Off-Nominal - 46 - Anti-Satellite Own Goal

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

Jake and Anthony are joined by Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian to talk about Russia’s latest endangerment to the ISS—their anti-satellite operationthat resulted in a huge debris field—and about how Jonathan does all the excellent work he does tracking launches, satellites, and where everything in space is going.DrinksPhelddagrif - Thodes Ale - UntappdSátiro - Thodes Ale - UntappdGenmaichaOrangina | Sparkling Citrus DrinkAnthony’s Gin & Tonic: half Drumshanbo Gunpowder Irish Gin, half Schweppes Tonic, and a shitload of limeTopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 46 - Anti-Satellite Own Goal (with Jonathan McDowell) - YouTubeRussia destroys satellite in ASAT test - SpaceNews2021 Russian satellite intercept - YouTubeOfficial ASAT - Anti Satellite Missile Mission / Mission Shakti Video by DRDO - YouTubeJonathan McDowell on Twitter: “Here is the orbit of ISS (blue) compared to that of the Ikar No. 39L satellite (cover name Kosmos-1408) (magenta) and the part of the orbit where the crew have been warned of possible collisions with a debris field (red). This shows Kosmos-1408 is a plausible candidate”Jonathan McDowell on Twitter: “The latest Starlink batch (Group 4-1) of 53 sats seems to include one dud - Starlink 3123 (red) is not orbit raising. (Green: deployment rods).”Jonathan McDowell on Twitter: “Another space collision of interest was the disintegration on 2020 Jul 12 of object 43673, an inert piece of a Japanese rocket. (Event - green; debris objects cataloged later - red; orbit height of 43673 itself - blue)”The edge of space: Revisiting the Karman Line - ScienceDirectOrbiting Frog Otolith - WikipediaKSP History Part 66 - Orbiting Frog Otolith - ImgurInternational Cometary Explorer - WikipediaKSP History Part 112 - ISEE-3 - post - ImgurPicksFoundation | Apple TV+The Planet Factory: Exoplanets and the Search for a Second Earth by Elizabeth TaskerAsteroids: How Love, Fear, and Greed Will Determine Our Future in Space by Martin ElvisUnmanned Spaceflight.comFollow JonathanJonathan McDowell (@planet4589) / TwitterJonathan's Space ReportFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterOff-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

DLS is go for main engine, start. Negative return. Welcome to space. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Offenomenal. We are super, super excited to be here with you today. It's been a long week, Anthony, of, like, tense space news, maybe. I think it's, like, not the space news that everyone...

Like, there's space news that's good, and then there's, like, bad space news that people like to hate, and then there's, like, not good space news. And this is a not good week, I think. Truly horrible space news. Just, like, straight up, not good. like barely worth making any jokes about, but we're going to try really hard. We're going to thread that needle.

Of course, we're here with Jonathan McDowell, the man behind the McDowell line, which I know is a thing that the off-nominal community loves. So let that sit with you, Jonathan. How you doing? I'm doing okay.

Yeah, I'm in a good mood right now. Saturday night, you know, and yeah, let's chill and talk about space, which, you know, once you get me started, I warn you is hard to stop me. So that's what we're here for.

That is what we're here for. But we knew that you needed like a chill Saturday night because we could tell early on this week that it was going to be a week for you. Oh, yeah. Yeah, like Monday morning you wake up and suddenly your email box is full of media requests. Oh, what happened? That's what I was like, do you think Jonathan should come on the show? I'm like, he's probably busy, but let's see if he's up for it because he can use a hang. out session, like, later on, to

commiserate, I think. Yeah. So, and you know, it's, I mean, my role is to try and, um, tell it like it is. Um, you know, put, give the historical context and,

uh, not, you know, there's been a lot of nonsense spoken this week about, uh, um, you know, the evil Russians. And indeed they are, but, you know, we're not Lily White. So you need to look at it in the context of, you know, anti-satellite tests, which is what we're talking about, anti-satellite tests since 1959.

Right. Yeah, I got some stuff to say about the whole situation there. I got some things, some of the things I would like to run by you to. But let's do the drinks first before we get too far. And Jake, did you pick up anything interesting there? I did, yeah. So as I explore this new craft beer market here in the Yucatan, Mexico, I'm learning that the craft breweries are like way more legitimately craft breweries than they were in Vancouver. Because like Vancouver is like a big, you know, thing.

It's industrial craft. Yeah. So like the craft local beer is like a pretty big brewery with a restaurant and attached bar that serves half of Canada, right? And that's like it's basically Anheuser-Bush with better labels. So here it's like legitimately people's home. They're just like some guy with a garage and he's like, I want to start a brewery and that's his job. And I got some of these today. So.

Did you buy these from the beer company? I did buy these from the beer company, which is the store down the street called the beer company. So these are really fun labels. He does all these with like Norse themes, I guess. So this is the first one here. It's called, I'll see if I say right, Feldegryff. Feldigriff. So it's like a flying hippogriff.

epipotomous or something. Do you see that? That looks almost more Greek. Maybe, yeah, yeah. Hmm, okay. And then... The flying hippopotamus was really throwing me for a loop. I'll be honest.

Yeah, it's weird, right? And I tried to Google what a Feldergriff was, and the only thing I got was some magic the gathering cards. So... Yeah, so that's probably the worst. Seems legit. The weight ratio there does not look great. And then this is the backup.

It's Satiro. this is like a sater or whatever, right? Yeah, so they're pretty cool. Great labels. So this is a hobby. Now, are these like printed off of a regular printer labels? They look pretty good. I was reading up on the guy and he had like a friend that did the labels or whatever.

Oh, nice. But this one's really interesting because this is a- confirmation that that is a magic the gathering situation. Okay, good. Yeah. I don't know if you can read it here. It says it's a hamaika ale, which is people drink a lot of Agua to Hamika here, which is basically hibiscus tea in water.

So we'll see what that tastes like. I don't know. It may be good. It may be awful. You got way more adventurous when you move down there. It's great. I did. Yeah, it's going to be fun.

So I'm going to start with the hoppy weed ale and then we'll go to the weird one at the end. So what do you go? Jonathan, I've seen a mug over there. Yeah, I've got actually like three different drinks here. Oh, wow. None of which are alcoholics. I'm descended from a long line of alcoholics and so I don't drink. but so the unborn is so I have yeah I've been sipping my my genmai cha which is a green tea with brown rice

brood with brown rice okay I was going to say it's in there oh it's in that brew right and that just gives the green tea a little bit of a I don't know kind of a barbecue taste oh it's not quite but like like a little roasted taste and it's just a very nice soothes my esophagus going down, helps de-stress. Good after a long week, right? And then because I also

might need sugar to get through this, I've got my orangina, which is this like phantalike drink, but it's from France. It's fancier. Yeah, it's fancier, but it also, you know, it brings me back to my youth, you know, at bistros in the,

in Boulevard de Janeiro and crepe of these on the Rue Mouftau. I mean, Paris was a very important part of my growing up. And so, mentally, a sip of this nice sort of sugary, fizzy orange drink instantly brings me back to that.

You're like the scene from Ratatouille when he has the, I guess, Ratatouille, right, that then shoots him back to his childhood. I don't know, hasn't nobody's Ratatooie? Oh, yeah, no, great movie. Fantastic movie. I haven't seen it actually. Yeah.

It's worth your time. I'll be honest. It's worth your time. So that's what I brought for you. Yeah, green, brown rice, green tea and French fizzy bowl. That's a powerful mix. I'll be honest.

I have a gin and tonic tonight, Jake. I don't think I've ever broken out something not beer and wine on the show. But I had some limes set round. I've got a fancy shirt on because I'm fresh out of a friend's giving. so here I am. You look really sharp too. I love the collar. This is like just like one one level up on the dial of handsomness today for you.

It's good. Meanwhile, I have a Star Trek shirt. That's how classy. Yeah, it's part of the course there. Yeah. Gus and that. I nearly wore that one. That would have been really funny actually if we showed up with the same shirt.

Jake, you're going to have to go right over your shoulder into your wardrobe back there that everyone can see on camera. If you ended up with the same shirt on. I would have to. It's still working in your background. You got some work to do with the background. It's, yeah, this is, yeah, working on it. We'll get there.

We'll get there. All right. Can I bring out my first topic of I need to settle some stuff with you too here? Yes. Let's unpack. Let's go. The anti-satellites. See, I almost fell for it, Jake.

This is my bugaboo this week. everybody calls it an anti-satellite test, and this annoys me, because in every other area of life, a test is when you do a thing fake, and it doesn't have the actual effect as it would if you actually did the thing. Like I said on my main podcast this week, if you tested a nuke by blowing up a city and killing hundreds of millions of people, that would not be a test, that would just be you nuke a city. So I would like to call these anti-satellite operations. I would not like to call it a test anymore. Yeah, and that's actually what I have on my webpage now, anti-satellite operations.

This is what I'm talking about right here. But I will defend test. All right, let's go. One is, yeah, this was a test. This is blowing up a Russian satellite was a test for blowing up an American satellite. Which would have had much bigger consequences. That's true. Okay, so you're more worried about the knock on effects, not necessarily orbitally.

Well, if you consider this as a weapon system, right, you're testing the weapon system to show that it works rather than using it operationally in a war. Right? So that's it. People in the chat are saying demonstration, which I think is a middle ground here. Yeah, yeah. But also there's a use of test that's a little different from the one you're saying, right, which is traditional in the missile world. If you go to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, say, that every launch has a test number. because in the early days in the 50s it really was testing, right? This is, by the way, the only person that would know this and probably has a list of them all, like, on his hard drive right now.

Yeah, and so this is like test number 6543 because they never grew out of calling it a test, right? No worse than Google, man. This is like... And so I think in the missile field, there is a sense in which test just means launch. Right. I think that's a little shervative, right, because it reminds you that space is hard.

Oh, my other least favorite one, but that's an argument for another time. I just think, I mean, in the same way, I'm actually mad about these two things for the same reason, because I think it lets you off the hook. By calling it a test, it like downgrades the effects that this actually has on the orbital environment, which is why I'm bothered by it. Maybe you could call it a failed test. Failed test. Yeah.

Well, it's a test, you know, it's a test of the way. system, it's a launch, and it's a debris event. It's a debris event. Jake, what's the dust storms on Mars now? They're the... Oh, wow, that global... Earth Encircling. Planet encircling dust event.

Yes. This is a planet encircling debris event. Right, right, right. Yeah, exactly. Event is a good, like, you know, wish-y-washy word. And or it's a, an orbital club No, I can't say that. You can't on this show, but that's actually great.

There are stronger words that one could use, let's say. Yeah, yeah. Jake, I haven't really heard your thoughts on this situation this week. Well, you know, I don't play in this space the way you do. So, like, I haven't, like, cooked up a good hot take. But, like, it's bad. I don't like it. That's my own take.

I don't like what happened this week. I was just like, I don't know, the first thing that just struck me is bizarre, even though when I, when I plotted out the logic, I was like, I got there. Like I was like, oh yeah, I understand this happened. But I don't, I don't understand why they would endanger their own space asset, right? And then I started to think about it. And it's like, well, actually, it's not Roscosmos that did this test. It's the Russian military. And then I was like, so that would mean they didn't talk to each other.

And I was like, oh, yeah, I can totally believe that happened. Yeah. Well, you know, that's absolutely right, you know, the military not talking to the civilians and so on, which was an issue in the missile people not talking to the space people was an issue in the 2007 Chinese test as well. And but there's also this thing of like, there's just a, you know, so what was the risk to the astronauts, right? Was it one in a thousand, one in a hundred, one in ten, one in two? and what risk would you consider unacceptable? And what's considered an unacceptable risk in the U.S., you know,

the Russians would consider, oh, no big deal, they'll probably be fine. You know, if it's less than 50-50, then they'll probably be fine. Unless that involves flying on American crew vehicles, then they're not willing to take the very low, exceptionally limited. I know that's different. But I think there is a real discussion to be had about, you know, are Americans too timid, too easily scared, you know, Russians are real men and women and, you know,

don't mind a few seven kilometers or a second pieces of shrapnel flying past their ears. And so, yeah, you know, that's the argument I think they would make. And so there's that as well as the general. just the siloed, you know, not talking to each other aspect. Yeah. I was remembering, like, you know, when I read up on old Soviet space history and stuff, just the level of competition and walls between even just the different directorates in the space group, you know, like the different groups of KORLEV and the other, you know, design bureaus and stuff,

they were not talking to each other either and they were undermining each other and really, you know, going at it. Well, it's just like in the U.S., right? The saying in the Air Force used to be, you know, the opposition of the Soviets, but the enemy is the Navy. And in the Soviet Union, it was, yeah, the opposition of the Americans, but the enemy are the other design bureau. And yes, you had Karolov and Shalemi and Rukyengal. And they were all jockeying for the contracts and jockeying for, you know, they each had a person in the Politburo that was. their patron and when you know Christchow right Chelemy got his got Christchhoff's son working in

his bureau and so when Christop was in the ascendant Chelemy got lots of contracts and when Christop was ousted not cut out went back to and Oostinov got into the senior position then suddenly Coralab was on the up and Chelemy was on the outs and and so that's just You know, that was very much how it worked in the Soviet era. And that was really a lot of what it was about. The Americans were a footnote. Yeah. Well, I'm glad that's the group of people who just put 2,000 pieces of space debris in order.

That should be a good end of that, right? What do you make of this recent analysis that it was a rear-end collision, essentially, where the satellite ran into the weapon itself? Yeah. So I think what happens? So the satellite's going at, you know, 17,000 miles an hour, right? Satellite would be faster. Yeah.

And the rocket launches northward from Plesetsk, and it does it a little earlier, and it gets the apogee and kind of hangs there as one does at apogee. And the satellite runs in- Plow through it. Yeah. And that seems to be the most likely reconstruction was going on. So it's not like sometimes you had, I think, in, for example, the Indian Asset test, the satellite was coming north over the Indian Ocean

and the rocket launched south and met it head on. Although, didn't it go, I was reading this again, it didn't go directly head on, it actually was like an upward trajectory on the satellite. They said at the time it was head on, but then when you looked at the imagery, they actually captured, which, by the way,

they have imagery right before they hit the satellite, which is kind of awesome to watch. I didn't know that. Yeah, it's amazing. But in that, you can see, they did like analysis of how the solar arrays were angled, that it actually was an upward flying projectile that explained the fact that it didn't take a lot of velocity out of the debris. It actually just like gave it some out of program. I think it doesn't matter much, to be honest, because what happens is you have this hypervelocity impact,

you shred the satellite kind of before there's a lot of momentum transfer. What you really have is you just dump a lot of energy into the, into the shredded satellite. And the corresponding fuel explosion that happens. It goes out. Well, I'm not in fuel. I mean, it's most of the kinetic energy, right? And so in the satellite's rest frame or in the rest frame of the collision,

it's just like expanding somewhat spherically. And you get energy dumped in all directions. And yeah, there's a bit of momentum transfer going on, but that's not the dominant thing. So you're going to get some debris going up and some going down. and it just depends on the complicated internal dynamics of the collision. And that's the crazy thing about these debris clouds too, because if you know how orbital dynamics work,

that means that if you have a bunch of pieces with just slightly different velocity vectors, over time it spreads out into like a whole ring of debris that just fills that whole orbital plane up. It's not like giving you one spot that goes around where it's like dangerous. It's not like that shit movie gravity. No, yeah. Yeah, up to a point. I mean, so it's interesting because there's several phases, right, and they did a really nice study of this with the Arridium Cosmos collision, which is not an anti-satellite test, or it was only accidental anti-satellite. It was an anti-satellite operation of some degree.

And so in the Eridium company flew their satellite directly into a dense communication satellite for, you know. As an own goal right there is what we go in the business. And so the And so what happens is yeah initially you have this cloud of debris that's kind of somewhat physically localized as it I mean orbiting around with the And in fact what happens is you have

hypersonic shockwave go through both satellites And they turn into clouds of debris That then pass through each other And are going largely on the original orbits Of the original satellites And that's like Man There's some mixing but largely

there's like just two clouds. And if you look at the orbital elements of the debris, you can very easily tell which pieces came from meridian, which pieces came from cosmos, because it was like a 90 degree angle here. And so then the debris, because

there's sort of slightly different orbital periods, they spread out along the orbit, in the orbital plane, but along the orbit. And which is interestingly what we also see with comets and meteor streams, right?

Meteor streams come from particles leading comets, and you see that there's the elliptical orbit of the comet around the sun, and the comets, what's left of the comet if it still exists is in one place, but the meteors are just all around, if you like, the mean anomaly,

ha-a-ha is the thing that changes, and all the other orbital elements stay the same. So you get this ring, and that's why the Earth goes through that orbit every year, Right. It's always there. Every year we get a meteor shower as we go through that orbit,

never mind the timing of where the comet would have been in that orbit. Right, right. And that's exactly what we saw of the past couple days with the ASAT, is that the ISS passes through the orbital plane of Cosmos 1408 once an orbit. Right, I don't actually a couple times, but. And so the astronauts, every 93, minutes, they were getting a warning you're about to pass through the debris cloud. And that's just the orbital period of the ISS as it goes through the orbital plane. And so then you've

got it around the orbital plane, but then... It's like the worst version of Lost ever. Right. It's not person's button. It's like, please put on a spacesuit and go to your, as the Daily Mail put it, escape pods, which is hilarious. Yeah, that's exactly correct. That's exactly correct. But then what happens is this thing called plane drift, which if you follow the the starlink constellation, people sort of see, that's how they use deliberately to kind of go to different orbital planes. And so all the debris is different heights. And so if you wait a few months, the plane drift depends on the height. And so the debris current spreads out in longitude, so it's no longer all in one orbital plane. And it becomes a thin shell around the earth.

It's getting better. Each detail. And then orbital decay. sets in for the lower perigy objects and the shell thickens to basically fill all of Leo. And that's on a time scale of a year or so. Is that the same physics that would make like a sunsynchronous satellite change with the... Exactly. Exactly. Like a precesses. For a satellite, right, you keep, you tune that plane drift to be exactly one degree a day. Yeah.

So that it makes one whole red. each orbit of the Earth around the sun. And so, and how much plane drift you get depends on inclination and height. If you notice, Jake, the stats of sunsynchronous, watch for ones that are in like the 600 kilometers. They'll have different inclinations than the ones in seven or 800 kilometers. So there's a certain inclination for each of those altitudes, essentially. Right.

There's a horrible equation that has like the medium- of power 7 over 4 or something. I'm just pulling up Jonathan's stats for this. Yeah, the Sunsynchronous orbit is one of those things where I'm like, I forget what it is. And then I go read it and I go, oh, yeah, I understand. And then 10 minutes later, I forget again. So I had everything. You know, Geo is really easy to explain, right?

And Sunsync. And then I go, okay, and the other special orbit is Sunsync. And yeah, you can ask me about that in the question. It's really, you know, you can do it, especially if you have some kids who are, you know, in a class that one of them can play the sun and one of them play the Earth. and then you can kind of make them do the right keep facing one way of thing. But yeah, it's not simple to get your head around. Okay. Should we get into the conspiracies?

Conspiracy theories on this? Like the Russia one of this. I think we have to do at least one or two of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I just, some of the theories out there were great. The Russia hates Starlink theory that was going around Twitter was a fun one. And they just wanted to put a bunch of stuff into the Starlink area. Russia is falling behind.

So they just wanted to nuke human spaceflight for everyone. That's a fun one. None of these are particularly motivating to you, too, I can tell. I mean, because no, you know, I mean, you always get in these conspiracy theories. And it's every time that something happens in space, someone has some, you know, level of, like, you know, when there's a missile test. 3D chess. 4D chess. We'd be waiting for six months.

Oh, it's in response to this political event. no, they've been planning it for six months. You know, it's like, no, they've been, you know, they've been working up this, this missile system with test launches for six years now. Now they're ready to actually take this. And so Target, they've been planning to do this for ages.

And it's nothing to do with anything else. And there's a movement to have a ban on kinetic anti-satellite tests in the next couple of years. Yeah, that I can believe. That one seems legit. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, oh, we're doing it for some deep conspiracy reason. I'm sorry. Well, see, the thing that these all get wrong is what we were just talking about with how things work within these systems, where your opponent is someone else, but the enemy is someone else. Right, right.

The conspiracy that would work is Dmitri Ragozin is on the outs, and the Russian military tried to take him out by the way of destroying the ISS and therefore completely ruining the political career of Dmitz. your Ramosin. I like that one. That's a better one. I wouldn't put that out there. Or just, you know, to embarrass Ragozin in front of his friends, right? Yeah, in front of the drinking club that they all go to. In front of the last drinking club, yeah.

So you should have Ragozine on this show. We kind of should have Ragozine on this show. I'm sure he'd be a good drinker, you know. He'd probably beat us, yeah. Yeah. So. That'd be a guy. Yeah, so no, I mean, I'm, you know, in general, I've looked, you know, I've done enough digging into secrets, like real secret, you know, like National Reconnaissance Office satellites and stuff like that.

And, you know, the general thing about government conspiracies is, have you met our government? Or project management? Have you ever tried that? Exactly. I mean, any government is just not competent enough to pull off a good conspiracy. It's just not going to happen. People are going to talk too much. Okay, well, should we get into the Jonathan topics that we would like to hear about? I've got some questions for Jonathan, Jake.

Yeah, yeah. Because I want to know how you got started tracking everything that goes to space and where it is at literally every moment in time. That sounds exhausting. Yeah, well, I'm obsessive. So when I was about 11, I think, 10 or 11, I found a list of satellites, this year's satellites in the back of James All the World's Aircraft. I was, like one of my dad's friends,

we were around at their house. They had a big bookcase, and I was bored, and so I, you know, looked up in space stuff. And so I copied out this list. And then I fairly soon I realized that this was not really the, you know, there were some missing bits in this list, like lack of information about certain military satellites and other things. And maybe it wasn't the best list you could have.

Turns out. And so I started digging and trying to make a better list. And so here we are 50 years later, and I have a better list. It's just, you know, if you dig, I mean, one thing I really believe is that if you pick a narrow enough field of specialization and really dig at it for a long period of time, it's not that hard to be the best in the world. No one else cares. And so I went, so I was growing up in England. and the media in England were not interested in space,

not even compared to the US, right? And so it was really hard to get information, and so I had to dig, you know, so I would go up to London at the weekends and visit the Science Museum Library and read the latest aviation weeks and dig into the older aviation weeks and the older, you know, see,

I sort of dug deeper and deeper into the libraries, making notes and making, you know, handwritten index cards on all the satellites and slowly built up my database. And I'll tell you, that was a pain when I had to actually get and type it into computers at some point in the early 80. I was going to say, so are some of like the earliest entries in your database today, like from that time? Absolutely. And I still have a 1978 handwritten satellite catalog in fountain pen. You know, and so yeah, you know, I just, I just kept plugging away at it because I wanted, it's sort of like, you know, a crossword puzzle.

I wanted to fill in the blanks. And every time there's this satisfaction, every time I fill in a blank, every time I find out the launch time of that satellite that no one else has written down, you know, that's that satisfaction that you get from like completing a Sudoku puzzle. And or, oh, I have the serial number of that eugenia stage that I've been hunting for 20 years. And so, yeah, you know, it's pathetic, but I get my satisfaction from that. I just like to imagine, like, some of your friends being like, oh, so you're like really interested in like space exploration? No, look, I just got to finish this list. This is got to be done. Like, I don't know what the...

When I was eight years old, my nickname in the playground was satellite. light. That is awesome. You know, it's, it's, you're so on brand all these years later. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. I really haven't grown up. And, and, you know, a little more seriously, right, that time when I was like eight or nine, right, was Apollo. And my dad was a physicist.

And we went to the U.S. for a year because he did a sabbatical year at NASA Goddard. I was at NASA Goddard in 1968 and so that was running up and down the corridors annoying people as an eight-year-old and so building 21 if anyone knows it and so you know it was all downhill from there right

I mean I was already into space but being an eight-year-old like at the spot that everything was happening yeah exactly So I was really inspired. I was inspired by Apollo. I was inspired philosophically by, you know, that visiting other worlds. And I think the younger generation can't appreciate the way in where the way I encapsulate the change, right, is that we used to have a saying, you're asking for the moon.

Meaning you're asking for something impossible. and after 969 we had it pretty quickly as saying if we can land a man on the moon why can't we do that's so true yeah the immediate switch of that that switch right from the impossible to the we did the impossible and now let's do everything else right it is that that was I think very profound and and certainly it was it it was a deep thing for me. So, so, so, so that's kind of how, and then I got first, the fact that I was frustrated because the British media, we've come back to England, the British media, we're not covering things in the detail that I wanted, uh, uh, maybe want to make sure, you know, that I,

I could fill in the blacks. And as I got more sophisticated and as I got, you know, past college and into, you know, knowing people at NASA and so on, I realized that in fact, even at NASA, losing information. The space comings, they were losing information. They were not writing it down. That's crazy to me. I joke. And particularly what happens now, right, is that you fly a mission at CDR and

PDR at the design reviews, you generate all this paper, or, you know, PDFs now, but paper not so long ago. And then, but then when the thing actually flies, you're too busy to write down the, you know, the post-flight reports are sketchy. They don't always get published. when the mission wraps up, people move on to another mission and maybe don't write.

From working on that thing for so long. Yeah. Well, no, also the funding isn't there to do the final report. And then the professional historians come in and they write the official history of the project. But because they're professional historians, what they're interested in is humans, not robots, and they're interested in the politics of how it got funded.

And they don't care about what actually have once it leaves the paths. So if you read an official history of a NASA project, you know, it has maybe 12 chapters and 11 of them are on the way up to launch. And then there's a final chapter, oh, yeah, and it went and it did something. And, you know, but they don't actually give the details of, you know, what the differences were between the Asflown and the pre-launch plan and things like that. And so, and maybe if you're lucky, there's an internal memo that gives that,

that you can, that's going to get thrown out at some point when people clear out their offices. And so if you're lucky and get that, you can record it. And so I made that my mission in life is to be the chronicler for people a thousand years from now that want to find out what exactly these spacecraft actually did when they flew and and you know get it get it written down for posterity man I that that jive so well with what I'm sort of like watching now with because I cover all these Mars missions like pretty as deeply as I can right and and like the perseverance mission that's that's what's happening they're like under the gun

they're they're hustle hustle hustle trying to get all these these samples drilled and get the rover moving and like nothing's getting released there's there's like you know the blog compared to say curiosity which is now like a scene or mission, right? It's like, yeah, they got lots of time to write for a lot of articles. Yeah, you know, but like there's nothing coming on in perseverance. And, you know, I think about some of the, like, remember there was like an anomaly for perseverance rate after launch. You remember, like the temperature sensors were all out of whack. That's right. I don't remember seeing any good, like, releases on that. Like, you know, besides maybe just an answer in a press conference, but it's, yeah.

I mean, I have confidence for perseverance that, and curiosity that, you know, people like Emily, like Duala will track it all down. Yeah, hopefully. Write it down, right? But yeah, it's hard. And it's hard. I mean, even ingenuity is doing a pretty good job. I love the ingenuity blogs.

But even there, they're not consistently going, here was the takeoff time, here was the landing time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, like, come on, give me a table. Right? A piece is cinematic. And so that for me is, you know, what I want to see. I mean, the same thing, you know, we had this thing with the crew three mission recently.

Who is mission specialist one and who is mission specialist two? And currently now on Expedition 66, who is Flight Engineer 7? There's nowhere you can look that up now. There's no systematic page that gives you that, you know, that level of detail, which isn't really that much detail, right? But at least it's, you know, but that sort of systematic. information is not interesting to the people who are in charge of public

affairs now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's just extremely frustrated. And then they, you know, and so then they say, okay, this guy is the 50th person to do this. And you want to go and fact check that. And there's no way to fact

check it because they haven't given you enough information at the time. The Inspiration 4 team got away with a lot of those that they couldn't be fact-checked. I tried to call them on it, but, you know, yeah. I don't know if you saw the thing about, yeah, in fact, I mean, hey, the Arsenal seems awesome. Yeah.

She was not the first person in space with a prosthetic. Nope. Turns out. Maybe the first acknowledged person in space with a prosthetic, but I'll give with that. But, you know, so all of these things, right, are other reasons for why that might not be public. But it's the same kind of story. It's the dumbing down of public information means you have to work really hard

to get the historical record of the level where you can fact-check things and have things reconstruct missions. And that's what I want to try and do is I'm going to reconstruct the space age. You know, I want through it. Just to have an easy goal to achieve, yeah. Yeah.

And this is, you know, one of my passion project is the deep space catalog. I've got a first version of it out there, but this is a second version coming in a couple of years, probably, which is the orbital data for all of the deep space probes. Because NORAD doesn't track them, right? Right, right, right. and so to find out what was the what were the orbital parameters of for example perseverance center stage in orbit round the sun not an easy thing to find out no no and and so and then where is it now well if you don't have the orbital parameters you don't know right with the

CubeSats that were on Insights cruise stage that got ejected. Same deal with them, right? We kind of knew where they were when they were at Mars, but now they're just out there. We have approximate orbital elements, but not current track. They're just, as far as I'm concerned,

they're future fodder for an anti-satellite operation. That's what they are at the moment. Well, or, you know, or they are, you know, future fodder for a planetary protection violation. that's totally true yeah yeah those ones at least i have seen the math on some of those those calculations and they do they do get that that percentage probability down pretty low

well but they only ran it out so far i mean there was a really nice paper done by one of the guys who does um long-term solar system stability calculations and he wrote a paper on in a great title um about something about cars. It was about propagating the Tesla orbit around the Sun and saying

what's the probability that the Falcon Heavy Tesla will impact a planet someday. Or impact the Sun or be ejected from the solar system. And so he did all of this, you know, integrated the orbit for millions of years,

right? And there's some statistical, you know, there's some uncertainty, so you do it statistically and get percentages for what might happen to it. Hmm. Yeah. Well, okay. That's cool. So I'm trying to think if I had another question too, because I think we got into it.

The D-Space stuff was really, I think, where I wanted to make sure the conversation got to because there's, there's the, I remember watching it. I think it was a tweet from you, Jonathan, at some point where you were tracking, maybe it was Cassini with like all the different pieces because like when Hoygens came out. Oh that's right. I listed all the different pieces that had come off of it. Yeah, there was like a cover on it. There's like there's like this weird panel now. It's like when you have a neutral mass spectrometer device, they have a cover on it to protect it from contamination that they eject at some

point during the mission. And if you're very lucky, you can find a paper that says when they did it. And then you knew, we're nowhere in Cassini was at the time and so you know what its orbit might be around the sun. So you know, there's this tiny little instrument cover in solar orbit with these parameters or that. And so, yeah, it takes a lot of tracking down to find that because it's no one's job to do it. Unlike in low Earth orbit, where it's space force's job to keep track of that. It's no one's job to keep track of the deep space catalog. So I've made it my job. And so there's now slightly over a thousand objects in the deep space catalog. And, you know, a lot of them are, yeah, it's lost, but here's, you know,

here's where it was last seen, right? It was last seen on this date going that way is what I'm trying to write down. How is there a thousand out there? Well, including lunar stuff. And, yeah, there's a... I mean, it's a lot of parts, man. Insight was how many parts, you know? Right, exactly.

You've got to, I don't count. When you're talking every time a hatch blows out of these things, right, you have to figure out like how fast that was ejected. Perseverance, right, has these mass balance devices that get ejected during descent. But they go to the ground, though, right? All that stuff is on Mars. So, like, there's like a centaur and then like, Mark, you know, like, I'm trying, I'm thinking like, okay, so.

The bolt that came off of Lucy's solar panel that didn't. Yeah, I don't have that, but, yeah. Zuma. I knew Zuma was going to get into this conversation. You keep saying, I'm trying to fill in blanks. I'm like, there's one big blank that no one filled in yet. A big empty role. I mean, I think it's pretty, I mean, what the mystery about Zuma is what agency owned.

That's true. As you don't know, right, Zuma was the code name for this payload that was launched on a Falcon 9. And unlike most payloads, the payload adapter was a special one that wasn't SpaceX as it was the Northrop Grumman's

as part of the payload, integrated as part of the payload. And it failed. So they say, I am 100% 99.5%. All right, that's good. That the story, as we've told it is right,

that it was, they reached orbit, they commanded payload separation, payload separation didn't happen. Meanwhile, the Falcon 9 was continuing its program. It goes, okay, I've released the payload now. I'm going to deorbit myself in the ocean. And so it happily deorbited itself in the ocean with this incredibly expensive satellite still attached.

And I kind of never thought about the fact that we might be able to like Glomar Explorer this and pull something off the bottom of the ocean. Go find Zuma. Yeah, yeah. Like some part. Yeah, somewhere over, I can't remember. I think the Indian Ocean. Yeah, most of those Falcon 9 upper stages just kind of fall into the Indian Ocean, don't they? Well, it varies depends.

The one, the upper stages for Dragon tend to go in the southern ocean, like southwest of Australia. Whereas this one was more like northwest Indian Ocean, if I remember correctly. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. And there are some that go even like in the Pacific, east of New Zealand. So it sort of depends on the insertion orbit. But anyway, yeah, there's a lot of hardware, melted, charred hardware on the bottom of various oceans. Here's the last thing I want to do before we talk, or I guess we get a lightning round. But what I find interesting is your catalog that you've been building since you were eight out of a magazine or whatever.

it was that you were writing stuff down. How critical is all of that to your 80 kilometer paper from years ago? I just find this storyline so compelling that you were writing stuff down from when you're eight and then you've built up so much that you can run statistics on. The reality actually goes the other way. I'm making a catalog of things in space. And so I had to decide what counted as things in space. Okay, so your entire life is driven on what you need to complete this list, essentially. Yes, that's exactly right, yeah. And as a byproduct, you have completely redefined a 50-year-old argument.

Yeah, I mean, I learned Russian in high school so that I could translate the satellite launch announcements in Pravda. You know, yeah, in so many ways. Well, let's say I've used the list as an excuse to, you know, to go down rabbit holes of various kinds that have led me in a lot of fun places. And so, yeah, and the 80-kilometer line one, where does space begin, very consciously came out of, you know, who's in the astronaut list, what launches, what rocket launches are in the suborbital space launch list. I have to decide where to put the line. And I wasn't just going to put a hundred because it just seemed to me like, no, that's pulled out of someone's weird orifice.

And so, you know, I started asking the question and read what had been done about it and did my own math. And then, yeah, as I said, I realized that I needed to do the common calculation, which means I needed to understand atmospheric physics, which means I needed to read it. a lot of papers and do some math and develop some code. And so after a while I had the code that reproduces the, it re-implaints the NRL atmospheric model and ran that a million times for different solar activity states. And so that means I had to investigate, you know, where to get the best solar activity list from.

And so, yeah, there's so many different rabbit holes. I had to go down to, and then, you know, coming out from the other side to investigating the history of high-altitude aircraft and how high is the highest aircraft and what counts and what doesn't, and balloons and so on. And so just a lot of research over a long period of time to keep, you know, beating on this question and testing, all right, does this make sense? What makes sense? What is my gut telling me when I amass this large amount of data and, you know,

and see if it's telling me a consistent story. And in the end, I was actually, I mean, the reason for the paper is that I was really surprised how consistent the story is. You know, that I was expecting, for example, my atmospheric calculations to show, um, uh, did we freeze and lose Anthony?

Yeah, he's a little frozen right now. I'm working that out there. You can hear it. Um, you know, like I was expecting the answer to be, well, okay. Depending on the solar activity, you know, the answer is either 70 kilometers or 90 kilometers or 100 kilometers or 120 kilometers, right? It might have been really vague. And in fact, for, you know, a given ballistic coefficient is actually really narrow.

The atmosphere changes a lot up at 300 kilometers. Ah, he's back. We're going to the second camera. I don't know what's going on with the other one right now. Yeah. And then, you know, but down at, it. 80 100 kilometers actually the atmosphere doesn't change that much due to cellular activity or other things. And so it turns out that, you know, it's the answer is 80 plus or minus five, essentially.

And so that gave me the confidence to go, yeah, I think you can really define a line. I mean, it's an arbitrary line still at some level. But if you're going to use the common argument, the line is relatively well defined. And so that's nice. It means, you know, it's a, it's a fairly meaningful number. And it fits with where things break up. And it fits with where satellite perjee's can go down to and all that. And so, you know, like several different lines of argument all solidified in this sort of, you know, plus or minus five kilometer kind of range.

And so that made me think, okay, this is worth, worth publishing. Yeah, you've got a lot of converts in our listener community, our viewer community. I know that for sure, because they all, because I know Anthony had you on the show to talk about it. And then he, I know he was converted. Anthony's like that, like a McDowell convert. And he convinced everybody else. And so here we are. So that's what we use now. I don't get into any fights about whether Virgin Galactic went to space or not.

It's not worth it. No, it's just stupid spaceship. Yeah. I mean, it's also, you know, for me, I mean, I think scientifically, the argument is good, but it's also more interesting as an answer for me. And it helps you build the list out, importantly. Including X-15 pilots is more interesting than not including them, you know. Where can you like not breathe anymore?

That's actually more like 20. Everett. Way lower, right? Yeah, Mount Everest. Yeah, there are other choices you can make, right? And it's a question of what, so I'm not arguing that. This is the only possible definition of space. But I think it's a better one than round number 100.

And so, you know. I like the dunking on 100 kilometers because it's the only time that we can dunk on metric as being arbitrary. And I enjoy that. I mean, I am, you know, as someone, you know, European educated, I use metric all the time. So for me, it's 80 kilometers, it's not 50 miles, right? but that's a different thing from picking a round number for your for your boundary and I try not to do that. So I've also been working on, you know, where is the boundary of deep space? Oh, yeah.

You get into all this with like hills spheres. Oh, yeah. I haven't thought too deeply about that one, but now I'm now I'm kind of intrigued. So maybe we have to have another show. Addendum. Is it in your lighting round? In my paper. You can read it in my paper.

Okay. I'll look it up. And we can chat. You know, all right, all right. Cool. So should we do lighting around? What do you think? Are we at that point?

The segment's called terminal count. We always forget. Terminal. Yeah, we always, yeah. The listeners renamed it and we never remember. And we never ever remember. So, okay, so Jonathan, this is a fun, fun round of questions. The point is, of course, just kind of shoot an answer out.

Don't think too deeply about it. But they're not as hard as you might be afraid they're going to be. So don't stress too much, but they're just, We always start with the calibration question, and it's very topical at what altitude does space begin? That's question one. It's a very easy one. All right. 80 kilometers.

80 kilometers, correct. I also would have accepted where you can't breathe anymore. Apparently, Jake's new argument. One person was suggesting on Twitter that you should ask me not just about the common line, but about the Ripley line. Oh, yeah. I don't even know what the Ripley line is. The Ripley line is, so there's a sad. doesn't travel in space, right?

And so there's a point, there's an altitude at which you can no longer hear someone scream. It's a legitimate argument. It's a legitimate argument. Alien, that space is in space, no one can hear you scream. So that's the spot. How high do you have to be before no one can hear you scream? And that's the Ripley line. Jake, I think I'm not lying.

I think this might be our key to the 15 minutes of fame, this test in particular. Okay. Anyway, I'm sorry. Carry on. Question two. Lightning round. Question two. The Russian ASAT operation test demonstration was A, good, B, bad, or C, heck and bad.

Hecking bad. Heck and bad. Seriously. Seriously. Seriously. Double plus ungood. Double plus ungood. Condemned three condemnations in this podcast.

No. No plus ones on that one. Okay, question three. Do you even remember what you were doing before Russia blew up a satellite this week? Because it feels like that has taken over your entire life. Right. Well, you know, that's not the other thing I've been doing this week. I also gave our Chandra, my group's twice annual report to the NASA suits about how we've been spending their money.

So that was a very stressful week. Kind of an important meeting. this week. And so I spent the weekend preparing that. And we just did the users committee as well. So I've been working a lot on Chandra stuff and preparing for our annual software release and things like that. But there's also another project I'm working on in my spare time, which is the next phase of the general catalog of space objects. And that is going to be the mission logs for every satellite. And so I'm

writing the code that converts. I already have it in like latex form and I'm trying to make an HTML version that's nicely indexed and things like that. So I'm writing lots of code to map my latex source to various kinds of CSS and HTML. A very light workweek.

Yeah, exactly. I feel great about my work week. Just a little side project, yeah. Okay, question number four is going on CNN scary? Not anymore. I mean, it is a little because, you know, the thing is right, you got to wait. So how big a fool of myself can I make in front of millions of people life?

It's a good test. At this point, the answer is, I've already plumbed that pretty well. So it's not as scary as it used to be. I first did CNN for the mere reentry in 2001. So I've been doing this a while. So, you know, but yeah, sometimes, you know, sometimes I come off a TV hit and I'm like, oh, I think that went pretty well. I think I looked, you know, reasonably sensible.

And then sometimes I go, okay, I can never show my face and probably can be able to. And so you just never know how it's going to go. And there's the black screen thing that we were talking about pre-show where when you're on that you're not looking at anything you're just looking at a black screen Right and there's this

there's there's the light travel delay Right if you're travel you know And so so you know it's like Oh now we go to Jonathan McDowell And I'm going And then you know Two seconds later I'm like Oh right yes

Hi Anderson So You know And so that doesn't help you look swath. And then your name's misspelled and they're like planet, you know, two, three, one, seven instead of the actual handle. France 24 kept calling me James McDowell this week. So that was a little bit of going. Oh, Jimmy McDowell. Yeah. Yeah. We're here with, uh, Joynethon McDougal who is going to do.

But, you know, that's not so. I'd rather, you know, if they're going to get something wrong, I can get that wrong. Don't get the space stuff wrong, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. Question five. your favorite space debris removal idea go oh I'm going to offend some friends here I mean I like the net I like the net that removed debris used I don't know if you've seen that video but throwing the net and reeling it in

that makes sense to me and it looks fun okay good awesome because it's like Spider-Man in space it's great it is like Spider-Man in space yeah yeah It's like fishing, really. Yeah, it's a fish controller. Question six, what percentage of your free time was swallowed up when Starlink started launching 60 satellites every three weeks or whatever it was? Yeah, I mean, actually, most of my science time for the past two years has been that. And not only that, it's been like the titanium rods or whatever, the deployment rods.

Well, it's not about that. I mean, yes, I've been also, the piece of, the like Jonathan's Space Report part of following Starlink has been a relatively small part. I've automated that pretty well at this point. But the astronomer part of assessing the impact on ground-based astronomy and being part of the committees and the conference organizers that have been discussing this issue, we've had a couple of U.S. conferences, we've had a couple of conferences joint with the IAU. in the UN. And so we're really trying to build a coalition to kind of get the night sky as something that's seen as part of the environment that we should protect. And so that that's been taking up a great deal of my professional time over the past two years. And then yeah, the other side of me that does the web pages is like, okay, yeah, and I, um, five minutes every day, I run the code that

checks which Starlink satellites have moved from drift to ascent, from Ascent to operational, from operational to orbit lowering, and, you know, manually verify that and update the graphs that are on my web pages. So it's all basically, I just have a, the process that I type, you know, I go to the right directory, I type make and it does all that. And then I make some manual edits to the once that I think, okay, need to be changed status, and then I type, make copy and it pushes it to the web. We've got a dud, and then everyone runs with that. Yeah, and so, yeah, exactly. So it's, it's pretty, it's the sum manual, but it's pretty automated. It's pretty efficient. And that's a lot of what I do is automating things so that, you know, I can cope with the flood

of data because there's so much data. Okay, well, follow up question to that, then, number seven. We just saw a new news item this week from Kepler Communications, 114,000 satellites in this application. I don't know what the deal with it is. But the question is, do you have to upgrade your computer now? I mean, the answer to that question, do I have to upgrade my computer is always yes. I was just on the, I get my computers built by a company called Thinkmate, which is out of the street in Norwood. They make custom-built Linux boxes. And so this one I'm speaking to you on now is like a $10,000 a Linux box with all the bells and whistles.

And, you know, it's a few years old now, so maybe I need a new one. I need a better graphics card because this one is having trouble driving the, let's see if I can do this without losing the video. Oh, my Lord. driving the six monitors including the main 49-inch monitor. A live look into the McDowell station. Yeah, and so, whoops. Oh, no.

Man, that's more monitors than when they have, when they're driving Canada arm on the space station. That's far more monitors, yeah. Oh, you got your camera's now way down there. Yeah, yeah, I'm going to fix it. Here we are. I have a device called a pen that's actually the thing up. So, hopefully that'll do for now.

let's see incredible yeah it spends all this money on monitors can't get a camera stand yeah right exactly I've got to fix the okay that's a good bet um so

yeah so anyway so I have toys and and you know midlife crisis I spend on on computers instead of cars and um and um

yeah it's it is going to be a chance challenge keeping up with all the satellites. It's already a challenge keeping up with the Starlings. And so, yeah, I just have to automate more stuff. And that's the problem because... You and SpaceX both. Well, that's true. Yeah, yeah, right. You know, the reason that I don't do things so automated, right, is that there's a lot of errors in the data that come through, right? You really have to spot, okay, this TLE is bogus. This. This piece of information is just not right. And so, but you can, you can kind of, you know,

so I've got a lot better at running pre-filters on things to spot where things don't look consistent and pull them up for me rather than having to look at every piece of data. And so that's going to be the challenge going forward. Okay. Question number eight, what is the most bizarre or obscure object you have tracked in space? I mean there's a lot of competition for that my favorite satellite name

I'll tell you that is orbiting frog odolith one Yes I know this one I know this one yes this is like an old Soviet I know it was American NASA science experiment where they flew two frogs on a non-return trip and we're studying there they wired up their ear autoliths right to to study their adaptation to balance, but it's just such a ludicrous satellite. Say it again. Say the name again. Orbiting frog otolith one. Is that better than two? Like, what's the deal with that? There was only one. They numbered it and there's just one? Right. Yeah, that's what are you going to do? I like that when your ambition outstrips your execution. You name stuff number one, you know, the first annual.

I made that mistake. Yeah, Atlas equates our energy distributions, paper one, and I still have paper two, 20 years later. So that's, that happens. So wait, were they, were they in like a little habitat? What's the deal? Yeah, they were in a time. It was, the satellite was basically a tiny little habitat with an attitude control system and the telemetry system. So.

Look at this. I never knew this. If you want to learn more about it, Anthony, I did recreate it for KSP history. No way. You did? Yeah, I totally did. That's awesome. I'm trying to think of this any other really weird.

You know, they're weird looking satellites, of course. And, and, but, and sort of orbital mechanics weirdness is always fun. Oh, I'll accept that answer. Like, for example, HGS1 slash Asia Sat 3, the communications satellite that they rescued by sending it around the moon. Oh, that's a great one. Yes, that's a great one. That's a good one. Is that the one they tried to like regain control out of like the back of a McDonald's?

Oh, I see three. I see three. Yeah, yeah. International Sun Earth Explorer 3, also known as the International Cometri Explorer. That's a really important thing about orbital mechanics. That was the first Lagrange point spacecraft. Yeah, it had an awesome trajectory. It went everywhere.

I feel like we skipped over the McDonald's very quick. What's with this McDonald's situation? So NASA wasn't interested, but it repassed the Earth in 2014 after having been sent out into solar orbit. And so Keith Cowan was that one McDonald's that we could do this from? What kind of weird sci-fi? Well, they were on low budget. So they had a little shortwave radio transmitter, and they commanded this satellite from, yeah, some parking lot or something, I guess. Yeah, it's legit, man.

it's a real thing. I was writing that while they were on a low budget as a title, but I'm sorry. We did that one in KSP history as well. Wow. Yeah, it's cool. But they, it was like they got like,

I want to say that they made contact with it, but they weren't able to like get control of it. Yeah, well, they weren't able to make an orbit change because the thrusters had frozen up or something like that. Right, right, right, right. You know, so or it leaked out or whatever. So they talk to it, but they couldn't send it on a new mission.

Okay. Good ones. Yeah, good ones. That's some Wikipedia rabbit holes to dive down right now. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, everyone's got homework now. Question nine, do you like being a meme in partnership with Emily Lakdala? And do you know what I'm talking about?

I don't think I've seen this meme. No, okay, so there's like a really great tweet interaction that you had with Emily where it was like the perseverance landing and you made a joke about this time it's aliens because perseverance is an alien to the Martians. Oh, right. Okay. Yeah, yeah. And Emily, you're an asshole, right. Yeah. And Emily replied just with a nice, like, succinct Jonathan period. And that's become a meme. We use that now. Every time someone. makes a really corny joke, we just say Jonathan. We have a meme and we have a custom emoji. Just Emily locked them all his head. I will own that. I will own that.

I do have a tendency to be the but actually guy that I really should try to rein in a bit more. All right. You know, I do it in a warm, friendly way, not in a, oh, you're an idiot, you're wrong way. That's my, the only defendant. 100%. Yeah, totally, totally, totally. All right. Final question of the lighting around.

True or false? It's an easy one. True or false? You can get a whole lot done with a good old trustee to access plot. What do you think? Hell, yes. Yes. That, you know, I don't, I mean, people complain about my graphics, right?

But, you know, do you want something pretty or do you want to know the answer? Do you get a lot of complaints about them? Oh, yeah. People all the time. You're like, oh, you need to upgrade your graphics, Jonathan. To be fair, you did just tell us you have a $10,000 computer. Yes, and I use it to do calculations. Stupid, you know.

He skipped from the GPU. You just got all CPU. Yeah, yeah, exactly. They're running all the monitors, so there's no room for a graph prettying in there. I just don't care, you know? I, let's say this way, I think my graphs are pretty. And the fact that my aesthetic doesn't match the aesthetic of the, the younger generation is not my problem.

Maybe a little drop shadow. What does that add, though? This was my only chance to make an okay boomer joke on all phenomenal. And I didn't take it. That is fair. I am technically a boomer, yeah. I love the grass. I use them all the time.

Yeah, they're fantastic. I drop me into my show notes so that when I'm talking about stuff, I can reference it. And a more serious thing is, you know, so the same is true of my website. site, right? It's, I recently upgraded from 1994 HTML to about, you know, 2003 HTML. Nice, nice. I've got CSS now on some of the page.

Wow, that's a big leap, yeah. It's on H-M.3.1, I think. Might even be in the X-Html days. I don't know exactly the timeline. And so, yeah, I mean, the website went up in like late 94, I think. And before that,

it was on FTP, you know. It was pre-web in that. sense and so um and i you know and it doesn't have you know it's pretty basic because i i edit the pages live in emacs in an as text editor right i don't have some you know you have backed up right like do we should we hook you up with like github or something oh no i have backups okay great yeah just making sure and and uh this is blowing my world because I'm like a new web developer. Like I've joined the industry like within the last couple of years.

And so like hearing about the... It's the old school way. It's true. That's a name I've not heard in a long time. Yeah, exactly. And so, but you know what? It's like because it's fast. Right?

And it works. This is not my day job. And so... You've got a system. It does what you needed to do. You don't need to over complicated. Right. Exactly.

And it's... My job is to get content out there onto the internet. Right? And to finish your list. Yeah, exactly. Technically, that's all you need that. Do the research and to push it out there as efficiently as I can. And then because it's all CCBY, it's all open, you know, creative commons.

If you want something pretty, you make it yourself. And as long as you say it comes, for me, you can make something pretty. And I would rather that other people spend the time to do the pretty, and I spend the time doing the orbit calculations. Okay.

That's it, right there. Mic drop. Is that you under the lightning round? That's question 10, yeah. Should we do some picks? I think we should do some picks, yep. All right. Who wants to start? You got one, Anthony?

I do. It's a plus one of your last pick, because I was on vacation between the last show and now for a little while. Oh, my other sub-pick, National Parks are freaking great. I went to a bunch of National Parks on vacation. I went to arches, canyon lands, Capitol Reef, Rocky Mountain National Park. I saw a bunch of elk. It was awesome.

All I wanted to see in my life is some elk. I saw a lot of elk. It's great. They're so majestic. They're just very, anyway. It's great vacation. I watched Foundation, Jake. I haven't watched the finale of season one.

I haven't watched it yet. I'm very suspicious because it's not really... I haven't read any of the foundation stuff. Oh, okay. So I'm going in just totally unaware. Same as me. And it starts out very bizarre. Yeah.

Season. And it gets less bizarre as it goes on and pretty engaging. And I'm digging it. I haven't watched the finale yet, but I'm digging it. You're exactly where I am. One episode left, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'm digging it.

I'm really like it. It's basically a shoot-em-up show instead of a show about... philosophy and politics and so. Yeah, a little bit, yeah, a little bit. It's not a ton of philosophy and politics. No, no. Yeah, yeah, it's, I don't know. I mean, there are definitely flaws in the original books,

but I still would have liked a more direct adaptation. Yeah, yeah, I think so. So I, but eventually I'll probably break down and watch it. But right now I'm binging on, um, uh, Wheel of Time and Cowboy Bebop. Okay, good. Is that your pick? And, and Discovery Season 4 is, uh, no, no, my pick. Okay, I've got a couple of, I've got some astronomy books for you.

Oh, nice. Oh, excellent. Um, we don't get a lot of books. We used to. Originally, we came out of the gate hot with books, Jake. These are like books are something that are, they're like YouTube videos, but they're sort of frozen. It's like a normal website if you take everything away but the HTML, right? Right, exactly.

So this is a book that about a couple years ago. Oh, I know this one. I know this one, yeah. Yeah. Planet Factory. And I'm recommending this because, you know, one of the biggest changes in astronomy, over the past 10, 20 years or so, has been the study of exoplanets.

And this is a really nice, fairly up-to-date analysis of a description for the public of all the different, how diverse the planets are that we're finding and how they're all horrible places that would kill you in various different ways. And I think Elizabeth Tasker, who works for Jaxa and is a planet formation theory, has done a really nice job in this book,

and I think people will enjoy it. She's a great Twitter follow if you want to follow Jackson stuff too. She's a great person to... Girl and Cat on Twitter. Girl and Cat, yeah. Yeah, good cat content and good Jaxa content. Right, and she's really transformed Jax's English outreach.

Yes, 100%. Yeah. This is another more recent book that's just come out. Let's see, I keep, I'm being reflected. Asteroids. I like that. So this is how love, fear, and greed will determine our future in space is the subtitle. Wow.

And so this is by my colleague Martin Elvis, who used to be a quasar astronomer, but is now studying asteroid mining. Well, that's a pivot. Yeah, yeah. Well, and there's a reason, right? His motivation is that astronomy satellites are getting too expensive. expensive. And so we have to change the economics to space if we're going to afford astronomy satellites. And the best way to change the economics of space is, you know, and this is the greed part, is to make money out of asteroid mining. And then that'll

bring the cost of being in space down. I understand why you two get along, because this is like the version of your 80 kilometer paper for just finishing your list. My only mission is to build astronomy telescopes and what I need to do is make a shitload of money so what I'm going to do is mine asteroids. Right, exactly. It's like

it's not being intimidated by the big ask. That's awesome. Let's change all of human history in order to achieve this technical thing. But this is Martin's a fun guy and the book is

engaging and fun. And so you won't agree with everything in it. I don't agree with everything in it, but it's a nice view of the various ways in which we might engage with the asteroids for science, for planetary defense. That's the fear part. And for mining, which is the greed part. That sounds awesome. I'm definitely reading that one. That sounds great. So those are my picks for today. Love it. Cool. Anthony, I have one that I am kind of embarrassed to say it took me this long to share. And also not just to share, but also just to like have in my life.

Like I knew about this thing and I didn't look at it for a long time until like this year. And I'm embarrassed about it. I'm like racking my brain for what this could be. Yeah, yeah. It's a website. Okay. And it's Jonathan, you'll like this because it's kind of an old school website. It's been around a while.

and it uses like an old PHPBB message board style. Like it's pretty, it's pretty vintage. Unmanned spaceflight.com. Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't like the name because robotics spaceflight. That's how old it is. It's as old as the website, yes. That's how old it is.

The name is that bad. But yeah, so this is, you know, there you're bringing it up. Yeah, it looks like a form for anyone wondering. It's the probe equivalent of NASASpaceFlight.com. Yes, yes, it is. Yeah. A project of the Planetary Society. I keep meaning to spend more time on it and I keep forgetting to do it because I'm too busy, but I need to be, thank you for reminding me about it because I need to spend more time on.

Take out these drop shadows between data access, image processing, news, discussion, exploration. Very classic. There are some CSS going on in this website. Very classic. Good, yeah. Only I could learn how to do that, yeah. But yeah, no, it's great because there's like all this, you know, there's this community of a fantastic Mars. image processors and analyzers of the data. People that will go into like the PDS, like the planetary data system and pull out information that I am just not quite willing to make that extra step every week.

And so I can learn a lot from them. And then there's just some gorgeous pictures, like all the mosaics and stuff. And so I've now incorporated it into my podcast research stream into my flow. And so it's hopefully it's getting better. But it's a great website. And I'm glad I finally kick myself in the butt to go again. I never knew about it. I never knew about it.

I need to thank you for that because, yeah, that's a good tip. Yeah. I know I think Phil Stook shows up there now. Yeah. Who is, if you want another pick, pick Phil Stook and his work on making atlases of the rover tracks on various worlds. Just, you know, that to me is like a Jonathan-level project. It totally is. It 100% is.

I would have had to do if Phil hadn't done it. Yeah, you're like, thanks, Phil. Yeah, thanks Phil for taking care of that for me. Yeah, if there's one guy that knows exactly where the rovers are and which direction they're facing who isn't at JPL, like that's basically. Right, right. Yeah, yeah, it's him. He's Canadian, too.

I think he's in British Columbia. So I'm actually kind of mad. I never met up with him when I lived there. So, awesome. Okay. So that's Picks. Anthony, we have some news we also need to cover before we wrap up the show. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. We have some fun announcements to make, right? So how do I want to say this? We're going weekly. We're going weekly. There's going to be more off nominal. That's the top line. So we've been doing the show.

Yeah, it's going to be offer nominal. It's going to be every week. So, you know, we've, I guess the, the, the, the story here is that, you know, we've had a lot of, uh, interesting things that we've wanted to talk about and there just like aren't enough shows, just straight up. So like, we get one, one shot a month. And, uh, if it's like current events or like an interesting person or an interesting topic we're going to dig into, there's never quite enough time.

Um, so we decided we're going to, uh, expand the show a little bit. So we're kicking off a new kind of off nominal. This show will stay here. is not change. Every month will be here. But every week, in addition to this, we're going to kick off the new off nominal happy hour. That's what we're calling it.

It's going to be in a regular time slot Thursdays at 4 p.m. Eastern. I think they got that time right. Anthony, is that correct? 4 p.m. Eastern? Yep. So that's 3. 1 p.m. in Pacific 4.5.

1 p.m. Pacific. 4 p.m. Eastern. And I think that's 2100 UTC for all of our European friends. So we get like a good, a good cross section of who can show up to this. And we hope to do more different things, I guess. I don't want to constrain it too much, but we got lots of fun ideas. Hopefully we'll be to do new things, more things more frequently, explore things that we wouldn't have had time for. And it's going to be right here on YouTube.

So hopefully that's exciting for everybody. And hopefully YouTube is fixed by then because there's a lot of issues. Yeah. Yeah. Apparently the stream's been a little buggy today. But yeah, that's what we're announcing today. So we're pretty excited about that. It's going to be more time to hang out.

That's pretty much it. Straight up. Yeah. More drinks. More shows. Details then. Yeah. That's the optimal way.

It starts the week after Thanksgiving. Yeah, December 2nd, it'll be our first show. We're not going to do one on Thanksgiving Day, obviously. But it's coming up soon. And I hope you like it. So stay tuned for more information on that coming up in the, I don't know, Twitter feed. If you're in the off nominal Discord, if you're a patron of Anthony or I,

you'll see more information there. It's going to be good. And if you're in Australia, I think you can turn it on in the morning as you're getting ready for work in the future, wherever you live. I don't really understand those times. I don't really well. I haven't looked that one up.

I think it's like 8 a.m. in Canberra. Oh, that works out pretty great. I think you can make it work. If you're on the other side, is it Perth that's on the West Coast? That's not going to work out. But, yeah. So that's how it is. Anyway, so I hope you enjoy that, everybody.

I'm excited for it. That's what we got. Jonathan, do you have stuff to plug? What should people check out? If they don't know Jonathan McDowell or Jimmy McDougal, where should they go? Jimmy McDougal.com. Planet 4589.org. Can you tell me what the number's about?

Oh, yeah. So there is a minor planet in the asteroid belt, 4589 McDowell that is named after me. Oh, that's like the coolest thing I've ever heard of my life. If you've got your own planet right, you've got to plug it. Jeez. So, yeah, that's my asteroid, 4589. Now, which section of asteroids is that? Is that the Greed one that's its named after you?

Or which section of that book is it about? Oh, no, I don't think my asteroid shows up in Martin's book. That's probably agreed. Yeah, yeah. It's named after you. So, yeah, maybe. But, yeah, so that's the website, Planet 4589.org. Or you can just Google Jonathan's Space Report.

and that'll take you to it. And Jonathan's Space Report is that, you know, monthly these days, a summary of everything that's been going on in space, but on the same website, you'll also find the general catalog of space objects, which is my master index to every rocket launch, every satellite, every suborbital mission.

It's all in there with a lot of documentation about exactly how you want to think about it. And I've recently added a glossary page, for like, you know, the five different definitions of the word satellite and things like that. One of them is you when you were eight. No, that's right. Now I should add that one. So, yeah, so, you know, find me as Planet 4589 on Twitter. If you have questions, feel free to send them at me on Twitter, and I'll do my best.

They'll show up in the tweet deck. One of the 19 columns he's got, yeah. Right, right, exactly. Yeah, yeah. I'll look out here in my notifications, and that's really the easiest way to find me. So, yeah. So thanks for having me on.

It's been great to meet you guys, and I'm being a fun chat. Yeah, it was great to have you. This is really fun. I learned all the things I wanted to learn, I think. And then more. Now I have to learn more questions. I have more questions.

That's always a good interview when you have more questions. But Jonathan needs a day off before that. Yeah, he does. Yeah, I think tomorrow is napping. And then, because we have more satellite constellation and stuff on Monday, I have important briefings and things like that. Fancy. Yeah.

So I'm like, I'm okay. I'd really like to do some actual astronomy one of these days. It's going to happen. So there you go. So yeah, tomorrow is an actual day off, I think. Should we close on a view of Jonathan's great socks? Oh, yeah, we heard that you have Chandra socks. Look at these things.

We're big into space socks around here. So we're definitely digging Chandra socks. You can see the solar panels on the main team. So Chandra, for those of you don't know, is the X-ray cousin of the Hubble. It's the mission that I work on. We've been in space since 1999, still doing great science, and now we have socks. And so one of the great observatories, right? Isn't it part of the great observatories?

Yeah. And we didn't even talk about it. Yeah, well, that can be the next. Yeah. We should. Seriously, we should talk about that. That'd be awesome. Yeah.

Yeah, I'd love to. We have more shows to do it on now, so. Yeah, weekly. We talked about that. Yeah, Thursday at 4 is our weekly Center for Astrophysics Colloquium. So. Sounds like a thing we can join. You'll never be on FPR.

We're still doing the regular show, so we'll do it on the regular show. Yeah, but Sunday night, I might be able to help out. Sweet. And yeah, when I come up to Boston, where I've never been yet. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. We love to show you run. Awesome.

Cool. Okay. Is that it? Jake. Should we say bye? I think that's the show. I think we should say goodbye now. I think that's it.

Say goodbye to this no good, very bad stream or whatever it's, whatever is happening on YouTube land here. Bye, everybody. Bye-bye. Okay, bye-bye.