Off-Nominal - 41 - Roscosmos Shoulda Bought Bitcoin

Episode Date: June 1, 2021

This month, Anthony and Jake are taking it bit easier. It’s summer, everyone is excited about getting back in to the world again, and space news will be winding down a bit.It’s just the two of us, and we go through a potpourri of topics from random space stories that have caught our attention, some stray conspiracy theory talk, then talk shop about our plans for the show, our work, our lives, and more.DrinksBourbon Blood Orange - Bridge Brewing Company - UntappdPodere Casa Rossa Vernaccia | Total Wine & MoreTopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 41 - Roscosmos Shoulda Bought Bitcoin - YouTubeChina acknowledges Long March 5B situation as rocket heads for weekend reentry - SpaceNewsLong March 5B falls into Indian Ocean after world follows rocket reentry - SpaceNewsAdversary Drones Are Spying On The U.S. And The Pentagon Acts Like They're UFOsStarship Orbital- First Flight FCC ExhibitRussian actress, Japanese entrepreneur cleared for space station visits – Spaceflight NowMain Engine Cut Off on Twitter: “It’s Space Shirt Friday in the @offnom Discord and Will is pulling for @RocketLab this week”PicksBossart: America's Forgotten Rocket Scientist, by Don MitchellAtlas: The Ultimate Weapon by Those Who Built It (Apogee Books Space Series), by Chuck WalkerDan CarlinHardcore History AddendumTaming Liquid Hydrogen: The Centaur Upper Stage Rocket 1958-2002Thomas Pesquet (@Thom_astro) / TwitterThomas Pesquet | FlickrMusic! | Life continues onboard the International Space Stat… | FlickrThomas Pesquet on Twitter: “@Astro_illini My own excuse to flex is the inverted “2” for “Crew2” ✌, but yours is not bad either 💪😉”Follow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterOff-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS is go for main engine, start. Jake, this podcast is a chronicle of our friendship, if nothing else. Oh, that definitely is true, yes, yes. But there's one thing that you don't know about me. Well, there's probably several, but one of them is, today is my favorite day of the year. Like, across the board. Like this date, May 28th?

No. Friday of Memorial Day weekend is like a holiday where I'm from, you know? Yeah. You get like several hours. If it wasn't absolutely shit weather out and this whole weekend, several hours ago, I would have been in a car on the way to the shore. That's just what you do. You grow up in South Jersey.

Like, you're going to the shore Friday Memorial Day weekend. It's the summer, like basically a holiday, you know? Yeah. School sucks that day. You're just mad about it that you even had to go. So excellent day to have an off nominal episode. I'm really glad that this worked out because it's like. I like that like, so this holiday, because Canada had it last.

week. We have our Victoria Day. So this past one way. You always do stuff early, like just a little bit early. One week early, yeah. But it's, it's everywhere you go, though, this weekend has like a particular like tradition to it. And every region has like a different tradition. Like I grew up in Alberta and it was always like, we called it May long, May long weekend, May long for short. And you like go camping. May long. That's like, yeah. So what are you doing for May long? Oh, we're going up to Bamp to camp. Like that's just what you did. And then I moved. I moved. to Ontario and it's not called May long there. It's called May 2-4 because of the beer. And you go out to

you go out to your cottage, not a cabin, it's a cottage in Ontario and you go out there by the lake and you drink beer. So now I learned that you have the shore. That's yours. Yeah, this is the start of summer, like culturally, if not actually. Yeah, totally. But we're definitely, we're heading into, as you and I were discussing, the low attention summer, you know, like, everybody is going to be checked out of everything for the next summer. Yeah, nothing's going to happen this summer. So if you did not get something out of somebody that you needed, like check back after Labor Day. I don't know, I assume you do that like early July, just a couple of weeks early. Yeah, yeah. Actually, you guys start school before us in the fall, so that's, that's role reversal there usually. Some of us. Yeah. Some of us too. What are you drinking? You got drinks? This is an early one.

We're doing a matinee here. Yeah, matinee. We're helping out our European friends, which you'd like to do from time to time. And also, we just thought that most people would probably be doing what you just said is packing up the car and heading out to the shore. So I thought I'd get it done earlier.

I got a weird one today. I don't know if it's going to be any good, but it's bourbon, blood, orange, wheat ale. So I don't even know what this is going to taste like. That's like a lot of flavors that I don't really know how to synthesize in my head.

We're going to see what's like Bridge Brewing, which is in North Vancouver, which is pretty cool. And you know, this may be, this may be the last Vancouver beer I drink on this show. We don't know. Oh. Yeah.

We got some news to talk about, I guess. We do have a little bit of news, yeah, because this is definitely going to be the last time that you viewers, an off-nominal will see this room. Because I'm moving. I'm leaving Vancouver. It's over.

Getting out of here. That's the story. That's the news. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A bottle of wine today, Jake. Focus. Focusing. I've got a little vernacia de San Jiminyano here.

A great little white wine for the summertime. Very refreshing. So I'm doing it different today, Jake. Usually you expect a beer, but look, it's summer. It's always a special off-nominal when you don't have a yards brewery. I was close to having a victory summer love, but I did not. Where do we want to start? We've got a list of topics that range in spaciness, I would say.

Okay. Do you want to start in space or non-space? I think we should start in space. Yeah, let's stay on brand for what to show is. Okay. So Long March 5B, do we want to talk about that? Yeah, this is a fun one. If you have not been up on the news, there was a Long March 5B launch.

They don't deorbit the core stage, which they like to refer to it. Actually, I believe that the, I forget which agency in China is in charge of the Long March 5B, but whoever it is, I believe listens to your podcast. Because you often describe SLS that the core stage is actually an upper stage that is groundlit. and whoever, whatever agency of China was saying that the core stage of the Long March 5B was actually an upper stage because it gets into orbit. Yeah. So I don't want to blame you, but how do you feel about that being used, your famous line being used that way?

Well, I'm delighted that my market penetration behind the Great Firewall is improving, so I will take that as a win. But yeah, no, it's weird. So it's funny because this is one of those space stories that reached. outside of this the spacesphere, you know, like where this is one where you're like, your mom is texting you. Like, do I have to worry about a rocket falling on my house? And I'm like, no, mom, you're at 49 degrees. Don't worry about it. But you read the legitimate excuse to say. Yeah. You're never going to be able to actually like have that explanation. There's no way to explain it to a non-space person. Like no, there's like either you lie to them or either they're safe

and they don't understand why they're safe or they're like probably safe, but they don't understand and how to process that probability. And they have no way to synthesize like why that is true. So you're just like, just don't worry about it. Like just, yeah.

Both times this Long March 5B and the previous one, the ground track was over Philly several times within the window on both of them. So I was, I didn't have that luxury to say, no, mom, it's not. I do, I am a little,

my feathers are a little ruffled about this story, mostly because like there's no coverage other than Andrew Jones's Twitter feed when boosters are dropping on anyone in China but the like mere chance that a COPV is going to land in your backyard

is like Lester Holtz talking about it in the nightly news here you know so I'm a little annoyed I would say yeah yeah yeah that's how it goes I guess yeah

proximity bias. There's not much more to say about that. It's a thing that bums me up. I do think, though, we can come up with some strategies for handling space debris generally. Okay. I'm trying to figure out if we want to get too deep into this topic. But I was trying to figure out, like, the issue that everyone always says is, like,

who's in charge of it, right? Because wherever you launch from, they're technically in charge of it. And there's no real enforcement of leaving. debris up, right? A good example, SpaceX's Starlink rods that I had railed against for a long time of like what's going on with these deployment rods that you will not show us. Recently, some of them are deorbiting faster, but there's like at least eight that are going to be up there for a long time. And I'm, I was kind of annoyed about that. Even some of the new ones, right? Like they started like deploying them lower and then all of a sudden they went back up. There was one with the ride shared launch that they deployed a lot higher than that.

So there's just these four giant rods that are like a bow. above the ISS still and that bugs me, you know? I don't know. Mr. Holtz not talking about that, is he? No, he's not talking about the Starlink Cross. But I'm trying to figure out a policy where like, do you, because the issue is who's in charge of it and who pays for debris removal. So I'm trying to figure out if you can set up a system where, and this might have to be

country by country, where like you are fined or penalized if you leave debris of a certain size in orbit. And they use the fines to cover the cost of missions to go and clear debris objects. Isn't that part of the Artemis Accords? Isn't there a space debris thing in that? Oh, I don't know. I have to look that up. I wonder if that's sort of the idea.

It would be like a framework that everyone kind of signs onto and then. We need some way to get a bunch of money to like. Yeah, yeah. Envasat is the big one, right? That's the huge dead ESA satellite that's like enormous. and has always been dead. Oh, I don't know that one. That's the one that essentially they're working up to that with the debris removal

projects that are going on. That's public enemy number one in orbit there. But it takes a while to get there. So they're like, let's start with these smaller ones. But I don't know. I think you and I could be, we could run this like intergovernmental organization to handle space debris. Oh, okay.

Because it's instantly then an international cooperation. An international collaboration. Yeah. You got a quarter of the G8, I think, in there. Yeah, we can see, like, we at least got a good start. Okay, yeah, yeah. We can get Matt from Interplanetary. 20% of the Artemis group is in there.

J.B. would probably be in. Yeah, friend of the show, J.B. A friend of the show. Here we go. We get it all right down. So it's similar topic about the, like, your mom being worried. that it was going to land on her. Was that an actual text?

Was she actually worried? No, my mom was. Actually, my wife was, though. And it was funny because she was just like, okay, well, so it's going to come down somewhere. Do you know where? I'm like, no. You're like, well, how much warning are you going to get? I'm like, you'll see it before you get warning.

Like, you'll see it coming. Too late. And she's going to like, that's normal? That's okay. I'm like, it's not okay. Is normal, not okay? Long story. Oh, man.

I'm trying to draw a line between Long March 5B and all of the UFO stories of late. And just like low effort journalism because people have a very quick reaction to these stories. Like China Rocket is going to fall in your house. Oh, got to click that. And then the UFO stuff. I was looking for a reason to be mad at China, but this is actually really convenient. Man. I got a lot of angles to take on that one.

you know Chinese rocket leaks out of the lab something like that UFO stories though are sort of the inverse where it's like there is no back half of the story

because it's like I don't know thermal imaging what do you think you know and then it's just kind of an empty story whereas at least the 5B has some legitimate follow-up that you can actually walk people through because there's explanation

nations of the UFO stories out there if you really want them, like and be like, well, even Roswell. Like, we know what that was, and yet it maintains this supremacy in the, in history of, like, the Roswell UFO incident. So I'm just trying to, I guess I'm trying to psychoanalyze the public and when it comes to, like, space communication on these stories. You haven't been following the UFO stuff. No, I haven't.

And this is actually, this is an interesting point because I, there is a podcast I listened to God, I'm trying to remember now what one it was. Oh, I think it was actually a 538 podcast. And they had on these people that were talking about conspiracy theories. This is all related to the election fraud stuff that was going on. So they had these like academics who like studied conspiracy theories and how they spread and stuff. And some of them are like very pervasive. Like the idea of like, you know, a deep state or something is like a pretty universal conspiracy theory that can be applied and kind of no matter where you go.

Some of them, like UFOs, is actually a very regional thing. And it's basically the United States and Brazil. It's like the two places or maybe it was Argentina. It was some country in South America. It was like the two places where everyone is like UFOs. And everywhere else is it's like, what are you talking about? They're not real. And they just move on.

Like there's no foothold for it at all. So thinking about that because you kept saying, we should do this UFO. I'm like, I have not been opinion. You have no opinion. Yeah, it's like irrelevant to your life. I'm like, well, yeah. People have been, like, captured by the story for weeks down here. And I really don't understand, like, what is...

I mean, I get why people are interested in it, but, like, I feel like these... When you get really into these stories and you see people that are, like, legitimately convinced of, like, these encounters or whatever, they have, like, detached from the everyday reality of the technology that surrounds them. Yeah. You know? it's crazy to me I don't know I just was kind of marveling at these

similarities in these storylines and yet here we are we always have these stories in our life we do yeah they're consistent and persistent the UFO thing early UFO stuff right 60s Cold War era stuff

I forget where I heard this but apparently the agencies in the US that would really like the UFO story to have proliferated were putting people into these communities to be like the UFO guy and like say

oh my God I saw some crazy stuff flying around so they were literally planting people into these certain communities to generate this hype because it was a useful cover story and I'm just like very similar to we're just now off into conspiracy theory tangent I guess the first book ever published with JFK assassination conspiracies

was funded by a KGB project. They funded the book publisher that published that book. Yikes. Because they were worried that people would think it was the Soviets that were responsible. Because it's just this crazy thing where like...

It's propaganda. It literally was. It was a book publisher funded by the KGB because they were worried about it being pinned on them. So they started this whole thing and then we ran with it. If there was one thing we're good at in this country, it is running with it.

You know? We will keep the Roswell thing alive. I saw some people in the chat wondering about Roswell. It was, I forget the name of the project, but it was high altitude balloons that were monitoring

for nuclear testing done by the Soviet Union. And then that is what crashed. And they like said it days later after the Roswell incident. And everyone was like, okay, cool. And then 30 years later, it was like, what if it was an alien?

And 30 years later, you have the X-Files. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's crazy. Huh. Okay. Anyway, so that's what's been going on down here, south of 49 degrees north. What else he got?

I got this list here of topics. And one of them that I want to pin you down on is your ridiculous theories of Starships' orbital test flight. Oh, man. Now, this is your conspiracy theory. Yeah. Some of it I'm not convinced isn't wrong. yet so like we're gonna see we're gonna see but yeah I know so we got like some details on the the first orbital starship flight right what they want to do with it and so it's like it

launches from Boca Chica and then the booster comes back and then goes all the way around and it lands in the water starship lands in the water off of coast of Hawaii so just north of Kauai but like that that's not a full way around the earth right because you don't get all the way back to Texas. And so I was kind of wondering like, you know, is this, is this an orbital flight? And at first I got, I got distracted because I was doing the math in my head and I'm like, I don't know how you get up to the latitude of Kauai when you're that far around the world. So like I started wondering what direction it was launching or if there was like a dog leg maneuver or something. But sort of that out, it's fine. It's, it's the right direction. But I still am wondering though, if it's actually like a

a suborbital flight because you could, it's a 90 minute flight, but it doesn't make it a full orbit. And so like something's wonky there with the timing. And so I'm kind of like wondering if it's like a really high apogee suborbital flight so they can like get up and get some good velocity coming in to test the heat shield and also stretch that time out so that it fits within that window. That's my like conspiracy theory. I could be totally wrong. What else? They say it would be like 1500, 2,000 kilometers maybe. Okay, so you've did this. That's high. That's really high. Yeah, yeah. And so that's the thing, right? Because if you, and the benefit of that is if your reentry burn fails or something, you still come down at the right spot, right? It's a ballistic trajectory, so you don't have to worry about that. Because the worst thing would be if it failed and then we had another long March 5B, but it was a starship. All right. You're convincing me a little on that point. I'm still like, why would they not just go into orbit?

and then de-orbit. I'm totally ready to be wrong. Okay. But my theory on that, though, is why I do that is because then you don't have to install the vacuum raptors. You can cut all that out of your development path, right? But they need to get, well, okay. I guess I see your point.

I'm less mad at you than I thought I was about this theory. I'm realizing that you have more reasoning behind it, but it just still sounds totally wrong. It could be. I say totally ready to be wrong, but if they really want to put the paddled on the metal and get this thing flying sooner rather than later. From a Silicon Valley minimum viable product approach, cut out all the vacuum plumbing. You fly it basically as it is plus heat shields,

the heat tiles, and then you're good to go. Put it in a suborbital trajectory and that comes down, right? And then you just do everything the same. So it's a quicker path to that first flight rather than going through all that plumbing and getting the new RVACs out there and doing all that. Man, I'm way less.

This is a worse segment than I thought it was going to be Because I'm much less, after talking with you now, I'm less mad at your reasoning. And at least, at least 50, if not 80% of your reasoning, sounds like SpaceX reasoning. Yeah. Well, this, this, that, and this, we don't need to worry about it. That cut that, you know, the scene from the Martian where they're just stripping, throwing seats out of the, of the, of the, uh, assent vehicle. Like, that model, I'm now less mad about it. And it sounds less crazy.

I think I was alarmed at how high that is. I don't know why. It's like a fear of heights latent in me Because it's not like 300 a thousand not that It's a big difference but it's like on the grand scheme of things It's not that big of a difference Yeah probably not I don't know I don't know what the entry velocity of that would be if you you know versus coming in from 400 kilometers I have done that much math on it but eventually they want to test it from lunar reentry right and so

And then you think about like EFT1 right that went to 3600 kilometers To so that they could test that higher entry, higher entry velocity? Yeah. Okay. There's more reasoning in this than my initial listen to your podcast and then get mad in the car kind of thing. I was doing.

All right. Well, moving on. We're doing a lightning round, basically, because we've just got a lot of things going on. The Russians are out of things to do on the ISS, so they've decided to turn it into a theme park for the remainder of the year. How do you feel about that? Yeah, so I, well, you know, I think the Russian space program is in way worse shape than anyone talks about.

So I totally get it. I was totally happy to roast them, though, on Twitter because they have these, what is it? It's an actress and a director coming up soon for one of their flights or whatever. So this woman will be the second Russian, that, second Russian woman that they send to the space station ever. Like literally ever. Let it sink in. 20 years of occupation on the International Space Station. Russia has been a partner since day one.

It took them until 2014 before they sent their first woman Cosmonaut up, and she was the last one. So that was a, that was, took some people by surprise, I think, on Twitter. They're going to double the amount of women they send up there. And it was like, wait, are you? A plus tweet, a plus tweet where it's really snarky and then very insightful. And then, you know, it's the full cycle there. It is crazy and it makes all the... Yeah, and it's...

It reinforces the fact that in the original space race, it was like, what can we do first next? Yeah. A woman. Yeah. You know, because they're clearly not committed to it overall. Yeah, because once they got the first woman in space out of the way and the first woman in spacewalk, because they won both of those races,

once they got that done, it was like, see you later. Like, never again. What was going on in 2014? They were like, oh, we... I guess somebody maybe brought up, we've never flown a Russian woman. Probably, yeah. Crap. Token, right?

So sucky. Yeah. Should be fun to talk to if we can, you know anyone we can reach out to? If anyone knows anyone related to any cosmonauts, just hit us up. I know you're not busy. All right. So that's the other thing. Then we've got, we've got Deer Moon himself going up on the flight after that.

So this is weird to me and people I don't know they're like it's not weird like he's rich and he wants to go to space so he's just going to go to space I'm like I don't know man like it's like I guess if you're if you're if you've got like your lunar tourism or your your space tourism checklist and you're like I got to get all this done before I die I assess is on that list so I don't know I feel I mean it's definitely not weird insurance it's definitely not weird it is so not weird it's like when you are planning really long vacations. Like, you know, you want to go to the other side of Earth from wherever you live. You tend to plan those very far in advance because, you know, I'm going to take like a month off so I can fly there and do stuff on that side of Earth while I'm there. And then, you know, and you plan years in advance. But you're going to go on vacation before then. You're going to take a week here or there and do something smaller scale. You know, I'll fly to Europe instead of Australia or something. It's definitely not weird. Because when you think about the scale, we don't, granted, we don't know what Deer Moon's

budget was. But these flights to ISS are tens of million. Yeah. Because tourist flights were much less expensive than the NASA flights. Maybe this is a good lesson in we don't know how billionaire brains work. Yeah. Or the scale, the magnitude of numbers is like just not connecting with us. Just bought a half a billion dollar boat and I don't really know how to process that.

So like maybe I should take that as a hint that like I don't really I can't follow down this line of reasoning. You've never bought a boat with several other boats on it. Yeah, my boats don't have support boats. Yeah, it's so not weird. What I do,

I am interested in to see what, it sounded like he's taking somebody with him to help make videos on the station. And I want to know what kind of outreach he will be doing. Because I think that would be a good leading indicator on how weird dear moon will be.

And I think we've talked about that last episode, we talked about how weird dear moon could be. And I want to know what kind of stuff he's going to get into on the ISS. I have a low-key fear that the dear moon passengers, once they're finally selected, is this going to turn out to be like he picked the hottest girls because he couldn't do his contest or whatever? That's true. Yeah. Yeah.

My fear is higher than yours on that, I think. You have a medium key fear on that? Okay. But what's going on, man? I'm trying to determine here that there's levels of. of what's going on with selling all these seats to the ISS from Ross Cosmos perspective. One is, legitimately, we don't have a lot of work for Cosmonauts to do because all of our new modules are delayed. The other is, we're mad at NASA for not buying seats from us, so we're just

going to sell seats to everyone, which could easily turn into that half of the ISS being crazy and being a party over there and NASA trying to get work done on the other side, which is a weird thing because now we've got so many astronauts going into the U.S. side. We've got like many magnitudes more astronauts per year going up. And the Russians are like, we'll sell all of our seats. I don't know. And then the two cosmonauts that are flying on these missions were up there like three years ago. Yeah.

So they're clearly flying people that know the way around. I think they're a little broke, I think is the big thing. Yeah. They're just like they're not bringing on new astronauts. They're, and I think, I don't know, it really feels like, the the Russian space program, especially the ISS, it's just running on momentum. Like they're just doing it like sunk cost. Like we can't stop the ISS, obviously.

And then that's so that that's just like the results of it. It's like that's how much desire there is to participate. And so you're seeing that reflected in the, yeah, the operations on ISS because we've all heard those stories that the American astronauts are busting their butts like getting work done. And like Russians have two hour work days or whatever it is. Right. You know,

sounds great. Like if I had to pick a side to fly to, man, don't hang out, you know. But then yeah. And then there's all this whole still this like cold war mentality, this competition where it's just like if the U.S. is doing something, Russia has to also be as good at it. And so we're sending our own tourists up there. We're picking up our flight rate as well. And we're doing a movie in space as well.

And we're sending cool billionaires to space as well. Like, they're just, you know, it's like little brother syndrome. So it's, I don't know. That's my Russian space team. We're going to have a tough time picking titles on this episode. Yeah, so we got Chris G in the chat here. I see difference of that versus SpaceX selling seats. It's the in addition to thing.

It's the like, there's tons of NASA, ESA, Jaxa, Canadian astronauts going to station on their schedule that they already decided. And then every once in a while, it's like, well, we got a port open. You want to come up for a week? And then you're hanging out, which is going to be a weird thing. Because it's going to be, we saw how busy the ISS was recently. So it's going to be crazy up there. But it's the, it's like the complete replacement of regular rotation missions.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because they're not wrapping up their like cosmonauts on board. Right, they're not flying the amount of cosmonauts they usually would and then adding a couple. I guess technically they are because they're doing like longer stays and they said they only want to have two on at a time. Yeah, I think they're just mad that we're not buying seats. I'm sure it's a little bit of it, right? And that's this all this, this, uh, flirting with China too is like, it's like a little bit like posturing, a little bit threat, a little bit like, a little bit of everything. Like they got the cash and we need it.

Yeah, yeah. You better like us. You better pay attention to us or we're going to go play with the bad guys, right? I kind of feel like Ross Cosmo should have just bought a lot of Bitcoin a couple years ago. It seemed like that would have been a better strategy. Smart. Now you know our exit strategy. Do we have other?

I don't know. I'm making our way down our list here. And one of these, I don't know if it's spacey or not, but you have, you had a dream that you would like to tell us about. I did have a dream. So, okay, it is a space dream. but it's I don't like consider myself like an anxious person

but I do have like panicky dreams every once in a while and this is like kind of one of those panicky what kind of panicky like you didn't do your homework panicky just like I have to make decisions or do work

and I don't know the next step which is like my biggest stress we talk about that a lot where I'm just like I don't know what to do I don't know what to do and so like I had one of these dreams but okay so SLS right fast forward a few months it is stacked we got the thing up on the boosters

Orion's on top ready to go they're rolling it out to the pad and it's like a big deal right and you know it's going to be a big deal this is going to be like when this happens Brendan Byrne's going to be down there reporting live for WNRP standing on the crawler with a lot of wind noise in that in the parking lot where they can just see the crawl away right and they're going to it's going to be watching it and the things rolling at And you and I are like watching it. I don't know if we're, I think we didn't go. We were like remote watching this thing on on NASA TV or something.

And so you know how the launch, the mobile launch tower had that lean to it? That story came out. There's like a little lean. So it's fine. Like it's just like a little slight lean. It's within margins. Everything's fine. But in my dream, this like little bit of margin had some sort of weird like cascading failure.

So like it leans a little bit of. little bit, which is fine, but it like put a little pressure on the rocket, which put a little more pressure on one of the bolts on the boosters, which is like put a little more pressure on the structure underneath it. And then this like big gust of wind comes and the whole thing just falls over in my dream. And it's empty, right? Like at this point, it's not got fuel in it. So it just falls over and like collapses on the crawlway in a big like anti-climatic like, you know, like, because it just crumples under its own weight, basically. And the panicky dream part of it is that you and I are watching this.

And I'm just like, what do we do? Like what does this mean? Right? Because you just watch like 20 years essentially of development just come to a complete like, you know, and we're like trying to go through all the events. I'm like, okay, well, I guess I guess Artemis 1 is off for one. That's going to be happening. And then we're like working away back and then we're talking about like the congrats.

like the congressional hearings and Bill Nelson being hauled up in front of Congress and then like Boeing just getting lit up about stuff and then north of grumming and like there was so much like blowback from this whole thing and and then yeah it's like did anyone get hurt like there's guys that walk by that thing when they're rolling it out there and there was just so there's too much it was like too much space news out once like I just couldn't process it in my dream and that was it how long was this dream this sounds like it went on forever No, it was really quick. We just like wake up and you're like, oh, man, I hope that doesn't happen.

So that was my crazy. Do you remember a lot of the visuals of the dream? Like, was it cinematic? Or were we sitting in this kind of stream position? I think it was, yeah, it was like just, we were just here. Because the way you were picturing the SLS butterfly effect of like this bolt blue, like, I pictured you getting like a close up camera angle, like it would be in a movie where like you see one wing thing go and then like a bolt fly no this is this is like this is like after

the fact we learned this okay the actual event would have been just completely stupid we're just like watching it it would have been so boring to watch and then it was just like plop it just fell over and we're like wait what just happened oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god you you need to take some time off this is it i really do i really do this is the moment when you realize like you got to stop thinking about this for a couple minutes. Do you want to hear another funny SLS story? Yeah, sure. Okay, so I sometimes make the joke that a lot of people are very, a lot of people have opinions about SLS, right? Oh. And I don't know if you know this, but I always kind of make the joke that I'm less bothered by it because I'm not footing the bill. I'm not an American taxpayer, so it's not on my bill.

And so it's just really just like a thing that happens or it doesn't and it doesn't really affect me. but that's turns out that is no longer true. So about whatever, maybe six, eight weeks ago, we had the press conference for the Green Run, if you remember that. And I,

I sent the email to NASA and got the press credentials. They sent the, you know, they send you the phone number and the password I dialed in. I was not paying attention. And it turns out the phone number was not a 1,800 number. It was a, I don't know,

like a D.C. number or Alabama number or something. And I just called it and sat on the press. conference for an hour and a half. And I got my phone bill a couple weeks ago. And I had like a $50 long distance out from this stupid press conference. And you were like, what did I do? Did you immediately know what it was? Or did it take some digging to realize that it was a SLO? I was like my phone bill never changes. It's like literally like it's like 50 dollars and 40 cents every month. Ding, thing, thing, like clockwork. And then it was like, hmm, $90. I'm like, wait a minute. This is not looking into it. I'm like, who did I call in?

this random times or area code for 90 minutes. Like what is what was this call? And I was like, oh my God. That is incredible. Yeah. So and then I went, I was curious and I went and looked up like the development costs of SLS and

divided it by all the Americans. And it's about on par. So we're, we're about the same now. You and I have both contributed the same amount. We contributed as much. Mine went to AT&T or something, but we both spent it all.

That is amazing. Yeah, well, eventually they pay taxes. So, yeah. It gets there eventually. That's amazing. I would have loved if you called them and, like, fought that you never made this call and then halfway through realized, like, oh, my gosh.

You had a good question, though, in that. So it didn't lead to a good answer, but you did have a good question. No, it never does. I've tried. I've gone on, like, four SLS press conferences and tried to get, like, John Huntercutt to say something that wasn't, like, you know, from the canned press release and failed. Yeah, everyone thought you were moving to the U.S.

No, no, no. reference moving and then that you were going to pay for SLS. Jake loves SLS so much and is worried about the karma that he has inflicted on it with his dream, that he has moved to the U.S. I want to expect contributing to this. No, no. No, I'm not moving to the U.S. I'm going somewhere more fun than that.

Ominous. Yeah. Yeah, do you want to talk about life stuff? You've been, you're coming down off the Mars main. And I'm curious how you're dealing with that. Man, I'm tired. I, it took a couple of weeks for it to like wear out. And I hope we had like, whatever, you do all the landings in like February.

And then it was like, okay, fine. And then March was just like getting everything online. And then ingenuity started in April and doing all that. And then finally as you wrong landed. And so like it's like finally kind of over like most of the big marsys. Most of the. Yeah. So starting back from like July of last year to now.

has been like crazy. Three missions, it's too much for me to cover in one launch cycle. So, yeah, two is the max, listen to space agencies listening. Two is the max I will allow for all future launch cycles. You're going to have to hire some staff for future launch windows. I'm going to have to, yeah. I need to grow a little more. But, yeah, I know I have been taking time off.

I have not been going pedal to the metal 50 hours a week like I did before for the last couple weeks because I needed it. There was days and I was like sitting in front of my computer, with stuff to do and I'm like it's not happening it's not happening like I got to and do something else because it's not it's not working so it's been a little bit of burnout so yeah I know you've maybe been feeling some of that too lately yeah I think we were talking about that as like general like trend I know there's some other spacey folks out there who have like I I work too hard I need some time off for a minute so it felt like there was a wave that I can't it's hard

to separate like you know pandemic burnout and that everyone's feeling now and then you know, space news generally has been nutty. So if you're trying to cover stuff, it's been crazy. Yeah, and I don't know. There was one week when I was like, hmm, I don't think I can do headlines this week, so I'm just going to bail on that. And everyone is super cool about it.

That's the great part, is everyone's like, oh, we get it. We're totally cool. Yeah, yeah, they're great. We do this stuff, so we kind of feel like, eh, like, you know, we're not on the nightly news,

but then sometimes you do feel like, but I do a show. like I need to do it every I need to be super regular. Yeah, yeah. It's always cool when people are like, no, go away. And I'm expecting that when everyone hears about your SLS stream for you to get a wave of those. That was horrible.

Yeah. Well, I will take some time off. So it'll be, it'll be good. But yeah, I know, it's definitely been. And I think there's, I think people like you and I are are in a unique position. I mean, we're not the only ones, but people who have been covering space for like at least four or five years. the quantity of space news has ramped up pretty significantly, especially in like the last two years.

And so people like us who were more like we were kind of in a habit and we were comfortable like paying a little bit of attention to everything. And that's becoming like unsustainable. Like there's just if you want to cover launch and satellites and planetary and policy and space business and you want to cover all the different beats, like at least pay attention to it and read all the articles, like, it's becoming harder and harder to do. Like, the specialization factor is, like, starting to weigh in. And I think I feel that pull, like, to a point where I'm like, I got to pick something to drop or I'm just like, you know what? I'm just, I'm not going to even pay attention to UFOs or whatever. It's funny. Just the name one.

Some space thing. But like, that's, I'm feeling that more and more, right? That's a good point. I was always trying to figure out if it, if it is more news or if, like, we are getting more familiar with stuff so we can dig deeper into details more comfortably and we were able to like realize what was and was not news like in a good way and a bad way I guess like I'm not going to

talk about this weird announcement of a Lockheed Martin Lunar Rover I was just thinking that too was not a news and what isn't I was like yeah that was not a news thing and I think it can go one of two ways when you're like starting out trying to do this kind of thing is that everything is news or or like only four stories are like

whatever SpaceX did recently whatever NASA announced recently and that's it you know and you got to find you got to be able to I mean half of sorting out making a rundown of a show is like figuring out what doesn't go in there yeah and that's a muscle to exercise like this thing doesn't deserve my attention nor the people listening's attention I'm going to not talk about that. I had that struggle this week with all the, all the human landing system drama that's going on, right? Because there's like so much being written about it and so much being said about it. I'm trying to like parse it all. And I'm just like,

I don't think there's enough this week for me to talk about it. But I feel to spend the time on it. Right. I still have to like parse it and go. Yeah, you have to sort out why it isn't. Yeah. Yeah. So you do the work even if no one ever hears about it. Exactly. Yeah. So I mean like my even just like my, my red planet review, when I first started, it was like, every week I would sit down for like an hour and a half, maybe two hours of like reading and typing notes. And then, you know, 30 minutes you're recorded and published and good to go. Now it's like three hours of research.

And then I think my flow is almost all ends almost about four hours now. So it's like it's getting a little longer to do those things. Yeah. So it's a lot. It's also tricky where we have two ends of the spectrum, I think, between us is that you have an interview show primarily. but occasionally it's just you doing your thing. And I'm the inverse where it's mostly me doing my thing and occasionally interview. And I'm realizing I need to do a middle ground because I do a show when I have a,

when I have like an interesting thought to add to the conversation. So you will never hear me do a show that's just news unless you're paying for headlines, which is literally just news. And I guess I give a lot of opinions there as well. but the main show is like analysis and opinion, which is hard to come up with. But booking guests is also impossible to do because it's so much work to do that.

So I'm like, how do I nail the middle of that? Because the frequency of things that I'm analyzing seems to drop as more news happens because there's a lot of things happening, not like theoretically happening, which is more of where the analysis is. So I wonder if you have a TikTok cycle of launch windows and I feel like I have a TikTok cycle of proposed things and then things happening.

Okay. That makes any sense. All right. I don't know. I haven't thought of your content that way, but I think you're kind of right on that. Yeah. You can look at the slow periods in my main show, and there's just a lot of things happening then.

And the busy periods are when there's a lot of things being talked about. Yours is probably a lot more connected to like just the normal human annual cycle, right? where there's down times in the summer and the holidays, right? Yeah. People tend to like do during the fall and the spring and get to work in the off periods, right? The summer of low attention as we're coming up with. Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed inside baseball portion of the off nominal. I'm really glad you mentioned the interview thing, though, because that is like, it's more work than it sounds like.

And I sometimes make the joke that I'm like, yeah, I do interviews because then the guest just makes all the content for you, which makes it sound like it's really easy, but like, holy smokes. Especially like, so I ramped up from every three weeks to every two weeks this year once I went full time. And that, that difference, it like crossed a threshold where I have to think more than one episode ahead at a time.

Like, I can't. I used to be able to just like, produce a show, find a guest, record it, produce a show. But now I'm just like, why I'm recording and producing one,

I'm thinking about the ones after that. Yeah, and it's, it's added a whole new dynamic. to it and it's like super interesting. So it's an iceberg problem where people listening see the guests that did get booked, but don't see all the guests that you reach out to and like scheduling was weird or the ones you get ghosted by.

Yeah, you didn't hear back or like you had them on your list, but you knew that reaching out to them means you have to do a lot of research into their thing and you don't have the time for that. There's all those various things that happen that makes it impossible. Yeah. So it's a weird. It's a weird thing to keep up on. Yeah. Yeah, I've always torn too between like trying to find something that's topical. So, you know, it's been very topical for me lately, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just covering all this smart stuff. But then like sometimes I just think it's important to just like pick some random interesting topic that is in no way in the news and just

do a deep dive for fun. So now that we're through all that, I hope I can do a couple more of those. I was going to say, do you want to talk at all about your long-running project? That was the Patreon goal that you hit? Yeah, I think I've mentioned it, haven't I? I think so, but I don't know if you wanted to talk about it. Yeah, I know. It's going interestingly. So I'm doing this audio documentary on the Atlas Rocket because we had it as a goal for 250 patrons,

which we hit with the most recent going pro thing, which is awesome. But this is like the most intense research I've done for a project. I've done sort of things that were like, whatever, a 40-minute episode and you do some research. Of course, I'm interviews and you're done. But this, like, I'm thinking this is going to end up being two to three hours. And it's like not a small thing. So, you know, I'm reading books like I got this thing going right now for Atlas early history. Let me see that picture.

Let me see that picture. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Atlas, the ultimate weapon. Look at that drop, the drop the shadow going on behind the block letters. Oh, yeah. This is like super 1990. kind of stuff.

That's awesome. But then you can't just have one source, right? So you're like reading all this stuff. And I'll one another book is my pick. I'll talk about that later. But, but it's yeah, it's cool.

So like you got to like learn this stuff and then like find sources for it and like fact check it. Port it all together in a narrative. I want to get interviews with it as well. So like I have to kind of get my shit together first and like figure out what you want to say. And then find the people, read out to them,

record those interviews and then the massive like editing job. So it's, It's pretty significant. I kind of feel like I know what Tim Dodd goes through now when he makes his giant videos because like this is not nothing. So I mean, I put hours and hours in this already. And I'm, I don't think I'm at halfway point yet. So the important question I have is that are you going to have a Dan Carlin quote voice when you're reading a quote? It's funny you say that because I was thinking about that. Like do I need to do that? Like is that like a I kept asking myself, is that like a a normal like audio documentary thing or is that Dan Carlin? Yeah. I think it's a. I think

it's a Dan Carlin thing and if I do it I'm just going to sound like a Chewreck. Well, I don't think you should try to do Dan Carlin's quote voice because no one can pull that off. But a different voice is helpful. It's a good affordance to your listening experience. Yeah, there is some Ux to that that he that he does right. So, but I don't know, I think I think I'll try to avoid the quote. Maybe we should get Dan Carlin to come on this podcast and talk about producing historical content when you're, maybe when you're, when you do this and you release it, we should do that. I want, I bet I, I, could get him to talk about like because I start this Atlas thing is starting at World War

2 man I bet I could get him to talk about some of the stuff you should get him to yes yeah yeah oh now I've committed to it on the air yeah yeah you got to do it yeah that would be like a total fanboy episode did you ever listen to he had on tom hanks one of the episodes yes yes I did he was like fan boeing because he had Tom Hanks on it yeah that would be like if dad carlin but also Tom Hanks was fanboying because he was talking to Dan Carlin. That's a good pick from both me and Jake is that episode. I'll put that in the notes.

Yeah. With his movie, right? It was the movie called, uh, Greyhound. Greyhound, the ship, yeah. Cool.

Do we want to, we're at the pick time and you're, are we there already? Holy smokes. I think. You've been talking on it. Okay, cool. Yeah.

All right. So I have, so continuing on the, the rocket. Atlas Rocket thing. This is the first book that I've actually finished. So this is Bocert. America's forgotten rocket science. So this guy here, Charlie Bossert, basically invented Atlas. So this is sort of his biography, talks about a little bit his growing up in Europe and some of the, you know, during World War II, he's, you know,

watched his city of Antwerp get bombed by the Germans with V2s and, you know, that plays into his his upbringing and stuff. And there's a lot of cool backstory of him coming over to America and his experience with airplanes and what he learned like from airplanes. The author like really charts this course like through his exposure in World War II. His exposure to helicopters and fixed wing and the work he does in like aerodynamics and like how it all like becomes Atlas. And it's like super fascinating.

So it's pretty good. I got to get this. I got to get this. But it's a good book. So I definitely recommend it. It's a pretty easy read, too. It's not that long, big text, you know. Does it get to the point at which him and von Braun are kind of like the faces of heavy versus light structure rockets?

And that they were kind of seen as like the competing. I didn't, I don't think I realized like the Antwerp. It's just weird. Yeah, because you think about V2 and the first thing you think about is London got all the V2s. But Antwerp got way more. Antwerp was the place that V2s fell. And yeah, so there's like this weird dichotomy because von Braun becomes like a very well-known figure in rocketry.

But they vehemently disagreed on some of these things, right? So like, because Boster is sort of known for the very lightweight airframe. That was like what he brought from airplanes. Balloon tanks, essentially. Balloon tanks.

So pressure fed, like Atlas would crumple under its own weight if it didn't have actualization inside. Did in fact. It's pulled the old SLS butterfly effect scenario happened. Exactly, yeah. Maybe that's why you had that dream. Maybe, man, because the crumpling rocket is in my brain, right?

But yeah, so you can see that kind of thing where he was like the early engineers for not for Atlas, but there was like this precursor project that they were working on at Conver as like the earliest rocket that he did, this MX774 project and they were it was they started it kind of operation paperclip had been going on and so like the Americans were sniping all these German engineers out of Germany and bring into the America but they didn't have the V2s yet the V2 all the V2 inventory hadn't made over it and so they were literally taking like life magazines where there was pictures of it and they were like measuring it on the life magazine and trying to reverse engineer the V2 they were doing what all SpaceX fans do the accounting pictures.

Xon starships. Yeah, it's exactly the same thing. So they were doing that and it's a pretty cool story. Just them looking at this and then he's just like, this is a dumb idea. They're like two separate tanks for the fuel and the oxidizer slotted inside another fuselage. There's like double wall. It's so much extra weight. And and the way he explains it, you're like, man, B2 sucks. What a stupid rocket. Sounds like Star Hopper. Yeah, totally. So wait, did they have any? Did they have any? Did they have any? interaction? Because historically, everyone says, Von Braun was for heavy structures, boss there was for light structures.

But did they ever communicate? They did. Yeah, they've met a few times. They don't cover a lot of that in this book. But they have met. Experience that. Just be a fly on the wall when they were hanging out. Just because, you know, the history,

the way it's intertwined is crazy. Yeah, totally. I mean, this stuff too, like, they were on kind of really different paths because Atlas was really it was a it was a weapon first right like he he built it to be this ICBM and it had a very short history like they crash course development and they were done in like the first one flew in 1950 six seven somewhere in there they were ready to go and it was operational and like three four years later it was done they just like decommissioned it tight and took over and that was like the end of Alice and they're like what we do with all his inventory and boom space. rocket, right? So, um, it, seeing that path versus the, the, the army stuff with the redstone whatever with Von Braun, like it's all different parts of the country and then it's pretty disconnected. So it's a totally different, like this is really all the space history I know about rockets seem to focus on von Braun. And like this is, to me, this is even better story. Like this is,

I love it. I got to read that. I'm even more excited about that as Atlas now than I was before. I'm not sure why I didn't read that. around the same time as I think a pick that I had on like single digits off nominal was taming hydrogen I think that was a taming liquid hydrogen about centaur.

It was the books that you're reading but about centaur itself. So it had a lot of crossovers but I feel like that would have nicely together. This one's going to have more centaur in it, this Atlas Ultimate Weapon one. I'm not very far into this one because this is more like a technical manual. It's like cut diagrams and it tells you

how the rocket works and I wanted to get the story first. So yeah, it's, it's cool stuff, man. It's really neat. And then after this, I'm going to dig into more of the transition to the space rocket and what it actually does for the crazy amount of work that Atlas did, you know, in space, Atlas Centaur and Mercury Atlas and all that good stuff. So Amazon Kuiper. Yeah, Kuiper. Yeah, exactly. The last hurrah of Atlas. Yeah. All right. I've got a happening now pick.

This is one. You've got to jump on this train, like right now. And you've got a couple of weeks to months to do it. Occasionally, astronauts go to the ISS that are a lot of fun to follow along with. And Tomopaske is like incredible. His energy on the ISS is exactly. He's doing the kind of hijinks that I think we would do if we got two seats on a Soyuz and went up to hang out. I'm just going to pull up two examples here

because I've got links in the show notes to his Twitter and his flicker you need to be following both because number one he's like legitimately taking great photos of space and everything but also you can see his hijinks as well so just to show a little bit of this they had a birthday party for Victor Glover on the station and there's a saxophone and like a keyboard and I don't know where any of these came from, but they had a full-on birthday party for Victor Glover, which is excellent.

So these are the kind of photos that you can experience from Tomopiske. And then Twitter, his Twitter is also great. This is my favorite because Mike Hopkins, after Victor Glover and crew came back down, they got vaccinated. And Mike Hopkins tweeted this photo of them all flexing with their vaccines. I know why you like this photo. Also, they're just all ripped.

collective. You love Victor Glover's guns. I mean, yeah, that's that's goals right there. Mike Hopkins is also loaded. But Tomopiske then just tweeted back this photo of him flexing with like the two for crew two on the station. And I love the like he's got enough time to shitpost back at crew one from the station. It's excellent. He's just a he's a great. I think actually if I go back into his flicker here, he got the entire crew two. Uh, he's a, he's excellent. He's just a great. I think actually if I go back into his Flickr here. He got the entire crew two. He's wearing like rugby jerseys on the station and he's got a rugby ball up there. I don't know. Rugby ball is probably the wrong term. Look, he's got like all of crew two flexing on the station. Like he's just doing hijinks up there that are excellent. So I think

you need to be following Toma Pesque up there. Am I saying that with enough of a flare to it? Okay, cool. Basque, yeah. He's great. You got to get on this. cool yeah good dude there's gonna be some good i s stuff coming up for yeah so many people up there like yeah it's a party for sure just a little extra time in the schedule and more people yeah yeah yeah more personalities and we got um Samantha christoph ready now just got announced a commander for crew four i think expedition whatever that is 68 maybe um but yeah that's gonna be really fun too she's so awesome um yeah it's gonna be fun there's like so many astronauts up there It's awesome. I love it. Love it.

And then there's going to be just a bunch of randos, too. A bunch of rando filmmakers and fashion designers and okay. All right, actors. All right. Well, is this where we do? What are you working on? Yeah. Yeah, you go first. I got lots. It's as we were just for discussing, it's interview season because I don't, apparently there's not a lot happening that I have thoughts on. So I was like, this is a good time to send out a thousand. You don't want to weigh in with how we should take all this drama in Congress? I know you're triggered by it.

I'm not even triggered by it. It's just like the NASA budget came out today. And before this, I mentioned to Jake that I look at it like NASA fanfic because it's like, when is the last time that has it had any bearing on NASA's budget? I don't know when. But it gets a nice news cycle out of it. Everyone talks about it. That's drama.

Whatever. Not doing that. So what I did was I sent a bunch of emails. and Jake never expected this in my life. DARPA emailed me back first. You were like, what is DARPA? I don't know what DARPA. Mostly because you don't know about UFOs.

DARPA goes up with UFOs in my head. Things that you don't track. Yeah. I'm like they do the mind control. Like I learned everything I know about DARPA I learned from the X-Files. So it's mind control. And you nailed it. Yeah, that's it.

That's all you need to know. DARPA, we talked to the Brock Howe, who's the manager for the nanorax airlock on station. that was cool. I think you'll be into that one because it's a lot of operational stuff. I did listen to it. It's good, yeah. Yeah.

I got some other ones cooking as well. So it's, it's interview season right now. That's what I got. That's it. That's good. Yeah. That's it.

Oh, I can do you want to see Will wearing a Rocket Lab shirt? I absolutely do. I can pull that up. This is a, we should have put this in the life update section. Here's Will wearing a rocket lab shirt. there he is

he's so cute this is courtesy of one of our listeners in the off nominal discord as well so he was he was loving the it says future launch team on there okay so he's definitely pulling for rocket lab to get back flying so I mean it's likely that'll be his first

rocket launch this electron out of Virginia yeah that's true yeah so how old does he have to be before he'll remember that what are you waiting for Well, right now I'm waiting for an electron to fly out of Virginia is number one what I'm waiting for. That's like, why are you waiting to take into a flyers game? Number one, I'm waiting for the flyers to still be playing and also not be a pandemic. Yeah, that's really all I'm waiting on.

Okay. Whatever. When is he going to remember? What do you remember when you're a couple years old, you know? But you have good photos of you being a year old going places. Yeah. I think like four or five is when I started five maybe when I start remembering things. Yeah.

So he's going to go to a couple before that. Just logistically, you know? Yeah, yeah. Can't put him a dig here. He might be there when SLS crumbles. I don't know. When it falls over on the goddamn crawlway. What do you got going on?

I got lots going on right now. So, yeah, we 100th episode of Wee Martians came out this week. So it was, we had Andrew Jones on to talk about Zhu Rong, the Chinese rover. But I was, so it's funny because like I was thinking about what I want to do for this 100th episode. I want to have a big, like some sort of special episode. Like do I bring on like a bunch of guests and have a party or whatever? And I was kind of like, you know what?

No, like the most fun thing is just to just to do the work, right? Just have the same interviews and whatever. So instead of like having a special episode, I just did like a whole special event for all the listeners and stuff. So the shop is it's cooking right now for sales. I just wanted to like give a bunch of stuff back. So we're we're doing a giveaway, which I do want to offer to all the off nominal listeners.

All you have to do is sign up for the mailing list that I have, which is low velocity, low spam. Like it's one email a month. And it's always something interesting. You sign up for that. I'm going to draw three winners from there to get a $25 gift card in the store. I've been putting a ton of designs in the store. My goal this year is like a new design of some kind every month.

So there's like a whole bunch of crap going out there. Good crap, not bad crap. Yeah. And this is like the design that the Staris Planetary Park design that I have is the one that came out with this event. Because on Sunday, the May 30th, it's the 50th anniversary of the Mariner 9 mission. which is the first orbiter at Mars. And that's the orbiter that discovered the Tharsus Mountain Range.

And so he made this little shirt there. You can get it on a shirt or a mug, which is kind of fun, all sorts of cuts, men's, women's kids, all that stuff. And then, yeah, there's like an ingenuity coffee mug we made. There's sticker packs. There's Starship shirts. There's parachute shirts from the Perseverance Rover. The parachute shirt, man, I've been wearing mine to death. Yeah, it's a cool shirt, right?

This one took off. This has been my most popular design ever because some people, so my theory is it got on to a Slack channel somewhere at Airborne Systems, which is the company that made that parachute because I sold a lot of shirts to some folks who worked there, which is awesome. It's like the most joyful thing for me to see that they like it. But there's lots of good stuff going on there. So you buy any two items and it's free shipping right now. Just use the code WM 100.

And there's this cool stuff. So discounted stickers, discounted mission patches. I'm going all out. So I wanted to kind of give back. And then also if you're if you're not a patron of me right now, if you join at the $5 level, you will also get a sticker pack for free, which is cool. We got some fun stuff in there.

So there's just, I just wanted to just like give. Blowing it out. Yeah. just blowing it out. So it's going to be a lot of fun. And people have been, you know, taking advantage of it, which is great.

And I hope to get some cool new space merch out there. And I'm discontinuing a bunch too. So there's like a whole bunch of designs on there. So the problem with one new design a month is that my skew count's getting a little out of control. So all the old stuff that's, you know, kind of past its prime.

I'm blowing out. So last chance to get it. I think June 6th is like the last day that all the stuff will be available. So, How about the one that would live in the off nominal shop if it exists? Yeah, if there was an op nominal shop. This was so much fun. This is more fun to make and market than it was to actually sell.

Yeah, the NASA Comic Sans worm. It's the NASA Worm logo but written in Comic Sans font. So it is like so offensive. It was like just like egregiously wrong. And people were tweeting it. They're like, I hate this. And then they would buy three of them, you know? And so it was really fun to see on Twitter.

It was a good one to go around. Yeah, I'm not going to talk out of school too much, but we got one excellent, I think it was a DM on Twitter. It was like, why are you doing this? The creator would really hate this. Yeah. And there was a lot of work that went around this last year and they would distinctly hate this. Yeah, yeah. And you know, I felt kind of bad because at some point, like a few days after I launched this, the designer for the NASA worm, like the original guy, he passed away.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, like, I was like, oh, no, I killed the guy with my comic sand. I think like internet culture understands this. Design culture understands this. Like, you know, on a different level. There's a crossover of a bunch of weird stuff. But it was fun. So yeah.

Lots of stuff going on. So I've been putting, like I've been putting more work into my shop than some people might realize. So I definitely encourage you to check it out. There's been some cool stuff by on there. And I appreciate all your support. Boom. Yeah.

Have fun with the summer of low attention. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I should also just say to just like some housekeeping. I mentioned this is the last time you'll see this room. So I am leaving Vancouver. I'm going to spend the summer with my family in Alberta because I haven't seen them since the pandemic started. You'll see a new room here. I will not be on the next episode.

So Anthony, I am putting it all on your plate. Yeah, you've done two Anthony-less episodes. One time I was on vacation in Italy and one time I had a child. Yeah, you had a baby. baby. So one month from now, which is when we would normally be doing this, I will be, all my crap will be in a truck somewhere and I'll be driving across the country. So, yeah, so I'm going to spend some time with my family in Alberta and then on to some new adventures, which I'll share more later. Yeah. Yeah. And he's going to take some time off so he

doesn't have any more dreams of ridiculous space events. I'm pre-recording some interviews to get them all lined up so that I can just kind of chill. Flush the memory. You need a hard reset Bye everyone Bye everyone Boop 1 2 3 4 5 5 4 3 do 1 end of tests That's me doing the outro

I loved it Should I leave that as the regular one Should I leave that as the regular one?