Off-Nominal - 13 - Bad Looking Unmixed Nuts

Episode Date: October 18, 2018

Elizabeth Howell joins Jake and Anthony to talk about her trip to Baikonur, the recent Soyuz situations, the politics of the ISS, and Canadian space. Beers (and not beers) DAVIDsTEA Phillips Soda Works – Captain Electro's Intergalactic Root Beer Brawler - Yards Brewing Co. - Untappd Topics Astronaut Saint-Jacques takes final steps towards journey to spaceflight - SpaceQ Eyewitness Observer of Dramatic Soyuz Launch Abort Describes What He Saw The Universe Needs More Canada — Don't Let Go Canada Picks Gallery: Global Precipitation Measurement SVS: Near Real-Time Global Precipitation from the Global Precipitation Measurement Constellation Ventusky - Wind, Rain and Temperature Maps From Above - Astronaut Photography with Don Pettit - YouTube Follow Elizabeth Elizabeth Howell – I share news about space exploration. Reporter, consultant, teacher Elizabeth Howell (@howellspace) | 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

DLS and go for main engine, start. I'm an old Miko. Welcome to space. All right, so after some fun, fun challenges with the internet, it looks like the internet is down across one-third of Canada approximately, but we do have a fun guest with us today who made it through the magic of Plano telephone system. We call it Pots, right? Is that the word for it?

Very relevant name for the day in Canada. Very relevant name for maybe why the internet. down. But yeah, so welcome to the new Canada where marijuana is legal and space is still kind of on the fritz, but we have a guest with us today. Elizabeth Howell, welcome to

Off Nominal. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. So, we brought you on to do some to talk about some fun stuff that's been going on in space. Has it been anything going on? Did you want me to just hit the... What's going on in space?

Hot drama. Elizabeth, this is the hot drama alarm. We pull this out very rarely. This week is a hot drama situation. Oh, beer, yeah. Grant says beer. I think I'm the only one drinking a beer, though, today, because this is an off-nominal, off-nominal, in which it is daylight for everyone.

It is an off-nominal, off-nominal. Yes, yeah. I'm calling in from a work conference, so I actually should not be drinking beer right now. So I've actually chosen something different. But why don't we let Elizabeth start? Elizabeth, do you have a drink with you? Yes, I've got some decaf tea. I'm really living it up today, aren't I?

Decapped tea. Well, is it like what kind of tea, though, is it? Like, is it a good Earl Grey or something? Oh, yeah. It's a good, it's like a David's tea, you know. Okay. That's fancy. But, yeah, so, yeah, David is a wonderful brand that is based here in Ottawa and a few other places. And I just love going into their shop because it's kind of like a coffee shop, except it's more relaxed. It's got a little bit of a tea vibe because everybody isn't over-caffeinated, right? so that you don't get the stressed workers. It's more like chill.

I didn't know that was based in Ottawa. That's a new piece of information for me. Yeah, they have a lovely store in Westboro, which is kind of a trendy neighborhood, just the west of downtown of Ottawa. And I actually stopped there once. I remember actually it was just before my wedding because kind of my bridesmaid was helping me out with the shopping.

And I'm like, okay, we're going to have some G now. We're going to figure things out. So good spot to be. Cool. Okay. All right. Anthony, you have? It's apparently an herbal day up in Canada, but I am not doing that. I've got a little beer

here, very typical Yards brawler, just a standard Philadelphia beer. I had a friend in town last week who moved out of Philadelphia, so he came over and we bought some old Philadelphia beers. So rolling with the old steady today. When is Yards going to sponsor you? Yeah, didn't they sort of already? I don't know. Oh, that's awesome. So I picked up I went to the grocery store. I'm in Whistler, BC, this week for a conference. And so I went up to this grocery store, and there is a, it's a craft beer, or craft root beer. So it's as close as I could get.

And it's, I don't know if you can see it here, Anthony, on the video. It's called Captain Electro's Intergalactic Root Beer. And it's brewed in Victoria. And it had a pretty cool bottle. And I was like, that's about as good as I'm going to get for a, not real beer. Is it a giant bottle? I'm going to say that's the most epic root beer I've ever heard.

So good job. It's pretty cool. It's pretty fun. Elizabeth, you should check the label out if you got Google nearby. I guess you don't because the internet's out, as we've established. But once it comes back, check this label out. I am cut off.

It is now 1985 in my house. I don't know how I'm going to cope. It's funny because the bottle here says, crafted with real cane, sugar, and herbs. So I'm not sure. Maybe this is actually less work appropriate than I thought, considering this is Whistler on October 17th. So we'll see. So I'm pouring a glass, but yeah, we're good to go.

Oh, yeah, that's good. Oh, I'm bubbling over. Oh, no. I've already spilled my rip here. All right. So let's talk about some fun stuff. So, Elizabeth, we brought you on because I thought that you'd be a pretty good expert for all the kind of crazy Russia stuff going on right now with this whole Soyuz anomaly. one of the reasons was because you actually got to go there this year, I think.

And so maybe we'd start off. Could you tell us a little bit about that trip? Because that sounds like it was a pretty cool adventure to Bikaneur. And what did you see and what did you learn? I learned actually that it's a remarkably open program because I'm sure that there are some listeners that have been to those Nassah Socials at Kennedy and a few other places. And it's really cool.

You do get close up to the hardware. But here, oddly enough, you're getting closer, which is sort of weird because Russia has that history, right, of secrecy and wanting to make sure they're protecting themselves. But they really opened up. And so I got the opportunity because I'm a Canadian journalist. I made some good connections with the Canadian Space Agency. And they opened up the invitation, I guess it was back in the spring. And they said, hey, you know, we got this astronaut that's launching, Davids Medevich, which I knew about. And they said, he's going to be on the backup crew.

And he's not launching or anything, but do you want to go down there? And I said, well, of course, because at the time, it looked like he was going to be launching in December. And a Kazakhstan desert in December is like minus 40 degrees. So I thought, I'd rather go in June. Minus 40. So it'll just be like the Rideau Canal in the winter then, right? No. Is that a local humor?

I don't know. Yeah, I'm going to fill us up with as many Canadian local jokes as I can and see how dazed you look. Yeah, I'm like, I mean, it sounds like a good joke if you're from Canada. I think your joke might have been so bad that she dropped off the phone line. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is riveting content. Hello, I'm back. There was no poppy and there was no connection.

I'm here. So let me try it again. Jake made a joke about some canal or something and then it kind of fell flat for me and you were gone. So I just assumed it was a really bad Canada joke. I was just saying that minus 40 in Kazakhstan would have been just like the Rideau Canal in the winter. No, I agree. It is like the Rideau Canal in the winter, so I don't need to go to another country to experience the Rideau Canal in the winter. If a lot minus 40, I'll just step outside and I'll stand there very much. Thank you very much.

That's my attitude. Like, if I'm Canadian and I'm leaving in the winter, I'm going south, going warm. Totally. But anyway, so I'm on this bus. We pull up to this huge building, which I guess is their equivalent of the vehicle assembly building. And then there's a railroad track, and they go and they pull this rocket out on the railroad track. and I'm literally like 10 feet in front of it. Now mind you, there were these guys with machine guns that were all around us

just to make sure we weren't doing anything funny, but all the same, I was 10 feet from it. So what they do is they bring it out of this vehicle assembly building and they take it down this huge track, you know, several kilometers long, and it takes a better part of a morning. And they bring it all the way out to the launch pad, and then you can imagine it's like horizontal, right, because they're not going to be, you know,

take this big thing for kilometers and kilometers and hoping the wind won't push it over. they take it and it's horizontal and then they hoist it to the vertical over at the launch pad which is a really cool process because they got to kind of jim it off the track and then move it onto this other platform and it was

incredible. Then the following morning we went back to that same site because they have a traditional blessing of the rocket where an Orthodox priest comes over and he has the holy water and he gives a sermon of short sermon in Russian he blesses the nearby officials with the water and then he did the same thing with the press and that particular day was

probably plus 30 degrees centigrade. So getting kind of on the warm sun in Fahrenheit. What would that be? 75. That's like 90. That's a lot hot. That's pretty high. That's like 90.

Yeah. Yeah. A dry heat, but you know, still kind of, kind of steamy for me. So anyway, when the water came on me, it just felt very nice

because it was so warm. And then the third day, this was the coolest day because it was a launch day, of course. So we basically rolled up to where the astronauts are coming out of quarantine.

They got into their launch buses. and then we went to the next spot where they get the space suiting done. And I didn't have a video camera, but if I did, I could have actually gone in and watched them being suited up, which was just phenomenal. But I got to kind of stand outside and horse around where they have all of the people come at the very end. Because what happens is the three astronauts, they leave the building where they're suited up. They go and they walk over to the Russian officials, and they say we're ready to go. And there actually are little boxes where the three of them can stand and are labeled.

Like one says commander and the other one says Soyuz pilot, the other one says, I don't know, not Soyuz pilot. The other person. The three of them. The third one. The other one, the other guy, right? Yeah, exactly. The other one. So anyway, there are these three boxes. And so any other journalists are standing there and we were watching and some Russians went over and they started to take some pictures, like pretending they were like the commander of spacecraft and standing in the

commander's box. And no one was bothering them. So we're going, well, the Russians can do it. Surely we, Canadians and Europeans can. So the next thing you know, we're all running over and we're getting our pictures taken in the commander's box, having some fun, trying to stay cool in the heat. And then they came walking out, and I was right in front of them, basically, as they were saluting the Russian Commission and saying they were ready to go. And then the actual launch itself, it's only about a kilometer and a half away, it's about a mile, I would say.

And we had the opportunity to go on standby. That's crazy. Yeah, it's like nothing, right? So you feel you're being knocked over by this thing, basically, by the time it lifts off. and the Canadian Space Agency was generous enough to actually let us stand beside the astronaut, the backup astronaut David Svejok, and watch this thing go. So not only was I watching a rocket go with people on top,

but there was another person who like new things beside me, if I had any questions. Like, who better to ask? What's going on right now? Well, you see, in our training, we learned. So it was incredible, overall. And I just wish that more people could see this, especially because, as I might get into later, the program's changing, and there won't be as many Russian flights anymore.

So get out there if you can. Try and get a tour group and figure your way out there. It's hard. It's difficult. It's expensive. But so worth it. Yeah. There's like my big dream is to be able to go and see the XOMAR's launch.

I would love that. I don't know if I'll be able to pull it off. It's like a million other percentage. But oh, that would be so cool, I think. And that's even more out because you're going to Mars in that case. In this case, we just were going a few hundred kilometers up, right? Yeah, yeah. And I mean, there's probably not going to be that many approaches.

left, right? So, like, that rocket would be a good one to see. Did you have to go inside any buildings on the tour? I got to go inside some really cool museums. So the buildings that were building all the stuff were closed off for security reasons, but we got access to a bunch of museums that are in and around Bikinor. And in one of them, actually, back in Moscow, I should explain, too, that we finished our trip at Bikinaur and we flew back to Moscow, and some of us stayed on to watch the docking over at Mission Control. So I actually got to stand in Moscow's mission control and watch the whole thing from the balcony and see them talking

with their families just kind of adjacent to me, which was moving in another way altogether, because here they were connecting with their families from space. So on that same morning, we went to the RKK Energy Museum, and there was like Gigerens capsule, the part of it that still was in existence today. So that right away sort of blew my mind. And then they had like, it was sort of like the gallery of spacecraft. It was like a lineup of all of these famous Russian missions, like Navy of famous Russian mission that's probably sitting there. You know, the first spacewalk was sitting

right there. And then there was one particular Soyuz, and we had been split up into two groups, because there were so many of us. There still were probably about 30 journalists. And I could see the people were like milling around this particular spacecraft for ridiculous amounts of time. So I actually left my group. I ran down to see the other half, and I'm like, what's going on? And they said, we can go inside this one. I'm like, what? And they said, yeah, it's a space flown thing, but they're letting us inside it. And of course, all of us Europeans and Canadians are going, this never happens, so we've got to get in here.

And you can imagine, like, these were journalists, so they actually had amazing miniature video equipment and they were taking videos inside of there. I wasn't that sophisticated. I just had my cell phone, but still I was like, I'm getting in. It's never happening again. Yeah, that's like, I went to, you know, you go to Greece, if you go up to like the Acropolis or everything,

they're like, don't touch any of the marble. And then, so it's like, if that's, like, a really popular place, But then you can go to some places, like, just across the pond, I went to this place in Turkey called Izmir, which is like basically the same thing. It's just like all these marble ruins, but they had like no rules. So like you were just like climbing on columns and stuff. It's probably the same feeling. It's the same feeling. Yeah, exactly.

And it's the same thing in Mexico. My husband and I went down there for a honeymoon and we were at Chechnica. And back of the day, you could actually climb the ruins, which he did when he was a kid. And he was like the star of our tour group because of this. But apparently there's still some other similar Mayan ruins in Mexico. so they just aren't as famous. They could still, like, touch the stones, and in some cases, climb up partly. It just depends on the safety factor, right?

Wow. Okay, but there was one particular building that you're not allowed to go into, and you're not allowed to ask about from what I've heard, which is the one that have all of the old Veron spacecraft in them. Is that something that came up? Is that strictly off limits? I'm very curious about that one building. Well, you have to understand that we were with a tour group,

we were told under no circumstances are we leaving this tour group. So there wasn't really a direct discussion about what we could or could not see. It just was kind of understood that you just don't go anywhere except where your tour leader is. And so we just all stayed in a big herd walking around for four days. It was a good thing that we were all good friends by the end of it because it could have gone the other way, right? Huh. Wow. That just sounds like such an experience.

I'm like still trying to process everything you just said. Like, oh, it's just a Gagarin's capsule. I'm still trying to process it. And for me, you know, the privilege was just immense. You know, I was able to afford to go out here. I had also clients that were picking up part of the cost. So I realized that right away, you know, I've got a responsibility to transmit what that was like because not everybody's going to get out there.

But then the other thing, too, while I was there was I actually had the privilege of speaking with some of the local workers because I speak a little bit of Russian, like enough to get by kind of thing. So anyway, an interpreter in our group, she teaches in an English class. and she asked me to go and speak to them afterwards. And it turned out that there were some people involved in the space program and tourism. And these are like 20-somethings that are just looking to make a better life for themselves, right? You know, they come from families where their parents and their grandparents were riding the railroad out to bike north, sometimes up to two hours to get up to a pad.

And then they would work their eight-hour shift and then they would come home. So an eight-hour day is instantly 12 hours. And then, you know, what if the weather's bad or something and there's delay with the train, you might be out there long? And so there's sort of saying, you know what? This is a great program. We're really proud of what's going on right here. But just in case things happen to change, we want to have English. So that we can do more things.

Because Bikinaur is sort of in the middle of a big desert, right? It was supposed to be remote because that was the way it was designed. No one was going to be able to find it. But now it almost works against them because it's hard to get in. It's hard to get out. So I just found them super inspiring. You know, they were very realistic about their circumstances. They said, we're going to stay here if at all possible.

But if not, we want to have our English so we can go on to other areas in a rest. or other zones that are sort of nearby us and do other things. It's an immense group of people out there, and I wish that there was a way that of us could go there and sort of see what the workers do and the amazing accomplishments because it's such a beautiful area. And the Russian space program is a huge history, as everybody knows. So read up on it at least and try and watch some videos. It's just incredible.

Thanks. I'm just like still thinking about everything. I'm like, well, what if you? Oh, okay, cool. So I guess then, you know, thinking about what happened this last week, like, what was your take on it? And with all that context, like, in your brain having just been there. We just went in June, I think, right? You said, or the subway.

Yeah, it was the mission before. Oh, man. So MS. Okay, so. The one with a hole in it, right? I had none. Yeah, there was a hole in that one. Yeah, it was the one with the hole in it.

Everything seemed to be fine. Yeah. So, okay, well, I guess we'll back it up a few months. So the spacecraft launched, to us, it looked fly. Wallace and everything was normal. We went to Mission Control. They docked and everything was normal. Then I went home and everything was normal. And then a few weeks later, they found this leak in the International Space Station,

and they traced it down to this particular spacecraft that it just carries somebody up there. So the investigation is still ongoing, and there's a lot of rumors floating out there, so I don't want to repeat anything that's wrong or might be half wrong or half right. But anyway, just understand there was a leak, and they're looking into it, the Russians, the Americans. So then NASA and Russia decided to do. have a meeting at the time of the next launch, which was going to be Thursday last week, right? It was a week ago almost that this next launch happened. So coincidentally, Jim Brindon's team was there, right?

And all these high-ranking Russian officials, they're like, okay, we're going to go watch this next launch, and then we'll kind of move on with the investigation. So I'm sure they're all standing in that BIP area that was next to us. So why don't I set the scene? If you're standing at Kazakhstan, at Bikinor, Kazakhstan, watching a rocket go, you're traditionally in this huge bleacher area. And you got one half where the general public and the reporters go, and you got another half to the left of that where all the VIPs are.

And there's a bit of a gap between the two, and there's like a balcony and stuff. So you can't just jump over there. So I'm sure that that's where all the VIPs were standing, just the left. And then as a journalist, I would have been on the right, on the bleachers, and looking out on the plane. So I read about an eyewitness who was there for Discovery Channel, and Science Channel, of course. And apparently when the thing was lifting off, everything looked fine, everything looked fine.

He's been to many launches, so he's just filming and doing it. his thing. And then he saw this odd smoke trail. And that really threw people off because I saw the replay on NASA TV and they were just sort of reading out milestones like it was normal. And then apparently the Russians on the loudspeaker at the site were saying Normana, which is Russian for normal. So nobody really knew what was going on for the first few moments. But then if you look at the pictures and the footage, it just looks a little bit strange, right? I mean, you can see what light these sparkles of some sort. Some are saying debris. But I mean, I'm hesitant to say that because we don't really know what's going on.

But it just didn't look like a normal trap. And then the videos are showing that the astronauts that were inside, the two astronauts were bouncing quite a bit around the same time that the smoke trail was observed. And the next thing we knew, they were making some announcements saying, okay, we're now waitless. And the reason they were waitless at that time is it was like they were reaching the top of a roller coaster. So you know how you got those G-forces building up on you. You're going up, up, up, up, and you get to the very top.

And then you're sort of suspended there, right? and that's what they were going through. They were not actually going up to space anymore. They were actually starting to come back down again because their spacecraft had boarded, and they had to separate. So the spacecraft separated from the rocket, and it made an amazing boarded landing.

Let me just pause and kind of mention that the board system worked amazingly because these guys were in a really, really dangerous situation, obviously. There was something like 50 kilometers off the ground. Something went wrong with the rocket. They don't even know what it is yet, but they're looking into it. and then the spacecraft separated, and it brought them back to Earth, and within, like, two, three hours they were having lunch.

Yeah, they're having some really bad-looking unmixed nuts with Russian officials. Yeah, exactly. But you know what? I would have eaten anything. Yeah, I guess you don't really care if you have to take, like, a different handful of almonds and peanuts, you know, it's like, oh, it's fine. Exactly. But, yeah, there were pictures showing them very clearly talking with each other and eating lunch,

and then they were shipped back to their families. very, very soon afterwards. There was probably, I don't remember exactly, probably about six or seven hours after the launch. They were back in their family's arms. And let's just pause right there and say that was a huge success. That part of it, the fact that the abort system worked

and the guys were okay, they walked away, they were healthy, at least physically healthy. That's really, really good. It's really bad, of course, that the rocket malfunctioned. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's like, it's actually kind of an interesting study to look at

in that the fact that they were so close to, you know, something very, very tragic. The way it played out was kind of fortuitous because it was like overnight for North America and kind of before you really knew what was happening, they were sort of like they're on the ground already and everyone knew it was okay. Like there was a very short time frame for uncertainty and because most people were sleeping, you just sort of woke up and found out they were okay. And so I think that had a very big impact on how it was covered and how it was felt because

like it kind of just felt like everyone just sort of moved on and it was like, well, this happened and it's bad, but like it's just kind of a news item and and that kind of thing. But like if that was like prime time that that was happening and there was like, you know, just if Twitter was a light with all this like, you know, like, what's happening? I saw the camera shake. And then like there's someone saying off nominal on the on the thing and like what's going on. Like it could have been a lot, you know, it could have felt a lot scary. I think of like the landings that there's been in like the past year.

There's been a couple of like 737 engines that have blew up like blown up on a actually flight and they've made emergency landings one here in Philly and those get like wall-to-wall coverage for 36 hours but that's something that like you only hear about that after they land as well and it just shifts you know obviously that's an that's like a thing that everyone can relate to which probably isn't the case here but it is kind of a really interesting storyline and that makes difficult to translate oh I agree and then the difficulty was just to translating what was going on to the public because they hear space mission gone wrong, and then they start to get these perceptions, right? And for one thing, you have to sort of appreciate that rockets, to this day,

remain very, very complex machines. And sometimes things happen with them. And when they do, then it can take weeks or months. And a lot of them is just trying to gather all the data, right? Because when the rockets go up, there's obviously staging and other stuff that goes on. So it's not like you could just kind of go CSI and kind of grab the rocket in midair and then, like, examine it in its position as it was in the time. they're often reduced to looking at the telemetry, the data that came down and trying to analyze it. So when I was asked on radio about 13, 14 hours after the accident, you know, what happened? I said, well, NASA gave a press conference.

It basically said something happened in the second stage, first second stage around there, but nobody knows for sure. And that's normal. It's okay. That means they're doing their job. Yeah. So that's kind of where we're standing right now. So even though it's been a few days, again, I want to caution that this investigation could take a while. there's supposed to be a launch in December. It's a bit up in the air. It's not really sure if it's going to be going forward in that time frame or not because it depends on what the investigation finds and then how long it takes to make the fix.

So there's a bunch of scenarios that could be happening, right? We could be trying to keep the people in orbit because to back up a second, we've always got three astronauts in orbit and three astronauts coming up to meet them, right? So the three that are in orbit, they may stay there a little bit longer. Or NASA and the rest of the partners may decide to bring them back home and leave the International Space Station without a crew for a while, or maybe they can send up something else. There's just a lot of questions and logistics to figure out.

And then, of course, the crew that was supposed to go up a few days ago, when are they flying again, right? The rumor is spring, but again, it depends with the investigation. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of moving parts. I think that the failure is... There's a lot of moving part. And the failure itself, like you said, the abort system worked exactly as it was supposed to.

So that's, you know, at the end of the day, it's like, yeah, it's a failure. but after the failure point, everything worked. So that's one thing that's really important. But it's just that the timing here is really exacerbating all of these other geopolitical situations that we've been going through the past couple of weeks because the ISS leak situation,

you know, it's one thing to figure out what went wrong, but the statements from Rogozin, who's the head of Roscosmos, following that, have been increasingly pissing off, me and other Americans who are like, no, no, dude, there was not a NASA astronaut drilling a hole in this thing because one of them was sick to fly back down. And so there was like a month worth of this drama that was immediately followed by a pretty like, you know, big headline failure. It's just about the worst timing ever. It's kind of funny to think about, yeah, well, it's like

that whole trip for Bridenstein was about going to have that conversation about solving the first thing. And they just piled on another one right into it, right? Like, it's, yeah, you can, you can follow through a lot of tinfoil hat scenarios there, for sure. I just am very intrigued to see how the relationship changes after this last month that we've had. You know, and it's, there are other international partners here, like, you know, the Canadian Space Agency, European Space Agency, and things like that that haven't gotten into the fray as much as like NASA and Bridenstein have been putting out press releases about statements that have come from Roscosmos officials. Elizabeth, what do you see, do you think the Canadian Space Agency and European Space Agency,

they're just going to stay out of it entirely until it shakes out? Or do you see this is something that could snowball into a bigger issue? Which works is basically NASA and Russia are the lead partners on that because they're the ones that the most modules, right? And also, Russia launches everybody. So it means that when it comes to a problem with the hardware, it's not like Canada can really go in there and go, oh, well, what's what we're wrong with the rocket because they don't know. They trust that the Russians are the ones because they're running the system to give that answer. So I think when it comes to the tactical side, they have to kind of sit back and just go, okay, you know, NASA and Russia, they're doing their thing.

Also, I should mention that NASA has its own independent flight review before every flight. So even if the Russians say that they are ready to go ahead, NASA is still going to go back to its own people who have some experience with these matters. And then just try and figure out on their side as far as I can tell if everything is okay. As for how much is going to be affecting everybody? You're right. It's a bit of an open question right now. We do still have a few more missions left where we're going to be flying on the Russian hardware

because the commercial crew is going to be ready sometime next year, maybe, if we're lucky, and they don't want to rush that program either. You know, the worst thing to do is to try and fix a problem by rushing another thing that's not even ready into the loop because some folks are saying, well, we can bring in a commercial crew spacecraft. And I'm going, yeah, but they're not rated to carry crew left.

Yeah, nobody's even tried a, an uncrewed mission. So it's tough. And as you pointed out, you know, at the very highest level, the political wind seemed to shift every week, right? I mean, I'm not American, but I can see the headlines coming out and I'm just going, going, okay, so this week it's one thing and next week is the opposite thing. It kind of makes things a little bit difficult to focus, I think, but the good news, if I can say there's good news out of this, is NASA and Russia, I've been doing this for a long time, working together, because we got the International Space Station Program. Before that, we got Shuttle Mirror, before that there was even Apollo Soyuz, and if there was,

few other things. So they are used to, at least on the technical level, working with each other, working out problems, the kind of tuning out the noise is happening three or four political levels above. And so I would guess that based on that history, that we're going to see a similar pattern now. But of course, anything could happen. I can't. Yeah, I'm not so sure only because, you know, commercial crew is perennially delayed here. And we're getting close to launching. And once that really starts working, you know, aside from being attached to a half of Russian station, the leverage changes entirely. Right now, NASA is at the whim of Ross Cosmos because it's the only way we're getting up to the station. But once commercial crew comes online, just the balance of

power there shifts a lot. And that's, part of me thinks that's why we're seeing a lot of these statements coming out from the officials now is just because it's an increasingly tense situation as commercial crew is going to strip funding from Ross Cosmos essentially. You know, we're not going to be buying seats anymore. That feels like it could be a good source of all the fuel for, you know, what is making these situations more tense. So, you know, if you're a couple of flights into commercial crew, I could see these kind of situations going a lot differently and being worded a lot more

harshly than the nice face that the NASA PR people put on some of these statements. Because I can't imagine, like Gersten Meyer puts on a very nice face when he's in front of Congress or he's in front of the media, but I would like to see him in a private room with doors closed, no mics. I can't imagine he's too happy right now with the way that these things have played out, not even just from a technical side,

but the way that these things have played out to everybody outside reading about the story. Because that's a whole other thing to have that image out there in public of this sort of warring faction of the ISS. That's not a good look for anybody involved. I don't know. Maybe I'm too angry about this situation.

I think you make a good point because, like, I mean, the money for the seats is just a whole other part of it. Like, just there's leverage, yes, but also just like you've said before, is that every seat is a pretty significant part of Ross Cosmos budget. And then you pile on the RD 180 engine and stuff. Like, it's getting dire over there. And, you know, already they're having quality assurance problems. it's probably pretty tense in Russia behind those closed doors, even without the NASA people involved, right? Yeah, it's a tough situation all around.

Yeah, yeah. The thing is, these are questions that are very hard to answer because not only can we not get into those rooms, but there's also the aspect of being an English speaker trying to read Russian media, right? Yeah. I've been learning Russia myself for four and a half years, and I am just barely almost at the point where I can open up a simple news article and get most of it. I was noticing that because the news was flying out of Russia.

I even got a couple of links sent to me in Russia. And so I went, okay, so I opened it up and I was looking through it. I got, okay, I got a maybe about 70% of it, but not quite. And then there's all the expressions. So, yeah, there's a lot of technical differences, a lot of cultural differences. As you're pointing out, the program itself is really shifting in the next couple of years. And so it's a big COVID question, just what's going to be happening next? Yeah.

Are you seeing, I'd be curious to know your take on, like, could there be, I mean, we're talking about this in a context of like reactive. So like, oh, this stuff is happening to Russia. And so this is what they're doing. But do you see maybe there's a different story where it's like Russia is seeing all this stuff coming around the corner and they're getting ready for some new paradigm for them to be in? And this is just part of their political game to get themselves there. Like, do you think this is more, they're more in control than maybe they come off as? I don't think that they're in control of what's going on, but I think that you're right that they know that there's a new paradigm coming around the corner because we've been having discussions about what to do with the space station for years now, right?

Because there was the discussion about whether to extend it to 2020, which was done. Now there's sort of a discussion to bring it on to 2024 and beyond. I'm not sure where all the partners are on that particular one. Do you know if they've all signed on for 2024 at this point? 2024, I think so. I don't have it. I think everyone's on for 20204. Okay, so they're on for 20-28.

And then I know for sure that Trump's budget, suggested budget, was saying that they wanted to cease funding in 2025. So NASA's on board, at least, just wasn't sure about Russ Cosmos. But anyway, that's a blink of an eye, all right? We're almost a 2019 right now to have it going until 2024. That's only five years. And they have to figure out basically as a group what they want to be doing next. And so Nasa obviously is going on about this, like at the name right,

lunar orbital platform gateway. That space station that would be, yeah, exactly. I feel very good for getting that on the first time. It's a space station that's supposed to be orbiting the moon about, I guess, a decade or now, and it would have astronauts out there periodically. I don't think it would be like the International Space Station where there's like always somebody there,

but there would be like crew shipping out there, I guess, a few times a year, do some work and then come back. And then the idea is that would be a place where we could practice for Mars without going through the trouble of having to go out there for two years and sort of learn on our way. And then we would go to Mars, I guess, in the 2030s or 2040s, if the budgets hold the way they are, which rarely ever happens. But let's be optimistic. So that's NASA.

Russia's talked about in the past going back to the moon. But there's a lot of other things they could be doing, too. They can make your own space station. I've heard rumors of that as well. So everybody's kind of at a crossroads. You know, Russia, Europe, the USA, Canada. Canada hasn't even made a decision yet about where they want to go. And they have to decide quickly, is what I'm saying, because it's going to take.

a few years for even the policy agreements to get moved forward, let alone all the technical stuff. So it's kind of like what are we going to do next to the International Space Station? Like, extend it, break it up, do something completely different. It's huge. I found the statements interesting recently, again

Ragoza and just stirring the pot here. He was saying, I think even might have been one other person talking about this at a conference recently that they are not interested in taking part in a lunar program at which NASA is the lead and it isn't like an equal situation like the ISS is.

And they're putting all this out there the same couple of weeks that all this is happening. And I don't really understand why those thoughts are being floated. Because again, we're in a situation where it's like the Russian brain drain situation of the space industry is not a secret. That's something that has talked about all the time. They don't have a very large budget. They haven't had very reliable situations like, you know, the MSO9 leak situation is a good example of this. I don't know, you know, pushing that button too many times saying, hey, we want

equal partnership, we want equal partnership, while also being an unreliable partner by throwing the other person under the bus saying that they drill the hole in the ISS. I'm not making sense of a lot of this. And I just, it doesn't seem like a great strategy to me because I could very easily see NASA saying, that's cool, man, if you want to sit this one out, that's fine. You're just out they're putting out bad PR about us telling us that we drill holes in the station. And, you know, it's, I don't know, it's just bumming me out lately. Bumbing me out. Well, and that's kind of what I wonder is, if that part of the strategy is that, like,

the gateway stuff is part of the, we know that we have to get into a new place where it's different. And this is just, they're using this as like a, not like a cover, but just like they're, they're taking advantage of what's happening right now to try and transition themselves to there, right? Because maybe there's internal politics about, you know, detaching themselves from NASA and they're trying to figure out a way to, oh, yeah, I'm getting it from the chat.

Yeah, this is a partly internal propaganda thing. Yeah, you know, if they have to build that narrative in Russia to detach themselves, this is one way to do it. That's a good point. It's possible. That's some heavy stuff. It's tough, man. What a depressing topic.

But at least the gauze are safe, the two who are launching up to the space station. That's what I keep focusing on. And then the responsibility, of course, is to make sure it doesn't happen again. Okay, well, maybe we should talk about something more cheerful then. Maybe we should talk about, like, state of affairs for Canadian space agency. That's always a good topic, right? Yeah, since I've Canadian, I may as well talk about that. Okay, so let me give a brief history lesson.

So the reason that we're all involved here in the International Space Station is we provide robotics, for it. So back in the space shuttle days, first week we made up the Canada arm, and that got NASA so excited. They said, hey, bring astronauts on board. And that really sparked Mark Garno and Deepaklaine and Roberta Bondar on the first few astronauts that came in. And then when we committed to providing robotics for the International Space Station, then more astronauts were brought on. And then the idea was eventually they were beginning station missions as well. So that's where Chris Hadfield came in, for example. He started on Mir, and then he went to the Space Station in 2001. And again, most famously in 2012 and 2013.

So that's how traditionally we've been given this access to space. It's by giving robotics. It's a small contribution to the station, but it's still pretty crucial, obviously, because first of all, it was being used for construction. And then as we started to change up the cargo ships that were coming in, the ones that couldn't dock, they had to get there somewhere, somehow or rather.

So then we would have the Canada Arm 2 kind of modified, the program modified, so it would go and it would snatch these spacecraft as it was coming in, and the process is called birthing. And so as it turns out, the robotics, even though they might only be used by the astronauts once in a little while, they're still very crucial because every time they want apples, you know, when it's coming up on that dragon spacecraft, we've got to use Canada to go and bring it in, at least until the other new documents have come home.

Well, Canada's thoughts is also out of crossroads because critics have been saying that we haven't had a space policy for a very long time. And a policy is important because in a country like Canada where we don't have the money and the way, like NASA does. NASA has like, what, a $20 billion a budget almost, USD, $19 billion, and Canada does it's just a few hundred million. You know, it's a fraction. It's barely a satellite mission, right? So we make smart contributions, we make good contributions, but we have to make small contributions because that's just the way that our system set up, even if you're bringing in Department of National Defense, they still only have a smaller budget compared to U.S. national defense. So where do we put our limited money? And if we can figure out where we put our limited

money, then the companies can go and seek out contracts with the particular country. Like if we decide all of a sudden we really want to be with Japan right now, that we could get all these international congresses going down there in Japan and then try and pick up some work down there. Or we really want to kind of close in our relationship, make our relationship closer with the United States. We can head over there and try and do some more work in that direction. But the companies are saying, listen, we're paralyzed.

You know, if we don't know what the government wants to do and as a government that's usually brokering the memorandums of agreement and all that, we're kind of stuck here. And especially with NASA and other partners kind of being restless about the future after the International Space Program, Canadians are kind of getting in there and going, we have to make decisions like now. We have to decide now where we want to be going. Do we want to join this lunar orbital platform gateway or do something else? So it's funny because just two days ago, there was actually a huge conference here in Ottawa made by the Don't Let Go Canada Coalition.

And it's a bunch of concerned companies that got together. They made a conference. They hosted it here at the Weston in Ottawa. and they just were having discussions all day about what we need to do to bring our space program forward and how to get the government to kind of make some decisions. Now, I don't know what the outcome of that was because I wasn't able to attend, but I must say that there's a huge media campaign. In Ottawa, I'm seeing full buses plastered with ads.

You know how there's like those wraparound ads that sometimes you get on buses that are advertising toothpaste or whatever? In this case, it's advertising space, which I think it's pretty cool, if for a sad reason. That's so awesome. It's pretty cool. Yeah, exactly. So you see these buses going by, and it's like, don't let go Canada in these huge white letters. And then the background is this beautiful, starry landscape, and they have a link to their website. So I'm like, that's pretty cool. I've never seen that before. But it's for a sad reason, obviously. So that's the policy side of it. And then, of course, just on the kind of mission side of it, we got out David Sajok is supposed to be launching in December.

It might be a little bit later, depending on how the investigation goes. But he's going to be up there for six month and he's got a suite of Canadian experiments that it's going to be running and he might operate the Canada arm. He might do a spacewalk. We're not sure yet, but that's what CSA was telling me a few months ago. He just wants to go ride the Canada arm. He just wants to get strapped to that thing

and ride it around a little bit. Like Chris Hatfield did back in 2001, I was like the He's just going to wedge that in some out. I really think the spacewalk would work better if you attach me at the end of the arm for a little while. I think I'm just seeing that's come together a lot better this way. Yeah, exactly.

Then I can take some pictures of the Canada symbol and then have me in it, and it's going to be a great marketing tool for the rest of Canada. He'll put it on buses in Ottawa. So anyway, yeah, yeah. So we got, that's right, it would actually be a really good wrap-round. That would be the 2.0 of the Go Canada campaign, having Devin said Jean-up with the Canada arm in the background. It would be beautiful.

So we got him. We've got another astronaut Jeremy Hansen, who was hired at the same time, and we'll probably be flying on commercial crew, which is super, super exciting. He might even be a pilot because he has a pilot experience, so that would be fun. And then we have two newer astronauts that just were hired last year. So they're only going through the astronaut candidate training, but they're going to be finished in about, I would say, 18 months or so, and then they'll be in the queue for future flight.

So we've got stuff happening. It's just that it's not talked about very much. We've got to talk about it more. So thank you for asking me. I'm excited. That's a good rundown. That's covering all the juicy bits. So, yeah, I'm excited for Zanjox's flight.

I mean, it's funny. It seems like it was so long ago, but it's still true that, like, Hadfield was like the last, you know, the last guy to fly for us, which is like, oh, really? Like, it was that long ago? There hasn't been anything since then, and it's like, yeah, that's how it goes, right? No, no astronaut mission since then. Now, they've been doing other things, obviously. It's not like astronauts just go up and the space and come down and don't do anything in between. Most of what's been going on has been work on the mission control side.

Both Jeremy Hanson and David are trained as mission controllers, and they're in there, they're constantly doing things. And then they also take part in other missions like isolation missions. So while they both been on Nemo, which is that underwater laboratory out in Florida where astronauts periodically do cruise, they do stuff in the Arctic. They also do kind of runs around Canada every so often. And they do public speaking events. And in Ottawa, actually, this was a huge event about a month ago, maybe three weeks ago, where we had nine the Canadian astronauts in one room, nine, which is pretty cool. It was like Garneau all the way to the present day. and Jeremy Hanson was there as well.

One of the newer ones, Jeremy Hanson and the two newest ones, Josh Kirtick and Jenny City Givens, were participating as well. So it's good time. That's awesome. Okay. Yeah, that's a good rundown. So we're getting close to the end of the show here. So I think we're going to move into a couple of the final segments. So, Elizabeth, I didn't tell you about this one,

but we started a new segment called Lightning Round. And it's going to be some 10. 10 quick questions for you, do you think you'd like to do lightning round with us? Okay. I don't know what that means, but let's see what happens. I may sound really stupid in about two minutes, but I meant. Okay, so the point of this is just to answer your gut and then keep it short. So we'll start with a calibration question, though.

This is, it's always important to calibrate to make sure that we feel like we know what we're doing here. So question one is. Exactly, science. Yeah, yeah. So question one is, what is your favorite province in Canada? Ontario. Incorrect. The correct answer was British Columbia, but that's okay.

We will move on. British Columbia does have Internet right now. I do know that. That's true. Yes, actually. We are one up on you on that one. Okay, okay. Speaking of Ontario and no internet and other things,

what is your favorite strain of cannabis from the Ontario Cannabis store? I'm just kidding. The favorite question. on a favorite string of Canada, I don't even know it. I don't even know any strains of cannabis. Okay, okay, real questions, real questions. All right. What is your favorite robotic arm?

Canada. Which one, though? Which one? Canada Arm 2. Canada Arm 2. Okay, all right, right. She likes all the upgrades. Yeah, all the upgrades. All the upgrades.

Exactly. I don't have the PS3. I have the PS4 and I want to get the PS Pro. Okay. Question four, favorite astronaut. I'm sorry, that one's tough. It's just that I've met so many of them over the years. Yeah, it's not bragging.

I'm stuck. I'm really, really stuck. I'm sorry. I'm just running through all the encounters that I've had with them. One of my favorite actually was with Doug Wheelock. I was talking to him about ammonia repairs in the International Space Station, and he made himself available on short notice to talk about something that was going on up there, and he just was so good at explaining everything that was happening. And then he even was following up on Twitter just to make sure I had all the answers that I needed.

And I just found that very professional. But they're all good. Wow, that's cool. Good for him. Okay. All right. If you were in charge of the Canadian Space Agency and could make them do one thing, what would it be? Some more astronauts into space.

Love it. All right. On to some Russia stuff. You went to Russia and Kazakhstan. Favorite food you ate there. This pizza, it didn't have any sauce on it, though. And it's just a good story to come back with, right? Like, who eats a pizza with no sauce?

Like cheese bread? That's what they had. Yeah, that's what they delivered. It was basically like a cheese bread. And I was so tired that day because, of course, we're doing these 12, 14-hour days. And then the pizza comes in, and I'm eating it, I'm going, something is missing, but I can't put my finger on it. So I took some pictures. I sent it back home.

And later on, my husband, we say the pizza, a casino casino, I was like, where's the sauce? I'm like, you're wrong. It's so soft. That's an interesting item. I don't know. That's an interesting other. Yeah, that's cheese bread. Okay.

Also, on your trip, what is the scariest thing that you saw? But I saw or that I experienced. Yes, experienced. Sure. Experience. Okay. So I was going to the airport and a taxi driver picked me up. And I will try to freeze this carefully because, of course, I'm speaking publicly.

But it appears that the speed limits in Russia are a little bit different than Canada. Let me put it that way. because at one point we were driving down, not all of your Canadian, but imagine a parkway with like two lanes and there's like forests and stuff around you. So sort of like not a highway situation, but more like a curvy sort of scenic drive situation.

We were going like 140 kilometers down there. 104 kilometers an hour. And I was going, okay, the speed limits are a little bit different in Moscow than in Canada. Just calm down, enjoy the experience. It's going to be cool. And that was a fun experience. That's like 80, 85 miles an hour, 90 miles an hour.

I got to do that. Five miles an hour just whipping along there. Yeah. It would have been really cool if it was daylight. I'm sure I would have seen an amazing blur. At this point, I felt like I was just zooming through a space shuttle with a space shuttle through space. But anyway, it was an experience.

All right. Favorite Soyuz, the rocket or the capsule? Capsule. What a weird question. All right, okay. Second to last question. Would you rather, fly on a Soyuz capsule

strapped to a Falcon 9 or a Dragon spacecraft strapped to a Soyuz rocket. The Falcon 9, and this is why. The Soyuz is just a really long-standing spacecraft. I think it's the oldest line in the world basically of spacecraft that have been going up to 1960s. I think the

history is incredible. So I would be in there, but I want the Falcon 9 because I love the reusable landing. It's just too cool. I would like to look from space and see my thing going back down. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that'd be cool. I didn't even consider that. All right. Last question, the lightning round. Who do you think drilled a hole?

She's like, I did. I was there for the launch. Yeah, exactly. Totally. Totally. Totally. You could have been pretty near to where that happened. It's possible. You are a suspect. I will just say that you're probably on a list somewhere. Okay. I'll just go on Metfutcher and I'll go plausible. And that'll be it. Possibly. Oh, man.

Okay, cool. That's lightning around. That thanks for being a good sport. No problem. That's half the fun. Yeah. All right. Anthony,

you want to do some picks? Yeah. Let's do it. Do you want me to get my pick first? Sure, yeah. I got a quick one here. I went to NASA Goddard like a month and a half ago or something like that.

And I was talking with some people from the global. precipitation mission, which is a really cool weather mission. And they release this video that you can go to at any time. And it's a rolling seven-day video of the real-time precipitation rates across the entire globe, like very precise. So you go to this one link. There's not like a good URL for it. So I'm going to put the link in the show notes. You go to the GPM page, the global precipitation mission page, and then there's a thing there to look at the current video. And it's literally just the last seven days in this animation and it is incredible and I'm looking at it all the time whenever there's like an interesting storm going on I just head into that video

and it's this like high-res 1080p video of the entire earth and it's just amazing I love it it's funny my pick is kind of related to that so I have this uh one of my new favorite weather um sites slash apps. It's called Ventus Sky. Have you seen this one? I have not. E-N-T-U Sky. And it has these gorgeous visualizations.

You can look up like precipitation and temperature and wind and gusts and stuff. And it's all color-coded. So like it just makes these beautiful like visualizations of what's happening with the weather. And you can like rewind or go forward and look at it all. It's amazing when there's a hurricane happening. Like you can just, you can zoom right in on this hurricane and watch all the different things that it's pulling it together.

So yeah, they have a website, which I almost always go to. And then I just found out they had an app, which you get some of it for free. You can pay that like three bucks or whatever for the premium one, which I'm definitely going to do. But it's just, yeah, it's super cool.

It's a really cool website. This is a very weather-centric episode. Yeah, we went all weather here. We got, we got Ventus sky, we got Goddard stuff. We got Rideau Canal in the winter. It's very, very weather-related. Elizabeth, did you pick a pick? I have a pick, but it's a little bit dated, unfortunately,

but because I have no internet, and I can't check these things up. I just say, go into YouTube and type in Don Pennett and Earth or something similar, because you're going to see some amazing time-lapse videos that he made on the International Space Station. The astronauts are generally very good at photography, but he just has this eye for art, and he just is able to sort of make things look amazing. Like you've got this effect that feels like where you're sort of looking at checkerboards down below that are kind of moving and doing things around.

So take a look at his pictures around his videos and you're going to have some fun. It's kind of psychedelic. He did some of the best long exposure photography from the ISS. I know I have a couple, I have this big folder of space images that are just my desktop wallpapers. And he's got a couple like star trail images

from the space station, which are absolutely amazing. So he's definitely like in the Hall of Fame of astronaut photographers. I think he would be an early inductee into that. I agree. He would be an early inductee. And I think it's also important to remember that older missions still have data. This is sort of representative. I had an agenda in doing this. Older missions still have data that can be used today. People always think, you know, the Cassini spacecraft's dead and that's it. No, no, no, no, no. The Cassini spacecraft has data, and that data is sitting at

servers here on Earth, and we can go back and we can actually reexamine it over and over again and get new insights. I mean, the Apollo Moonrofts are looking at them again and getting new insights, right? So science continues. Even though a mission might finish or a particular space program might finish, if we still have the data, we still might be able to get something new out of it. So this is my cool, symbolic way of showing this to people. That's totally true. Yeah, they just released a paper. For a very depressing main topic of this show. No, they just had a paper come out for using Galileo data like earlier this year. So, yeah, there's a lot of... The Galilee or the spacecraft.

Yeah, not the guy? It wasn't his... No, not as telescope drawings, no. So not that old, I guess. Oh, man. Okay. Elizabeth, if the listeners want to find out what you're doing on the internet or track some of your work, like where can they find you? Definitely Twitter. That's where I hang out every day.

So Howell Space is my tag, which is spelled H-O-W-E-L and Space. And if you've got some older listeners on here, just remember Gilligan's Island, Mr. and Mrs. Howell. It's spelled the same way. Awesome. Okay, great. And I'll also, I'll plug something of yours as well. You have your website has the link to all the coverage of your trip to Baikunur. So that will be a good thing for the listeners to read up on as well. Yeah, exactly. If anybody has any questions about what it was like or how to get out there yourself, there are ways for the public to get involved, but it's basically through tours. And I actually know the fellow who has gone in the past sort of on other ways as well, but you have to kind of go through customs on railroads and stuff. speak Russian. So there are ways of doing it, there are other ways of doing it. Let me just put it that way. That would have been your scariest moment if you had done that route. That would have been the

answer to the Jake's question there. Okay, awesome. This is really fun. I agree. Thank you so much for having me on. And hopefully when I log back into internet, I'll be able to see all the comments for the show. Read the log after the fact, yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's finally answer everybody. All right, see you everybody. One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, end of death.