Off-Nominal - 16 - Imaginated Soap Buckets

Episode Date: January 22, 2019

Jake and Anthony talk about New Horizons’ recent flyby, Chang’e 4, and take on a handful of questions from listeners. Beers Stoked Winter Ale - Mt. Begbie Brewing Co. - Untappd Of Hops and Clouds - Vault Brewing Company - Untappd Topics MU69 appears as a bi-lobed baby comet in latest New Horizons images | The Planetary Society Chang'e-4 update: Both vehicles healthy, new imagery from the Moon’s far side | The Planetary Society Off-Nominal Events WeHaveMECO Twitter News List My RSS Feeds, January 2019 Edition - Main Engine Cut Off WeMartians Twitter Lists Martian Chronicles - AGU Blogosphere Midnight Planets Space Mission and Science News | NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory FIRST UP, Your Daily Dose of What’s Up — SpaceNews Picks Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet: Steve Squyres: 9781401301491: Amazon.com: Books Flying the Skies of Saturn’s Moon Titan | The Planetary Society Abandoned in Place: Preserving America's Space History First, Roland Miller, Roger D. Launius, Betsy Fahlman - Amazon.com Off-Nominal Merchandise Off-Nominal Logo Tee Team CAESAR Tee Team Dragonfly Tee WeMartians Shop | MECO Shop Follow Jake WeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to Mars WeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | Twitter Jake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | Twitter Meet up with Jake in Scottsdale, AZ Follow Anthony Main Engine Cut Off Main Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | Twitter Anthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | Twitter

TLS and go for main engine, start. Welcome to space. Hello listeners and three people who are watching us on Twitch right now. Watching us stumble through this technical setup. We're not good at Twitch. We are audio people and this is a new thing that we're trying. So bear with us. It's a little weird.

But welcome to Nogne. We'll be good soon. Yes. That's our promise to you. We do tend to get better at this. things when we try them more. We commit to it. I think there's a word for that practice maybe.

Yeah, something like that. Amateurs would be the other one. Yeah. We can maybe go for like pro-am, right? That's like when you know you're an amateur but you want to give yourself some credit. Yeah. You buy like the nice camera, not the really nice one. Just like, you know, it's got enough megapixels.

Yeah, yeah. Lots of megapixels. And then just like whatever is the bottom of the line. you just go one step up. Yeah, one more. The ones that come out of the same factory, but they're just a little after hours. So, you know, it's the same quality.

It's just a little cheaper. They just don't have all the features hard disabled in the chipset. Welcome to 2019, I guess, first one of the year. Yeah, it's going to be a good year, I think. I think it's going to be a crazy year. I actually, after I said that,

I immediately regretted it because I just did a headline show this morning about how it might be a terrible year. I think it's going to be like a year of highs and lows, I think. I think it's going to be, yeah, without going into detail, I think there's going to be like some really, like, amazing points of 2019. And there's going to be parts where we're just like, uh, could this year get any worse? That's going to be like the year that like all of your favorite celebrities died that was like 2016, right, where it was like Prince and Bowie and all that.

I think this might be that year for space. For space. Anyway, way to start the year off on a high note. Yeah. We're doing great so far. What are you drinking? Yeah, what are you drinking? What am I drinking?

I have. This is from Mount Begby Brewery, which is in Revelstoke, BC, which is like kind of up north a bit, a little bit rural, close to Alberta. It's in the mountains, very snowy. And this is the stoked winter ale. And it's got like a label. It's like a little like sewed on label. Yeah, like an ugly Christmas sweater label.

That webcam's got a really nice depth of field by the way. Now that we're on the Twitch life, we can tell everybody. Twitch.tv.tv slash off nominal is where you can see Jake's epic depth of field on that new webcam he's got rocking. It's not even that new. It's like, I don't know, it's a couple years old. But anyway, I'm opening this. And it's Jake sized for everyone wondering. Yes.

Not quite, not quite Edward Forty Hands. but close. 22 ounces? I had heard 40. So we used to do that in high school. And we used, there was a beer called Big Bear. Did you ever hear of that?

Big Bear. No, I only know Big Bear because I believe Big Bear is like a ski area around here that is very small. And I used to go when I was little. Or that's a lake. Maybe it's a lake. Big Bear. So it was like, you know, I'm like, I don't know, 16, 17 or whatever.

And you could get this beer. I got it in Alberta. I don't know where else you can get it. So there may be a couple listeners that know it. But it was basically, I'm trying to think how, it was bigger than these bottles. Like it was, I think it was 1.14 liters.

So I guess that's, that's terrible. Yeah, well, the reason it's 1.14 is probably because it's like some terrible conversion of a metric. It's probably like 40 ounces. But it was literally $3 for that. Like it was just the worst terrible beer.

that yeah it wasn't a growler shape it was like a bottle shape but maybe as much as a growler um and so we used to do that yeah edward maybe the same thing but you duct tape the bottles to your hands right yeah and then you can't yeah so that's what we used to do in high school in Alberta because there wasn't much else to do in rural small town prairies well i wouldn't be playing edward 40 hands tonight i would be playing wizard if we were doing a drinking game here because i have a can in my hand. Jake, guess what I'm drinking? It's not yards. I got you. Uh, so I went to the little local establishment and I went to the little seasonal selection or like, you know, the ones they have, the new ones they have in. And I knew we were going to do some planetary discussion in this

show. Uh, so I found this beer sitting there. It's this nice gradient label, like blue, green gradient. And it's called of hops and clouds. And I thought that was fitting. Hold on. I got some shiny light. We're new to this, people. I thought it was fitting because we had some hoppers on Hayibusa. We got some clouds. Those epic photos that Juno has been sending back. There was like maybe my favorite photo of Jupiter ever sent back recently. It was a pretty good one.

That's a really good one. Yeah. So I thought that would be fitting. This is by a company called Vault, who I've never heard of. And it looks like they're in Yardley, PA, which is not too far. maybe our resident other Pennsylvania man who's in here can let us know if Yardley PA Vault Brewing is a known establishment.

I've never heard of it. So I'm curious. This is a pale ale with mosaic citra and some other stuff. And it is a tallboy, unlike me. Unlike you. I found a picture of Big Bear. I'm going to put it in the Discord because people have to see it.

Yeah, it is 40 ounces now that I can see it on the label. Very, very large. Now that I can see it because the photo I found is somebody with duct tape to their hand. Wow, that is so... Like, just the worst beer. Like, you can just tell how bad it is just by looking at the label. Yeah, it's like the prop person in a movie

had to come up with a beer can or a beer bottle design really fast and they're like I don't know, is this good? That's awesome. Oh man, this is bringing back really bad memories. Premium malt liquor. It doesn't even say beer on it. Oh dear.

Why did I drink that? It doesn't even say beer on it is my favorite. It's definitely already the title. It's like when you get the really cheap chocolate at like the dollar store, but it's got such a little, like a low cocoa content that you can't legally call it chocolate, so it's just chocolate-flavored candy.

Yeah, that's what this is, but beer. Beer-flavored alcohol. About last year, I found out that milk or white chocolate is like, not chocolate. It's not, it's just the runoff of actual good chocolate. And this is, I felt like I was like Alex Jonesing a conspiracy when I found this out. Yeah, it's just, it's just milk and sugar. That's all it is.

So, we got some cool stuff going on. You like it? It's dark. Yeah, it's got, hold on, the ingredients told me, it's got, it's like one of those spiced beers, right? Nutmeg, clove, cinnamon, and chocolate in it. I've been getting more into that lately. I haven't, I historically have not been into that, but I've, the last few I've had,

I've like, oh, okay, I can see why people enjoy this. I can only have one. That's the only problem with it. And you're like, okay, that's enough. This one's good. It's a little hopier than like my, my, my typical yards pale ale, but it's very drinkable. I like a nice citrus pale ale I've noticed.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, we want to talk about some planetary stuff, which I guess is not too off nominal for you. No, not really. There's just been good stuff going on. There's been good stuff. We got Chang of 4 on the far side, the moon. We've got new horizons out there.

Yeah, New Horizons was awesome. I thought it was such a cool start to the year, too, because it was like New Horizons and then Changa on like the first two days. And it was like January, like halfway through January 2nd and I'm like, this is such a busy year. There was already a lot going on. There was so much happening. But yeah, so what did you think of MU69, the shape? Did it surprise you?

I had very little opinion going in. Did you not to think too deeply about it before? No, I would just kind of let it be. I was ready to accept. whatever came my way. I don't know. It felt like we, they knew this was going to be the shape,

but they didn't want to rule out other possibilities. It's kind of how it felt. Especially when they showed after the fact, I think it was Alex Parker on Twitter, lined up the first photo back from MU69 with the, like the, all the occultation research they've done, and they actually drew out what they expected the shape to be.

And the photo was like, exactly it fit right in the shape that we saw. I was trying to free that on. I'm like, how did they get it tumbled exactly the right? Because like it was tilted the right way. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah.

What are the chances of that? I don't know. I mean, maybe it's, is it, I'm looking at the picture now, though. I don't think it's actually the photograph that they superposed. It's like the outline of the models. They may have been able to turn it to however. wanted to do it. Well, still, no, either way.

Like, they got the photos. They got the photo imagery that matches the occultation they did. What was that? Years ago? How many years ago was that? 2017, yeah. That's wild. That's the one they did down in, uh, was it in Africa?

I think they did it in Africa. And South America, like Chile and all sorts of stuff across South America as well. I'm blown about that they can even pull off an occultation like that, like that kind of observation. like if you think about the path of light that takes like it's got to be just a narrow it's mental to me when you think of it on a photon level it blows your mind yeah like an individual photon taking that that trip yeah but i mean it just speaks to how uh how well they plan this out and uh um you know there's success with it so that's really good to see yeah and it was

i i'm curious about one thing um maybe you've done more reading on this but uh Alex Parker I feel like I'm going to keep going back to him because he's just been so good at posting all sorts of interesting tidbits from the MU69 stuff. And he had a big threat about how they initially found MU69 as a candidate among a bunch of others. And it sort of felt like they had a very limited time window on when to find candidates that they could fly by.

And then it was like they had mere weeks to determine if one was going to match. and they were able to pull off the flyby and now they're talking fairly confidently about being able to find another thing to fly by with just the vehicle, not even, you know, other observatories because we're now beyond the realm of

what Hubble can even help with. So I was confused as to this like disparity where they had a crazy couple of weeks to find MU 69 and pull off a flyby essentially like to find the target and get it approved. They had very short window of time and now they were very openly entertaining the idea that they could find one with just New Horizons itself.

Yeah. Yeah, I wonder if it was it an artificial constraint? Was it like you have to get your proposal in by X amount of time? Yeah, it was file your TPS report by whatever day. Yeah. In which case they're rushing just to get the paperwork done in time. But maybe now they're feeling like they can wait a little longer because there's less risk.

Like if the mission dies, well, we did two flyby. Right, right. Right. Right. We're okay.

Right. But I mean, I don't know how they're going to, because they have so much data to send back. And you've got to point the spacecraft in a certain direction to do that. I don't think the, the Lori camera lines up correctly with the antenna. And this is going to take 20 months to be all of data back.

They're booked up for the next couple of years. Yeah. So like, are they going to like start observations like in, late 2020 and see what they find and then you know it has to be far enough out that they can do a course correction a little bit so i don't know it's interesting i mean we're i guess we're used to these long time skills now especially with this mission but yeah it's mental to me just to think about it okay now let me uh maybe be a debby downer about it is it worth doing another flyby if you know we're obviously, like you said, it's going to take 20 months to get data back.

Say we find out some good info, right? Like, it's always cool to fly by something. But is it worth the years of extended mission that it would take to find a target and do another flyby? When presumably that would be another instance like this where we fly by in like a split second and we scrape some data that we can get. Like, I think we had this conversation recently about extended missions versus funding new missions and kind of like the sunk cost fallacy feeling that that is at certain points I'm wondering you know because if they could just keep saying well we're going to find another

one we're going to find another one we're going to find another one we're going to find another one like at what point do you think we've gotten what we can out of the Kuiper Belt for right now so I go you're saying I think in this case though it's still worth it because this is new ground new horizons is what we're talking about yeah new horizons on the on the new frontier of anyway but like if it was like oh we flew by Mars and we're going to also fly by Jupiter and then by Saturn and then by like

you're like okay that's cool well that one you got to do because it only happens once every 176 years sure but I mean because you have an opportunity for pretty small marginal cost to go somewhere for the first time and kind of knock off that first reconnaissance

like New Horizons may well be laying the groundwork for a whole bunch of missions in the future that would not have even been on the table had we not even done these split-second seemingly less valuable flybys. Well, I guess, so I guess I phrased it wrong in that. Not that this one wasn't valuable,

but if what we're going to find is more of these similar objects, like, do we need to fly by every asteroid in the solar system? And do we need to fly by every Kuiper Belt object in the solar system? Or if we find that, like, well, New Horizons, for the next foreseeable future is in this area of the Khyber Belt where they're going to be similar objects. How many do you do? If what we, if we found, you know, by all sounds of it, MU69 is like the quintessential. What was this contact binary thing?

This is like that example, textbook example of a thing that we thought we would find there. Yeah. I don't know. Are you thrown off by the comment that our styles are merging? I'm reading that, yes. We are becoming our own contact binary right here. So let me answer... Let me answer...

Let me answer your question with another question. And that is, how many different Kuiper Belt objects are there? types. I don't know. I don't do this work. I just do a podcast. We don't know, right? Right.

No. Yeah. What if you fly by the next? If you fly by the next one and it's the exact same thing, like, okay, well, looks like there's kind of the same stuff here. But what if you fly by and it's like something completely different? It's like some random chunk of like methane ice. It's an actual spaceship.

Like, yeah, like, you know, like, oh, muamua is out there. Solar sale. Another discarded solar sale. You just don't know, right? And so it's a, that's why I think it's important to take the opportunity because you will never get one like this for a very long time. And I guess the, this mission certainly doesn't have the scale of it as a Mars rover, you know, or, hell, this thing was in sleep mode for months and the team was working on team stuff, but the spacecraft was just sleeping, waiting for its next event, you know?

So they have a good track record of being able to, like, let the spacecraft be itself, do its thing and ramp up when they get close to it. So you're right in that if, you know, we have, well, right now we don't really have any funding, so that's a whole different thing. But if we have some spare funding, this is an easy win. Yeah. But, man, if they find another one, that's going to be amazing. Yeah, I think it'll be super, super awesome.

And we're learning so much so quickly about this part of the solar system that we had never been to before. I think that's really cool. So I'm all in. Keep going until the spacecraft dies. All right. Well, we solved that one. What do you got on Changa for? All right.

Putting stuff to bed here. Okay, Changa. So the press conference happened last week. Last week? Yeah, sure, last week. I think it was like Sunday. And we learned about kind of the, we learned some more details about the back half of the planning, right?

So like the whole Changa project was like eight missions long. And they'd done this really sequential, iterative. process, right? Orbiter, orbiter, lander with a rover, better lander with a better rover, and now they're moving to some sample return stuff. And then what they announced is right at the end of it was like a lot of technology demonstration. Like Changa 8 is supposed to have like a whole bunch of tech demos

that are like literally meant to hand off lunar exploration to people. What? What? Tycho not. No, no, no. hand off lunar exploration. Are they doing like a surveyor situation here? No, I mean like figuratively. So like China is trying to explore the moon and the first part of it is robots.

And then once the robots are done, they pass the torch to people. And they and people build on the tech, the learnings, the operations, all that stuff. So I thought that was just really cool. And I mean, we, because you don't really always get to have this visibility, the China space program. and so when you finally get to see kind of the end-to-end product and you're like oh wow they thought it through and they planned it which like is obvious based on how they operate but you just you don't get to see the plan so you never quite know for sure um i think that's really interesting that that we got to see that and then it makes me think about what they're doing for mars because

we know about i we know about one mars mission next year launching and i'm i think i can't remember now, but I thought I saw that they had talked about a second one in 2022. But how many are planned out with that? After that, are you going to hit every launch window now for Mars exploration from China? And do they have people on their horizon? I'm kind of intrigued by that. Here's the thing you're forgetting, Jake. They're making a massive mistake.

And they're building a space station. And I'm not going to get off of this soap. that they're getting stuck. They're getting stuck in a low Earth orbit space station. Do we know what their budget is? Have you ever seen any... Nah. I mean, you could probably find some figures,

but even that is very... You'll never be able to find out-year figures, like the next couple. And that's the thing when I had Andrew Jones on main engine cutoff, and he was always saying that, like, yeah, they're doing, they say they're doing a lot, but there's a lot of areas where the funding is not there

and is not, you know, it's not, maybe not the most consistent funding because, like, right now, they are having some tough times economically, and there's some signals that, like, maybe some of the, this is more, like, geopolitics, economic stuff, but maybe some of, like, the China's growth was actually overstated, and they're starting to maybe see some drops economically, so maybe they're going to start redirecting funding, and there's a lot of, like,

mystery around that side of them right now. So I'm, I don't know, you know, they've been working on this new generation of Long March vehicles for a number of years, and that's been painfully slow to see them take off, and they've sort of done the Russian thing where they've kept certain lines of rockets flying really long, and those are doing great. You know, Long March 3Bs with a couple of Baidu satellites were flying off every two weeks or whatever through 2018, but they seem to have had a lot of problems with the newer vehicles coming online. And that's kind of step one to any of this. Hmm. Yeah, I don't know. Like, if they were, I would kind of agree with you, if they were in sort of a year to year, they have to figure out their budget kind of from

scratch like the US does, you know, like it's a complete coin flip and toss up every year what's going to happen with NASA. Like, you just, you have zero idea. But it's not that bad. And, and China and maybe it's still not like a 100% planned economy, but they can probably do five and 10 year plans with their space program with a lot higher degree of confidence than we can over here. Yeah, coming from an American with a shutdown, partial government shutdown and a Canadian that spends $0.00 in space approximately. Zero.2 dollars. $0.2.

Canadian. Yeah, Canadian. Yeah. No, so I just, I wonder, like, and the size, right? So China's got four times the population of the United States. And if they fund their space program per capita the same, and then you just, I don't know, half it based on their economic power per capita. I don't know what the GDP is or whatever like that.

But even if they can, like, if they, if they're as quarter as rich as the United States, States and they fund it the same per capita, their budget will be the same. That's what I'm trying to say, right? And so if NASA can support a space station and launch to Mars, basically every launch window, China could too, right? Yes, but the, I guess it's going to be really like the battle of the next couple of decades is, does all of the private space talk pan out? And does that actually enable more than its share of input, you know, because that's the thing. Like, could NASA have kept up what they're currently doing while also flying shuttle? Yeah.

I don't know. Like, would planetary budgets have been as high as they have been in the past couple of years if there was also a couple of billion going to shuttle? Though granted, it's a couple billion going to SLS Orion and that would be it. I was going to say, what was shuttle's budget in the last like five years? Probably not that different, right? No, right. Interesting. Okay. Well, I mean, we'll never answer this question, I guess.

No, I don't think so. But I think that is like the, that is, if you want, like, if you're a person who wants space racey kind of stuff, then that is the thing is like, can China do what they say they would do faster than the private space, the rise of private space, you know, enables so much more than we were even planning as a constellation program or whatever would be with the NASA-ESA. Canadian partnership. Especially once we shed that dead weight that Ross Cosmos is. On us right now. Oh, so much change ahead of us. I'm not a big Ross Cosmos fan right now. I've heard that. Yeah, I'm not big on it.

I would rather see, I was going to say, I'd rather see a couple of Antares fly, but that's also maybe tied up and all that, so maybe I'll refrain. But no, Changa 4, man, had some cool imagery coming out of it. The descent, I love that they do the descent videos. They're a little spec, but that's really the most curvally looking videos.

You know, it really makes me want to go play some curvil space program. It 100% looked like my descents to the moon. Yeah. I loved the, the coolest thing to me was the hazard avoidance right at the end, right? So, like, it comes in, you know, and then does this pitch over maneuver and it's like already canceled its horizontal velocity, comes straight down, and then it like hovers. and does like do do do scan. I'm imagining like Terminator scan

where it's like building this like digital train model like on the fly and then it's just like boom, we're going right there and then it like diverts. It was such a cool, you know, I'm just thinking more of the landings that I'm used to. Like think about even just think about like Falcon 9s, which is really kind of just come in pretty hot

and just kind of, you know, hope for the best. Yeah, literally in most cases. This felt so, yeah, it felt so like calculated and in control I don't know, it struck out, it struck me as something that was interesting. I feel like we're going to have that same feeling when we see New Glenn's launch because they're supposed to do the same thing, right? And well, New Shepherds do it too, right? They kind of like side hover a bit, but one last thing on Changa 4 that I liked is this kind of like out in the open collaboration with the lunar reconnaissance orbiter where China is like, in case anyone with a space telescope above the

moon is interested, here's our coordinates. And then NASA's like, in case anyone with the lander on the moon's interested, we're going to take pictures of them. And it's like this, they can't actually talk about it, but they can talk in public towards each other. And I feel like it's a really good example of some really, like, I understand motivation for these boneheaded policies in the U.S. And in certain cases, there are legitimate concerns that prevent the U.S. from working with China and space. But it also shows that, like, you know, people that are in the technology realm tend to route around legislation across the board.

And this is another example of that, like, there's just scientists on both sides that really would like to see this collaboration. Because NASA did it with Changa 3 as well. They took photos with lunar reconnaissance orbiter. So this was a really... But even that was behind the scenes. This was, like, very publicly... Here's our coordinates.

Here's our... the day that we're going to take a picture of the landing site. So I'm really curious. It's coming up on the 31st, I think it was. So that'll be really cool to see the images there. It's a good lesson because, I mean, even we do it. Like, we just refer to them as China. Like, just, it's just China.

The space agency, the country, all 1.3 billion people is China. And they act in unison as one monolithic, semi-confrontational place. But, like, their government and their scientists are different, you know, because they're just people. Everybody's people. That's your your friendly lesson for the game. Everybody is people. Thanks for listening to Offnominal Humanitarian Edition.

I feel like we had a long list of things for this show. Should we keep power it on? Sure. We had a bunch of questions that people sent into us. Yeah. Do you want to do that? I think we should, yeah. So this is sort of a new thing.

New Year, new us. We put a call out on Twitter and the Discord and I don't know, somewhere else maybe to just put some questions out there to see what you guys wanted to talk about and we got some good ones actually. There were some questions in here that I thought were super interesting. So we made a big list.

I think we're just going to go back and forth and pick one, talk about it, and then we'll see how much time we eat up, I guess. There's some really good ones in here. Yeah, there's some really good ones. Do you want to pick first? Sure. I want to start with chases.

He asked what our favorite Apollo mission was. And then I countered with, like, I bet we could guess each other's. So I'm going to guess that yours, I'm actually going to just state that yours is Apollo 17. Correct. Because it's a geologist on the moon. And that's, like, straight up your alley. Yes.

Now, I'm going to caution you that the more I thought about this, man, I got three really good ones that I love. And I've got three now. I'm going to need you to help work me through it. I bet you could guess which three. Well, you mentioned in the Discord that you were weighing between two, and I'm pretty confident. I was.

I added a third. I think I know what the two are, but I don't know if I know what the third one is. Okay, what are the two? Okay, so my guess is you like Apollo 16, because you love John Young. Yes, that is definitely in the contention. That was actually the third one that I added. Oh, okay, all right.

Because John Young is definitely my favorite astronaut. I loved them driving the rover around the moon because they were just having such a fun time with it. And I loved the whole anecdote of him being told that the Congress approved the shuttle while on the lunar service, and he was the first crazy-ass dude to get in that thing. Yeah, yeah.

I love that. It's a good bookend. Yeah, and so then I thought the other one that you liked would be Apollo 12. Apollo 12, he nailed it. Because I think Pete Conrad is from Philadelphia, right? Yep, he was born in Philadelphia. Yeah, yeah. And he was like, his first words off the moon was a short one for Neil, but a long one for me.

And as a short person, I just resonate with that. Apollo 12 is so good. just because of all the, like, misadventures, too. Like, yeah, totally. Apollo 11 was so epic and cinematic. And Apollo 12 was just, like, a couple of buffoons on the surface, like, with playboys on their things and broken cameras. They're trying to do pranks and they, like, messed up the pranks.

And, like, oh, it was just... It's exactly what you would picture, like, you would want to be, like, if you went to the moon. Apollo 11 was, like, very stately. And it was, like, we are citizens of Earth and we come here in peace. and we're very cordial. And then Apollo 12 was like, we're on the goddamn moon and we need to have some fun up here.

I'm trying to think what the other one is for you. Okay, let's see. We like that mission. I'm wondering if it's like, if it's Apollo 8. It is 100% Apollo 8. Because that is just, STS 1 is definitely the guttiest space mission

that has ever been flown by humans. But Apollo 8 is damn close. Yeah. So cool. Just because how fast they rushed it out too. Yeah, they were like, oh, there's a giant rocket on the pad in the Soviet Union. We got to go. And it's like, all right.

We don't have time for the lander. Launch it. It's so, like, opposite of what would happen today. Oh, yeah. Can you imagine NASA sending people around the moon today with, like, what, it was like two months notice or something, like crazy? Like, they moved the whole mission up. Like, can you imagine taking them? taking that risk today.

Like, yeah, we're just going to whip together this SLS and throwing a Ryan on top. You guys ready? Because we're going in March. It was essentially like somebody walked in. It was like, a ransom numbers last night. Like, we could get there. And they're like, yeah, we know. That's what the Rockets for.

And he's like, no, no, right now. Yeah, dude, we get a launch window every 30 days. It's their 28 days. It's the moon. Of course we can go. We got to go right now. Listen. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. Those three are really hard. Like, where do I go? You know, hometown hero, really gutsy mission, or favorite astronaut. I think I'm going to go top three ranking, Apollo 8, Apollo 15, Apollo 15. 16, sorry. I don't know why I said 15. Nobody really like David Scott.

I like Dave Scott. I was saying Apollo 14 is like the forgotten one. Like I don't even know who was on that mission. Yeah. What a, that sucks, man. That's when they had that, it was before the rover and they had that like wheelbarrow. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's rough.

14. I literally can't remember who it is. Do you think if Apollo 13 didn't happen that the rest of the Apollo missions would have been as like fun as 12? Hmm. Because 12 sort of like they sort of knew nobody was watching and they were just having fun. And then 13, everything got very serious. I don't know. They appeared to have fun in the missions at the rovers.

So maybe I'm being facetious. Anyway, we should keep moving. We got a lot of questions. We got a lot of questions. Okay. So I would like to ask you, we're going to go meta for a little bit here. And this is from, I'm trying to find it.

I know what the question is. I'm just trying to find on the list here. So Chris says, what do you want to be doing 10 years from now? Oh man, we're going real. Yeah, yeah. That's a great. Chris is in the Discord, and that's a very crisp question. Oh, Alan Shepherd.

Kurtz Telepel and South. Yes, Alan Shepherd. Okay. Obviously, the golf swing. Oh, the golf swing. Miles and miles. Okay. So Chris is in the Discord.

He says, what do you each want to be doing 10 years from now? And I'm going to presume that he means in terms of, like, the podcast and space and not just, like, generally. Oh, I assumed life. That's a very quick question. Yeah, yeah, totally. But maybe we'll just we'll just frame it though. So where do you want main engine cut off and off nominal to be

10 years from now? Well, not to tip our hand too much, but I think we've both always liked the future that we can see in which off nominal studios is an actual thing that contains many enterprises in the space realm. And that we are in the early days

of finding niches, you know, because I feel like as much as I try to keep general stuff on my podcast, I tend to have a slant. You obviously are Mars-focused. There's a lot of other niches, man. Yeah. There's a lot of people out there with a lot of interests in a lot of niches.

Because Caleb Henry's writing this stuff about satellite industry, and I'm just trying to keep up with like all these X-Band, L bands, KU bands, Cobb bands, like all this stuff. There's niches everywhere in space. And I feel like I can see a future where there's an off nominal studios. Oh, in the moon sample return thing that Grant brought up. Once we make a bazillion dollars, we're going all in on moon sample return. Patreon's going to hit it big.

When we get to, yeah, 200,000 Patreon supporters. If Patreon left. If Patreon left. Yeah, I like that feature. Yeah, we've talked about that. And I think that, you know, in my, in my, I imagined, imagined. Imaginated.

This beer's a little strong. Writing it on the list. In my imagined future, I like to think of it as even like, you know, bigger than podcasts. I'll just these, all this kind of. A lifestyle brand.

No, no. Not like that. No. But like there's probably a lot of room for different, Wow. Yeah, Paul Allen Enterprises. Like just different. I have found that there's like services on the internet, like just websites or like information databases where I was like, man, I really wish there was a thing that did blah that would really help me like set everything else up. And, you know, we could do stuff like that.

We had some development time and stuff. mission trackers or I don't know there's a lot of stuff to do and I've also really wanted to get into public speaking something that I'm going to try and figure out this year is maybe get some spots and do some talks

because I think that would be really fun I've sort of considered that as well we got the Franklin Institute here in Philly always does like star parties and stuff up on the roof and I feel like I feel like they could learn some things about rockets right yeah i mean i could throw together 15 minutes about i don't know what you say you say you say r s l and you're in you know so yeah that's something that i i've learned to do more of and

then uh so we'll see it is maybe that's not 10 years maybe we're i don't know yeah that's like next year yeah that's like um i'm trying to get the lifestyle brand is 10 years yeah the lifestyle brand uh when we have our own brand of protein powder okay okay We know we'll have made it. Bone strengthening. All right. I got a, Kurt. Kurt asked us to each prepare a lightning round

in which he actually recommends that we switch from lightning round to calling it terminal count. So I would like to bring that before you as a ruling as the purveyor of a lightning round slash terminal count. Yeah, I like the terminal count lightning round. I like it. That means we have to do them as like, okay, T minus 10 is, but it.

Yeah, I didn't. Okay. So I wrote a little mini. one because I thought you have always had the fun here writing these and I wrote a little mini one for you. You don't have to have one for me. It's okay. But I wrote a little one Mars flavored.

And I wanted to throw your way. Okay. I don't have the thunderstruck thing ready like we normally do and I think we would get taken down off Twitch anyway so I'm going to avoid that. Favorite Mars Orbiter. Ooh. Uh, uh,

uh, hmm, Mars Express. Oh, favorite Mars lander. Pathfinder. Favorite Mars rover? Talking at the heartstrings here. Opportunity, yeah.

Favorite 2020 launch window, Mars mission. Ooh. I got to say X-Mars. Yeah, just because there's Canadian stuff on it. Favorite Mars failure. Oh, okay, okay. Well, it's favorites a tough, okay. okay so I like the I think it was Mars 3 the Soviet one that made it to the surface and then sent back a garbly goop that was like is it a picture on its side and I was like no dude it's just static

it's literally a Rocheck test from Mars yeah it's just I thought you would have said what was it uh Mars climate observatory that got the units wrong well so is that the one that I'm thinking yeah uh that's too good Mars Polar Lander and Mars Observer, or Climate Orbiter, yeah. Those two I see as, I see those as like the same mission. And so, and I'm reading a lot about it right now. Like I've been doing some research on those two missions. And it's, they're thematically so connected that it's, it's too big to call favorite, I think. All right.

That's like, honestly, those two missions was like a little bit of a turning point in the entire Mars. exploration history. This sounds like a little foreshadowing. A little bit. Last question for the very slow lightning round that we just did. Warm and wet or cold and icy. Damp and snowy. Damp and snowy.

It's much like his right now in Philadelphia. That's all I got. That was my lightning round. Cool. Okay. I wanted to try it out. You're really good at the terminal count. I keep saying lightning round.

Terminal terminal count lightning round. We can just join them together and they're both the same thing. Okay, I'm going to grab someone from Twitter here, and let's see, which is a good one. There's a lot here. Some of these are not good. Okay, I like this one a lot. Okay, this is from at Provo Troll One. And he asks, I'm assuming it's not tipping the hand at all that this may be a trolley question.

Is that? I know, I think it's a really good question. So, um, he asks, do you guys sometimes ask yourself what unforeseen consequences rapid reusability might bring? So, um, you know, maybe it's the thing that makes a military kinetic arsenal and Leo finally feasible bombing any place any time. But tungsten rods from God. I don't know what that means.

Um, sound pretty scary to me. Doesn't want to sound too dark, but he's, he's, he's enthusiastic, uh, and he's an enthusiastic and he's a enthusiastic space nerd and he's really looking forward to all the benefits, but he's wondering if we just miss something in the, big picture. So that's a good one for you to kick off because you are the rapid reusability officinado in this relationship. That's a big one. Yeah. Yeah, but I'm also of the sometimes heretical belief that we're in the middle of the long piece because we've gotten smarter about how destructive our weapons are. And I tend to not, I tend to not worry too much about that

because it's like, you know, hammers can build stuff and they can smash stuff. Depends which you prioritize in your civilization. You know? Because I don't think there's not the whole like

a full Leo constellation of bombs ready to go at any minute. That is not a very practical way to deploy massive amounts of weapons. And furthermore, we have a very hard time deploying massive amounts of imaging satellites or GPS satellites

Like, we've got a lot of other massively distributed Leo constellations of other stuff that we really need before we get to, let's put massive missiles in a constellation in Lower Earth Orbit. I don't know. I'm not, I'm not like, I don't know, I think on the long time scale, this would do massively more beneficial things, much in the way as air travel has. you know, because air travel, in general, one of the most amazing things we've ever developed also is a thing that has dropped many bombs in places.

So it's like, would you rather have a world with air travel that can enable all sorts of different opportunities and economic impacts and, you know, everything that it brings while also having that as a side effect? You know, it's all scales, man, it's scales. You know, it's a good way to describe you. I've had a lot of heavy conversations with you. You are the opposite of an alarmist.

Yeah, I like that. I'm good with that. I don't know what that is. A calm, a calmist. A calm person. A person with strong faith in humanity. Like what? Optimistic? There's been like serious times and like not serious times where I've come to him and like, And you're like, chill out. And then I do.

That was a great question. So thank you, Provo Troll 1. We need to answer Eric Berger's question. We do need to answer Eric Berger's question. Because that one literally made me chuckle. And he said, very charmingly, first human on the moon in the 21st century. Tyconaut, astronaut, cosmonaut, private spaceflight participant,

Jeff Bezos or McKenzie Bezos. I love your reply. You really stuck the landing on that one. Man, he just nailed it. Yeah. Who is it, Jake? Who is it? Hmm, hmm, hmm.

We just talked about it just a little bit. I'm going to go out. I'm going to take a risk and say Tyconot. Astronaut on a private lander. NASA will not let the next person on the moon not be a NASA person. And they'll pay... A large sum of money do not have that be the case. That's fair.

Yeah. That's fair. And my guess, I'm going to just do a little more called shot. I think it will be on a blue moon. Wow. Yes, I will. Should we on the air put down a bet for one pint of beer? I feel like at that point, we're going to need to have a lot more than one pint for that event.

I feel like whenever that happens, you and I will probably be in the same place. Yeah, with like a full brewery of beer. All right, okay, that guy gets the bill of it. Because our lifestyle brand will be around by then. Yeah. Money will be good with our lifestyle brand. We'll be pimping different breweries on our Instagram and it'll be. Influencers.

Yeah. You got any other good ones you liked? Kurt says that private spaceflight participant needs a way better name. And I agree. passenger a passenger a ticket buyer a customer

I think is the right term we're looking for here I liked we had a live question coming in Jake oh did we yeah

we had a live question from Adam if you had to choose one to a 10 would you go to DM2 or Falcon Heavy 2 DM2

yeah DM2 100% people man I don't don't even need to think about that one. There is something different when people are on a launch vehicle that you're seeing go into the sky that I have yet to figure out like it's just it's so much better.

You went to a shuttle right? I went to a lot of shuttles yeah. Yeah. Because I have not seen the person. Yeah. It's just it amps it up that extra little bit. The vehicles are bigger, they're greater, they're just more amazing pieces of machinery. Dragon 2 looks incredible on the pad right now. It really does. That's going to be awesome. He also asked if we can get an off-nominal launch party house on the beach for these. Yes. That is where we launch our lifestyle brand.

A pool party. A pool party on Cocoa Beach. And we will have Instagram influencers begging to attend. We won't even need to pay them. You got any other good ones? It's a really good idea, actually. If we rented like a house,

like an Airbnb that could see the launch site, who would come? Do you think we could get enough people to come? You got at least five people watching this bullshit. On Saturday night.

I don't know what you guys are doing. Let's watch two bozos on Twitch, talk about beach houses. Waiting for the kids to go to bed, most of them, I bet. Influencers. Oh, we got some in the Pacific time.

It's not a bad time to be hanging out. It's a great time to be hanging out. You got any other good ones before we talk some picks and stuff? Yeah. What are your main sources, websites, blogs, people you follow on Twitter where you get your Mars slash space industry news

and analysis from? Wow. Excellent read. I'm actually really excited about this because I just recently remembered through all of my use of Twitter lists that those are also public if you want them to be. So I made a public, I remembered that my list was public.

I have this news list on my Twitter account, and I can never figure out how to actually get to the lists in a URL format, so I've recently remembered that part, and I will put that in the show notes. And this is a little list of news sources, companies, interesting people that are always posting about their companies or projects or whatever. And that's kind of like my main Twitter feed these days. I don't often read my straight-up timeline, typically just this space news feed. and that's kind of just like my daily thing that I'm going through. And I also, a lot of that is a big crossover with a big RSS list of feeds that I have going there.

So that's typical space news, spaceflight now, Lauren Grush at the Verge, got the space science feed in there. What's all the other great ones? Eric Berger of Ars Technica is a definite go-to. Let's see, what's the other like main ones in there? Planetary Society blog has been really good for all these different planetary missions going on right now. A lot of good policy stuff in there as well. I used to do more Reddit, but I don't do that too much anymore. It's mostly my RSS feeds, and that feed list is freaking long.

So I can post, maybe I can find a way to post my OPML file or something as well. Yeah. So I'll link to those things because there's just too many of the name. I need to be better at using RSS feeds. I don't do that now. I have basically Twitter and I have yeah like the go-to sites

that I just kind of hit. I get the Space News email which is a good summary. That's a really good one. That's we should definitely mention that. It's first up by Space News. That's like a definite and there's an RSS feed for that as well.

Yeah. Eric Berger's got the Rocket one. What's it called? Rocket Report. Yeah, that's a good one too. And then for, yeah, planetary stuff, you have to have NASA JPL. They're in their news feed. And then the Curiosity team does a blog like three, four times a week.

And they post that on the AGO website, which is really good. So you can stay up on that mission. Honestly, for Rover News, just looking at the raw pictures sometimes tells you quite a bit about what's going on. that's one that I use I think that's kind of it I mean and the Martian Soil Twitter account that's a good one too

Yoast Yoast Shout out to Yost Should we do picks Because that's sort of piggy You know we should We should also honestly just mention As a source of news

Is the Discord Oh the Discord is a great place Not to plug our own stuff here Not to plug our own Lifestyle brand But to plug it The Discord is a great place to learn news. That's accurate. Yeah, if I've had like a busy day of like real life work,

I'll just like pop in there, see if anything major has happened and then go, whew, I miss nothing. Yep. Cool. Cool. You got any other picks? I have a, I guess. No, I don't. Never mind. You don't have any picks for this week, this month. I do, but I'm not done it yet. That's fine. You can give like a tentative pick. All right. All right. So, unless you're not feeling it. If you're not feeling it's right? No, no, I'm feeling. Okay, so if you're watching on Twist, or Twist, twist. One more of these, okay. If you're watching on Twitch, you can see that I am now actually in my new studio. So I got these cool space audio panels behind me. I'm using my road mic for the first time, I think since July. Like, it's been quite a while that I've had this out,

and I feel awesome about it. And in my new studio, I'm building a shelf up here, and I am determined to have a shelf with real books on it. I am an awful reader. I don't have real books, but I want to have real books. And so I went on eBay and started just buying stuff for like really cheap, like old like library sales and stuff that you can get. And I started with Steve Squire's book, Roving Mars.

Of course he did. Yeah. It's a really good book so far. I'm only through like the first couple sections. But learning about how the mission came together and stuff, Spirit and Opportunity Rover. How the missions came together is really fascinating. As every planetary mission,

it's never a straightforward path. And it's been good to read. So I'm excited to get into the assembly, landing ops part of it, and I'll go from there. So yeah, my pick is Roving Mars, by Steve Squires, and it's my journey into real books again. Journey into real books.

Well, I picked a real book, but I did pick a real book, and then I listened to another podcast, and it was too good that I can't not mention it here, so I have two picks. Recently, there was a Planetary Society podcast, Planetary Radio, is the name of their podcast. There was an episode all about Dragonfly, go team dragonfly, and it was a great,

great episode that I think gives you a lot for all the crap we did about Dragonfly this is a fantastic interview and it's just amazing so I'm going to link to that because it's so good to go listen to it but let me grab this real book so shout out to I work full-time job at a place called Big Cartel and every year I've been there four years now so they send us a little gift

and they always send me some spacebook that somehow they haven't gotten me a spacebook that I don't have yet. And this year, I got this book. This is called Abandoned in Place. I've heard of this. I had two, and it had been on my list. So this is by somebody named Roland Miller.

And it's a collection of photos of old facilities at the Cape and other places, not just the Cape. It's like some Marshall Space Flight Center in here, some Stennis, some Vandenberg stuff. there's really like any facility that you could imagine in here. And it's all of facilities that have been abandoned in place over the years. The interesting thing is that a lot of the photos are from like the 80s to 90s to 2000s. So a lot of these launch sites, there's a whole section on here about launch complex 13

and how sad it is that it's dissembled and you've fallen apart. And there's freaking about Falcon 9s landing on it now. So the photos are old, right? I think this edition at least mentions Falcon 9 so it's fairly updated but you know the photos in there are of these places that are now like

rebirthed into something new and the places that Blue Origins taken over is in here and it's pretty amazing to see that cycle happened because it was like look at how decrepit the entire cape is and everything's crumbling nothing's happening and then all the sudden

boom there's you can't get a launch site on the cape if you wanted one today so although relativity just did but it's really cool it's awesome it's like it would be a snapshot of the dark period yeah and that's kind of what I like about it is like there was a lot of doom and gloom of this time period and it captures that in a way that it's a very weird

caught between Apollo and shuttle and the new era of space it's caught right in that time slot there and it's you know at the same time as like the old Atlas pads were shutting down, the Atlas 5 pad was coming on. And, you know, they put Challenger away into the silo

and Launch Complex 31, 32, and next door was the launch complex 34, monument to Apollo 1, and all those things are falling apart, but then all around it are these new startups, and I feel like it's a really good story of this era of space. So it's pretty big-ass book, too. Yeah, it looks like lots of nice,

high quality pictures in there, is that right? It's awesome. I feel like the paper feels great in that book. It's thick paper, yeah. You're always like, I think I'm holding two pieces of paper, or is this just one page? Awesome. Cool. Yeah, I also want to echo your O-A, like that picture.

This is the F-1 test stand out at Edwards Air Force Base. Really cool stuff in here. So, anyway. Yeah, I also want to echo your. your planetary radio pitch, that episode was really good. It's such a shame that that mission won't fly. Yeah.

Just a little shade for the end of the episode. Team Caesar. Get your t-shirts at shop.com. Oh, yeah, we should plug the shirts. Plug the shirts. That's the start of the lifestyle brand. Oh, man. we wrap the sucker up? Yeah, I have one more thing to talk about though. All right. I just wanted to say

that if you are in the Phoenix area, coming up, February 8th, it'll be an off-nominal meetup. It's just me. Anthony will not be there. So if you only like Anthony and you despise me, this event is not for you. Meet me at yards. It's around my birthday-ish. So February 8th at 6 p.m., we are meeting at the McFaite Brewing Company in Scottsdale. I'm down covering a space conference. We will be having a few pints on the Friday night there and just talking about whatever we want to talk about. So if you're in the area, I would love to meet up with you.

No RSVP or anything. I'm going regardless. So just show up 6 o'clock when we'll get there. And you can, we'll put the link in the show notes, but events. Dot op-nominal.spaces is where all the details are, the address, everything like that. And yeah, I would love to meet any of our listeners who are in the Phoenix area. That's going to be rad. I hope so.

You got to remember to get a photo. I think you forgot one last time. Yeah, I'm bad at that, especially when I drink. Well, Jake, until next time. Did you have fun on your Twitch? Yeah, we got some things to work out. Yeah, yeah, we do. We're in beta.

It's fine. Luckily, it looks like there's only like two or three people. Yeah, we're in. Stealth face. Yeah. That's what all the cool space companies say. But now everyone's going to listen to this and they're going to subscribe and the next one is going to be public. Yeah, we've got to do some work before then.

Yeah. Good thing I'm going into like the busiest month of my life. So that's good. I'll try it out on my end. I think I have like six flights in the next 30 days. So we'll see how that goes. I don't even know what to say to them. You broke my brain.

That's too much. I work from home. Yeah, I don't. Cool. That's all I got. See you. Hope NASA reopens this next time. Yeah, I hope so.

That would be really, really sad if it's not open by the next top nominal.