Off-Nominal - 175 - Hijinks on the Moon

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

Jake and Anthony sit down for an election-week palate cleanser and explore some fun discussion prompts from Anomalies just like you!TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 175 - Hijinks on the Moon - YouTube“We Can Fix Anything”: Remembering Skylab’s Salvation, 50 Years On - AmericaSpaceIn 1973, as a prank to the Skylab 4 astronauts, the Skylab 3 crew left behind three of these dummies aboard the space station. : r/spaceNASA Administrator Statement on Return to Moon in Next Five Years - NASAI'm Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s | Scientific AmericanFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine, start. Hi, buddy. Hello, how are you? That's all I got. That's the biggest intro I've got for you right now. It's just me and you. Hey, buddy. Can I tell you, I'm all at a sorts right now

because my wife took a girl's trip with her friends. And they like swung for the fences. So instead of like a weekend in Vegas, it's like three weeks in Southeast Asia. So like not only is she like not here. Like I'm doing Bachelor life for like a, significant amount of times. You're untethered.

I'm untethered. You're Bruce McCandlessing right now. But she's 13 hours ahead of me. So like I wake up. Oh, you don't even talk to each other. You know? So like I'm just like I get the world is different.

I don't know what's going on. Like I don't know what time it is. Sometimes I catch myself like walking around the house. Like like I'm supposed to be doing something right now? Like I can't remember. How many Lego sets have you purchased for? for this time. Not enough Lego sets.

But man, I've done a lot of yard work because I just get bored and I just go and dig up a bush or something. It's been it's been something. Three weeks on opposite sides of earth is like you either need to rearrange the entire house by the time she comes back or go full planet of the apes. Like, you know. I come back and I'll just be like lying here in a pile of my dirty laundry. Do you have anyone, any neighbors that have like dogs and cats?

that you could watch for a day. Like whatever day she's coming on. Just be like, oh, I got a couple of new cats for a little new animals here. I got this a new iguana. Just load that house. A whole fish tank. Yeah, yeah. The world is out your fingertips.

Yeah. So. Well, we're here for a little pallet cleanser. Palate cleanser. Yeah. We've talked a lot about the election. So we thought, what if we didn't? That's what we need.

Because there's no space news yet. It's all conjecture. There's nothing, no details. There's an Eric Burger tweet here and there. But yeah. hilarious feedback to the Eric Burger episode, by the way. Can I just make a comment that, yeah, when we have like Peter Beck on, we kind of get outside of our usual little web and we end up with day traders in this chat or something.

I don't know if it was the burger-ness. of it all, the R's Technica people, or the MAGA people online? Like, we captured some other section of the internet. Yeah, we skip the bubble, yeah. Best one was a tweet recently that just said, never let Berger near a newspaper or magazine again. I was like, yeah, no problem. Like, we're not doing the paper media at any point here.

That was good. Yeah, yeah. Someone called us clowns. That was fun too. Yeah. So, well, we should do drinks first. That's what we're doing first. Yeah. So what do you got for us? What do you got? Prima pills. Just a just regular victory. Just a pill. What does Prima pills mean? Prima. Probably like, you know, kind of spring. Prima vera, maybe. Ah, probably. Glad of, got up. Okay. All right.

Prima vera. I think it just sounds cool mostly because you can buy this all times of the year. So it's not seasonal by any means. So I get that because I've been making meads and I've been naming the batches after planets so far. And so like it gets to a point where I just like I pick a planet and then I try and find an adjective that's, that's alliterative with it. And that's what I do. Can you tell us some? Well, I had Luna Yenna was the second one I made.

So that's got a lot of L's in it. Got it. They're all in Spanish too just because I think it's fun. Marte is, Marte Mojaro is the one coming up. that's wet Mars. So, yeah. You know, but they're going to get dumb. It's how it's going to be.

Or, what is it? Warm and wet? Yeah, cold and icy, yeah. Cold and icy, yeah. All right. Well, are you drinking that today? Is that what you got? No, not today.

Nothing's ready yet, Anthony. Okay. All right. I was like, why haven't you had these yet? I know I've been making mead for like eight months now. It's weird that I have a podcast where I drink alcohol and I have not for any. It's coming. It's coming.

Because yes, they have. The first two batches, nerd, they haven't been drinkable yet. I've not done them right. And there's a chance that aging them will mel them out and they'll be okay like in a year. So those ones we're going to wait. Batch three is a maybe.

It's like racking right now. It's close to bottling. That's the Mars one. Batch four, I'm very hopeful because I just racked it and it was drinkable right away. Like I could, it wasn't like the best meat I've ever had. but like it tasted like meed and it was sweet and good and, you know, it wasn't like,

so that's like I'm really hoping that one is the one. And so I'm rocking that. I got some, I got two batches. There's one that's got a cinnamon and vanilla in it. It's going to be good. So. That sounds like the one. I don't have that today.

For the, uh, for the off nominees. That sounds like that's kind of what I'm hoping. That should. Holiday party one. That might work out. That might work out time wise. So, um,

no, today I have, uh, A cocktail. This is the one that doesn't look good, but is good. This is kind of like this pea color. But sure is. This is Ishtabintun, which is that local Mayan honey liqueur with with star anise in it.

So it's like black licorice and honey. And then you put a little rum and lime juice in it. Oh, it's perfect, man. My favorite. Is that your hurricane drink? You're about to get a little swacked, I think. No, I'll just get a little rain. Guess where that hurricane is going to hook.

directly back to West Florida every time. It's crazy. This one looks like it's going to like fizzle out, so we'll see. We'll see. The fizzler forecast is correct there. I don't remember when we solicited prompts for discussion. Do you remember when this was? It was a while ago.

So we were doing that show, the newlywed show that we did together. That's right. We had like, we sent up that Google Doc and there was all the questions in there. And we picked out the ones that were good for newlyweds. eds. And there were a bunch of other questions that didn't quite fit the game show format correctly, but we're still good. So we just threw them in a document. And then we go and harvest it when we don't have a show. We sat on it for years. And then we said, we should do something unrelated to the election. And all we had was, let's do some questions that are fun and completely unrelated.

Some questions. But yeah. So did a little bit of prep on these so that we have, you know, some content. But it should be silly and fun. And I hope it's useful. question in the chat when's family feud i we still have not found a family feud wow that's huge i hit this button and that is absolutely enormous uh thank you andrew uh still have not really found a dungeon master for family feud who can uh independently organize who first of all has the patients to go through all of your responses independently organize them into appropriate categories that turns out we need a third employee for this yeah we need our intern quit a couple of years ago and we haven't got another one day. So it's some one day, Steve Harvey, we'll

wait for retirement, yes. All right. So do you want to go in a particular order? Do you had, you had one you were hot about right before this in the pre-show? Uh, I, well, you think that's the grand finale. Well, we were kind of talking about a tangentially related topic in the pre-show, which was, uh, I don't know, it was kind of, that was pretty serious stuff. Maybe when I save that to the end, I don't know, I don't know how you want to lead into this. Well, the biggest one, that we had was if we were going to create a high budget feature film about any historical space event, what would it be? And by create, I mean hire professional filmmakers to make it for you. You don't have to learn to do that yourselves.

Solid because that would be a lift. Yeah. Yeah, so high budget feature film. I assume this is like kind of dramatized a little bit is how I took it or are you doing documentary? What's your? So I have a couple ideas. One of them is, funny and one of them is serious. The funny one, I think I've talked about, there's a chance we've done this question because I started writing this out and I was like, I feel like I'm, I feel like this idea

was already up here. And I don't know why it's up here. So, but I think that we need to make an Apollo 12 movie. I think that is like unmind gold because all the attention goes to Apollo 11 and Apollo 13, rightfully, because they're a big, big deal. But Apollo 12 is like a great opportunity for a, like you could make it a comedy almost. Like you could make it something that was like really lighthearted and fun and and weird because like there's so much weird shit happened on that at that mission. Like you had the lightning and the SE ox all the camera shenanigans.

There was like pornography in this mission. Like it was wild how much weird shit happened in this mission. And I think it would be really funny if we like did that. one as a as a thing that's our patron saint mission that's the that's the nominal mission of all time yeah that's nobody talks about it so you should have to explain the camera one you know well the camera one is like a series of jokes this is why it's so funny right because there's like like the joke is alan bean sucks at cameras like that's the that's the whole joke right so okay what there was the first one was he like stepped out of

the lander on the surface and had the whatever the hassle blad or whatever and like immediately pointed at the sun and ruined it like that that camera was done like immediately like it was game over within like a minute on the surface like screw the camera up done and he was like wow I guess maybe I shouldn't have be in charge of cameras but then there was like uh so they that was the pinpoint landing right they landed next to Surveyor 3 to demonstrate like you can pick a spot and get there and so they went to this old robotic lander to go and whatever. And he had this idea for a gag, right? He's like, I'm going to bring this remote camera shutter for the camera that no one knows

I have. And then I'm going to take a picture of me and Pete Conrad on the surface together. And it's going to confuse everybody because they're going to be like, who took the picture? And it's going to be the best joke ever. That was his plan, right? This is 1960. Apparently that's a really, you know, this is,

I guess, no, it's 70s, right? No, this is 69 still. Yeah, late 69. So I guess, you know,

a remote camera shutter was just unconceivable, inconceivable technology, even though they could get to the moon. But anyway, so he lost the shutter, which was the big thing. He,

like, apparently threw it out with the trash at one day and just, like, lost it. So he never got to do, he never got to do his gag. which was funny. Still great pictures, though.

Is this working? I got some weird message. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. So only one astronaut in a picture next to surveyor. Only one astronaut. Still great, though.

I always loved the way that the landers, the limb is kind of up on the hill and has this very fantastic framing to it. I always love that. Love that moment. Yeah. And then the third camera thing, the third camera thing was on the way home. the capsule reenters, splashes down into the water, and they had the camera like stowed up in like some sort of like netting or

compartment. And it came out and smoked Alan being like in the head, like real hard. Like he had to get stitches. Like it was a, it was like a non-trivial injury from getting smoked in the head by the camera. So I thought that was funny. And then, yeah, pornography. And this is why he's a painter now.

He gave up on, he paints now. He's like, I'm done with, space and cameras. Yeah. Yeah, that's really funny. That would be a great one because it's, it's hijinks on the moon. I mean, that's.

It's hijinks on the moon, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And if you don't know the, the pornography story, so the Apollo astronauts had like a little book on their arm. It was like literally like instructions for the mission, like your timeline, like do this, do this, do this as you're doing your surface EVAs. And some Air Force guys like got into the supplies and they slotted in all these like nudes of girls into the pages.

And so they're like on the moon doing a very serious national EBA and they're turning the page and there's just like naked girls on there. And they had to like, you know, got their excitement for the, for the EPA. That's some like post-war, you know, nonsense. I love it. And it's just, it's just so funny because you step back and you're like, you think about the seriousness of Apollo 11 and Apollo 13 and you're like, Apollo 12 is right in the middle of that. And it's just, like, that's the thing that happened.

And we haven't had to move in the modern era. That would be ridiculed as like the reason that Apollo 13 happened. It was like, we got so soft on Apollo 12 and we took it so easy that. And maybe that's true. Maybe that's exactly the car that was coming for him. This is what happened when you let Elon Musk run the moon landed. Oh, man. Too real.

But yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. That's what happens when no one's paying attention. you, I guess, in the fall of 1969 and you've gotten the one out of the way. And it's just like, all right. Now it's our time. Totally.

It's a time to shine. All right. Do you want to do your serious one? Sure. Yeah. So my serious one is, okay, so you know, the strategic defense initiative, Star Wars, right? This is like 1980s program, Reagan, space weapons, big idea to counteract the Soviets. was a like a pretty frantic response in the Soviet Union to that.

Like they were kind of scared about that, that that was coming. And so like in their mid-80s, they had all this shit cooking for how to deal with it. What are we going to do about Star Wars? What are we going to do about Reagan space lasers coming to get us, right? And so I would love to see like kind of behind the scenes stories. of what was going on inside, not just in the Soviet space program, but the Soviet military and, you know, kind of like a little lower. Stay away from Gorbachev. Like, I don't want to be up in that level. I want to get down into the trenches, a story down in there with the designers in there,

because they, you know, they were cooking up ideas. And I think the movie kind of like culminates in the Energia launch of Polyas, right, which is like 1987. That's so brand new, huge rocket. There's a story there that we're all going to love, like this enormous. monstrosity of a rocket. And then this freaking nuclear space laser that is a real thing that they built and flew to space. Like it didn't work, but. Well, they did fly it to space and then immediately back.

They flew it to space and it was like, no, thank you. And it turned around and literally and came home. Immediately de-orbidate. Both of yours are ending in off-nominees, which I love. Like that's- Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's an off-nominee. But I think that's probably a pretty wild story if you get down to the, I don't know how much it is declassified, but if there's enough there, there's a great story of it.

It's, you're on the right track because it's, it's hard to find space events that have not already been given the treatment that don't have an ultimate crescendo. That was the tough part about this, right? Like, I would watch any movie about any of the Mars missions or the Cassini mission. Cassini might be a good one of coming together and flying it and some of the crazy maneuvers that they were doing around I mean, Jupiter and Saturn missions are fun because you've got so much activity

in terms of moons and rings and all that to deal with. Are you getting warp-drived? What's happening? Your whole screen was lighting up, like you were getting neuralized from Men and Black. All right, so, I mean, Jake, guess what movie I would make? I'm blanking. I don't know.

Come on, baby. You know? Skylab. Skylab, yes. In the same vein of your things, right? Hyginks. Do you know how screwed up the original Skylab mission was? It was unbelievably screwed up. Everything went wrong with, obviously, Skylab, the launch, totally screwed up.

Was that the new to? Which one was? That was later. I think this first mission was, so they launched Skylab. They were supposed to launch to the next day on, you know, the humans were going to go up the next day. And they're waiting a week and a half to figure out what happened to Skylab. Yeah, everything is micrometeered shield ripped off.

The solar rays all janked up. They lost all thermal control. And they thought once it was that hot, it would be like all of the gas outgassing would be in the cabin would be creating like toxic air and all this kind of stuff. So they purged the air within Skylab multiple times before the crew showed up. but the rescue mission to repair Hubble for like or Hubble I've just read the chat about saving Hubble which is another good one that we will get to the rescue mission to save Skylab uh you might remember okay yeah they probably docked and they fixed some stuff do you know about this EVA that they had to

do this is this is the one i know that they're because that we're talking about the sun shield is that what we're going to get into here and the solar right the makeshift the makeshift sun shield to keep it cool down. That's the one, did they have to climb on the outside and like push it through a hole into the space station? Pretty much. The thing was tangled up, right? The solar array was jammed

closed, the one that got screwed up, right? So they were going to try to free the solar array first. But the best way to do that was not to just dock and then go outside for a typical EVI. They flew the Apollo spacecraft next to where they needed to work.

And then Paul White's stood up out of the hatch and they held onto his ankles out of the Apollo hatch as he used a 10-foot pole with a hook to try to like yank this solar array open. Somehow not preparing for the fact that they were going to be yanking the space station towards them. They were like, oh my gosh, we're about to crash into the space station. They forgot about Newton's laws. Okay. All right. Yeah. And they, through the course of this, used up, like, the vast majority of the propellant for

attitude control that Skylab was working with at this time. This is coming back to me now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just love the fact, though, that they were, the best plan was fly next to where you need to work, hold this person's ankles as they try to yank on the solar array. Yeah, and then, obviously, deploying the sunshade was a total jury-rigged, like, I hope this works, and then they unfurl basically a parasail. and that ends up bringing the temperatures down

into like a reasonable level. But just the, again, let's compare this to modern day, right? If this were to happen, how long do you think it would take before NASA would launch that first crew? It wouldn't be what turned out to be 11 days later, Skylab launched. It was like May 14th, I think May 25th or something. Let me fact check these days. It was fast.

It was really fast. Yeah. Huh. Yeah, you're right. It's a great movie. That'd be a great movie. Where's the list of Skylight launches? TV series. Not a movie, though.

It would be a great TV series, yes. Because then you have some normal, like, look at this guy, showering in space for the first time in this way. And remember the weird little shower thing that they would pull up around them, like the little curtain? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And maybe, like, maybe like a limited series,

like sort of like 12 episodes kind of thing. You know, six or eight would do it. Which are, by the way, like, when we say this is, this is a modern day's construction calling this a TV series. It's when you do a six episode miniseries, it's six movies is what you're making. Let's be serious. Like, that's what they are. Six of one hour movies.

So, yeah, it was May 14th, uncrewd launch. And then they were supposed to launch May 15th, but they didn't launch until May 25th. But the fact, and again, Pete Conrad is starring in all of our movies, by the way. Yeah. So, go birds. We love Pete Gun Ride. That's my local moonwalker. But again, if this happened today, if NASA launched a space station, imagine one of

these commercial Leo stations launches. Everything goes wrong with the launch. It might not even work as the space station. Do you think the delay would be 10 days to develop procedures? That's what's wild. Is that it is like, well, we need a little more time to prepare. I think we can do it in 10 days. And then go up with all these plans of like, all right, we're going to EVA this

way flying next to the space station. Number one, that would never happen. Let's unfurl this weird parachute-looking thing over top and hope that that works. All right. Now let's make sure that we've got enough solar power from the one janky array that's left on the thing before we actually dock with spacecraft. They had to actually dock the first time, they had to disassemble part of the docking node. Like the original docking adapter did not, it was not docking. They had to like disassemble and tweak some of the hardware to actually dock. And had to, the original docking adapter. And had to do it with the pressure suits on because they didn't know what they were getting into the first time. Wow.

So it's a lot. It's a lot. And then obviously great crescendo with the de-orbit of Skylab ending up in Australia. And all the angry, angry Aussies, yeah. I could see it. Even, you know, that weird radio host who, like, put out the call for, like, if you get hit with a piece of Skylab, I will, you know, send you $10 million or whatever. I forget what the story. That's approximately correct.

But you can have like some, you know, the B plot is like what's going on in the ground around the world, tracking Skylab and that guy in Australia is doing his whole thing. Iron, no. So that's your Australia guy. Yeah. The four syllable nose. And older, older Garriott are going to star in our movies. Love it. Skylab's the one too where they had the, didn't they leave the prank for the next crew?

they like set up all the dummies in the in the suits so like when the next crew arrived at the station and opened the door there was like fake people like eating dinner at the table I'm pretty sure that's Skylab as well that makes sense lots of shenanigans uh I mean I would not again that was a that was one where you were up there so long that no one was watching okay here I think I found the picture yeah this is what you're thinking about that's the one yeah on the exercise bike yeah that's so good That's so good. So funny.

Yeah. Also, Skylab just had such a cool vibe to it inside. Because we didn't know how space stations worked yet. No. You know? It had a trap zone where you could just like be out of reach of all your handholds and be stuck in microcraping. Yeah. I hope one of your friends is going by soon.

Yeah. Jump at me so that we both get out of this trap zone. If we want to thematically roll along, Jake, one of the questions was a what if? Is the what if one a good one to roll into here? Yeah, I think so. What is your favorite alternate space history? What if? So this is like a for all mankind style.

What if the Russians landed first Soviets, I guess. Mine is Skylab related. Shocker. Okay. Yeah, let's do it. What if the shuttle was ready in time? Skylab got boosted. Shuttle was flying there.

That's interesting. Do you have a Skylab Soyuz mission? Right. Do we add modules to Skylab? Still flying today? Dust off those other Saturn rockets and send up a couple more Skylabs. One more Skylab, the one that's in the Air and Space Museum? Yeah.

Ooh. I like that. I think just the shuttle implications are interesting too because you think about the early manifest of shuttle. You know, they got... Shuttle was supposed to go to Skylab

as most of its early missions. They ended up trying to figure out what else to do with it. They did a bunch of defense satellites and weather satellites and the thing where they captured the two commercial satellites and brought them down to, you know,

send them back up later and Tidris satellites It's, I don't know, there's just something interesting about how would us have unfurled and what would the decision-making process have been, you know, because we wouldn't have gotten on the space station freedom track really at all at that point. We'd probably be, you know, would Hubble have been pulled for earlier in the timeline? Couldn't really, there's not much room earlier for that, right, from 81 to 85, basically. It's an interesting one because, like, you're right in that the early shuttle program was real awkward. It was like very much like we don't really know what this is for. So we're just doing everything with it to see what sticks.

You know, that was that was an original shuttle plan. It's just like this is the only launcher. All launchers are now obsolete. It's shuttle for everything, which was not smart. But yeah, that's interesting. Yes. I'm here for multi-module Skylab though. That would have been a beast.

That would have been hefty, hefty boy. Hefty boy is correct. Yeah, I don't even know if it would. it worked. There was a big telescope on Skylab, right? Wasn't there like a big lens thing on the top? Yep, the solar telescope mount. Yeah.

It was kind of under the, um, what, I guess, was that where the engine would have been? Or is that, or where the limb would have sat on the, on the Saturn 4B stage?

I believe so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. The Apollo, what was it called the Apollo? Solar. telescope something something like that

yeah yeah Apollo telescope mount I think it like it launched like facing up and then there was like a 90 degree turn it did on yeah to face the other direction yeah there's the telescope going in

that's how you drive it there's my boy Paul White's doing stand-up EVAs there you go here's the there's the deployment of it that's crazy too that like sky lab, you know, was a solar mission.

There's a janky solar racing there. Yeah. Yeah, there's, I mean, the janky, everything. Look at that. What a piece of shit space station. Listen, it's a space station we had, okay? Worse than Salli 87, they just broke continuously. I like that as a factoid on, on, uh, if you look up like Skylab, uh, I was trying to look up EVA dates and stuff. And one of the Skylab 2 facts is like, this was the first, let me read how this was written.

Furthermore, its crew was the first space station occupants to ever return safely to Earth. The only previous space station occupants, the crew of Soyuz 11. Like, Jesus, that's what a dumb superlative for this mission. Very odd. Brutal. That's so bad. I was the first one to ever do that and survive. It's like, okay.

Cool, man. Oh, man. Jeez. Okay. That's dark. What's your what if? Speaking of dark. All right.

All right. Actually, one of the people in the chat kind of guessed it here. So my what if is, I was thinking about, okay, I was thinking about for all mankind, right? Which is like, that's the low hanging fruit of space what ifs is like what if, what if the Soviets. won the space race, right? I wanted to go back further because I think that there's a scarier one, which is, what if the Nazis didn't lose? So.

So you're doing Man in the High Castle. But space, okay? So think about it. So you have, in my scenario, the Nazis, like, capture, like, a lot of Europe, right? In my scenario, the Nazis. It's just a sense I never thought we'd get to in this show. Yeah, yeah. We're going to get canceled for this show.

Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. I'm already canceled. Yeah. Okay, so imagine a world where like the Nazis capture a bunch of Europe. Start it again. Start again. In my scenario, in my dream. The Nazis capture a bunch of Europe, but it doesn't like cascade into some long dystopian future. Like that was not a stable regime. Like Hitler probably gets stabbed in the back at some point anyway. and then it chills out. So I'm kind of imagining like sort of the same thing that happened with like the Soviets and Stalin, right?

Where like Stalin was like a nightmare. And then the every successive leader just got kind of weaker and weaker until the whole thing fell apart, right? So imagine that with the Nazis. So like, you know, the U.S. still around, the UK still around. They don't really take much more than half of France and Italy and a bunch of Eastern Europe. And they've got this big junky empire, maybe part of northern Africa, whatever, right? This big strong German empire coming out of World War II. So space implications, right?

First of all, all the V2 engineers do not get distributed between the U.S. and the Soviets, right? So you have all this talent stays in Germany and they got V2 technology and they keep working on it. So that's like your first kind of what happens, right? Now you have the U.S. needs to like do their own thing. you guys need to basically make vanguard work, which didn't work very well. But that's your space program now is whatever those guys were doing. The Soviets, same thing. They can't steal a bunch of people and they got to make on their own thing.

But what I think what's interesting, though, is that in a world where the Nazis stick around, like the coldware probably doesn't happen, right? You and the Soviets might have even stayed kind of friends because you had this, other thing, right? So like, the whole, our whole world changes because of this, right? Like, the whole NATO alliance doesn't really happen. If you guys aren't getting a cold war and all that kind of stuff, I don't know, maybe there's a world where like, we might go back to somewhat isolationist at that point. Maybe or, or maybe you like team up with the Soviets and, and like the today's ESA space program is like, you know, you can imagine a like pan American, British Soviet kind of like

thing or you know with some other some other some other maybe western european country i don't know like some some kind of like not you know it's like the nato against the nazis right like that becomes the sort of thing what the russian like has to take yeah i got you exactly exactly right so you kind of have the same idea of of of what the what the Soviets became with the russians and and that kind of rivalry but it's with the nazis and all the talent doesn't get mixed up at the beginning and there's there is no space race probably maybe is, I don't know, but like, it'd be way different. And like, it's just, and not, I don't know, thinking about this, like, is not something

like, I really thought out all the way to the end, but it does kind of, like, help me. I'd rather us come in half-baked on this kind of shit. Yeah, yeah. I have some follow-ups if you'd like to further refine this. All right, let's do it. Let's do it. In the space realm, what is the Nazis French Guiana? Hmm.

Because you have, you have sculpted an area that is the worst, worst spot to ever launched a space from. You've carved out like, where can you not launch to space from? And you circled it and said, that's what the Nazis took over. Okay, well, let's see. Because the Germans did colonize Africa quite a bit. That's what I'm going for. They had, let's see.

Like were they the Kenya space port? Like the Andy Weir, yeah, KSC down there? Yeah, so I'm stalling because I'm embarrassed that my African geography is not great. But the Germans colonized Tanzania. And that is, has an East Coast. Is it, but does it have a long enough downrange? I mean, again, we're assuming that the Nazis would not worry about dropping rockets on people, which is maybe the worst assumption to make in this scenario. It's got a great, Tanzania's got a great space coast. It's like almost equatorial, completely east-facing coastline over the Indian Ocean.

And I think you can probably capture the tourists that want to go see the Skywalker homestead. Isn't that in Tanzania? Tunisia. It's in Tunisia? I thought it was in Tanzania. I'm glad that your African geography is as bad as mine. No, I just straight up forgot where the homestead was. Okay, it does.

Yeah, yeah. All right. That's actually fairly fantastic. Anywhere was really on to something. Yeah. You know? All right. So they've got that.

I mean, it's not, it's, it is very much the French Guiana in that it would take a long time to ship any of their stuff there to get launched. So that's a thing. When did the Suez Canal open? Shit, man. I didn't know I was getting tested today. Jeez. I mean, the British kind of opened that, right? but that was because they had control of Egypt, right?

Opened in 1859. Construction began, completed 1869. Oh, geez, it's that old. Okay. Anyway, well, in this scenario, the Germans captured the Suez Canal and have complete control over it because they have North Africa.

And yeah, so you just kind of like build your rockets in wherever in Germany, ship it down to the Adriatic, get her on a boat. Straight shot to Tanzania, baby. All right. So they got the space launch sorted out. And now your other stipulation was you don't know that the space race would happen. The U.S. Soviet space race doesn't happen.

Right. But a space race probably still would. Could be. Right. But if they're not, let's run this. Let's run this. If the Nazis won or didn't lose, I guess, right? You're kind of saying they kind of fizzled out.

internal strife happens, leadership structures fall, fizzles out, there's only so much you can conquer, right? Right. They would have hit the Roman limit at some point, so. Would there have been a, you know, what's the nuke situation at that point? That's a good question. That changes a lot. I didn't think about that.

Because there's always, in every era, there is a, in that the superpowers are always vying for technical supremacy on something. So, you know, once the, once the bomb was sorted out, focus goes elsewhere, space was right there for us. And I don't think there's anything like, I don't think anyone was particularly motivated internally to like, I want to race in space. It was like, I want to race on technical supremacy. And space happened to be the next thing.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. So I have more to add then. because the so the bomb stuff would still be relevant because split the atom in 39 I think that's when that happened and then like the the original weapons program in the US was designed to counteract the Nazis like that was why the you know we didn't end up using it on the Nazis but that's why you you built it right but I was trying to think how this scenario would play out like why did not, you know, in my fake scenario, why did the Nazis win? And to me, it has to be because you

guys don't get involved. You know, the United States doesn't get involved, which means that Japan doesn't attack Pearl Harbor, right? That's probably, that's your, that can be your, like, yeah, we're not going to poke the bear. Right. And then you guys like, no, we're, we're happy selling you guys. This is a European problem. That's the top 10 dumbest decisions of all time. Yeah, guaranteed. Yeah. Maybe number one. So the other, the other interesting part of that then is that what happens in the Pacific theater, right? It's where Japan also wins, and they have control of China. And so you have like the Chinese space program doesn't happen the way it did.

Right, but the Japanese one does. But the Japanese one does, which like did pretty well considering. I think that makes NASA, Jaxa in the new world where we're like, oh, look at that cute little agency doing those cool missions. It could be, right? And like, you know, the Japanese space agency that's a really interesting kind of history because they developed it with a bunch of restrictions because they were also, you know, in trouble after the war.

They were need to be disciplined, right? Yeah, they had to think about something for a while, right? And so, like, all of their original rockets and stuff were built without guidance systems because they weren't allowed to have weapons guidance systems. So, like, they had this, like, they worked around some pretty wild constraints. They were the Joey B of space programs. Yeah, and if you look at some of the early rockets,

they had them all tilted on the launch pad, right? They were like, they were launching at like five degrees or whatever because they had like done the math. They're like, well, if it starts at this high, then gravity will slowly turn it and it'll hit orbit. Like that was how they guided it to orbit instead of having whatever else,

which is like, that's insane to me. I don't know how you, but that's, you know, but like what is, what does Japan? What does Japan unleashed do for a space program?

It's an interesting question in the 1950s and 60s and 70s, right? So, The whole world order of space is disrupted by Japan decides not to bomb Pearl Harbor. I like it. That was so different than where I was going with it, but I absolutely love the grandiosity of that because now I have to consider every other geopolitical situation that ever has existed in the modern world. Yeah.

I mean, like, this is not a, this is not a new idea. Like, a lot of people have thought like, what if it, you know, because everything we know in our entire. Aircraft carriers never became the dominant form of modern metal. Like, that's also different. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it's interesting. But, yeah.

I dig it. The space night hasn't been explored. All right. Let's do the more recent. Let's do a recent one, though. Let's do if you had to do a what if in the last 10 years. On the spot. Some really near-term shit that you wish would have went differently.

Last 10 years. Yeah. So 2014. And later... I'll roll it back. I'll roll it back to 2010 so that you can say, what if the shuttle was never canceled? And that opens as an option,

if that's what you want to take. I doubt you would. No, I'm in a dark place still, so I'll say, what if Russia never invaded Crimea? And an ex-Kremia. What if Russia was like, no, we're good? Hmm.

The space station would still be falling apart. Right, but you'd have a little more cooperation. You wouldn't have had the whole, you wouldn't have had the whole engine disaster with Atlas and whatever, right? All that kind of congressional mandate. Balkan probably wouldn't exist. You would have, I don't know. Would you have the rabble rousing for commercial crew in the way that we did? I probably not.

Probably not. I mean, that only got its full budget once that, you know, the early incursions happened. Yeah. I like that. Maybe we'd have Orion taking people to Space Station today, you know? that's not a bad one that's an interesting one i was going to go what if what if um j b got his way and we flew o'ryan on a another delta four or a falcon heavy or some shit i like that too the only problem with that one is like it's really fun and then they like to think about it and then

they fly the flight and then after you're like man nothing's different no it's just we're right where we are yeah we're right where we just got this flight and it's like okay that's fine Cool to see, though. Weird-looking rocket, but that's pretty much right where we are. Yeah, when did I start calling with the Bridenstack? When did that? The Bridenstack. I feel like I've caught that name on Twitter once or twice.

But that's funny. That's a good joke. It's really good. I like the Bride stack. What if Bigelow didn't go under? Wait, where are we? Can we have a retrospective on Bigelow Aerospace? Man, I would love to get.

We should, when we get my gold for the UAP thing, we should get Robert Bigelow out of here as well. just to spice it up. It is, all right, so it is funny to me how much of a China hawk he was and rolled a clock 10 years forward and you're like, yeah, he's right. Kind of right where we're at. I think the idea, though, of inflatable, expandable, they were doing expandable and inflatable, I guess, there's a difference, right? R rigid structure versus. Sure. It's like a Zeppelin versus blimp.

Like these are different things. Where is the structure? I always thought it was more of a, um, kind of like wet workshops, to be honest. It's always more of a fun academic idea than useful in practice, because the sheer amount of outfitting that you need to do is,

it makes it very quickly like, all right, probably should have just figured out how to get a bigger diameter rocket than, then worry so much about faring size. Like, oh, this is hard. If we were at like the physical limit on what we could launch a space diameter-wise, if that existed, right? If there was a like, well, you know, in the way that Mars aeroshells are kind of like,

well, this is the size that we can land on Mars. If it was a hard limit like that, I'd be like, yeah, I get it. You know, pack every inch of that faring. But since that era, it just, we have like bigger and bigger fairings and bigger and bigger spaceships and it's kind of not mapped up to where we are in the world. Curious that Sierra Nevada or Sierra Space is still. pursuing it. But there's so much

outfitting that you have to do that I still don't understand like, that's multiple expeditions worth of work to go in and build the interior. That seems problematic. It's a funny,

it's a funny like dissonance because it's like, oh, we have to launch this inflatable thing because launch is so expensive and tiny that we have to maximize it. But we need to launch five more times to have people say, the whole day thing. But it comes in IKEA packages and we need to then

instruct it all of ourself in space. That's totally the Swedish space program is just that. It's all flat packed. You get it up there, you sort it out. Are there any other points in recent history that felt like a moment

of divergence? I mean, the moon and Mars stuff is interesting to consider, right? If, per our pre-show discussion. By the way, we haven't plugged the Discord in like a year, I feel like. So offdom.com slash Discord. It's where you support the show and you get to hang out with us all the time and also the pre-show where we discuss whatever the hell is on our mind for like a half hour before we go live. We were talking about the fact that Mike Pence went out in, did we decide it was March 2019, early 2019 and 2008-19? That sounds wrong when I say it. It was 2019.

I know. And then we went to, I see that October, and that's when they were like, they were hitting full steam, right? It was that? Oh, my God. I still, I know we decided this like an hour ago, but I'm still feels like, was it 2019? Are we right? Was it 2018? Maybe I'm wrong.

I don't know. Now you're going to look. I'm looking it up. Because. Man, this is a long week. We're talking about the election again. No, different election. They are.

Inaguration was January 2017. It took over a year for Bridenstein to get confirmed, right? We decided that was like April 2018. Yep. No, you're right. We're right. It was March 2019. Mike Pence announced that NASA's moon landing goal would be accelerated by four years

with a planned landing in 2024. Yeah. So, and then May 14th, 2019, Brianstein announced a new program to be named Artemis. That's crazy. So that's a moment maybe That's a what if moment Like what if that track didn't happen

Right where were we at right before We were still journey to Marsing Kind of putts in along on the SLS timeline This is a sad one because it's like Nothing would be different It wouldn't wouldn't though right I mean we have Actual contracts for Moonlanders out right now

Sure sure yeah I guess Sure sure It's a couple of Bill couple bill out there. Maybe Gateway would be flying. We'd be doing gateway. We'd probably would, yeah. Yeah, maybe all on the gateway.

It tries me nuts. We're on the election again. We're on the election. Instead of handing out an HLS contract, it would have been a gateway contract for that. The Mars, the Mars Colonial Transporter. The transport vehicle,

the NASA, MCT, yeah. Yeah. That's right. All right. We're on the election. We're going to lightning round the last couple, Jake. What are those other ones that you wanted to do?

You could recover one space object from the bottom of the ocean. What would it be? I thought about this one so long and I didn't really honestly come up with a great answer because I don't know what was still intact down there. But I don't know. The one I kept thinking about was that dragon from CRS 7 with the, or seven, not seven. Seven? The one that blew up.

I had the docking apart, right? The docking adapter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I go get that back. Zuma. Oh my gosh. Zuma is correct. I'm going to push this button.

It makes it huge. Zuma. Zuma is the correct answer. Yeah. That's not at the bottom of the ocean, though. That's not at the bottom of the ocean. Yeah. That's just flying.

That's stealth satellite. That's the correct answer if you don't know the truth. Polyas? Yeah. Polyas. Yeah. Get the space laser. Let's get it back.

Man, let's get it back. No, I actually have a go-to answer for this, which is the Apollo 13 RTG. Because it was designed to withstand Earth Reefense. entry. It's the only lander that came back. It's somewhere at the bottom of the ocean being all nice and warm and cozy. There's probably a whole ecosystem built around it. There's like a weird fish around that thing. Yeah. Hell yeah. I like that one. That's my answer for that one. What else? Where did Mars 96? That'd burn up all the way? Anything? Mars 96, right? It's the one

that failed. Had to have burnt up. Yeah. Yeah. That's a bummer. Yeah. Get the planetary society mission out of there. Recovered. Dig it out. find the impact points and the lasers that took out that mission. Who was the person with the crazy theory about that? You remember this? I don't know. So you remember how there was the, who was the guy with the labeled release thing?

Oh. You know what I'm talking about now, right? Yeah. Who's the Viking guy? Yeah, the life experience, the Bill Clinton, we found life on Mars. Oh, good Bill Clinton. Who is that guy?

I don't remember his name now. Wow, I'm a bad Mars guy right now. That's a really bad Mars guy. Tells you how much I actually thought this was the big news. You're going to think about this so long that they'll say in the chat before we do. Gil Levine, Levin? Yeah, that's the guy, yeah. Okay.

So, you know, in the later years of, in recent years, I feel like he's appeared on other programs talking about how he definitely found life and there's a massive conspiracy to cover it up or something. Is that kind of appropriately? Yeah, that sounds right. Yeah, he was like recently publishing Dill about that experiment. Like, no, it's real, it's real. Avi Loeb.

Yeah. I think there was a branch of the theories there that Mars 96 also contained one of these experiments. Is that true? I have not heard this conspiracy branch. Somebody, I feel like I've heard this somewhere. That Mars 96 also contained life-confirming capabilities. and it was like shot out of the sky so that it would not fly to Mars.

Like that's a theory I've heard floated, I think on the space show at some point. So I'm pretty sure I didn't dream this up, but that's a theory I've heard floated. That's out there. I think it's out there. I think it's a good one. I like the, I don't know, conspiracy theorists really crack me up sometimes. I don't know. I love our slash conspiracy.

That's such a good stuff. right. Yeah. We need to add our what if questions, like these little prompts. We need to put one on for later, which is just like what is a space conspiracy theory that you believe. That you believe. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Everyone has one conspiracy they believe, right? Yeah, yeah. Everybody's got one. What would yours be? It's got to be like, Dragon X-L isn't real. So good. I made a shirt for it. I have to believe it.

Yeah, I plug that. Plug that shirt. Yeah. I forget what mine is. I feel like I've had a good answer to this at some point. I don't know. I don't know. Any other lightning round ones? If you want to launch one personal item of yours into space forever, what would it be? Are you discarding something? Are you memorializing an item? I don't know. I'm not a stuff guy. Like, I don't have like things that mean anything to me. I don't know. That's a weird thing to say. But like, like, I have stuff I use a lot. But like I don't like if it, you know, like, I use my MacBook every day. But if he's like blew it up and got me different Macbook. I'm like, oh, yeah, whatever. There's nothing sentimental to me, you know? Like, I don't even wear a wedding ring. Like, I just, like, I don't care about that shit, man.

Like, I just... So good. It's just an excellent... I don't know. I have to talk about... Excellent theory. Yeah. All right.

How about... Is there an aspect of space exploration that you most want a huge leap in technical ability? This one felt too obvious to me. Like, I feel like it has to be propulsion. Does it? I would say, nah. Really? Yeah, what are we going to do with a, this is like the nuclear thermal thing, right? Like, does that really change our ability to pull off these missions in the current environment?

If you had a Merlin engine, that's exactly the same as the Merlin engine we have today, except you add a zero to the IFP. You don't think that would be a big deal? I think I'm, I get stuck on that because. I could launch with a single Merlin and accomplish all the exact, all the exact same thing. exact same missions. I'm so not motivated by propulsion, I guess. I don't know. I think I struggle with these theories and like nuclear thermal

stuff because I don't see the technical gateway or the gateway to us achieving these epic programs as being a technical one, but being like a funding or programmatic or planning or political or motivation or economic. The caveat to this question is it specifically said technical, right? I know, I know.

But I would pick power generation every time. like some of the kilopower stuff that you were talking about? I feel like we have that figured out. But we never really deployed them at scale or anything. I don't know. What we both should have said is Mars downmast. That's what we should have said.

Mars downmast is the biggest. But propulsion was all that too, though, I think. Would it? Yeah. I mean, we have rocket engines. Basically, you can say like launches, you know, if you add a zero to ISP, effectively launches one-tenth the cost. Right.

Okay. We always, we've talked about launch as a gateway, like a, a gate to our amazing space future for the years. Like ever since Falcon came on in the scene, it's like this is it. This is what's going to change it.

We're getting out of, like this is launch, launch, launch, launch, launch. Like all we talk about is in rockets. And like at the end of the day, what that actually is is like, Like launch is a higher order function of propulsion. And I think if we had that figured out, like Merlin and like Merlin, talking about Merlin, I'm going off.

We got three minutes left. I love it. Talk about Merlin. Merlin's a great engine. Like, you know, Merlin and Raptor together are the, the best engines we've ever had, basically, right? And their, their big thing, though, was costs so much as it was performance, right? Like that, you know, if, if Merlin cost the same as, uh, you know, like an Atlas engine, it wouldn't

really be that remarkable. It's like, okay, it's a little bit better, but like whatever. So it's still R. It's still R. It's still R. So I don't care. Right. But if you could add the zero to ISP, like I keep saying here, that's effectively like a, uh, a cost

reduction of, of 10x as well. And that's so like you're, you're talking the same sort of innovation that Merlin made, right? Yeah, I don't know. I think I'm, I use your former logic of like, we've talked about launch for so long that, yes, this would solve it immediately. And I'm like, kind of have. And like, here we are, you know, we're. I don't think we've solved it.

I'm a, I'm a launch skeptic, though, in that sense. We've talked about this before where it's like, it's like, okay, yeah, there's like more starlings going up, but like, how much has it changed? It changed it a bit. Right. And that's where I'm at, I think, is that obviously, like, if we did propulsion and we did, like, faster than light travel, then yeah, hell yeah, we're both, we're both on for that. But we were going, like, near term, like, in our lifetime jump kind of thing.

But, no, my biggest, my biggest, my biggest point that I've always made that is that if Falcon was as revolutionary as you think it is, then they wouldn't have had to invent Starship, right? Like, that's the thinking. But I think that's where I'm caught is that Starship is, though, is a, different, it's not just launch, Starship is not just launch, it's also downmass. And that's the, the game-changing aspect of Starship is not the, what the launch enables. It does for like, astrophysics missions or whatever, but also having downmass, not just to Earth, is an absolute game changer to the Starship. If we, if we have a big behemoth launch vehicle,

then yes, we could solve the downmass to Mars problem. I'm not, I'm not convinced that that engine ISP or engine efficiency is the thing though is my that's my that's my holdup I think with propulsion could be yeah I watched a lot of Star Trek recently and the the the uh ease at which they just sort of casually transfer between orbit and the surface in like a little shuttle yeah yeah let's just go down I'm like oh my god are you kidding me like that's a whole freaking thing we got to do here. You want to go to orbit? Buckle up, man.

We've got to like set the whole damn thing. We have a whole sort of career based on that. Yeah. Hop in the shuttle and up we go, man. Like, let's do it. One day.

One day. Well, on that note, Jake, there's a starship next week, I think. Yes. Hopefully. Yeah. If the Department of Government Efficiency does their job,

then it'll be launching on what Monday? I think that's the Monday. That's the day. Monday afternoon so that the deorbit and landing is visible this time. That's right. That's right. It's going to talk about next week, right?

It is what we're going to talk about, I think, because Dayton is from West's Space Flight is coming on. So, yes, either going to be talking about it or why it didn't happen. And otherwise, I guess we'll talk about European launch companies because. And we'll get his take on if the Nazis won, right? Yeah, I guess you could bring that up. That sounds like ripe show content. We'll see if he comes on next week. So that's what we think is coming on.

But after this show, let's hear of it. We might have a change of guess. We'll determine if I'm canceled by whether Adrian shows up next week. Too good. All right, y'all, send us your best film. Tweet us instead of shitting on Eric Burger in our missions, please tweet at us what film you would make and what your what-if scenario is. And if Jake or I is right about the best film.

the nerdiest argument we've had on the show, whether engine ISP really matters that much. That was as nerdy as I thought we should always be on the show. And if you don't want to tweet us, you can skeet us because we're, blue sky's a thing apparently this week again. That's a thing. How do we, what are we on there? At offnom.com. You can do domain verification there.

Oh, yeah. I did that. I did that for you, I think. So yeah. Oh, I did that. You helped. All right. You have domain control.

It was a joyed effort, team effort. Yeah. yeah. All right, y'all. We'll see you next week. Bye.