Off-Nominal - 21 - Carpet Bombing Venus

Episode Date: July 16, 2019

On the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, Jake and Anthony talk about the aftermath of Apollo and alternate histories we could have seen—the Apollo Applications Program, a crewed Venus flyby, and more Skylab. Drinks Nimble Giant - Tröegs Independent Brewing - Untappd Capella Porter - Ecliptic Brewing - Untappd East Coast IPA - Russell Brewing Company - Untappd Topics Apollo Applications Program - Wikipedia Manned Venus flyby - Wikipedia Skylab Skylab B Picks Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story, by David Hitt, Owen Garriott, Joe Kerwin, Alan L. Bean, Homer Hickam Main Engine Cut Off — Apollo National Park Time to Eat the Dogs | A Podcast About Science, History, and Exploration Destined for the Stars | Time to Eat the Dogs Destined for the Stars - University of Pittsburgh Press NASA Apollo 11 Lunar Lander - 10266 | Creator Expert | LEGO Shop WeMartians build the LEGO Apollo Lunar Module set! - YouTube Follow Jake WeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to Mars WeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | Twitter Jake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | Twitter Follow Anthony Main Engine Cut Off Main Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | Twitter Anthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | Twitter Off-Nominal Merchandise Off-Nominal Logo Tee WeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine, start. Miko, welcome to space. It's the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. It's the 50th anniversary as we record of a few nights before launch when people are probably running around crazy trying to finish things. Can imagine being a journalist on that night? No, I literally have no concept for what works like. Imagine doing what we do, but like 50 years ago.

I do have a concept for that because we did do that at Valcon. and heavy, and it was mostly just drinking and talking about how cool the launch would be. So I can imagine that. Three days before launch, we'd be sitting at that little, like, what, the port side bar. Yeah, the Mexican place, right? Yeah, many people, final records of their podcast. Yes, thank you, Lars, for the, bringing us to realism in what decade this is. We should do one of those new Discord polls we can do now and see if anyone would buy

a vinyl edition of one of our podcasts. Oh my God, somebody would. That's sad, that somebody would. Nice cover art. No. It's a whole new level of Patreon. But like, so we did that for a Falcon Heavy, and that was really like the best equivalent to the Apollo era for that would have been like Apollo 4.

You know, like it's like the first flight of this big new rocket. Which, let's be real, though. I think I would have, like, if you could say you get to see one Saturn 5 launch that isn't Apollo 11, Apollo 4 is 100% it. Because they didn't prepare at all for that. Because the sound must have been just unbelievable at their press. Like it must have been like the end of the world. This reminds me, this is, I had a similar experience when I was in eighth grade

where the end of the year we had to do like some sort of talent show thing. So me and three other guys in class were like, oh, well, we all play instruments. Let's do like a concert thing. We had this like 80 year old English teacher where this was going to be happening. And she approved our idea to bring in half stacks and drums to this like regular classroom. And then the first note happened. And her eyes were like, what have I done? Like, this is a horrible idea.

And that's, I imagine that similar feeling of like, you know, the launch team realizes how crazy things are getting. And they're like, we did not run any tests on this, what we needed at all to handle this. I can just imagine these poor, like, newspaper writers, like, sitting in those bleachers, like... I'm actually going to die right now. Yeah, so... Anyway, so imagine, like, you know, imagine that, and then there's also people on top of it. So, that must have been a crazy time.

Yeah. And I had a moment earlier today. We'll talk about what we're actually talking about today in a second, but I was reading through some stuff, and I was, I found myself reading an archived version. of something from 1999 that talked about the 30 year anniversary of Apollo 11. And those are the times when I realized, like, how close our lifetime is to the Apollo era, it's so weird that it feels it's a complete other universe.

You know, looking now, like, the world looks nothing alike from today to then. But I was born in 91, and it's like, that wasn't that far after 69, you know, now that we're this far away. Yeah. And it's like,

yeah, I always, that comes to me exact same thing when I remember that H.W. Bush did the, the, you know,

his space exploration initiative on the 20th anniversary. Yeah. You know, like, oh. That always makes me, it makes me feel both like, because I felt like being born in 91,

I missed all of like the notable historical events other than like Columbia, you know, the Miss Challenger. Missed the first shuttle launch. Mists all the Apollo. Missed Apollo Soyuz. You know, missed all the stuff that you read books about.

Yeah. But, man, that's cool. Anyway, so, yeah, we're talking about, we're trying to be relevant to the Apollo topics. But, you know, not too relevant. So we don't want to talk about Apollo 11. I don't even remember how we thought of this. Well, we had another idea that this kind of morphed into, just to stay somewhat topical. But, yeah, we just wanted to sort of.

of alternate history. That's kind of really where we started, right? I want to kind of just say a shout out to the listeners, though, because you are buried in Apollo 11 content right now and you're listening to us. So like, kudos to you and, you know, beer, beer for that, I think. So what are you, what are you drinking? Oh yeah, we got to talk about that. All right. I went down to the seasonal selection. I was surprised to not find any space beer. Like, I've been getting all these pitches about books and movies and everything. But how is there not a space beer in the fridge in here in Philadelphia?

Philadelphia America for the pre-show listeners. But I did find one from one of our local favorites, Trokes. They had a beer that they do once a year called Nimble Giant. Okay. So this is a little foreshadowing, along with my Skylab shirt. Nimble Giant, I think, is what it would have taken back then to do what needed to be done. you had to be a nimble giant with a budget that big. But it's a tasty beer.

It's a little summer beer. It's got like, what's it got? Grapefruit and pineapple and honeysuckle. All sorts of summer stuff in there. And I thought it would be the most, the closest I could get to being something that connects to my topic later. Okay. And it's a tall boy, which is like the Anthony equivalent of Jake sized.

So I have a tall boy today. Okay, cool. Yeah. So actually, I have two beers because I was thinking like, what am I going to do? And so I went to the liquor store and I was like, I'll just got to get like just the most American beer I can find. And I was like looking around and we don't have that greatest selection of American beer here, at least at the liquor store across the street from my house. But so I almost bought a six pack of Pabst and I was like, no, I can't do it.

So I'm just, I'm too elitist for that. But what I did come up with. They're like, you're going to have to go across the street to the other store for that. They're like, can you see your ID, sir? Anyway, so I do have one American beer that I'm going to drink tonight. And this is a gift from some close friends of mine. So the Kerner twins who are from down south from your neck of the woods. Beth, of course, is the designer of the Weimarist's Mission Patch.

And she and her sister, Kathy, came up to hang out with me in Seattle last week, two weeks ago. Why was that? Oh, two weeks ago. Time flies. 50 years, two weeks. Anyway, so they brought me an ecliptic brewery. Oh, nice. Acapella porter.

I guess it's called. Capella porter? I don't know. Acapella. The Acapella. I know. The Discord chat is creeping back into my. Anyway, so it's a brown porter.

But it's not a Jake-sized beer. It's a regular human-sized beer. So I had to get another one. And I have to drink this one first because it's lighter. This is an East Coast IPA from Russell Brewing, is here in Vancouver, I think. Oh, no, I'm failing. I think it's local sometime. But this is a fruity one too. It's like, it says juicy vibes.

Juicy vibes. It's all about the summer beers here. Yeah. So I don't know what it'll be like. I've never read out of this before. Is the beer can, is the beer can opening sound better than the bottle cap opening sound? It was very clear on this one. Sometimes the bottle's a little too subtle. All right. Well, I'll try to be. really obvious with it when I do open it. Anyway, let's give it go. So alternate history is where we started.

I totally forgot. That's how we ended up here. So we've had this idea for a long time to talk about interesting alternate histories, which we'll save for another time so I can go on and on about Gemini-based everything. But we wanted to look at the Apollo applications era. I'll just say the era,

because I don't know if we're super confined to strictly things that were called Apollo applications, but that post-apollo era, when we were figuring out what was next, where things went, how they evolved from there, because you've got 18 different ways it could have gone. So we thought we maybe take a look back. And originally we were like, okay, let's do this where we each take a particular Apollo application. But then I think we both got down too many rabbit holes and overwhelmed by too many different topics. At least this is what I did. And then started thinking about all of that in context with each other. So we might just free flow here on the ideas of the era, where things went, where we would have liked to see them go, and maybe we'll end up somewhere useful.

I think we will. I'm pretty excited for this. Yeah. So, I mean, I guess we should probably explain, like, what the hell was Apollo applications? Like, why did we have it, right? And the biggest thing, obviously, is that, you know, when you think of the Apollo era, you think of it sort of kind of culminating it. Apollo 11 and stretching into the early 70s. But if you look at the funding,

it was earlier than that, right? What peak funding was like 64, maybe, 65? Yeah, that sounds right, 65. And if you are a NASA executive or anyone really NASA, it's very obvious that once that

funding starts to go down, that you know, maybe you don't have a job after you win the space race. And so there were tons of ideas on how to leverage all the investment made into Apollo to keep doing stuff. Go next. What's after the moon? What's, you know, what's further, what's faster, what's better. And that's kind of where the Apollo applications program sort of eventually manifested from. There was kind of a few interim,

like it morphed from a lot of different things. There was like the Apollo extension series, I think, was the first. There was like, let's keep doing Apollo looking things on the moon. And then there was what else could we do with the hardware that doesn't involve the moon? Yeah, that's a good way to describe it. Because even some of the stuff that happened in Apollo, some of the later Apollo flights with rovers and with, you know, longer duration stays on the surface, some of that was influenced by the early thinking about the extension. And the like 15, 16, 17 missions were originally in that timeline of like there's an Apollo

phase, which is Apollo 11 and 12-ish, and then there's like, I forget what the phase names were, but there was like three phases and 15, 16, 17 were the second. the second of the three phases. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because that's when they added the rover, right? Right, and you know, extra payload and stuff like that. Yeah, it's interesting because it's like, just like any other

NASA program that we think about it, it never quite gets to the finish line the way it started. Yeah, and that's, I think, the interesting part about when we look into, you know, obviously there was all the ideas for, okay, we're going to do the Venus flyby, you know, what,

what other planetary bodies can we hit with Apollo hardware? And even some of the, you know, the Apollo extended, like, we're going to build a moon-based thing, there were a lot of these ideas that were thought of in the early 60s as logical places to go, assuming that money stayed around. Because nobody really thought money would drop off as quick as it did, you know, given how much of the other cultural influences at the time or, you know, actual policy stuff that was happening in the U.S. given how much that affected Apollo budgets, people just assumed this is the way that space works. We have all the money. It's the space industrial complex. We're going to

be having this amount of money forever, so we have to figure out what to do with it. And then the back half of the 60s were, well, that's not happening. So what, how do we get from that to realistic uses of hardware and experience? My cynic side is coming out again. I'm just kind of realizing that maybe that's why we have such a problem today of like resisting change. It's just kind of cling on to that Apollo dollar is still like there's still some left. We can still keep holding it. We can milk it a little longer.

Where did you, when we started talking about this topic, what were you attracted to in Apollo applications? Where did you go with this? Well, I actually started with Voyager Mars, which is like, yeah, obviously, right? I'm typecast. because it's like sort of a planetary mission. And it's, you know, the basic things that I read about was that they were going to take an Apollo command module and convert it into some sort of robotic lander and then eventually start using that as a precursor for human application. But it turns out that that mission was really only tangentially related to Apollo applications.

The idea for it existed before applications and it persisted after applications is just sort of, cross paths for a little bit. We're like, hey, we could use a command module and then like, wow, this is a really bad idea. And then they left and went on their own thing. So that was the big lesson I got from Voyager Mars is that it's not really an applications program. There was like maybe a year or two where the studies were spilling into each other. But anyway, so, and then I was reading more about it. And, you know, there's all this kind of natural extension of Apollo. There's, you know, moon bases and all that kind of fun stuff. But what really caught my eye was, there was a a few different studies actually into a Venus flyby with people.

And it's actually super fascinating. So it's kind of like I really, I liked it because it was, it seemed more realistic. Believe it or not. So the basic concept for the main one I read about was basically three missions. So they would do two low Earth orbit checkouts and then a third. mission would actually go out. And it did the real basic thing that kind of Skylab ended up doing, which is this wet workshop in the upper stage of the Saturn rocket. And then kind of a converted service module on the on the capsule, which kind of used, so they subbed out the service,

was it the space propulsion system, service propulsion system, the SPS engine on the command and service module, because it was too big. So they put in two lunar descent engines. And it like, it kind of tucked, it tucked in a little bit. So it was like the spacecraft was like shorter. It looked kind of like a Boeing starliner with that kind of flat bottom. But yeah, it just would, you know, come off the S4B, turn around, dock with it. Where the lunar module was would just be like a whole bunch of like the outfittings for the wet workshop. So they would empty the fuel out of the stage, crawl into it with all their stuff, set up a whole habitat.

And off they go to Venus. So yeah, so I thought it was kind of interesting just because, you know, the two, precursor missions were totally in the realm of possibility if they could figure out the wet workshop. That's probably the biggest question mark on it because we know that didn't exactly work out for Skylab. They went a different way. And then the cool thing about it that I thought was really achievable was that the Venus flyby was only a year. It was like a 13 month mission. Wow. I didn't really think about the timeline. Yeah. And so I'm just like, oh, because you kind of think of these interplanetary things like you're right or not. You think Mars, you have three years. You just kind of

You're not getting into orbit, so it's not like you have to wait for a return window. No. So they just kind of like, you know, you dip in past Venus and then you kind of come a little further out. You come out to about one point like two AUs and then you and then back to Earth and you're on the way back, right? Yeah, yeah. And so.

That's such a weird mission. It is a weird mission. And that's and that's sort of the what kind of would maybe really think about it. Because just like the science was, I don't know, it was okay. Yeah, like what were you going to do with that? Well, so they actually loaded up the service module with like a whole bunch of like probes and stuff. There was like 14 little spacecraft that would eject from it when you flew by. So we're going to cluster bomb Venus with like a couple of humans in there?

Basically. So there was like there was like atmospheric probes for studying the way down. There was a couple soft landers, a couple like hard landers like rangers style. There were even some balloons that would float around inside there. So 14 little probes. How did that work? I don't know, man. It's all on paper.

It's all on paper. Just don't worry about it. But yeah, so you just like, yeah, carpet bomb Venus. They would do like, they had that cut that mini telescope that they would hook up to it and then, you know, photograph it. And then there was a kind of an extra opportunity. Once you went past Venus, you came within 0.3A.U of Mercury. And so they would just do a bunch of observations of mercury on route because they were just so close and then come home.

Wow. Yeah. Yeah, it's like totally not, I don't know exactly what kind of papers would be written after that mission. But having a human that has visited three planets, you know, at the same time, it's like in one mission, that's pretty awesome. Yeah. And that's kind of why I think. Did they have any thermal shielding like on the, to cover the whole thing? Do they, I guess maybe the Skylabesque solar? shield or they're just yolo in it?

I didn't read anything about that. I wonder if it would have been that bad. It's close to Mercury though. I mean, that's... Well, you still only... They were still outside Mercury, I guess. Yeah, it's just because it happened to be that Mercury lined up.

And so it was like in, you know, alignment with Venus. So it wasn't they actually were that close. But, um, yeah, the, the sad part, I read this thing that was just like, um, yeah, so the, the discourse talking about the radiation.

So there was this whole bit about how we didn't know anything about the sun at that time. We were planning this. They'd only ever like observed one one solar cycle, one like 11-year solar cycle. And so they had no idea what was going on. And if the mission had actually flown, they'd looked at the timeline. And like on the way back, there was actually a huge coronal mass ejection. And they're like, yeah, these astronauts would have been toast because we had no radiation protection at all. So it's actually good that we didn't.

fly it. But I think it's a cool mission concept because when you say, you know, what science papers would have been written about it and there would have been like a few, but, you know, would they have been great? Maybe not. But how many other missions to Venus would have happened because of that one, right? And this is- If the coronal mass ejection happened. They're all dead. I don't know if that would have been a great great marketing cycle. Robots from here on out, I guess, which is not too different than- Law says a lot of science about radiation exposure. Yeah, exactly.

But so it got me thinking to, you know, what we're working on today, you know, Artemis and Gateway and stuff. And, you know, the later stages of Gateway, if they decide to continue making it a moon-to-Mars sort of thing, there is like this Mars transfer vehicle thing. And then I was just thinking, what a great way to test that. Instead of doing a Mars fly-by, like, do a Venus fly-free. fly by it's shorter. You know, we understand the duration. You can still test all the same hardware out, all your radiation stuff, the long distance travel, the being away from home,

but you don't have to wait three years for the first kind of mission. Like, that's a big step, right? So, and then that would probably help the support of the program if earlier on there was like a good Venus, like people, you know, Sanita Williams with a selfie of Venus or something, right? Like, that would be awesome. Because that was, the whole year checkout thing was in the plans. You know, back when Mars Transfer Vehicle was a thing on the horizon, they would just, I think it was, they would boost to an incredibly high orbit of Earth where they weren't quite, they didn't quite leave the Earth system.

And they would hang out there for a year, you know, away from Gateway, away from Earth. So that's interesting. If you can do a similarly, a similar duration, I don't know, but yeah, if they could solve all the problems that come with that mission, that they didn't. didn't give two shits about in the 60s. Yeah. The second mission of this trio, like the last checkout was actually that kind of thing where they would just like do the whole mission dock to their workshop and then fly up to

almost like to geo and do this kind of like, you know, high orbit mission for a long period of time to check all the systems out and be outside the Van Allen belt and everything. So kind of similar to that. It was this really logical incremental approach. that I thought was cool. Hmm. Yeah. So now I'm like pro-venous fly-by.

Let's do it. But why, Jake? I just told you why. No, no, it's funny. Your journey of, you know, why do humans go to space? You know, in a year later, you're like, I think the Venus thing was a pretty good idea. I just want to get the fly-by in, you know,

before they cancel my Mars program again. So that's the real reason. Mars program is always canceled. You're getting a lot of black. I know, I'm getting lit up right now in this Discord. Listeners, I hope you're nicer to me than the people in the chat room right now because they are not taking kindly to my idea. We Venusians.

Yeah, you are going to have to branch out. All right. Are we talking about Skylab now? I guess we have to let you. I read a lot about the moon base idea, extended Apollo, all very realistic. But like I said, it was not going to happen. with funding going the way it was. You know, those were programs that required the huge budget, giant investment,

and that was not in the cards. So I was doing a lot of thinking about when they hit, you know, that point in time when they had to decide what was next, we had three things in the country. We had dwindling budget, massive infrastructure built up. you know, we had all this, all these Saturn 5, Saturn 1Bs, we had a lot of Apollo hardware. We had all the launch pads. We had all that stuff built, paid for.

It was there. And we had a huge industrial base of knowledge and experience. Like, people knew how to do stuff then. They knew how to pump out hardware. They knew how to fly missions. So that was the thinking that led to the rationale for what at the time, was like the space transportation system, not shuttle as we came to know it, but the full system, which included shuttle, which included a tug, included a space station, it had all these things.

A system, if you will. An actual system, not one thing that they called a system. And that rationale, I think, stands, that stands up. You know, if you were to look objectively and not get, you know, down into the depths of policy decisions or actual technical decisions or what actually came to be between shuttle and Skylab, the rationale of we have to figure out how to do more with less money, even though that didn't technically pan out because of how much shuttle cost, the rationale of like, let's use all these things that we have, people, the hardware, and less money to make productive progress in space.

That's pretty solid. But I think the main problem is very similar to my take on Gateway today, where objectively it could be a useful piece of hardware, but is it the right one to do first? You know, like, is Gateway the right one first? Or is it something that could be useful eventually? And at the same time was when they had the decision between shuttle and station, was shuttle the right one to do first.

Oh, if you ask me, I'd say no, definitely. No, it wasn't, right? And then the crazy part is they did station first. they threw up a Skylab. The problem was that shuttle was already funded. So when you're looking back to the Skylab era, it's this weird window of time. Like, Jake, do you know how many days Skylab was habited?

It was three missions, right? Three crews went up. And it was, they were like ranging between 70 and 150 days each. They kind of ramped up. bit, I think. 173 days total. Okay. It's less than an ISS mission.

All right. Total. All of Skylab. I thought the first one was like 70 days or something. How depressing is that? Oh, yeah. Like we used all this hardware for 173 days. They botched the reentry prediction.

They thought it would still be up when shuttle was on schedule to re-boost it. But it's like, it depresses me that there was so little time. at Skylab and yet when you go back, I'm going to get off my Skylab soapbox in a second and tell you why I think, where I think this could have gone different. But if you look back and you read all this stuff from Skylab era,

so many things sound so familiar to the stuff that we're doing on ISS today. They were learning so many of the things that we have now learned again from ISS. And that's where my brain started going of like, say shuttle didn't get funded and they went in on Skylabels. lab as let's put up an orbital workshop, use the Apollo hardware that we have with maybe some

more thoughts to, you know, if you didn't have the commitment to shuttle, you would have a commitment to hardware from Apollo. So you might start making some upgrades like, you know, a smaller service module because they didn't need the full service module for lower the orbit. In fact, they launched it about a half filled. And because Saturn 1B couldn't put that in orbit. They didn't need all that delta V. So, you know, maybe some smaller. service modules, some sort of reusability coming into play, you start making the upgrades for longevity. And all of the sudden, there is a space station in orbit that starts teaching you about human duration, or human, you know, long duration, human spaceflight. And then there's a bunch

of ideas that they had to fly shuttle or Skylab with Salute 1. There was an idea to have Skylab B, the one that's in the Air and Space Museum today, there was an idea to fly that as Apollo Soyuz to put that up there and have part of that mission interact with the Skylab module. There was ideas to start, you know, Skylab B to turn that into an international space station. So you could have jumped 20 years ahead of time and had an international space station in orbit back in the 70s. and what we did instead was 10 years of development on shuttle 10 years of oh shit

we need to redevelop parts of shuttle then 10 years of ISS development and building and construction and everything and then here we are today and it's like it's that piece that I can't get over of like they did make the decision to do station but they had already committed the shuttle and then if they committed the station instead then, I think it was the right time to start building up some orbital infrastructure, to start

thinking about things like depots and stuff that would have caught on differently back then. Yeah, yeah. I'm just now imagining like an ISS where the diameter of the modules was limited to Saturn 5 capabilities and not shuttle capabilities, and it's making me really excited. Yeah, but I don't even know if you needed to like always have Saturn 5 flying, right? Like, there was, here's a couple of things that I turned up in reading. There was a concept to fly Apollo with either the full service module, but in my alternate history, the smaller service module.

There was an idea to fly that on Titan 3, like Titan 3C, I think it was, which was way cheaper than Saturn 1B, had just the lift needed, and they could have flown more frequently. So you didn't even need to keep like the giant hardware flying. Yeah. But maybe you have two Skylabs, three Skylabs. Because we had a bunch of Saturn Vs laying around. We donated the last three to museums.

Could have launched three to four, five Skylabs. This is why Alternate History always messes me up because I'm just like, now I'm just wrapped up in thought. So here's, let me, all right, so one of our listeners out here, radishes in the Discord, sent us a gigantic collection of PDFs on all things. Apollo applications. Yeah, shout out. I downloaded this one of them

that I was reading through the most that was like station growth. Dot PDF. I highlighted a bunch earlier. This paper was June 25th, 1968. So this was before a lot of the decisions about what would be Skylab turned out. They still were unsure if it was going to be wet

or dry at this point, I think. They were still theorizing what could be on orbital workshop, but they were pretty sure at this point, if not completely definitive, that orbital workshop was happening and not, you know, a Venus flyby or any of the other ones. So there's a couple good quotes from here. First, as the charts indicate, there's a bunch of charts in this, we are seeking the economic benefits which will accrue

from the achievement of a longer lifetime of objects we place in space, both equipment required to support humans and to run the station and the basic scientific equipment, which we place in space can operate for long lifetimes. With proper logistic support, they can be reaffirm. used, refurbished, and where wearout phenomena or random failures have occurred, be replaced, and perhaps more importantly, can be modified to take advantage of gains in technology or changes in experimental objectives. So this, like, permanency idea was all throughout this document.

And I found that interesting because it kind of spoke to an idea of, let's throw the hardware I have up now, and then as we learn new stuff, replace it. Instead of, you know, an ISS design phase happening where it's like here's phase one of ISS and it's this like 10 year long deployment from shuttle it's like oh no we have three modules ready let's just toss them up there so just doing station but agile yeah yeah Saturday Jake all right I don't want any of those waterfall space station stuff all right it's actually kind of true though like that maybe that's why I was into this your software is showing uh second quote that I pulled out First, when we have achieved a crew size of 10 to 12 people, we begin to realize the economy

of large size since only a small percentage of total crew work time will have to be spent on functions of operating and maintaining the station. That was wishful thinking. Yeah, well, how familiar does that sound? Right? Like, we're hitting this point. We're adding one more human up next year. Just so we can actually do science.

Double our workload. But it's like, okay, so we could have done that in 79, not 2019. Yeah. That's a bummer. All right, here's my favorite part. This is going to be a Jake fill in the blank. That's the new segment that I have.

I'm ready. Is my goal to get it right or get it funny? I'll give you one chance at each. All right. As noted earlier, I have discussed some general reasons why we feel that space stations are advantageous in developing an economic program for the beneficial exploration of space

and one of the main advantages I noted was that it could provide an earth-like environment which would enable a wide segment of our scientific community to be potentially available for space work. This leads me to discuss what I believe is a very important aspect of space station requirements. Namely, the need that the station be designed to,

Jake, fill in the blank. Named to be stationed to be designed. That was a long sentence, I'm parsing. All right, I'll give you the Cliff Notes version. They want space space space space. stations in space for economic advantages, they want to enable the most amount of people to be able to work in space.

So an important aspect to provide an earth-like environment on a space station is casinos. Casinos, 100%. Okay, funny one, nailed the funny one. I'd say it's just like accessible, right?

Who do you think you're talking to here? No, it's not the ADA. They didn't care about ramps back then. That didn't happen yet. That's not what I reusable. Nope. It's me, man. It's me. Space stations.

Space stations. What do I want in a space station? Oh, uh, gravity. Artificial gravity. There's like, like 80% of this PDF is about attaching Skylab. Yeah, let me scroll down to the diagram section. There was this awesome thing. Damn.

Is that just like a tether? It's like a tether one. Is that what that is? Yeah, can you describe this? So it looks like a, a, Saturn S4B stage with the wings opened up and peeled back, a tether coming out across a distance to the other side of the spinning bit, which is a Apollo command module and service module with some sort of like tin can adapter on top of it. And then you can't see it,

but there's a small diagram of Robert Zuberin just crying his eyes out on the side of the I'm kidding. But anyway, so a lot of this stuff, the PDF that I'm reading here is interesting in that it discusses so many of the issues that we're talking about for ISS today. And it puts it in the way that I could probably copy and paste some of these paragraphs and drop them in a document that goes up on a NASA server tomorrow and nobody would notice.

And that's the part where it's like, we had the things in place to start knocking down some of these problems then. And if we did it at a time when, you know, the funding issue was not just like we have this much money, we had to figure out what to do with it for eternity, but we had this amount of money. We know we're having this amount of money next year. How do we make this more cost effective? Build some infrastructure, you know, and start actually thinking about it like a depot, not an endpoint for the shuttle. Because that's kind of what ISS became.

We had shuttle. then NASA wanted to build the station because Skylab re-entered by the time shuttle was flying and it started becoming that the shuttle was building station not that we were building station because it should be built. Yeah, so I have a space shuttle shirt on right now and I'm starting to think that maybe

you don't like the shuttle very much anymore. Yeah, we were talking about this the other day. I love and hate shuttle so much. It's a tough one. it's like I'm trying to think of a good analogy of it it's like when you have no that's not a good analogy

I'm not going to say that one I don't know but it's it's tough because it's like a beautiful amazing engineering like can't even wrap your brain around like how does it work it's a miracle this thing flies at all and you just have a deep appreciation for that

and it achieved amazing things The missions it contributed to are absolutely incredible and some of the greatest space achievements. Some of them still flying, man. Some of them still flying. Hubble. But yeah. But also like if you if you're a kid 20 years from now and you're looking back the 70th anniversary of shuttle or of Apollo, not 70th of shuttle, if you were that distant from the Apollo era, that distant from the shuttle era. How does space look different in 1980 and in 2012?

Is there a fundamental change that happened in the shuttle era? I mean, you could argue that it was continued occupation of space, right? Mm-hmm. But... But we had a branch for that back in the 70s. Yeah. Like, I think that's my point. All right, let me phrase that better.

Is there a thing that came out of the shuttle era that was... unique to the shuttle existing, right? Because space stations don't require the shuttle. The ISS required the shuttle. Space stations in general do not. I'm thinking through. I mean, you could maybe argue like there's some spin-off benefit to reusable spacecraft,

especially the reusable engines. You know, RS-25 engines are a legacy of technological. achievement that will persist in some way, but it's not a shuttle specific thing. You could have done that with anything else, right now. And a lot of people in the chat right now, like Radish is saying, your previous guest literally said shuttle, salute, and Mir taught us how to do Leo permanently. And yes, they did. But I don't think that's because shuttle, Salute, and Mir had a unique element. It was because those things existed. And that that was

the thing that we were doing. But if we were doing the ISS in the Skylab variant, those things would have happened there. Right? So that's still not a unique to that thing aspect. And that's the part that I struggle with is like, you know, in the long view of history, did shuttle fundamentally change things for space or in my alternate history

where we developed on ISS based off of the Skylab's salute era? You know, would that be fixing a 20-year delay? lay in our plans. Because if you take 73 to 93 when we started arguing about Space Station Freedom and ISS again, you know, we could have fixed a 20-year gap there. We don't have shuttle. We have other hardware. But do we jump forward 20 years in the development timeline? Do you think that shuttle taught us tough lessons we needed to learn? Probably, but again, I think that would happen. We would have fried the hell out of two or three people flying to Venus.

Yeah, maybe. Astronauts dying is not unique to shuttle. Maybe the other thing, here's one that might placate that question, is that with a crew cabin that could seat eight at its highest, there was definitely a component of international collaboration that became out of that for sure. Definitely, yeah, it was like, what, 355 astronauts that flew to space on shuttle? Right, that's a huge leap in the amount of people that have been to space. which would have been harder to do with a three-person Apollo council, right?

You know, like, how do you give up one-third of the space to a European or a Russian or whatever, right? I mean, because they do it now with Soyuz, but... I'm just trying to put my head, you know, 30, 40 years in the future from here. And if you draw the timeline of, like, pivotal moments in space history that are unique to that era, right? We know Apollo was unique. We know all of the things that happened before Apollo. All of the achievements, like the firsts in space, were unique to that time period. And then we have some weird windows there.

You know, I just came in here to brag about how cool a Venus flyby was. And then... And I got really emotional about this 20-year gap. You got a little strung up here. You know why? Because I see so much of myself in it. I like the development phase. I like building stuff.

When it starts working, I'm like, what's next? And that has been what we've been doing since Apollo. We've been in development phase. No, I want in, when it's not my work, I want stuff to work and be productive. Right, but since Apollo, we have been in constant development phase.

I don't know, I feel like I'm going to get a lot of flack for this, what seems like shuttle hate. Yeah, you've basically ended our podcast. podcast now. All the listeners have unsubscribe. There's three left. Well, hopefully they're all overwhelmed with the Apollo content. Three left in the Discord who just came here to listen to some good Apollo stories.

No, it's fine. I think you're right. I mean, the fundamental truth of if we had just used Apollo stuff a little longer, that would have been awesome remains true, right? That's kind of where we get to is that we had this awesome capability with this super heavy lift rocket and proven space capsules. and enough experience. I think I read a cool stat.

It was just like people think Apollo 11 kind of moved fast and broke things, but they had an amazing testing program going from Mercury to Gemini. It was like 99 flights up to Apollo 11 to make it work, right? Like if you count just all the things, every flight that counted towards a surveyor, Ranger, Mercury, Gemini, all these kinds of things.

So a huge test program. It was a lot of investment. that we got to the moon and then washed it all away down the toilet. Yeah, some of the photos of like Gemini missions taken off with the Saturn 5 in the background, you know, that the test versions of Saturn 5 rolling out. I'm like, man, that had to be so cool.

What a time to be alive, right? Yeah, you got two humans flying on a, you know, a Titan rocket and there's like static testing happening with a Saturn 5. All in parallel, yet, like, you know, so tight as you're saying. Like that amount of flights and that amount of time is crazy. And when you consider, you know, Apollo 1 and how that delayed things.

Yeah, they had some pretty serious setbacks in the middle. And they had to build everything. Like, it was like trying to do SLS, but you also had to build the VAB, you know, like. And the launch pads. Like, it's crazy what they had to do with it. Let me do one last monkey off my back quote. The, all right, so Skylab existed. There was Skylab B, which is in the Air and Space Museum that was always going to fly up until right before the fourth Skylab flight went, Skylab B got canceled.

So it was like, for a while, they thought it was still going to happen. Do you ever use the site Astronautics.com? I love that site. That was, that site was like source Numero Uno for KSP history back in the day. Oh, KSP history. Have we ever talked about you're the KSP history guy on this show? Maybe we have. I don't remember. I think we should talk about that at some point.

That's why I can casually roll into these shows with very little research just because I spent like two years just doing nothing about reading space history. Well, the fine folks, I don't know, is it one person at astronautics? I don't really know what happens over there. Yeah, it's like, I don't know, it's just text, so it can't take that long to build. Yeah. They have this little blur about Skylight. B that you should read, which ends with the line.

The opportunity to launch an international space station at a tenth of the cost and 20 years earlier was lost. Oh, brutal. That is obviously a line that whoever wrote that just snuck it in at a spite. Just being like, I've been reading about this and making this website now, I'm past. Whoever you are, if you're listening, please contact me. Help me deal with the bad feedback that I'm going to get about my shuttle love and hate. Oh man.

You know, what's especially ironic for you is that you're a John Young and John Young love space shuttle. Hmm. I wonder. I mean, he did. I mean, he was on the payroll, I guess, right? He wasn't thrilled when he landed on that first flight. No, he was not happy about that. He was not thrilled when he got down.

Oh, man. I don't know. It just feels like, it feels like the moment, if I could pick one time in space history where there were so clearly, you know, know, choose this and the future is that, choose this and the future is that. That was the largest fork in the road of space history. It was kind of like the moment where it was our ball to drop and we dropped it, you know? Yeah, or just like the future looks vastly different. Either one of these decisions gets made. Because then you also, here's the knock on effects. Shuttle never happens

Buran never happens What are all they working on You know all the people that worked on Oh geez No we can't even be gay That's a whole other podcast No that's my point though Is that was a point in time

Which everything changed If the Americans hadn't tricked the Soviets Into buying a really expensive airplane I'm not one of the Buran killed the Soviet Union guys That shit was going down anyway I'm just saying like There were people working on that stuff Right

It's the moment in time in space history where things are entirely different if it goes one way or the other. That's crazy to think about. Yeah. I get especially like weepy when I think about the amazing planetary missions we could have done with the Saturn 5. Cool man. Saturn Centaur? Oh, dude. We were going to talk about that.

We were going to talk about that. Okay, everyone, listeners, we don't need to spend. too much time on it, but just imagine a Saturn 5 rocket, but in place of a Apollo command modules on top of the S4B as stage 4 is a centaur upper stage.

High-powered hydrogen Poo-Pew-Pew. What did I send? I sent you the other day the throw capacity to Mars. Wasn't it like 40,000 tons or 40,000 pounds? I guess. No, it was 40 tons, yeah. Yeah, 40 tons.

To Mars. You phrased it as a as a new Glenn Leo payload to Mars. Flying by Mars, yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. Now, that's a launch vehicle.

I almost kind of wonder, like, so even just kind of building on that, what would planetary missions look like if weight had never been that big a concern? You know? Like if we had micro computers before the space age? I don't really know what you mean. Yeah, well, kind of.

But it's just like, when planetary really, I mean, we were doing some mariner stuff then with Atlas, but although I guess with Centaur's faring size, you may not have done too much. But like, you know, if Saturn 5 was like the vehicle of record, like the notional launch vehicle capability, what, you know, what trajectory would the spacecraft tech tree have gone? you know, there was so much work put on to,

there was so much work put into miniaturization and making things smaller and lighter. I had the question flipped in my head of if we could make things much smaller and put them on giant rockets, not if we had giant rockets and that set the boundaries for the spacecraft. Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit of both, right? Because you presume that computers would have also happened regardless. So, yeah, like I just wonder,

all the work that went into trying to make things smaller and lighter that work could have gone into something else, right? All that money and time. And who knows what we'd be exploring. Man, there's so many weird ways to go. Well, I think it underlines a point that it's a pivotal moment, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Did the Voyager Mars thing not work out because the ghost of future JPLers were like, it's not a 70-degree back shell? It won't work. It will crash on impact. Yeah, well, I mean, it, no, because it became that really, because Voyager Mars was like this amazing giant Mars thing, and then it got downgraded and downgraded, and then they stole the Voyager name for the actual Voyager probes, and then the Mars part went off to this other trajectory that became Viking, which had the had the Spirit Cone, right? That side of history all worked out, though. It did, yeah, well, a little bit. It landed Viking.

It landed Viking and then kind of took a break for. true, true. Ten years, but yeah. Well, we don't have that reality now, Anthony. No, we sure don't. We do have really cool stuff happening. This has been a nice detour. We really took like the most optimistic time of like feel good about space and took the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 and put on everyone's parade. Hope everyone's having a great Apollo 11 day. Oh, real quick. Let's talk about The good stuff that's happening right now. Yeah. I am thoroughly enjoying this shark week-esque Apollo series of shows that's on Nat Geo lately.

I haven't been watching it. I don't really watch TV much, but I'll flick it on sometimes and cruise through the guide. And Nat Geo has just been wall-to-wall Apollo stuff. And I would like to formally propose that in the Shark Week-esque manner, we get this every year. It's just nonstop space content. on one channel. Yeah. Whatever week July 20th falls in, that's Apollo week.

Or not even Apollo week. Let's just make it Space Week. It doesn't have to be Apollo shows. Because even like one of the ones we talked about last time with Chris, the Challenger thing that we talked about with the Feynman. Forget what the actual show is called. That was on. So it's not just restricted to Apollo stuff.

So I think we should have Space Week. And then Shark Week's hot on the tails because in that like August or something. they have Shark Week up in Canada? We know about it. Okay. I don't know. Do you have sharks? You have sharks.

You got that Greenland shark. You got the crazy old shark. Sure. I'm not a shark guy. You have sharky week. I'm a whale guy. Mammals for life. Oh, you're a mammals guy.

Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, got to stick to the family, you know. I don't know. Apollo Week. Space Week. We got it. We got orcas. They're kind of like sharks.

What happened? I don't know where I went wrong here. Where was my alternate history moment where this, I could have avoided this current time. All right. How long we've been going? Should we talk about picks? Where are we? Yeah, we should probably think about picks pretty soon here.

And I think we have some plugs to do too. Oh, let's do plugs slash please provide us an off-nominal meetup follow-up. Oh, yeah, yeah. It was great. So we went to Airways Brewing. Airways Brewing? Airways Brewing? Airways Brewery. Airways, the taproom. And it was cool. It's like right in Kent. Like it's like there. And so there's like this big screen on the wall and it just like loops New Shepherd launches. Oh, really? Yeah. It's just like it's a super pandery bar. Like they're just like blue origin employees please drink here. And they do. So it's good. And I even had a New Shepherd pale ale. That's what I drank. you're not drinking one on this show? I don't know. Now I really regret not bringing a growler back or something.

Thank you. You're welcome. Was it, you know, you had the people there that looked pretty good? I mean, I saw like one photo from you. Yeah, I know. I'm awful at taking the photos of those things, but there were a good show. So Blue Origin showed up, which is really cool. There's some people we know there, some listeners and stuff that came by.

And they're fun. Blue Origin is an interesting company. So you know how secretive they are. Well, they're, it's like, that's the culture. Yeah. So a lot of them wouldn't even tell me their job titles. You know, they had like department names that were super obscure. Like, yeah, what do you do?

I work in concepts. Okay. Cool. You work in Kent? Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Nearby, yeah.

I worked nearby. But, you know, Some of them were driving Tesla's, though, and that seems kind of counterproductive. You know what I mean? You got another option for him? I don't know. It was a joke, Anthony. Jeez.

But yeah, meetup was great. I was super stoked for all the people that showed up. We had a good time, and can't wait to have another one. Yes. We mentioned last time we don't know any details yet, because we literally haven't started planning any details yet. but October IAC in Washington, D.C. Since the last time, we both have been approved for media stuff, so that's happening. So we're developing some concepts for a meetup, roughly in the area of Washington, D.C.

On either, I'm going to go ahead and say it's either the weekend of October 19th, the 20th, or the weekend of the 26th, 27th. It's either before or after the show. It depends on travel schedules. If you are remotely close, just keep an eye on the channels. Isn't that the benefit of doing it in that area? Is it like 100 million people are remotely close? Yeah, a lot of people are close.

Plus, I believe, Jake, I'm spitball in here. You can tell me what I should cut out of the actual show. I believe we're going to try to hitch some sort of meetup to some sort of air and space museum. Yeah, definitely. Which one? What are you thinking? Wait, there's two?

Yeah. Oh, shit. There's main one on the National Mall, which has a lot of stuff. Oh, that one. Okay, you're right. Which is where Discovery is. It's going to be such a long trip. I have to do all of this stuff.

Well, the mall part is easy. It's kind of, it's close to the Commerce Center. It's super close, yeah. Everything in D.C. like right there is super close. Hmm. Maybe we can do that on a slow day. Yeah, I think we, I think we do the meetup. out by Udvar.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because that's also like the setup there is big and wide open. I think it would be a good spot to walk around with a group, whereas the National Mall spot is a little tighter, harder to keep a group together. But like Udvar Hazy is Udvar Hazi, I don't know how to say it, giant hanger. There's plenty of room.

We could be a small band of miscreants browsing space stuff. It would be pretty bad. Yeah. I kind of did that with this, for most reason, meetup. We hit up the museum flight. Oh, yeah. Check out the Apollo 11 capsule on tour there. Oh, you did see it on tour.

It did see it on tour, yeah. That's funny, man, because I've seen it... It's looking good. I've seen it at the actual air and space. And then the last time I was at Udvar Hazi, it was in the... What do they call it? There's some name for the area where they restore the vehicles that they have. I forget. There's some fancy nameboard. It's named after somebody. I forget who.

So I saw it in there getting restored for its press tour. And then when I was in Houston in 2017, it was at Johnson Space Center when I was there. So I've seen it like make it's way through. Yeah. And I think it's coming out to Pittsburgh or it already did and I missed it. And not that that's way farther than DC, so I don't know why I would go out there to see it. Yeah, that's in Pennsylvania, right? It's in Pennsylvania, USA. Yeah. Anyway, so keep your eyes peeled if you're into the meetup and stuff.

Yeah, no, it was cool. We're still doing it. Yeah, but no, we should definitely do it. So take none of this as Faye accompli. We're going to do something. I don't know what it is yet, but we'll let you know, listeners. And please come out. It would be awesome to have a, would it be awesome if there was 20.

of us like rolling through. Oh, it would be great. Then getting drunk after. Yeah, that'd be good. Okay, what's your pick? My pick's the space lab book. I told Jake before this, I was doing all this reading about,

what did I say space lab? Because I was thinking about it because it said Udvar Ozzie. One of the space lab modules is there, by the way. Okay. That's cool. Anyway, Skylab. Skylab book.

This is a Jake style pick because I never quite finished the book But I was like oh crap I never finished the book so I picked up the Kindle this week and I've been reading back through It's called homesteading space the Skylab story David hit is the author a couple other authors throughout the book as well including owen garyett um alan bean as well everyone's favorite whimsical astronaut i love alan bean yeah i know you do so there's some LMV in there. It's really interesting to read. Granted, I haven't finished the whole thing, but it's very interesting to read because Skylab is this weird part of space history

that's glossed over and is so interesting. So if you're at all remotely interested, or if you're not, you have to be somewhat interested. If you're not, you don't know Skylab, right? It's just something you've never read the Wikipedia article. Just pick up the book. It's really interesting because there's a lot of cool stories of space history in this. and David Hitt's like a massive Skylab fan

just a nerd on Skylab all things Skylab so it's really really worth reading yeah I think I follow him on Twitter he is like a yeah he's a good tweeter he's a good tweeter shout out to David Hitt maybe he listens who knows um and you have something you want to plug too right oh yeah I made an Apollo National Park shirt this is a something I did a recent trip to a couple

National Parks. It was out in Arizona, did Tucson and Sedona area stuff. So we did Sawaro National Park and Grand Canyon. So I was looking at all these National Park shirts. And then the Apollo thing was coming up. And I had a couple ideas for Apollo shirts. So that was one that I put together. That is the future, alternate future, where Apollo National Park exists. So it's moderately politically polarizing and that I'm taking a stance on what Apollo sites will be. but it's a pretty fun little shirt

so shopped up main engine cutoff.com it's a really good shirt I was going to buy one for Apollo 11 but it won't get to me in time I'll send you one yeah yeah you order it and then forward it to me and it'll probably beat the same speed

but I'm just yeah that's awesome yeah so definitely go get that it's a cool shirt my pick so I kind of have two I guess I was only going to have one and then Anthony reminded me

of something else I can make for a pick so I'll just do it. But the first one is a pick slash plug. Check this out. You ready for this? The pick plug. The old P&P. The old P&P, yeah.

I've actually plugged this podcast before, but I'm going to do a specific episode this time. So this is the Time to Eat the Dogs podcast. And they did an episode. It's so good, right? Time to eat the dogs. It's the Arctic thing. Anyway, and so.

So the host of this, Michael Robinson did a great interview with someone called Catherine Newell. And she's the author of a book called Destined for the Stars. And it is a kind of a story of, it's very kind of apropos of what we're talking about today. This like pre-Apollo, Werner von Braun, Willie Lay, Chesley Bonestell, vision of what space exploration should look like. and she does an awesome job of kind of portraying how this this sort of like zealous you know uh effort to to make space because space wasn't a thing at the time and so these these guys were trying to like define what it was going to be right and she kind of explains it in a way that compares it to a religious experience like

a secular religious crusade almost right um so it's kind of a fascinating um uh uh book and the interview was out really good as well. And the reason it's a plug is because around the same time this episode's coming out, you're also going to hear in the Wee Martians feed, I teamed up with Michael Robinson to do a bit of a collaboration. And we explore the question that's been dogged me for a long time, Anthony. Dogging you? Dogging me. Time to eat the dog and me. You know, why do we send people at these space? Why should we? we talk a lot about how or when or who but not necessarily why so i called up michael robinson who is a historian of exploration so he is an expert on ocean voyages and arctic expeditions and all

these kind of things through history and we talk about how that is relevant to space and how it isn't and you know what's driving people to do this it's a kind of interesting conversation just had it this morning got to do the editing still but uh By the time you hear this, by the time you hear this, it should be ready. And it got intense a little bit. It's like a very,

it's not a typical Wii Martian show. It's like pretty philosophical, very step backy. I don't know what the term is, but high altitude show. It's a high altitude show, you know, but it's fun.

I think you should do more, I haven't heard it yet, but I think you should do more high altitude stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It ends up being a little rambly like this show, though.

I don't know. I know. It's tough. I have a, I have some theory here, and I just haven't totally formed it yet. I thought you might be able to help me put it together. And it sounds like that's what you were doing with time to eat the dogsman. Yeah, kind of, because as you know, I've been losing sleep over this damn question for like more than a year now.

Yeah. But you did find your answer in that they are meant to go to space, to fly by Venus, to secure future funding, and then get fried on the way home. Yeah, exactly. Get the one, do it for the grant. It's a martyrdom. Dude for the Anyway, I do have a second pick which is very briefly

the Apollo lunar module Lego set you should get it. It's amazing. It was a really fun build and it looks awesome on my desk and the little platform that it sits on. Have you looked at it?

No, I haven't seen it at all. It's got a little crater. Oh, I did see somebody tweet that. I was curious. Okay, can you show me how it sits on that? Does it lock into any of those spots, or is it just kind of... It just kind of sits. It just kind of goes there.

So, like, you can see there's, like, in the corner, a little round things. And the pads just... Okay, so it is supposed to go there. flop right in there, yeah. Nice. So it just sits, really cool. And, yeah, it has a little crater on it. And then the best part is if you look, or the astronauts walking, there's little footprints.

Oh, that's pretty clever. I know. It's adorable. Oh, man. Lego's so good. Lego's the best. How many, how many Canadian dollars? is that sucker though?

Uh, I think it was like 129. Nice. I think it's 100 US. Okay. It sounds right. Yeah.

Not too bad. Yeah, that's pretty good. So it took me about, I don't know, two hours to put it together. One hour, two hours? I made a video about it. You can look it up on YouTube.

Time lapse. Whoa, you made a video? I missed this. You missed the video? Yeah. It's super funny. I'm really funny. You should watch it.

one of the weeks that I was off the internet? Maybe, because it was probably June. June, June's a rough month for you. Yeah, anyway. I should have hit the ultra music right there. One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, end of death.