regards to those break-ins. So that's an alarm. But in 2011 was the- Were they just to do it? Like these first people were they just like, I bet we could do it, or did they, were they up to-

Anthony's trying to bail out the Italian series? I'm Italian too. I will totally, but however, there was an Italian who got arrested from Interpol for breaking into your face now. So, I know, I'm Italian until I get it. We don't want to look bad. We already have such a bad reputation as it is. Not too far from the South Philly mob houses, like, that's fine.

Yeah, it's okay. I think they were located in Europe. But so there were, there have been, I think, two or three arrests by Interpol regarding the previous break-ins. However, in 2011, China broke into the Deep Space Network. It was the largest hack they've ever experienced. You have to remember that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which runs the Deep Space Network, also is affiliated with the military. They do a lot of work with the U.S. military still of classified information and there's levels of security. They've reached the top during this break-in.

And Robert Bigelow lost his shit. He went, he's like, I told you, they're coming for our licensing. They totally are. That was literally the day he commissioned that cartoon to be written. Oh, Robert Bigelow. I like him. He's kind of lovable in that like old grandpa kind of way.

We got to get on this podcast. You should definitely make that effort. The worst case thing you'll get is a no. That's fine. Anyway, so they hacked literally maximum level of possible JPL. Maximum level at JPL. And the systems were open for a while before anyone found the break-in. And the report says the investigation is still ongoing.

And from what I know, that is still true. That they're not, whether this is true or not, they don't know what China took. But it does say in the report that during that break-in, they had the ability to control the International Space Station for about 30 minutes. So this is why you don't want to have people break into your networks when you're NASA. It's very bad. 30 minutes.

Yes. And they had access to every single spacecraft that we could have possibly locked onto during that window. A lot of seconds. I'm not trying to get two tinfoil out of here. This was 2011. That was the big one, yes.

Wasn't that the anti-satellite? Test also. Yeah. The Chinese anti-Sat. Yeah, I was the 2011. Oh, no, that was 2007. Yeah, there wasn't, 2007 was the one that they blew up with all of the. Okay.

That would, yeah. 30 minutes, though. But, yeah. I was going to say, if you got the wrong spacecraft, look up, man. I know, isn't that scary? And that's not even the network that they use to communicate with the space station. But when you're in that system, you're in there. they say that they don't know what they took.

Maybe that's true. But they had access to things, everything from the ability to control the spacecraft to engineering schematics for everything we've ever designed. Maybe like we can like give them the benefit of doubt and they just really wanted to learn how to land Mars spacecraft and Congress would let them talk. So they just like, well, we'll just, we just want to know how thick your heat shield is. We're just trying to explore Mars. that is that is a very I think reasonable thing highly possible yeah yeah I don't see why that

doesn't seem crazy to me at all oh yikes some of the recent fighter craft that China has been rolling off the assembly line and then look up their counterparts from us and others and it will look incredibly similar so yeah yeah but that's the that's where the whole budget goes into scan is that that's their job to keep the network safe and so with that report found was, you know, oh, you guys were throwing your hard drives and dumpsters behind the buildings that weren't totally cleared yet. Or, you know, you're supposed to be using 12 numbered passwords and not eight, and they were only using eight. So there's things like this that they were in violation of, and they didn't like that I knew that stuff, but it's just in the report. It's just

public information. But it's like, yeah, you sort of have to take it seriously when you've got like $25 billion worth of spacecraft and all it takes is breaking into that computer system and you're, what would happen? That's the thing I could tell people. What would happen right now if we lost the DSN? And we lost contact with all of our spacecraft. What is our space program without the planetary aspect, without the robots?

no more Mars, I mean, Cassini's done, like, no more Osiris Rex, no more asteroids, no, no nothing. There's nothing. You have international scientists. Exactly. You have the space station and you have, you know, our nearest things. That's also just like years lost of productivity for everybody as they try to rebuild everything. It's like totally wild. It's decades.

Yeah. Yeah. So the risk is big. so you don't want China breaking into the DSN. That's bad. I don't want anyone breaking into the DSN. No, I know. Especially that that one was big.

And I would love to find out what they... Yeah, it's really curious, because if it was any other actor, I don't think it gets the same alarm bells, like, in government circles. You know, because the Italian one is like, well, that's weird. What were they?

just a couple of idiots trying to break into stuff to see what, right? You don't like paint all of this, you don't project all of this motivation onto random Italians, like sitting at some cafe in Milan trying to like, let's see what you get in, you know, like drive Mars on Mars a little bit. I hope they were in a cafe. I hope that was what happened. When you, when it says, someone says China, you project all this.

Like they're going to deorbit the ISS. They're going to, you know, ditch curiosity into a crater and we're never going to get it again. Like, they're going to just needle us a little bit. So it's surprising that that itself hasn't been, because we've heard all these congressional things, like, what about China? China's doing all the space stuff.

China, China, China, China. It's amazing that that hasn't come up as well, because that is like the number one. China could control the ISS for 30 minutes, and they're not even allowed to talk to us about it. And I don't know how that's not an example in all of these hearings. You have a great career set up for like a congressional staffer,

if you want. You could be right at the top, right, in all of this stuff. You could run congressional sessions if you wanted to with just this info from this session alone. Yeah. Yeah. I thought about maybe I'll just become a lobbyist and just try to convince people to give more money. Don't want China controlling this space station. And here's why that would be terrible. That's basically how all politics works now. It's just that kind of fearmongering. So it should be pretty effective. You'd think so. You'd think so. It's still a bureaucracy. I love NASA more than anyone. But So what's the future like here?

What are we going for? We hoping for a bigger budget. Do we see potential solutions, be it like, you know, a more robust communications network around Mars that sends all of the Mars data back in one batch, which we're kind of doing now a little bit? Or is there other alternatives? You know, like recently there was this company Odyssey that got an FCC license for what is essentially a commercial tracking data relay satellite system.

so there's starting to be here at Earth commercial alternatives to this that seems pretty far-fetched for something as complex deep-stace network so what do we do what do we do about this that's a good question well I mean technologically speaking they have to they have to upgrade the antennas eventually to optical communication so well the radio waves that we're using now will become obsolete eventually and we'll still use them but we have to have the ability to send and receive higher bits of data and like high-res video even, which we absolutely cannot do.

So there's that, which is going to cost money, but should eventually be cheaper. I actually don't know. I don't see a future where they get more money. And that's just based off of casual conversations I've had with people, interviews on the record that I don't get any impression that there's more money coming. I mean, the deep space gateway is pretty hot. It's got to be able to like. Yeah, the lunar.

It's just called the Lunar Gateway now. The Lunar Gateway. Space Station 2, we'll call whatever you want. But like, it's pretty, you know, popular among people who can send money to NASA. So is that a possibility that that could like, you know, tow in some extra cash? Because if we can't, if we can't stream HD from the Lunar Gateway, what are we even doing it for? That's going to be a problem.

Honestly, I think it's like, it's going to be a problem. Like, they're going to want, they're going to expect that. People are going to expect that in, you know, 20, 20, whatever, we've got astronauts around the moon. There's a brand new fancy space station. We can't stream. We can put an astronaut in orbit around the moon, but we can't stream video. I hear that, I hear it now.

Seriously. It's going to be the telecon joke all over again, right? I can't do a telecon. So, I mean, I wonder if that could, potentially highlight that okay, you know, as, and they could, they could shove it into the exploration systems development budget line. Like, yeah, we need lunar gateway upgrades to DSN. Here's, here's a half a bill that we found in the, in the couch cushions, you know, like, I don't I wish. I think that's totally possible. That's totally possible. Couch cushion money sounds great.

I think they would love couch cushion money. They found a new mobile launch platform in the couch cushion, so. Yeah. Yeah. There's money in the couch cushion. of Deep Space Network, right? Or more than a year and a half. I know. I think it's even like if their budget hadn't been cut and had just stayed, I think at this point if you're like, we're just going to not keep cutting the budget,

they would just lose it. They would just throw a party and throw hands with each other. And I think just a little bit more, but you do make a point about private communication networks. And I think that it is a little bit more complicated a nuance because NASA won't use a private, probably, just because of hacking in the security situation, they probably won't use a private communications network or an array of intent to talk or communicate with their spacecraft. But if someone has, you know, I've got

$5 billion together with a bunch of investors, let's make some big 70 meter dishes that do optical comms, like let's put some ears on there and get a higher bit rate. Like, they could do that. And we're looking way in the future with private companies on the moon and doing things like that, they're private companies that go to Mars. They're going to need a way to talk to their own people. Yeah. Yeah, I can't imagine like, you know, like Jeff Bezos tolerating the congestion at Deep Space Network.

He's not going to be able to. This is the bread and butter of Amazon. is like we do infrastructure. Yeah. Yeah. Which they'll have to build their own. Take that which will. He says he wants to lay the infrastructure for entrepreneurs in space.

I see a very viable thing that needs to be built out with a billion dollars a year. Space internet. Yeah. Yeah. That's all, those are all like weird logistical things that will have to be figured out. Like if we, if they're really going to go to the moon and spend time there, yes, when we go to the moon, we're not going to accept the, the grainy Neil Armstrong, like, cutting it and out photos, which they use the Deep Space Network

for those videos. Yeah. You're going to want GoPro's, like, like, multi-angle 3 cameras. Maybe we can get some money from GoPro and Red Bull. Like, they spend a lot of money on random stuff like this. Seriously.

But that is like, yeah, those are good questions. Someone's going to have to figure that out. But I don't know if NASA will have any participation in that. Yeah, Grant says in the chat, well, Starlink, have any deep space capability. And probably not at first, but, you know, we've talked before about Mars needing a new

communications orbiter. It's not outside the realm of possibility that somebody tries to do that first. And it's one of those things that's chicken or egg, really. You know, like we don't have the capacity to send more missions, but we won't get the capacity until there are more missions, until it's an absolute need, necessity. So it's curious to that extent where it's like, we won't have the lobbying power. until we have sufficiently advanced plans that are like, this is a priority because it's impacting people that give you money

and you give NASA money, you need to give them more money, or we won't give you money. Yeah, I might be too skeptical. I'm very skeptical too. I don't, where I see things now that doesn't look amazing for the DSN, I don't see them getting everything that they need. I mean, they don't really know what happens five years out, But the trouble with not having beefed up the DSN all along with cutting the budget for whatever

reasons that they did it, whether it's mismanagement or they really just needed to put the money somewhere else, is that when people at JPL or wherever they are design a planetary mission that they know they're going to need the DSN for, they can only design it based off of the current capabilities of the network. And you say, okay, well, we're going to launch in 2025. What do we think the DSN looks like now and they call up the DSN and say, hey, what do you think our dishes are going to be capable of carrying bitwise

in five years? And they go, we have no idea. Like, we know that we can give you what we have now. And so what happens is you have to, you know, these missions take years and times a decade, maybe more to plan and submit. Yeah, it's

a whole thing. It's, yeah, 20 years. So, you have to build your spacecraft based off of the the ability of the deep space network as it is right now. So, you know, because if Cassini had launched now, I mean, imagine what more we could have gotten based off of how much it's grown since the time it launched. But that's the thing. So our whole planetary exploration program is designed in part based off of what the deep

space network is capable of because it's not just photos they're sending. It's not just navigation or communication. It's the science. it's everything we know about, oh, this moon has an ocean. Oh, this moon has an ocean with complex chemistry. The only reason you know that is because we're able to transmit this information and that spacecraft was built with instruments and an antenna

that is in partnered with the network. So everything is built around this system. And if you don't build that up in, you know, hoping that you've got a really nice, large planetary exploration program in the future. You're sort of shooting yourself in the foot before you've even left the gate. It is Infrastructure Week at the Trump White House, I've heard.

It is. No, infrastructure week? Oh, my gosh. You know, including this. Has it been Infrastructure Week for a year and a half? Yeah, it's been, yeah. We're just in permanent infrastructure week. We're in infrastructure hell.

I think there's like a really dark, 1984 analogy there somewhere where it's like you're always at war something. I'll leave you guys

with that one. You can sit on that one as I sit here comfortably on the other side. Yeah, just rub your beautiful countries. Hey, you've got a map

of Massachusetts on the wall behind you. I love America. I love visiting there on vacation. I love visiting there. We live here, man.

All right, you guys want to do some picks? Yeah, let's do some space picks. I can go first this time. Yeah, you go first. Okay, so you guys know about the high seas mission. That's a space analog on the top of Monoloa. Started back in February and ended four days into the mission because of a medical emergency. And we didn't know a lot about it at the time.

If you were following along, it was kind of like someone, they called an ambulance and went to the hospital, and they ended the mission after someone quit. Well, we finally got some good information about that. So a journalist by the name of Marina Corrin at the Atlantic, writing for the Atlantic as well, she did a great, great reporting on it and got one of the simulating astronauts to interview with her. and she got some people from the, from the University of Hawaii and from NASA and stuff and really got a really good story on it. So she published an article

which is part one of my pick. It's a two part part pick. Complex. Part one is her great article. So you definitely need to read that because it's been, it's a fantastic story with lots of drama about on-call doctors

not picking up the phone and ambulances getting lost and, you know, electric shocks and all sorts of crazy stuff. The doctors were switching to a follow the sun schedule, Jake. Ooh, burn. That's too real, too real.

Anyway, so our good friend Brendan Byrne, part two of my take. He got Moved to Hawaii. He got Marina to interview on his podcast, Are We There Yet? And so she kind of went into a little more detail about her reporting and stuff.

So the two together paint a really detailed picture about what would have happened and it's quite a story. I definitely recommend looking into it and reading up on it and listening. That's actually a really good example. Full sensor. Full sensory experience. Yeah.

See, yeah, we're just tying it. Yeah, it's all tied in. I've been meeting, I've bookmarked that article to read this weekend. But now that there's a podcast,

I know, but I'm also going to listen after I read the article. It's like probably the Cliff Notes version. Yeah. Well, so she added some, some different information. Like I worried it was going to be just like read the article and make an audio file of it.

But no, there is some new information. So, It's definitely worth listening to both while reading one, listening to the other. But yeah, what a story. Like, oh, my goodness. That's crazy. What do you got, Anthony?

Is this where I talk about surviving Mars that I've been wasting my time on for the last month? So my previous picks have been, like, weird because I was traveling, then I was moving into a new house, and I finally got all settled in. My wife started work. She's been working like crazy. So I was like, I've got newfound time on my hands. I've had surviving Mars this new game, or I guess now not that new, in my Steam library for a couple of months. It came out like beginning of the year, I think. Yeah, not too long.

But it is so fun. Like, Kerbal's still the best space game that there ever will be. But surviving Mars is so fun. It's basically a little bit of city builder with a little bit of space, a lot of bit of space. You're basically like managing a settlement on Mars all the way. from you get to pick what your organization is, whether you're, and there's all like analogs to real world, you know, there's like blue sun and space Y and stuff like that. I think there's one that's like loosely based on the Latter-day Saints.

Like there's all these different, you know, organizations that are your found, what is it called, the supporter? There's like a, there's like a China one you can be plus one to hacking. Plus one to hacking and moon tariffs, I don't know, but you basically pick, you know, who who your sponsor is and that changes the perks that you get. Like one, you get more funding and one you get consistent funding, one you get better rates for like the rare metals that you export to Earth. So it's really fun to do that kind of stuff that you can like tweak how you want to play the game.

But man, it is so fun and I've been wasting so much time. But you've got to do, you know, you've got to get your power supplies going. And you know, your oxygen generation systems, your water wells and you're rigging up domes all over the surface of Mars. you're sending out rovers to do different stuff. And man, I had a rough lesson right off the bat. Like I made my first colony or whatever, setting it up, got my first settlers there. And immediately there was this giant meteor storm, which was not very realistic, but it was very traumatic because it immediately took out all of my life support equipment. And I was just done instantly.

And I was like, okay, well, learned the value of redundancy. And my next one was like water supply here and all the way on the other side of the map. and like, I don't know, it's so much fun. It's a great game. And it's got an incredible soundtrack. Do you have to have a PC? No, it's Mac and PC and Linux and anything Steam. Raspberry Pi.

Again, you had that O that was like a disappointment. Like we were talking about the poster of my wall before and you were. I was hoping that you'd say like you have to have a PC because that's why I couldn't play Curbles. I was like, oh, I don't have a PC. Oh, you can play that on a Mac too. I just extra ruined your time. so.

I always wanted to play that game. Gosh, darn it. All right. Well, I guess that's good to know. I'm going to try to forget that you put that. Both on Steam, Carville, surviving Mars. Great games. See, we couldn't, I mean, could we survive Mars with the dust storm right now?

They're in the game. I mean, we could. It's very interesting. So there's four disasters. There's duststorm, dust devil, cold freeze or something, like, roughly name that, and then meteor shower. there's like, oh, and the other cool thing, meteor shower sounds fun. It's just like,

it picks a random area in your base and just starts bombarding it with meteors. But the fun part, when you're picking where you're going to land, you can pick anywhere on the globe. Like, you can pick per cord. So you can pick, like, I want to land, you know, right in, like, right next curiosity.

I want to land in Opportunities area, right down in this valley. And it's pretty cool like that. I once asked that Mars, a scientist, he's a geologist who works at GPL, where he would live if he was going to live on Mars. And he said in Gale Crater with curiosity, because because Gail Crater is deeper, there's just a smidge more of an atmosphere above the crater. And I was like, okay, noted just in case I ever. Now it's useful. Well, now you will.

Yeah. And then I'll die at speed here, Shaw. I was like super geeky with that coordinate system. and I was like, well, maybe I'll land at a proposed site that never got selected. And I'm like, this place sucks. That's why they didn't pick. Oh, I died within seconds, like 10 times.

Yeah, don't know they did later. There's no water. There's no anything. Oh, my God. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, drive on half of it because it looks like ourselves. Your picks are way cooler than mine. I was just thinking about cool stuff from this weekend.

And I realized that last weekend, I watched Annihilation for the first time. Do you guys see that movie? It's scary. Really? No. One of you? With Natalie Portman, where she, there's like weird alien life that comes to Earth and it does, like, our biology starts, there's interspecies. It's just strange.

I've heard the book is much better, but it's kind of scary and I recommend that you watch it. You didn't mention that Oscar Isaac was also. also in it. Because now it's a must watch. Oscar, I guess. Yes, it's a must watch. He's very cool. He's so cool. He's cool in every single thing he does. He's cool. Yeah, so now you have to watch it.

I won't give you the spoilers about what happens to him. Aliens is not going to say. He retires to a nice farm is what you're saying, right? He retires to a pretty place somewhere else. He packs the DSN and is locked away forever. Interpol comes and gets him He's sitting in a cafe in Milan Just having a coffee

With some Italian Thinking Italians So that was going to be So Annihilation was really great So you guys both need to watch that But the coolest news I think last week Which was not as fun of the pick

But also really cool Was that There was new data out from Cassini RAP That we found some, I know, right, there should be like a signal, a hand signal that we do every single time we'd mention its name. That Cassini found some more complex organics on Enceladus. There was then some hot drama though that there were some people like, hey, we got to go there

instead of Europa and there's like, they're trying to make some hot drama happen. Yeah, well, there's cases for both and that's definitely why. why? Well, I would say we go to both, but there's probably not enough band with. That sounded, yeah. Yeah, yeah, we got to go. I think, well, that's the thing as well, we'll go back to Saturn, but it's going to be to Titan with Dragonfly, right? Yeah, we're having you back on and we're going to do this thing again. We're going to do this. Like, no. What, where do you want to go instead? I know. I love Dragonfly. I just love the Caesar one like one percent more. I don't know how you could possibly It's terrible

We're going to have you back on We're going to do round two of this Because the down select is going to be In that this year? Like later this year or something? It's next year Yeah, prepare your material You know how

You know how some scientists are like really into like the glamorous Like oh I do photomosaics of Gail Crater And it's beautiful and I was like Oh this is so amazing And then some scientists are like I measured the amount of manganese in this rock for four years. It's not glamorous, but it's still pretty important, Anthony. And that's what's supposed to me.

Yeah, you want to know the amount of deuterium on all of the asteroids we can possibly and it rains weird things and there's hazing. It's 49.51, Shadden. We can ground truth a sample. We got to send a drone. It's going to go. It's not even going to work. It's going to hop.

That was stuck. I know, that would be terrible. It just lands. They're like, well, how would it not work? You can, you can. One rotor. Yeah, if one of the roaders dies. It's very rare.

That would be terrible. It would be like everyone that's ever flown a drone ever has experienced where it just skids across the ground. That would be a better. That was like. Or it just lands and it just like accidentally falls into one of the lakes and they're like, oh, God. Still pretty rad, though.

It could literally fall into a lake and it would still be a cool. mission. Because you're in on freaking lake. I watched a I watched the chief engineer on the Mars helicopter. She did this great talk

at the JPL and she's this like, you know, nominal mission end is probably going to be the helicopter crashes. It's like it's like accepted. This is how the mission is going to end. I hope that's how it ends.

Yeah, right? It's like perfect for that. Yeah. I hope it's just like, there's like video of it just. I'm happy when a technology demonstrator crashes because it's like, all right, we got demonstrated. But when a new Frontiers mission crashes, not so good.

Yeah, I know. Yeah. But we're crossing our fingers for Dragonfly. Oh, yeah. I would be very happy if Dragonfly got selected. It's going to be. Don't worry. It's going to be.

It's got to be. Because I'm going to throw an absolute fit if it's not. Yeah. Yeah, but so the The organics I'm in the cell of this are pretty cool So I think the icy moons are where it's at Yeah

I think a lot of people feel that way There's like a diminishing amount of reasons Not to go to there anymore You know like Yeah, there's a lot of people that are like We should only be making planetary emissions To the moons Like forget the planets

The planets aren't habitable They're like death zones You gotta go to the moon Whatever man They're just gonna kill you And they smell like ammonia and it'll just, it'll crush you. Just go to the life harboring areas. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, it's pretty cool. We don't want to keep you too long, Shannon. We've kept it too long already. Although we are getting you pretty fired up about Dragonfly at this point. So maybe this is just right. That fainte d'emong just finally hitting you. Exactly.

It's been hitting all the way. Thank you so much for hanging out with us. This has been fantastic. Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. And thanks for supporting the DSN and nag anyone at NASA that's in charge of money that you ever meet them.

Yeah, I think this is the new like ground swell movement is like everybody protesting. DSN needs more cash. Yeah, we should make a hashtag. I think there was one on Twitter actually when the article came off to find it. It was like fun DSN, hashtag fun the DSN.

Yeah, fun DSN, that's simple. Simple, seven characters. Put the pressure on them. Six if you're clever. Just make it feel so guilty. They're like, fine. Here's $5 million. Six if you're, then you just get mixed up with, oh, the DSN is so much fun.

Yeah. Works, both of the way. It is. Awesome. Okay. Well, yeah, Shannon, super appreciate it. This is a lot of fun. Yeah, thank you guys for having me.

5, 3, 2, 1, end of death.