Off-Nominal - 221 - Ornithopter of Spacecraft (with Jeffrey Kluger)

Episode Date: December 11, 2025

Jake and Anthony are joined by Jeffrey Kluger to talk about his new book, Gemini: Stepping Stone to the Moon, the Untold Story.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 221 - Ornithopter of Spacecraft (with Jeffrey Kluger) - YouTubeGemini: Stepping Stone to the Moon, the Untold Story: Kluger, Jeffrey: 9781250323002: Amazon.com: BooksGeminiFollow JeffreyJeffrey Kluger (@jeffreykluger) / XJeffrey Kluger | TIMEFollow 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. It's the Matinee edition, Jake. Hello, hello. It's Matt Nail. We're doing this one for the Europeans today. For the Europeans, yeah. They need a little love. They need a lot of love right now.

Is that true? Okay. We'll get back to that. That'll be a topic later, but we've got Man of the Hour, Jeffrey Gluger. Welcome. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me, guys. I lost my prop.

I heard it is. I put it on the shelf. The book, Gemini or Gemini, we shall debate. Yeah. You even in the book got into the debate of how to pronounce it. Absolutely, yeah. So how do you say when you're going out on this junket here? Lately, I have slipped back into Gemini, which I'm not proud of, because I always considered myself, you know, enough of a NASA junkie that unless I was talking about astrology, I would always.

say Gemini when I was a kid when I was growing up I barely ever said the word Gemini I was all Gemini 6 Gemini 12 the Gemini program and I went to a summer camp called camp comet which was the space age camp for boys in Waynesboro Pennsylvania all of our bunks were geodesic domes named after the planets and one summer the counselors with a couple of out of off camp and engineers built a full-size Gemini capsule set in a frame that allowed it to both Hitch and Yawl. Wow. And it had working instrument panels that were connected to a control room outside that also had working instrument panels.

The entire thing was made of wood. It was just, I spent four summers at that camp in that capsule. And we always called it the Gemini simulator. I'm desperately searching if this is still open, Jake. No, originally it's not. Okay, I was going to make me and Jake go. We have threatened before that we were going to try to go to space camp together and film the whole thing. And this, if, so what happened to simulator?

Does a simulator exist still? Did you buy it? Is it in your knowledge? No, no. Yeah, it never would have survived. It was, you know, in 1966, they built it. So, you know, it would have fallen apart. But the camp was ultimately bought.

and they basically raised all of the existing structures and started over. Man, we got to find it. A relic lost a time. We got to find it or build our own. It's got to be on that eBay site you found with all the flight jackets and stuff. Oh, yeah, we went a couple weeks ago, Jeffrey, we went down an eBay rabbit hole finding somebody's selling on eBay, like, current Soyuz mission backup jackets. We don't know where this person on eBay is getting them, but, like, cosmonauts. that have just flown.

Maybe I should buy one from the most recent flight. I have a pretty good idea where they're getting them from. That one could be a keystake. If this is the last crude Soyuz mission to ever fly, Jake, maybe we should get a jacket from it. The launch pad fell apart for Christ's sake. Oh, that is dark. That is dark.

Yeah, all right. They'll be fine. Jake, it's pretty early. I don't know if you brought a drink or just something fun to drink out of. Oh, I have one. Yeah. All right. Nice.

Oh, what the hell is that? I'm trying to say how to orient this, but I had to get it. Spicy tamarind chili. Wow. Yeah, tamarindo chili. And it's, I'm not great at time zones right now. It's the morning? In New York.

No, no, no. Jake lives in Mexico now. Is it noon? It's officially after, it's after lunch now. Okay. Well, because sometimes we're the daylight saving doesn't land properly. So sometimes we're two hours apart. We're one.

We're one today. We're one in the winter. What do you got up there in New York? Uh, 105 p.m. Oh, I meant what do you, do you bring anything to drink? Oh, no. You got stuff going on, man. Nothing for me, yeah.

I got some vodka in the kitchen, but it's a little early in the day. I have an entire pot of coffee. Nice. And I have a very festive mug. I'll go one shot on this. Oh, I like that. Very festive, but, you know, I'm outside of Philly, so I've got the Liberty Bell. I thought we might have a little Liberty Bell talk in this.

There's a Mercury portion of the book. I knew that. Yeah. I was glad that I was able to include Mercury in the book. I think it was essential to sort of give both the science and the human piece of that program and how it sort of evolved into Gemini as well. Yeah, you went deep on like the actual spacecraft side in a way that I feel like a lot of people gloss over when they were coming out of Mercury, what they were going to do from a hardware perspective. I thought that was a really fun portion of the book. Yeah, and just making a larger capsule, you know, back in 97, I was, or 98, rather, I did our cover story on John Glenn's return to space, and I was sitting in his Senate office,

interviewing him, and on an end table next to the couch where I was sitting was a model of the Mercury spacecraft, just, you know, big enough to hold in your hand about as tall as a shoebox, put on end and you know I didn't think anything of it until I looked at a label on it and it said one ninth scale which meant just nine times bigger than that toy on John Glenn's table was the size of his spacecraft it was a ston machine now they had to the the slogan it or the saying among the astronauts is you don't climb in the mercury you put it on that's really what what it was like. It was like a, you know, a titanium garment. It was so tiny.

Jeez, yeah. Now, I think even, Mercury for sure, I think even in, like, Gemini capsules are, it's the same idea. Like, I mean, it's bigger, but you had two people in it. And just hearing some of the logistics of, like, this, you know, going outside the castle. Like, are you, like, just trying to, like, change into your flight suit in there? Like, I can't even imagine. I know. It's incredible. And as Jim Lovell pointed out to me, the Gemini capsule was slightly less than twice the habitable volume of the mercury, which means it was too in and they actually had less space per capita than they did in the mercury. Yeah. Less space, more poop. It's not a good combo.

Yeah, like literally have to like poop on the guy's lap. Like it is, it is a, it's not an ideal. I think that's exactly how Jeffrey put it in. a book as well. Yeah, exactly. That's why Frank Borman went, Frank Borman went nine days on Gemini seven without pooping before his body finally told him enough, you can't do this anymore. But, you know, his idea was if a man can't control his own bowels, he can't control anything at all. And, you know, he was pretty adamant that he was going to try. I'm curious how, before we talk too much about the content of the book, I want, I want some, like,

context on why this book now, based on all the space books you've written and everything that you've written at time and elsewhere, like, was this something that you had cooking for a while and it was just finally the right time? Is there something recently that made you go, oh, I should finish that Gemini book up, Gemini book up? Gemini book. Yeah, you're absolutely right. It is something that I had, I'd been thinking about for a long time. I probably first started contemplating it in 2008 or so because in, in 2010, I was on a Middle East, a morale tour of American bases throughout the Middle East. And the featured speakers, there were two pilots who had achieved great things in the Air Force.

But the other three celebrities on the trip, much more celebrated than the pilots, were Jim Lovell, Gene Cern, and Neil Armstrong. So you've got the first man on the moon, the last man on the moon, and the commander of Apollo 13. It was a pretty rarefied group. And I remember in 2010 asking Armstrong if he'd be willing to be interviewed for a book on Gemini. And he demurred and said,

well, maybe if you send me some questions via email, I'll consider responding to them. But that's how long ago I was considering this book. And from 2010 to 2003, when I got the contract, I wrote about either four or five other books, and after each one of them, I thought, is it now time for Gemini? Should I do that book that I've been wanting to do for so long? And finally, a couple of years ago, when I had exhausted the book ideas I was working on, I, you know, turned back to Gemini.

And I think it's, you know, I think there are a lot of reasons to do a book on Gemini. The, you know, Tom Wolfe owns the Mercury space. People like me can write about Mercury in other books, but for at least another 50 years until the right stuff is a century old, no one's going to try to write the definitive Mercury book. And nobody should. The right stuff just tells it. I've read it four times. I plan to read it five or six more before I shuffle off this mortal coil. And, you know, I and other people had written about Apollo in depth, but nobody wrote about the Gemini program.

It was very much the overlooked middle sibling of, you know, the Troika of great space programs. And I thought it was time to tell the story and, you know, make clear that not only without Mercury, without Gemini, would there have been no Apollo, there wouldn't have been the rendezvous and dockings that we routinely do with the International Space Station. There wouldn't be the six-hour EVAs that astronauts typically go out on. There wouldn't be the long-duration missions of people in space for a year or more. Gemini just kicked open the door to all of those technologies, all of those practices, all of that sort of intrepid energy that astronauts brought to long-term missions. Do you think that part of that is because, I mean, in a way, And not in a way. I think officially, Gemini was supposed to be like part of Apollo.

Like it was really like, it's like Apollo phase zero, right? It was because it didn't exist initially. It was supposed to go mercury straight into Apollo and then they kind of went, well, actually, we don't have any idea what we're doing and we got to practice some things first. And so that, you know, Germany became that bat. And so like in a weird way, it's almost like part of Apollo. Do you think it kind of gets overshadowed because of that or is there some other reason that we don't have? Well, I think you get.

Yeah, I think it gets overshadowed for two reasons. We had the question of novelty with Mercury, you know, the first Americans in space. And the first American in space, then the first American to orbit the Earth, then the first American to fly a long-duration mission, Gordon Cooper's 22-orbit 33-hour mission. So it had the, it had a great novelty to it. Apollo obviously had its own headline, making power because, you know, that was three men at a very sophisticated ship going to leaving the gravity field of Earth for the first time. And Gemini just didn't have either one of those that headline making potential. Now, that's not to say that the program didn't get a ton of attention.

I remember going to school when Gemini missions would be launched. And on launch day, there would be televisions rolled into classrooms. and, you know, our classes, our class sessions would be abbreviated so we could watch the, you know, watch the missions unfold live. But they still didn't have the historical impact of Mercury and Apollo. It's interesting, too, because, you know, space nerds like us get so into the Gemini missions that it's, like, I feel like I don't stop and think about the perspective outside of our community. of nerds, you know, and you're right that it's like, well, first we did this, then we had two guys,

and then we finally went to the moon. And it's like, all right, you just shortened like a lot of the most interesting missions that we've ever flown, let alone pausing to talk about ejection seats, which were a chaotically terrible idea. But like, I think you've been a great picture of understanding why it's stuck in the program and why like, you know, testing be damned. They were still part of the mission because they couldn't afford an escape tower from a mass perspective at that point and all these different reasons that they stuck around but uh i always think about the ejection seats both that and in the shuttle as just an absolutely horrible idea yeah terrible idea that would have subjected them had they ever ejected from a moving gemini a moving um titan booster uh would

would have subjected them to 20 gs or more i mean you know the the booster could kill them but so could their escape system. You know, it just I thought that was a great way. You put it, though, you were like, of all the, you know, they already know that this whole machine has many ways to kill them

and the seats were just one more way that it could. Right, exactly. A good perspective shift on, yeah, they probably weren't that worried about it. They weren't that worried about it. Yeah, and they were pilots. They had all ejected at one point or another,

but not at 20 Gs and not at the speed that the, that the Titan missile was flying. Yeah. They probably knew if they survived, they have the best story of, anyone. Exactly.

But they would have left two smoking holes in the in the side of the spacecraft. So that pretty much would have been the end of that Gemini capsule. Yeah. It's a while. Yeah. Yeah. I guess it's like, Anthony,

I talk a lot about how I'm really into the operational side of space activity. Like, you know, the technology is cool and the accomplishments are cool. But like I get really excited about just the idea of people like coming together and like, working at it like a pace and getting like a rhythm and and figuring out all these operational challenges and solving them and implementing the program. And I think like Gemini is like the shining beacon of that because it's like getting the work done is not sexy, but you have

to get the work done. Right. Like this is literally just like it's practicing. It's like literally like going down a checklist of like we have to be able to do this, this and this and invent these things and practice these things. Get all the astronauts so a little bit of space time so that when they go into Apollo they're already veterans. Like it's just all these. like really clutch accomplishments of Gemini that they don't really make a lot of good headlines right yeah i mean they were all basically single point failures you know if you don't have rendezvous and docking that's it your apollo program is over if you don't have long duration space flight that's it your apollo program is over if you don't have space walking um then

there's no training and exiting a vehicle which is exactly what they did on the surface of the moon so every one of these things was you know it was failure of mission failure of lunar objective if any of those things had not been worked out so you're you're very right that it was very much a developmental arc from the end of mercury to to the beginning of apollo straight through jemini and every step they took was one more technological and and navigation step that they didn't have before. Yeah. I draw a lot of analogies to kind of the things that we celebrate today and the modern space

companies. You know, if we talk about SpaceX, their ability to sort of iteratively develop, you know, like kind of like pick off one one tech tree problem and then solve it. And you'll make a little bit of failure along the way. But like step by step, they sort of like advance very, very quickly down this path where they get something really incredible at the end of it. I feel like Gemini Apollo is sort of like the best example of what NASA could do. that because like Gemini is exactly that like very good cadence like every couple months they're

going up with a brand new crude flight they had like such a specific clear detailed list of objectives that they you know would just kind of knock off and i was this there was something very beautiful about the the pace and and um and i don't know and the willingness to adapt too right like the Gemini six seven situation where they went from a screwed up a gina to all right well we could figure this out with the hardware we've got that's that's something that we are very much in the net Jake's saying Gemini, so you're going to have us convinced by the end of this to say Gemini. I just want to fit in. I just want to fit in. See if we can pull it off for the next 41 minutes.

Like, I do think there's a lot of kindred spirit going on between the modern day commercial space industry, like being in its Gemini era in that they're trying a bunch of different things. They're pushing their capabilities. We always joked on this show that Jared Isaacman was running his own private Gemini program under the Paris program. We'll see how that develops. given where he's going. But not only that, but also the kind of, I mean, we did have a little bit of rebellion from the astronauts in the Mercury program, Scott Carpenter not laying off the gas

on his flight, but there was a lot of, you know, bring the corn brief sandwich, take off your flight suit when you're not supposed to. They were pushing the boundaries and saying like, well, we're up here. We know how we need to do things. So we're going to push that back on you from an operational perspective. That's the personality that a lot of commercial companies, have when it's like, well, we are going to land on the moon. So what paperwork do you need to get together so that we can go do that? Because I don't know if you see behind you, we have this giant thing that was ready to launch. We're pushing the boundaries in the same way. It's very much Alan Shepard's light this candle command. And, you know, basically what Gemini did, what SpaceX is doing,

what Blue Origin to a lesser extent is working to do is to light the damn candle. And, you know, to do it fast. SpaceX has, I mean, you mentioned the iterative process, and that's especially true with SpaceX. I think they've launched 10 starships at this point. Now, they haven't had a whole lot of success with it, which is one of the reasons that Sean Duffy is reopening the contract for another human landing system. But, you know, SpaceX has been able to push hard and to push fast. They've launched, I forget the total number now, but they've launched high. hundreds of Falcons of Falcon 9 since, you know, since they first began flying in 2012. And, you know, they've improved them steadily with each one.

I mean, first stages weren't landing early on. Now they, you know, they've flown some stages seven and eight times. 30 times. Some were in the 30s. Yeah, there's a couple in the 30s now. That's what that's also like, the fact that we all follow this and we're like, yeah, it landed again on the boat. It's like multiple hundred landings on a boat. I'm like, I don't mention it anymore.

You know, like, I'll tell you if it fails because now it's just part of it, you know. Yeah, and I was talking to, I think it was Scott Kelly. I did a piece, interviewed a number of people for a piece I did on back in early November on the 25th anniversary of the space station. And I think it was Scott Kelly. You know, I was raising doubts about the human landing system, about that, you know, that long, tall, silo-shaped spacecraft that's going to take, or is supposed to take the place of the lunar module,

which had this wonderfully low center of gravity and, you know, force, blade legs. And they're trying to land this rolling pin straight up on the surface of the moon. And I said to Scott, I think that's madness of the first order. And he said, well, they're landing first stages on moving barges. I think they can have this stationary moon. It's really incredible. Good point, Scott. Yeah, that's similar to what Gene Cernan has said on a number of occasions, which is that landing on the moon was nothing compared to landing on an aircraft carrier.

You know, the ship is moving, it's pitching, it's dark out to night landings especially. It's dark out. And, you know, I've been, when I went on that morale tour, we flew out to the USS. Eisenhower aircraft carrier. We did a tail hook land in and a catapult lift-off. It was a really incredible experience. And as we were approaching the Eisenhower, they opened the bottom hatch of the airplane,

the ramp that's used to load cargo. They opened the bottom hatch so we could see the carrier deck in the water beneath us. And that is one tiny target compared to the enormous. normity of the ocean around it. And, you know, these, I mean, Navy pilots are practiced in doing that. So for CERN, you know, give me a flat, flat, long stretch of stationary moon, and I'll be a lot happier landing there. Yeah. That's such a, a thing that he can say to, like, four other people ever. Landing on the moon was fine, an aircraft carrier. You're like, all right. You're like the one percent of the one percent that can say, yeah. Scott Kelly knows it to be two, right?

I guess he's landed on a carrier. But yeah, that's right. I'm just thinking about that open hatch now. Yeah, how is that advisable? Even me out a little bit. Yeah, it was pretty amazing because it was just completely open to space. You could, you know, you slide down that. I mean, it's basically the hatch that's lowered to create a ramp on a tarmac if you're

rolling, you know, moving assets aboard like jeeps. And we were just, it was us inside this plane with a job. giant hole in the bottom of the plane leading straight down to the carrier deck. It was pretty scary. And you're like, I should write the book about Gemini. I never got to do that. Yeah, and the catapult launch, that kind of scared me, you know, because I didn't know how what it was going to be like.

Lovell was on that plane with us. And I said to him afterwards, I said that catapult was something. And he said, well, I don't know, I was asleep. And it woke me up slightly because we taxied for a long time on the carrier deck. So these guys are completely unmoved by the thing. You were like, did you hear that boom when we took off? And he's like, I don't hear booms anymore. I'm like, dude, I've been on a Saturn 5 and remembered the time before that when I was on a Saturn 5.

This is nothing. This is nothing. Yeah. Yeah, it was pretty incredible. Lovell said to me once, I mean, these. guys put things in such a human perspective when we were writing apollo 13 um he and maryland were planning a vacation and he said and he said yeah we can go anywhere and but you know i've been to asia i've been to south america i've been to the antarctic i've been to the moon i've been to

europe and he just tossed the moon in and it you know it wasn't even first on the list it came after africa and arctica and he wasn't crying he wasn't playing for a joke there He's just ticking through the places he's visited in his life. And you were like, well, actually. Yeah, exactly. Have you, though? Right. Does it drive you nuts when people get the quote from Apollo 13 wrong?

Houston, we have a problem. Yeah, does that drive you nuts? No, and funnily, when the movie came out, the New York Times, which gave it a rave review, opened with that fact that the movie says Houston, we have a problem and of course it was Houston, we've had a problem.

And they said, and I thought they were going to say this was the first of many fictionalized aspects of it and the first of many errors. And they said this was the first example in a tiny syntactical way that Ron Howard streamlined this mission and made it seamless.

There wasn't a ton of downtime in the movie. they consolidated three or four engine burns into that one dramatic engine burn where Lovell took a bead on the earth to aim the spacecraft but yeah they pointed that out as a perfect example of why the movie moved as swiftly and compellingly as it did all right now I'm saying Gemini and I'm no longer being annoyed by this Jake the only reason that it's the only reason the the small syntactical change that it is

I think is notable as somebody who's like, yeah, but they are dealing with the problem and telling you about it versus asking you what we should do about it. I feel like that's the syntactical difference of like, we got this going on up here and we're going to figure it out versus like, I don't know what's going on here. You guys are not to let us know. Now like we know how it played out, but yeah, I always thought that was different. Yeah. While we're at it, do you think Armstrong really screwed up his first words on the moon? Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I saw, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I saw an interview with him on, I think it was 60 minutes. I'm not sure.

And they were walking through a museum and they stopped next to a mockup of a limb. And they asked him about it. And he said, well, I thought I said it right, but I maybe said it wrong. We'll never know. And, you know, I remember back in 69 when broadcasters, where newscasters were trying to make sense of it because the A was missing. They initially said he did say the A, but it was lost in static. And no, he didn't.

And let's just, you know, I mean, a lot of places, a lot of print outlets will put the A in and sometimes in brackets, you know, to make it make sense, but indicate that, you know, that it's not quite what he said. But it's a little bit like, you know, I was down at the Naval Academy in October for the service and funeral and burial of Jim Lovell. And he and he and Marilyn are side by side. They're back together now, which is, you know, so nice because they were together for 71 years in life.

And they have a beautiful headstone, and it's black marble headstone and etched in it is Jim's quote. You know, I've seen the earth as a grand, as an oasis in the grand vastness of space. And he actually said in the big vastness of space, which is kind of redundant. So they changed it, cleaned up the quote for his headset. You know the role of a good editor. Yeah, exactly.

If that's not like a perfect example to illustrate how we can't always trust primary sources, I don't know what else. I'm just thinking about all the history we've done by like digging up like old Sumerian like gravestones and being like, oh, this is the grave of king whatever who did this? It's like, did he? I don't know. I'm sure you got that. Yeah.

I got a weird one for you. You need to write a minor part two and go down the weird Department of Defense storyline on how might we use the Gemini spacecraft in all these different ways. Yeah. Some of the blue suit stuff. Right.

And there was consideration of a Gemini anchored space station. It would have just been, you know, like an eugenia-sized vehicle attached to the nose of the spacecraft that would serve as the first space station. There was talk of flying the ship around the moon and coming home, which never would have worked because it wasn't built for hitting the atmosphere at 25,000 miles an hour, and it wasn't built for 5,000 degrees on its heat shield. It was built for easing into the atmosphere at 17,500 miles an hour, generating no greater than 3,000 degrees on the heat shield. So it was a nice idea, but, you know, they would have had to have basically rebuilt the ship.

Yeah. And even the man-orbiting laboratory version had the hatch through the heat shield. Right. Never since right with me. Yeah, that makes very good sense. I mean, wasn't a big Gemini, I think, too? It was like a... It wasn't what?

There was like Big Gemini. It was a thing. Big Gemini. Yeah, there was a... Yeah, they were talking about an enlarge vehicle. I don't know that they could have seated three people, but it would have given the two there a little bit more room for longer duration flights. Yeah, yeah.

Speaking about the heat shields, I love going to see the Gemini capsules and museums because they, you know, when they tilt them on their side and you can see the underside where they have sort of like the, just like streaks, like streaks of, you know, where it hit the atmosphere. And you can see how it does the thing where the center of gravity is off center. So it's like it's coming in banked, right? So it kind of like, you know, float or skipping on the atmosphere or whatever it is. So it's like just that off center spread. That's one of my favorite things to see.

Yeah, it really is amazing. Of like science. Yeah. And you'd think of the thermal violence that etch those lines into it. You know, it just gives you a sense of what they were experiencing as they came through the atmosphere. That's why I've always said, you know, people ask me, would you go to space? And I said, yes, on the condition that I would be under general anesthetic for the liftoff and the reentry, because I don't even like roller coasters. So I ain't lifted off with a rocket,

at least not conscious, and I'm not coming back that way either. Transport me to space, and I'd be very happy floating in the space station. But if I were there, I ain't coming home, because I'm not doing that reentry. I have the same kind of thing where I like roller coasters that are mostly like flips and turns and interesting stuff and I hate ones that are just only drops. Like I just like this is not that enjoyable. So then I'm like, God damn it, do I? Would I hate free fall or is it totally different? Like because you don't have the wind sensation and everything around, you're rapidly approaching the ground.

Like is that what I don't like about the experience? And I would be fine if it was free fall. I got to buck up and get a zero G flight ticket is what I got to do. That'll answer the question. Yeah, I've had the opportunity and I've declined. when we were shooting Apollo 13 and they were doing the zero-g scenes in the vomit comet, and I was included in, you know, virtually any step of that movie I wanted to be included in, but I was not invited aboard the KC-135 Vomit Comic Blaine,

and I was saying to friends, I have never been so grateful to be disinvited from an event in my life because I couldn't have said no if they had asked me, but I would have deeply wanted to say no. So this, you know, I never had to deal with it. Man. The other thing that makes me bummed about potential spaceflight future is that I'm intensely skeptical of cruise ships and the various gastrointestinal diseases that you tend to catch on them.

And I'm like, they have a lot of fresh air on these things. It's going to be bleak if you've got 100 people in a starship going somewhere. Yeah, it's going to be rough. Yeah, I think that's starship. I know. I don't care how robust the air filtration system is. Even air on airplanes is filthy. We just ran a story about that in the health pages and the health section of time.

And, you know, it's just filled with pathogens. You've got 250 people in a metal tube sitting shoulder to shoulder. How that's not basically ground zero for every infectious agent in the world. Are you telling me you didn't believe all of the post-COVID propaganda about how flying was like this, the cleanest air? It's actually cleaner than the ground because of all the class 10 heapilters or whatever thing they put in the Yeah, I don't believe that for a second. I mean, I was, you know, I'm sneezed right into the hepa filter for sure. Yeah, I'm old enough to remember smoking on airplanes and I'm also old enough to remember the folly of having a smoking.

section and a non-smoking section midway through the plane, as if the smoke is going to stop at seat B-23. That's not how it works. You know, it was as smoky in the front as it was in the back. And don't tell me pathogens don't move the same way. Yeah. Jake's a cruise ship stand, though. So maybe he feels differently about this.

Yeah, I've been a loss. Never got sick, really. Well, I guess we'll see how. that goes for you in the future. Yeah, we'll see. We do have to do the vomit comet, though. We do, yes. It's part of the show's lore.

We have a movie to film there, a romantic comedy, the Offnom, Vomcom, romcom, yeah. That's in our future. If you'd like to be the producer, Jeffrey, let us know. It's obviously a highly attractive product. Yeah, count me in. I am happily a part of it. We won't make you come on the filming of it. That's good.

Yeah. Yeah, we won't ask you. I wanted to ask this, I usually ask this to any author we have on, but like, you know, most people who write a book about something go into it with a pretty good like, you know, baseline of knowledge about what you're writing about. I assume you weren't a complete novice about what Gemini was doing before you started writing it. So I'm always interested to know after writing it.

Like what is, what did you learn? Like what is the most interesting thing that you didn't know going into it that now you do having done, you know, the on the ground research for? right? I think what I didn't know is something you guys mentioned earlier, which is that iterative process between Mercury and Gemini. I had always assumed that they came into the Gemini program with a plan to build a ship that was a bigger sibling of the Mercury that looked like the Mercury that, you know, in some ways flew like the Mercury, but, you know, with much more nimble, a much more nimble set of thrusters and the ability to accommodate two men.

But I had not realized that they considered, you know, just sticking with Mercury, making it a little bit more robust and continuing to have one-person flights with, you know, the astronaut exiting through the nose of the ship for an EVA and, you know, being able to stay aloft for a week, even though I don't know how they would do that in that tiny capsule. So what surprised me is the fact that it was not at all clear from the start that they were going to build a two-person Gemini spacecraft. And they had to go through a lot of theoretical engineering and a lot of planning sessions to decide, yes, this is the way we're going to go. But Gemini was absolutely not a done deal in terms of planning as late as early in 1963. And when they finally decided on it, you know, it was a crash course to get to get it flying by March of 65, which is when Gemini 3 flew.

Yeah. Man, those timelines are just, they don't fit today. That would just like, can you imagine NASA inventing a new, like a new human rated spacecraft in one year? And then four years later, like it's flying with people on it. Like, I just, that kind of cycle just doesn't happen. I know. Like that's just, it's reminiscent of the lunar module, which took, I think, seven years from conception to, to the Apollo 9 flight.

And that's one of the reasons that I am so deeply skeptical of the possibility of us having astronauts on the surface of the moon before 2030, because they haven't even chosen a human landing system yet. and you know you have to choose it then you have to design it and then you have to you know flight test it uncrewed and then it has to be ready to fly astronauts to the lunar surface and i just don't think the calendar will allow that not by 2030 i do believe i mean look my feeling is i mean i would obviously be happy if the next footprints on the moon are made by somebody with the stars and stripes on the on the shoulder of his or her uh space suit

but I will not be troubled at all if that next person is wearing the Chinese flag on the edge of the sleep of the spacesuit because it's not just emissaries of a nation that are going out there. It's emissaries of humanity. You know, Michael Collins, I interviewed him in 2019 for the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. And he said what struck him the most during his world tour afterwards was when people came up to him and said, we did it. They didn't say, they didn't say you did it. They didn't say America did it. They said we did it because Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were living emissaries of the human species. They weren't just emissaries of their nation.

And I think that's one of the, you know, the richer and sweeter things about the global reaction to spaceflight. So I will be untroubled if a Chinese tykinaught beats us to the moon. Beets you, yeah. An interesting counterfactual would be to wonder if that reaction had been the same, if it was the Soviets who landed, you know? Just only because of like, like, just because they're, you know, they're humans, but there's, There's different global reputations for those kinds of countries, right? Right. No, China is a little more well-received, I think, globally than the Soviet Union was.

But still, there's, you know. I wasn't around. So that's tough to compare, but I'm like, that's an interesting thing to consider. Yeah, the Soviet Union was pretty damn scary back then. I remember being a little boy and hearing that Khrushchev said, we will bury you. And I remember looking out the window of our playroom thinking, so was there going to be dirt covering the windows? I took him literally.

You know, Nikita Crusoe, I scared the bejesus out of me in 1962. Yeah. Do you think if there was not the same, like, the fact that we have such access to limited as it is, what's going on within the Chinese space program and China generally, like there wasn't that in the, you know, 50s and 60s between during the early days of the Cold War, it was this, you know, the boogeyman that you could write yourself.

And that played better to both sides to have the other kind of have a weird boogeyman perspective. Whereas now we're like, we got spy satellites that have taken photos of everything. We know it's going on over there. We've got social media. We can see videos, even stuff they don't want us to see and we don't want them to see. Like, do you think the familiarity is what helps that, Jake? Or is it?

Well, I think the free markets is a big thing, right? Like, you know, even though China is... We're not getting chips from the Soviet Union. Yeah, like I'm sure I know China puts their finger on the scale, but like there's much a much bigger culture of free market, you know, economics in China than there was in the Soviet Union. Like they're still doing business with everybody everywhere and providing products. And like that's good, right? It's nice to be able to buy good stuff that's inexpensive and China provides that. And so you get a lot of goodwill for that.

Also also gulags. Yeah. Like if there were gulags, but they were shipping good products our way too, would have felt different than yeah exactly yeah we're all we're all communicating right now on something made in china do you think that you think that that the same would be true in the 60s if they were like talking on soviet phones i don't think it would have worked that way you know so i have a feeling the ed baldwin reaction was the exact reaction it would have gotten though jake if the soviets landed first the steaming in a bar ed baldwin view yes yes yeah china's progress is pretty extraordinary

You know, I was speaking to someone, we had the Time 100 or the Time Magazine person of the year announced this morning. And we had the opening bell on Broad on Wall Street. So I was on the floor of the stock exchange this morning, which was pretty... I'm thrilled to accept it. I'm just absolutely thrilled, yeah. It's coming your way. The trophy is in the mail. But somebody I was speaking to said he had just been in Shenzhen.

I'm sure I'm pronouncing that wrong. and he said, you know, 30 years ago, the population of that city was like 18,000. Now it's 22 million. You know, the Chinese just move fast and do remarkable things. And they're being pretty quiet about their effort to get to the moon. But, you know, it seems clear that they are, you know, very much targeting it. Yeah. Yeah, they do.

They're going to win the market in a lot of ways. and you just get exposure like that. So I think it's a much less of a, you know, a sheltered regime like the Soviets were. Right. Yeah. Hmm. Just was looking at the dates here, by the way.

The first and last crude flight of the Gemini mission, like, just fits really well in between every gap that was ever predicted between Artapeus missions. Right. You know, like, and then some. You might even be able to fit two of those entire things. The pace is just unbelievable. That is so depressing.

You could fit the entire Gemma program. I was really intrigued by the parts of the book that were about that sort of the management side of things. Because that definitely gets almost no coverage by anybody because probably it was hard to crack into when there was so much happening so fast. You spend so much time on the missions. But actually being able to orchestrate that and keep that program on track and moving to hit those milestones every couple of weeks. is a, that's an incredibly impressive half of the thing that we never talk about. Right, yeah. Speed was very much of the essence when it came to Gemini. And, you know, I mean, look, had there not been the Apollo 1 fire, had they built that capsule

right the first time, we could have beaten the lunar deadline by two years, you know, because that's how much time, that fire happened on January 27, 1967, and the next Apollo didn't fly until October 11th, 1968. So they lost about 21 months, which, you know, had that capsule worked, we could have landed on the moon 20 months earlier than we had. So it would have been a 1967 landing. And that actually was JFK's initial target. Openly, he said, you know, for public consumption, he said before the end of the 1960s. But within the administration, they wanted to do it by in 1967 because it would have been, you know, America's opportunity to spit in the Soviet soup since that was the year they'd be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the, of the revolution.

And, you know, that's what JFK wanted. And had it not been for the fire, that's what he would have gotten. They might have done it, yeah. Yeah, Pace is, it was a different world. I don't know, I don't know. I don't know what to say about that. Also, Jake, I know you're a big Regalo wing fan. It gets its due in the book.

What a weird storyline that is. I don't think I realize all the ins and outs that you have in the book about where it came from and how it sort of operated as a primary path for a little while. Right. Yeah, it was Francis and Gertrude Regalo, and I forget now where they were from, but they dreamed up the idea in their garage and initially used chintz curtains as the fabric for their model of their of their regala wing and it was an insanely complicated system for very little payoff you know would have had to have these wings somehow folded and stowed within the skin of the spacecraft then the sides of the spacecraft would have had to have opened to let the wings out then a pair of of skids, yeah, would have had to come from the bottom of the spacecraft so they could land properly. And this picture is something that Neil Armstrong helped dream up a, you know,

a one-third or two-third scale, regalo wing one passenger, an experimental model. And it actually worked after a fashion. But, you know, when you're coming up against parachutes, which have been, you know, in use for 300 years, you know, why in the world do you? want to introduce this insanely complex system into the spacecraft for very little payoff. It looks like a Michelangelo drawing, you know, like one of those that fits in the line of crazy inventions from 500 years ago. The ornithopter of spacecraft. Right.

Yeah. It's ridiculous looking. And the reason was because the astronauts wanted to fly it, right? I think you mentioned this. They wanted to fly home. They don't want to ride home. Right. Right.

And the ostensible reason was to keep the spacecraft out of the hands of the Soviets should a, and should a crew land very much off target the way Scott Carpenter did and land in Soviet waters or areas that the Soviets were patrolling. You know, the fear was the spacecraft and the astronauts would have been scooped up as, you know, propaganda targets. And Russia could have reversed engine, reverse engineered our Gemini. But that wasn't likely to happen. You know, the Russians weren't going to do this. It did reduce the area of possible recovery spots. You know, had Scott Carpenter landed 250 miles off target,

and that meant that they were searching something like 16,000 square miles of ocean for him. So if you can eliminate that and land on the land, you know, you are basically landing on a, you know, on a military runway, so the recovery would have been much easier. Isn't that thing that I showed the photo of? Isn't that in the Udvar-Hazi Center, the Smithsonian? Is it? Is it? I'm not sure.

I feel like it's been displayed there in the space shuttle. I'm 85% sure that me and you looked at it together, Jake. I'm pretty sure we fit there. Yeah, I don't know if you guys are familiar with Amy, Shira, title. She runs, yeah, she is. She's an amazing woman. She knows more about space than virtually anyone I know.

She's a 39-year-old Canadian who was not around for most of those programs. And yet she's incredibly knowledgeable. And when I first met her, the only time I met her, she interviewed me when my book on Apollo 8 came out, I noticed that she had a tattoo of a Gemini spacecraft under the Regalo wings. with its landing skids out. And I looked at her and said, Amy, you are the real deal. There is no one in the world,

even an astronaut. It wasn't just a Gemini capsule. I mean, she got deep enough into the history to know the early models that never flew. She's really amazing. I watch her YouTube channel all the time. Yeah, she does this proud. I guess I have to pull the photo.

There's a picture that I have of you behind Discovery and you can see it in the background. So I know that it's there. Yeah. I've seen it then. Okay. Actually, yes. All right.

I can fold some. Get back to me in a minute. I'm pulling a picture. Okay. Yeah. That's one of my favorite things about studying like historical spacecraft is some of the ideas that never were. Like I did, you know, Regala wing and the like the dinosaur like, you know. Oh, yeah.

The X-20. chaser like prototype you know all those kind of things yeah the the verticals make all those kind of spacecraft they're always so fun i don't know there's something just really really charming about them yeah yeah they've got a real sci-fi quality to them they're like tint tin goes to the moon yeah here we go jake this is our off nominal meetup at udvar hazy you can see it off to the left there yeah that's a beautiful there it is big big parachute proof there's a picture of us with it It exists.

Yeah. The shuttles are really gorgeous machines. It was either Charles Crowdhammer or George Will in talking about the fact that in many ways the shuttle program was a, well, in critical ways it was a failure because, you know, 40% of the spacecraft either exploded or disintegrated killing two crews. So, you know, it's hard to take that black mark off of the, you know, off the shuttle's history. And it's hard to say that it was, you know, a perfect. flying machine the way the Mercury Gemini and Apollo spacecraft were. But man, it was pretty,

and man, it was complex. And man, it was inspiring to see that thing come in for a landing, you know, and lift off under its five engines, two solids and three liquid. But George Will, either George Will or Charles Crowdhammer in acknowledging its troubled history, said, the shuttle belongs in the museum of things too beautiful to exist. And I think that's a really nice way of phrase in it. Yeah, I agree. I'm a space shuttle apologist, so I will take that to the bank. All right, but if the, if NASA got, well, actually, this is, you were here for most of this

storyline, so I would like to pick your brain about when the shuttle was being proposed. Were you following the TikTok of which format of the shuttle was actually getting approved and going to make it into development? And did you have a favorite that didn't make it? I had a favorite that didn't make it, but it didn't make it because no one has engineered this properly yet. And that is the single stage to orbit spacecraft. You know, you take off in one piece, you return in one piece, nothing is shed along the way. There are no external tanks. And that was the original plan for the shuttle to take off like a rocket,

re-enter like an airplane, but do it in one piece the entire way. And as soon as they began sticking hardware on the outside, two solid fuel rockets on either side, and the giant external tank under the belly of the ship, you know, it became an imperfect and much more complicated spacecraft. The clean lines of an SSTO, a single stage to orbit, you know, it's an elusive dream because, you know, when you pack enough fuel into it to allow it to make that journey, then you add a lot of weight, which means bigger engines and bigger engines add weight, which means more fuel, and you get into a vicious circle of, you know, engineering that takes you

into just a complete inescapable spiral. So, you know, nobody knew at the time, or at least the public didn't know at the time, that SSTO was a very hard thing to do, and the shuttle likely would never be able to achieve it. So, yeah, they wound up with all of those external components. Yeah. Earth is a two-stage planet, unfortunately. It's the burden we bear, you know, two-stage at a minimum. Two-stage at a minimum.

Yeah, and Musk's starship lunar landing spacecraft, in theory, would be single-stage to orbit. It would, you know, land and take off. But I think, you know, I was talking to people at Lockheed Martin who are proposing the alternative human landing system and theirs is going to go off the old lunar module model with a two-stage spacecraft and the Ascent stage using the descent stage as a launch platform and taking off. And I think that makes sense. I mean, it's worked before. I don't know why in the world we want to complicate it now with 150-foot silo-shaped spacecraft. It's just, it's not a plausible or realistic scenario. Scott Kelly's going to find you and just tell you how it is when it sticks to land.

Exactly. Yeah. You're not a big fan of the elevator, I take it. Oh, man, is that insane? There were nine rungs on the lunar module. And, you know, the last one was like three feet above the surface, so they had to jump. That's fine. The idea that you need an elevator on the surface of the moon, that is too much hardware.

That's swatting a fly with a blunderbuss rifle. It makes no sense at all. I like that analogy. That's good. Just depends how much it costs to get a version that doesn't have an elevator. That's their kicker here, you know? Right. Especially when there's a company talking about IPOing. Yeah, there was, I got an.

email this morning from a Wall Street analysis firm that was offering an interview, and they said from their data crunching, SpaceX would be valued at $2.4 trillion. And I think that's all Musk again, because it's an amazing company and it does amazing things. And the Falcon 9 is basically the world's workhorse rocket, which, you know, has never existed before. A commercial rocket that, you know, countries around the world can use, but still $2.4 trillion. That is completely out of brain. I think it's, I was telling Jake this before we went live. I think it's still too low because you can't put a price on priceless.

And I think until anyone shows any hope of approaching SpaceX as the outlier in the industry, they are an actual priceless piece of infrastructure for the country and the world in many ways. They are the outlier in so many extremes. that it doesn't make sense and they are invaluable as an asset. Right. I tend to agree with you. And I mean, the first time I visited there, the first time I interviewed Musk, you know, it was well before he became, you know, the political pariah that he's become.

Actually, I interviewed him three times. And the last time was when he made him person of the year in 2021. And he was quite personable and, you know, quite genial. And he handled the press well and he handled the attention well. And he spoke with a little humility. You know, he and I were on CBS for a piece on the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing of Apollo 11. And I was talking about Pad 39A, which is, you know, where Apollo 11 took off from, where every lunar module, or lunar mission except Apollo 10 took off from.

And now Musk had a, you know, a 10-year lease on Pad 39A. And I said, so you've got 39A. one of the most iconic pieces of real estate in the space program. And he said, I know, I'm not worthy. I don't know how I got this. It was a really wonderful and strangely humble thing for him to say. Well, I mean, Starship coming soon there. Going big into Florida.

That storyline is going to hit us quicker than we're ready for. I think there's a lot of work to go in Florida before they start flying Starship from there. I would bet that as a shock to the industry, they would like to fly one as soon as practically possible, just to make a statement of like, starship has arrived on the space coast. Because the storyline for years has been, they're going to be messy and dirty and, you know,

blow up a lot of things in Texas. And then once it's all buttoned up and tidy, it'll come over to Florida for the operations. And those timelines have converged in the fact that Starship program is still a bit of a mess. And I don't know. I feel like they're going to want to get one off from Florida. as soon as they can.

I think they will, yeah. I mean, Boca Chica has seen a lot, but it's, you know, it's made a lot of noise and it's done a lot of environmental damage and it doesn't have his star base doesn't have anywhere near the geographical reach that Canaveral has. And I think ultimately they're going to have to start launching from Canaveral and do away with Boca Chica. It's just the people, the residents don't like it. the wildlife hates it. It's just too big a rocket for, you know, an even sparsely populated

patch of land. Yeah. Yeah, the shipping lane problem is a big issue there too. Like, there's just not a very good clean like trajectory out of there. You're going over tons of boats and countries and islands and flight paths. And it's just like it's just very crowded kind of coming out of that way, right? Yeah. Jeffrey, before we get Chad here. Tell people where you want them to buy the book, Gemini, Stepping Stone to the Moon, the untold story, it's pronounced Gemini, not Gemini. It says it's too small for all to see on stream, but that's the second subtitle. Yeah, and available wherever all fine books are sold.

The St. Martin's Press, St. Martin's site is the best place to buy it, but it is available everywhere, Amazon, and hard copies in physical bookstores. That's my favorite way to get any book. I read half of it on the hard copy and audibold my way through a lot of it when I've been busy the last couple days, which is, if you're a listener, it's up there. Yeah, thank you. It's always a good thing when it hits so close to the release date. Sometimes it takes too long to hit the audiobook version. Right, no, they did that during the year.

We were producing the book, so I was really happy that they did it. And we had long discussions about whether it should be Gemini or Gemini. and we settled on Gem and I just because we didn't want to throw people off and confuse them with the program. And it hurts you every. That's why you don't listen to the audiobook version, right? Exactly, that's right.

You'll never hear it. Yeah, it's anathema. It's just not, it's, you know, it's a violation of all that's historically holy. Well, it wouldn't be the first audiobook to mispronounce something. So I think you're in safe there. well thanks trying it out and yeah any other books you want people to scoop up you've got Apollo 13 obviously we talked about I bet everyone that listened to this show has at least read it

at some point in their life but anything else you want to point him to Apollo 8 that was a whole lot of fun to write you know it was Apollo 13 revisited without the accident but with the you know the poetic history of orbiting the moon and there's holdout my novel that came out in 2021 about an American astronaut who refuses to leave the space station when her rotation is over. And she has a reason. And, you know, it's a pretty compelling reason. And I had a ton of fun writing that book.

Is she the one that drilled a hole in the Soyuz that one time? Yeah, the only way worked that out. Yeah. I think we know who it was. She wanted to stay in international waters Yeah, yeah Jake, we got a big week next week, man It's our favorite show of the year

Every year we award the off-nomony The Off-Nominial awards take place In which we award the thing that went most Chaotically wrong in space Stiff competition this year One week left for the Australians to get their act together And send us the goddamn video of the Gilmore Space Launch vehicle deploying its faring on the launch pad

The video exists, we are told this We are pressing them to send it to us. We will air it on the show. You will win the award. It is the only time this award can be bought with a video file. Yeah. I'm going to call my shot too, Jake. I got something else going on next week.

Flying close to the tower here because there's an 85% chance this gets rescheduled. But if it doesn't, on Tuesday, I'm driving down to the Pentagon. I'm going in to interview General Saltzman for an hour, the head of the Space Force. Wow. So that will find. That'll be on Miko, the other feed. I don't know. I convinced them to let me come in and hang out and record for an hour.

So we're going to talk a lot about. Yeah, that's going to be interesting. So we'll tell that a little next week on the show too. I think Brendan Byrne is hanging out with us for the off nominees, by the way, Jake. Oh, excellent. I have a production meeting here on the air. All right. All right, y'all.

Get the book. It's great. You'll love it. We promise. Jeffrey, thank you for hanging out with us. Hopefully you'll come back when you're not on the pressures of the junket and to hang out again. I would love that. You guys have a great show, and it's been a pleasure talking space with two such knowledgeable people.

Oh, there we go. He's trying to get rebooked, Jake. Yeah, yeah. He wants it back in. All right, y'all. We'll see you next week. Thanks, everybody. Bye.

All right. Thanks, guys.