Off-Nominal - 119 - Don’t Train for the Nominal Shit

Episode Date: August 11, 2023

Jake and Anthony are joined by space artist and illustrator Paul Fjeld to talk about his career and to hear some stories from interesting projects and programs he’s worked on.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 119 - Don’t Train for the Nominal Shit (with Paul Fjeld) - YouTubeList of Experiences -Paul FjeldThe Space Review: Saving Skylab the top secret wayFollow PaulSpace Art by Paul FjeldFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine, start. Jake, you are fired up today. You're yelling, go, go, go. I'm only 30 seconds into the live stream, and you're saying, go, go, go, go. What's going on, buddy? Punch it. What are we waiting for?

We don't need to wait. We don't need to wait. Let's go. I'm the coolest guy in the room. Let's like this, can. Yeah, exactly. Paul, the person that we've been waiting to have on the show for years since we were debating it,

standing under the wing of a space show at IAC 2019, welcome to the show. finally what's going on four four years what the heck in my in my defense there's at least one time that paul told me to wait okay that's all i'm saying right i know i don't know that i got anything interesting to talk about and they're like three years later are you got stuff now that's interesting i'm i guess so you're like i'm only getting older that's right i was like i'm gonna fall over let's do it now oh wow okay yeah i'm stoked for this so yeah This is like the reverse. I've never experienced this, Jake. I'm on the show and then you came back and you have a national park review.

I do have a national park review. I thought about it and I was like, I know Anthony's going to ask me about which national parks are the best. So I have, I actually have a ranking because I did four in the last week. Yes. All right. You're right. This is awesome. Joshua Tree. Yeah. It's not, it's not Joshua Tree. It's not Joshua Tree. It's not, it's not. Canadian National Parks, though, none of these wacky. American... Listen, I've been to national parks in at least three countries. So, I'm an equal opportunity. I just don't go there as much. So, yeah, yeah. It's a little

far for these flight prices. These flight prices, all right? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, should we, like, do drinks first? How do you want to do this? Yeah. You want to do it? Sure. Okay. I'll go first, and I... Okay, so I knew we had going to have Paul on, and I was like, I should get something with, like, a good label. Like, the label, like, the label

should be artistic as of what I figured it should be. And I went, I'm in Canada still, and so there's lots of good crap beer. And I was in like, oh my God. I was up in, I got this in, I think I got this in Canmore. I thought you were going to show the label. I had you full screen for too long. That was my bad. Oh, I'm telling the story here. Yeah. I just picked out the craziest, spaciest looking thing ever. And this is, this is what happened. Okay. Oh, boy. Boney's in space. I like the helmet. The helmet's great. I don't think it's going to be good because it's orange creamsicle something?

I don't know. 11.6. Yeah, you see that? You see, that's a disaster waiting to happen right there. But it's got a flying. I don't know. It's just like a flying monkey quadruple IPA orange creamcicle beer. Look at all the stuff going on here.

What have you done? I don't know, man. You have missed a good beer for too long. You've totally forgotten any standards that you once had. That was done by a professional graphic artist that barfed that onto a fan. Yeah, exactly. This is from, by the way, this is from Flying Monkeys Craft Brewery in Barry, Ontario. So shout out to Barry, Ontario.

Tweet me if you're from Barry. I'm curious to know what color it is. Okay, here we go, here we go. A little less orange than I thought. I'm being very risky here because I have my computer right below this. Yeah, this is so ill-advised. It's a bit like a BFRC. It's a lot of head.

You're going to have to wait for that to come down. It looks like a root beer float. Jesus Christ. What did you bring? Is you bringing something more civilized? No, it's a little on the nose. And I'm a little embarrassed to do it. I wanted to get a really cool craft beer.

Do you remember when we were at the IAC, what, four years ago? And we went to Hasi, you know, nearby Do you know, and then somehow Jake said, let's go to a space beer bar. And I thought, how are we going to find a space beer bar around here? And he said, I found one. You know, I'd go there, and it was really good beer, and it was all space steam. Couldn't find it. Had no idea.

So I went to my local brewery, there you go. I don't know how you do that. It's Orion. It's a little on the nose. I like that, though. It used to have the actual constellation of Orion, but it's not a local gear. It's from Japan, Okinawa. But it's delicious.

And it has two spacecraft. one that I love and one that I'm hoping is going to be okay. Orion was Lemma 11 on Apollo 16, of course. Of course. It's like waiting for next two you'd pick, yeah. And then the one that's on the top of whatever the SLS is going to do. So that's cool. No, I don't need to.

Whatever it's going to do. Clearly, based on the press conference this week, neither NASA nor you know what exactly it's going to do. So that's the whole of time. It's going to reenter properly. That's all we get to worry. I haven't watched the press conference, but the vibe I got for of it

was that what we know Orion is going to do is hold up the schedule. That was going to be which I'm very mad about, but I don't know. Let's say they're on time and then they have to wait, what, three more years for Artemis 3? What does that work? Maybe not.

They might just do something else. That's NASA's problem, though, if they want to be ahead of schedule. That's just saying. Just saying. I just have a basic-assstrokes, perpetual. IPA, so no pomp here. There is like, I don't know if you can see this, but there is stuff floating in this. Is that clear enough?

Particulate. Yeah, like this is, this is an unfiltered. It might have come from the graphic designer. They might have come straight from the ground if we're being honest here, but we'll see. So, this is the cycling podcast, Jake. How do you feel like the road championships went? Yeah, what did you do to my podcast last week? What happened here?

Or this week, I guess. But not only was it the wrong topic, it was in the wrong time slot. I could have canceled, but I persevered. And now I'm here for your National Park Review to keep it in the non. Nothing's going on in August. It is extremely, there's a lot of launches, Jake, and there's not a lot else to debate. So we're dipping into the non-space topics. And then what I'm very excited about, stories from Paul.

Oh, boy. Yes. So do you have any, do you have a list for us, Jake, prepared? Okay. Of, of parks reviews. That's what you want first.

Yeah. Okay, well, so I went to, in order, um, best to worst was Jasper National Park. Of course.

Then Banff National Park. Then Waterton Lakes National Park. And rounding it out as just a highway through some mountains is Kootenie National Park. There's, There's nothing. They have a hot springs and a road as the extent of the national park for Cooney. So that's the Joshua tree of Canada? Yeah, so far. Yeah. I don't think I've ever been to any other. I think those are the only four I've ever been to. So we'll see.

Any highlights from each of your top half? Obviously, we don't need one to the bottom. Well, Jasper is lovely because it's like, it's really high up. So it's like subalpine. There's like really dry. There's not a lot of trees and went on top of a glacier, which was pretty cool. Um, go see glaciers, by the way, because they're, they're going away. They're not going to be around much longer. Uh, so that was fun. Uh, and then Bampf, uh, I went on a cool lake cruise in Bamp. It was fun.

Get out there on the water and stuff. So, yeah. Did you see the famous, um, did you see the famous inn that's on that lake in the knussel in all the mountains? I think everybody paints that picture. Yeah. I mean, everyone kind of has one like that, right? So there's like Lake Louise's got one and, and Waterton has.

As one. Yeah, Lake Louise. Yeah, yeah. We just drove through Lake Louise, so we didn't spend any time there. But yeah. Cool. But yeah. So, there you go. I can't wait. What was the bad park name? Cootney. I can't wait for the Cootney stands to come out and just hit your mentions like they did mine. Hey, man. The difference with you is that the national park that I dump on is like the influencer national park because it's two hours from L.A. So there's a lot of like both influencer and like modern hippie culture that love Joshua Tree. And they say Joshua? That's like the whole thing.

So you're, I bet no one will stand for Kootenny or whatever. No, no, no. Whatever it's called. I forgot it was actually its own National Park, to be honest. My son and my wife stayed at Joshua National Park last summer and loved it. Because they saw the sky and the sky was amazing. And they kind of parked their bodies under these kind of cool rock.

I mean, they're not really hotel rooms. They're just nature or sort of carved out, whatever. And then you sleep under that, and you fend off the rattlesnakes and look at the stars. No truth. Half of that sounds all right to me, yeah. Oh, dear. Okay. All right. You got a lot of stories for us, Paul.

And I feel like we should just start with your origin story, though, because you go way back. And I don't know how this happened. You've given us like a PowerPoint's worth of content to thumb through here. So I'm going to do my best when you shout out what file I should show. Oh, no. I didn't memorize any of them. But I just want to know. So like go way back.

How did you start getting involved with being, where you were the artist in residence? What was the name of it? What goes back? A NASA artist. NASA had an art program. If you wanted to go back, I mean, all right, I was born in Norway. I was born two years before Sputnik went up, so I'm an OK boomer type guy.

And then grew up as a teenager during the Apollo program, got completely freaked out and excited by that, built models did all that stuff, followed Apollo 11. I got really serious about it when I got a lunar module model, so it's pretty weird where I ended up. It's like I went nowhere. I just went from building little plastic ones to real ones.

It's like, what the hell happened to my life? Anyway, and so, and this is a lot, And this is in Montreal, and they had Expo 67, which was a great world's fair. I was 12 years old. Two years later, they were still using the fairgrounds. And there was this one guy who loved space, and he made a space pavilion. And I somehow insinuated myself into being really involved with them. I wrote guides, whatever.

And I decided I got to go down and see a launch. The next launch was Apollo 15. I'd managed to get to know a couple of the public affairs officers by luck, Wright, Kearns and Dick Young. And they said, well, Paul, if you turn 16, you can come. come down and get a press and I went, sure. Took a bus, 24-hour Greyhound down to the floor wall, which is space mecca, can you imagine?

And I was like, as soon as the doors opened to the press center, which was on Coco Beach, it's like, I'm here. What can I do? And I said, well, we have tours. Do you want to go on a tour? And I went, yes, what do we get to see? It's a little rocket, spaceships. And I went, all right, I'm in.

And so I went in and I saw the VAB. The first day I got there. We just had like almost a personal tour, got to go and see the top of the VAB and there's a picture that's there of me. It's the first picture of kid in the thing at the Kennedy Space Center. This is who I was and I think actually deep down I still am. Try not to look at the word dork to kind of bubble up into your consciousness. Listen, man, those glasses are coming back around. Hey, this is back in style. So those are BCD's I got a pair of those. Earth control devices. And I can tell you from your experience,

They're really effective. But at any way, I'm here in the All-Sept Clean Room, and they were getting Apollo 16 all-sep ready to go. I actually had a concern that maybe I'd somehow accidentally loosen some of the connectors to one of the experiments. And then that's a bad joke for Dr. Lentz. I know anything about the heat flow on Apollosite. I know it's too soon.

So anyway, so I got this whole experience, wrote a story about it, did the rest of it, went back for when we rolled out from Apollo 16th. got to go up the top of the mobile launcher as they carried Apollo 16 out the first time, which was insane. So I'm addicted now. I get to Apollo 16, the actual. Hold on.

This is a picture that's called Apollo 16 rollout. And I'm like, I need a minute to figure out what the hell's going on in this photo. Let me squint and see, I think I see some towers that back. Yeah. Well, what you're looking at right behind my right hand is the launch escape tower. My island. Oh, you're that close. At the cue, yeah, at the cue ball.

I'm right on the tower. I looked straight down. You see how low that handrail is? Well, the whole mobile launcher was shaking like crazy. And, you know, leaning over, driving out, because we're going at about a mile and a half to launch that. On the left of that was a mobile service structure. And then way behind that is a VAB.

You can see it. But we got to walk around on the pad and you see this monster and you go, is it possible for this to take off? I'd seen it already. I still didn't believe it. And I went down again to see the damn thing launch. I got this close, I got to see it take off. So I did that, but I'm drawing and painting and the rest of it,

and we have this incredible thing. I think they still do that. It's a sort of sunset rollback of the service structure, and it is a glorious moment when it's against the sunset as this thing slowly reveals this amazing thing, because you don't think it can fly. They put all the beams on it like crazy, and they shoot off across the horizon,

and it suddenly starts to ooze into your, at one point the background and the rocket are the same color almost because of the water. light and then this bright thing starts to glow and you're freaking losing your mind. So I'm painting, painting and I looked at my right and there's another guy painting. Nobody else paints around here. And he goes, yeah, I'm and I looked at a badge and a picture badge. And I said, NASA artists.

And I said, that's what I need because hanging around with these press people, I don't want to do that anymore. I want to go behind the team. And NASA had an art program. That's right. And they had a minder and they would go everywhere. They would, you know, on a mercury, they had Bob McCall. in the room where they were encapsulating Glenn.

Bob was also at the suit room for Apollo 16. He saw them, Paul Callie for Apollo 11. He's actually in the room where they're suiting up. They're in the mission control. They're in the launch control. This is where I have to be. So I asked my guy, the public affairs officer, right Kearns, I want to be part of that. And he said, well, it just so happens.

I'm responsible for giving them clearance. And I went, really? Can I come? And he said, well, you have to talk to Les Gabor, who him and Jim Dean were the two guys running the show. And Les was a curator of painting at the National Gallery of Art. So I worked out at an appointment, I brought all my paintings. I took a bus down. I gave a choice from Montreal at D.C.

And I'm waiting in his room, and I'm waiting. And he never shows up. And I'm like, what the hell? I came all the way down here, you know, by bus. So I take another bus back to Montreal. And he writes me a very nice letter and says, look, I'm so sorry I missed you. Tell you what.

I understand you've got a press pass. We can bring you along with us with the press pass. You know, even though you're not official NASA artists. And I went, that's great. I'll do that. And so on Apollo 17, on Skylab, I went with them. And they found me very useful because I was one of those little dorks that knew every little stupid technical detail. And the minder that they had was maybe from accounting, who was more mesmerized by the ducks flying around and all kinds of weird stuff like that.

So one of the artists had a question about, you know, that's a launch vehicle. Why do they have these things on the outside? I go, well, that's the part what goes up and the other parts to it. I used to know it better back then, but I forgot a lot of my skin. Anyway, I just ask, I don't know what it is about, like, this time period, but there's so many stories of people that are like, oh, I really wanted to have this amazing job. So I just, like, went to the place and sat down next to a stranger and they're like, I'm in charge of the jobs. And can I have one? It's like, well, you got gumption, kids, so I'm going to give you a chance.

And they're just sticking on a bus and send you up with, like, the present. Like, how does that? Like, that doesn't happen anymore, does it? This feels like a story from... I'm not sure if it happens anymore. I'll tell you, it does feel a little insane, and when I think about it, first of all, I'm 16. You know, I'm going on a bus.

That's the starting point. People that I talk to who are responsible always say, how did your parents let you go on a bus by herself when you were 16? Well, they were Norwegian. They grew up in the war. This was nothing, you know, for... I'll do it. They were beaten down by the 20th century, so yeah.

The key thing is that I was a weirdo. in this particular case. And it was, I did art and I love the science. The engineering and the science I was all in, and I was an artist since I was a kid. So I somehow managed to merge those two things, which apparently is fairly rare. And the second thing, I had this desire,

and I don't know where I got this, it just, I felt like I needed to do something useful. Is there anything I can do that's useful in a scenario? And as you'll find out, if I'm quick here, that I found a couple of places where I could be very useful, and then asked the folks noticed it. And that's it. So really luck.

And then you just keep pushing. It keeps perfect. So at the end of this Apollo 17 thing, and I got to, you know, see incredible thing. We got to go down to the rubber room and the Saturn 5 launch thing, clean room stuff. You could see maybe some of the, is it the NASA stuff that I have the clean room or the kid of the cave stuff? I can't remember. Yeah, I should have done it. I'm sorry.

I got. I see some people in some bunny suits here. Here you go. That's a picture. This is the one. Show that picture. All right. Hold on.

That's what we're talking about. There you go. That's the NASA artist group, minus me. Carol Garudi, Lamar Dodd, the middle guy is Jim Dean, Nick Salofiof, my favorite artist ever, Jim Dean, sorry, Les Gaber behind him. So these are like the big guy. The first time that I got in a car with him, we were driving out to the VAB to do the, you know, you've got to see the VAB.

That's the first thing. And I'm sitting beside Nick Salofio. I did this incredible painting of the inside of the VAB that gives you a better impression of what the size of it is than anything I've ever seen as a photograph. And I was sitting next to him and I was going like, gee, you know, Mr. Salivio, and he's calling me Nick. And so I called him Nick and Jim Dean and Les Gabor, sorry, Lester Cook are in the front seat. And I said, that's an incredible painting. That was a beautiful painting.

And Cook turns to me and says, I gave him an A minus. And I thought, well, I'm screwed because if that's an A minus, I got to get some F's with my art. But anyway, I gave them a bunch of the work that I did. Some of that might be in my NASA folder there. one cool shot of looking up into the command service module through the window into the altitude chamber. We were there just on 17. They were getting Skylabrated to fly in May. So anyway, there you go.

That's the thing. It's a watercolor. So I did a lot of sketches and watercolors. I hadn't yet done any of the, this is what it looks like up in space that nobody else can see. And on Skylab, the next mission, earlier down there and they invited me to come along with them again, which was amazing. that they kept me along. I think it was okay. I was a nice guy,

and I didn't yell or scream or cry. It's easier to deal with than the other people that would have taken your spot if they didn't give it to you. That's the trick. Part of the reason is that they're old and getting clearance for them

was interesting because they grew up during the communist period in the 30s and some of them were communist members. So you had no history, no voting history. Yeah, they called up the FBI. This guy, Fiel, is he okay? I go, yeah. And then that was it.

So no deep dyes into me. So I get there for Skylab, whole thing, cool thing. They launched the thing, the big Saturn 5 with the orbital workshop on it, goes into a damn cloud deck. Last view of Saturn 5, which is very sad. So we go back to the press Saturn. Yeah, there you go. That's the painting I did.

We were going around the pad, and there's these really cool tracks that lean really close to that big berm where the astronauts come flying down the slide wire. And then there's a, I think it's a locks tank on the side there. Yeah, that site, it never gets old. It was really cool, too, because Bob McAll, one of my favorite artists from the program, we got to, we're sitting beside each other. He's painting, I'm painting, I'm going to like, this guy really is that he's doing. But anyway, so that was fun.

I love this because the, like, rockets always look epic, but when they're illuminated at night, it's just a different level of epicness. It's amazing. And there's like a, there's like a Kennedy version of that, too, like, because you can see those lights like all the way around on the other side of the Indian River, like all up in, in, you know, the towns and stuff. You can see those lights from everywhere. And they still, they still look like even, no matter how far you get from them, they still look like light shit shorting up at a rocket. Like you, it's unmistakable what it is. And that's what I love about that.

The bizarre thing. The bizarre thing is that if there's a cloud passing by, they'll shine, you'll see the shadow like a shadow puppet on the cloud of the rocket. Which is, you know, You see that in a shuttle program. You go like, what's an airplane doing up on the cloud three miles away? And it's pretty spectacular. But anyway, so we got back to the press center, and then we're hearing, you know, like, oh, we got a big problem. This is, you know, this thing is cooking. But what happened on the mission was the micrometeoroid shield that was a protected.

This is the orbital workshop during space got ripped off. It got a little piece of supersonic slipstream came in. They just kind of peeled it off. And in the meantime, it made the two, I'm going to try and show this. the wings pop out and then the solar arrays pulled down. And so they were indicating that they hadn't been deployed properly. And the McDonald-Douglas engineer, who was seconded to the press site, was sort of sitting here trying to figure out what to do.

And he was coming up with all kinds of cool ideas, working. It was like a real engineer. And I went up and I said, look, would it be cool if I tried to do a painting of what it might look like? And his eyes lit up and he said, yeah, let's work on that. So for five days, we were trying to work out structural analyses. and they had these little butterfly hinges that would pop out. Where would the shield rip off and doing all that kind of crap?

In the meantime, as we were leading up to the launch, we had press conferences. Bill Schneier, the program manager, would come up and he'd tell us the status of things. One press conference, there was a reporter, is that we understand you've got some kind of special camera that can maybe take looks at this thing. And he goes, no.

In effect. What makes you like that? Yeah, and then the day before launched. You never launched a camera to space. The only one was the one that Buzz was carrying. Well, no, the Stella But was, was it on the ground? Was it in Hawaii? Was it a telescope?

Was it something up in space? We didn't know, secret. And so this big secret, you know, percolated a long. And then I finished these two paintings. And Ed Harrison, who was a public affairs guy for the post, we're going to use it. Is it okay with you? And say, well, I'm working for NASA, basically in my kind of weird, you know, NASA art thing. So, yeah, go ahead.

And he took him. And we had, he brought me into a little tiny room. And there's Bill Schneider. he's going to authenticate them and I'm like wow Bill started and he liked the paintings very much but he pointed to him and he said this one was not 30 degrees that one's completely gone and I'm like you know that

I didn't say that like that I just kind of looked at a mute and so the guy lied you know he knew now I said that he lied in that commentary but I guess the proper way of saying is he didn't betray his country so that's a better way he didn't just tweet a photo of of an image from a KH11

That's right You were the original The original paper of this story Yeah Well what I should have said is hey look I'm Norwegian I'm still a Norwegian citizen From Canada

I took a bus down here And you're giving me this information Is this a good idea So Times of change Yeah Because I didn't go to the bathroom Yeah right

Imagine He was a foreign net But he was just like getting Disclosed information From I didn't see we didn't know existed yet I'm the head of the secrets department.

Wait, when was NRO just closed, like the 90s or whatever? Yeah, something like that. 20 years ahead of time. And then, yeah, now there's like his buff dude sitting in the bleachers at Kennedy just iron up Jake as he like wanders around lost trying to find which is the best bathroom. He's obviously a Canadian. Look at the way he walks. Did you see how he looked at that picture of the president on the wall in the media room?

Like, what is wrong with this guy? That's really funny. Can I play this Walter Cronkite bit or is this later in the story? Well, you can. It's a minute. You may want to click into the middle of it. and then he turns to it. This is just through my mind.

Well, we were going to click in a minute, honestly. A minute into it. All right. A minute. A whole minute. There you go. There, there. Right here.

Okay. We got no audio, though. Oh, it's not going. You know what? Hold on. Hold on. Let me do it different. Yeah.

Can I set this up? Let me set it up while I debug. The two paintings were put on dyeses or sort of on these, whatever you call them, you know, these little platforms. In front of the big pre-flight press conference, when the entire NASA establishment shows up the day before and said, and so the two paintings were like featured right there. And I'm like, this is incredible.

And as the press conference was finished, this guy goes flying out from the press group, grabs the two paintings and runs off with them. So I'm running after him. And, you know, I yell at him. Excuse me, you know, what are you doing? And he goes, oh, I just wanted to see if we could use these paintings. Well, who are you? And he says, well, I'm with CBS News.

And I'm like, okay, go ahead. And that night, we saw this thing that you're about to see. so go ahead and play the rest of it. All right. Let's see by now. I wish I could give my pain. I'm a new one. Paul White's are going to be 10 days behind schedule.

That's because of the accident, moments after Skylab's launch here, a week ago Monday that ripped away a heat shield and crippled of the space labs power plant. The heat problem apparently is more crucial than that. Power shortage. He stumbled on that.

Jeez. A sunshade over the sky lab. Here we go. On an umbrella device, it's going to be pushed through a small opening in Skylab, and then the umbrella deployed opened up, lowered down for a 22-by-24-foot cover here. Then toward the end of the mission, Conrad and Curran working outside the Skylab will erect a longer long-sting shade for the following missions. It was the Skylab back in the day. The Skylab.

He didn't even give you a shout-out. He just let the graphics crew do it. I'm fine. I was fine. Notable faker Walter Cronkite. I don't know if you remember this bit, Jake. I always think about it. Didn't even shout out, Paul. There's one that in the public affairs office, I was looking at the broadcast with Eddie Harrison, a P.A.O. at NASA. And he just, after he saw that, he turned to me and he said, Paul, 25 million people just saw your name.

And I'm like, okay. That's what I've really look. Get to Houston and show these paintings. to three flight directors. They just happened to be at one of the press conferences. The three guys, Don Putty, Neil Hutchison, and Phil Kaffer. And I'm showing him, I say, hey, I'm pretty close because they just got video from the crew as they'd gone up. This is 10 days later when they went to look at it. And I'm pointing at stuff.

I'm saying, that's wrong, isn't it? That's wrong. And the flight jury thing, no, it's right. That's right. You should know that. And, of course, I didn't know that. These are flight directors. You see, you get one flight director.

He tells you something. That's the law, right? You get three flight directors telling you something. That's like a tsunami of flight. directors and you just got to you know keep your powder dry man because then I anyway I thought it was hilarious is that the collective noun for flight directors the tsunamis this is a hard group of people really cool group of people and they kind of took me under their wing and um had sky libyba um when they had to do that the great

skyline to rescue this thing rusty schweiker who was a backup commander in the capcom um he was doing all this work in the water tank so i was studying that video and then periodic Don Putty or Neil Hutchison would come and say, Paul, we're going to try and hook these things, you know, to this little bent module on the SaaS beam. And there you go. And that thing there, it was called Bill Schneider in a press conference, called it a black for a big, long, adjustable tether. But a press guy laughed his head off when he said that.

So they changed it to the bet, which is a beam erection tether, which is much better, obviously. Is it? I don't know. And he's pulling, anyway, I did that in like four hours up until five or half the night. and then I had to show it again to be authenticated and there's rest well story was so good that it ripped apart his internet connection that's hope it comes back you know the eBA oh he's back are you back okay I'm back okay I'm not frozen and okay I'm not frozen well it's because I'm making too many big moments but anyway so I was in the um yay so I was in the the video the viewing

room to the the moker the mission control room and um while Pete and Joe were whipping down the slick side of the vehicle there to pull that sucker out. And I was sitting beside Jane Conrad, Pete's wife. And I'm showing her the painting. So, oh, that's really good. And she passed it around and we're chit-chatting. It's incredible. What the hell are I doing?

Jane Conrad. But she as bizarre as good. So this is even better. We get back. The crew comes back. They have their big press conference post-flight. And they do the whole thing. And I tell Jack Riley, another PAO.

I said, look, we're trying to get information about how the EVA went. I'm trying to help national. Geographic magazine. And he said, ooh, that's interesting. So he pulls Joe Kerwin off the, when they're done

with the press conference and then marches them right in front of me. And he said, Paul, you have some press questions for Joe? And I go like, yeah, you know,

what did you do? What was it like? And he started explaining, you know, how they went flying off he had a tether attached to his chest big and long adjustable one?

Well, no, it was a different one. This is a small, regular SRT. Not the one. Yeah, they hadn't done a spin off yet.

That's a bad joke. I'm so smart. I like it. I'm here for that kind of stuff. I'm trying to get through this just quickly because I know I'm boring the shit out of you. But in any rate, so I get to the point where, let's see,

you're just, you're just, you've just thought about these stories so many times. It feels like you're just making it up right now, like chat GPT style, because it's like, how could all of this possibly have happened to our Norwegian Canadian who snuck into NASA at some point

because he took enough Greyhound buses down to Washington, D.C. and getting me. You're just reinforcing the stereotype here. Like, oh, I wish I'd give my pains on the news. Oh, I happen to be Walter Cronkite. Well, I wish I could show that. Walter Cronkite's producer. We're all flight directors.

Come hang out. No, no, better than that, Jake. Walter Cronkite's producer committed a theft of his paintings to get them on the news. Where's that Norwegian kid? He's just Norwegian. He can't give you credit for this. It's fun. Yeah.

He has no rights here. Yeah. We don't respect the intellectual property. rights of Norway in this country. Just steal them. Credit, Walter Cronkite. Now, now he's both a faker and an intellectual property theft machine. Well, I met him. He invited me in and he said, they photographed for everyone. I said, why are you stealing my art? I didn't say that. But anyway, so let's just go back. So Joe says that he went flying off the thing and then the tether, the tether, the tether, yanked him back and he cartwheeled and all this stuff. Fast forward another two years. Finally,

Jim Dean says, look, you've earned your spot as an official NASA artist for Apollo Soyuz. You're going to go down with the Russians. Finally, after all these years, painting for the NRO and the Apollo astronauts themselves, finally, we will bestow upon you NASA artists. After a letter of recommendation from Pete Conrad, I was finally allowed to get on his wife. His wife, yeah. So anyway, and he says, is there anything cool? Because this whole time, Jake, he was actually living at the Conrad's house because no one else would let him rent an apartment.

because he was a Norwegian Canadian, and she said, I'm tired of this guy sleeping on my couch. I need him to be a citizen so that I can actually get him off. He's freeloading at my house. I need to let him have his own apartment. No,

it was Don Puddy, the flight director. It's great. The rest of the story, I wish I could find a part. Whoa, I happen to be an Apollo astronaut. Come live with me.

And a landlord, yeah. It's nuts. It is nuts. I agree. So it's got Netzer. It gets crazier. So,

um, Jim asked me, is there anything cool I wanted to do? And I said, yeah, I'd like to be in a mocker, the mission and operation control. Can you make that work for me? And it goes, yes, we can. So I get down there, and I've got my now official picture badge. I got a badge. And I got a badge that says AV on it.

There I am. And that was the scariest one. Hold on. Pause. You are sitting in the independent podcaster seat. It's not a real seat. It's in the back of the room. This is the stuff.

Jake and I have inherited the status that you held among the press corps and NASA. We haven't inherited your position as, I don't know, just sit over there and don't get in anyone's way. This is exactly what you're doing here. That's right. Well, here I'm right. Actually, the Capcom is sort of just that's Al Bean and Jack Lousma behind. You can see him there. There were the backup crew.

But what was funny was that. And you taught Al and Bean to paint, didn't you? He came up to me and he said, you got to talk to me about painting because I ever want to paint. And I'm like, well, I just want to ask you what it was like, but I'm not allowed to do that. So, okay, we'll talk about art. He's like, neither am I because of the aliens. I can't say anything. That's right.

But you see, that's all I wanted to do. I just wanted to fly. I wanted to know what it was like. So when you've got John Young, Jean Sternin, Christ, you know, you just want to go up and do a Vulcan mine meld, you know, and say, what was it like, the beauty, whatever? And but you can't because you're a pro.

And so I was hanging back, doing drawing, stuff like that. Out comes over. And he looks at my paintings. And he said, these are really slick. And he was super nice. And he wrote me a letter. He signed a patch and said to Paul, for your, you know, an appreciation for your great talent.

And he wrote in the letter, he said, it was there's anything I can do. Don't hesitate to ask me. And about 20 years later, I was driving him from a, we had a symposium about art. And I said, you know, Al, that thing, you told me about anything you could do, please stop painting because you're killing me.

But we made so much fucking money with these $100,000. I got no money left for me. You know, so he thought it was funny. At first I thought you were like, I can't take it looking at these paintings. They're so bad. I thought that's the, that's the tack that you would be taking. Please stop.

These are horrible. Yeah, no, you're killing me because you're sucking up all the funds. So anyway, but the best thing was this. I showed that Skylab painting to Joe Kirwin. I brought it up to his office. And he loved it. He said it was great. Can I buy it?

I said, no, NASA owns it. But yeah, this one. And he told me the only thing that was wrong with it was that those umbilicals would go in these huge sweeping arcs. They were pushed by the airflow going in it back and forth. He said, it was really cool. And then I left. And then I'm sitting beside Gene Cernan going like, what's it like? What's it like?

The rest of that. And then I find out there's a message for me at the public affairs office. And it's Joe Kerwin. And he wants to tell me what it was like. And so he tells me about this great SkyliebVA. He and Pete, when they were flying, they had to whip down the dark side of the vehicles. So they couldn't do anything. They had to wait during a dark pass.

So they just raise their visors. and got their minds blown. They lost their shit. And Joe was describing this thing because it was like a three-quarter moon, the moon shining over the ocean, huge thunder clouds and storms. He said it was like a giant walking across the earth.

You could see the Milky Way and the moon at the same time, city lights, all that stuff. And it described in detail for like three hours, and I thought, this is what I need to do. I need to paint what it's really like because there's no record of that. Even the photographs they take today from the ISS, they're over-exposed to a large extent.

So anyway, that was the beginning, really, of the career that I think that I had. If you look, there's a couple of early attempts that I had of sort of moonlight training with the shuttle. I did a lot of work for, there you go. That was for the AIA cover at one point. And it kind of gives you a bit of an idea. But if you look at the photographs today from the ISS, you don't quite get the spooky, weird feeling that I had.

And a lot of the astronauts that I've talked to is when they see something really that's blow their minds. They try not to take a picture of it because it kind of wrecks the memory of it. So I'm trying to do paintings of visual experience, you know, if you were there. Yeah, that's kind of the beginning of the adventure, I guess you could say. I was lucky. Just the first part. Just the beginning. I still can't believe it.

And I was so lucky to get the last part of the Apollo program because at that point, the interest was not anywhere near. is high and all the people in the program were like, where's all the interest? And I'm like, I'm right here. Please tell me, Mr. Engineer, whatever, everything you did. And then they were very excited to sort of bring me in. And in fact, I did a painting of Al Shepard and his Apollo 14 crew for Al Shepard, because I thought he would be depressed that people weren't as excited about his mission. You know, this guy's going to the fucking moon. It's like, oh, this painting really picked my spirits up, you know, but anyway, good. And that's why the PEO guy said,

this kid, he's all right. You know, let's bring him in. That's amazing. Kid, you're all right. I'm worried about Al Shepard. That's right. He's only going to, he's only going to satisfy the most outrageous, possible experience in the history of humanity.

He was crying on the man. He was kept on the surface, and he said, it's been a long way, you know, but we're here. And apparently he had a little, you can maybe see it in that. a hassle plan picture from the window. Not clear.

Anyway. Maybe. So that's the beginning of things. And then we had a shuttle program and the work with SPAR on the Canadian part, went of course back to Canada and insinuated myself into the Canadian space program. But then I had a record. I said, look, I had National Geographic magazine. I was doing stuff that Aviation Week was publishing and all that kind of stuff.

And so they brought me in and I found myself working. There you go. There's an Ave week. That was a big deal getting that cover. Galileo, man. Boy, I wish that's the way the spacecraft ended up looking after it did it. Yeah, it didn't look like that. No, gravity assist. I almost wanted to do another painting with it sort of attached with a, but it would have been sad. I asked Dick Spiosky at the launch. He was a program director. If they had launched it when they were supposed to, had Challenger not happen. He said that Galais would have blown up. because the bus built by measurement Belcom-B-B-B had a problem with the thrusters,

and the duty cycle that they had intended was too long, and they exploded. And so this German satellite that flew up, it was going to fly up after the Galileo, but it went before, and it exploded. And so they had to not just change putting all the sun protection because it was going to go venous or gravity. They also had to change the duty cycle of the thrusters, so they couldn't do the burns in one long piece. they wouldn't blow up. Hang on. So that means that they went in there and they replaced all the other stuff that was going to blow up and they didn't re-grease that damn antenna.

Oh, no. I think they thought the antenna was fine. There was that malignant or whatever. You know, the driving back and forth, you know, is what kind of killed them. And they thought, no, we already tried to deploy it, right? They already did a test deployment at the Cape and then they buckled it up, sent it back to JPL. Yeah, yeah. I brought it back. I don't remember how it happened. But poor mission, poor mission. They still had some fantastic stuff. They managed to dribble it out through that log in and then we got some good stuff. Yeah, they did.

Yeah. Yeah. All right, I want to hear about a thing that I know you did, but I have no ideas about what this was process was like. But you at the Smithsonian with this lunar module. Oh, yeah. Like, how did this thing come about? Who remembers you or did you just take a bus down to the Smithsonian one day and said, I would like to go inside the limb? And they said, great.

It needs to be sweeped. I'm like, what's the process? I'm the head of this most million. So you're in the right spot. Now I'm an official Canadian, so that's different. Oh, welcome. Welcome Canadian. The Jake's not even that anymore.

What? You never not become a Canadian. They will not refuse you. But anyway, no, I was always interested in the lunar module and a very good friend of my, Randy Atwood. He's a Royal Astronomical Society guy. He and I have been really good friends. and we decided we wanted to do a book about the coolest thing we ever knew, which was a lunar module.

Nothing would be done really well, we thought. Anyway, and so the first thing you do is talk to the NASA folks, who I knew, because I had good old Eddie Harrison back in the day, and I said, look, we want to see Lem 9. Sorry, yeah, Lem 9 that was there and go through your photographer. Uh-oh. The story's hot, too. Is he on Starlink?

Is he on Starlink? I don't know. I don't know. How is my connection holding up better? I don't know. Oh, my God. He's back. We're good.

So, okay, anyway. And so we just went to Grumman, too, and he said, hey, you know, we're interested in doing this serious book and showed us now by this time our bona fides. And they said, yeah, we're really came. And there's a bunch of engineers you probably want to talk to. It's all the people that did the job. You know, so they want to talk to you. If you're interested in know anything and can speak to them in a smart way at all,

they'll come flying out of every corner and tell you the most amazing details. And so, and I got to know Josh, staff at the Cradle of Aviation Museum, the curator there, they had LEM 13. And they were going to use it for, from the earth to the moon, the production that Tom Hanks was. And they asked if I could help them with dressing that up because I knew the way the thing looked. So over a period from 97 through 2002, I got to know the LEM extremely well. And then they had me, I was a mission, I was a spacecraft manager on LEM 13. I actually had a little badge.

And whenever the grubman engineers would shout out for the managers, they go, oh, you're the manager, one-thirteen. I go, like, where'd you go to school? I mean, well, I dropped out, actually. I'm an artist. I dropped out of art school. Most of my learning on Greyhound buses between Montreal and D.C. But I knew what the hell I was talking about because I spent, you know, months and weeks and years, you know, sort of going over to every stupid engineering growing and then seeing the real thing.

And so I built it and the Smithsonian owns that stuff anyway. And so I got to know Alan Niedel. And then later, Alan said, well, you can seem to know a lot about the lem and the lem just makes everybody's head explode. So why don't you come down to the Smithsonian and help us do a partial restore in 2009? That's me. Yeah, that's after that. That's a lot of fun, by the way. Oh, that's in the simulator.

I've been in all the lemm simulators, but they weren't working at the time. Unfortunately, that's the one that they got at the cradle. And then when I was in Houston and I got to play around in the simulator for about 30 hours of real working one, the command module one, the Lem one was no longer working to Satrapolitics team, that 17 guys all trained at the Cape. And so I got to play in that one. So I've been in both Lemm simulator. And Lemme 2 needed to get really well refurbished because they were going to move it into the milestones and it had been sitting out there in front of the McDonald's for decades absorbing grease.

So you think, you know, all that special space, hard, you know, space is hard, the hard environment, all like stuff. Nothing like being outside of McDonald's. And so we had to clean that stuff. Man, that was hard. And then they did a final complete restore. Okay, well, here's a good example. That's me on that thing. That was hard to fit in there, by the way.

I kind of tell you. Yeah. It would have been great for this job. We pulled, we were, I was, we pulled all. My arms are short, but. We pulled everything off LEM2. And then I built a bunch of blankets. We had to finish the top deck here properly.

Do you do the next picture if it's in the, there you go? So that's the stuff that the engine sees when it fires to get off the moon. They had to protect the top deck. So in case, especially during an abort, if they had a, like to fire the engine so close to a working descent stage with fuel that the thing would just blow up. Hot staging. A lot, yes, a lot faster than they had intended. So anyway. Seems like a little bonus thrust to me.

That's right. I'm done it, Gerbil. Who hasn't? Exactly. Yeah, that's one of the ways of getting a little extra thrust in that thing. Who needs a decoupler? Just blow it up. Is there another?

There's some shots. Honestly, like, if you're looking for the next version of Starship, we actually don't have a decoupler on the booster anymore. We just light the engine and hope that it separates from... That's right. It's got that little grill, the grill. That's hopefully all the propeller as well. Do you think it'll do as well as the first time that they had the fire in the hole

on the pad, the OLM, the Orbital Launchdown? It can't get worse than that. It's going to be a crater on top of the first of the Starship Heavy. I thought that was brilliant. I can't wait for the next round

of, you know, Plume versus Fink. Brown versus Texas. Starship versus concrete. Phil Metzger was fantastic, by the way. I love that. We're kind of running out of time, I guess.

but there's a painting that I did a couple of ones from Apollo 11. And one of them here, we can, you, you guys need to use a universal symbol for plume, Regulith interaction. Thank you. You did it.

Oh, you want me to show the, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know what's talking about. I find it. I think I got it. This is it, right? Regular.

In any of your shows. Oh, hold on. Hold on. This is not the right. There we go. There you go. That's what we're talking about.

That's it. There is. There is. All of Phil's, you can see it right in there. Yeah. Well, what you can see is the plume research, sort of, it's a swallowed shock, really. It's sort of the plume is coming out of the engine, bouncing back up off the surface,

and the unburned propellant that's in that plume gets reheated and glows. You can see it when they launch the ascent stage from the descent stage, like on Apollo 17, the views from the rover. If you watch for like two seconds, it's lifting off, there's like this flame that seems to lick up. Well, that's a swallowed shock. It's bouncing off the thing and then being illuminated. It only gets far enough away. It no longer has the power to do that.

But what I don't have here is that really cool entrainment of the dust particles and, you know, that kind of weird-ass donut. I can see probably in the middle it makes a little mound of a flat plate part of the time. What am I doing? We have so many titles to pick from. This is going to be a great episode for the podcast listeners. Oh, yeah. Not seeing all you listen on the podcast paintings up on the screen.

Yeah. Yeah, this is one you need to come over to YouTube for podcast people for sure. I need to come take a look at that. Hold on. So I got a question. We skipped over the LEM thing too quick. I got a LEM question. Because one of my favorite things to do is to get to the Smithsonian super early so that I'm

the first person in Skylab before anyone's made their way there. And I can just stand there for a couple minutes and no one's bothering me. That's it. Did you like purposely schedule some things so that you could just go in the limb and just be in the limb for a bit and just hang out? Yes, I did. And what did you discover? Well, first of all, I was responsible for closing it out.

And we had to get a drug. I found a drug. We were to put that up in the hatch and the upper hatch. Found a discy, a display and keyboard that there was a big hole in LEM2. And we got to install that, which was really cool. And then at the end, yeah, there we all are. So I was a project for that. So I had to tell everybody what to do.

And I'm not a great manager, but I'm a good painter. And I was able to build a lot of the stuff that went on it. But no, I see two ladders here. Did you get to climb the real ladder? No, absolutely not, because that thing could not take...

It's built for one-sixth gravity. Once again, I was sitting right here the whole time, Paul. That's all I'm saying. I'm very light, very tiny. Well, maybe we'll shove you up. We'll see what...

Yeah. But no, the best thing was being in the limb, and I had like about... Here we go. You hear me? Ah. Yeah, you're good. Okay. I'm in the limb and I'm at the commander station, the CDR, and I'm looking through the window.

And the window is this little triangle. And you can see 90 degrees to the left, but to the right, you have this big structural beam that makes the nose of the lens. So you can't really see that far. And when you look down, you can see just a little tiny piece of the forward foot pad, maybe a bit of the gear. And that's it. And you're high up in a weird spot. And this is a really strange place to be. And the first time anybody ever landed that thing, he was flying in that, he'd never done that before. He'd ever flown that vehicle. I mean, he'd flown things that give you sort of the dynamics of it with that flying bedstead thing that was kind of simulating one-six gravity. But he's sitting in his seat and he's lower down. He was in the trainer, so he's got a bit of sense of where the switches are.

But that, you know, integrating all that stuff. And then especially Neil the first time landing it, you know, when half the world is watching you. I think that's the most incredible, you know, test pilots. anything ever done in the hatred that's how yeah and he went ahead to go along too right he had to he had to kind of bail on the first the first site and go past the rocks right well as he came in and they pitched over and he started you know messing with the controls to make sure that they worked and he didn't really have a look down his grid that gave the the computer was telling where he was going to go until fairly late in the approach phase and he saw there were a bunch of rocks right around his big crater called

west and so he said okay in doubt go along so he arrested his descent didn't break quite his heart and was flying over. And I think he just needed to feel really confident about his ability to fly the thing. He was using the minimum impulses on the rocket. He used the exercises system as little as possible. I thought he could have landed in front of that little crater. He finally flew over. It seemed like he had a lot of room.

It looked like he was going to that and he changed his mind. As he said, you know, he kept his ability, his right to be wishy-wash about where they were. I love this. I love this. No one else would critique Neil Armstrong, decision of where to land on the moon. I love this. Yeah. Well, he critiqued himself. He critiqued himself because as he was coming in for the landing, he didn't exercise any of the yaw. So he couldn't see to the right his spacecraft because of the pitch and roll inputs. He sort of worked his way,

tilted away from where the shadow was visible. So it was hard for him to see the shadow. And now he also had something he'd never seen before, which was just streaming out. And so you've got this illusion of moving backwards. So he's like going, wow, what am I doing? What am I doing? As he said, he was kind of jerky with his controls. He was drifting right. And he finally said, the hell with it. I'm just going to come down.

He kind of clump going left. So it was pretty dramatic. That whole thing was. And he landed with about a minute of propellant, by the way. Just to let him. There's that saying, right, one of my favorite sports saying that's like, you know,

it's not scary to go to the Super Bowl. What's scary is to go to the halftime break at the Super Bowl and change all the plans that got you there, right? And that's like, that's like the space equivalent. And it was like landing on the moon isn't scary. It's going in and one minute before landing, changing your landing site. And having never done any of that before, right?

I was what the hell is going on in this show? You've got national park reviews and a football, American football reference. What is happening up there? I'm going to put the cherry on the cake here. I'm going to say you train for the off nominal. That's what you're trained for. That's the whole point of life. Off nominal.

They don't do the nominal shit. They don't worry about that. It's what happens if this goes wrong, if that goes wrong, can I save the mission? Can you save your podcast in an off-nominal situation? Well, let's find out. We need to replace something in the intro with they don't train for the nominal shit. That needs to go in the intro music. They don't train for the non- shit.

Lightning round. Lightning round on mission patches. We're going to give me one sentence about each of these, okay? No more than one sentence. I'll be harsh on this. Okay, go. Mark Garneau, personal patch. Those Aurora in the background is from his sailing days.

He was a sailor. Next one. I assume there's a semicolon in there. Awesome. So at the Canadian, I worked in the Canadian... You did that. Okay, I'll do it properly. I'll do it slow for you as a Norseman.

Bjerney triagvasom. That's how he would say it. And all the astronauts in Canada, they had their own personal patches, which was kind of funny when they went down to see the American crew going like, I got a special patch and you don't. So anyway, Chris Hadfield had one of those. And he had me make personal patches for each of his crew, which was a lot of work. Anyway, so this is Bjarnie's patch, Viking.

He's Icelandic. And he's flying little pits in the, you can see a little tiny pits aircraft. He was a pits specialist. He wanted to make everybody barf. So if you visited him in Houston, he'd take it for a ride and try and get you to throw up. It was fun. Next one. Amazing.

Okay, so I'm claiming the design of the Canadian space agency before they changed me recently. Yes. How is this a claim? This is just accurate. Isn't it? Yeah. I'll be brief about this one. In 87, the director of communications, whose name, he's going to kill me.

He asked me, he wanted to do a fun, cool patch for kids about the Canadian space program, Wally Chowinski. And I said, sure, this is a cool thing. and I love sunrises, and I did the sunrise, and that's aloead flying overhead, and it's the milk, the little dipper with the North Star. And then the next day, practically, Canada decided, we're going to be, we're going to have a space agency. And Larkin Kerwin, who was the first director, I said, we need a logo. And Wally Choroulski said, well, I've got this thing, but it's for kids.

And he says, no, no, no, I like it. We're going to use that. And so it was displayed big the first time they did it. And then they had it on all the, you know, logo, the letterhead, everything. The astronauts hated it. Bjorni Petrugosan especially, he said, that's like for kids. So anyway, five years later, I met the agency, and they said, we've got to have a serious logo. This is too cute.

And so they tried to, they had these guys come in, graphics people, and they made these really slick corporate-like logos. And they passed them around the whole agency, and they said, which ones do you like? And they say, well, we like the old one. And they, so, they wasted all that money. And they finally just kind of low, my version of it. And that thing was on a freaking. launch vehicle that took JWST up. When I saw that R&5 roll out

and I saw that thing, I'm going to like, that's my art. That's a, that's a my art delivery vehicle. Whatever it's doing beside that. You know, it's like, okay, next one. That was not one sentence, by the way. You say, I got a minute. All I have to say about this is that I now understand how New Zealand feels about every picture of a map ever.

Thank you very much. Yes. Okay, first pouch for the crew, SES 90, my buddy, it was fellow, you know, Dave Williams was on that. That's a neuron that you're looking through into the year. And you can see in the payload bay I've got a little EV rat and a little EV snail on the Omspot. Oh, yeah. Yeah, there they are. They did not survive the flight.

I think they probably enjoyed that experience more, being out at least compared to what happened during the flight. Next one. Amazing. This is a pass that didn't fly. Very sad. Scott Parazinsky had me on speed dial. I did his SCS 100 patch as well. And this is going to, I got to hang out with Barbara Morgan one time at a baseball game in Toronto,

the Toronto Blue Jays were playing years earlier. So I kind of got to know her a little bit. And Columbia was going to come in. We wanted to do a neat reentry. And then the next day the crew died. So they didn't get the flight and they didn't want to use that as a patch. And I said, that's fine. I understand.

That was really tough. Next one. I decided I was never going to do a patch again because it's really, really, really hard to get all the crew to agree. The way you start is you say, what's your favorite patch? That's not the one you flew? And they'll give you about 10 different ideas, and you're like, oh, crap, I'm done. And I did one. But anyway, Chris Hadfield, I've known him a long time.

He said, look, I've got a command. You've got to do a patch for me. And I went, fine. So I did a whole bunch of ones with Zumi's and did some things flying around, whatever, and sent them to him. And he and Tom Marshburn saw him. And they said, we're not feeling it. And I'm like, I know they suck. And so Chris said, let's have a little, you know,

te-a-teta-teta chat about the experiences. And so we had a great time for about an hour, just yakking about everything, what they thought was cool, the darkness, the spookiness, the speed. And so I, like literally a day later, I came up with this and we tweaked it a little bit. But it's a bow, like a bow and arrow,

shooting our imagination into the future. And how did I forget to do that? that. And it's all right. It's getting called. It's Hatfield again. It's going back up. It's the, it's the, it's, it's, it's, Paul, are you available? Have another job. Can we do a cool retro patch for my old flight? I really needed to get some credit. Just a personal one, Senator, administrator, Bill Nelson. Do the next picture with the crew. Do the next picture with the crew. Oh, got it, got it. Got it. So this is what excites me the most. It's to see these dudes with the patch on their on their chest and the funny thing is is that Chris on the right there he's got three of my pieces of art on his chest I didn't do the Canadian flag I was only

eight so I guess I didn't have a chance but so I got the CSA and he asked me to do a an astronaut version of the Canadian airport of wings so I did that yeah if you look inside it's not yeah there you go it's like a little arrow pointing up into the crown so I designed that yeah so like I said, so the crew is a Paul Fiel art delivery. Art delivery vehicle once again. That's a lot of fun, though. To have your own stuff up there

to talk to them and work with them or work with the engineers and really get a feeling for what it's like, you know, out in space. I had a design teacher in school who did a bunch of patches. It's stretching my mind now. Tim Busby? Do you know Tim Busby?

Oh, sure. Oh, really? No. I've heard you name. I know a Busby. He was, he was, design teacher I had in college and he showed a patch one time that had it was like a bunch of objects coming out of the space shuttle including a kitchen sink because the crew would not stop asking for other items to come out of the shuttle

payload bay or something like that. I kind of forget the details but he had a patch that flu that had a kitchen sink on it and I was like that's a great story too. Really funny and that's actually that's the personal kind of stuff that the guys like you know the folks like when they put up there but it's yeah and they and it stands for their work. This

weird patch. You don't realize the value of it. It's pretty funny. I like your patch, by the way. I've got to say the beer launch is perfect. And when I saw I saw, you had to change it when Jake went down to Mexico. We did. Yeah. Yeah.

From Philly to It's a funny flight pattern, but it works better because it doesn't impact the coastline. So it's not exactly a great circle, but it is exactly. Yeah. That's some art. That's some art stuff. This is Walter Cronkite approved. dart as far as I'm concerned, Jake.

Absolutely. We're doing great today. Yeah. Yeah, we'll take that my extension. Where should people follow along with you? Or if you don't want them to, you can just say no, thanks.

No, no. Well, you just have to Google me, Paul Fial Space Art. You can see all the connections. It's a PF in space. It's like you, Jake, Jake in orbit. You know, he's like, you wish, right? Like me, I wish I was in space.

So, in my mind. He also had a great article. on the space review recently. Yeah, that was in May. Oh, yeah, it was featuring you, I should say. More extensive story of the Skylab stuff, which was worth a read as well, sure. It was funny that he put me in there, the artist. The artist.

Who revealed all? Jake, what else we got to talk about before we're out of here? Well, I'm going to go home this weekend. So the weird schedule stuff is over now. thankfully I'm excited to get back to the studio and not do all whatever I got AirPods in like what's going on here this is all off nominal here for sure for me so I'm excited for that is what you train for man yeah oh and his internet collapses right at the end did you make it back you know here I can still hear you so you're coming back you're coming back eventually all right right

I don't know. I'm here. I'm here. Maybe. The Lauren Gresh wave. Can you see me? I'll do the plug. I'll do the plug for next week.

We have one of the two co-founders of K2 space coming on, which should be very sweet. Karan's going to come on and talk about building satellite buses that fit in Starship, banking on a future where there's large payload volumes available. I'm pretty excited about this one, Jake. It's going to be great time. I'm excited for this one, too. Yeah. Yeah.

We're going to get into some interesting areas, I feel like, so. I think so. I think so. Well, Paul, thanks for finally hanging out with us, and you should come back because you have like 8,000 stories we didn't even get to. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah. Sorry for having too many stories from the time Walter Cronk had stole my art and like high ups at NASA.

We're like, yeah, whatever, go stand over there. That's cool. That's right. Me and the Triumvirate of flight directors. All right, everybody. We'll see you next week. Bye, everybody. everybody one two three four five five four three two one end of death