Off-Nominal - 24 - Jim-Adjacent

Episode Date: November 5, 2019

Jake and Anthony tell the tale of IAC 2019—meetups, making connections at the conference, trolling around the expo hall, and the much-anticipated-and-surprising meeting with JB.DrinksPumpkineater - Howe Sound Brewing - UntappdGalactic Hammer - Slate Farm Brewery - UntappdTopics66 - IAC 2019 - WeMartians PodcastEpisode T+137: Artemis Politics, United Lander Alliance - Main Engine Cut OffEpisode T+138: Peter Beck, Founder of Rocket Lab - Main Engine Cut OffOff-Nominal (@offnom) | TwitterOff-Nominal on Twitter: “introducing the ANOMALIES. just the best people at our meetup, including our friends from @orbitalpodcast #memoriesofIAC”Tory Bruno on TwitterOff-Nominal on Twitter: “Pretty great finish to #IAC2019 meeting NASA Administrator @JimBridenstine. He’s very excited about the Jim Bridenstine Fan Club. We’re gonna need more pins.”Off-Nominal on Twitter: “The Legendary @garynapier, Gary From Lockheed”PicksFor All Mankind on Apple TV+Follow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterOff-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine, start. Welcome to space. Jake. Anthony. There are stories, and then there are stories. Jesus. And I think what we have tonight is the coming of age tale of OffNominal. Offenano's all grown up now.

I think this is the season finale of Season 1 of OffNomenal. So I cannot wait to get into this. We've had a week. We've had a week to recover. Are you okay? Are you doing it? I'm actually still fully exhausted. I don't know. I went in with like into this week with still too much of a sleep debt.

And because I got home late on the Friday. I got into the house at 1 a.m. Pacific. And so and I did not sleep on those planes, unfortunately. So I was pretty tired and then I was busy in the weekend. And then I had to work full week. And here I am. So you're okay. Yeah, I'm alive.

You sound great. Yeah. Sounds good. It was tough getting back to real, real life. It really was, yeah. I, like, went to work and I was like, uh-huh. For a single week, Jake and I lived the dream of, this is our job now. And then we kept going to each other, like, man, it's going to be tough to come back from this one.

Yeah. Well, and you're, like, so amped up on, like, on just, like, consuming space all the time that, like, I felt hard to, like, go away from Twitter or, like, go away from the Discord or anything like that. Like, I just, like, I'm still plugged in. Oh, I unplugged. I let you handle that. Yeah. I did not unplug very well, so. I enjoyed almost getting my feet run over by Buzz Alden on a motor scooter.

You and me both. Yeah. There's a couple incidents there. We'll get into that. Yes. What do you drink it? Okay, so, well, if this is the season finale of phenomenal. Season finale.

Finale, man. Do you say finale? It's a finale. Well, okay. So I have a hard time saying French word. wrong. So that's why it's finale. Because it's final. Anyway, so I thought we'd go full certainly. Yeah, angry, angry meme emoji. Amy Jake emoji in the Discord. Yeah, Big bear. Well, funny you should say that because I have a very

giant beer right here. We're going to end the first season of Offenomel where it began. So I have the first beer I had on episode one, the house down brewing, pumpkin eater, imperial pumpkin ale. It's lovely because it tastes delicious. It's still Halloween-ish. It's 8% and it's a liter. It's a lot of beer. It's a lot of beer. Wow. Okay. So our first one was October 2017 and you remembered that beer from all the way back then or did you look it up? Or is this your October? Is this your pumpkin favorite? This is my pumpkin favorite. And so when I went to go get the beer for this, I saw it and I was like, wait, that's the one I had on episode one. So, yeah.

Yeah, and so some of the people in discourse are saying a liter beer. And if you're new to this, yes, I drink very large beers because I buy them one at a time. So here I am pouring. I know it's good. I don't need to drink one before I can give you a review. It's delicious. Well, Jake, you are not the only one with an enormous beer tonight. Yes.

And I wish I could tell you exactly what I was drinking. It's unclear. It is unclear. I think I have, with good certainty, I know which one it is. But you may have heard, if you are a subscriber to either of our patrons, you may have heard us in IAC week giving you updates. If you are a subscriber to the MECO one, you heard a surprise entrance on the last day of IAC by the man we all know is Pat, who is from Maryland.

And I think this is his brother, brother-in-law, brother? We'll get clarification in the chat, who runs a brewery, brother-in-law, called Slate Farm Brewery. So he brought some beer for us to the Airbnb. This is a 32 ounce can. Okay? So it's not like, it's shaped like a tallboy if you held shift in Photoshop and scaled it up a little bit. It's kind of how it,

it's like if you took the ICPS and you made it the EUS, you know what I mean? It holds a lot more. And there's, so it, my favorite, I love this can. And I don't know if this is a can you can buy, because the can doesn't say any beer on. it just says beer and then it just says the letters ABV and then you fill it out I think

this is all by hand as they're working out beers and maybe this is how they do all the cans but there's no actually identifiable details on this can and then there's red Sharpie that had written down under pale ale and 5% but that was not enough it is scribbled out in silver Sharpie and it says galactic hammer 10% and it is 32 ounces So we'll see how many ounces I get through before the show goes totally off the rails. But I'm going to drink it. And we're going to see what's going to happen. I did the conversion.

32 ounces is 946 milliters. So it's actually, we have the same. We have the same size beer. And Jake took a screenshot for everybody to see. Yeah, because it has the Maryland flag at the top. Oh, yeah, it does. The brewery thing is written in the Maryland flag, which is an off nominal lore now. And I've already spilled it on my desk because it's hard to pour out.

of this giant can, but it's not as disastrous as last episode when I spilled it all over my keyboard, so we're fine. Yeah. So that's what we're drinking. It should be a good night. Okay. Is it time for this? It's time.

So I think any good season finale starts with a previously on segment. Don't me to set you out? Yeah, yeah. Go ahead. Previously on off nominal. Wow, that was interesting. Because I really think there's so many things from our past that came up here, Jake. And I think it's important to cover them because it really tells the full story of why last week was so epic.

I guess we should set the stage that, well, no, we did that last show. If you are confused right now, go back a show. Yeah. So we started this three, two years ago. And shortly after you came to Philly. Well, you were at LPSC, and you came to Philly. We did a meetup in Philly in March 2018. And we were talking about IAC being in D.C. in 2019.

And we were all talking about how this is going to be a great meetup. We were going to go to Udvar Hazi. We were going to do all the bunch of good stuff. We were going to go to IAC. We had have this on our calendar for like a year and a half solid. Because we were so jazzed up about IAC because that was right after the 2017 one when like we got the first starship update. What was it then BFR again? I don't remember what it was.

IAC was like the place to be. It was hot. Everyone was running around big crowds. We didn't want to go to Germany, so we said, well, we'll wait to D.C. So that was kind of like the early days of Off Nominal. And then very shortly after that, I think it was just three months after, I'm looking at a rundown here, we had Jason Davis of the Planetary Society on. Jim Brynstein was not even, maybe he just got confirmed, and it was like a few months

into his tenure. And we were kind of discussing, is he good, is he bad? we developed the nickname J.B. on that show, Jason Davis himself. Should we play that clip in the recording? Sure. Insert clip here. It probably depends on, you know, in this hypothetical situation where a Democrat wins in 2020, it depends on whether that Democrat runs on, I'm not Trump, or if they run on, here's my new idea and just pick me over Trump, right?

Because that seems to be the challenge right now in candidates that we see, right? Are they just a not Trump or are they actually the own person? Even so much as like, we're going to change it to the lunar orbital platform gateway, even though it's the same damn thing. Totally not the same thing. Totally not. Well, it could be right. Maybe they'll just keep Rydenstein, but they'll change his name, right?

They start calling him, they rebrand him. He's like, J.B. Yo, J.B. J.B. That sounds so much better. To connect with the youth, the millennials. How do you do fellow kids? Skateboarding through, you know, building nine or whatever.

Oh, Lord. So that was episode nine. We go a couple episodes after that. Episode 12, we have Lauren Grush on. And things go off the rails on that show. But we get really... You two got me really jealous about Gary from Locky. Yeah.

Yeah, because Gary set us up at, he set me up for Mars Base Camp, and then he worked with both of us on the Insight mission, so I met him at the launch site. You had all these personal connections. Yeah, Gary from Locky, great guy. So then we went two episodes because of scheduling, and we had Gary from Lockheed on the show. Yeah.

I got to meet him. Great, great moment in off-nominal history. It was. I was so sick on that episode. Do you remember? Yeah, I do remember that. That was right when I got mono. Oh, yeah.

That was the start of it, and I couldn't finish my beer. So those are some of the big points in time. And then two months ago, was it two months ago that you had that Seattle meetup? Yeah, that was right at the end of August, because I was just about to go to Halifax on vacation. So it's like August 28th or something. And what happened there? So that was, yeah, Pat flew out. Pat came to see us.

We had a small little meetup at Airways Brewery, which is a cool little place to be. And listener Kevin, so Kevin, you know who you are. You showed up with a big bag of Jim Bridenstein fan club pins, which was the joke because we were like all into Jim Bridenstein. And we had, we were the presidents of the J.B. fan club. And you brought those pins and you told me, I only wanted to, I only want to be. wanted to make a couple, but it was cheaper just to make a big batch. So now I don't know what to do with them. And so I said, give them to me. I'll take him to IAC. We'll hand him out. I don't know.

I kind of just, whatever. We'll give them to fans or whatever it is. Cool. All good. Kevin, please email us. Kevin, we have a lot to talk about. So that's, those are the, like, if you were, you know, previously on segments, they never contain all the storylines you love. They never contain all of the characters you love. There was plenty that we love. that have been on the show. But those were the moments that relevant to the storyline of this episode, those are the pieces you would put in that little trailer. So now we go to I-Seed, Jake.

We got to talk about the meetup. We got to do a meetup recap. Meetup recap. So I landed after no sleep on my red eye. And I was not smart. I flew into Reagan Airport and then to attend a meetup at Dulles Airport. Took a connecting flight. Took a connecting ride in the chauffeur service of Pat.

Bless his heart came to pick me up so that I didn't have to take a what probably would have been a $70 lift across the city because it's actually pretty far. Dulles, not that close to D.C. Turns out. Just if you're not from the area, a little far out. So yeah, so we're going out there. And we started at Udvar Hazy. What a turnout.

I was so ecstatic about the turnout. There was like 25, 30 people there maybe. Yeah, I don't know if we got a final count, but it was about that. All in. So a ton of people came out, which was really great. We had dads with their kids. We had like all of this fun stuff. Our friends from Orbital Mechanics were there and brought some of their fans.

And we kind of joined up and did a big, we had kind of a mob going through that building, which was, which was really fun. It was really cool. What did you think of that museum? I thought it was great. I mean, it's like a, it's a hangar. Like it's just like a big room full of stuff. which is fine, you know, that's really all we wanted. But I love that our group because, like, no matter, we would go, like, display to display

and there would be someone there who knew something about each part of it. So then, like, it was like we just kind of took turns doing tour guide stuff. So, like, we learned so much, I think, from each other on that little, little walkthrough. So it was awesome. I was stoked. Yeah, that was exactly what we had in mind way back when of what we wanted to do on the meetup. So if you were there, you're the best. Do you have a favorite thing from there?

that you saw? Artifact? Yeah. What was your favorite little bit from it? Let's see. It's, I mean, it's hard to not love the space shuttle, but seeing a bunch, you know? What if we just take that one off the plate? Aside from Discovery.

I guess I got to say the Virgin Galactic Engine. I was just about to tell that story because me and Kurt saw it. Kurt was there, and we looked at that thing, and we were like, oh, this. engine looks familiar. It has that weird, like, slanted bell. And we're like, where have we seen this before? And we're like, we couldn't remember where it was. And we're like, it looks kind like cruddy. It's all sparked up and like, like, ablated and like, oh, what a rough looking engine. They're like, oh, it's the version galactic spaceship too. All right. Obviously. And then the, the serial number on the side, VG would ever make a lot of sense. Forty-eight. I think it was.

48. I guess that's it. Because it's just kind of like, yeah, it was pretty disgusted. It was a really ugly looking nozzle with all the junk that flies out of that thing. No. I mean, watch a video, man. That thing burns dirty. Yeah. But it's like, I don't know, it's kind of funny that it ended up there. I think it's kind of waiting to go to the main one, right?

Maybe next to Spaceship One. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they just kind of had it sitting. And it wasn't in the space area. It was sitting next to the Nazi planes. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's a plane, too, I guess. Moving on.

I got to write down the title. It's a plane too, I guess. Yeah, yeah. I tried to find Dusty, too. That was my big disappointment, though. Yeah, we couldn't find it. Dusty is like the copy of Opportunity Rover that they use in the lab to test things out. So it's like a fully functional Mars rover.

And I had on good authority that it was somewhere in that building because the main air and space where it's going to live permanently is under a significant amount of renovations right now. And so it was supposed to be stored there in a box somewhere. I looked at every large cubic thing I could find to try and get it. But no luck. There was one box that had a serial number on the side that I believe it was Mass Fraction who just Googled the serial number.

And it was a long, it was like 32 characters that he was just standing there typing in. And it turns out it was like Telstar 1, I think it was. Like some, I don't know why it was sitting in a box there, but it was there. Yeah. You didn't say what your favorite was. My favorite? Well, there is a Canada arm there, so that's pretty exciting. Oh, yeah, yeah.

I mean, that's the dark Canada arm. It's one of them. What's the first one, right? I don't know. I didn't read the block. Literally, it's the Canada arm. Well, I mean, there's probably, like, a couple of them didn't make it, right? Oh, boy.

But there's also one in Ottawa, so I don't know which one it is. And then... I think it's, though. But I like... There's five space shuttles, man. There's a picture of me in the Discord loving it. I also like the... There's a one section that had like a whole bunch of, like, really, really retro probes,

like some of the first satellites hanging from that one overhang. I thought that was pretty cool because it brought me back to my KSP history days. Yeah, you were picking them out. You were like, oh, I think I built that one. Tyros 1. M. Rerrhyr. So, yeah, it was cool. Oh, they had, like, Pathfinder and Sojourner there as well.

Like, their little mock-ups, right? Yep, yeah, the Pathfinder one was pretty good. Everything else. And then the poop stuff that we sent to Brendan. Of course. We'll put the link in the show notes for that one. The poop stuff, yeah. That could be the title, too, the poop stuff that we sent.

You want me to write that one down? So then we went on to the beer garden. Well, we, yeah, beer garden. later. After the rain. We had an intermediate meetup. Oh yeah, we did. The Rocket Frog. Rocket Frog Brewery. Yeah, I kind of forgot about that until right now.

Yeah, well, we finished the first meetup too soon, and we didn't want to start the second meetup too early, and so we invented a middle meetup so that there was three. And this is the place that on the menu had a food item on the menu called chips and snacks, and it was $1. So I thought that was very interesting. So I went up to the guy, and I said, we'll do it. order of the chips and snacks for $1 because that's hilarious. And then he just pointed over his shoulder at a shelf of like the tiny snack size

Cheeto bags and said, which one do you want? And I was like, oh, that's less funny than I thought it was. I thought there was an invented menu item. Yeah, it was $1. How could I not order that? So that was the highlight of that meet up for me. Yeah. That was cool.

It was like the rocket frog thing. So like the, was it late late? I don't you say it, Laddie, lady. Laddie? Yeah. That one launch where the frog. photo bomb the thing so they made a brewery about it there's a cool painting of that picture there was really awesome that was sweet I enjoyed that I they should sell that

yeah they should and then beer garden meet up again beer guard killer turnout yeah again we had to be 20 people probably the same amount yeah yeah 20 25 people I kind of like that place I wish it wasn't raining yeah it was raining there was one other person there that wasn't us so that was fine There were a couple guys there that left early that were like really, really drunk. Yeah. Not part of our meetup. Not part of our meetup.

They were just there. But, yeah, no, it was a great, great turnout. So we started handing out those pins and stickers and Mars bars. That's where the pin thing was really kicking off. Yeah. Yes. So now we get into the meat of IAC. You can go to our other shows to hear what we thought of IAC.

This is where the real IAC happened for us was the pins. The pins. So we started handing these suckers out. We're handing them out to everybody at the meetups. And the next morning was the opening ceremonies. So whoever was going to the event, we said whoever gets this to J.B. first wins. That was the quest. That was, yeah, captured a flag style.

You get to have a pin under the condition that you beeline it to the NASA administrator and show it to him. How long did you think that was going to take? Um, I was thinking like, you know, two, three days maybe, four even would be not too unreasonable. Like somewhere later in the week, we would have seen that. Yeah, you got the vice president on Monday morning there. J.B's got to attend to that. There's security. Yeah, yeah. How long did it take? Three hours or something? I think it was way quicker than that. Wasn't it like right after the speech? It was immediately when they opened the exhibition hall. Yeah. Like two to three minutes. Yeah. And that was Stan did it, right? Stan.

Stan, shout out to Stan, won the contest, got the pin to him, got us a picture. Although someone else took the picture. I'm confused about the picture set. I'm extraordinarily confused. Stan gave the pin. Someone else, I think someone named Lou took the picture, but Lars sent the picture to us. I don't understand how that worked either, but it was so fast that J.B. saw the pin. So we knew we had first contact. We had first contact. And where do we go from there? Forget what was the next major pin event? Well, we just kept handing him out all week, right?

And so we were giving them, and people were telling us that they were, you know, I couldn't get it to Jim, but I got it to, you know, oh, this, you know, I got one to, Tori Bruno. We tweeted a selfie of him holding the pin up, which is amazing. Yeah, that's a really good picture. And so, like, the next best thing from getting it to Jim is getting it to Jim adjacent. So, like, there's, you know, the, The first level of contact outside of the NASA administrator,

you know, people who are on text message basis with him was kind of the key, right? Or would have meetings, right? And could just wear it and it would be funny that they would be wearing it. Yeah, yeah. That was kind of the idea, I think. So. Yes, there we go. The Torre Bruno selfie.

I'm going to post this in the show notes because everybody needs, yeah, he tweeted it at Pat and J.B., which is hilarious. Oh, man. God, I love that photo. It's so good. So we're handing these things out, and the thing we should note about these pins is that there is no identifiable info on these pins. There is nothing that says off nominal. We Martians, Miko, our names.

There is nothing but Jim Brynstein fan club and his face. Yeah. Literally nothing. And it doesn't exist. This isn't a thing you can Google. So if somebody gets this pin and, like, I wonder what's happening with this, they find nothing. It's just this weird, under. underground thing that's happening.

And that's when I realized that like we're on to something here because throughout the week, it's like building, right? More people have the pins. People are asking about the pins. People are seeing the pins and nobody will know anything about it. And there's like that level of mystique that I just love about this story. Yeah, yeah. Let's see.

We gave one to, did we give one to Gary? Gary from Lockheed. I think we gave one to Gary. we got them to I feel like there were some other Most of the Planetary Society Yeah yeah Jason Davis got one for sure Casey Dreyer got one

Someone showed Bill Bill Nye Probably Jason I don't remember I don't think he took one I don't I'm not confirmed if Bill Nye took one But he has seen it Man there's so many good ones Yeah a lot of people

It spread pretty good Oh I got a couple into nanorax Nanarax, yeah. They spent a lot of time at Johnson, so there's probably people that find it funny there. Yeah. So shout out to the anomalies because they went to work at this conference and got it going. So that kind of happened for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Thursday was the pivotal day for us in terms of the J.B. Fan Club challenge.

We went to a media availability for Jim Brynstein himself. He was giving a little speech, taking some questions. There was a really weird question about harvesting poop fumes into usable methane gas. Yeah, I got like real burning man there for a little bit. Do you have any idea what that lady was asking about? As the Mars guy here? I barely heard her, but yeah, it sounded like taking poop and then getting the methane from it and then that's fuel or like something else. I don't remember.

Not worth thinking about longer than that. Yeah, we've already spent too much time talking about this. So just today, you sent me that link of all the Flickr photos that were posted from the IAC account, right? Like their official, it was like 20 pages of pictures. And I opened it up. And on page one was that press conference. So there's this picture like across the stage with Jim standing there talking. And then like me and you and Pat are standing there like all proud and listening.

Can't really see you because of your height challenges. But and then our friend, I and I already talked. Thomas, right? Thomas, yeah. The guy from Denmark was there. The number one Danish space correspondent? Yeah, the number one Danish space correspondent. So we made friends with him and we gave him a pin.

So there's my lapel and Thomas's lapel are like straight clear in the shot with the J.B. fan club pins on it. So it's just like, it's perfect. And out of frame to the right was the Planetary Society crew wearing that. Yes, yes. Yeah, there was probably six or seven in that little press scrum. Well, I think, yeah, the tweet that I made. I was like, we're having the press conference.

and I count at least six pins in the audience. And at that point, we knew that he was seeing them. So I just hope at some point in the press conference he saw a glimpse of one. I was like, oh, shit, and like this again, you know? So when the press conference started, you made an interesting observation of who introduced J.B. Yeah, well, I saw the person who introduced him, and she was off to the side. and I saw she had the IAC name badge on and it was Bettina who's the Coms

Associate Administrator for Communications, I think is her title who I've seen that she's always the name at the bottom of the administrator press releases so I was like oh I wonder if that's like the person we should talk to if we were interested in meeting Jim Bridenstein and oh there our helpful little discord is on the ball with they gather our show notes for us Yeah, they really do.

So yeah, so we tried to, so after the press conference, no, no, no, no, no, no. She introduces J.B. And as everyone's clapping for J.B. to get on stage, you leaned over to me because I'm very short. And you nudged me and he went, there she is. Because Jake had, right, this was our theme all week, right? Somebody famous would be on stage speaking.

And we were finding who is the keeper of their schedule? That's what our goal was every time. It's like, okay, I see the person up there that I want to talk to. to, but who do I need to talk to? This sounds really creepy. No, no, no, because it happened all week with, you know, Gary from Lockheed is the same situation. You want to talk to who's Rob Chambers,

but you don't go right to Rob. Is Rob Chambers? This is his full name, right? Yeah. Okay. You go to Gary from Lockheed, because Gary from Lockheed knows, knows what the schedule is. He knows how to make the connection.

You got to find that person. You do. And that was our operating procedure all week. So Jake immediately is like, I know what J.B. is going to say, but she's our end. in. And it was like mission, got the mission. We can talk to Rob. Everyone's giving us crap. We could talk to Rob Chambers. Jake asked a great question at Rob Changers session. Yeah.

Not a great answer. He punted, but he punted. But if he wants the opportunity to come on and give a better answer, he's welcome. Hot drama alarm right there. It was a perfectly good talk. No, it was. I'm just kidding. So after the, after the thing wraps, there's kind of a, everyone's milling about the NASA booth. This is in the middle of the exhibition hall. And we, as it happens all week, whenever we didn't have anything to do, we hung out with Gary from Lockheed. I guess we should have mentioned that. We just kept hanging out with him.

He's awesome. I love Gary. Gary, you're the best. My favorite part is that when we were just, we would just like wander over to the Lockheed booth, which was the main entrance to the exhibition hall. So you ended up there, even if you didn't want to. It had a coffee bar. How could you not end up there? Yeah.

So we would just like, oh, we don't have anything to do. Let's go sit with Gary for a second. And anyone that came up from Lockheed, he would introduce us and then have to explain the whole backstory. Everything. They talked about me on this one show. They got me on the show. I drank. What was it?

He drank. Super Colorado beer was like a Coor's Special Edition or something. Yeah, out of like the ball aerospace. You can only get it within a hundred miles of Denver or something. Yeah. So we stumble up to him after this J.B. thing. And we're hanging out with him. we're telling them like yeah we wanted to meet patina this that or the other we're building up the

confidence to take her away from what is actually important in her day to day work I guess and then she randomly is like oh I guess I just decided I want to say hi to Gary from Lockheed everybody wants to hang out with Gary that she fell into the same trap that we did she's like that's it Gary's there he's a comfortable guy to stand he's the same space yeah So she comes over and just like, hey, Gary, what's going on? And me and Jake are like, yes. If she's like, because now we know Gary's going to do the thing. Because he's done the thing four days in a row at this point.

He did the thing. So we get introduced. And then in the middle of our conversation, she gets her phone rings. And she's like, oh, it's Jim. I got to go. What were you thinking at this moment in time? I was like, that's it. That's the last time we talked to her.

I thought it was a fake phone call. I thought it was one of those situations. No, I'm kidding. Dial my number. It's probably five minutes, so I have an out no matter where I am. Now, do you remember the next, the pivotal moment here? The pivotal moment. Well, so she came back and Gary finished his introduction.

No, no, no, no. That was already done. Bettina's approximately my height compared to Jake, who's a monster. So Jake's J.B. Fan Club pin is at eye level for every regular human on Earth. Yeah. And she came back and saw the pin almost immediately. And I have to say that my, like, read on her interest level before she saw the pin was lukewarm. It was like, okay.

Yeah, she's like, oh, great, you're doing some podcasts. Ah, amazing, excellent. And then she went to ask me like a question. Like she was, I don't know, she was going somewhere and like mid question she stopped and she looked at the pin. And she was like, what is that? It was my favorite moment of the whole thing When she was like, what is that? And then we had to do the explaining at that way.

Okay, well, let me explain it back it up. And then we had to do basically what you've been hearing for the last 30 minutes, This entire podcast, we had to explain to her in about 90 seconds. Yeah, and land it. That was our moment to shine. That was our moment. And yeah, I'd say she was interested. She thought it was a pretty cool thing.

Got the connection. It was in. Yeah. So, Kevin, like, your pins made a difference, man. They made a difference. Yeah, that was the moment it turned. So she was like, here, you know, contact me. This sounds pretty cool.

Like, you're, it was mostly like, I don't know what's going on here, but I guess I should figure it out because there's something happening here that I'm not totally privy to. So let's just, like, let me get a little more info out of this exchange. Yeah, she was, uh, we got a hook in there. there. That's what I would say. And then we had some drinks and then I left. Yeah, because that was Thursday night, because you were, you were bagged, you were done. And there was like, Friday's the public day. So you're like, well, it's going to be a whole bunch of like kids and stuff in there.

So you decided to go and, because you're, how, the two hour drive or something like that? You're not that five. Two and a half, three hours, yeah. Yeah, okay. So my flight wasn't until Friday, though. So I went out and I went to the Planetary Society meet up. They had a volunteer meet up there, which was really great because I got to hang out with Jason Davis and Casey Dreyer and some of the other planetary people got to meet Bill Nye, which was pretty neat. And that's when I got a, I got a Twitter message from Bettina. And she said, 9.30 tomorrow morning. Jim Bridenstein is making a speech. And he'd like to meet you after that. And I'm freaking out.

Are you still around? And I'm, I like immediately freak out because I'm here, but you're, I don't know where you are, Baltimore at this point. Like, I don't, I have no idea, right? So, I call you. I'm like, how far are you? How far did you make it? No context. I was like, shit, what did I forget?

No context. How far did you make it? And you were like, pretty far, dude. well and then I realized actually I barely left I've just been sitting in a lot of traffic so I like it was not far at all so I explained the whole thing

and then I was like don't worry man like I'll take the meeting it's fine and then I kind of hung up and went back to my party and then you texted me some good stuff I did I took the next exit well because I had the I had a constraint on Friday

to be back in time for that this this would compromise. So I had to make an additional call and say, let's figure this out, because I need to turn around immediately. I need to whip this. I don't know where I am. I'm going to whip this exit and go the other direction. Let's figure this out. Figured it out. I think Jake's looking for a text thread. Yeah, I took a screenshot, so I'm going to give it to the Discord here, but it's pretty funny. Yeah, you can see my... Spun this baby around faster than you could expect for...

I am turning this thing, beep, around. Around is in all caps, so. I made it back in time. You made it back. You came to the Planetary Society thing. We had a couple more drinks. Said goodbye to our friends.

Went to the show the next day. Went to the show, had a little speech. Typical Artemis speech. I thought it was actually a good speech because it wasn't just Artemis. You're right. He was big on the Pluto as a planet thing. It was like everything that NASA is doing in 60 minutes, which doesn't get everything, obviously, because that's a lot of stuff. But it was a pretty good overview for all of the level one requirements. Yeah. Oh, dear.

All of the level one requirements of what NASA is doing. No mention of any moles. So yeah. So we listened to the speech. Speech was good. You know, it was public day, but it was not. It was not as crowd as I thought it would be, quite honestly, public day in general. But I think probably because I see itself as a little impenetrable, right? It's kind of a weird thing. The site kind of sucks. Hard to know what's going on.

I wonder how much outreach they did in general for like local schools and stuff. Yeah. There were local schools there. That's the one thing I think was a success is they had like whole classes that obviously took the day off from school and came to the event. So that's, I think that's a win. that's a good use of the time. But I don't know how much of like just the general public

or like taking a day off work to go to this conference. Yeah, probably nobody. But yeah, there was a couple of school classes. As you know, if you heard any of our I.C. bonus content. Yeah. Because they had to go through all the hallways all the time, apparently. So then after the speech, we go, we got sent a destination to meet. And we go hang out.

And here he comes. J.B. himself walks up. Yeah. We get to hang out with him for 15, 15 minutes, 10, 15 minutes? Yeah, I was like, 10, 15 minutes. Nice little conversation. He asked us about the speech, what we thought about it. We gave him some thoughts about outreach.

We talked about Viper, cool little rover that they're sending to the moon. And yeah, it was awesome. And the best part to me was that, like, she introduced us. And like, oh, he's like, what do you do? Okay, well, we do these podcasts, blah, blah, blah. and then he saw the, did he see the pin? Is that what happened? Yeah.

And he's like, wait a minute, is that you guys? And we're like, yeah, the J.B. fan club, this is us. We're the pin guys, I said. He's like, you're the pin guys. He's like, I've been getting text messages all week. I got like a dozen text messages of people sending me these pictures of these pins. What is going on? I think he like jabbed mine a little when he said, what is that?

And he like jabbed it a little bit just to like needle me. But yeah, he said he got like 12 texts, and we admitted to being the pin guys. And it felt like a full circle moment. You know, it's all of these things. Think back to the previously on, right? We had the J.B. Oh, I told them about J.B. Yes.

Yeah, we call you J.B. Oh, wait, no, we told Bettina about J.B. Yeah. And in one of your text threads or your DM threads, she referred to him as J.B. Yeah, that came back after she actually. I have a little bit of a feeling that J.B. might catch on. J.B might catch on. That was the best part for me is that later when we talked with her, she was just like, oh, yeah.

Send me the link to the tweet because J.B. will retweet. And I was like, she's calling him J.B. Dude, I think J.B. is going to catch on. What else was notable? I think that was it. I think that's the story. And it's such a good story. Great photo. Like, you couldn't have written that story.

like in, like if you had written the movie of that story, weaving all of those storylines into that climax of being able to sit down in a private room with Jim Brianstein and just talk, you know, he was just like, sat down. He was like kind of relaxed after his speech. He says, how did you think that went? Yeah, you think that went. He's like, you know, I really want to try to get to more people and really get the outreach going, especially the people that aren't into space every day.

And like it was super genuine. Jake was like standing up getting all pumped. Oh, my God. He was, yeah, no, and he was a super genuine guy, so that was really kind of cool. Got some photos, which you saw on Twitter. And, yeah, it was really great. And sitting with him in person is you can tell even, you know, the thing that we always liked about him is that regardless of all the politics and action and everything else that happens in Congress and funding in the White House, you can always tell that he's a spacegeek, right? He talks about space the same way that you and I do, regardless of all that other stuff.

Yeah. And when you sit with him and talk about Biper, the way that he talks about that or the things he talked about in the speech, you can just tell that he loves space. Yeah. And that's why we love J.B. Yeah, it is why we love J.B. That's it. It's a perfect end of the story. So shout out to so many people that made that happen.

I mean, like, the meetup in Philadelphia where the idea started brewing. Jason Davis for coining J.B. Gary for Lockheed. Lauren for setting up Gary. Gary for being such a stand-up guy and introducing us. Kevin. Kevin. Email us, Kevin.

Email us immediately because we owe you. You made the pins. You started the whole thing. We need, by the way, email us because we need another order. Yeah, we're like straight up on a pin. I need that PSD. Yeah, we got to think about that because there's definitely some stuff we got to do with that. So I was just so pleased overall with IAC.

I mean, it was a perfect way to end it. And I couldn't be more thankful to everyone who helped make it happen and get it to us. All of the patrons of both Miko and We Martians, like you literally made that trip happen. And I hope that the content we're making for you is really good because you earned it for sure. Yeah, you want to give a little preview for, uh, let's do a little plug of our other shows like you make us do every time now. Jake does Wee Martians about Mars. I do manage and cut off about Rockets and Politics. Yeah. Uh, what else at the conference in general, is there another, like, you know, aside from our off nominal storyline, what was the storyline for Wee Martians at IAC?

Um, I mean, so my episode is out already. So if you, if you want to hear more about IAC and the We Martians take on it. You can go listen to it in the feed there. I talked a little bit about, I mean, the big theme I took was just like, it was really cool to see so many different companies and so many different countries all together in a room. It very obviously made a lot of sparks happen. Like, there was just people meeting and ideas and handshakes and deals and like, we saw it too. Like, that was some of the best networking you and I have ever done, I believe. Oh, by a billion percent. By a billion percent. And, uh, That was just really cool.

Like, I just, it was like, I'm going to get sappy for a bit, but it was like the power of just, like, people. Like, just humans together in a room can do a lot of stuff. And it was really cool to see. So that was where my episode kind of went. And that was my big takeaway. So, yeah. What about you? Well, I think we determined that days one and two were Miko beat, right?

Politics and all the industry stuff that was happening there. So there was a lot of, like, news that happened at ICE. that is relevant to the show. Yeah. So I did a couple shows on that. Had Peter Beck on the most recent managing cutoff, which was a thing that only happened because Rocket Lab had a hell of a force at IAC,

and they are wonderful people. So that, like, that connection happened. Amazing. Shout out to Rocket Lab. They were awesome. Chief Engineer, by the way, Canadian. By the way, wants to come on the show. It's only like two different times.

Yeah. So you may hear from him. You may hear from Grant. Yeah. Yeah, they're just like really cool. You know, there's companies that were at IAC, like Rocket Lab, that brought the company. And there was others that kind of brought the contractors that do their booths at trade shows. And I think that split was interesting to me because you could walk up to the Nanorax booth

and you're talking to all the people that I love from Nanorax or go to Rocket Lab and you're talking to all those people. And it's cool to meet the people behind all of the hardware and to meet people behind what actually happening in the industry. And you, you know, you get a more personal level than, you know, Jake and I do this stuff remote from places that aren't traditional space places. Yeah. So to kind of be, you know, at the center of it all for a couple of days was just, like I said at the beginning, I think it was a glimpse into our future, our hopeful future, that we just absolutely loved. Adam's asking why would they would send PR people to, to the booth. Well, just straight up, it was open 12 hours a day for five days straight. So you just

You needed extra help. You needed extra to extra human labor. Yeah. And it wasn't that the companies didn't have anyone from the company there, but there's often, like Jake was saying, there's a lot of dealmaking that's happening. So they're off in this conference room area, right, signing all this kind of stuff. But it was really cool. We touched a lot of rocket engines.

We did. There was a, like, I was surprised about that because, like, I felt like I was doing illegal stuff. You thought you were going to get arrested a couple times. I could, like, put my hands inside of a BE4. And I'm like, there's no way. I should be here. And they had an RS 25 and an RL10 and what else?

A bunch of smaller stuff too, yeah. Yeah. But that's, I mean, those are not insignificant engines, so. It was awesome. It was maybe six of the best space days of my life. Right on. We've had some good ones, but those were really good. Yanni picks.

You don't, huh? I did not prepare very well. Turns out you're spaced out. Well, Jake, let me use my benefit of a time zone on you. Because today, for All Mankind from Apple TV Plus was released. Yes. And before this show, I've got through two of the three episodes that are out. I'm so jealous.

I came straight from work to this podcast. Yeah, well, that means you have extra time after this. It's true. Depending on how long we linger here. See if I can convince my wife to watch it. Okay. So on that thread, I think if you, I remember you both liking the first. Right.

She got into that, right? She got into that, right? She did. Yeah. Yeah. There seems to be a lot of that, right? I'm obviously only two episodes in. There does seem to be a lot of people.

I'm not doing any spoilers. Everyone's worried about spoilers. I'm not doing any spoilers. I mean, the only non-spoilery fact about the show, I guess I could set it up, is that it's an alternate history of the Apollo era. Soviets land on the moon first, and then the show starts. Which was in the first five minutes. So it's not a spoiler.

Yeah. But yeah, a lot of that personal drama kind of stuff comes through. And it feels like a better mix than the first, where there's, the first was very heavy on people. And I think we even talked about it in this show how we both liked it because it was one of the only shows that started from the people and made you care about them before it got into the space stuff. Yeah. And this feels. Ended up shooting themselves in the foot that way. It turns out.

Yeah, right? This feels like a moderate mix of both. Okay. They've already been renewed for a second season, so you know that you're going to get at least two seasons out of it. There's three up now, and then I think one comes out every Friday for the next eight weeks or something like that. And I'm digging it. It's a cool mix of, like, real people from the era, right?

There's Neil and Buzz and Gene Cranz and Werner-Vebrun. and then there's fictional characters that are weaved into that. Obviously, you know, when it gets alternate history, they're going to need to take it in a different direction where Neil didn't fly. So I think that they're kind of setting up like the fictional people for the future stuff, but grounding it in today's, or not today's, the actual events. I'm excited to watch more. What do you feel about alternate history stuff like that?

Are you cool with that? Are you kind of weird about it? No, I like it a lot, actually. I think it's really fun. I know sometimes it may seem the way I am with others based up, may seem I'm not interested in that, but it's actually, I think it's kind of a fun exercise because it helps you explore real themes that happened

by turning it over upside down and be like, what if it happened this way? And it makes you ask a lot of questions about things that happen in real life, and I think you can learn a lot from it. Not only does it make you ask questions about, what happened in real life. There are some questions that come up in the first episode that are questions that if you and I brought up topically today,

people would still debate. Like, in today's space environment. And I just found it that, and it almost made me realize that there are things that happen in the Apollo era that we in our modern mindset attribute to the shuttle era, or even later than that, that may have started in the Apollo era, and we didn't know it because it was veiled in all the grander.

of Apollo. Interesting. And it kind of blew me away for a second. I was sitting there. I was like, holy crap, did I miss that whole point? You know, in the veil of history, did I miss that? And it came out 20 years later by what happened. So there's even in the first episode, I'm like, wow, that changed my perspective on

space history in like 30 minutes of a fictional show that just came out today. Okay. Well, I guess I need to watch it. Yeah. I'm getting an agreement in the live chat, too, so I'm feeling good about that take. Feeling good about that take. So good I might even tweet it. All right.

Yeah, I have no pick. I'm sorry, guys. This is my first episode without a pick. No, no, probably not. We've probably done that before. Maybe. We did this story way faster than I thought. Yeah.

Well, I mean, it was, this is not the first time we've told it now. That's true. Because we're so damn proud of it. How many times have you told that story this week? Yeah, I've told it a few times to some friends. Non-space friends, right? Yes, non-space friends. What do they think about it?

They are... I mean, like, my non-space friends, like, obviously I have a day job, and it's like, it's kind of like become like my other life now. Like, there's obviously like a really big distinction between my space life and my not space life, which is like really bizarre. So they don't really get it, you know, know. And it's also just like not really, it's not really, it doesn't make sense even to me and you sometimes. Just like, why, why are you meeting with us? And there's, sometimes I feel a little

like, like an imposter. So I'm sure it's even worse of that. But obviously the, the pictures from, my non-space friends love the pictures from the Planetary Society event because there's Bill and I in the background. So that's how I can make them understand. I'm like, yeah, I got to, this is what I went to do is to meet people like this. And I'm like, okay, I get it. That sounds like a great week. And I'm like, yeah, it was great. Mine are the pictures of the rocket engines.

They're like, oh, that's what you're always talking about. I'm like, yeah. And if we're in bonus time here, because we've only went for 49 minutes based on my clock here, the one that seals it is one I even tweeted because I thought it was cool. When you see, they had those three panels from Vulcan on the floor. And you totally forget five minutes. meters is giant and real life. It was so big, man. Like, yeah, like Vulcan five meters and we were like, we were floored and then, and then we even asked ourselves that like, so okay, so imagine

New Glenn, which is, was seven and then imagine Starship, which is nine. And like we, we couldn't think in our brains how big that was because like five meters, like it just seemed enormous. Like, we're like, there's no way there's a rocket this big. You did that with the engine too, because we were looking at the BE4 and we were like oh yeah cool two of these with that size and then you were like yeah yeah but there's going to be seven seven in a cluster and it was like oh honestly even like the even four of the RS 25 together would be pretty impressive like it's they're all they're all super super intense that thing was about so dominating over the exhibition hall the RS 25 yeah because you would come in and it was it was they left it on the trailer

that it was pulled in via. So it kind of sat up above everything. Yeah. And it's just, just huge. Yeah, it's a really big engine. And it's beautiful. Like even, whatever, 40 years later now we're at, it is a beautiful engine.

That one person we were talking to, though, at the RS-25 setup on the NASA side of the booth was like lamenting to us that the BE4 was too simple do you remember that? I don't remember that part. We were talking to somebody who was like, because we were talking about like, wow, there's just so much stuff going on

on this RS-25 and then this person was like, yeah, and then you look at the BE4 and there's like, where's all this stuff? And I'm like, yeah. That's the point. That's the point. It's like, am I impressed that you jammed more stuff on this thing?

I don't know. Hear me out. What if we had more pipes? I couldn't tell what the, and like where does that conversation end, you know? I don't know. But it was awesome. The RS-25. What a, what a tragic end of that story.

Well, here we are. I think we're out of stuff to talk about. Do you got any future things that's on your radar? There's one more thing we have to talk about. There is now officially an off-nominal Twitter account. Oh, great point. So if you go on Twitter, if you're a Twitter person, go on Twitter at Off-Nom. FF, NOM. It's like, it's going to be just our shitty memes and bad takes. So follow it because you want those. Don't follow it because you think you're going to get great space scoops. Yeah.

It's the stuff that we find still tweetable yet too lowbrow for our other accounts. Yeah. But there were a couple ones during the, there was a couple of my favorites during the conference where we would be sitting in a session and then one of us would say something and the other would go off, off non. That's an off-knob tweet. Like yours, the, what was the Trillion X? Was that the Lockheed Mars session?

No, no, that was in the Tori Bruno session. The Trillion X engineer. That's an A plus tweet. Yeah, it's pretty good. I was proud of the Lyft and Uber one. That was my favorite. Oh, that's an all-fammer. I wish that would take it off.

It didn't take off the way I wanted it to. You get ratioed? No, you know what? No, you know what? Just like sometimes tweets they just don't catch, you know? That one's still getting likes, though. I see a notification every once in a while that somebody liked that tweet. So I was like, oh yeah, good take.

Yeah, it was it? What was it? Uber to get to the, to the, you said pub. I said pub. So that people knew who tweeted it. And then Lyft to get home. And it was a picture of Blue Moon and then the Lockheed, uh, assent mock up. And it's just so good. They're getting them in the Discord.

They're showing us here. Yeah. At Offnom. We don't, it's not high volume. So go, go partaking at all. It's worth your time. Just add a follow. And then every once a while, you'll get a delightful tweet in your,

online. Are we done? Oh dear. Uber's to the pub, but lift to get home. Yeah. Oh, if you go there, you can see all the photos

we're talking about. You can see the J.B. You can see the Tori Bruno selfie. Yep. I think we retreated that. Must have. We should right now anyway, even if we didn't before.

If we haven't, we will do it immediately following this show. Yeah. The Gary from Lockheed photo, that's right? We were hanging out there. Everything's there. All at Offnom.

Go do it. Cool. Yeah. That's it, man. You know,