Off-Nominal - 173 - A Bigger Diaper (with Scott “Kidd” Poteet)

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

Jake and Anthony are joined by Scott “Kidd” Poteet, Mission Pilot of Polaris Dawn, retired United States Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, and former Thunderbird #4 Demonstration Pilot, to talk about his recent flight to space.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 173 - A Bigger Diaper (with Scott “Kidd” Poteet) - YouTubePolaris ProgramPolaris DawnPolaris Dawn Crew Returns to Earth, Achieving Major Objectives During Their Five-Day Mission - Polaris ProgramPolaris Program Photos | FlickrFollow KiddKidd Poteet (@KiddPoteet) / XFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

DLS and go for main engine, start. Hello, Jake, this has been a simulation. This has been a simulation. A simulation. We're not live, but we're faux live. It's good to see you. It's a matinee edition. But we are graced with one of the newest astronauts.

I think that's still a true statement, right? One of the three newest astronauts. Has there been a new astronaut? I don't think any of the ones that just flew up with rookies, right? I don't know, honestly. That's a good question. Are we talking to the newest astronaut? Sure, let's go with it.

Let's do it. Let's do it. Oh, yeah. Did you, so when you were flying up, by the way, this is Kid Potee, we just flew on Flares on. You clicked on this show, so you know that. But when you were flying up right before you got to choose your own, your head, former Air Force, so maybe you chose 50 miles as your destination of space.

Did you just, like, sink back in your chair a little bit? So you were the last one to officially make it into space and slid Anna and Sarah forward a little bit? It was actually later in flight when we reached the apogee of 1408. I'm reaching up higher so I could be the first. Everyone's clamoring to the ceiling. That's excellent. So who was it? Who was it for real though?

I would be doing that. Who won that battle? Who won that battle? I'll give it a tie between Sarah and Anna for this woman who ever flown from space. That's legit. There you go. That's a legit fact right there, unlike our fake facts that we've started off with. Jake, what did you drink here on this matinee edition?

So it's a little early for me. I was about 10 a.m. as we're recording this. So I did not load up on a brew or anything. But we're doing diademuerre toast down here. So I made some coffee and I made it spicy. So there's a little bit of cinnamon and chili powder and cocoa powder in this, which is a really fun way of drink. coffee. So yeah, cheers. Don't sleep on that mug though. Let's see that. Let's see that.

Madge Lake, Saskatchewan. Shout out if you've ever been there. Saskatchewan, really? Okay. Yeah. You have roots in Canada? Yeah, yeah. I grew up in Alberta right next door. So. Okay. Yeah. Madge Lake is my wife's family. It's their lake, you know, their summer destination. So we spent our summers in Walker, Minnesota. Brainerd area. It's a couple hours north of the cities.

So close to Canada. Not quite. Yeah. The Canada. Not far from Magic, honestly. So, I also brought coffee. Not spicy.

Not spicy. I am drinking it out of the space exploration engineering Yeti, as I'm known to do. But it's just regular La Cologne coffee once again. Scott, did you bring anything delicious over there? Oh, my gosh.

I didn't know I was supposed to. It could be a one. I got some water. And then I got black coffee from my, uh, my heron-filled. Just spoke at the academy. Shout out to, uh, a local charter school. Nice. Nice. Nice. As the newest astronaut, you're making the circuit. That's legit. Yeah, why not? You know, you got to, uh, inspire the next generation. So totally, totally. Where do you want to start? Jake? There's so many topics. This guy is technically outside of spaceship. I was going to say,

should we tackle the really big question here? Oh, geez, okay. Do you count this as a spacewalk? Did you do a spacewalk? There's debate on the Twitterverse and other places that are not great, but like inside the capsule,

but outside the capsule? What do you think? What's your take? Let's hear. I'll take that. I'll look at glass half full. Right. You know,

space was right there. You know, it was within reach. I had an unbelievable view, actually, when Jared first opened the hatch. It was transitioning through a sunset. And as you guys know, Sarah spent most of the time in the vastness of space. But I'd say the first half, first third of the time that the hatch was open was this immense view of Earth. You know, we got the same views from the windows, but this was obviously a slightly grander view. It's different.

It is. It was a complete sensory overload. I know you guys have heard us talk about this, but just the feelings that we were experiencing, the temperature swings, the changes in your voice, those are all indications that this moment is building up as he's opening the hatch and we're in a vacuum. And then you got this obviously view that it's really hard to describe. You know, I spent the last month and a half trying to articulate the view. And you know, people talk about the overview effect, the orbital perspective. I'm still going to mull on it for another couple of weeks, months to be able to finite my comments.

But the view is just insane. You know when you go like hiking and you're up like up in the mountains? and you get like this nice panorama, some amazing vista where you can see forever and there's mountains mountains. And you like, I got to take a picture of it so you pull your phone out and snap it. And you look at the picture and it just sucks, right?

The picture sucks. And you're like, it's not like the view at all. I imagine space is like an order of magnitude more. Like there's no, there's no way to ever capture putting your own Mark one eye balls on it. You know, ironically, we were so busy up there trying to get as much science and research that we could accomplish.

But when we had moments, and we'd catch glimpses of the earth and it's like we can't pass this up we'd float over the window and my go-to was the iPhone um you know in fact it's this one right here that's crazy that's also crazy yeah it took the best pictures um and we we spent you know we touched upon this in the very beginning before i think you push record but we spent a lot of time with john krause trying to learn how to take good pictures um because we didn't want to pass that opportunity up. And it's a little bit different for the space station because they have so much time available. We knew our opportunities were going to be very fleeting. So we wanted to kind of hone in those

skill sets to be able to take advantage when the, you know, the opportunities arose. I was kind of focused on video and Sera and Anna were kind of focused on taking the images. But, you know, it just happens so quick because the capsule is constantly rotating to point towards satellites and the solar panels. And it's just, you know, these opportunities are so quick. And I just was relying upon the iPhone to kind of take some of these pictures. But to your point, yeah, it was definitely does not do it justice. Harder is to take pictures of Earth moving out of a spaceship or your children. What's the vibe on that?

Well, you know, every time I take a picture of the kids. That might be easier than what I'm dealing with four and two months. So, yeah. Well, the, the, I got teenagers. I got an 18 to 16 or 14. You take pictures of them. It's like they're never happy. Yeah, you got to see it.

So taking a thousand pictures, but maybe lucky to get one that you can post on the internet. I was going to say, does someone like John Krause get mad when you, when he trains you how to use a fancy camera and then you spend all your time? time on an iPhone. Doesn't that trigger a photographer? You know, he's he's almost like the British. He's very polite in his critiques. So he's he doesn't discourage us, but he's not afraid to provide some direct feedback, let's just say. I love it. We're going to have to ask him about that. Got to get back on with that real drink rather than that crazy blue thing he brought on there the one time. That was, he did not do a good job with that drink.

It's great at photos, bad at drinks on a win. He's still young, you know. He joined us before he even turned 21. It's crazy. It's wild. How talented Krauss is for his age. You sometimes forget, but, you know, he's going to go a long way. He's like an Olympic photographer.

Like, I watched the Olympics. I'm like, so the best. you could be at this sport is when you're 17 and then the rest of your life is the down down slope like when you can't be really good at this sport as a 47 year old that sucks and he trains like an olympian you know he is not it's like jared you know constantly going and going and going john's the same way he's like he can't pass up can't take a break and miss a launch he's got to go to hone those skills and he's constantly coming up with new ways to capture the same thing more or less.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's some, we're talking all about our upcoming John Krause interview now, but the one thing I want to really ask him about is just like, is that exact thing. It's like, okay, so this is your 138 Starlink launch. What are you going to do differently this time? It's got to not be easy as a creative person to figure that out. Yeah. And he's, I don't know, he's constantly on the go.

and sleeps in his car to, he's just, his dedication is unwavering for sure. So getting back from, you compare two experiences there, looking out the hatch from a lower altitude, still high, still pretty high. You were at like 700 kilometers?

Yeah. The spacewalk, something like that. Yeah. What would you take that or the super high apogee view at the window? If you went back up today, what are you building the mission around? super high. I mean, we want to continue to push the envelope and go further and further. It was really unique to see the perspective from those different altitudes and all the altitudes in

between. At the higher altitudes, you don't make out the details. You can see continents, you can see oceans and weather patterns in this very round sphere. At the lower altitudes, you know, it's a little more subtle, the horizon, and you can make out the geographical features, the cultivated land. You can see contrails with like a dot in front of the contrail where the airliner is. So it's almost like you're at the really high altitudes. You know, the highest I went on, F-16 was probably 50,000 feet. And obviously this is a lot further than that.

But it had that same kind of perspective. You're looking down and you can see, you know, present day versus at those higher outdudes, it almost like back to the creation of Earth, because there's no boundaries, there's no borders, you can't see any details. It's just this massive globe. That's super interesting.

I would say my favorite is probably the higher altitude. That's wild, too, that it's, I would have figured that perspective would be like someone who went and hung out a geostationary space for a bit, right, where you've got like, you zoomed out to 30,000 kilometers or something, but the difference from ISS altitude up another 600 or another thousand is is that profound. That's really cool. Yeah.

And, you know, the pace as well, the lower altitudes, when you're flying a fighter, people ask, what's it like to go mock or, you know, mock too? It's, you typically do that at the higher altitudes when you don't have this ground rush. And it's other than, you know, you see a little blip on the, on the speedometer. you don't really sense it until you get down low going 400 miles an hour or 500 miles an hour that's the sensation that you feel with regard to speed similar fashion of those higher altitudes it's really subtle yes you're moving but those lower altitudes it was like and the with the rotation taking those images it's like you've got this fleeting opportunity a couple seconds and it's gone.

That's really interesting. I wouldn't have known how to predict that because sometimes I think about altitude and it almost feels like a diminishing return. Like there's like a big difference between like how far I can see it on my yard if I'm on the patio or if I'm on the roof, which is like, you know, whatever, 15 feet or whatever it is. And I feel like every every increment you do after that gets you less and less benefit for in terms of like how far you can see, right, which kind of makes sense.

But it's interesting. So I almost wasn't sure. Like, I'd almost think like, yeah, there's not really that big a difference to what you can see at, you know, 400 or 800 or 1200. Like, to me, I don't know. I wouldn't have expected that. So that's really interesting to hear that. Well, the level of roundness is going to go up pretty substantially up where you guys were at max altitude. Yeah.

That's like a really, you know, intense globe for you at that point. Yeah, absolutely. And you can really sense it with the with the sunrises and sunsets, which was probably my favorite, dawn, you know, ironically. like this thin blue line. And it's just like, it's so simple on some of the pictures that we have, but it's like there's just something about it. And it just, this radiant glow just increases and engulfs and just more or less takes over the globe.

And it's just, but the lighting is, and this is super geeky and it's probably better articulated by Kraus. But it's not your pure sunlight when you look outside. It's just this weird atmospheric glow. that again is really hard to describe. Yeah, yeah. Not a lot of confusion, right?

What was your vibe on dark side? So one of the most impactful moments for all of us was, I think it was day four. And I can remember who it was. I think it was Sarah picked up the Northern Lights. Actually, let me back up a second. So at night, you know, you can make out the cultural lighting, you know, especially when there was like this really thin. cloud layer, it just provided this like mute lighting from the cultural lighting.

And then you could pick up little like sparkles from the lightning. So you'd see this every once in a while. And then there was one incident within like a couple minutes. All these things happened at once where you saw the cultural lighting. You saw the lightning. And then Sarah would make up the northern lights. So you could see all three of these at one time. And then we floated up to the Fort Hatch and you could see the moon and all these stars.

And all of a sudden we started making out the Starlink train constellation going by. Oh, really? So all these sensations at once. And we're like scrambling to turn off the interior lighting so we could get some images. But, you know, back to your point, it was just we could not do it justice. Complete overload. I feel like that would mess me up. Like the, I think the, like, I don't know, the richness of a visual experience like that,

I feel like later I would just be like, no, I don't know about stuff anymore. I think the closest we can get is the total eclipse. Like, we both talked about the experience of being in it when you feel like you've just entered a different dimension of the solar system because you're looking at it like you're in the solar system, not like you're on Earth looking up at it. But you're just like all of a sudden, like, wow, that's the edge of the sun and those are the other planets. That's like the best feet on the ground experience that takes you out of Earth.

way but it sounds very much like that where all of a sudden you've got yeah you're like are we too close to those star links because that's a lot of satellites going by and we had to inquire we're like are you know you guys tracking this and they're like oh yeah we are yeah that's your internet going by which was phenomenal it's a legit face time call that's a big iPhone ad this whole thing I know I think we need to be pushing this because how it happened was very naturalized. You know, we had the whole violin event planned, and that was going to be the bid broadcast over Starlink.

But as soon as they flipped it on, they're like, hey, you know, instead of using the radios and the downlink for family calls, we want you guys to try some FaceTime. And, you know, typically when you're talking, you're stepping each other because there's a slight delay, it's audio only, it's just awkward, you know, 80s, 90s kind of technology. But then they said, hey, let's give FaceTime a try. And as soon as we turned it on, we hooked up to the

internet, we FaceTime, and I'm staring at my entire family. I got three kids and a wife. Wife's at home with the dog, and then the three kids are at school. One's in class with the teacher in the background. The other one's on her way to her northeastern class. It's just like, this is where we're at, you know? I'm on the image, giving them a tour of space and, oh, here we are flying over South America. And then I look around and I see my three crewmates floating around in the capsule talking to their families. And it's like, that's where we are. And the connectivity was phenomenal. I mean, it was like we were on Earth talking. There was no delay. There was no stepping on each other. It was other than stepping on each other in the capital, trying to put their own

little space to talk. I mean, you're closer to the satellites than Jake is right now on himself. I think you got some priority bandwidth because I still step over guests on this show here and there and I'm on earth fully, fully on the ground. I do know it's a little delay, so I'm like trying to keep up with it. Yeah. Oh, interesting. It is cool to consider the fact that the fact that spaceships are going on that journey at the same time as airplanes is kind of fun.

Like the fact that both kinds of air and spacecraft are getting this connectivity at the same time as like every airliner in the world is like, we're going to do Starlink 2. And you're like, yeah, now we have legit internet, not, you know, Tidress, delayed weird comms from the ISS. I know. And we've done interviews and podcasts from Jared's aircraft once it got Starlink. And it's just we delivered some Starlink to Africa. And on the way, it's just like we had connectivity the entire route. It's definitely a game changer.

A funny moment actually was a text I got from my kid. We just finished the spacewalk. And Logan, my son, he's cross-country runner. And he's like, he texts me. He goes, hey, dad, nice spacewalk. Can I get some Nike vaporfly shoes? I'm just like, okay, here we are. Here we are.

I am floating in space. Just finished a spacewalk. And this kid's more worried about his running to tire. Just in case you thought you were special for a brief moment there. Yeah. Still dad. Yeah, check out my drip, dad. I'm curious to pick your brain on the run-up to this mission.

as well, because especially with your role on Inspiration 4, you were mission director for that, right? And we saw you on Netflix and all that, working a lot on all of the other aspects of the mission, not being crew and all of that. Were there any, like, learnings from that time that changed the way that you prepared for this flight, either personally, but also as a crew with Anna and Sarah, who are going through the process the first time as well, where there are things that you and Jared picked up, like, oh, we should or shouldn't do that, or we could do less of this and more of that. obviously EVA stuff aside.

Like, kind of curious, just flight preps generally how it was different this time around. Yeah, lessons learned. From inspiration to Polaris. Yeah. Yeah, it's the second time through that you guys are taking people that haven't been astronauts before and making new astronauts. And the first time, I feel like there were probably more unknowns in terms of, you know, SpaceX is like, you know, one of their early crew flights. So now there's tens of people that have flown on Dragon. So is the prep coming down?

Is it getting to be the case where, like, you know, you could throw one of us in there and not worry too much? Or do you still feel like there's an element of that prep that's really, you know, intensely necessary? Yeah, that's a good point. You know, we got, we did it right with Inspiration 4. And the fact that, and going into that, we didn't know what we were doing on the Inspiration 4 side. It was like we're making this up as we go along. and we had the vision. Based on Jared's conversation with SpaceX,

and the ultimate goal is to prove that anyone could go to space and that we are fairly limited on our time structure. We had six months to make this all happen. So we built the mission profile was designed based on that in mind. And the fact that we didn't know. who the crew is going to be with the selection of and it was very important that we partnered with with st jude to continue to benefit life here back on earth so those were kind of the the milestone or the pillars if you will that we weren't going to deviate from

otherwise it was like okay what are the necessary skill sets that we need to build out to make this team cohesive as well as safe um and prepared for what they were going to experience. And that was kind of the framework for Inspiration 4. It was successful in my mind. And then we quickly transitioned into preparing for Polaris. And so all those lessons learned were fairly fresh. And there is some basic concepts that Jared implemented that we built upon

or just rinse and repeats for preparation for our mission. But what was unique about us was it was developmental test. We're going to do things that are, take this to the next level. And in similar fashion, what NASA did with initial spaceflight, Mercury and Apollo, going to the moon, in between there, you got Gemini. That needed to solve some of those challenges, the first docking, the first spacewalk, multi-duration,

or multi-day missions. multi-crew in a similar fashion, hey, what does SpaceX need to accomplish, overcome in order to get back to the moon and Mars? And that's why we came up with the spacewalk and space suit development. So that was the big focus. And it's like, okay, we've got a very experienced crew, meaning the backgrounds. You know, you got Serenana. And then operational test, experience in the military flying of 16s, and then Jared, obviously, a proven astronaut with his aviation background. We had a pretty good foundation to start from, but we wanted to take some of those concepts, the training practices that we did in Inspiration 4. We didn't necessarily know the timeline was going to end up being two and a half years.

I can't imagine any of you were shocked by that. No, you know, it was It was like, okay, we're going to put a flag out here for a tentative launch date, and it just kept on shifting further and further out. You know, we saw the ride in the wall as we began the development. But all, the principles more or less remain the same, but certain things were definitely enhanced. Yeah, the focus is different. I mean, it tracks very well to inspiration for being Mercury in the like answering, can we do this? and Gemini answering the how do we do this

and then the Apollo being the thing that we did which so I feel like you're in that framework it tracks pretty well to this being you know obviously the flight two stuff that's out there of like what is flight two going to be and there's the Hubble drama and my dumb theories and Jake's dumb theories and

it's fun to theorize but it's notable from the outside you know how how serious business this one looks considering what's being developed, which is really cool to see because it's not just, you know, a lot of the inspiration four days and even how that gets lumped in with some of the starting of Virgin Galactic and Blue Origins, suborbital flights. A lot of non-space people can just be like, oh, it's just billionaires flying around. But there's definitely like a serious business tone to the things that Polaris is

choosing to take on and help, you know, usher along the development from the SpaceX side, which is pretty cool. Yeah. It was, um, it was, um, it was, um, um, it was, um, we definitely pushed limits, scar tissue along the way. I mean, but it was all necessary to get to the point of us accomplishing these objectives. You know, it was, we certainly weren't going to launch, and to your point, we knew delays were going to happen, and they were definitely necessary to ensure that it was a safe mission. because there was a lot of critical feedback, you know, on social media about, you know, taking two bite, too big a bite of the elephant on this one.

But we were confident in the team that was putting this entire project together. Couldn't ask for a better end result as far as the success of the mission. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's cool. I think you're definitely on to it there, Anthony. Like the, it's really easy to dismiss a lot of this stuff as like, just kind of like frivolent forless like, you know, pleasure cruises, I guess you can almost say that. So it's nice.

I mean, inspiration forwarded this to you, right? They had a great undertone of, of accessibility and supporting St. Jude and stuff. And then this one, like you said, is, yeah, there's, there's like hard work being done this one. So that was, it was pretty cool. I agree. Yeah. I haven't think though that inspiration for stuff was even if it was Jared and three other billionaire buddies is still a dumb take because it's I'm like it's the first one like I think there's definitely a legitimate question of like can can we do the whole normal person in space thing is a legit question however much money they have in their pocket is completely separate from that if this is the 400th space flight that dragon has ever done then sure like pile on the criticism but I'm like it's the first one that's that's a thing you know so I'll that's that's only a standard

It's only important to us, though. I know, but whatever. So all this stuff is, right? Like, we're the space nerds. But that's my point is that, like, I will, I will go out there and fight that fight happily. Yeah. So, yeah. That's a whole other thing.

A whole other thing. Yeah. I want to ask about, like, I don't know how, how technical you can get with some of the stuff. But I got, I mean, I have, like, 100 questions about the space suit. And I know that some of it is going to be just, you know, ask SpaceX kind of stuff. But I'm just kind of curious about your experience with it. Like this is, this is obviously SpaceX's first EVA style suit. And so there's changes you have to make to that. I know when we were watching, like, some people were like, oh, you know, oh, it's a spacewalk. And I'm just kind of

like, how well do his joints move? I want to know if it was like, where, you know, if it's working out, well, there's stuff. I've got thermal questions, all this kind of stuff that I'm asking myself. So I'm just kind of curious to hear maybe off the top. After just criticizing me for that's the thing that we care about. Go on, Jake. Let's get let's go deeper. Yeah. Yeah, I'll probably, I'll probably skip the beeps and squeaks and the numbers and all that. Probably, uh, because I don't know them or I'm not allowed to talk about them.

Yeah. But as far as my experience with it, um, you know, when we first started out, it was, it was an IVA suit with, with some modifications to it. Um, and Jared highlights this quite a bit. interviews. It's like we would provide feedback at the end of a week, training week, and then we come back on Monday morning, and they spent the weekend making certain modifications, adapting some new innovative technology into a joint to try different types of technology to see what's better. So they were relentless in their efforts to make improvements. It wasn't a matter of settlement.

at any point. And obviously the biggest focus was spent on the joints, some of the avionics technology, as well as the thermal layers. As far as my experience on orbit, for exceeded expectations. You know, one of the concerns they consistently had for us is like, okay, where's your hotspots?

Where is the suit irritating when it's unpressurized, when it's pressurized based on, the durations were expected to spend in these suits. You know, typical, it's like I had the base of the thumb was an irritant hot spot and then the back of the neck for me specifically when you talk about biometrics. But up there, zero. No issues whatsoever. And I think that is attributed to, you know, being a 1G versus zero.

I was going to say, is that the 0G or did they fix it? Yeah. Well, it was both. Fixed in production. Eric Krause. One of the tax, he was like, relentless. How that works, Jake. It works on my machine is a very common software excuse.

And it just turns out that SpaceX machine is just in goddamn space. It totally works up there. But he was, Eric, one of the texts, he was constantly, he was relentless on trying to make improvements based on comfort. And he was always tinkering coming up with something. knew to enhance or improve or streamline the suit. So the comfort level was was better than expected. As far as thermal was concerned, you know, one of the big concerns is the heat, getting too hot in the suit. I actually was getting too cold. That had a little to do with the body function of a 50-year-old man having a pee every 30 minutes.

So the opposite of the Olympic conversation. It turns out, old men, great. Great at space. I was borderline hypothermic because I was so cold. Because they had this additional secondary flow, which was good for coolant. That was my issue. Everyone else was super comfortable.

And then the heads-up display. It provided, you know, the data we needed to be able to execute our mission with the pressure of the suit, relative humidity, temperature, time, all the information that was critical to make us confident that the suit was working properly in the vacuum. Did that feel as Iron Man as it sounds? Yeah. You know, it's being a fighter pilot and wearing... I was going to say, you probably wore all the original versions of that. So yeah. Yeah, I mean, let's just say these are early developmental stages.

Not the best one that you've used, I suppose. Always wanting something more. In fact, we were there the other day for a debrief and they're asking, okay, what would you, what else would you want to add? And I'm like, just keep adding. You know, it's information overload. If I can, you know, have it your way, you know, to be able to select, deselect information, the more intel you can get, the better.

Is it the F-35 that has the helmet that allows you to, like, see through the plane entirely? Yep. I think maybe that would be good up in space. That would be good. I miss that by about five years in my career. Yeah. It's probably more expensive than the entire Polaris Dawn program, but it would probably be good.

in space. That's, uh, that's for sure. I was thinking recently about those, um, is it the Apache helicopters that have the, the helmet with like the one eye is covered with like some information. And, and there's like, I think I've read that like there are certain people that just can't do it. Because you have to kind of like look at two things at the same time because you've got like, it's like a different depth of field. There's information like this and like you, you, you train to like learn how to use the helmet. And there's just like some people just don't have whatever biology you need to just like figure that out and they're just like you know you can't be an apache pilot or whatever it is so yeah there's a pretty wild yeah they have a monocle um and they have uh they have them for fighter jets as

well scorpion is what our enemies uh use we have what's called jahmix and it's um most of the data is focused to infinity so you can actually focus on it without having to adjust your near and far so you can kind of look through it uh almost similar to what uh those elementary speedometers have in cars now with the projected up on the windscreen yeah yeah so it's similar technology but uh in SpaceX fashion in fact we were there last week and they're already talking about newer versions of what we flew with so you know we're old news with the was that part of the idea though that some of that might feed back into even the IVA version of the suit i don't know what what and obviously not the environment

environmental control stuff, but is any of the helmet tech or something that could be useful down in the IVA version? I can't imagine them not, because these are all customized suits for anyone who goes up. So I would imagine they're definitely going to incorporate some of these elements into IVA suits at the same time in parallel effort. They're going to continue to work on the next version of the EVA suit. You know, we wouldn't do this program justice if we didn't capitalize on what we learned and approved the things that necessarily didn't work as great as we expected in order to move

the needle because this wasn't a joyride. The whole purpose of this is to continue to push and get further down this track of getting back, you know, to the lunar surface of Mars. Yeah. This HUD stuff gets really excited because one of the things that I'm like jazzed about in terms of SpaceX making a suit is that like they approach everything the same way where they're just going to like challenge every assumption and not compromise and like you know and iterate and improve really quickly and I feel like like spacesuits like EVA space suits like on the basically our other

example is the NASA side and like bless NASA's heart but those things are kind of struggling they're kind of old and you hear stories about them. There's always like the, you know, the water breaches and the astronauts come off EVAs with like bleeding knuckles and stuff from rubbing against the joints and that kind of thing. They sound kind of tough, right? They don't fit a lot of the astronauts. So I feel like that's a ripe area for disruption and I'm really excited to hear some of

the stuff that SpaceX is going to stir it up with. Yeah. And, you know, it's I'm sure they're working on their efforts to improve and develop and evolve. But they can be parallel programs. Sure. And there is collaboration that's happening between all these organizations. It's certainly not a stovepipe. So throughout the entire development of our suit, we were relying upon the resources of NASA and all their expertise and years and decades of experience doing this to ensure that we

we got it right, A, with a priority on safety and B, and proving the capability and the technology. And, you know, we spent two sessions at JSC, one in the chamber early on, you know, to learn about the physiology of the pre-breeved protocol. And then more later in the program, closer to launch, is when we actually tested the flight suits in the vacuum. and they were right there with us the entire time, going through the feedback and discussing things we experienced. That was hugely beneficial. And that kind of attributed to the training that we went through is having that experience to go into the vacuum in your suit,

to feel those sensations, the temperature deviations, the cooling effect that you have going down in a vacuum, the voice changes, all those things you anticipated on orbit and it didn't catch you off guard so you could focus your attention and stay concentrated and compartmentalize on the important stuff. Yeah, if your voice starts changing, you're like, I think I might have an issue here. Something's happening. I don't know. You know, we have this like that promotional video that's recently been released.

And I hear Jared speaking when he pops out of the capsule, or, you know, during the EBA. And I can tell his voice is slightly changed. That's really funny. Is there like, we talked about lessons learned, but maybe I want to ask that question again and zero in right on like the ops of a spacewalk. So you plan, you know, Polaris on how you're going to operate. to spend on that. You're developing the suit at the same time.

Then you go and do it. So like coming back and if you're going to provide guidance to Polaris Day or whatever the next one is going to be called. You know, is it going to be like what are you going to change about how you, you know, advice you would give to the next person has to get in that suit and do operations in it. Ooh. What advice you give.

You can also just send over the training module people. PDFs if you want. We'll be happy to look at those, you know. That would work. Even I don't have access to that. If you did, it would have said wear a sweater, you know? You would have been a little warmer up there. Wear a bigger diaper. The, you know, I think I'm putting on my Bauter Pilot instructor hat at this point.

It's like, what is your objective? You know, I think that needs to be identified first. It's are they going to go with the self-contained emu type development of this suit? And if that's the case, ultimately, what is your objective at that point? I would say one of the biggest lessons learned, which is what we did it right, is just time in the suit. And this gets back to the basic element of learning any skill set. It's like the more reps you have, the more they become secondary and subconscious behaviors. So just putting on the suit at 1G can be challenging at times.

And we did it constantly. It got easier and easier. Once we got up on orbit, zero G, that was so easy when you're just, when you adapt. When the body adapts and you get used to the whole fluid shift and moving within the capsule because it takes a lot less energy, you're overcompensating initially just trying to float around when all it takes is just a slight push or to stabilize yourself. In similar fashion, you kind of get in that position to be able to put the suit on. And what we had planned for volume requirements to don't and doff the suit, more or less you cut it in half. Typically right there in front of the suits by the side hatch is where we would don't adopt the suit.

It got to a point where, you know, even after the EVA, I was in the outboard suit way up in the corner. and I was just waiting, you know, for the girls to adopt their suits. I'm like, I'm just going to try it right here. And in zero-g and the way the suit is designed, it took me two minutes to get the suit off. And that was attributed to, you know, all our experience don't and off the suits on Earth. And then just the ease factor when you're operating in a zero-g environment. So I guess advice, one would be reps, getting used to the technology. We didn't have any issues with the suits at all to do any repairs.

We were trained on that, how to fix things. It's funny. This is drawing more Gemini iconology for me here. Because wasn't that the whole thing when they started doing the spacewalk? So they struggled with the first couple, especially like Gene Surin, I think really, really had a rough spacewalk. I think he was like the second one, right? And then over-exerting himself and sweating and fighting the suit and all that kind of thing. And then I think wasn't it, wasn't it Buzz Aldrin that kind of came out and said,

okay, what if I try and work with the flow instead of against it and those tiny motions and kind of like documented like how to do it. And that was sort of the way they went forward with it, I think, right? And we learned from that, you know, And some of the suits team, they're passionate about the history of suit development. And they would study Apollo and Mercury and Gemini and all the different suits throughout the history of spaceflight. And that was common, the cornerstones of developing the spacesuit program of how we approached it and addressed some of those issues. And that's why we did so many reps for the spacewalk.

And it, you know, we could do it in our sleep how many times we went through the rehearsal throughout some of the specialized training that we did in the simulator of, you know, the communication of who's going to say what and when, what are we looking for? What are the issues at certain phases throughout this process? And now all the contingencies, what if this happened? So we're constantly rehearsing all those steps that it became, once we executed, it was so much easier than any of the training events we had performed, you know, previously in the last two and up years.

That works. Do you have practice and no gravity is a big, big engine. Yeah, not the dominating force of your life and the lack of it. It's pretty, pretty good. Do you have plans beyond this in terms of yourself with the players program? Are you going to revert to mission director mode? Are you moving on to the hangout now that you've achieved every fighter pilot's dream of being an astronaut? I assume that's true.

I'm going to hang out with you guys. Just talk shit on the internet. Bartender on the flight deck of Starship. Is that what it's going to be? Who knows what the future holds? Everyone's just kind of a taking a breather right now. We've, we just finished this whole thank you tour. We hit up all the different SpaceX facilities down in Texas and Florida and Redmond and Seattle and obviously Hawthorne.

Just to meet with the various teams and say thank you and do a lot of Q&As and pick their brain as well as share the experiences. is just so they understand how thankful, A, we are of their efforts and getting the success of this program. And B, just to have them ask the questions that they want to ask that are specific to what they were working on. So we spent a lot of time doing that. We're doing a lot of, I'm doing a lot of school visits locally. just share the story and get the word out and try to inspire the next generation. So there's still conversations going on about Polaris II. And I think the main objective is to just identify what are the objectives?

You know, what can we learn from players Don that we can leverage and move on and continue to move the needle for players two? And then obviously Starship for Playa's three. Do you want to hear my three dumb proposals for Polaris II? I don't know if Jake's heard of all. You alluded to it earlier, so I want to know. I got, no, I have two other off-the-board ones that you've not heard about. Jake hasn't even heard of one of these, and I thought this is a good time.

I said, you're still thinking about it, and I'm talking to Jared on Friday for the other show that I do. So this is my week to make a pitch on these ideas for Polaris 2. Number one, my original idea was the first human flight to polar orbit. This has been squashed by Fram 2's existence. So I rescind that one and offer two others. Okay. Jared untethered spacewalk. So this is the Bruce McCannless version of a spacewalk where he flies away in a little jetpack

gets disturbingly far from the spacecraft and flies back. That's number one. A little bit further though. He's got to go a little more than McCandless, 100%. Just a little. Yeah. Who's a badass? And I think was one of the flight controllers in the Apollo era, right?

Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. A little bit further, though, like that's not nothing. And he, you got to look that up. He went far. Like he went, like he said, disturbingly far. It was like, okay, maybe I feel like we've accomplished the task.

He's like, no, no, I'm going to keep going a little bit further. You're like, you're getting really small. I can't quite see you. That's my main pitch. Second one is, y'all aren't apparently allowed to fly to Hubble. So I think you should do the next best thing and send John Krause up with a really fucking huge camera lens. That's my replace the Hubble with John Krause is my.

my second offer. Maybe we send cross out one vector and then Jared out another and get this. It's like a tether experiment. Yes. What if we riff on the Gemini idea and we do like dragon orbiting laboratory with like an extra module on the bottom? And then in there we do like the the 1970s idea of like what if we put people in space to do like spy satellite stuff and we install like a giant telescope in the. you know, pointing down at Earth and then John Krause can take pictures of... I think kids got some contacts that probably worked in that program.

So that was an Air Force thing. That'll read well in headlines. Billionaire makes spy satellite out of Elon Musk's spacecraft. That'll do great in the late 2020s, yes. Oh, wow. Yeah, you're on to something with the untethered. that definitely would move the needle

I mean the only thing you gotta work on is boots you got to do untethered and then you got to do boots and I don't know if there's any other rocky surface that you would get to on the flight to you know that's more of a post-starship

you know that's a I mean Polaris three boots that would be good oh yeah oh shit that tracks with Eric Berger's

current layout of what the the initial HLS Starship flight might be. So that's a good one. That's out the eclis on a store ship. There we go. And John Kraus.

And John Kraus. Yeah. We're really lobbying. John, hit me up, man. I'm doing the work for you, buddy. We'll get him there. He's either going to love us or hate us talking about him here when he watches this. We'll slot him on the schedule and we'll hash this out on what he would do on an untethered

spacewalk with a giant, giant runs. So wait, I made an oblique reference. of this, but I'm curious if, as you made your way to being a fighter pilot, did you have astronaut on your wish list, or was this a little off of what you expected? You know what? I made a bucket list when I was like a preteen. I got to dig it up because my wife asked me the other day if it was on there. Honestly, though, I grew up in the 80s. You know, the original Top Gun came out. The double VHS, right stuff was released in the mid-80s. Those were absolutely my inspiration to pursue Fodipa.

I was a terrible student, C's and D's straight up. The only reason why I went to college was because I was recruited to run cross-country and track. So I got into college, went to University of New Hampshire, failing miserable as a student, got involved with the academic program called Outdoor Education. So I figured, okay, I can't. I can't, I'm not good in the classroom. Here, let's take the class out in the woods.

So it was a lot of scuba diving, rock climbing, winter, mountain rain. My wife went to Hopkins and knew a lot of the lacrosse players there. She was a lacrosse player. But on the men's side, some of them not the smartest, great lacrosse players, would take a class called rocks for jocks. And I'm pretty sure that's what you took. Pretty sure you were a rocks for jocks guy. But it was an entire academic program.

My degree is in outdoor education, which actually, you know, fast forward, what is it, 30-something years? What we did to train for space, climbing coat epoxy, Rainier, flying fighter. So there's a lot of this experiential learning. We did training for space that I did back then. Anyways, back to the point.

And on top of not being a good, you know, this is the shuttle era. When you're the selection to be an astronaut was you've got to have this aeronautical engineering and physics and whatever. So I knew it wasn't not in my cards. And on top of that, I was intensely affected by motion sickness and a fear of heights. But on a whim, I decided, hey, let's go in the back of this, KC135.

I was invited to go check it out at the local guard base, puked the entire flight in the back as a freshman in college. but I got two minutes up in the boom, or back in the boom, to watch F-16s pull up and get refueled and peel off. And I was already inspired by Tom Cruise and Top Gun, and here's this, you know, at 16 that, hey, all I got to do is do this ROTC program and I could be a fighter pilot. I got to overcome a lot of things. You get smarter and get past my motion sickness and my fair heights. You class, yeah. Yeah, I was sold on that. commonly associated with being in the Air Force, by the way, who was like,

really smart guys who don't get motion sick. Great. And you're like, I can do that. I can sell all this in one go. Maybe I'm not selling it well right now, but that was my catalyst. That was my spark. Never dreamed space was an option. So I did 20 years as a fighter pilot.

Retired. I thought I was going to retire. But I got hooked up with Jared and, in some of his endeavors with Drachin and Chiff 4 and all that, certainly unpredictable. Even when we started Inspiration 4, it was like I had initial thoughts in the beginning, like, oh my gosh, he's going to space.

Maybe I'll get my chance. And it was quickly squashed with, no, this is bigger than taking your fishing buddies to space. This is about, you know, doing something significant with the program that we came up with. But I was sold in his vision. I was a big believer in what he was trying to accomplish and what SpaceX was doing.

I'm like, I'm going to contribute as much as I possibly can. And so I became a director. I wouldn't call a mission director. Everyone labels it as mission director. What they do is SpaceX is a totally different ballgame. I was getting coffee. I was coordinating logistics, trying to get them to their training.

Anything and everything the crew needed, I was trying to help out with. So it wasn't until that faithful day, you know, a couple weeks prior to Inspiration 4 launch is when I had that conversation with Jared about Polaris. Wow. That's pretty awesome. Before the inspiration for launch, yeah. It was right around there. Okay.

Yeah. Just see you can watch it with a different perspective, hey? Yeah, it's slightly different. See, if I was Jared, I would have told you a lot sooner so that when you were doing all the training and everything, you would have had your head and more in the game. That's how I would have run the show. I know. I got a little bit of at the beginning of our training. I'm like, man, I just, I should have listened to all that academics.

You know, I was too busy, like coordinating lunches and all the little nitnoid stuff. There you were once again behind on your tests. You're right back in it. Well, seriously, this experience, and people ask me, what was the most challenging thing? And like, the easiest was flying the fighter jets. The hardest, though, was keeping up with those three. You know, they're brilliant minds. Their intellect level is already off the charts.

Now we're in a subject that they are experts in. and I'm the you know here I am just trying to keep up like do you ever fly a plane four feet away from another plane because it's pretty that's pretty hard you know that's like which it is and they're like yeah that's really hard that's harder than anything else I do like that's impossible that's a hand-eye coordination thing that's like didn't look at from the beach where I was watching uh huh Jake you have you ever seen uh something like the thunderbirds Jake yeah yeah Yeah, yeah, I've done air shows and stuff. All right.

I don't know for you that. They're badass. Yeah, yeah. You were in position four, I think I read. Is that true? I was Thunderbird 4. Best seat in the house. Man, I just could sit back and watch the formation.

So. It's crazy. You're the one tucked up right under two other F-16s, like, at all times. You are, actually, I just dug up the eight-mill. Your wingtips are this far apart, and you're just chilling out. Both of them. Not even one of them. The guys on the end.

have one wing close to everyone else. They have an easy bailout direction. So when you start out, I mean, you've got nine, ten years of fighter experience, fine formation, but when you start out, it's baby steps. You know, you're three feet apart, two aircraft, and then you add a couple more, and then you build up the formation, increase the maneuvers and the G-forces. But you're white-knuckled that whole first season, because it's just like, it's just something that's so abnormal from what you're used to in a tactical environment. I'm miles away from my wingman. And I'm maintaining situation awareness based on sensors, not visual references. But a thunderbirds is a little bit different, obviously. And you work that three feet down to sometimes

18 inches. And you're traveling 450 knots and you're pulling four and a half to five Gs, you know, and you're pretty close to the ground. But by the second season, you're, you know, you're there smoking a lucky looking around thinking about what you're going to have for lunch but it's it's all just gets back to that rehearsal you we do it so much that it become second nature and you have this different level of comfort and that's what we experienced on orbit as well is just you know were there moments of fear at all and it's just like no because we rehearsed all of those things so much um the real-time simulator, you know, doing the launch profile, the entire phase, everything. There's no fast forward or let's speed through this.

It's like you go through the entire sequence. Yeah, yeah. Other than that sensation of rumbling and G-forces that you don't have in the simulator, it's pretty darn close to it and they get you prepared for that, just like you did in the Thunderburst. Man. Nailed it. That's awesome.

What a good ending. You crushed it. Let's go flying. I was going to say, is there anything you would point people to? You mentioned the video with the promo video that came out. I guess like the mission wrap up. And anything else you would point people to if they somehow miss the flight and they want to like partake? I don't know if there's a, is there a Netflix thing happening this time?

Man, you should go to the Miko podcast and watch. We are working on the documentary. I don't know if they're going to release it as a single or if they're going to wait for mission two and three to kind of throw it altogether. They got all the entire coverage for the last two and a half year. So who knows when that will be released. I mean, I even even watch the live stream or livecast, whatever, it's live stream. I don't know.

From the lodge. So every next time I jump on the bike and watch that. Definitely a good one. Yeah, good stream. All right. Well, thanks so much for hanging out. Yeah, it's always fun talking. And, I mean, you've got 8,000 stories.

I feel like we barely scratched the surface on. But having you right, you know, far enough away from the launch that you've kind of like let some of this sink in, I think is a really fun time to hear stories. So we appreciate it for sure. Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks for having me on there. To next week, Jake, I don't know if anyone heard. I've certainly heard, based on the 18 mailers I get in my mailbox a day in Pennsylvania, there's an election next week, Jake.

know that. I don't know if you knew. I've heard of it. Yeah. Yeah. We've randomly convinced Eric Berger to come hang out with us next week to talk about whatever the fallout, presuming we know the fallout at that moment. We should be good. We should be good. I think it'll be faster. Fast results this time. We should go late Thursday. Thursday? Oh, yeah. Yeah. We should be good. So we're going to discuss whatever. At the very worst, I'm sure you, me and Eric can come up with 60 minutes of stuff to talk about. I'm sure. We'll fill 60 minutes of content based on everything going on in the world of space in the moment. So that should be, that should be fun. Yeah. That's all we got, folks.

All right. See you later. Bye, everybody. Thank you much. Bye.