Off-Nominal - 14 - Gary from Lockheed (really this time)

Episode Date: November 12, 2018

Gary Napier joins Jake and Anthony to discuss doing communications for Lockheed Martin, dodging flat-earthers, and Dean Martin. Beers Colorado Native Amber Lager - Coors - Untappd Dale's Pale Ale - Oskar Blues Brewery - Untappd Perfect Storm - Townsite Brewing - Untappd Topics Ikonos Satellite European Service Module Arrives in Florida | NASA.gov Atlas V carried on an Antonov | 45th Space Wing Orion EM-1 being prepared in the Neil Armstrong Operations & Checkout Building | NASA.gov Crew Quarters being upgraded at Neil Armstrong Operations & Checkout Building | NASA.gov Suggested Epcot Paths for Off-Nominal Meetup Full Revolution of Bennu from 197km | OSIRIS-REx Twitter Bruce McCandless on the first untethered spacewalk | NASA.gov Anthony's weird door to door flat Earth propaganda Picks Artemis | Andy Weir Time to Eat the Dogs Podcast | Michael Robinson Skunkworks | Ben Rich Follow Gary Gary Napier (@garynapier) | Twitter Off-Nominal Merchandise Off-Nominal Logo Team CAESAR Team Dragonfly WeMartians Shop | MECO Shop Follow Jake WeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to Mars WeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | Twitter Jake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | Twitter Follow Anthony Main Engine Cut Off Main Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | Twitter Anthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | Twitter

TLS and go for main engine, start. Nominal Miko, welcome to space. So listeners, we have a pretty special guest with us today. So some of you may have remembered a couple episodes ago. We had Lauren Grush on the show, and the conversation meandered to insight because I always bring up Mars everywhere I go. And from there, it went to a pretty cool individual who has kind of become famous all of a sudden in this podcast, Gary from Lockheed. and we actually have Gary from Lockheed on the show.

Gary Napier, Gary, how are you doing today? I'm doing good. How are you, Jake? I'm excellent. I have to ask you, when you read that email that I sent you, and I tried to go from step one to step seven of how we got there, was it or was it not the weirdest request you'd ever gotten? Well, you know, I'm used to kind of chatting with you on email back and forth

and fun requests like this and that, but I got to tell you at first, just wasn't getting it. And it's like, I guess I need to go listen to this podcast. And then it like took a while. But, you know, I love Lauren and she was cool. And then finally it got into this whole Gary from Lockheed thing. It's like, wow, okay, this is weird. I felt very left out.

Everybody knew Gary from Lockheed. And I was like, I'm seriously missing out here. I've never met Gary. I know. Anthony. That's when we made the promise that we had to get you on the show. and I'm very happy that we are promise keepers here on OffNominal. So, Anthony, I've been racking my head trying to remember if we have met or not at some launch down at Kennedy or something.

And I mean, I know Miko, your show, and I've heard of your name, but I don't know if we've ever met. I don't think we have, but there's a lot of launches coming up. Didn't you, you went to EFT1, didn't you, Anthony? I did. That was a long time ago. That was another man. back then. Don't say that.

No. Yeah, that was there. Yeah, because you did NASA social, I think, right? Anthony, maybe you did meet each other and you don't remember and this is just. Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. This is like one of those missed connections things. It could have been.

I was at the NASA social for EFT1 also. Oh, then we probably did. But it was a room full of people, right? It was like 150 people. That was seriously packed. That was cool. Okay, so I just want to say that the fact that this started because Anthony didn't know Gary from Lockheed and it ended up with Anthony actually met Gary from Lockheed.

Makes us the perfect end of the story. Not only did Anthony meet Gary from Lockett. Probably met him first. Like way back today. Oh, that's perfect. That's good. Yeah, I was typing up this email. I was like, yeah, I'm just going to ask Gary to come on the show.

He's going to be like, well, he's going to ask why. So then I backed up a step. And I was like, oh, I need to back up one more step and one more step. And then it ended up being this big email. We should almost show people. It was really funny. And then I just like fired away. And I was like, I hope he talks to me again.

That's cool. That's cool. Awesome. Do you want to start with drinks? We're terrible at getting off track really fast, but maybe we should do that first. Let's do it. Gary, do you want to start? Yeah.

Being a Colorado guy, I've been up here in Colorado for about 19 years. You know, Lockhe Martin Space has been up here. I started with the Glenell Martin Company and then Martin Marietta. We've been here for 62 year, something like that. I thought I'd get a, and of course, Colorado's famous for Coors, right? So I thought I'd get what's called a Colorado native. And I don't know if you guys have your Skype up. I know you're not doing video right now, but I'm showing it to you.

Colorado Native is actually brewed by Coors out in Golden Colorado. But what's so cool about it? This is an amber logger. And it's brewed with 100% Colorado ingredients from the barley, the hops, even the water, and then like one of the oldest strings of yeast in Colorado. And even the bottles and the cans are all sourced from Colorado. And the coolest part is you guys aren't ever going to drink it unless you come visit with me because it's only sold in Colorado, which is kind of cool because that's how Coors was back

the day. So it's a pretty cool amber logger. Kind of fat tire-like, but pretty good amber logger. So let me take a SWIC here for you. That's like an awesome, awesome selection. That's really good. Anthony, what do you got? Well, I bought a little something from Colorado as well, little Dale's Pale Ale. Longmont, I think it's in. Does that sound accurate, Gary? It does. It sounds right. I've had it. love me a Dale, so I went out and I figured that was the best bet for what my local shop has in Colorado flavors. So I hooked myself up with one and it's pretty great. And I do see on this that just to tie it a little more spacey in here, that there's a ball logo on this. Yeah. What's up

with that? Because the ball company that first started making ball canning jars, you know, moms and grandmals, you know, would can the peaches and all of the preserves or the green beans in ball canning jars was here in Colorado. Then they spun out a division called Ball Aerospace. Go figure, right? What does this have to do with this can of beer, though? Because they make the cans. Oh, they, okay, so they... Aluminum cans.

Kept the can part rolling. Absolutely. Even though the other side is probably, that's probably more lucrative to make cans, to be honest. I was going to say, quantity. It's a quantity thing, right? Make a lot more of those a year than you do, you know, imaging satellites, I guess. That's quite the reach to, like, you make aluminum cans. You'd be like, you know, let's start an aerospace company.

It can't be that different. Anthony, we should spin off an aerospace company from the podcast. We did. Didn't we talk about doing like a Kickstarter or something for a lunar sample return? Yeah, something like that. That's still in my head somewhere. What do you got? You got a giant beer, Jake?

I always have a giant beer. Jake? All right. So, Gary, you've met Jake. know how large he is. He always gets, how many ounces in that? Or how many milliliters is that? It's 650 milliliters, which I think is like 22 ounces, maybe. Yeah, it's a big one. But it looks regular size because Jake's like nine feet tall. So he hides it on stream. Okay, so I chose this one for two reasons, and I'll explain it first. So, actually, I'll show

it you first. So it's called Perfect Storm from Townsite Brewing. It's an oatmeal stout. So it's a really kind of a heavy one. So I chose the stout because I've been kind of under the weather this week and I wanted some comfort style beer. So something thick and delicious. And then perfect storm because we finally got the rains of winter hit Vancouver. It's just miserable out right now. It's this cold, wet drizzle.

And you guys are going to have to remind me what the sun looks like every couple of days until April when I see it again. So it seems appropriate. And also, I'm kind of bitter because my wife's in Palm Springs right now, and she doesn't have to deal with any of it. So that's really going to drink that whole thing over this next hour? I usually can finish it up. I bring a glass, though, so I can raise my stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm drinking mine right out of the bottle, but... The bottle's a little big to drink. I can see. It's almost like a... His arm would get tired. He'd be sore by the end of the show. Yeah, you can't really hang onto it, so...

There you go. Look how thick it is. though. Well, you can't see through it. Like that weather outside the window there. It's not pretty. So here in Denver, it's pretty chilly too where, you know, Denver gets like 300 days of sunshine out of the year. So it's really a cool place in that sense. But I think our high today was something like, no, I don't know, 45 or something Fahrenheit. But it's getting down into the high 20s right now, even the mid-20s. Gary, I want to ask you a question. How do you get into a job of communications at Lockheed Martin?

Can you tell us the spin the yarn of how you get to that place? So, you know, I graduated from the University of Texas, El Paso, Utep, in El Paso, Texas, where I lived for 20 years, and actually studied public relations journalism. And, you know, the degree allowed you to go, either go into journalism or go into PR. So I'm one of those few rare people that still, I don't know, 30 years later, doing what they got their degree in. No pivots. Yeah, I know.

So, you know, from that, I worked in a variety of organizations, whether it's graphic design firms or public education, school district, public relations. My wife and I and our kids moved out here to Denver in 2000. My wife's job brought us out here and looked around, and I ran into this really cool company up in the northern Denver area called Space Imaging. And I don't know how many folks know what space imaging was or what they did. But back at the time, they were the company with the world's first commercial high resolution Earth imaging satellite called Iconos, I-K-O-N-O-S. And my then boss was a ex-A-B-C news producer, and we just headed off.

And I got on board there, and I hadn't had a lick of aerospace history in my repertoire at that point. But for whatever reason, man, it was a cool place to work with space imaging merged with another company called orb image out of orbital sciences. You know, you guys know a division of that as orbital and then orbital ATK and now north of Drummond. Keep the list going. I know. And hey, one more.

And then that company stayed around as geo-I for quite a while until Digital Globe acquired them. And Digital Globe was Space Imaging's, you know, biggest competitor. So as I kind of jokingly say, Ford bought Chevy. I mean, it was a big merger. And for the longest time, Digital Globe owned Iconos. Well, so how did I get to Lockheed Martin? Come to find, you know, not come to find out, I knew this. Space imaging was a 50-50 joint venture company of Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.

Raytheon built the ground system. Lockheed Martin built Iconos. Of course, Lockheed Martin has this, you know, grand history of building Earth imaging satellites all the way back to the Corona era in the 60s. So it just made sense. So I got to know all the communication folks down at Lockheen Martin down there in Littleton. I'm way on the other side of the company of the city. And I worked there for a long time for five, six years. And then right when GOI and Orb Image were all in space imaging, we're all kind of getting mixed together.

I jumped over to Lockhey Martin, and I've been there for about 12, 13 years now. Wow. Resolution on this satellite back in the day was pretty awesome. I'm looking at some of the images they still got up on the website. They've got a couple of shots of Angerwatt and Fukushima. Yeah. It's pretty awesome.

It holds up, even today. Oh, my gosh, yeah. These new fangled ones going up. Yeah, you know, and one of the things that I did was back, this was before, you know, Google Earth and Google Maps and satellite imagery on our... cell phones right, is that we were working with news organizations like, you know, New York Times or USA Today, and boy, I've got tons of stories around that, of getting them satellite imagery

of denied areas of the world, you know, the Bushir nuclear reactor in Iran and showing this thing being built in the middle of the desert and then later being buried. And so, you know, a lot of investigative journalism would actually use and come to a was for satellite energy. Taipo Dong, as a North Korean nuclear, not nuclear, yeah,

North Korean launch site. And so, you know, we were dealing and getting a lot of imagery to news media back in the day. In fact,

you know, one of the, we were one of the only assets that was overhead on, you know, September 11th, 2001. And we were,

you were able to take imagery of Manhattan and ground zero a couple hours after the, tragic attack and a couple days later and you could see ground zero and of course at that time Norman Netta the head of the FAA grounded all air flights so there really wasn't a lot of overhead images of ground zero and we were able to take them with our satellite and you know get them

out to TVs and newspapers around the world wow I always forget this is somewhat related the astronaut that was on the ISS at the time was Frank Colbertson who's now he he he I forget his position president of the launch side of of or launch and Cygnus side of what was Orbal ATK I don't know what his title is now at Northrop but he was the one on the ISS that was taking photos from the ISS that day always like it's crazy that you know to know he was on there and now he's got this position in the industry still it's like a weird connective tissue to 20 years ago that's pretty cool Kind of crazy. Yeah, it was pretty cool. That's some, like, pretty heavy, heavy background. And it kind of makes me think, like, so you get to do all this work with different segments of space. You know, like, so you have this kind of imaging stuff, and a lot of that crosses over to military. A lot of it's civilian.

But then you have this kind of human space flight side that you get to talk about. And then you have some science side you get to talk about. What's that like pivoting between that? And maybe what's your favorite one? to work with, you know, what's, I'm just kind of curious to know how much exposure you get to those different branches and what that's like to work with different kinds of content, you know? Well, I mean, first of all, it's not just me either. I mean, we've got a pretty good department of professionals out here at Lockheamarton space. And we're actually broken up into

two areas, one here in Littleton and one out in Sunnyvale, California. And so, um, the, the ones that deal with external communications and media relations, we are kind of assigned out to different lines of businesses. And so I work with the line of business called commercial civil space, which is basically everything civil space or NASA or NOAA. And so for the last 12 or 13 years, I've been the one dealing with the robotic and planetary and weather systems. And just recently within the last year and a half or no. So another lady, Danny Huff, has taken over that beat. And so she's the one dealing with Insight right now and Osiris Rex and all of that

coolness. And I jumped over about two years ago to start dealing with Orion. So, you know, what's my favorite is, yeah, those. So we've got other really talented folks that are doing the communications around our military space and the GPS, GPS 3. we're replacing the entire GPS constellation, you know, or strategic missile defense folks and, you know, Triton and all of that.

So a lot of different other areas that other folks are handling. So it's definitely not just me. Is it, and I'll ask this in a way, I hope you don't take it the wrong way, but like something like GPS, is it hard to get people excited about that? It's so ubiquitous in our life now. Like when you're, you know, and maybe you don't necessarily work on this part, but just from your experience, like, how do you get, say, even just journalists engage with covering something like that when it's going to be tough to generate, you know, clicks on a website or whatever, right?

It is. I mean, at least it's a product that just about everybody knows. And that's good. So talking about it, you immediately have kind of that, for lack of a better word, brand recognition about what GPS is. GPS and GPS3. And you know, you keep in mind that it is an Air Force program and it has a specific, you know, need for the Department of Defense. You know, and the reality is that, you know, the large, broad mass media aren't doing a lot of

stories on and they really don't need to. But, you know, the first GPS3 is getting ready to launch here at the end of the year. So that's going to be really cool. So it's typically a little more of the... the industry, the trade papers, and, you know, folks like GPS World or Space News, Sandra Irwin out there at Space News covers it. So you're right. I mean, you know, you're not going to open USA Today tomorrow and read this awesome story about GPS3.

But hopefully you will sometime in December when the thing launches. And they're talking about the great new capabilities that this improves constellation is going to bring. Anthony, is that you? I can see you on video now, man. Yeah, I've been listening to you the GPS chat. Right on. Debugging a little bit over here. Nice to see you.

I think we're getting it sorted out. It's good to see that handsome Philadelphia mug. Are you going to get out to any of the GPS launches? Is that something on your books? Yet to be determined, probably no. We've got the communicator is a good friend of mine, actually lives in the same town where I live, is Chip. He handles that and

they'll probably go to the first one. Launches on a Falcon 9 which is pretty cool. So I probably won't but you never know. You might find my way out there. There's plenty of them. There's going to be quite a lot of them. There are. You'll get a chance.

It's the good part about constellations. Okay. Here's a fun question for you. What's the best part of your job and what's the worst part of your job and what's the worst part. Really put them on the spot there. You have to think carefully about that. I know, right.

I mean, clearly the best part, the best part are kind of the big mission milestones. I mean, clearly launches are just awesome. I haven't been to a ton of them, believe it or not. You just go to the ones that you need to work. I think I've counted the other day. I may have been to nine or ten launches over the last 12 years. Most recently, insight. Yeah, I know.

I think you and I are still debating whether there was really a launch or it was just a loud rock band or something. Just a NASA cover-up. Right. Another NASA cover-up. Another NASA cover-up. Yeah, don't get me started on the flat-earthers. Or like the arrival events, you know, Juno arriving at Jupiter or Insight landing at Mars. Those are just cool.

I mean, it's like crazy amount of work leading up to it months and sometimes. years of communication efforts and leading up to it. And then, boy, the day that happens, you're in the moment, you're clicking off things and you're dealing with press conferences and media interviews and executing and helping with

social media and conferences and guest ops or whatever it is. It's all cool, but you're exhausted from it. But those are clearly the best days without question. Are we catching you right before the crazy rush? Because Insights coming up real soon. So is it about to like things about to get crazy?

It's crazy right now. Already is? Yeah. You just decided that this is a good way to spend a Friday night during the crazy time period of your journey? Friday night. And, you know, it's cool because insight happens. And you'll know what I'm talking about, Anthony, Jake. I think you're not so aware of this.

There's a thing here called Thanksgiving. He's early on that, man. He's already, he's been done that for weeks. That checkbox is done, man. I get it. And it happens, whatever it is, one, two, three, four days after Thanksgiving. So kind of weird timing. And, of course, there's something about JPL and planetary arrivals and them landing on holidays.

And I have spent many a holiday, whether it's Thanksgiving at Kennedy Space Center that I've done with Mars Science Laboratory launch or Stardust. arrival on, what was it, Valentine's Day or Grail lunar orbit insertion on New Year's Eve or Phoenix landing on Memorial Day. This is longer than the amount of names in Orbital ATK's heritage. Pathfinder on Independence Day, New Horizons on New Year's Day. What was that on Independence Day? Juno. Juno, J-O-I. Juneau.

That's right. Oh, that's right, yep. And you can go even across the pond. You've got like Mars Express on Christmas. Yeah. That's funny how that all works, but it's cool. Not going to complain when you get to go to. Is it sort of related to like the it tests better on Sundays kind of thing that is known in the industry where it's like, you know what?

We can let it sit for Saturday. It's way better on a Sunday. I don't think so. No, physics doesn't really let you. Yeah, the whole physics thing kind of doesn't lie. you got to live with it. The solar system doesn't care about statutory holidays. Right.

Okay, and then you can't evade the other part of the question, though, worst part of the job. I kind of forgot the other part of the question, worst part of the job. Yeah. You can take it as hard as part, too, if you want. I guess it's like any modern day office worker, it's the mundaneness of sitting in front of a screen,

you know, for five hours and dealing with email and the onslaught of 200 emails coming in your inbox and everybody asking for or needing for saying, hey, you're late on this. So, you know, that's kind of the mundaneness. But it's the stuff that has to be done in the background to make all the coolness happen that's public. So, you know, it's not that bad.

They're not bad days. Conference calls, am I right? Conference calls. I got a lot of those going on in a given week. They do chill out toward the end of the week. It's funny. They, like, really start heavy on Monday. get crazy by Wednesday and then today I only had three so it was it was pretty pretty light day it was

nice I have another question now so you're talking to two to non-professional independent podcasters you got a lot of experience what tips do you have for us how do you how do you engage people how do you get the word out first of all I think you guys do a great job I far from call you non-professional so I think that you know the podcast is kind of seeing this cool new resurgence in the last two years, right? It was like the thing to do 10 years ago, maybe eight years, five years ago. And then all of a sudden it's like,

eh, we don't need to be doing live video. We need to be doing podcast. And boy, everybody's doing them. So you guys are in kind of a thick market right now. I think you do a great job with the, you know, the social media promotion of it and kind of staying in touch. You guys are like more in touch with what's going on in the industry sometimes than I am. I mean, you know, I've got my blinders on sometimes and I'm hammering on one or two, three specific things.

It's like, wow, I didn't realize that happened. Well, see, the problem is that you're reversing this cause and effect. The cause was we've never stopped reading this stuff and we're like, well, maybe we should be productive with all this time that we spend reading all of these threads. Right. And for me, anyway, that's where it came from. I think Jake is similar. So it wasn't like we started a podcast and then read a bunch. It was just like, man, I should turn this into time that I don't feel.

bad about anymore because I'm spending a lot of time on these Reddit threads. You're enthusiasts first. That's what you are, right? You know, I think, you know, at least Jake, you do a good job with, you know, being very focused around one topic, and that's Mars. And I think you do a pretty good job, too, about not getting too opinionated with one thing or the other. You seem to be like a lover of everything that goes to Mars, and that's cool, right? Whether it's science or future human exploration or whatever. Miko seems pretty launch industry specific. And opinionated, I think.

I don't have the non-opinionated version of Jakes. No, no nominal very well. I'm kind of starting to learn it a little bit better, so that's cool. You guys do a great job. It's cool. And I love the fact that we've got different voices, because not everyone can be, you know, Neil de Grice and do StarTalk, right?

So we've got to have these cool niche different voices out there. And definitely, I bet you guys are doing well with them. But, you know, that's why, Jake, when you ask me, hey, can we get some guys to talk about Mars Base Camp or talk about Insight? It's like, absolutely. They appreciate talking to you guys and to your audiences. So you guys do a good job.

Oh, thanks, man. Jake, all of a sudden turned this into a strategic marketing conversation. Hey,

can you give me some tips and maybe some pointers? It's going around the front of the website now. It's like

We Martians endorsed by Gary from Lockheed book flap. Yeah, we got to talk about that endorsement thing.

Yeah. It's not too opinionated does a good job. Yeah, that's all we need. We need more opinion

in news reporting. Yeah, Yeah, that's what we're going on with Orion. Why don't we dig into a mission a little bit? So you said you're working a little more on that right now. I mean, I'm trying to pay attention to that news a little bit. It's a few items down my list, but I think service modules actually has arrived in Florida. There's a couple capsules in Florida, too.

Looks like that production line is moving a bit there. What are you working on with Orion? Yeah, all of that. There's a, like you said, the European service module, which was built by Airbus out in Brenham, Germany for the European Space Agency, you know, is done. It got shipped over the ocean. Which was it? Over the weekend. It was on the fifth and then arrived on the six in Florida on a big old Antonov, 125, big Antenov.

120 or 125 big Antonov. Those planes are crazy. Yeah, they're cool. Quick, quick little side note, because I like to go down rabbit hole sometimes. We used to use Antonovs to fly the Atlas 5 booster out of Littleton. And we flew them, drove them out of our Waterton Canyon facility, where we built Atlas 5 for a long time and drove them out to the Denver International Airports, put them on Antonov and then flew them to the Cape or flew him to Vandenberg.

So cool, cool plane. So anyways, the European service module is at the Operations and Checkout Building, the Neil Armstrong Operation Checkout building there at the Kennedy Space Center. And we, along with some of the Airbusch guys and gals that came over, are going to start putting things together. And they're going to put the crew module. adapter, which is kind of the large ring, it's going to bolt on and attach and integrate to the service module. And then those two combine are called the service module.

That's, you know, when if you look at Orion and you see the service module, there's kind of this big flaring, bearing around the middle. That's that crew module adapter that we Lockheed Martin built here in the States. So there'll be a nice big event this coming Friday, the 16th, something for all of your, viewers to watch. It's going to be live on NASA television, I think. I should know this better. So I'm 9 o'clock Eastern. I know the dates are just in a, you know, a massive amount of emails and all of those other stuff. But the administrator is going to be there and talking and Jan Wern is going to be there. And so a lot of other really cool folks. And it's a great time

to celebrate this big milestone. And then it is pedal to the metal. 400 and four days is what my folks tell me of integration and testing before we turn around and deliver it to ground for launch. So a lot lots to be done. That Neil Armstrong checkout building is pretty awesome. We got to go in there on the NASA Social back at EFC1 and walk through that whole thing. There wasn't anything particularly of interest in it at the moment because we were just there the day before launch or whatever. Right. But they still have those, you know, they've got all the work platforms there that even, you know, Apollo went through and all that. So it was pretty special. It was actually good that there wasn't anything there because I got to go into it, whereas otherwise I would definitely not be allowed in that thing. And Jake certainly would not be allowed in that. He would definitely not be allowed in there. But that's, I think there were some good, didn't Orion back EFT1 Orion go through there as well? That's where they assembled. Oh, absolutely.

The service module. Yeah, because there's some great photos from that assembly as well, which I'm sure that will be. even better ones this time around. So the really cool building. Yeah, it is. You know, the history of is that's where Apollo did its final checkout before it was stacked on to Saturn 5. So back when we, you know, started the Orion project, you know, part of our idea of where to go build this thing was actually build it on the property of Kennedy where it's going

to launch. So we took over the O&C, completely refurbished it, made it into a modern manufacturing facility air bearings and portable clean room walls and hepa filters and it's and we've been building the full integration of Orion happens there in that building so the the main structural elements like the the pressure vessel for the crew module and get put together or welded up out at Mishu where you know NASA Mishu just outside of New Orleans and that's where we built a hundred 35 space shuttle fuel tanks, external field tanks there. So kind of that same stir friction welding process.

And of course, SLS, you know, tanks, Boeing builds that whole booster out there. So the main propulsion vessel or not propulsion, the pressure vessel, the capsule, gets built out there and then shipped out to Florida. But then that's where it all gets integrated. All the avionics come in, the propulsion elements, everything and it gets put together. Yeah, it's a cool facility, modern manufacturing facility. And EM2.

The first crude Orion spacecraft is being built out there right now. We just finished the propulsion. I keep saying propulsion, the pressure vessel. And if we had Mishu and we shipped it over there a couple months ago, and now it's getting put together. Hmm. That, the Armstrong Center, that's been recently refurbished, hasn't it? Like, then they do a bunch of work in there? So the office building's area is where part of it, I think it's up on the third floor.

You guys might know this better than I do. That's where the astronaut crew quarters are before they go off and do their flights and after they come back. So that is what got refurbished recently, you know, got all updated because, of course, we're going to be starting flying astronauts out of Kennedy again. So let's get them some really cool new crew quarters. They also have in there still, they still have the vacuum chambers that they did the All-Up Apollo vacuum tests. I don't think they've been used in quite a while, but those are still, there's like two giant things there right before you get to the work bays that are on like the outgoing side of the building. It's pretty awesome.

There's some good photos online. I remember we weren't allowed to take photos in there. But there's some good photos of the work that they've been doing online. I was just checking them out. we can post some in the show notes for viewing later. I was going to say they probably had to put like Wi-Fi and USB ports into the walls and those crew quarters. That's basically what they did, right?

They had to change out the 30-pin iPod docks like all the old hotels that you've stayed in. And run an Ethernet Jack to the TV and like, ah, crazy new future, right? These astronauts, you know, the last time we launched astronauts, there were iPods. This time, no more iPods. We've got to change this whole lightning port thing. Oh, funny. When it comes to Orion, I mean, you've got this vehicle that's going to go into deep space and it's going to carry people.

And that's something we haven't done. Well, I say we, but the United States hasn't done for a very long time. What does that like to work with something like that? Do you feel weight in that? Do you feel like a sense of importance that changes how you interact with the work you do? Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, it's been different and in some ways similar from dealing with the planetary missions. You know, these planetary missions, Juno, Insight, Lucy, you know, pick it. They are like lean and mean and they run fast and, you know, you win a proposal, you design it, you build it, you launch it, you fly it, you do science. Sometimes they do extended science, sometimes because of the mission, the mission's done, and boom. and you know there's a lot of emotion around that because it's just where they're going and they're so cool and the science that they're finding and they're rewriting science books but when you're dealing with something like Orion I mean you're dealing kind of with that human side of it and and this is you know our nations and honestly our world next big major exploration system so you know count them on one hand count

them on half of one hand. We had Apollo and we had space shuttle and we're soon going to have going to have Orion and so I think we're kind of in the early days. You know if you guys have been to the Kennedy Visitor Complex and you've seen the Atlantis exhibit and you go through that cool storytelling that they do and there's this movie right. Anthony's nod in his head. Oh, it's so good. Best experiences. They just nailed that. So that movie is about how they, you know, in the, throughout the 70s, kind of, we're going to build the next great thing after Apollo. But this time it's going to be a glider, folks. And then it kind of goes through all of the turmoil and the challenges and all of this awesomeness that's going on.

And then, boom, we finally launched space shuttle. And then the screen goes up and there's Atlantis and everybody has a tear in their eye. And it's cool. But I always kind of think, we're in that. we're in that movie right now with Orion. The mass public doesn't know a lot about it. They kind of hear about it. They keep hearing these.

They actually kind of get it confused with some of the commercial systems. And that's okay because none of them are on my phone yet. But we're in that movie right now where back in the day, you know, before everybody knew what space shuttle was and space shuttle was doing amazing things. you know it was being designed and built and it's only launched once and now it's getting ready to launch again you know in a year and a half or so and so just kind of project yourself out five or ten years from now the world's going to know it in mass it's going to have already been going to the moon for you know quite a few times and and so we're in that movie right now and it's it's exciting it's exciting that's a very poetic way to put it there was a just thinking you

back, you said, you know, it's launched once, the Orion mission that flew. This actually, this photo behind me is from the causeway, the morning that it was, actually the morning that it scrubbed before the morning that it launched. Oh, cool. But that was a particularly, been to a bunch of launches, but that one, for some reason on the causeway, had a different feel to it because it was a extraordinarily grand production the whole week leading up to it. It was this giant rocket, this huge thing. And the Cape hadn't seen activity like that. that in years at that point. You know, it had been like three years since the shuttle.

And it was the first time that the Cape had that vibe back. And I think everyone there was so excited to have that thing back. And I think that was like one of my main, the things that I think back to about being there for it was seeing like the whole area get so pumped up. And I'm, you know, knowing that the next couple of years are going to be filled with astronauts taking off from the Cape again. I'm very excited to have that area, have that all year round now, rather than that the next then, you know, once every once in a while, they have these big launches,

EFT1, Falcon Heavy, where, like, everyone floods in, flights get expensive, hotels sell out. I can't even imagine what both, like, the first crewed missions of commercial crew, and then the first, EM2, or EM1, first of all, is going to be absolutely insane. It's going to be a circus. Gary, if you go, we are going to be doing an off-nominal meetup at Epcot. I've been talking about this every time. We're getting prepared for it.

you are this is an open invitation so em one circus at eck pot it's going to be fantastic you say if i go well i mean that's the thing right everyone's going to be there i think everyone we've ever known in the space world is going to be there for that so dude i'm the PR guy for iran and locky martin well you were like well you know it depends on which launch you get to go to so hey i was just leaving it open i don't know if you got a lot of calls that day or the calendar will be clear. I don't know. Too many telecons. Yeah, what day is it launching on? Because if it's a Monday or Tuesday, no luck. Yeah, if it's late in the week, we're good.

Hey, I like it, man. We've got rockets, and we've got Disney and Epcot, and we've got off-nominal. That's like a trifecta right there. I like it. Yeah, we just have a rule and you can interpret it either way. Either you always start at Mexico or you never start at Mexico. Depending on who you ask, the rule is different. It's a rule. I'm a clockwise guy, so I started Mexico.

You start at Mexico. Oh, no. Yeah. Hey, but we all got to go do mission space, right? And we got to do the extreme one. But that's why you finish at Mexico, because you end with Mexico and then you're right there. But then you're, well, see, I do mission space first. And we just went like in March.

That's smart. My two young adult kids, and we haven't been like in six years. But we did mission space first, and then we went in eight. and ate our way around the lake. So you don't like eat your way around the lake and then go into a centerfuge. You can do both, I guess. I mean, some people might.

I guess, all right. I'm game. Can neither confirm nor deny. It really depends on what kind of outcome you're hoping for. I think we're going to do like a couple of tests here. We're going to send half of the group starting in Mexico

and doing mission space first. And we're going to send half the group starting in Canada mission space last. and see which one turns out better. Well, what if we did it that way, then you have two meetups, one halfway around the circle where the two groups combine,

and then you meet up back at Mission Space and you both end on it. That's how you do it. There's a big old high five there at the America one in the middle. We'll go watch the movie and then we'll keep... Fake Philadelphia, baby. I love it. Is that the one that's halfway America?

Yeah, man. I don't remember. I've only been there like once, so... It's far away from me. I've seen some fun, some fun chat going on, and one guy's talking about night before he on Gary's trashed in Mexico. So I don't know if he was listening earlier if I actually said it, but I lived in El Paso, Texas for 20 years, which is on the border of Wada, Mexico.

So, you know, I went to high school and college in El Paso. He's trained for this. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, well, I think we've got it all planned out. I mean, I don't really see any more reason to keep talking about this. I think it's locked in, yeah. Sounds done.

Just don't do it on a day that I have another appointment, but I'll come over there, man. That's all cool. Do you want to pivot to planetary stuff? What are you excited about? Insights, Osiris Rex, there's kind of a lot going on for you guys. There's so much going on. In like a week. Because doesn't Osiris Rex hit like December 3rd?

It hits like December 3rd, I think, is. the Osiris Rex arrival at Benu. So if you all have been seeing the images, these approach images of Benu, holy moly, those are so cool. And if anything, what's amazing is that they look a lot like the radar imagery that they've been taken for years as far as the shape of the asteroid and all. Now there's this cool rock pile held together by,

low gravity and it's actually got this big old boulder hanging out on the bottom of it so you know they're gonna go look at that thing up close right that's so cool so it's approaching and and you're right that the actual true arrival date is December 3rd but you know we don't actually go down and and take a sample for for quite a while yeah a few months right yeah no no no year so we didn't spend the next so so So the sample date is July 2020 when we do what's called the touch and go event. So between those times, which is, what, a year and a half, they basically just image the heck out of that asteroid. I mean, and all different spectra and all different resolutions with the cameras and just and then sit there and analyze it. So it's a lot going on, you know, in that next year. and a half. The reality is they have a lot of time because there's only, they have to stay there until March of 2001, I think is when it leaves Benu. So they have plenty of time. There's no reason to rush it. It's all orbital mechanics, right? Right, right, right. Fly across the solar system and

come back to Earth, you know, Star Trek style. So we're going to be hanging out there until 2021 anyways, early 2021. That makes sense. You can map it and get the best sample, pick the spot that you want to go to, you know, that's a good idea. That's it, right? I mean, so, you know, we went to this asteroid Benu for a very specific reason because it's one of the few that are out there. The first, it's a neo. We didn't have to go out to the belt.

It's one that's actually in orbit around the sun that's going by Earth often. And it's carbonaceous. So it's got organic compounds on it, or at least we hope it does, the spectra that they had used, you know, and analyzing it earlier showed that it had organic compounds on. that's what we're after to go, you know, find and research those compounds. So they want to, you know, map it down to just a crazy resolution and find the perfect spot that, you know, first of all, isn't full of big rocks and boulders because this Tag Sam head, which is just a marvel in itself, this kind of reverse vacuum thing that we invented. You know, it doesn't work well with big boulders.

It's more about trying to get into kind of like sand and small gravel. And that's ultimately what we're wanting to collect up. So we've got to find those areas. And then we've got to find areas that are maybe, you know, have higher concentration of organic matter than others because it's all distributed, you know, randomly. So, yeah, a lot's going on. And so we're approaching it.

We're putting the brakes on. We did a couple of those trim maneuvers to slow the spacecraft down. because we were screaming in to try to catch up with it. And now we're putting the brakes on, tapping the brakes and slowing down. And, you know, they talk about going into orbit with it. And the reality is we basically are kind of doing formation flying with it. It's such a small body that it really doesn't have a ton of gravity and not enough gravity to keep this spacecraft in orbit around it.

So unlike a spacecraft that's orbiting, you know, the moon or the Earth or Mars, and gravity actually keeps it in its orbit. That won't, the gravity around Benu won't do that. So we actually have to kind of do this cool formation flying. But, boy, we wrap that, we orbit that thing kind of like a ball of string. It's not over the poles, over the poles, it's like over the poles, over the equator, over the, you know, big elliptical ones and little tight little ones. I mean, that's the good part is that you don't have to fight orbital velocity,

in the way that we do on Earth to change your plane, you kind of are rendezvoused with it. You can, oh, you know what, I'm going to fly up a little and then over the thing. It's just like a shuttle flyer on. So I think our flight folks would argue with you that that's not that they wish they had the consistency of physics that's very easily to map out. Easily to map out in Matlab. I'm not saying it's not more work to be constantly driving around this.

Right. So here's a small body. have never gone into flown at some of the altitudes of these small bodies that we will with Osiris Rax. I mean, we're going really low on some of these. And so it's the unknowns of how the small body and the rough distribution of the gravity that it does have and how that effect is going to happen. So that's actually going to be some of the things we're going to do over the next year

and a half. As we fly back, fly over, we're going to try to understand how the spacecraft reacts when we get real low and when we get over high spots or this and that and we'll actually do a couple little practice events approach events stick the arm out and do our approach event and then pull out before we actually touch down on it and practice that a couple times because this is all a first yeah yeah it's not like we're landing on mars or anything i mean yeah you just need to hire more fighter pilots to fly your spacecraft because they love having manual control over everything. It's great.

Yeah, manual control. What is the light time delay at, I should know this, but maybe I can look it up real quick. While we're at Ben-new, the light-time delay isn't crazy, but it's something like four-minute light-time delay or two-minute light-time delay. Man, that's nuts. Yeah, that sounds about right. Four, I'd say four to eight, probably, is the range you're looking at. Yeah, so I know Insight

is eight minutes, lifetime delay at EDL. But I'll try to look it up real fast, but I don't know. But it's not as bad as out at Mars right now, but it's still, you know, you're flying on, you're making this spacecraft do things autonomously, right? You send up these commands to it, these codes to it. Days or even weeks in advance and on a time code, boom, the commands pull up, and they execute.

and it does that. So whether you're landing on Mars or whether you're trying to do a touch and go or whether you're firing thrusters on Osiris Rex to change its velocity and kind of start going over the poles, it's all doing it by itself. And we're just sitting back here on Earth watching it. I always kind of say it's like watching the Super Bowl on an eight-second time delay. And you don't know if Peyton Manning's like cocked back and thrown that awesome, you know, pass. And they've touched down and we won the Super Bowl or they, You know, they dropped the ball. But the reality is it happened over there, but here on TV, it looks like it's in live, you know, it's live to us.

Here's a good example of this. If you live close enough to a stadium, you will know if a touchdown happens before you see it because you will hear the fireworks go off, which happened several times to us last year during the Super Bowl or during the championship game. When we're like, oh, here comes another one. Oh, that's the worst. And there were a lot of touchdowns against the Vikings. Or Mr. Miko, my favorite one is watching a rocket launch live, right? Oh, man. Hey, if you want to talk about hearing a rocket launch, you've got a better story of that at insight.

We do. Don't look at me. He too. We had no idea. The king of hearing launches. But on a clear day, you know, and you're two or three miles away and you're sitting there, and whether it's at night or even at the day, you know, you're listening to the count down speakers or you're on the phone and you're listening and then you're hearing three

two one ignition and you look across the water or the parking lot or whatever and you see this flash of light and it's dead quiet and the smoke's bellowing and it's like your your head's going that's not the way rockets work every time i've seen them on video or on you know it's kaboom and you know and and and you're just a little confused you're like crazy excited and this thing is rising and all of a sudden this low quiet thunder starts bellowing and getting out or not and it's just it doesn't it screws with your head because of that sound delay from that three or four miles away yeah yeah that threw me off from my first launch too which was a yeah falcon heavy was my first launch and so I set a high bar

and it was yeah it was just that experience you described it you can't underestimate how crazy that is so we have that captioned on video where we took a video of the launch and of us watching the launch. And during that silent moment of awe, you see me grab Jake like, it's doing it. It's doing the thing. And then it's like seconds before this thing gets there. I see Chris on line said it's 7.18 minutes on one way light time delay, which sounds about right. That's kind of what we were guessing, in four to eight minutes. Correct to guess again. So, you know, 14 minutes for us to send a signal, receives a signal, and sends a confirmation

back that it got that signal. So, you know, you don't joystick this stuff, right? Yeah. And that's what kind of hurts your head. You know, I'm a liberal arts major, man. So math doesn't work with me very well. And so that's what hurts your head is like the size of our solar system and how far these planets are. And so, you know, we talk about the space station is 240 miles above us and you think that's really far.

And the moon's 240,000 miles away. But yet I look at the window and the moon's right there and it's really big and I can see craters. But it's a thousand times farther than the space station is above us. And then Mars, you know, is even farther, especially when it's across on the other side of the solar system from us. But even when it's at its closest, it's what, like 34 million miles away when it's closest to her. So just the distances to where something traveling, the fastest thing we know, the speed of light, it still takes eight damn minutes to get to us. But then there's things like Parker Solar Probe blowing my mind with. like, oh, it's at Venus.

Okay. Oh, it's at the sun now. Made it by the sun. It's like, oh, my God, that thing is moving. It made it to Venus. What was it? Venus in like six weeks or whatever? It's got to have like measurable time dilation, right?

Like, it's now like four minutes older than it was when it, like, launched. Right, right, right. That's good. Oh, man. Yeah, New Horizons, right? Nine years to get to Pluto. Like, come on. And Parker Solar Pro is like, man, I'll just make it to Venus in six weeks.

No problem. Yeah. Alan Stern had like a job in between from when it launched to when it arrived. He had a different job. So, I mean, and that's cool. Now it's going out to that new body out there in the Kuiper Belt. And so that thing's still screaming out there. By the way, quick little trivia, APL built the spacecraft,

but we Lockheed Martin built the RTGs on New Horizons. We used to be back of the day, built all of the RTGs. We built them on set on Cassini and Voyager. and Pioneer and Galileo. I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of them. We built most all of the RTGs back in the day. We haven't built the more recent ones, the MMRTGs that are on curiosity.

You guys got your paws on everything, hey? Try, man. You got to make beer cans like ball, man. You got to get into it diversify. Yeah, do a spin-off beer can company. All right. So we're wrapping up here. We have kind of two segments left.

The first one is our new segment, which is still getting its feet under it. It's called the Lightning Ground. Hold on, Jake. I forgot about our whole, I forgot about our stick with this one. I'm going to juice it a little. How's that? Is that juice? Okay, but then you got to dial it back so I can talk, though.

Oh, okay. We're pros. We are pros. All right. So it's 10 questions. The point is. you got to kind of answer them sort of quickly, go with your gut.

They're fun, don't worry. And we'll start with a, yeah, they'll be a little bit silly sometimes, so just bear with me. But we'll start with the, we always start with the calibration question. And so the calibration question, question number one is,

there are a lot of different Martins in the world. For example, the city, Martin, Tennessee. You have Martin guitars, that's a guitar company. Pennsylvania, baby. Martin, the 1992 American sitcom. But of all the Martins, what's your favorite Martin? Dean Martin.

Dean Martin. Off the board answer. You went in a different direction than I expected on that. Come on, man. He's unfa. The rat pack. All right. I was going to give you what the correct answer was, but I have changed it to Dean Martin,

so you are correct. He's been convinced. You're the first off-nominal guest who successfully change an answer for the lightning round. All right. Question two. If you could send 100 Marco-sized insights to Mars or one insight-sized Marco, which would you send?

Marco-sized insights, so we could land on a lot more different parts of the planet instead of just one area. So definitely Marco's size, 100 of them. That'd be cool. I think Bruce Banner would probably agree with you on that one for sure. All right, question three.

If you had an opportunity to bring two independent podcasters to tour the Lockheed Martin facility, who would they be? So independence is a choice because I think Neil de Grice would probably be one of them, but I don't know they're so independent. I think he's big podcasting. Yeah.

He's got lobbyists or something. There's an Anthony guy out there whose name, last name I can't pronounce very well. There's this Robin's guy that, you know, anytime they're out in the Littleton area, I think we could probably get them on our property and take them for a cool tour. Listen, he's a foreign national. This has presented problems to us in the past, so you might have to finagle something. We can work it. We're going to give you lots of notice.

He does come from a country with good robotic arms. so he could probably add a little something to like, you know, you might need some help some time. Canada arm. We come in peace. All right. Question four. Worst acronym, Insight or Osiris Rex? Yes.

Osiris Rex. It is the worst one. You're doing really good at the lightning round. Hey, quick trivia. Quick trivia, Maven. acronym or just a word? Acronym. Jake?

Mars atmosphere and volatile evolution, I think. Evolution and to cram the acronym in, they had to put the end at the end of evolution on it. So they did like an omega capital first and last letter. So does that mean like I'm thinking like the last four Mars stuff that you guys have built or last three. So we got Insight, you built Maven, you built Phoenix.

Only Phoenix has not been an acronym. Is that the one for that one? Phoenix wasn't an acronym. Yeah, because it rose from the ashes from being the orbiter, I mean, the lander that we had to put in storage while we were building Odyssey. Right, right, right, right. Yep, yeah. Okay.

Question five. Would you rather land on Mars in the Lockheed Martin Mars Base Camp lander or on the moon with the new Lockheed Martin Human Lunar Lander? Ooh, wow. I'm going for Mars base camp, man. It is Mars. It's a sweet ride. A lot of common between the two of them, which is going to happen.

Yeah, a lot of common, a lot of Orion inside. But just from a design standpoint, it's pretty cool. And I mean, come on, landing on Mars. Yeah, Mars lander looks way cooler. The moon one looks like reasonable. The Mars one looks like a cool sci-fi awesome spaceship.

Because of the aeroshell. You got to have the you're dealing with atmosphere and that's why it's all slick and cool looking. And it's got like some shuttle-esque elements to it. It's just like a real good fusion. SR 71 actually. Oh yeah, right. That's even better.

And sort of some materials on it. So now cool and I like that. Okay. Question six, favorite astronaut? Interesting. Bruce McCandless. Oh, that's a great one. That is a great choice.

A friend of mine passed away earlier this year. I went to his funeral, would go to lunch with him once in a while, and he was just such a cool guy. I didn't actually get to know him back in the day when he was flying MMU. But, you know, graduated the same Navy Academy. class as John McCain. Whoa, I never knew that. Was the Capcom on Apollo 11? Yeah, yeah.

Oh, that's right. Yep, I did know that. That was a good trivia. It was on the shuttle deployment, I mean shuttle. It was a shuttle on shuttle for Hubble deployment with Charlie Bolden. And then, of course, was the first man to fly untethered in the MMU, a George Clooney. Way better.

than him, though. You know, I always got to do the, being the good PR guy, do the Locky Martin plug. We built the MMU out here in Denver, and that's, you know, partially why Bruce ultimately ended up living out here. So, yeah, I miss him. I'm missing. A good guy. I go back and forth and whether that was the bravest thing, any astronauts ever done or not, like, like.

Of course it is. Dude, he was going to burn up if he went wrong. Like, that dude was going to just orbital decay his way back into Earth if something went wrong. That's like. I'll just take it out to like 300 meters, guys. I got this, don't worry. Just like,

Pss, see you later. And that picture of him, like, ugh, best space selfie ever. It's not really a selfie, I guess.

Not really selfie. That would be crazy. He would have really long arms. Yeah. But, other than probably Neil Armstrong standing on,

on the surface of the moon, that is probably this, in my mind, probably the second most iconic astronaut image out there of him floating out there on that. Yeah.

That's beautiful. 100%. Man, that is an amazing answer to favorite astronaut and one that I have never heard anyone give to that question. And that is like, man, that is up there. If I had to vote for one favorite astronaut answer, that is my vote right there. Okay, question seven. How long is too long to spend inside of an Orion capsule in space? Like, what is the rollover in days where you're like, no, it's time to go home.

We got to not be in here anymore. seven days, 10 days, 20 days. Probably just Orion more than 21 days because that's right now what it's rated to go just by itself. Put another habitat on it like a gateway. And then we could go a couple months and then you got a little moving room. But four people in there for 21 days,

I think is going to be about the max of comfort. That's when the toilet start to overfirm. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, question eight, favorite Orion capsule, EFT1, EM1 or EM2? Ooh, interesting. One's flown, one's about to fly, and one's going to have astronauts on it. So, you know, right now, EM1 is my favorite because that's the one that's being built in the

thing. Dang it, we've got to get that thing to fly. But if you line them all up, it's going to be EM2 because that's going to be the one that's going to have crew going out to the moon and making his story. Question nine, favorite interview you've ever set up with a journalist. Wow, interesting. Got too many of them. I feel like the insight, Lauren Grush insight on that cargo plane was pretty involved.

Lauren's so cool, you know. But we've taken quite a few reporters on planes out to different launches, taking them on C-17s and C-5s. One that's jumping into my mind, and it's kind of a little known fact, is I was interviewed by Matt Lauer, live on the Today Show, a couple, whatever it was, about a decade ago, about 10 years ago. So that was kind of interesting actually doing live TV. So you both have to set up the interview, but then also be the subject. But, yeah, favorite interview. There was this one time when we did this live video chat with some guy that has this podcast.

and we were talking about Mars Base Camp and it was with Steve Jolly so that was probably one of my favorite ones. I really wasn't fishing for that one. I didn't want to know if there was a good one. I should go look up. He saves the fishing for answers on the first two questions. There's just been so many of them over the years

and so many topics. It's cool stuff. All right. Last question. What's the weirdest interview you set up besides this one? Wow. Weirdest one. You had any flat earthers?

Yeah, I don't. Man, I'm just drawing a blank on that because they're all a varying scale, you know, on a scale of greatness, right? Some of them are like, okay, I think we're going to have to back up and kind of explain where space starts and how spaceships get up there and why. And then you get some reporters that are like, are, man, man, these guys are sharp. You've got to be really specific when you're talking with them because they want to get into the weeds. So, man, I'm drawing a bank on some of the. the weirdest one, but we've had some weird ones over the years. We try to be good, you know, trying to be the good PR guy. You don't want to get into weird situations with a good spokesperson and burning

up their time. You kind of want to do your due diligence and say, you know, I don't know that that's really worth my spokesperson, vice president's time, and you kind of go to try to deal with them offline and maybe I'll do a phone interview with them by myself and try to get them up to speed and answer their questions and not go in awareness. So, We don't get too wacky or loony at times. We don't do that. Well, you, you get a lot of them, but you don't pass this. That's what I'm picking up.

You personally get a lot of weird interview requests. Yeah, or just a lot of weird emails, period. Wait a minute. Are you filtering this one, too? Is that why we're talking to you? Yeah. And then Microsoft chunk filter, I sure does work well. Oh, that's hilarious.

You guys have a great, like, artificial. intelligence email reading algorithm that sorts them for you. Like, oh, independent podcasters put into the low priority folder. Yeah. Some guys writing flat earthers, they email much. And the reality is, no, they don't email me. They're the type that love to troll on social media so they don't have to deal with you one on one. But no, they don't call because there's just no reason for them to call.

I got an amazing Are we done lightning around Jake? Yeah Do you want me to hit this real quick? Just give it a little outro music All right, that's the Astro music I got an amazing We'll do this and then we'll get on to the picks

I got this This paper folded up and put in my door handle A couple of weeks back that was like Flat Earth propaganda Wow And it was a double-sided like scanned a thousand times piece of paper where like I guess you're supposed to attach like a couple of sentences of something scan it on like scan your addendum to this paper and then print a bunch of copies

and distribute them and it is incredible and I feel like I should post this somewhere because I never experienced this in my life but it was like door to door flat earth propaganda and I never knew this existed it was crazy I scanned it's crazy I'll send a little copy out it's amazing So I just went and saw Scott Kelly speak at the University of Colorado Boulder. My son's actually studying mechanical engineering there. And of course, just got done reading his book in Durrance and paid attention to the urine space. And I was cool.

And someone asked him about flat earth. He goes, don't you think that the edge of the earth, if it was flat, would be like the biggest tourist spot ever? You could walk up to it and look off the edge. He said, if that existed, that would be like the biggest. tourist spot ever so no like I never heard that that's so funny Scott I love it okay cool do picks Anthony yeah let's do some picks other than the edge of earth which is an amazing tourist attraction all right Gary why don't you start my pick um kind of what you explained is just something

cool and interesting that I think's cool in space or something I've read or a movie I saw or or whatever. It's been out, I think, for about a year and a half now, but Andy Weir's book, Artemis. I read it when it first came out, and I really dug it. And, of course, when the Martian came out, I read it like twice before I even heard there was going to be a movie. But I read Artemis and really enjoyed the book.

It's completely different than Martian, but I love the fact that Andy does such a cool job in kind of bringing in real science, real math, real technology into this fictional story. And it's cool because right now we're talking about, you know, the way a commercial economy can be built up out at the moon, starting with the gateway

and then commercial landers and lunar landers and ultimately some sort of moon bases. And then we actually, in our discussion, start talking about Artemis as an example of kind of the higher echelon of what a commercial economy at the moon can look like so slugs and all cool books right right I think that was the best concept from I haven't read it so I'm assuming that was like an inside joke no it's like the currency is like based on was it solid landed goods like SLG and they call them slugs so the currency was like one kilogram of cargo on the moon.

So you could pay this currency to get you one kilogram of cargo from the earth. Kind of Bitcoin like, right? Right. It wasn't physical. It's all transferred through your mobile device that everybody lives off of, which isn't too futuristic nowadays. I'll go next. So I chose a podcast.

And this one is only quite. space related, but it touches on it a little bit. It's called Time to Eat the Dogs, and it's about kind of the theme of a little bit of science, a little bit of exploration, a little bit of history, and a little bit of, I guess, like, human experience, I guess. So it's really interesting because it kind of branches off to all these different topics. You know, there's the guy that the host has a PhD and he studied in Antarctica for a while, and that kind of kicked off his his interest in humans exploring into these remote places and stuff. And so there's a little bit of crossover between Mars and stuff.

He did an interview with Garrett Reesman, astronaut on the ISS. He's done, I'm just looking through the episodes here, a couple about like imaging from space and maps and how those play into how we explore and experience things. But I kind of came into it by accident, just looking up the interview about he talked to a guy who was an American

who served on the research vessel that went to the Soviet Antarctic Station in the 60s so it was like he was like the only American guy there and he went down I forget the name of the station but someone's probably going to be able to look it up in the chat but if you've ever seen that there's a very famous photo that came from that expedition where

though the doctor had to give himself his own appendectomy to take out his appendectomy There's always black and white photos of the guy cutting himself open with a mirror and pulling out his appendix. So that's the expedition. Yeah. And so this American guy just talked about the experience of how he had to fly down to like South Africa and meet these people and living with, you know, 60s-era Soviet living conditions, which are not great. The food and the water was pretty rough. And yeah, it was pretty interesting.

Mernie Stason. Mernie Station. I'm looking at the website. Murny, I think. Yeah, Mernie? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the one. So that was a fascinating episode. And then I just kind of stuck with it because it was pretty cool and ended up being a few space connections in there. So yeah, I recommended it. It was really good. Time to Eat the Dogs. It's a hell of a name of a podcast. Right. Yeah. Yeah. My pick is from 1996. This was released on February 1st, 1996. I'm keeping it lockheed for you, Gary. All right. I am working through an audible backlog here. And I'm, and I'm, I'm, I'm working through an audible backlog here. And I'm, and I, I had saved, somebody recommended this in the off-nominal discord months ago.

I want to say it was mass fraction. He hasn't been around in a while, but I want to say it was him. This is Skunkworks, a personal memoir of my years at Lockheed, and it was written by Ben Rich, who ran Skunkworks during the era of the F-117 development. But he also worked on U2, SR71, a lot of different projects at the time, some even that were canceled. And he talks a lot, so this is semi-space related. This is more aerospacey in general.

But I think if you're into engineering, there's a lot of really interesting stories in this. And I'm not all the way done it yet. So this is kind of a midstream pick. But some of the stories he has about working on these programs, like these crazy secret programs that are very small teams focused on certain issues. If you're into engineering, into aerospace, into development at all, I am loving it so far. and I'm very excited to get through the rest of the book. But yeah, it's like 22 years old. So it's an old one, but all of the stuff holds up

because it's an aerospace history book. Very cool. And Skunk Works is just like one of the coolest things ever. It is. I mean, we're so proud of that place. Of course, Kelly Johnson is kind of the engineer that everyone thinks about when you hear Skunk Works. But man, those folks are working on some really cool things.

Hey, if we got like 30 seconds for a cool story, I'll try to use that and I'll wrap it all up with what we kind of almost started with. Let's do it. So back after Iconos launched space imaging, and this is 99, so back in early 2000, an organization called Global Security.org, wanted to test the theory that we could take an image of anywhere in the world because of open skies, and this was a commercial satellite. And he says, okay, fine, there's this place outside of Nevada called Groom Lake.

Take a picture of that and give it to me because you're a commercial satellite, and we did. it. And we took a picture of Area 51. You know, we were allowed to do it because of open skies and the ability to take imagery at one meter resolution pixels so we could see the hangars and see the runways and there was nothing outside. But little did I know that I was going to end up over at Lockheed Martin at the day where that, you know, Skunk Works has a lot of cool stuff going on in Palmdale in that region. So that was a, that was kind of a cool little full circle. Officially sanctioned photos of Groom Lake. That's like nobody, nobody can really say that story. Hey, that might be one of my coolest, weirdest interview, because I then had a documentary

company, a couple of them come out and want to do documentaries that were, we're doing documentaries on Area 51, and they wanted to come talk to us about how we took this amazing satellite image and our interpretation of it. It's like, yeah, we're just. Don't interpret, but we'll do the interview with you. So maybe there's, there you go, Jake. There's my weirdest interview. Perfect. That's what I was fishing for.

Okay. Gary, thanks so much for indulging this interview. It was, I know it was a super weird request, and I felt weird sending it, but you're a stand-up guy. You're a class act. I'll take the opportunity to also thank you for all your help in the past with all the interviews you've set up with me. It's been awesome, and I hope we keep working together. Absolutely.

man. I really appreciate it. It's, you know, a nice Friday, get to have a beer and chat space with guys that are really enthusiasts and know their stuff. It's fun stuff. So Anthony, it was good to meet you virtually. And Jake, I'm glad we got to meet out there. And I'm in California. I look forward to seeing you guys. And I look forward to hooking up and meeting you at Epcot. Meet you at Canada. We're starting in Canada. We're not starting in Mexico. Hey there, Opnominalians. Off nominally. Look, I don't know what to call you, but the point is there's something we forgot to add to this podcast. It's a little bit because Anthony and I are kind of dumb, and it's also probably because we were drinking.

But the point is, we are excited to share that we finally have some Offenominal merchandise just for you. You can now pick up an Off Nominal logo, Tri-Bend, T-shirt, and it's got a special Easter egg hidden in it that only listeners are going to understand. Now, do you remember Episode 4 of Off Nominal where we went over the New Frontier's Downside? select missions, that would be the Caesar mission to 67p and the Dragonfly mission to Titan. Well, now you two can take a side in that debate by picking up a Team Caesar or Team Dragonfly t-shirt. And don't worry, I stocked up on a ton of Team Caesar shirts because I know exactly how this contest is going to go. Now, Offenominal doesn't have its own storefront, and so you can pick up these t-shirts in either the main engine cutoff store or the We Martian store.

It doesn't matter where you get it. Prices are all the same, and all the funds are going to go to fund hosting fees for off nominal as well as future meetups. So as Anthony likes to put it, you can kind of consider it a down payment on a beer if you ever make it out to CS1 day. So the only thing it does matter is bragging rights. So if you want to make Anthony a little bit embarrassed because he lost to a Canadian, head over to shop. com. And if you want to make America great again, well, you know what to do at shop. main engine cutoff.com.

So thanks for all your support. We're really excited to have it, and we hope you like the T-shirts.