Off-Nominal - 25 - SpaceX Cinematic Universe

Episode Date: December 10, 2019

Jake and Anthony are joined by Marina Koren of The Atlantic to discuss the very Off-Nominal-esque Apollo 12 mission, regional Pennsylvania sayings, and to deliberate on and announce the 2019 Off-Nominal Award winner!DrinksComet Launcher - Off The Rail Brewing - UntappdHazy Lager - Workhorse Brewing Company - UntappdTopicsJake is making some big life changes!The Second Moon Landing Was Much Rowdier - The AtlanticSpaceX's Test Failure Remains a Mystery - The AtlanticNorthrop Grumman’s new rocket suffers small explosion during ignition test - The VergeA New Health Risk in Human Spaceflight - The AtlanticPicksA Year In Space | NetflixFor All Mankind on Apple TV+The Mandalorian | Disney+ OriginalsThey Are Already Here - Sarah ScolesFollow MarinaMarina Koren (@marinakoren) | TwitterAll Stories by Marina Koren - The AtlanticRSS Feed of Marina’s StoriesFollow 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

DLS and go for main engine start. Welcome to space. Boy, am I glad this week is over, Anthony. Marina, Jake quit his job this week. Did you? I did, yes. Are you excited about it? I'm very excited about it.

I want to do this more. I want to do this a lot more. And, you know, when you run a show as a hobby, there's only so much time for it. And so I'm taking a scary little leap and I quit my job. I'm going to try and make something to work here. So it's really exciting. So this is the week that I had to communicate to like the whole world.

Like everyone had to find out and it was just like mentally exhausting. And, uh, but I'm excited some fun stuff. And then capping it off with an off nominal podcast. Perfect. I love it. Well, congratulations. Well, thank you. Um, welcome to the show, Marina Corrin.

Corinne, is that how you say it? It is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Uh, should have done your prep earlier, Jake. Way to go.

The, I know. I've been busy this week. Yeah, so writer at the Atlantic, one of my favorites. I love reading your stuff. So thanks for coming the show. We're just really excited to have you here. Yeah, thanks for having. Can I do a shout out to the Atlantic real quick? The Atlantic is one of the only publications out there that lets you subscribe to RSS feeds by writer. So, and it is amazing. Like, I can get all of your stuff in a feed. And I wish every other. publication would do that and almost nobody does and it makes a huge difference so to whoever at the Atlantic likes RSS feeds I applaud you I didn't realize we had that I didn't know that was available it's available and that's why I read all your stuff so it's amazing so find that person and just say keep doing that please I can send you a link to yourself if you want and you can see it it'll be in the show notes it'll be in the show notes because everyone should subscribe to that and RSS in general it's not dead you're actually listening to it right now if you're listening to a podcast

Keep it alive, nerds. RSS. I don't know why I went into an RSS plug here. Marina, what have you been up to? What have I been up to? Let's see, we had our company holiday party last night, the Atlantic Company holiday parties. That was fun.

How you feeling? Let's see, I've got some tea with me. And I had some ramen for lunch, so I'm doing much better. Nice. Yeah, this is a matinee edition. Usually we do the show at night, but we've got some other circumstances that make that impossible, including Jake quitting his job and schedules being weird. So this is a matinee edition, especially for Jake. I don't know, Jake, are you drinking anything at this early hour?

Yeah, I kind of wait for it, you know, like, I'm unemployed now, so. You're allowed. Yeah, I found this beer at the one across the street from my house. It is a Vancouver beer from off the rail brewing company. And it was perfect because it's got, it's called Comet Launcher and it's got hops flying to space on it. And I thought that was a good. You have so much space beer out there. It's so hard for you to find anything out here that space theme at all.

I don't have much space gear at all. My mug right now, I will show you. It's a shark and it says don't tell me to smile. I don't have much space. gear. I need to get on that though. He just has so much space. Everything space themed out in the Pacific Northwest. And I didn't even like know. So I went out with some friends last night and went to just like a random brewery that someone suggested. And it turned out to be a space themed brewery like 10 minutes

from my house. And I was so upset that I didn't know about it. Because all my friends are like, why are you so upset? I'm like, you're talking to one of two people that have a beer themed space podcast in the whole world. And, I didn't know about this brewery. It's so close to me, and I was really upset. So we're going to feature beers from that one pretty soon, I think. But I had this one in the fridge already, so I'm just going to go with this one this time. I don't have a space theme beer.

I have a workhorse brewing company, hazy logger. This is out in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. I don't know why I said that. King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. One of the weirdest town names that we have. It's not far from Havertown, Pennsylvania, which we'll talk about shortly. It will be relevant. That's a Chekhov's Havertown reference.

This sounds so ominous. Wait, why is it going to be relevant? I didn't study for this. You did. You did study for this because one of the topics we wanted to talk about today was Apollo 12. Okay. So now you're feeling better? Are you feeling better about this?

I am. Okay. I think I know where you're going with this. Go on. Well, Jake was like, oh, we got to talk about Apollo 12. Jake was the only person who was like, I love the 50th anniversary of Apollo 12. and then he was like, oh my gosh, Marina wrote a whole article about the 50th anniversary of Apollo 12. And that is why he was like, we got to get her on this episode.

Jake, why are you in love with Apollo 12? Because Apollo 12 is like, it's the off-nominal Apollo mission. Like, let's be serious, right? Like, it's the one that was just like a little wonky. If there was an Apollo mission that needed to be the mascot of this show, it would be that one. It just had so many, like, in the foil of Apollo 11, which was so regal and, like, you know, like American flag, it was just, Apollo 12 was just like getting real, you know, it was like real people that went there and goofed around and I don't know.

It was really fun. I just, I love it. I think it's so cool. And you like it too, so it seems perfect. So I like it because it is my hometown moonwalker. There was a Pete Conrad was born in Philadelphia and went to school over in Havertown, Pennsylvania, which is what. I was talking about.

And so I love Apollo 12. I'm just digging it. And it was just, your story captured this perfectly. So you wrote this pretty long form article about everything on Apollo 12. I'm curious to know where the inspiration for that came from. Are you similar to Jake in that?

You're like, look how weird this mission is. And that's why you were writing a big story about it? Or was there something else? I think I had just gotten over my Apollo 11th, 50th anniversary hangover. And then it was like, it was time. Like Apollo 12, the anniversary came right around the time that I was like, oh, okay. Yes, there's more to this program than Apollo 11.

And so over the summer, I read pretty much every transcript for the Apollo 11 mission from launch to landing. And I did the same thing for Apollo 12 because all of that's available. I mean, I'm sure an asset cut some things out, but, you know, they put most of the transcripts online. And so I'm reading through the communications from Apollo 12. It's like, wow, this is rowdy. This is a little, like Pete Conrad was a potty mouth. Philadelphia, I'm telling you, man. A lot of jokes.

Yeah, that has to be why. And so there was a lot of swearing and joking around. And, I mean, I showed my editor a few pieces from the transcript. And she was like, yeah, we can't include this. this is not this is not safe for work and so that's what I really liked about the mission I guess because I'd spent so much time writing about Apollo 11 I had expected the other missions to follow kind of the same trajectory in not you know yeah going to the moon but also in tone and mood and atmosphere but Apollo 12 I mean fewer people were looking and they'd already done the big thing so it didn't

really matter what you says you could kind of get away with a lot I really liked that about that mission Yeah, it feels a lot more human, right? Like, it just, there's, Apollo 11th's very, you know, it's an important mission, obviously, and it's very cool to read about, but just like, it's hard to identify with, like, superhuman Neil Armstrong, right? Like, he's almost like an alien. He's such a, uh, a talked about figure and, and it's, you know, his behaviors and stuff, it's like hard to identify with that, right?

Right. And because he, he became a national treasure and he became more of a museum exhibit. it than a real person some ways. And so the Apollo 12 crew, they were just more, yeah, they were regular people, much more relatable. And they didn't have all that pressure on their shoulders. They could say, and I could pull it up right now, but the first words that Pete Conrad said when he stepped onto the surface were, whoopee, man, that may have been a small one for

Neil, but that's a long one for me. And that, I don't think, would have gone over well if that was the first ever moon landing. It's just a fun mission, especially when you think about what came next. Apollo 13, very different. That's going to be an interesting story to write next year. Anthony loves those first words. I do. Yeah, he's like an inch taller than me, so I'm like, oh, yeah, okay, now I get it.

You know, there's not a lot of famous short people. There's mostly like Napoleon and then Pete Conrad. And I like that one a lot better. So I can really relate to, like, wow, that was a long jump down this ladder. I think that. Right. Then you had Alan Bean. Alan Bean was a weirdo too.

Right. Yeah, very quirky. I think he was the one that called everyone Babe. There's a lot of Babe in the transcript. I was like, this is really casual. You guys are on the moon. But okay. Do you think that that's like the, that is the psychological trick, though, is that

Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Mike Collins knew they were doing like a human achievement. And then a 12 was the first one where it was like, maybe this is normal now, like maybe we can just keep doing this. And they were psychologically set up to just treat it as if they were like going out four-wheeling. I don't know. I feel like I would have a hard time getting over that. That's like, you're the second crew, which is like, I guess we're the first of everybody else. Yeah.

I think that's another reason that the lightheartedness of Apollo 12 surprised me because the geopolitical stakes had changed for sure. You know, the Americans beat the Russians, the Soviets, excuse me, to the moon. That was a done deal. Everything's fine now. But the stakes in terms of the dangers of the mission of keeping these men alive, that didn't change. So I thought it was really surprising that they were joking around and being pretty chill about things when they could have died. That could have happened. Yeah.

It must just be like what kind of people they were. You know, I'm just thinking like, because yeah, even if it is a little bit of people, you know, I'm just thinking like, Because, yeah, even if it is the second mission, you're right. Like, it's still kind of scary still. It's still, like, can poke a hole in your glove and be done, you know? Yeah. Right. And I think it was, I mean, like, Pete Conrad was known for being a goofy guy

and, like, dancing around and humming to himself and singing. So a lot of it was just personality. I mean, I think he was the polar opposite of Armstrong. And imagine if one of the famous things they did wrong was, was it Alan Bean who, like, immediately pointed the camera at the sun and destroyed the camera feed that they had. And it's like, okay, imagine if Neil got out and was like, whoops, guess you can't see us walking around on the moon for the first time.

That would not be great. Yeah, yeah. Twelve was not televised. And that I think is pretty funny, but just goes to show how much, you know, NASA I think was more willing to accept mistakes. But, yeah. Yeah.

The camera stuff is like my favorite story to tell about Apollo 12. I think Anthony's probably hurt me tell it like 15 times now, but we'll do it again. Because you have, you have like, that was the first thing is he blows the video lens on the, on the sun. And that was like only the first one. Because then they, if you remember Apollo 12 tried to land, well, did land next to surveyor three. Was that the one that they, it was like the targeted landing practice? They'll go visit the spacecraft, this robotic one that they'd done. And so Alan Bean had this like great idea.

They're going to get this like, you know, that shutter, the remote shutter that they wanted to do to take a picture. of both the astronauts, but he like smuggled it on board so that the mission controllers wouldn't know what he was doing. And then they had all these questions like, who took this picture, what was going on? And then he like lost the shuttery. He couldn't find it. They had gone, like, hiked all the way out to the surveyor and he couldn't find it. So then he screwed that photo up and he couldn't do that one.

And then he went on and like painted that photo later. Yeah, I think that's probably why he got a kick out of painting because he was like, well, clearly I'm not good of photography. I think I'm going to just switch rolls here. Yeah, exactly. Right. And then I think on landing, it, it, it, out of the compartment and hit him in the head, the camera, like the hassle bladder or whatever,

and then he had to get stitches like when he left yet. Yeah, didn't he come out of the capsule bleeding? I think it was a pretty, yeah. And speaking of photos, I mean, I just remember this. I don't read my stories after I published them, so I'm like now thinking back to the story. Speaking of photos, so before 12 launch, the backup crew, I'm sure you know, snuck a bunch of pictures of Playboy bunnies into the astronauts wrist checklets so that when they were walking around the moon and going through their various procedures, then they were flipping through this little flip book and they were just met with this, a picture of a nude woman. And as far as women going to the moon, like I think that's our representation there, which is a shame. I don't think that

joke would fly in the year of our Lord 2019. Yeah. But, I mean, it was, nor would Mike Pence be particularly pumped about that, you know? I don't think he would be thrilled of everyone on there. No. No. The face of artists. And I wonder if that stuff would come. If that stuff were to happen today, I wonder if it would come out sooner than the story of these risque pictures.

Because I think it took a couple of years from that time. That was a pretty well-kept secret. But I don't know. That is a good question. Yeah, I could foyer. Yeah. Good luck with that. One of the weird things, though, oh, wait, before I had one of the question.

I know that the Atlantic wouldn't let certain things from the transcript on, but we have much lower standards than that. If you are comfortable with any of the ones that got cut, was there a favorite that you were like, maybe we could get this in and it got shut down? Or you could say, skip this question, and all of this will be removed from the show. How many, who's your audience?

Who loves listening? Are there children? Oh, no, no, no. Meet the podcast. There was one thing. about it was a quote that I found impressive but it was just too vulgar to include

from, I think it was again Pete Honorad he was getting hungry and he said he was so hungry that he could eat the ass out of a porcupine something does that mean

I don't know I understand the intent but like I've never heard that phrase I did not no and I'm thinking well okay so it's not like a regional Pennsylvania saying no I didn't Google it.

If it was a regional thing, I think it would be like a groundhog and it would tie to like Ponsetani Phil. Right. Yes. Okay. So maybe he was getting that mixed up. We made a reference to it. We just mentioned something scandalous about a porcupine and I linked out and to my readers who were curious, they could just go and find it that way.

You will decide whether or not you want to cut this. Oh, I definitely don't do not want to cut that. And not only that, I'm going to start saying that just in regular life. I'm going to make it a regional thing. Be like, yeah, Pete Conrad invented that. I just Googled it. And there's a Reddit thread that says that that idiom makes this person lose their appetite. And then there's like one comment that's like, who says that?

Oh, man. You can't be good, be colorful. Yeah, not kidding. I'm curious if you think the rest of the Apollo missions would have been more like that if 13 didn't happen immediately after? Like, do you think that this was unique to the crew, or do you think that if it continued to be lower and lower stakes with fewer and fewer people watching,

would it have been even more off the rails? I think it would have gotten more off the rails if things with 13 had stayed on the rails. I think that's definitely true. Because I think there's a tendency, it's just natural for people after they achieve one thing to think that the next time they do it, it's going to be easier.

That's just the human quality, I think. And I think that 12 showed that NASA couldn't let their guard down. The astronaut court couldn't let their guard down. Nothing about spaceflight was going to be routine, even if it seemed like it would.

So I think 13 was definitely a reality check. Similarly, I wonder how many shuttle flights it would have taken to get as off the rails if we didn't have disaster so early in the program. Does that make any sense? Like, if we were 30 years into the shuttle

and no one ever died on that thing, things would have been very weird. You think so? I don't know. I think it got, probably got pretty weird on shuttle. Like, there was... Seven of them?

There's a whole mob of people that can pull pranks. Yeah, and it's like tight quarters. And there were a lot of flights, like, even before, you know, before the first accident. So, I don't know. I'd be curious. I wonder if, like, I wonder if there was... like less attention on shuttle than there was on Apollo and more of those transcripts, you know,

were even just not even stricken from the transcript, but just not recorded to begin with, right? Like we can just, you know, turn the, turn the mics off or whatever and just have, there's probably plenty of shenan. I don't know. We're giving all this work to Marina to FOIA this now, though. Right. I think that there is a lot that we don't know. And NASA does make a big deal out of posting a bunch of flight transcripts, whether it's from shuttle or Apollo. online and it is in NASA's charter to share with the public what they discover, what they find, what they do. But, I mean, they're still a government agency at the end of the day,

and they're definitely striking stuff from the transcripts that we're never going to see. Yeah, the whole conversation about drilling that hole in the Soyuz that is not recorded. That was definitely not picked up. Yeah. That's interesting because I still haven't been able to get a clear answer out of NASA where they are with that. much the Russians have shared about their investigation and the results about this mysterious poll on the ISS. So I don't know. I think where they are with that is, beats us.

I will keep asking. I'll keep you posted. But yeah. But that's the kind of stuff that I think is a good reminder that even flying to the ISS and living and working there is not routine. You know, nothing awful has happened there. but it just goes to show that space exploration is not a guarantee, safety guaranteed kind of thing. Yeah.

This is a pretty good transition, Jake. It is, but I wasn't done yet. Okay, we're going to park the transition. Yeah, we're going to park the transition. Remember that where we were. Yeah. I wanted to ask, Marina, just because I am a big fan of your writing, so I'm going to brag about you for a little bit here.

But I just, I love how you always, you paint, good pictures with context, right? So there's not just a story like, this is what happened, but you, you kind of give it a lead up with like, these are all the circumstances that make the story interesting and you're a very colorful writer. I wanted to just kind of hear from you, sort of like how you describe that style and why you write the way you do and rapport on space the way you do. Well, to borrow from Pete Conrad, if you can't be good, be colorful. That wasn't even better transition. So at the Atlantic, I mean, our audience is very different, I think, from other space publications or other places where there are space reporters.

Our readers are not, they don't necessarily have science backgrounds. They are just general interest readers. And I was that reader for a long time. I do not have a science background at all. I think I got a C in high school biology. Like, and high school physics I took senior year, so I skipped a lot of class,

which I now regret doing. But so I think that the reason, one reason that I like to include a lot of context in my stories is because, I mean, I don't necessarily know all the details and in order to know what's happening and why it's important and what it means and what in the past says,

and that's my catmiao, in the background and what in the past has informed this thing that's happening, I need to include a lot of content. I learned over the summer when I was reporting on Apollo 11 that people, like some of our readers, still think that there are people going to the moon every year. Some people think that shuttle is still flying. So a lot of it is just a matter of space literacy. I want to tell the full story, not the exhaustive story, because that would take a lot of time in a lot of words, but I want to make sure that our readers know there's a lot of history there. Like, I can't even throw out commercial crew and expect our readers to know what that is.

And three years ago, I've been on this beat now three years. Three years ago, I didn't know what commercial crew was. Neither did NASA based on what we're seeing today. They're still trying to figure it out. Wow. Sorry, too salty, too salty? No, that's good. Yeah, I just, I love your writing.

You capture still that kind of like the old school way where like, you know, if an article from you pops up, I'm like, oh, goody. And then I like, I like get onto the couch with like my iPad and like I'm ready to read this. Like I would get excited about like settling in to read it. So keep up to good work is what I'm going to say. Thank you. You're making me so uncomfortable. But no, thank you for reading. Please.

Are there stories in 2020 that you are hoping to write or accept? expect to write that you're excited about? Oh, I mean, commercial crew is going to be the story of the year. Whatever that is. If NASA astronauts launch from Cape Canaveral next year, that's going to be, in my opinion, the biggest base story of the year. And I'm really excited to do that. So my first time at the Cape was for Falcon Heavy last year. And I didn't know what I was doing, but it was a great experience. And it's, I mean, so I'm based out of Washington, D.C., and I do a lot of my reporting from my desk over the phone,

and it was so great to actually just be there, not just to see the launch, which was incredible in of itself, but just to talk to people, like get to know the area. There's so much history there. I mean, it's a space city, and to be surrounded by that was very exciting. And I'll be down in Florida again for Boeing's uncrewd. flight, which has now moved to December 20th after, I think it was the 17th, then it moved to the 19th, now the 20th, getting perilously close to Christmas. So I don't know what they're going to do

with that. But I think being able to spend more time at the Cape next year to cover that story is going to be really exciting. And I think it's going to excite the public in a way that, you know, robotics space missions really can't. Yeah. I'm curious to know what the, attendance will be for that launch because Shalk and Heavy was certainly the closest to the shuttle mayhem that the Cape had seen probably since five-year anniversary, EFT1.

That was pretty nutty down there. And I'm curious to know if crew will get that, you know, back to that spot where there's hundreds of thousands of people coming to see astronauts launch. It's, to me, it's like going to be, it's tough because it's not, doesn't have the grandeur of a space shuttle, right?

But it'll be cool to see what the motivation difference is for when it's the same rocket flying people instead of robotic missions, if that drawl is similar, or if it was unique to the shuttle that had that kind of mind space in most of America, that people would like schedule vacations around this. That'll be kind of an interesting test case. Right. Yeah, I mean, we're past the days of a, you know, middle school teachers pulling in TVs into their classrooms so their kids can watch a shuttle line. But I don't know, maybe this is going to be the year that some teachers going to live stream SpaceX's webcast. Like that's the new viewing experience for young people around the country.

But I'm really, yeah, I'm really curious to see the turnout and the interest and how many people are going to be paying for them. Yeah. I think it'll probably be, there's a potential for it to grow pretty crazy in size because you have that sort of draw, like you say, of people flying from, you know, Cape Canaver for, for the first time in a long time, but also you, you layered in with all the SpaceX glitz and glam, right? Everyone loves the SpaceX live stream. So, you know, they, they just accidentally put a live stream up. There's 50,000 people waiting in that thing. So it's like, it's pretty crazy when you think about it. I think there's a chance for it to be pretty, pretty mental down there for DM2. I think traffic's going to suck. For sure. I remember leaving my Airbnb super early.

for Falcon have it heavy like four hours ahead of time just to like get to the press site. I think it's going to be madness. And you're totally right because there's there's a whole. It's like SpaceX cinematic universe is going to be there. You know, like it's an amazing term for it. It's like right. It's a completely new contingent of fans and supporters and employees that's going to be there. It's going to, yeah, it's going to be unprecedented, I think.

I'm too excited. You got to be pumped. Gosh. I mean, don't get too pumped because I have no idea when this will happen. And I don't know how to plan my vacation. I know. It's still a couple months away. It's going to launch on my birthday in February, and it'll be a great birthday present.

It'll be awesome. I think February is early. I can't see that. Probably. It's early. It's way early. I'm hoping for like April, because it works a lot better for me. That would work for your schedule.

All right. We'll go April. No, I'm going on vacation in April. It has to be after that. Well, then it be my birthday present. May it be my birthday present instead of years, Anthony. Yes. May we'll do the off-nominal meetup at Epcot.

Yeah. Marina, have you ever been to Epcot? This is the off-nominal literacy test. Have you ever done drink around the world at Epcot? When I was... No, I was 12. No drink around the world. Well, then you're...

Your test can be live at Epcot, whether you start in Canada or Mexico. That is the traditional off-nominal literacy test. Can we get back to my sweet transition? Yes. You were talking about how things in space don't always go well. And the namesake of this show is off-nominal. Last year, we had a great year for this. We did the 2018 Off-Nominal Award, and we awarded what went the worst in space in the year 2018.

Last year's winner was this size. of MSO-9, the drill hole, and the subsequent daggering of that vehicle on a spacewalk, because that was definitely the off-nominal winner. I still laugh when I think about it. That was a great spacewalk to watch. That was incredible. You're talking about the cosmonauts, like cutting through insulation to find the hole on the outside of the ISS.

Like, what were they doing? That was, so that was really fun for me to watch because I'm Russian. and they'll speak Russian at home. So when I've watched NASA spacewalks and Russian spacewalks, and they're so different. Because the Americans are very, they're all business. I recently spent a Sunday watching a seven-hour spacewalk for journalism. And it was really soothing and it was great, and I highly recommend it

because it's just like wonderful, like white noise, them talking about, like, oh, do you have the PGT and, like, there's torque. There's a bunch. Anyway. But the astronauts are pretty serious, but the Russians will joke around. And with, like, whoever their Capcom is, they'll joke around and be sarcastic and tease each other. And I just think that's so funny. But, yeah, that one spacewalk when they were just trying to get at this hole, I think their Capcom was saying, like, one of the Cosmonauts just wanted to keep going and keep going.

And Capcom's like, you're going to ruin your glove. Like, but the Cosmonist's like, but look, I don't want to leave it like this hanging out. not going to be pretty. And mission controls, like, it's not going to be pretty when you cut through your glove. Like, you don't hear that on the NASA. It's like Apollo 11 to 12. It's like the same thing. Yes. Apollo 12, 100% would have won the 1969 off nominal award if it existed back then. MSO 9 was a runaway. 2018 was tough though. We had Zuma. We had MSO 9. We had MS 10 in flight abort. We had a lot of good off nominal events in 2018. So tough, tough to beat. We have a list that we ran through

of the things that went wrong in space. So we're hoping that you can help us pick this winner. Okay. If you're okay. So these are the 2019 off nominees. That is our name for them. We were pretty clever. Wait, I have to get let me get a writing utensil. I want to forget. We can drop these notes. Okay. We got notes. Jake, you do the first one. I'll drop notes into the Skype chat.

We got a professional journalist on the line. Yeah, right? Just getting out a whole stenopad on us. Where do we want to start? Because this is a tough year. I'm not going to lie. I don't think it's as tough as you say it is, though. There's some wacky stuff that happened this year. All right.

Where do you want to start? Let's start with, well, let's just go on your list here. So, Insight, Mars Insight. Well, that's a you thing. That's a Mars beat. That's you. That was going to be the first thing I was going to say. Yeah.

Heat flow, physical properties, probe, slow going to get this little probe down in the ground. and then like so the whole year was already like an off nominal like this thing just needs to get underground and then all of a sudden it was like plop it just like shot out like a I don't even I can't think of a good analogy I was trying to think of one like an ass of a porcupine like the ass of a porcupine oh sorry I didn't think we were going to revisit that but that's okay I emailed me the list by the way marina okay awesome thank you it just shot out of the ground like crazy and like that was like it was in 20 minutes and we were all on Twitter because there was no there was no like press release it was just the the the the feed of the images

started coming back everyone's like um what is going on right now like is this an out of time kind of thing where it was posting them late or is this actual but it just like shot right of there and like that was like shocking to me I just remember sitting in front like I was like at this desk right now and from my computer watching it and I was like oh oh this is not this is not good but then I think it got even worse though with the aftermath because there was no clear press release except that we had like Thomas Rubin like out there trying to spin that the mission was fine. It was just the German things broke. It's fine. It's not even part of the mission. I actually forgot it was even on the

spacecraft. It's not a big deal. It's not a level one requirement. Don't worry about it. So, which I thought was just like like wacky. Like I had no idea that they'd try and take that route in terms of spin. So I don't know. What did you think watching it right now? I mean, they definitely tried to downplay what was happening. But even like I remember them hyping up this instrument so much before launch. This was going to be, I think the headline that we published for the story for Insights launch was something about like the dawn of interplanetary geology. This probe was going to burrow deep into the surface and unlock the secrets of Mars and its interior. And then you're right.

The thing gets stuck and they're like, oh, well, I didn't see that coming. And we're just, we're going to, like, we're trying, we're doing our very best to get this thing going. I had a pretty good press release with all the things that they were going to, they said they were going to try. So they definitely made like a big deal out of like the efforts that they were going to put into rescuing this instrument. But I don't think anything is working so far. And it's like, this gets at one of my favorite things. about this beat is the constant sense of helplessness that we have when we send robots out to space to do the work for us. Like how many of those scientists and engineers wish they could just

fly over there and jam that thing into the ground? Yeah. Yeah, we talk about that a lot in our Discord community. It was just like, just like, I'll just push it in with my thumb and it'll be over in like 10 seconds and it'll be not a big deal at all. But it's been like eight months with this stupid spike. Right. And they have a replica that they use for simulations here and they,

all it took, I think was a nudge to get it going again. So that must be really frustrating. Yeah. It's bad. All right.

So that's a good contender. Yeah. That's a good one. High stakes. Bad result so far. I'm feeling good about it. Expensive. A lot of money on that one.

Which definitely was in the running last year with Zuma. Everyone said that costs a lot of money. That definitely was a, we've definitely taken budgetary concerns into account here. If we want to stick on the lander category, we did have dual moonlanders, Barashit and Vikram that didn't work out the last couple hundred meters. I think I would give the edge, if we were going to pick a moonlander, I would give the edge to Vikram because of the way that India handled this,

which was like, uh, didn't hear from it. Must be on the moon. Don't know where yet. we'll let you know in a couple of months and have said like almost nothing about it. And then even when we were at IAC, there was no mention of the lander anywhere. And the whole the whole Isro booth, there was all of the references were scrubbed. There were clearly spots on their signs that it was supposed to talk about Vickram and there was nothing. Like they just did white out.

Chandrayan orbiter on one side of the poster and then like an empty square here. On the other side. The handling of that, I think for me puts like Barashita. I'm like, yeah, you guys just, you know, you didn't land, it's fine. Vikram, they were like explicitly trying to, you know, forget about it. Yeah. But I don't know. Is that a bad enough for, was it too expected to make this a winner?

I think these are definitely contenders. I think the response from the two different sides is not surprising. Like, that's why I don't want to be too hard on India for just, you know, not providing any details on the aftermath. and just wanting to not to ignore it because in the case of the Israeli lander, I mean, that was, again, these are two national efforts. But for India, it's a matter of, you know, the government setting out to do this thing. And then when you fail, you want to cover that up. Whereas with the Israeli lander, that was mostly the work of a nonprofit.

And, I mean, Israel has a huge, like, startup culture. A ton of startups there. And so they have the whole like, oh, we messed up. But failure is good. failure is what you need, you know, to reach success, let's just keep going. So the responses from the two different sides didn't surprise me.

But I don't know which one. They're both. You're right, though, because then they announced, oh, we'll do Bear Sheet 2. And then they said, eh, I'm not doing that. I still think that's because they made that partnership with Firefly to build that kind of lander for the NASA program.

So maybe they said the next lander will be for the NASA contract. that's my assessment but I don't know good contenders good contenders but did you watch live the live streams for the landings yes it's tense it's very it's very tense yeah especially because then you start seeing something on the screen right where you're like little that's not that's not that's not the right graph that we want so because I have um every once in a while at at my office I I try and get all the non-space people excited about something and so like the the bear sheet landing was like in the middle of the day. It was perfect. So I was like I threw it like a meeting

request to like all these people in my office. And I was like, hey, if you want to see a cool space thing like Israelis are going to land on the moon. I come. I block by 20 minutes off, come to this room and I'll put it up on the screen and we can watch it. And so I had like 10 people in this room. They were like, what is this? I came here because I like you, but I don't know what this is and then. And so I'm like, okay, I'm like touting it up. It's going to land. It's so cool. And then they had the telemetry up there and we're all just and they're kind of like half interested because like telemetry is not really that interesting if you're not into space. And then I'm just kind of like, uh-oh.

Because it was like, something's wrong with that number. And they're like, what? I'm like, this is not going right. And then it was just like, look, like there's anticlimactic ending to it. Just go back to work? It was super awkward. It was like, okay, well, I got a meeting by. I need a good German word for the singular tension and fear that one feels watching those

live streams because it's unlike anything else. It's different from a rocket launch, I think. I don't know. there's just something about it. I just, it frays my nerves. Yeah. You, like, you feel it, like, in your chest. Like, it's like a knot.

Very visceral. Yeah. Huh. All right. So maybe we go to some human spacecraft stuff. So Starliner. This one might be my favorite. I don't know.

Yeah. This is a real contender. I went off on this one, but the parachute for the abort test. So the, the, the, the, the board test goes off and the spacecraft comes in for landing, but one of the parachutes did not deploy. And then, but it landed safely. Everything was fine. But I think it would have been fine if they had just come out and said, yeah,

one of the parachutes didn't work. And we figured it out and it's fine. But they, like, tried to cover it up. And they were like, this is not a parachute failure. It was a deployment failure. A parachute deployment connection failure or something. And I thought it was so funny because like the parachute didn't come out. That means it's failed.

I don't know how you spin that. but that that like made it the storyline last much longer than it needed to last well and it made better by being forced to live stream it apparently from what we know by jim brydinestein j b a j b fan club is where this is the headquarters of jim brydine fan club marina i don't know if you know that long story but j b was like you guys got to live stream this and and larry from boeing our friend uh set up a live stream and I am wondering the alternate universe in which that was not a thing that happened, the live stream, when we would have, we would have had to have Marina FOIA this to find out about this parachute situation. But live streams are the future,

especially when what you're live streaming cost taxpayer money. There's no way around that. Yeah. But then to not attach the parachute, like, come on. I think that I'm not quite sure yet why base companies don't realize that the more you call something not what it is, the more you say, oh, deployment failure, anomaly, all these other, yeah, euphemisms, you know, it's only going to draw more attention and it's probably not going to be, it's the more suspicious. Yeah, yeah, because then it makes a whole secondary wave of stories where everyone's like, oh, they're trying to cover it up, but here's what actually happened. Yeah. That's a good one.

Yeah, yeah. And speaking of live stream, can we just say like the, the SLS core stage that they just, you know, twisted pieces? Why did they not live stream that? That would have been so cool. Or post a video already. A whole huge hydrogen tank that they test to failure and the whole thing ruptures. That would have been an awesome video to see. I'm mad about that one.

Nobody else has strong feelings, but I'm just like, why didn't they, they've been. posted video yet. And is it an optics thing? It's got to be an optics thing. Maybe. proprietary information. I mean, I don't know. That's always the case.

I think they were worried about like a Tesla Rati article about how SLS tank failed. They need to like have like a posted video with like a floating banner like this. It's like this was on purpose. This was on purpose. It just bounces. So you can't Photoshop it out. And this is like no matter where. I like that.

Oh, that'd be good. Not a deep fake. All right. So we got a long list left. Let's start banging these out. Dragon 2 was the other human spaceflight failure. This thing blew up on the static fire stand. That's a rough one.

That's a rough one. That's like the serious off-nominal of where it's like there's nothing funny to say about that one. That's number one for me for the year, I think. Yeah? Well, no. Okay. Okay. Number.

Oh. Number one. If you have any, Marina, please jump in, like, let us know if you have one. No, I just thought of one that I thought was worse, but it was 2018 because I have no sense of time anymore in my life. No, I was thinking of the Soyuz abort, but that was... No, that was the end of 2018, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay, okay. No, I think that Crew Dragon ranks top for me just because I remember, and I'll move quickly through this,

but I just remember being there for the launch and the mood was just, everyone was ecstatic, like Elon was giddy, as hell. It really looked, all signs pointed to SpaceX being on track to like do something big this year. And then just to see that go up literally in flames, that was just a huge setback. And that video that leaked was particularly rough, you know? Like, you just can't imagine, you just think about people sitting in that and it blowing up, right? That's, that's the human reaction to that video is imagine if I was sitting in that thing. it's that's rough that's a rough one and I'm sure there was again with the leak with the information that gets

out because information is like water that's one that you know they wish didn't leak but would have come out eventually and that that's a rough one Jake that's got to be higher on your list than I think it is already it's pretty high yeah yeah for sure uh we had a couple of launch ones we had uh we had the Iranian situation this year they had three failures very quickly in a row and the third one we had that whole situation where Trump tweeted the photo that he took up a piece of paper and then tweeted it and that declassified the existence of that satellite, which everyone knew about anyway, but now we saw how high-res our satellites were, and then all the satellite trackers were like, this was the exact one, here's where it was at in its orbit, now we know

that that Hubble Space Telescope that points at Earth is legit. So I think that whole situation is a good geopolitical off-nominal situation. Quite the range here. This is a great list. We're everywhere. We're everywhere. All right. I don't know if that's going to really hit the top three, though.

Maybe not. Yeah. Next one is very high up for me because I have a particular hate of the Omega launch vehicle. This was their static fire. At the end, the tail cone of their solid booster blew up and they called it an observation. They said we had an observation at the end of the test and that it wasn't actually an explosion. It was an observation. So this one, this one, because of that element, I put almost number one because I love that kind of cover up of like, no, it was, like you were just saying about, no, it was an anomaly or it was a fast fire. This was an observation. And that's a great term.

That was peak, peak spin. I thought anomaly was bad and misleading, but observation. And observation. That's like, it's like getting like dangerously Soviet, you know? It's all on a spectrum. And, yeah. And boy do we know, North of Grumman launch services knows how to get dangerously Soviet. Hey, you. Got them. Two Starship things made the list. Number one, they had that nose cone they were building way back in the day that then just got blown over in a windstorm and crumpled on the ground. That was pretty great to me for me.

That's kind of a three-studges situation of like, oh, Jim, you didn't tie down the thing. I like that one. And then recently we had the over-pressure. situation where they were tanking the starship prototype and then the top blew off. And I very much appreciate the video of that. Yeah, it was a good video. Yeah. Because it just went up and up and up.

Are these two, like, since SpaceX is being a little fast and loose with Starship anyway, are these as good as, should they make the list at all? Because we know that their goal is to kind of be off nominal. Yeah, it wasn't really that off nominal for them, is it? Right. They love blowing up spaceships. They do. I think a requirement has to be presence of flames. Okay, that's fair, because this is kind of like a, you know, a bottle popping off. That's true.

They have to have fast fire. We can redefine that beyond. I don't know. I like this, the presence of flames. Okay. Well, I mean, no actual flames, but on the list I have Mars 1 going bankrupt. Eh. Yeah.

They were always bankrupt in my eyes. This is just, this is just bottom of paper. paperwork, right? We're getting zero reaction out of Marina. So I don't know if her video froze or if she sat over Mars one. Well, no. I mean, a couple of people have done some really great stories on it, but I think there's so much more of that story to tell.

It's on my bucket list of stories to write because. There's like a million threads in there. Like it's fire festival in space. It is. It's the space fire festival. That's a great headline. I might take that. Steal it.

Steal it. Jake made it up. I just said it again. Did I make it up? I thought you made it up. I don't know. It was probably the off nominal after we watched those fire festival documentaries

when we were talking about it. Yeah, maybe. Okay, I'm down into the dredges of this list. I don't even actually know if I want to give all these. You had the Artemis churn on here where there was like eight different stories about how it's going to be delayed to 2021 for EM1. then they were going to consider commercial launchers, and then Mike Sarangelo showed up for a week

and essentially was that Simpson's Giff where he comes in, hangs his hat up, turns around, grabs a hat, and is out of the door again. So there's some good political churn. Right. No funding for Artemis, that probably counts. Yeah, no funding situation, but they're still keeping on this 2024 thing. Totally, totally.

And it's funny, too, because so Marina, for context, we do like a weekly news show, each of us for our, our main shows. And we went back through all the headlines. And I found three separate instances where I reported a headline that said, SLS may slip to 2021 at like different points in the year. Like it just like kept the news just kept coming up. And I just kept reporting on it.

And I couldn't remember the other times that I had done it until I actually looked back. So that was pretty fun. SLS. But SLS is like too easy of a target for some of these. So it's like it's not interesting. We had an XO Mars. They were having parachute issues. Yeah.

Yeah. Kind of regular. Parachutes are hard. Yeah. It's pretty pedestrian to make this list. You've got one in here about orbit beyond, how they were awarded a task order, and then decided that they were not solvent anymore.

Yeah. That's a good one. Similarly, we had that whole situation where Vector Space, the launch company that makes those little rockets, or we're going to make those little rockets, were in back-to-back days, awarded an Air Force launch contract, and the next day announced that they were closing up shop.

that's a good little combo but again still not great so I'm thinking that what do we say what would you think our top three is

Marina Dragon 2 you're big on Dragon 2 yes Dragon 2 for sure how do we feel about observation no

insight sorry I'm being difficult I think one of them has to be one there has to be one moon lander in the top three okay I don't know

No. One moon lander. Okay. Right. If you had to choose Vickram or Bearishap. I'm on Vickram. They printed posters for IAC by removing stuff that was on the, supposed to be on the poster.

And I went up to the, to the, the SRO booth at IACC and I was like, hey, I want to have someone come on the show to talk about, I think I was talking about the Mars mission. And they were just like, this guy like very, like, calmly slid like a business card across the table and he was like, call this number. They will connect you with the embassy. The embassy will put you in touch with this person. And I was like, I don't want to do all that. I have a microphone in my pocket. Is there anybody here that can talk to me right now? And he was just like, call this number. And it was like super, super creepy. And then the vicar makes me think of

that. So that's a memory for me. That was very specific. I think, okay, I think you've sold me on observation. Because if that's, now that's a good mix. We got failed lunar landing, floated, empty astronaut through capsule and observation. I think that's great. I love the observation. I love the observation. And it's hard for me to, I know that, I don't know, insight's pretty good. Yeah.

It's pretty shocking. Man, this is tough, actually. You're right, Jake. This is tough. I think the reason I wouldn't go with insight is because there have been so many Mars missions. like something was bound to go wrong and now that it has, there are other Mars missions. There are going to be

future Mars missions. That planet is plenty studied. You're playing a stats game here, I see, I see. I like that. I like that. Does that sway you, Jay? Okay, so how do we come to a decision on this? I don't remember how we did this last year. I thought the guest

shows. It was, well, it was just us two last year and it was incredibly easy to pick the time that astronauts sliced up a space in orbit. Marina wants to pick. I like how we didn't even tell her we were doing this, and she's so invested in. She wants to pick the one.

I don't know. I'm just kidding. I'm kidding. I think you're right about Dragon 2, though. Because when you think about, like, I think Dragon 2 is going to stand out in the long view of history in the same way that the drill hole on the Soyuz did. Yeah.

Omega is going to be irrelevant by summer. Okay, I have a suggestion. I have a suggestion. We do two awards. One of them is the serious anomaly award and one of them is the funny one. It's like a listener's choice kind of thing. And we do Dragon 2 for the serious one and we do observation. The observation.

I like it. All right. Confirmed. That's good. I'm in on that. Good with that. Congratulations, Northrop. I should get their music ready.

Where is it? Here we go. Congratulations, North of Grumman. You have won the funny Offnominal Award, and SpaceX has won the Serious Off nominal Award for 2019. Oh, wow. All right. That was good.

Picks. Got any picks, Jake? Yes, I do have picks. I actually have a lot of picks, and I don't know which one to do right now. Last episode, I was so busy, and I just, like, crashed my, my prep program, and I had no pick, and now I have, like, four. So I'm going to pick, I'll pick the most relevant one. So I recently watched, this is old, old news now and no one's going to be really like impressed by this.

But I finally got a chance to watch the Year in Space documentary on Netflix, which was like, I don't know, like 12 episodes or something. But they're like short episodes, like really tiny ones. I binge it all in one night. So it's Scott Kelly's a trip to space. And I thought it was really, really good. I was, um, I was not expecting it to be like really, really. insightful but I found that it was um like it did a good job of reminding you how human it is to go to space you know like this year in space thing we kind of just think of it as this like well you go there

it's a science experiment you got a twin on the ground it's tough whatever we go to the ISS all the time no big deal here's some biomedical information about it but this was like a lot about him and his family and and you know the living through that year and and how long it really really probably felt like. And I thought it was really kind of humanizing and I really enjoyed it. So that's my pick. I have not seen that. You should go watch it.

I kind of totally forgot that it existed. Yeah. I got a little, I got a little like emotional in some of the scenes, so it was good. Oh. Yeah. Look at that. Is that rare?

I don't know. I guess I never really thought of Jake as a movie crier. But this is? Oh. I also watch stuff. I feel like this is kind of a, I've been traveling. in a lot, so I haven't had a lot of time to, like, invest in new, new things. So I'm doing a little midterm update on for all mankind and the Mandalorian, which I've just been keeping up on.

Yep. Both, no spoilers, no spoilers for anything. Spoiler-free feelings at this point midway through both seasons. Similarly, I feel like I'm enjoying the world in which they exist, and I'm enjoying just like existing in that world for 30 minutes, an hour at a time. I feel like the plots are a little wandering and I'm not quite sure if they're like if somebody said what is the show about I can just tell them the setting that it takes place in but I'm not sure that I could say like a theme for each show and for all mankind is kind of working its way through NASA scandals of the day both in like mission stuff but also people stuff they're kind of like picking the things

from NASA history that we've all kind of got our like you know things that are marked off in our history books, and they're doing their own take on what that situation would have been like back then. So I like the kind of pondering on that, but it feels like I'm not sure where it's going, still enjoying it, still watching it. And both is true for Fraudmankind and the Mandalorian. Hmm. Okay. Baby Yoda. Baby Yoda. That's not even a spoiler anymore. Don't worry. It's not. That's my only contribution. You do have a cup of tea in front of you so you can be the meme. You could live be the meme right now. That's true.

I have enjoyed that meme. That's great. I have not seen The Mandalorian. I'm like, this is enough. The meme is enough. Do you have a pick, Marina? I do. My pick is a little forward-looking.

It is a book that comes out in March 2020, so consider it a New Year's resolution to buy this book. It's by my good friend and fellow space reporter Sarah Skolls. It's called They Are Actually. Oh, sorry. They are already here. UFO culture and why we see saucers, which I think is just a newly hugely relevant story, at least since 2017, when the New York Times came out with that story about the Pentagon's

UFO surveillance program, which may not have actually been what it was. I mean, Sarah's done some last minute reporting, but she is a fantastic writer. She wrote a book last year profiling Jill Tarter, the SETI pioneer, called Making Contact. And that was such a great book. And I don't read that many space books because I'm like, oh, I just spent all day working on this. I'm not sure I want to read it for fun, but I recommend Sarah. And I don't really know that much about UFO culture. I think that's like a blind spot for me because I, we try to write about things that are

a little easier to prove. But I think it's going to be a great book. You are, oh, man, Jake, I got a great idea. We got to get her on for the March episode, and we got to get Tom DeLong on. We got to do a joint show. That would be something. We got to do it. I don't know if I can handle that.

Oh, we got to do it. We got to do that. We got to work on that. That would be such a good episode. And we'll just get Robert Bigelow in there just for fun, too. Oh, man. Awesome. Okay.

Marina, is there any articles that you've written recently that you want to, you know, brag about and put out there on the internet? Like, if listeners have never heard of you before, what should they read first and what should they do to follow you more on the internet? Well, I would recommend that they follow me on Twitter. It's just Marina Corrin because I tweet all my stories because I want everyone to read them. So that's the best way. Or apparently one of these RSS fees that the Atlantic has.

sign up for that. That'll be in the show notes because it's my favorite link. It's my favorite link on the Atlantic. Let's see. But a recent story that I really liked working on, it was a new research study of astronauts who spent up to six months on the ISS. And the scientists found that

the blood flow in these astronauts in one particular vein in their neck was really affected by microgravity. So the experience of weight, homelessness basically caused the blood flow in this vein to either become stagnant or start moving in the opposite direction. And one astronaut in the study actually, you know, they don't, I don't know if it's a here or she. They didn't release the identity of these participants, but they were doing an ultrasound on their own neck, being guided by someone back on Earth telling them what to do, and they discovered their own blood clot in this vein.

And they were pulled from that research study because after that it became a close. clinical case. It was no longer a research case. And that was the first time that anyone had seen that type of side effect in human spaceflight. And I wrote about that recently and talked to a bunch of people who study this and they were all surprised. Not surprised that there's still so much we don't know about spaceflight, but just surprised because blood clots are not good. No. Certainly. An important story about our future. I read that story. It was really good. That's a wacky like result like backwards blood flow. That caught a lot of headlines. It really kind of got around.

Right. But nothing bad, nothing truly bad happened. So that's almost encouraging because apparently these types of clots can develop in a matter of hours or days. And if they were up there for six months and nothing went down, there's a silver line. Yeah. I'm still going to try to avoid it personally. I'm going to try and not get a blood clot. Trying to get not backwards flowing neck blood. That's the medical. That's the clinical term for. My wife's a doctor. I sent out of the link and I said, would you make a term for this called backwards flowing neck blood?

She said no. I said no. BFNB. That's all I got. Okay. We out of here? I think we're done. That was 2019 off nominal awards.

Thank you so much, Marina, for being the 2019 off nominal award. Give her? Thank you. It has been an honor. It was an honor just to be nominated to give out this award.