Off-Nominal - 32 - Well Within the Kill Zone

Episode Date: July 28, 2020

Jake and Anthony are joined by Lord British himself, Richard Garriott de Cayeux. Richard is a storied video game designer/developer, an entrepreneur, an astronaut who flew to the ISS for a week, and an adventurer with so many tales it’s hard to keep up. Richard is also the son of Owen Garriott, a NASA astronaut who flew on Skylab II and STS-9.Richard joins us to talk about growing up as the son of an astronaut, to tell tales of spaceflight and undersea adventures, to ruminate on the commercial spaceflight industry, and to blow our minds with stories of dodgy Russian safety protocols.Also, our fundraiser is over and we’ve made a significant impact on two organizations working hard to bring racial equity to STEM and space. We raised nearly $35,000!DrinksRichard’s Very Fancy Limoncello, Prosecco, Lime, and Mint CocktailJake’s Coffee and Forty Creek CreamGalaxy & Comet - The Hop Concept - UntappdSuper Villain - Urban Village Brewing Company - UntappdTopicsWe've Made Space Better - Off-NominalOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 32 - Well Within the Kill Zone (with Richard Garriott) - YouTubeSpace AdventuresWith Russia’s OK, Space Adventures seeks a customer for spacewalkApogee of Fear! -- NASA VERSION. Written & produced by Tracy Hickman, Directed by Richard Garriott - YouTubeWatching a rocket launch from 200 meters away. It brought 3 astronauts to the ISS - GIF on ImgurPrivately Owned Soviet Moon Rover Sparks Space Law Talks | SpaceLunar Rover Is Spotted For First Time In 37 Years : NPREverything we know—and don’t—about Tom Cruise’s plans to film a movie in space | Ars TechnicaMoonBox | AstroboticPicksFall of Civilizations Podcast – A podcast that explores the collapse of different societies through history.The Moth | The Art and Craft of StorytellingCometron 7x50 Binoculars | Celestron - Telescopes, Telescope Accessories, Outdoor and Scientific ProductsAZ-GTi Mount | Sky-WatcherFollow RichardRichard Garriott (@RichardGarriott) / TwitterRichardGarriott.comExplore/Create, The Book – RichardGarriott.comFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterWatch the Launch of Mars 2020 Perseverance with us! - WeMartians PodcastFollow 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. Jake, welcome to Off Nominal. I've got two orders of business to start the show. Number one, Richard, we had NASA administrator Jim Bridenstein on two episodes ago, and after that one, my brother said to me, you didn't say who you were the entire time, and I feel like you probably should say who you were. So I'm Anthony Colangelo, and my co-hosts in Vancouver is Jake Robbins.

How you doing? That's order of business number one. Number two, occasionally I have been. moments in my life when I think what we do is really weird. And recently on a recent episode, we were a drink or two too far in with Jason Davis. And we mixed up two astronauts. And then one of them corrected us on Twitter. And then we said, you know what? We should make this up to you. You should come on the show. And he said, okay, but you're going to have to wait because I'm going to the literal bottom of the ocean. So you need to wait a couple of weeks. And we said, okay, we can do

with that. And here we are with Richard Garriott, Lord British himself. How are you doing, Richard? Excellent, excellent. You know, I still haven't made it to the bottom of the ocean yet, but that's another topic we can discuss. You've been close enough in my book. Yeah, we're going to get into that, because I've got a lot of questions about the bottom of the ocean to talk about today. Excellent. Excellent. So yeah, you're in Paris, so we're doing a matinee edition. We're stretching the time zones today. And I appreciate you guys willing to get up early and not make me stay up too late. So we're just just in time for cocktail hour. Yeah, what do you got over there? Yeah, what do you do?

So this is a drink that I learned from the little cafe that's literally just a few doors down for me. I don't know what they call it. I failed to write it down, but I did remember to ask how it was made because I really enjoyed it. So it's a mix of limoncello and prosceco with a little bit of lime and mint. Wow. Limoncello, prosceco, lime, and mint. It's very tasty, very refreshing, nice and summary. Delicious.

I am super jealous of that for so many reasons. We're getting out classed here, I think. And what are you drinking? Milk in the morning? Yeah, so it is 8 a.m. here in Vancouver. So I was thinking, you know, I have drank, I'll admit it. I've had beer pretty early in the morning, but I just didn't think that this was the right. So I got coffee and I put it in my Jim Brynstein fan club mug here, but I wanted to tart it up a little bit.

So I have this, this is a distillery. in Grimsby, Ontario called Forty Creek, and they make a great whiskey, and this is a whiskey cream liqueur. And so I figured I would just, you know, top up the coffee a little bit with this, and that way I can participate. I love that you're mixing it live on air, too. That's fantastic. It's part of the magic, Anthony. It's got a little stir it a little stir it a little bit. I've got two tall boys here, two pounders, both, both relevant. So the first one I've got is called Galaxy and Comet. Let me get my focus. Oh, nice. I guess it only focuses on my face, because I have face detection on.

This is not, I didn't plan for this. So I got this, obviously. We're in the days of a nice comet that has come through the first time in a long time, something that's nice and visible. I've had horrible weather, so I have not yet seen it. It's been cloudy every night. You know why? Because I bought this new tiny telescope here that I could have for planetary times in the city,

and it's been cloudy every day since. And the second one, I got, it's called Supervillain, and this just looked so Richard Garriott that I had to just buy it for this show. Nice. Nice, nice. Nice, very nice. That's great. Fantastic.

So, Richard, our show is just a pretty laid-back, casual space chat. Great. Typically, we come in with like, oh, we got a couple of nice topics to talk about. We have way too many stories to get to of every variety. I read your book over the last week to study up a little bit more. Excellent. See, I've got my Skylab shirt rocking today. Oh, even better.

So I want to start with Skylab because I'm a huge Skylab fan. Your dad flew on the second crude mission, which, what number did he use to refer to that? Two. Everyone uses like, is it Skylab 4 or does it go up to? It's only book to 3. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Well, so here's the way my family broke it down.

So Skylab Roman numeral 1, Roman numeral 2, and Roman numeral 3 were the crude missions. but the launches were SL English number one SL 2, 3, and 4 and so the launch of the vehicle was SL 1, SL2 would be the first crew, SL3 would be my dad's crew,

SL4, the final crew. So to me there's no confusion how you have to write the nomenclature. But you know that's funny because like on my mission patch that's so far behind me you can't really see it there, I was flying on

Soyuz-TMA-13, and I came down on Soyuz-T-M-A-12. Oh, yeah. But I only found out after I was already training and had my patches made that my own increment actually had its own nomenclature. I was VC-15, but my own patch doesn't even say that on it, because nobody explained this to me that because I was really up and down with no one else was, yeah, there you go, We got it. No one else went up and down on the exact same increment as me. So that's literally my own mission, which is VC 15. And the VC stands for visiting crew. So any of the short duration crews, the long ones are called expeditions. So Expedition 19, Expedition 20 were going when I was up. And then I was VC 15 was literally my increment. And you got the crew nomenclature there.

You weren't a crew participant. Oh, well, you know, the space flight participant. You know, so what's interesting is I still argue with folks about this all the time. As I'm sure you guys are well aware, anyone who's flown privately, the six of us who have flown privately, people love to call space tourists. And there are people like Charles Simone who flew twice to space. So there's actually been seven flights, six people privately. Charles flew just before me and just after me, and he goes, I did go as a tourist. I said, he had nothing to accomplish. He was never to have a good time. He paid his way and enjoyed

his time and doesn't mind being called a tourist. I, on the other hand, have a problem with it because I actually built the company to take all of us there, one of the co-founders, the company. I took on an incredibly heavy load of scientific and commercial work to help pay for my current flight and hopefully build businesses to pay for future flights. I was doing this as a professional endeavor, but just not a government endeavor. So I consider myself a private astronaut, not a tourist. But NASA and Russia actually have a contract with each other that says anyone who flies that's not a NASA or Roscosmos career professional or one of their other partner agency professionals, they will be referred to as spaceflight participants, not as astronauts. And,

And so, which, of course, I find, you know, unnecessarily. Exclusionary. Exclusionary. Exclusionary. But interestingly, all the other astronauts, which are members of an organization, if you've ordered the Earth at least once, you're invited to join something called the Association of Space Explorers. They all call me an astronaut. And they're quick to point out that in the Association of Space Explorers in Russia, in the Russian language,

is the Association of Space Flight participants. So actually, so in the Russian language, they're not really trying to be insulting. That's really what they call it in Russia. I just think in English it doesn't sound right. No, no. Frickin call me an astronaut. Get over it.

Call me an astronaut. I'm really glad now to know that in all the tweets where I called you an astronaut, I was breaking NASA rules. That kind of makes it really on brand for our podcast. Carre down those gates. Unnecessary gatekeeper. Richard, in every one of your games that you develop

for all of eternity from this point forward, there should be a NASA gatekeeper, like somebody that's named like N-A-A-A-A-Ga-Gate-Ckeeper. Yeah, yeah, the NASA, yeah, NASA. But yeah, that's a very, very good idea. And obviously, you're familiar enough for the games to realize that I do that a lot with people who have run cross, well,

ways with, you know, people or companies. And since you tipped it there, just for those who aren't familiar, for example, there's another long-term executive in the video giving industry guy named Tripp Hawkins, one of the founders of Electronic Arts. And he and I and he and my companies have often come head-to-head on various subjects. And so Trip Hawkins spelled backwards is pert Snigua. And in my games, Pert Sniqua is the most nefarious pirate to ever sail the seven seas

and always shows up doing something no good and eventually became a ghost pirate and still literally in Shroud of the Avatar is haunting the lands. So, you know, he lives on. So pick your least favorite NASA administrator and then put the name around. Exactly.

Oh, exactly. And I have one. NASA actually 72 hours prior to my launch tried to stiff arm me into not even entering the United States segment of the ISS

and when I got this letter from NASA saying you're banned from going in the U.S. segment please sign here that you agree I was like, what do I do with this? You know, I can't even talk to lawyers and my roommates.

Yeah, I'm in quarantine in Kazakhstan, exactly. It was 72 hours prior to launch. And my crewmates said, Richard, they can't stop us. They literally could, I mean, we're all going to go fly together. Just ignore it. And so I ignored it for about 24 hours. And then NASA came back and said, if you don't sign this, we're going to cancel all the experiments that our people have been doing with you, even things that would help NASA. The stuff that's for NASA, they were going to cancel at all if I wasn't willing to sign this. And I showed that to my crewmates. And they went, okay, we have a new plan. The new plan is that once we get in space,

Whoever the ISS commander is makes the rules, right? So the law is the C. And so even if you sign this, we can override it in orbit. And they said, well, that's good, but I need to make sure NASA understands and agrees to that. And so I called NASA on the phone and said, do you agree that the ISS commander can overrule what I'm signing right here? And they went, oh, yeah, that's the way the rules work. And I went, put it in the contract, which they did. And so then I signed it, sent it back to him.

We got into space. The ISS commander said, welcome the ISS, Richard. go back and do your business like you were planning to originally and ignore that contract. And so, but you're right. But I, but there is it. I won't name him here. I probably have in the past. I bet we might have the same one.

There's odds, odds are you've interviewed them. And, uh, but yeah, so, uh, I know just to put in future games. So, uh, he's got to be the gamekeeper. The gamekeeper, exactly. I don't think there's a lot of math necessary to go back and find out when your flight was. And then, yeah. Exactly. That's easy.

That's easy. The crazy thing about Richard... It's the Johnson Space Center, by the way. It wasn't not headquarters. It wasn't the administrator. In this case, it was the head of Johnson. Meddling. Richard's book is a must read for all space fans

precisely because of stories like that. I found it interesting on all parts because my day job is software, so there was, you know, the relevancy of your stories of the game development industry were relevant to my personal life, but the space side, you go on at length in these stories that aren't the things that are going to be written about in typical media or your entry on pooping in space was the most descriptive and wonderful description of that, which is always like the jokey topic that everyone wants to talk about. But the way that you wrote that entry is wonderful.

And I know our friend Brendan Byrne will be pumped to read that. And there's so many of these little anecdotes that you kind of put throughout the book. One thing I'm curious about, you mentioned, you know, your relationship with your father throughout the book and the way that, you know, he was an old school astronaut on Skylab and shuttle. You mentioned, you know, both that you had a great relationship in terms of the space world, but you also said that in the early days, he wasn't like talking a lot about being an astronaut. Maybe it felt just like it was his job. I'm curious what, if that was something that was consistent through his life or did it change over time once he was out of day-to-day astronaut business and thinking less about. office politics and more about space? Did that change in his take on things at all? Way, fascinating, you should ask that question because, in fact, it did change, but quite

late in life. And I didn't get a chance to write about this in the book. So all through my growing up and even after we moved out and was a young to middle-aged professional, my dad was the way I described in the book, which was very much like Spock, literally the unemotional, simple, logical, perfect, analytical person, never, you know, said anything compassionate or heartfelt to anyone that I ever met, family included. And, but this one time, and we'd all been to NASA with them many times. All of us as kids had gone on the NASA tour with my dad, but it was, you know, it was, oh, okay, here's the usual, you know, work stuff. And, but my sister-in-law, Marcy, the wife of my old, just older brother, bought at an auction a tour of NASA, given

by my father. And so that was, you know, she was the high bidder. So we all showed up and said, all right, dad, give it. You know, it's been, we haven't been back over there on campus in 10 or 20 years. Give us the tour. And it was completely different than any of us had ever experienced before in our lives. And we're not sure if it was the time that went by or because it was his daughter-in-law that had made this heartfelt purchase. But for whatever reason, suddenly for the first time, and I'm sure I was like, I was well, easily in my 40s already, might have been close to 50, my dad gave this incredibly passionate tour of all the NASA facilities. You could tell how much he really appreciated it, how much he was proud of it, how much he felt about the trip itself

during the trip. I mean, it was a, it was completely, it was like he was a changed human being, but it was really quite recent that that change occurred. So, but yeah, it did. That's really fun to think about because it kind of reminds me like there was, Skylab has a little bit of a reputation. The crews that went to Skylab had a bit reputation for sort of eventually skirting around the rules a little bit, right? Yeah, your space mutiny there did not start on your flight. No, no, no. Well, even little things like, well, so what's funny is even though my dad, like I said, was Spock, there were these little clues that I had throughout my life that he somewhere, there was something else in there. Like, you know, my dad, you know, there was a local Chevy dealer that gave, literally gave cars to all the astronauts.

And so almost all astronauts drove a corvette because it was a free car given them by some local dealership. My dad, however, not because there was a corvette, you don't think? There had to be some of them that were like, oh, it's a corvette. I'm definitely driving that. Not because it was free. No, no, no. They got their pickup cars. Of course they picked the corvette.

They picked the corvette. They said, the dealer said, what do you want? I want the Corvette. My dad said, you know, hey, Owen, Gary, what do you want? I want the station wagon. It's very practical, you know. And so that was the free car that my dad got was the station wagon.

But he bought from a different dealership a Mustang. You know, and I'm going like, okay, it's a nice car. And, you know, when I get old enough to drive to school and can borrow Dad's car, I take it down and all the other kids go like, hey, you know, what's it got out of the hood? And I'm going like, hell if I know, I'm sure it's whatever the standard, cheapest, smallest thing is that exists. And they'd pop the hood and go, no, no, you know, that's actually a bigger.

engine and it's got a four-barrel carburetor and all that's kind of stuff. I'm going like, no, no, no way. They said, oh, that has to be special ordered. And I'm going like, no way. My dad would never pay extra, never pay, never special order anything like that. And as I went home to my dad and said, hey, dad, explain the car to me because my friends have noticed. And you're like, oh, yeah, I special ordered that. So he did. He had this, he had this little streak in him that he kind of hid from the rest of us. So I want to ask you some, some questions. about, so you're kind of uniquely positioned to speak about this. We're seeing a bit of a change in how commercial human space flight is going to happen, right? I mean, and you were on the ground

floor of that with Space Adventures and building that up. But you're seeing a lot of stuff happened like just this year. So SpaceX with their new crew dragon and Boeing's coming up with Starliner. Axiom is building this space station. Space Adventures is suddenly like back in the news again, we're seeing, you know, some stuff happening with them. Yeah, what's your take on all this? I want to kind of hear, you know, how you feel about everything that's happening with all that. Well, first of all, I think that the commercial side is critical to driving costs down, access

up. I think, quote, tourism is only going to be a tiny piece of the market. I actually think the, you know, while that will help, you know, it's still going to be expensive. And so, but what's happening is imagine that you have an experiment you want to do in space. If you can imagine one, it's also really expensive to get to space. So if you have a good idea, but it's, but it then has to face a phenomenal amount of cost, there's good odds that cost will reduce the probability of ever pursuing that idea.

But we've already now seen, if you look at the peak price of putting either a kilogram into orbit or a person to orbit, you know, the peak price and frankly the peak danger was on the space shuttle. So the space shuttle was easily over $100 million per astronaut to send them there, and about a one out of 70 chance of death to launch them into space. We're now, even at the prices that you and I can go on the internet and book a Falcon 9 launch, and even though, you know, Elon, they haven't really published their commercial rates yet, but you can go. Yeah, you've got a different internet than I do, I think.

Yeah, so you can figure it out. But it's gone from, you know, hundreds of millions to now we're down into the tens of millions. So it's already 10 times cheaper. And Elon thinks he can get it down to the ones of millions. And that would make it a hundred times cheaper. And so whatever is you're thinking about doing, you know, making some plastics, 3D printing stuff, you know, pulling threads of fiberoptic glass that are more pure in space, crystallization and stuff that I was doing when I was up there. When the price goes down a hundredfold,

then it's a lot easier for entrepreneurs and people who have great ideas to think, you know, I can raise the money to do that. It's literally a hundred times easier to raise the money now than it was, you know, a couple years ago. And so that's what's really changing. But I've been in the business not only of sending people to space, but the team that I worked with to do that, we also did other kind of extreme exploration companies. So we did something called deep ocean expeditions to take people down to the Titanic and other deep targets and kind of a spinoff of that is the one that's going down to the all the way down the Marianas Trench, you know, now. Another company called Adventure Networks International, which is the only company that operates on the interior of Antarctica.

One of those, one of the guys that worked on both those also used to guide people up to the top of Mount Everest. And all of those trips that I just spoke of, they all cost somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred grand, and they all are arduous, and they all involve some risk. Like, you know, if you think about climbing Mount Everest, it includes an incredible level of risk, much higher, frankly, than I'm willing to. Some risk says the guy who got literally stuck under the Titanic. But climbing Everest is literally far more painful and far higher risk than I am willing to undertake, at least at this stage.

I can't imagine doing it unless I build a. special quadra bike with an inflatable, hypobaric chamber. But that's another story about my plan for how I might eventually do others. The only guy that will ever climb Mount Everest in a mech is my money is on you for sure. That's it. That's it. That's the plan. And but until then, the point of that was is that I've thought about price. I've worked in companies that have been studying price elasticity of very expensive, somewhat dangerous, a little bit arduous, training required activities.

And so when you think about suborbital, which Virgin and Blue are both about to open up, you know, within months or a couple of years of the worst, I think that to the degree that they can get the price back under the $100,000 marker, then I think there's an ongoing business for that, just like there is for these other experiences. to the degree that it stays above 100 grand, then I worry that they'll run out of market share. Similarly, if we're going to orbit, I think that if any time you're north of a million bucks, it's a pretty elite group of people. There's still plenty of them, but it falls off fast. But if you can get it down to one or two million or even better below a million,

and with Starship, Elon thinks he can get the cost of going in Starship, a million dollars. He's been throwing out numbers of a few hundred thousand dollars. And so if he can get people to orbit for that price, then I actually think tons of people would go. Most all of us would go. I mean, the analogy that I use, and let's move it just out of orbit to Mars here for just a point of discussion, if you think about the people who move to the new world from the old world, these are people who said, you know, I'm going to I'm going to America. And to do it, I'm going to sell my house. I'm going to sell all my my possessions because I can't load them up with me. I'm going to sell my business. I'm going to

turn all that into cash. I'm going to buy some tents and take stakes and shovels and supplies and a ticket on the Mayflower, whatever it might be. And off they go to, you know, forge a pretty hard life in a completely new place. And so if you use that analogy for Mars, you know, a couple hundred grand, anyone on Earth could probably save that up. Any employed, any gainfully employed person who's going, I want to be born on Earth, but die on Mars, hopefully not on impact. you know, they can probably save up the money to make that happen. And so I think a lot will. I'm curious about the more expedition side that you were talking about at the beginning.

Is there something that's inherent to, you know, if it is a viable analogy for us to use, and we can learn some lessons from that, is there a reason that those expeditions are still as pricey as they are relatively and haven't come down so much? I know in the case of the Titanic, there's legal issues and a whole other environmental issue in terms of it degrading over time. But those expeditions are still in the tens of thousands. Why haven't they come down closer to the single digit thousands over time? I think the main reason is that they already started close to their floor. And here is my argument for where the floor is in the usage of all mechanized,

exploration. Whether space ships, submarines, ships, airplanes, or cars. All of them, if you think about driving your own car, you know, you go to a dealership and you buy a car, it's going to cost you some tens of thousands of dollars. A nice station wagon.

Yeah, exactly. It might be 10 grand, 15 grand, whatever it is, your station wagon. My Subaru hatchback, I brought off my brother, my first car. You know, I think I paid three or four grand, but that was back in, you know, 1970, so it's probably more than that now. but the once you own the car um if you think about the cost of operating it through its lifetime

you you can you can do a measurement off the fuel cost and so let's suppose every time you put a hundred dollars worth which you know i know you don't put your tank doesn't hold 100 gallons but a hundred dollars worth but let's use use as an easy number every hundred dollars you spend on gas you probably spend another $100 on depreciation, insurance, and maintenance. And actually, actually, probably $200. So the point is if you take all your other costs plus fuel, it usually adds up to about three times the fuel cost. And that's true for cars that you can,

when you run out of gas, you go fill it up and keep driving. You run out of gas, you fill it up, keep driving. It's the same for airplanes. It's the same for boats. it's the same for trains. So all these things that you can just fill up the gas tank again and go, the depreciation of the high cost of the vehicle is depreciated over many, many, many, many, many, many uses. Well, the one place that has not been true until now has been spacecraft,

where every spacecraft was destroyed on its maiden voyage. And so think about that analogy going back to a car or a boat or a train or anything else. if every time you bought your car for 10 grand at the dealership, you put in $100 worth of gas, and at the end of running out of gas, you crush it and go buy another car. Well, no one's going to drive very much. You know, the only times you're going to drive is when it's really, really essential to go drive. And so that's why the price of going to space is coming down is because of reusability. It's a profound improvement on the cost.

But in the case of the submarines, they're already reusable, right? You just charge them up and go again, charge them up and go again. And so you already were at the floor some time ago. And in fact, the trips I've made to Antarctica and the trips that have made down to Titanic and other deep targets, those have actually gone up in price in the 20-some-odd years I've been doing them. You know, I think the first price I paid to go down to super, you know, six thousand meters or so, you know, is like $25,000. I haven't tried to buy one of that.

particular depth recently, but it's closer to 100,000. And so that's actually gone up, but I think that's really just economy that's made that go up. Is that a factor though, where it's, you know, there are very few ventures that are offering those kind of trips with very high cost of, honestly, like operation. It seems like it takes an entire ship's worth of an expedition to go out to one of these things. So you're paying a fixed price of, you know, everyone being there working. So it does feel. That's correct. But you're not, but even if there were two, though, you know, to competing companies, the price wouldn't come down much. Because both those companies will require a huge amount of infrastructure to make that happen.

So I feel like that's kind of what I'm saying is like, is that, is that a good analogy for, you know, orbital spaceflight that we would see in our lifetime unless there's some crazy propulsion breakthrough, which we might be able to talk about as well? That might be a pretty good analogy for the kinds of prices that we could see is tens of thousands at best. Or am I, like, making an assumption off of submarines that won't necessarily hold that. No, no, here's the way to measure it. So if you look at the vehicle I flew in the Russian Soyuz, the Soyuz, you could also go buy from Russia, and the price today is, I haven't priced it, but it's probably about $150 million, they would charge you. If you go, I want to buy the Soyuz, I want to put my own three astronauts in it, and I'm

going to go to wherever the heck I can take it. They'd say, sure, pay us the money, and we'll give you all three seats. And it'd be about $150 million. For you, for NASA, probably $450. Yeah, probably. Probably that's probably true. But actually, the difference in prices is with how much training and other extras you need. But I think the pricing is actually pretty consistent.

But if you think about that, you think about, okay, well, you're going to throw it away. We know that. But the majority of the mass, as you all know very well, is really caracine and liquid oxygen. So how much does the kerosene and liquid oxygen cost that goes into this $150,000, what will be trash soon? And the answer to that question is about $800,000. So it's $800,000 compared to $150 million vehicle that you're going to throw away. But if you do the math of the previous thing I said, three times energy cost. So instead of being $800,000, you can triple up so maybe it's about $3 million.

And that's about a million dollars a seat. And so if the Soyuz was 100% reusable, they could probably operate it at about a million dollars a seat. And so when Elon throws this number around of about a million bucks for, you know, eventual price of a highly reusable dragon, for example, if you could really reuse the capsule. And at the time, he was thinking of the first stage and the second stage. And right now they can't, you know, do the second stages. But the point is the floor for chemical rockets is probably for orbital chemical rockets that only hold a half a dozen passengers or less. It's probably about a million bucks.

But the reason why he thinks he can beat that with Starship is because it holds two. hundred people. And packing them in. And so packing them in. And so, but that, but that economy of scale really does continue to push it down. And so he thinks he can get another almost order of magnitude or somewhere in that neighborhood by packing them in. Jake's doing math. I'm doing a lot of math in my head now. I'm not trying to. So what do you think is going to be like, like, different about about the flights now? I mean, if they're, if they're coming down and you're, you're starting to take advantage of Dragon and whatever's coming in the future. Like if you think about your 2008 flight, is it going to be, is that the market we're looking

at these sort of like, you know, one week trips to the ISS or is there something something different that we can do now? Well, you know, what's interesting about, you know, plans that, for example, space adventures has had. I don't know if this is their plan now. But, for example, even if there was a fully private launch, that NASA or the ISS partners did not want to park at the ISS. I mean, you have to negotiate for that, right?

You don't, you know, just because I can buy a rocket doesn't mean they'll let me dock. And so one of the things we used to work on a lot was what do we, what we sell people that, that doesn't involve the ISS if we manage to get fire, have our own rocket. It would be very cool if your customers got one of those letters from NASA. Well, the, well, what? What's interesting is, obviously, the farthest humanity has ever been out in space right now is around the moon and back, right? That's three days away.

That's a good distance away. And the Apollo 8 trajectory was particularly important because it was very safe. It actually, you know, it's that figure 8 around the moon and back. And the reason why that works is once they were lined up and launched towards the moon, they, by going around the leading edge of the moon in the direction of the moon's orbit, they would actually lose some energy and so they had a free return back to the earth.

So once they were going ahead in the right direction, everything else is on cruise mode, right? They literally just coast and they would at least come back to the earth at the end of all that. And so you want, so there's that fly. The flies in here again. But the,

so a free, a free return is an important safety procedure. Well, it turns out, actually, a gentleman by the name of Dennis Tito, he was actually the first client of Space Adventures since I couldn't pay for the... I was actually supposed to be the first client of Space Adventures, so that's when the dot-com crash and I couldn't pay for my own first seat. So we sold that seat to Dennis Tito. But Dennis Tito, who also, he did Mirr Corp, but other things, too.

He was pursuing this as long and hard as I was, probably even harder. So if anybody had to beat me, congrats to Dennis. He is also an incredible engineer and mathematician. He loves to plan orbits. And he has planned this fascinating orbit where you actually use the moon a different way. You have launched past the moon, but instead of it in the figure eight around the moon, you actually go up and you get a little kick from the moon further out into space,

but then on the way back down, you go past the moon again, which slows you back down and then you fall to the Earth. So it's another free return orbit. it, but takes you farther away from the earth than anyone has ever been by a long shot. And so we're going like, hey, that'd be a fun, you know, that'd be a fun one to go do. If you're paying, if you're paying for a trip yourself and, you know, and the ISS is either boring because you've already been there or they don't, or the door mat's not out right now, so they're not welcoming you.

Then, then let's go further out in a space than anyone has ever been before. And that can be done safely, relatively cheaply, and, you know, big fun. Yeah. And they've been looking at these like Gemini-style flights too where they go pretty high altitude just in low Earth orbit, right? Where it's like 11,200, 1,200 kilometers or something. That would be pretty awesome because I've heard from different astronauts that even like, you know, like shuttle astronauts that went to the ISS versus shuttle astronauts that went to Hubble. ISS is like 400 kilometers. Hubble's like 600 or so.

I'm on ballparking here. But like even that difference like totally changed the way the Earth looked. And so doubling that again must be. Yeah, you look at the photos from the Hubble deployment. And you're like, damn, they were up there. They were high. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, in fact, I can't remember this in the book or not. But, you know, so I already told the story about how I, you know, 72 hours prior to flight, I was even, I was actually worried if I was going to get my trip canceled out from underneath me. And so, you know, the day we finally were on the launch pad and in the final phase of the countdown, we're like, at least we're going. I'm going. And then you take this amazing eight and a half minute ride. And that's all it takes to burn.

You're sitting still on the ground. You burn the entire 90% of the mass of this rocket in eight and a half minutes. The engines cut off. The thing heals over. And actually just tumbled in space for a few minutes before they turn on any attitude control. And you might think that my first thoughts, when finally being in orbit and finally seeing the earth, it would be reasonable to think that my first thoughts would be, oh, wow, I made it to space.

Look at the beautiful Earth down here below. me, hooray. But that is not what went through my mind. The first thing I thought when I looked out that window is, wow, we are not nearly as high up as I expected to be visually. I sure hope we're in a perfectly circular orbit. Because if we're not, we're going to be reentering again in like a moment or two. That is really going to suck. And so, but there were no alarms going off on any of the equipment, every gauge was reading correctly. So I didn't say anything to my crewmates. I just sort of kept listening for alarms or other information. And after we tumbled a few times, I noticed the view out the window wasn't changing in a good way. Then I could relax and go,

okay, yeah, we are. We're safe. We're in orbit. You could lean back just enough in a Soyuz. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, barely a little. I feed her up one inch more than they were a second ago. Yeah, you could use that little pokey rod and touch the window. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Only the commander had that pokey rod. We didn't have it. Oh, okay, okay. It's a privilege to have the pokey rod. Is that in any of your games? That should be a weapon. The Soyuz Pokey rod? Yeah. No, that's a good one, though. That's a good one. Can we make the NASA gatekeeper styled in my image with the Soyuz Pokey rod?

It's a Poked. Absolutely. Absolutely. There's got to be a better name for it than Pokeyrod, right? You named it, man. What have I done? Oh, my God. But yeah, but it's funny. You know, on a previous trip out to a launch, you know, I've stood about 200 meters from the base of a Soyuz as it launched. You know, well within the kill zone.

And one of the things I got from one of the engineers there at the time is the key that they used to turn it on. But it was never explained to me whether that key was in the Soyuz or in Mission Control. Turns out it's in mission control. But it is, there is a nice little aluminum, you know, one-toothed key that has to be inserted in turn. So, you know, arm the Soyuz Proost, apparently. 200 meters. Never seen. Yeah, can we talk about 200 meters?

We got to go back to that. What's going on there? Were you in the blockhouse or something crazy? Yes. Well, so this is how crazy that was. So I assumed that when I actually. when I agreed to go do this, when I found it was plausible to do this, I was, of course, very excited and wanted to go do it.

But I also assumed that we would be in some sort of bunker or something, you know, close. If you're that close, you would like to have. A good story about Russia, isn't it? Yeah, you would like to have some defenses. And so we go out, we go out with this group and we have to go through some checkpoints and there's guys there with guards, you know, with guns and stuff. And whoever a guide is is convincing them that's okay for us to be here. even though it's really not. And we go park the vehicle down by this bunker,

and then we go down inside this buried bunker. And I'm going like, okay, well, somewhere in this buried bunker is going to be like a little place we can stick our nose up or a piece of glass. We can peek through like on Space Force, if you watch the new Space Force. And that's what I'm imagining. But instead we go down like this old dilapidated machine shop

where like somebody's been sleeping down here and there's like cans of old cat food laying around everywhere and a few cats. And it's just a trash heap. but there's no windows at all. And I've been going, well, what are we down here for? I mean, isn't there, are we going to watch the launch? I mean, we're very close.

I mean, we really were only 200 meters away, but we couldn't see it. And so I'm going to like, what are we waiting for? What are we here for? And they said, oh, we're waiting for them to finish the sweep on the surface to get rid of anybody on the surface. And so we're hiding down here. And it's like, oh, okay. And so time is now ticking down. and we're like, we're getting, you know, five minutes from launch, four minutes from launch, three minutes from launch, two minutes from launch.

I'm going like, are we going to, are we staying here? You know, maybe 90 seconds part of launch, I'm going, okay, now. And then we all get up and go out of the bunker, and we literally just stand in the grass right in front of the rocket. As this rocket launches, and it is awesome. And so this, because you are, you know, if you didn't have ear protection on, you'd be hurting. if anything went wrong, you'd be dead. And the only reason that they wouldn't let us go closer than 200 meters is because it's actually outgassing things that would kill you if you were closer.

So it's literally the closest you could be and survive during a nominal launch. And the way that they know 200 meters is the safe spot? I don't know. You can imagine, but I don't know. I don't know for sure. That is wild. I'm going to be having nightmares about this story, I think. I mean, I've heard from, I was at NASA Goddard a couple years ago,

and somebody there that works on some of the different climate missions was 800 meters from an H2. I think it was one of the original H-2s. But he was inside, like you were thinking, inside a bunker with some glass, and he said it was still unbelievable. Just, okay, that's a, now I always thought people in those videos from, you've seen like the videos of people on the, I think it's at the Sechong

set of launch center, the one out of the valley in China when they're like up on the gantries that are next to the rocket. Now we know how this happens. And how I found out about this is actually one of our handlers is a photographer. He was military and he was a photographer. And he's been in the gantry that is the

electrical protection. He's been up in that during the launch. So the rocket launches is right beside him and he's got pictures there. And he also showed me some other pictures of launch. And I'm going like, how are you looking up at the bottom of this rocket as the flame is coming down towards you? And he said he was in the, there's not only a flame trench that funnels the fire out in one general direction, but there's some side tunnels.

And he was down in one of those side tunnels shooting up at the rocket as it launched. And then he said the pressure wave actually pushed him up and out of that side tube. So he got thrown out of the side tube. And they're going like, you are crazy. You are crazy. And, but yes, people do that. Apparently, China, but also in Russia. And as long as things go nominally, you know, you'll survive to tell us tale.

But, you know, people are a well away. You know, I assure you we were, even though I expected a bunker, I did know that we were, you know, going into the zone that is, you know, you would not be normally accessible by the general public and shouldn't be. The Toasty Zone, yeah. The Toasty Zone. We do have an update from the chat. Curbel Space Academy is here. And he says it is called a Thing Longer. Not the Pokey, what did we call it before?

Pokeyrod. Oh, a Thing Langer. No, the Thing Langer. The Thing Langer is from Good News, everyone. Television, the Futurama. Oh, okay. The thing longer. Yeah, the Finglonger.

That's from the professor on Futurama. We're getting bad info in the chat here. We got to. Thanks, Curbl Space Academy. Oh, you're supposed to teach us stuff. He gave us the clue we needed to fill in the gaps. Fake news, fake news. Oh, that's great.

We have one order of business that we need to talk about is that you own some lunar spacecraft. I do. In fact, I am the world's only private owner of an object on a foreign celestial body. Now, is this a special order or is this right off the line like your dad would buy it? This was special order. This was actually a Sutherby's purchase. in 1996, I think it was. It was right after the fall of the Soviet Union.

A lot of public and private companies over in Russia were hurting for money because the economy got trashed and the government wasn't paying basically anybody. And a U.S. lawyer, a guy named Art Dula, actually, went over to Russia. He was helping them out on a variety of other fronts. But one of the ways that he also helped him, he said, look, you guys own a bunch of the space stuff and I can probably help you find buyers in the U.S. And so they worked with Sotheby's and they

put up this Russian, you know, one of the first ever Russian space auctions. And most of it was the stuff that you guys now see on eBay or Sothebyes or Chrissies or other auctions all the time. You know, whether it's a manual that somebody took with them to space or their glove or a boot or, you know, a thruster

or a piece of... In the case of our friend Tim Dodd, the everyday astronaut. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. All those things. coming for sale, but one item that came that was up for the sale was Lunacod 2, the second Russian lunar rover that was put up on the moon at about the same time as the U.S. landings. And they had it projected to sell for, I think, $10,000 or $12,000. And, you know, whereas a space suit at the time was costing something like $25,000.

And I went and said, you know, I think that's worth a lot more. than $10,000, but I actually don't know how much it's worth. And I would hate to, you know, what I usually do in auctions is I will seal a bid and put it in and then, you know, cover your eyes and ears and let it ride. This is the only auction I participated in live because I really just had no idea what I would be willing to pay or what I thought others might be willing to pay. Or what you in a panicked moment would be willing to pay. That's right. Well, in fact, there was a second item I was bidding on that I did not win, and I'm glad I didn't. And that was a Soviet lunar sample, a raisin-sized lunar sample that I bid way beyond my means, way beyond

reasonability, eventually chickened out, and the person who I was bidding against made the next bid and won it. And I was going like, wow, I'm so glad I didn't win that one. But anyway, that was the same auction. So I've not done live auctions since either. But in the case of Lunacot II, I purchased it for $68,500. But I knew even before I bought it that my whole reason to buy it is so that I can make the statement, I am now the world's only owner of an object on a foreign celestial body. And you guys have probably all heard of like the lunar, I can't remember what they call themselves. People sell lunar property up there on the moon and they do it by just, I look at a telescope,

I see a little spot and I'm going to sell that track there because who can stop me? But they don't really have any other claim other than that. then nobody else seems to claim it, so I'm going to do it. In my case, I immediately followed my purchase with hiring a bunch of lawyers, so I've spent almost as much on legal fees as I have on the vehicle to assert my claim as follows. That, you know, while there really isn't particularly good law yet for the moon, there are treaties that give you a framework for ownership of property off Earth. For example, if you're on a cruise ship and throw a life preserver off the side and it washes up on an unclaimed island in the Pacific, you don't own that island.

But on the other hand, if you wash up on that island and you build a farm and you put up a fence and you till the soil and you grow some crops, international law says you do own that. And you don't own the whole island, but you at least own the part that you have an active use. But if you leave the island and quit using it, it goes back to nope, you don't own it anymore. And similarly, there is convention around even geosynchronous orbital positions, things that are mathematically describable spots in space. If you're the first one there and you continue to use it, you control it, you basically own it. But if you fall out of, if you lose control of your vehicle and it leaves that zone, then it's up for grabs for anybody else. And you probably are aware of the treaties where no government will aid claim to property off Earth, but one that was not ratified was where they tried to ban private individual ownership of property off Earth. So that laid the door up in for private ownership.

And in the case of my lunar rover, first of all, it's still in use. There are mirrors on board, the lander, and the rover that are used by modern observatories to do Earth, Moon, distance detecting. So even though it's not moving any further, it is still in use, so it's not junk. It's used. So I don't think anybody would argue with I own the rovers and the lander. I don't think anybody would argue that I own the dirt immediately under it. but the next assertion is that my rover tilled the soil for 40 kilometers. And so that 40 kilometer trackway, I believe I can assert ownership on also.

And then my rover also surveyed the land from a six foot high pedestal with 360 degree cameras for everything that can be seen from a height of six feet along that 40 kilometer trackway. So I also claim that visually mapped area that my rover has mapped. So my claim is modest. It's only 40 kilometers by a couple kilometers wide, but that is my claim on the moon. And I actually believe it would hold up, at least better than others, if it ever came down to push the shove. So you're welcome to come to the moon. I've even offered some Google Lunar X Prize people.

I already said, you're welcome to come on my property. but I will even pay you for some photos you take while on my property, but I'm also going to charge you a pretty much similar amount for rental to be on that property. Jake, we've got our spot for the future lunar edition of Offnominal. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Future headquarters of Offnominal, yeah, for sure. We've been on, we've been...

We've got a lot of different future headquarters when you say to set up here. Yeah, we've got one is that bunker that he watched the Soyuz launch from. That's one definitely on my list, but I'm eyeing up this spot on the moon. as well. Okay, I have another a line of questions here. So we recently got some news. Actually, we kind of participated in some of this news that Tom Cruise may be filming a movie in space. And it looks like he's working with Axiom and NASA a little bit. You also have the claim of the first science fiction movie filmed in space, which I watched last night. I watched it last And I think the quote that I said to Anthony was, this is the best thing I have ever seen in my life.

Excellent, bro. Go on. Excellent. It was great. I want to kind of hear your take on that. What do you think about this movie in space? Well, so, first of all, any excuse to go to space is a good excuse. So for Tom, you know, if you think about the production budget of Blockbuster movie, you know, they're pushing a billion dollars.

nowadays for making a movie. And so to, hey, to put $100 million in a flight to space is plausible. You know, I'm not sure the results would actually be better than you'd get out of doing it simulated on the ground because zero-g simulations are pretty darn good these days. And your ability to control actors and cameras and other things is much better in a sound stage or even on a zero-g flight than it is actually in space. So, but, you know, but it's fun to be there and knock yourself out. But it is true, though, that, you know, one of the things that I learned, and literally, even though I, you know, when I first heard this, and they were claiming it was to be the first movie I ever filmed in space, and I was going, nah, that's really not.

I really did offer in seriousness to offer some advice. Now, and I'm not the only person that could because, like, there's some IMAX films that obviously been filmed in space, and so they've learned some of these same lessons. But it's fascinating that when you're in space, it's like being on a three-dimensional air hockey table, right? Nothing sits still. Everything migrates. And so, you know, if you set up a camera shot and you're supposed to start here and here, good luck with that, right? The people and objects are going to go, you know, in completely different directions than, you know, would have been planned. And so, you know, understanding that and managing it is, it adds a level of difficulty of complexity to the shots.

So I had offered to help consult. Strangely, no one has contacted me yet. Just us, actually. But what's interesting is Tom has a good friend at the Explorers Club in New York. That's also a good friend of mine. So we actually have one degree of separation that has made the offer, not just in jest, but in seriousness. Because I think there is, if you're really going to go blow that kind of money up there,

you really better get as much of this planned out as well as you can before you go do it. You're welcome to bring them on here. We can have the discussion live on air whenever you want. Great. All right. Perfect. Yeah. Yeah.

Happy to do a filming in Space 101. Yeah. I will. He calls me up and we need a place to chat. We'll do it right here. Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about that. Is it like the logistics of filming in space and just like, you know, when they announce it, there's like a bazillion questions going to your brain.

It's like, okay, is it, is it Tom going up? Is Tom going to bring one? camera person, a camera person who is the director, a camera person and a director, what's it going to look like, what kind of equipment, how much, how much master they need for the camera? I just like my brain explodes when I started thinking about it all. And then, yeah, you bring a simple question of just moving the camera around. It was so hard. It was so hard to get shots. And by the way, then you run into the things I ran into for filming Apogee of Fear on YouTube. and I also ran a foul of Russian

what's the word of superstition Um One of the things One of the things you learn quickly in the space program in Russia is how much superstition there is. Like for example, there are these rituals you go through that most of what you're just kind of fun and you do them because of most of it in my mind because they're fun But there are things that were done since the beginning like you know you're always blessed with some holy water from a Russian Orthodox priest and you sign the door of the room you stayed in the night before. And you watch this one movie on the bus on the way out to the launch pad.

You watch White Sands in the Desert because everybody does. And there's a place where the bus goes down below a hill so that nobody can see you. And everybody stops and goes and pees on the tire or the van that's taking them there. And you're going like, oh, these are going to find a fun and find. Or there's one where you, when you start your walk up the gantry to climb up on board, one of the Russian generals gives you a kick on the butt. And I forgot about that one until I got the kick on the butt. And I went, oh, yeah, that's the ritual, you know.

for one second you were like oh shit it's the NASA lawyer he's back you know the irony but another one you don't do is you don't shake hands through a doorway and that's on your ground base house or in space you when the hatch opens up and you might reach you might think about

Emmy hey comrade on the other side let me shake your hand you don't do that that's bad luck and they really really believe it they won't do it and so I went through all that I knew all that. But when Tracy Hickman, the writer who's probably best known for the Dragonlance series of books, he wrote the script for me. And the reason why I asked him to write that script is he had also shown me a game proposal he had done some years previous

about this, what you called it Party Flicks, this game you can play at home, where you'd start with a script and tell your friends what their parts were, but no one got to read the script. All you did is said, okay, Bob and Martha, you go to the kitchen, here's your lines, say them, and now let's film the next scene. And you film the whole thing in order, and only after it's completely filmed,

do you rewind, get some popcorn sit in the living room and see what the film is you've all made because you shot it in order all on the first take. And so that I figured I could convince my crewmates to participate in because it would be done in a hurry. It wouldn't interfere with either their professional or personal time. But when I brought this up to my crewmates,

because two of them were already in space before I launched. I said, I didn't really get a chance to talk to them about it before I met them in space. And so I'm going, hey, one of things I like to do is film this movie. And they're going like, it's okay, yeah, fine, whatever. Can we see the script? And I showed them the script. And they said, oh, we can't participate.

And I'm like, why not? And they said, as you know, the script shows that we leave the space station without you and you stay behind. And they say, we think that's bad luck. Because already the previous two Soyuz's prior to our return have had bad malfunctions that could have killed the crew. And we made a spacewalk to go remove some explosive bolts that hopefully have repaired that. But we think participating in a movie that makes fun of or has in some way implies that something might go off nominal. they thought was bad mojo

and so they literally wouldn't participate so I had to rewrite it in real time while I was in orbit and yet the anomaly day one is still the title in the movie anomaly event day one day six Jake and I were pumped we ran a thing a year or two ago

to figure out what our fan community was called and we've determined they are called anomalies so I felt we felt very excited to see that in the movie as well Yeah, yeah, that's good. The door, the no handshakes through door thing. Do we know where that came from? Because it sounds a lot to me like that was some Apollo Soyuz test project finagling that they didn't want to have a handshake from a Soyuz to an Apollo.

So they had to make the docking adapter and then do the handshake in there. Well, you know why the docking adapter was changed, right, to this, right? Because nobody wanted to be either end of the docking adapter. Yeah. And the Russians apparently wasn't going their way. way, they wanted to have a handshake in the docking adapter area. Yeah, apparently, yeah, yeah. That's some weird history there.

Yeah, that's crazy. I think we just passed the date of that as well. I saw some tweets about that recently, so we're being very topical. Yeah, totally. Jake, we forgot to do some homework or housekeeping up front. We did, yeah, yeah. So we have, so Richard, I'll give you a little backstory here, but we actually, a couple episodes ago, a couple, yeah, a couple episodes ago, we kicked off a fundraiser

that just finished up. And so we wanted to share some of the results of that. But this was for, we, we picked two organizations that are helping kind of fight racial inequality and racial injustice in space and in STEM. So it was Black Girls Code and the Bannaker Institute. And so we had some generous people that were matching for us. And we finished that up. And so we're so super excited because our listener is really stepped up. We had like this awesome showing that everyone who's listening here is just an amazing person and it's just awesome.

So there's the results that we got there, you know, with our matching funds, $35,000 raged for these two groups. So we wanted to make sure we took an opportunity on this podcast to thank the listeners for this outstanding work. I don't know, Anthony, do you expect a number this high when we started this? Definitely 100% not at all. And the cool thing is that the amount that we raised for Bannaker specifically is higher than their listed figure for an entire student. So we had John Johnson on last show. We'll probably bring him back next year because one student next year will be entirely funded by everything that we did over the last month. Yeah, that's super awesome.

That's phenomenal. Well, congratulations. And, you know, I find these to be very interesting and important times we're in, you know, on this subject. And I have to reflect even on my own career in the video gaming industry. The video gaming industry is another industry that is in need of introspection and change. on this same front. And it's not for lack, or at least I did not perceive

on a personal level that was not for lack of trying. I consider myself a militantly anti-sexist person. I wouldn't even let my wife take my last name. We blended our names because I wanted to make sure she wasn't giving up her identity, et cetera.

And yet, you know, the number of female engineers I've employed through my career is low. The number of people of color I've employed through my career is low. And I used to say, say that that's because even though I would interview, you know, non-white geeky males, you know, there were very few that came up through the system that I could employ. I mean,

I really felt that way. But I was at a, about a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago, I was at a development event at the University of Texas and had a much younger cohort, a much more integrated cohort. and I was giving my patent excuse for not having done better. And they called me on it and said the following. They said, so Richard, on your website, does your website show diversity in your employees and in your management? I went, no. Does your call to action or does your call to come join us include specific statements

about your lack of diversity or lack of having achieved that goal and your desire to overcome it? And I went, uh, no. And I said, well, how would you expect any of these people to be applying to you then if you are not, you know, admitting that or fixing the fact that if you don't look like us, why would we apply? And I went, wow, you are just so right. And so it just showcased to me how easy it is for those of us who even feel like we're hopefully at least not part of the problem. And hopefully we're being part of the solution. and how easy it is for us to miss these really important beats. And things like raising money, of course, are super important.

But having these discussions and making sure that everybody is really not just saying, hey, it's not my fault, but we're really going back and addressing why, after all, this generation or two of talking about it, why has it not been fixed? and I think we all can play a part not only with our cash, but with our actions to really move the world forward right now. Yeah, we were talking about the same thing, is that, you know, that story sounds so familiar to me because I'm the same way.

I feel like I talk the talk and I do all these things. And when all this stuff started happening, we were looking back and doing some retrospection and, you know, the people that were bringing on this show and it was definitely not as diverse as it should have been. And so we're trying to fix that as well. And so I think it's good that we keep talking about. And that's why I think it's really important to do the update now,

because we're about two months since the start of the most recent demonstrations and movements against this stuff. And it's really important to not let this, you know, fade out and burn out into some smoke and, you know, until the next bad thing happens. Like we can't let that happen, right? And so we've got to keep working on it. And I think that this is a good first step. I'm hoping next year by the time that the,

2021 Bannaker season rolls around the pandemic will have faded a little bit. I'm hoping by then. I'm not super optimistic, but if so, I'm hoping to drive up for the summer and hang out for a day or something because we will have sponsored one of the members there. So it would be pretty awesome too. But just the response on that is incredible. I just see, I'm blown away. These listeners are just we bow down to you totally. Should we do some picks?

I think we should. Yeah. Who wants to go first? I'll go first this time. Okay, that's different. Yeah. Yeah, I know. I usually leave it to the end because I don't know why.

So I'm going to go a little off book. It's not super space related. It's not a space related at all. But I've been obsessed with this new podcast. So it's called The Fall of Civilizations podcast. And they're a long form. They're like two to four hour long podcasts. And they just kind of go back into ancient human history and look at like the Sumerians or the Azte.

or the Romans in Britain and all these kinds of places and they explore a civilization and they kind of outline what happened to it and why it's not around anymore and it's just it's just awesome they have a Patreon I joined up on the Patreon and everything so what's that one called sounds really cool that sounds like when I want to enjoy too so what's that one called yeah it's called the Fall of Civilizations podcast so it's a guy named Paul Cooper and he he I think he does it full time and he just does he's really heavily researched he's got voice actors that come in he does these cool things um he he had an episode with uh about easter island um rappenui right and um he had locals from the island record some some cultural music of the time and they put that music on the recording like it's just

so cool some of the stuff that he does so i've been uh i i go hiking here in the in the on the weekends in the mountains in vancouver and i save the the episodes for hikes so i i go up to a parking lot i don't have cell phone reception i fire up one of these things and i walk around in the woods and it just really trips me out. It's fun. That's awesome. Richard, do you have any picks for us? You know, it's fascinating.

I am a huge fan of the moth, and maybe you guys already know that one well. But one of the things I love about the moth, and I didn't know, I hadn't even heard of the moth prior to being invited to participate in the moth. and my participation is actually what landed me my book deal because somebody who heard me speak at the moth was in the audience was an agent that said we gotta go write a book we gotta help you write a book and uh but i stayed a but i stayed a fan of it and the reason why is is that uh it taught me that really everyone has a great story literally and i mean literally everyone and i think it's really easy for people and maybe this is even biased by people who believe that they're in some way special or have accomplished something special in their own life. And I think everybody's sort of proud of whatever it is they do in some way in exclusion to others.

But when you participate in something like the Moth, and once you start listening to Moth, you realize everyone's life journey is not just unique, but frankly compelling. And if you really understand who they became and why and some of the twists and turns that kind of molded them that way, that it's a... It really makes you, I think, cherish humanity in a way that at least I hadn't previously. And I'm a big admirer of their methods. And what I mean by that is when I signed up, when they said, hey, you want to come on the moth and do a presentation? I was like, okay, whatever.

I do this all the time. I'm happy to do it. And I said, oh, okay, that's great. But by the way, you have to show up three days in advance. And for three days, you will rehearse with our producer and all the other presenters. and you will present with each other. It has to be exactly 10 minutes, not your usual hour that it takes you to tell one of your stories. And at 10 minutes, the microphone, we turned off.

So if you're not done, it's over. And I'm going like, what? What do I sign up for? Oh, my God, this sounds nightmarish. I use my slides as the way I stay on, you know, keep the flow going. And to do it extemporaneously and memorize or not even, they don't, it's not even memorized. To keep it feeling right, I was totally intimidated. But then after I went through the process, I realized, no, it's, you know,

they're professionals and with the other speakers. They really help you be so much better than you. It's the same story. It's just way better told. You understand the, you learn a lot about communications and how to do it well. So I just became a big fan of the whole process. I became a fan of every other speaker. And I listen to it all the time now just because I'm going, like,

There is not a subject they've covered, not a person I've heard speak, that I'm going like, well, I would like to know that person. You know, I'd like to sit down, have a chat, share a drink, and I'm confident, you know, that we would enjoy sharing stories. There's a, there's a word for that, actually, hey. It's called Saundre. Saundre. Yeah.

S-A-U-N-D-E-R? S-O-N-D-R. And it's just like the realization that every person you see has a, some story that says vivid and, you know, know, complexes, as you might imagine. It's that, and when you think about it times seven and a half billion people, you're like, wow, there's a lot going on. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

There is. Yeah, exactly. And that's my new favorite word, so I'm going to go store that. The fact that that was a word that was so short and not either Dutch or German, surprise me. Because usually it's like, it's a word that means this entire paragraph. That's probably Dutch or German. Yeah.

Anthony, what do you got? Oh, and that was the moth.org for anyone trying to find it. I'm fighting this fly right now. You're fighting a moth right now? A show or two ago, I said to everyone, buy a telescope, literally whatever fits in your budget, it's a great summer for, other than the weather in the northeast, great summer for astronomy. Just this past week, I was talking to a friend that I worked with who is going camping next month up at a state park in Pennsylvania called Cherry Springs State Park, which is the darkest zone in Pennsylvania.

beautiful views in the Milky Way, incredible night sky. And he was like, hey, should I buy a telescope? I said, have you ever seen the Milky Way before? And he said, no. I said, do not futs around with a telescope. Buy a nice set of binoculars. Astronomy binoculars, man. These, like, sometimes I forget how much I love,

just partaking and looking around the night sky with some binoculars. For some reason, I think, you know, not like doing all the setup and then looking through a tiny eye piece, just being able to have a pair of binoculars that gets both your eyes going, at the same time. It's so much more engaging. And I forgot, I have this pair of Celestron 7x50s,

which are pretty wide view. I use them a lot for finding targets that I'm going to pick out with the telescope or traveling because they're so small. I can just throw in my bag. These were $35. Like, I forgot how cheap these were. I was like, oh, this must be like $100 pair. $35 for this pair of

Celestron binoculars. And they are amazing, and I would highly recommend just grabbing some binoculars and look around. If you want to spend some cash, The Canon image-stabilized binoculars are incredible. My dad has a pair. They're probably $700 to $1,000. They're pretty expensive for the image stabilization,

but it's like you push this button and it blows your mind how it's stable. Really? I didn't know that such a thing existed. It's amazing. Image-stabilized binoculars. Yeah, the Canon ones are really nice. Can I thought of a thought and a question on that, too, between this two. By the way, I totally agree with everything you just said.

And what's interesting is I've had on my previous homes, I've had observatories, and I've have one planned in my next Texas house as well. And in the shed that you're currently sitting in now that we've talked about that. And now that we're talking about that, we're going to punch a hole here and get a, get one going. But what's interesting about technology now is it used to be that as an amateur, you're still, everybody's fighting to get as big an aperture as they can to gather as much light as they can, you know, to be able to see stuff. But it turns out that I don't care how big an aperture you get.

If you're looking just optically with your eye, the faint nebulas up there are still going to be pretty darn faint. But the great news is that even a low-quality webcam, when you drop that in an eyepiece, which their webcam eyepiece is now for everything. And for free or 50 bucks, you can get a piece of software to stack those images. you can get phenomenally good space photography that is way better than you can see by eye with that little telescope that's behind you. That would be,

that little scope behind you would get better images by far than the instrument I had in my last home, which was a computer-controlled tracking device but did not have an eyepiece, a camera eyepie-stick stack images. And so that simple technology has made it way better. Precisely why,

So he's talking about this tiny four-inch. It's a maxutav little thing here because I've got an eight-inch dobsonian that I keep out at my parents' house in Jersey to get away from some of the light pollution. But I'm about to have a kid. Oh, I should mention that as well. I mentioned on the other show. I'm about to have my first child, so people on off-nominal. You might miss a month from me coming up.

We haven't determined what we're going to do with this particular show yet. Jake's got the keys. But knowing that I'm not going to be able to drive out randomly whenever I wanted to have something here. But it's also, I've got this great, I guess I'm doing like pick time over here, Jake. This is way more picks than usual. I've got this, this mount is a Skywatcher, AZGTI. It is so tiny, and it does tracking. And it can hold like 11 pounds on the dovetail mount. So this, this is small enough to do that. Refractors are as well, but it does tracking and all that. So I can attach the camera that I'm using right here and do some astrophotography off my back deck, even in light pollution

zone, and like Richard's saying, get pretty incredible stuff. Cool. Here's another bonus game. And I presume even if that, I couldn't tell if that mount will take out the rotation. Oh, yeah. But even if it doesn't, the software would. So, yeah, that'll take out the rotation too. You can unlock this and do it all by hand, and it will still maintain the tracking that you

have set up. But it will, there's an iOS and Android app that you can, you know, connect via Wi-Fi, align it correctly on something that's bright and visible and then it can track. Then it takes care of it from there. Yeah, it's amazing. Phenomenal. It's great. Technology is so cool.

How's those picks, Jake? You like those picks? I like those picks, man. Wow, cool. Okay. I'm just getting them all in here. Yeah. Richard, this has been an absolute blast hanging out.

I feel like you are king of the people that Jake and I try to be both in the realm of development and space nerds. your peak of both. So it's just been awesome to hang out for a while. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, thanks, thanks, thanks. Please let everyone know where they can find you if they somehow have not come across you on the internet,

where should we point them to? Well, I would say I'm most active, although I have an account on most social media, but the one of them really active on is Twitter. So I'm at Richard Geriot on Twitter. Beware, we're in election cycle right now, so in addition to games and space, I'm a little obsessed, read a lot,

with politics. And my wife is actually a major fundraiser for the opposition candidate at the moment. And so be aware that you'll see me flying that flag a lot right now. But normally, but after the election, it'll settle back down into my other main interests, which is space and games. So you'll get everything. Which actually just brings up the interesting issue, which is one of the, in fact, in the book, which we've referenced to the Explore Create that I read a few years ago,

one of my beliefs is that if you're going to do anything, if you're going to do podcasts, whatever it is you're going to do is your vocation or abocation, if all you do is research your immediate competitors, your immediate predecessors, all you'll do is iterate on yourself or what they're doing, that the only way to do things that are really original and really compelling and hopefully lasting and important is if you cast a net for understanding and inspiration that is as wide as possible, as broad as possible. And so I feel that my games include a lot of science, include a lot of astronomy, include a lot of politics, include a lot of social commentary. And I periodically have people

coming on Twitter going like, hey, get off the politics. You know, why don't you go back to making games? And I'm going like, my games are all politics and all social commentary. So it's sort of already there. That's what I do. And so, anyway, so if you're interested, come see me on Twitter. Drop me an email. If you go to my Richard Garriott website, I think this is richardgariat.com. There's a contact message there to, I'm responsive pretty much to everybody that writes in.

So I'd love to chat. Cool. Jake, what have you been up to? I'm super busy. You've not had a lot going on, right? Oh my God. Yeah. So Richard, my main podcast, this is our fun kind of side gig, but our main, my main podcast is about Mars exploration. And it's a, it's a busy couple of weeks for Mars, like you've got to say. Yes, it is. United Arab Emirates have launched. Chinese have launched. So we're

two for three, perseverance, the main event coming up. So we will have a live stream event that I'm doing with that. I have, all these details aren't quite out yet. So you're getting a sneak preview here YouTube but my good friend Tanya Harrison who is a professional Martian planetary scientist she'll be co-hosting with me on a live stream as we watch Perseverance launch we have some cool guests showing up to talk about different parts of the mission it's gonna be really exciting so I'm pretty busy doing that so I'll keep eye on our our Twitter for that and it's gonna be really fun I'm excited and then you'll sleep after that it'll take a little bit and then I'll finally sleep

yeah Mars is such an exciting place right now you know it's it's so hard to get to you know, not of the launch is really cool, but the landings are even cooler to watch and keep, you know, bite your fingernails for. But, but I think Mars is clearly the most important space target in our next decade of activity. So, uh, yeah, let's get there. Let's get there. Let's get there, let's get there as fast as we can. Let's do it. Anthony, what about you? Oh, I've had some good interviews this week on main engine cutoff. You've been busy. Yeah, we did a lot this week. So Caleb Henry, who's a writer at Space News, came on to talk about, there's like a lot of satellite drama right now. The FCC is fighting with like everybody, so there's a ton to dive into.

And then I talked to two members of Astrobotic, who are one of the first three companies that are sending landers to the moon next year. We're a year away from their first mission right now. Yikes. So they might go see Richards Rover. I don't know exactly, but I mean, they're not. We've talked about it. We've talked about it. We've talked about it. So that was fun. We talked a lot about, you know, the way that they're, they've got two different landers because they're the ones flying the big Viper rover that's going to the South Pole in a couple years. So we talked a lot about like small landers, big landers, payload management, a lot of nerdy stuff.

So it's been, this is a good time for space, which is exactly why I'm having a kid right now so I can take a month off and ignore it. You know, Astrobotic is also working with DHL to deliver little packages to the room. I was looking at that. Jake, I'm thinking we should send some stuff on this rover. It's a couple $100. Is it? Yeah. I actually worked with, I actually worked with them on a, an advertisement, a marketing campaign

because I, for Astrobotic for the Moon, but I had also worked with DHS to actually deliver a package to the ISS. That was one of the commercial activities I did to the ISS, was I actually delivered a DHL package from Earth to the ISS and then take a different package from the ISS back down to Earth. So in any case, yes, so I'm a fan of DHS. and astrobotic, because I agree, it's hard to get personal things up there. And by the way, if you two want to become one of the private, the only private owners of an

object on the moon, now you can't. Get in there. Start claiming territory. Come on. Jake, we got to put something on this lander. Everybody send us your ideas for what, it's like they're very small. They're a couple inches that you can send up, but we should definitely do it. Think of coins.

Think of things the size of coins and postage is standard. Maybe we should make like an off nominal challenge coin or something. Oh. Yeah. See, that would work. All right. We're going to do that. All right, we can talk.

We're going to talk. Thank you so much, Richard, for hanging out with us. Of course, my pleasure. I'd love to come back anytime, so thank you. 1, 2, 3, 4,000, 1,000, end of death.