Off-Nominal - 47 - The Birdy in French Guiana

Episode Date: December 19, 2021

Jake and Anthony are joined by Matthew Russell of the The Interplanetary Podcast to talk about the wackiest space news of the year and to crown the winners of the 2021 Off-Nominees.DrinksDouble Blizzard - Tröegs Independent Brewing - UntappdWandle - Sambrook's Brewery - UntappdToro Petate · Christmas Stout - Cuerno De Toro - UntappdCerveza Patito - Mérida, Yucatán - UntappdTopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 47 - The Birdy in French Guiana - YouTubeHappy Hour - Off-NominalHappy Hour - YouTubeOff-Nominal Happy Hour - Dec 9, 2021 (with John Kraus) - YouTubeOff-Nominal Happy Hour - Dec 16, 2021 - YouTubePicksWatch The Expanse - Season 6 | Prime VideoFor All Mankind | Apple TV+Geostorm (2017) - IMDbGeostorm - Rotten TomatoesOff-Nominal on Twitter: “because you come here for great content, we'd to share with you the top ten reasons we think every space fan should watch the 2017 warner brothers science fiction disaster film geostorm starring gerard butler buckle up anomalies cause this is the bad movie you love to hate”Event Horizon (1997) - IMDbEvent Horizon - Rotten TomatoesFollow MatthewThe Interplanetary Podcast (@Interplanetypod) / TwitterThe Interplanetary Podcast | UK | Space ExplorationRecovering Queen : The Queen PodcastFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterOff-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine start. It's a good song. It still works. Negative return. Welcome to space. It's that time of the year, Jake. It's December. I have an epic Christmas sweater on.

Let me show this song. Yeah, let's see this. This is pretty good. Whoa! It's got everything. It's a NASA worm. It's got rockets. It's got Saturn's.

Wow. This was approximately $20 at TJ Max, and my wife found it. She texted me a picture joking. and was like, look at this thing I found. And I was like, I need it. It's the best Christmas jumper I've ever seen. I just thought it was a standard Christmas jumper. It's a NASA warmer.

Oh, my God. Yeah. We were joking before. I had one last year, but I didn't bring it with me because I would never wear it here. So I'm a very light. I'm a very light Mexican Christmas sweater here. That's great good. Yeah, it's short sleep.

I'm sporting very old merch which is my right there we go there we go it was a joke at the time about the American space war yeah you're really militarizing space over there Matt oh we should introduce Matt we didn't even introduce Matt

we forgot how this works Jake no yeah yeah we didn't forget how it works we never established how it works and then never followed the thing and we never established so we have our friend Matthew Russell here from the interplanetary podcast. We have been friends for a while now doing the space podcast thing together.

And we thought we need someone with energy and excitement and a good sense of humor to do the December episode of Offenol. The December podcast is kind of hallowed now. Matt, are you ready for this? Oh, well, I'll try and do it justice. I just don't part that you keep piling the pressure on now. Yeah. I'm trying to break you under the pressure because that's when I get your best word. Wow.

This is the old Matinee edition, too, so I feel like it's going to be a good time because we're spending the time zones again. Europeans have been spoiled this month because all the happy hours and now the main podcasts have all been accessible to European time zones. So you're welcome.

Merry Christmas, Europe. Should we start with what we're drinking? I think we should start with drinks, yeah. Matt, why don't you go first? or who wants to go first i'm trying to pull my focus here double blizzard right here trog's double blizzard IPA it is a jigs it's a not a jake size what's a jake size these days how many ounces we're talking for jake 22 ounces this is just a pounder as they call it

a pounder that's mostly just for me i guess neither of you would call it a pounder No. Awesome. It's 8.3, by the way. Just a nice percentage for 2 p.m. East Coast. Okay, I'm going to say we're kicking it off earlier today. That's good. Matt, what do you got today?

Well, I'm got to go driving, but I do stick to being very much a British person, and that is drinking cups of tea. Spilling tea on your teeth. Spilling cups of tea all over my thing. I'm trying to see if I can get it. So, but no, I'm drinking tea. But if I was drinking beer, I'd be drinking Sam Brooks Wendell, because there's a long story, which is quite good.

You're going to have to send that one to me. I'm not trying to spell that. I don't know what you just said. Well, yeah, it's the name of a river that runs through London. But weird coincidence, there's a guy called Mark Kelly, who's one of the, one of my patrons. Oh, not the astronaut? I know, he's not the astronaut. I got excited because I thought he was.

but it turns out that he runs a brewery that I used to visit when I used to work in London and it's the oldest brewery working brewery in London and he actually runs it and invited me over and it's like well I've been here before and this is the drink that I always used to drink so it was really really cool so Sambricks Wondell as a shout out to one of my awesome patrons so yeah that's right that's what I've been drinking but I'm actually drinking a cup of tea right right now but I thought I'd advertise for me mate and there's some yeah some product placement

going on there I was definitely product placement yeah I own a flavour when he gave me free pizza so I can't well I want to ask about the mug though because I've had this question about this logo this is a is this a Lego you is that what that is on there yeah it's a Lego me they used to be a Lego Jamie as well and when I when I made the Lego Jamie I

when I made the Lego Jamie I almost wet myself laughing because it looked so much like him. It's very square head. It is. He must have a really square head or something, but it was, I don't know what it was, but it was just brilliant,

which is one of the disappointing things that he's no longer on the logo, but you know. That's what you get. What can I do? That's what you get for bailing on the show. Yeah. No, he bailed and had a kid.

You know, what's more important, podcasts or procreating. That's what I want to know. You can do both. That's what I thought. We've got at least two out of three, three of us are living proof. You could do both. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I did it, you know.

Jake, what do you got? Where did you go to the beer company? I did go to the beer company, trademark, which is the beer store nearby to me. And I got, so I got two Christmas beers. So these are both local breweries. These are a little bit bigger, Anthony. So you're going to be able to find these on untapped when you did the links like the last time. Matt, last time I had a beer that was from the brewery so small that it did not have an internet presence. It was just like a garage brew. I just had to type whatever Jake said in in the show notes.

Sorry, you can't find a link. So this first one here is from a brewery called Guerno de Toro. And it is, they're both Christmas beer. So this is a, you know, a Navidad beer. And it says on it, I'll try and read it here. It's like very Christmassy stuff. There's like vanilla and anise. here maybe a little cinnamon and stuff like it's pretty pretty rad stuff but i just i love the label the label

is just amazing and then i have as my backup here uh this kind of matches your sweater anthony it's um from a brewery called batito uh which is here in merida and it is uh same sort of thing this is it but this is an imperial stout with chocolate and rum in it so uh it's going to be pretty intense this is the the stronger one so i'm going to do that one second i'm going to say you're saving that i'm going to ease into it so We'll start with the to-o here. That's what I'm going to go for. So, yeah, cheers.

Merry Christmas, everybody. Merry Christmas, Merry off nominees. Bottoms up. Matt, let's start. It's been a while since we chatted. We haven't had you on this show. We haven't been on your show in a while. I know, no, I know what's going on.

You kicked Jamie off. You kicked him off the logo. What else has been going on? I kicked him off. He wasn't pulling his weight. Well, I've got this string of sort of co-hosts now. So I've got a guy called Chris, who's a sort of direct replacement for Jamie.

He's a mate of mine. Looks a lot like a Lego guy. He does look like a Lego guy. He actually got a bit Lego hair. And yeah, so Chris, he's an actor and he's in various little things, but he's, he's a space enthusiast. I've got a couple of, you know Julio, of course. Julio of Praia, he comes on a little bit of co-hosting, but he's over prepping for

the Ariam launch. Yeah, he's got some stuff to do. right now. He's kind of an important show. I'm coming up, right? Yeah. I've got Lynn, uh, bulk Christmas,

who's a lovely, um, astrophysicist who's doing a PhD in exoplanets at the moment. So that's really cool. And Harriet, who works over at Astra scale, so she co-hosts as well. So I've got this kind of nice string and often my son

George as well, who was the original voice of the podcast when he was a young child. He comes on and does the occasional crazy, um, crazy ones where he's like seen some YouTube thing about fractals being the universe and stuff and he comes on and does that so that's quite cool so like I look forward to my future in this exactly kind of model I remember when you first started bringing him on like later in the podcast and his voice had changed from like when the when the originally recorded yeah and I was like

whoa that's George yeah it's funny yeah they do grow up it turns out time does progress even if we're all at our house for two years. Yeah. Oh, God, yeah. You can imagine being a teenager. We're locked in your house. Yeah, it's not the best. I mean, I locked myself as a teenager anyway just to play video games,

so it wouldn't have been that bad for me. Well, yeah, that's what my youngest son does. He just plays, you know, CSGO and all those kind of things. Yeah. Crazy. All right. They've given up on, they've given up on what's the Kerbal space program, I think. Oh, no.

I know, I know. George used to be very enthusiastic about it, but he's kind of all he does. It goes in waves. I fired it up in the last week or two and started, I'm figuring, you know, got some time off over the holidays. I think it's a terrible cycle. Yeah, I was thinking the exact same thing. I'm like, oh, man, I get some time off. I think I'm going to, I don't know, we'll see.

I'll have to figure out what I'm going to play. I'm going to do, but I need a new mission or something. I am pretty committed. I don't know what KSP 2 is going to get up to, but, like, I'm pretty committed to keeping a runnable version of curbel somewhere in my life so that when will is old enough that we can get back into it and it'll be like a retro game you know so i feel like i've got to like have a a vm or something that runs curbel just like always ready to go in case it's the moment yeah it'd be like me trying to teach george how to play tetris i know i think i probably will

end up like that yeah yeah roblok's all that doesn't this have any more pixels i'd rather play Roblox space program. That's probably exists, right? Minecraft. Should we get into the good stuff? Oh, no, we have a little housekeeping, Jake. We do have a housekeeping. The last time that we did a main podcast here, we were starting this new thing called Off Nominal Happy Hour.

We've now done three of them. And we would like you to check it out. If you're somebody just listening to the podcast, this is a YouTube-specific show. Got to go over to YouTube.com slash Offnominal. The first one, we talked about Jake's project, Mars Time, about timekeeping on Mars. We got

real nerdy about calendars and math. It was a little deeper than I expected, to be quite honest. Then we had John Krauss on, the photographer. We talked about all of his work with Inspiration 4. What else do we get into? Fighter Jets versus Zero G flights, which one you'd rather do? That was kind of fun. Other highlights.

Oh, he drank like a blue. What was that thing? I say mouthwash maybe. I don't know. Yeah, that was weird. Yeah, apparently it had alcohol in it, but I'm just, you know, I need some more. Reportedly. I need more proof. Yeah, I need some evidence. And then just yesterday, we're doing two shows in two days here. Just yesterday, we talked at length about our plans for 2022, which includes the fact that as of right now, as of just a few hours ago, I am now full-time independent. This is my job. I quit my full-time job. We're doing this. Jake and I are both independent now doing this, which is why we started a weekly YouTube show.

it's not unrelated so if you want to hear about that the decision to do that what we're going to do with all the extra time plans that jake has for we Martians into 2020 the December 16th happy hour is the one to check out I think you'll enjoy hearing some behind the scenes updates

yeah that is living the dream you know you guys are my that's it now you're the gold standard I'm looking at it going you need higher standards we've set the bar so low that you could trip over it. Now that's my job. Yeah. And I would emphasize too, so if you're just the podcast listener, we do talk a little bit about, you know, why is the new show only on YouTube?

Because we have heard your questions about why we're not cross-posting that to the podcast beat. And I think that we have some good answers. So please check it out. We promise you the visual format will be very good on the YouTube side and we think that you'll like it. So check it out. All right. We got to get the off-nominees. That was the housekeeping. That was all the housekeeping.

I would like to start just to explain a little of the spirit of the off-nominees to just maybe, Matt, I know you're feeling a lot of pressure. We've built this up a lot in the last 15 minutes. We started this two years ago. I think we've done it two years in a row now where we decided because we're called off-nominal, we should award the off-nominees, which is the things that went wrong in space, but not just things that went wrong. They need to have a certain kind of comedic side to,

it. There needs to be a certain irreverence to the failure mode that was experienced. It needs to be something that really captures the spirit of things that we laugh at in space. So the time that Orbital ATK blew up a solid rocket booster on the test stand and called it an observation. That was a good one. The time that the Russians had a hole in the Soyuz and decided a good way to figure out what happened is to go outside with a knife and cut the whole thing open. That was particularly hilarious. Yeah, that was definitely in the spirit. And mostly this is a hedge against, I don't know if you noticed Matt, there was a lot of people that went to space this year, like the most that have went to space in decades, I think. Well, isn't it the most amount of space at any one time as well?

We did set that new record, yeah, on that latest new Shepard flight. Just like last week, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're like, nothing went wrong this year, which is great. But like, I don't know if that's going to be true forever. Yeah. One day it may happen. Yeah, there were a couple of close calls, as we might get to at least one of them.

But like we got to, off nominees have to have a certain comedic value to them. So there might be something we don't talk about on this show that went horribly wrong. And you're like, why didn't you talk about, you know, whatever Chinese rocket blew up and ran into a cliff? Can I ask a question? Oh, yeah, absolutely. If, if we were doing this in a few days' time and the James Webb telescope blew up on the launch pad, would that be one we'd be allowed to talk about or not? Would it be too harrowing? We would talk about it the entire show and we would not do the off nominees.

You see Matt, this is a very strategically timed show because we were before the launch. And so we don't have to talk about it on this show. And then if it goes wrong, it'll still be in 2021. I'm knocking on wood there. It'll still be in 2021. And so we won't have to talk about it next year either because it'll be a different year. See, this is a very, it's a very strategic, strategic view on this. So presumably you were the people sort of delaying the launch so this would happen.

Yep. Because we went in there, we popped that payload release mechanism off, and Julio was really mad at us for a couple of minutes. Did either of you see the Twitter, sort of like it was a picture of it falling? Yes. It was being mounted onto the... That was a very rude Photoshop.

I did actually have a little bit of a kind of moment just for a second. It was like, no, that can't be right, can it? Yeah, it was good. I don't know which one of you tweeted this most recently. I think I did from my personal account. Well, I was trying to find that, Jake, but then I got into this whole thing that you got on about the AI generated art. And now I'm in my...

So we're going to bail on that. Let's just get to the off-nominole. Let's go. We got to give us... Talk about how this year's a little different, Jake. Yeah, so we were putting this together and we were noticing some... We were noticing some patterns in the off-nominees that we were putting together.

So usually Anthony goes through all of his work for the year. I go through all the stuff I put out for the year and we pick out all the headlines that we thought would fit. And we found some patterns. And so this year we have decided to actually have categories. So we have, let's see, one, two, three, four, five big categories of off nominees. Okay. And so it's going to feel kind of like the Oscars maybe.

We're going to have some, you know, some categories. And then a few nominees for that category. And then we'll be able to have a winner for the category. And then maybe at the end we'll decide if there is some sort of overarching lord of all the off-fnominal awards. But we'll see how it shakes out. We don't really plan these things. But yeah, so we have some categories and they are kind of weird categories. Maybe I don't know.

We just sort of picked them based on what was in there. So it's a little bizarre. Yeah, that I would say. So we'll start. The first category, we have the best rocket stunt flight. This is the category that we've got first here. Would you like to intro the nominees, Jake? I'll pull up some videos here.

All right. So the first off nominee for Best Rocket Stunt Flight is, of course, Astra with their, what is it? LV6, right? Was the one? And this is the vehicle. A strong competitor. This is the power slide. Look at this flight.

Just sideways. Immediately too. Totally. Right. It was like, I don't want to go up. I'm going to go over it. Sideways. I reckon that would have been terrifying if you were there.

I think so, yes. And I love the camera panning out, too. It's like trying to find it. It's just like sidling off into the future. Yeah, where did it go? Yeah, my head out. Yeah. Exactly.

Jason's got that great comment in there. So, yeah, so that's the first nominee. Second off nominee in the category of Best Ruck. stunt flight is uh fireflies backflip supersonic backflip i don't know if we can get this zoomed in a little bit for this trip but it's it's uh it's hard to see but this is this is right when it goes super sonic and it just just spins around tail whip just totally does like a full 360 degree flip and then a little more this one's awesome before they i forgot how good that one was It's, I mean, yeah.

And like, we like this one too because. The fade to logo isn't all. See, that should win it, the fading to logo. We like that one because, like, not only was it entertaining to watch, but it was a pretty good first flight for Firefly. Like, all things considered, that was a pretty good distance to get to you on your first flight. Third nominee for Best Rocket Stunt Flight was the Long March 5B returning to a earth and no one knew

no one knew where this was going to come down I asked Jake to put some links in the show notes that I could pull up as we talk about these nominees and I did not look at this one beforehand because this is what he has for the long march unconstrolled re-entry I forgot that was this year you see yeah it was near the Maldives right so this is why the Maldives I don't know how you say it but this is this is where it was so incredible that was a picture that came up that I stole from I don't know nine gig or something.

No, I thought that was real. So yeah, so that was the work. I remember all the drama. Everyone was like trying to figure out where I was going to come down. And it's like, will it hit my house? Jonathan McDowell made the rounds. He was on every TV station in the world, basically.

John McDowell tour, yeah. And then the final off nominee for Best Rocket Stunt Flight is Starship. Oh, serial number 10. What happened here? Oh, I don't know what's going on there. I think I got an ad. Oh, no.

That's in three seconds. Yeah, they got the ad right at the good stuff. All right, we don't need that. All right. This is the Starship, if you recall, that came down and made the landing, and everyone was so excited. And then it just kind of like stood there for a while and it was leaning a little bit. This was the ultimate fake out because eight minutes later, it blew up on the pad.

And maybe it's not a stunt flight. Maybe it's a stunt landing. But we think this one deserves special to notice because it incited some serious debate. over whether it was a successful landing or not. And I think we still fight that in. Where are you at on this? Where are you at on this vehicle? Did it land?

No, because presumably if you want your payload back, like humans. Your outcome driven. It is not successful. This doesn't look good to you? No, it kind of puts me off traveling on it for some reason. I don't know why. But yeah. I mean, it was

blooming epic, though, isn't it? I forgot how much of it was I forgot the way that this happened that it shot most of the vehicle upwards. You know, I forgot how much was flying through the air. Yeah, you can see the whole thing

comes back down. Now, there were a couple starships that we could have put on here that we didn't. We gave this one, this is the most comedic of the starships that went wrong this year. We had SN9 before this,

I believe, was the one that landed on its back. You know, it was so good at doing the flip that it landed on its back. SN11, obviously, the one that blew up in fog, and no one knew what happened to it. And the next morning, there was shrapnel all the way to South Padre Island, essentially. I think it broke Tim Dodd's camera equipment or something like that, landed on it. So a couple of good ones, but I think SN10, because of the debated nature, you know, the controversial nature of it.

Yeah, nominated for Best Fake Out of Best Fake Out landing of, of the year. All right. So we got Astra Firefly, Long March 5B, S&10. Matt, talk us through your thoughts on these.

I do like the Astra one because when you mention this category, that's the first one that sprung to mind. I mean, everyone's going to, I can't help feeling that everyone roots for SpaceX all the time because, you know,

it's SpaceX in it. And it is ridiculously epic. But there is something very cool about it just going sideways. And the fact that it just carried on going, They thought, no, we'll give it a go. We'll give it a go anyway. And there's no way that that's going to get to space.

But they thought, yeah, no, I'll give it a go. I love that. I love that. Very plucky spirit there. That's a good point. That's a solid point. Yeah, the, so you actually would nominate whoever was on the flight termination system button that day that they had met.

That's a steady nerve. That is a steady nerve. It's like, I'm still deemed the right way. No. Point the end is still up. We're still in the cone. We're okay. We're okay.

That is some cone, isn't it? It's not even a cone, is it, at that point? It's like a sort of, I don't know what you'd call. It's a dome. Yeah, dome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember, I showed that one to my wife with no context. I'm like, you got to see this rocket flight, and I put it on it.

And her eyes just went wide. She's like, that's not supposed to happen like that is. And I was like, no, it is. She's like, that's the wildest rocket launch you've showed me. Yeah, the comment. here next up is max queue because they were like oh i guess we'll just go with it like this is totally normal it might be a few seconds late to max queue but we're getting there yeah yeah jake you're similar similar vibes on this i think so yeah i mean the firefly one is also good but i think the

aster one is what it helps that we had a better view of it because it was right up close and uh i think you know matt your point the same thing it did just they just kept going they were just like like, Monko. Yeah, we're flying. We may as well finish us off. I'm just going to cast my vote for Firefly because I forgot how epic that tailwhip was.

But Astra wins. Best Rocket Stunt Flight. Let's move on to the next category. By the way, we're going to do a grand champion at the end of all this. So keep this in mind. Astra, current winner of the best rocket stunt flight. Would you like to intro the next ones, Jake?

I think so, yeah. Now this category is a bit facetious, so bear with us, but we're calling this Best Performance. And this is things that worked real well, and I'm putting that in quotations. So first off nominee for the category of best performance is the Starliner valve system. And this is a shot. This is my favorite picture of them, like desperately trying to fix the valves on the pad while the rocket is stacked. Just no idea that the whole thing, is just knackard. Like, it's just not going to work. Who's got skinny wrists than I do?

What size watch do you wear? Can you get past this one turn? I have a skinny wrist, but my arm's kind of short. I can't really. So, best performance, Starliner Val. Second off nominee for best performance is SLS engine number four. So specifically engine number four, because this is the one, this is from the green run.

hit with these ads. Yeah, we're going to get hit with all these ads. But this is the one from the Green Run test that shut off early. So if you remember, the first attempt at the SLS Green Run ended after like a minute or something or 100 seconds or something like that. So Engine 4 shut down because of a faulty sensor. But Engine 4 is also the one that doesn't work right now. And it's the one that they are fighting on the pad or in the VAB rather right now with SLS,

with the controller not working. So, you know, because of the double whammy here, we're nominating SLS. engine number four for this uh there it is shut down it's right there that's your nominee right there well i suppose it is a new design it doesn't been around for it does it yeah no nothing new about it uh third off nominee for best performance are the virgin galactic pilots in spaceship two who despite veering outside of the approved cone in their f a license did not abort the flight they held steady. I have to say, similar spirit to Astra.

Very similar spirit. If we're giving them credit for stick-to-itiveness, I think the pilots here have a good, that's a good run in the place. I do want to just do a quick reminder as well when we talked about this on the podcast months ago with Joey Bernard. We also cram up with the best meme ever for this flight,

which was the button for either flight safety or job safety. Do I shut this down? not get Richard Branson to space, what was it, eight, nine days before Jeff Bezos? Or do I just try to make it back to spaceport America? And they said, you know what? We're going to make it back there. Am I right in saying that the pilot

is indeed a Scottish, he's a Brit, isn't he? Is that right? Dave McKay, right? Is that who was on there? I think it was. So, yeah. Yeah, he's one of the very rare Brits that get to go to space. And no one talks about. Not that I'm really bitter about it. Although Richard Branson, I suppose, was a Brit. There was one of them.

There you go, yeah. Yeah. That's got to be a common one there. Yeah. And the final off nominee in the best performance category is the dragon toilet on the Inspiration 4 Flight. This is a shout out. This off nominee is a shout out for Brendan Byrne.

I hope he's listening. But we decided to put the Komodo dragon in here, which didn't work very well. inspiration for flight apparently. Tried real hard. I think leaked stuff in the spacecraft somewhere. Yeah, we might have had a

Gemini moment somewhere in there for Apollo moment or whatever it was. Yeah, it was an Apollo moment. Yeah, you're right. I love this article. I link this article for you, Anthony. If you scroll down, there is a quote from right there.

It's a very clean mission from start to finish. It's a very clean mission from start to finish. That was the reason that I wanted to this article. That's excellent. That is excellent. Yes. That's awesome.

That's hilarious. All right. That gives it a little boost for me. And I hope Benji Reed meant that. You know, realize that he could really nail a good one there. Yeah, that's a,

that's a Brandon Byrne level toilet pun right there. It's pretty good. Tough competitors in this one. Yeah, you got some stuff that's got long implications and some stuff that was very short term, right? We've got Starliner. SLS that are still, we're still working on this.

We still don't even know what happened in either of them. And we've got Virgin Galactics continuing to just, you know, be Virgin Galactic about everything when it comes to flight safety. And you've got a lot of people go into space and having problems pooping. Where are you at, Matt? What are you feeling? I think it's got to be the pooping one. A, because obviously, like Brendan, I find it very, very funny.

But it's the fact, it's thinking about billionaires having to suddenly the realization that space tourism might not be that glamorous. It's a real thing. I'm not a big cruise person, right? Because I'm always like, oh, look, everyone gets sick on cruises and this, that or the other. And then I'm like, oh, shit. Like, space flight is like cruise, but you're carrying all your atmosphere with you the whole time. You don't even get that. Yeah, it's not like booking into a six-star hotel, is it?

No. It's not, you know, it's not gold toilet seats. Definitely not. No. Yeah, so I'm going to go with that one. I think it's kind of fun. It's very space, isn't it? Like you said, it has an echo of Apollo 8 on it.

That's pretty old. That's not mine. I didn't do it. It was, that's too sticky to be mine. It's not the lines. I'm having a tough one here, Anthony. I'm, I don't know. I'm leaning between SLS and the toilet.

That's kind of where I'm resting right now. I agree, but I think the toilet has the spirit of all phenomenal in it. Probably, right? Because, yeah, presumably, like, there was a whole segment of time where they realized what had happened and what needs to happen. Like, there's a lot of implications around that storyline. Yes. You know, at least one of the four were probably happy because they were like, thank God I don't have to use this toilet that's up on the ceiling while everyone's looking at me. Like there was some of that, right, the social pressure.

That's, there's a lot to unpack that I enjoy about that one. All right. Okay, I'm into that. Let's do that. Komoto Dragon, best performance. Best performance, the Dragon toilet and inspiration for. All right. I'm going to jump around. I'm going to reorder these categories of it in your notes, okay? I don't know if that's going to mess up your production. I'm good. Everything's fine. I want to make sure we save the best for last.

So we're going to jump to a category called planetary and science. We're going to go into some gopy planetary science stuff here. So the first category is, or the first off nominee for the category of planetary and science is Insight, Dumping Sand on itself. This was a story that had us very confused for a while. We just, because there was no announcement, like NASA told us nothing. And then all of a sudden these pictures come down of insight, digging in the sand and the regolith and just dumping it on the deck of the lander.

And we had no context for what was going on. And even when you hear the actual reason for it, like it wasn't even, you're like, okay, that sounds like you made that up because you dumped it on your lander back. Like we did it at the right time so that the wind would come by. and then the little things of sand were falling at the same time as the wind would go to the left and hit the panel and then because of dust it would collect on the little sand grains and tumble off and they gave us a fancy word saltation they were salating across the panel and i'm just like you're making this up this is all this is all made up you can't get away with this nessa so that is the uh the first off

nominee for it's a strong it's a strong start that's a strong start uh second one is perseverance and the case of the missing sample, which I think was also a lot of fun. The case of the atmospheric sample, right? It would be the Jazz's preferred title for this. So I gave you four pictures there, Andy. I got them all in a row. I got them all in a row. So we got, so this is Perseverance, drilling.

This is the very first time they went to go drill in Jezero Crater. And then after they drilled, you can see the hole. Yeah, drill was successful. There it is. But then they went and looked inside the sample tube, no rock. And they went and looked inside the hole. No rock. And I was very confused by this.

I was like looking around. And then, and I could tell too, because the pictures that were coming down after was them like looking around on the ground trying to see if the sample had fallen out. Because there should have been this nice little pencil-shaped rock.

But alas, no, it was ground down because the rock was a real poor choice. And there was just powder everywhere. So that was a good one too. Good one for the spin related that they now have an atmospheric sample. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we have taken a sample of the Martian atmosphere and sealed it off.

A lot of resonance between the reasoning between the insight, you know, dropping dirt on yourself and then this one. A lot of spin. Yeah, if we had a category for best spin, it would be up there as well. Now there's another one coming up. That would be also a competitor. Ingenuity, oscillating flight. This is ingenuity's the helicopter, Flight 6. So they hit some, and I'm trying to remember exactly how this happened.

But basically they were flying this sixth flight and something got a little off kilter. It started to tilt. And then there was like this positive feedback loop. So, you know, it would tilt a little bit to the right and then it would compensate and it would go way to the left. And then it would try and compensate again and they go way to the right. And so this could definitely be in the stunt flight category as well. But we stuck it here in planetary because it's planetary. But yeah, it was like wobbling like, you know, 20 degrees or something in the flight.

And it stuck the landing. So like some sort of safe mode went off and it saved itself. Yeah, let me read. I'm going to read the description of the final bit of this flight because I really like the way it's worded. Okay. Ingenuity began adjusting its velocity and tilting back and forth in an oscillating pattern. This behavior persisted throughout the rest of the flight. Prior to landing safely, onboard sensors indicated the rotorcraft encountered roll and pitch excursions of more than 20 degrees,

large control inputs and spikes in power consumption. Everything was going awire. It's all over the place. And then boom, we landed. Okay, everything's fine. Like, I just love that. Because it's kind of how like we all fly drones. You know, it's fine for a couple minutes.

And then you're like, oh, uh-oh. I'm too high. I'm going behind my house. I can't get line of sight anymore. And then, you know, hopefully it doesn't end up in a tree. Yeah. So, yeah, we like that one. Strong, strong one.

Ingenuity ended up being such a success story this year. So we love that one. We love a happy ending. And the last one is the JWST shipping department and their anti-pirate mitigation methods. We definitely wanted to highlight this. And this article from Maria Corrin, who has been on the show,

was just great because of this lead, this picture up at the top here. I mean, this is just fantastic. And if you don't remember this story, this was basically NASA realizing that when they ship a $10 billion satellite from California to French Guiana, maybe you want to think about pirates, I guess.

I don't know if it's anything more complicated than that. They watched out for pirates. It's the first time that many of us thought about pirates in a long time. Yeah, it was, definitely. I mean, like, what were the actual mitigation? Like, was there decoy ships? Was there, like, was there, like, radio jamming devices on this? I really wonder.

I would, I hope, like, 20 years from now when, you know, some project scientists, Declassified. I hope that we get to learn from that. So yeah, so those are our nominees. Insight. Matt, first, how would you defend JWST against pirates? What's your mechanism there?

Well, just as a side note, I think about pirates all the time. Just, you know, if you say nervous of thought, but that's not true. I think about pirates all the time. I don't know. I guess you would just have, you know, someone like James Bond on it or something. Oh wow, one to one. You're not even bringing a whole team. You're just bringing one.

Yeah. You only need one guy. That's it. It's Bond. That's it. You just need that. It's a weird one, isn't it? What would you do?

Funny part is that Matt and I are both showing our biases in our countries because he picked James Bond and I was like, I don't know, steal Team 6. Like, that would work. And I'm just like, Canada. I'd lift it there. yeah so yeah i do you want my nomination for this one yes we do yeah yeah it's it has to be ingenuity i mean all the others are a little bit digging in the dirt whereas that's a helicopter on mars for god's sake do you know what i mean it has to be the coolest thing of the year it's a helicopter on mars it's it's ridiculous so i'm i whatever

that comes up on. I like it because it's an epic achievement. It had something go totally wacky and it worked out. Like that's it right there. That's the essence. It's ridiculous. So Anthony, you're voting for helicopter. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Why? What would you? I'm going to give the vote to insight then just because of how bizarre of a tactic that was. It's just too weird not to vote for it. I will see the victory to ingenuity on behalf of the majority but I got to give insight to vote.

It the inside one is a little bit like a pig or something isn't it that sort of like in the dirt just just putting a bit of dirt on itself just getting a little mucky yeah yeah I kind of envision it it's like you know when the elephants like just go like slurp up mudwater and then they put like and they just don't put it on their head yeah just like that exactly all right where we're going next you switch the order up here so where are we going yeah okay so the four of the five categories is, and this has been alluded to already, this is best Russia. Russia has earned its own category this year because of how crazy things were in Russian space. So the first off nominee is, of course, Naka. Nauka. Do we ever settle on how to pronounce that? Nauka.

which limped its way to the ISS, barely made it, docked, and then decided, nah, I'm a head out, and it died to undock. But it did not delatch itself. So this is a Scott Manly video showing exactly what NACA did to the ISS, which was like a rotation and a half on the pitch access before all the other engines fired to compensate and could write it. So it was a little scary. Hold on, you forgot. It ran out of repellent that it would be using for this kind of stuff. Not that the other ones made up for it. It was out of gas.

That is the most off-nominal part of this off-nominy. It was the fact that it only stopped because the gas ran out. So, yeah. So that's Naoka. I don't know what else to add to that. How about you add what happened like a month and a half later, which was Soyuz MS-18, also trying to make a strong competitor out of it, which it also tried to aggressively undock and also spun the ISS out.

And I think also ran out a guess that it would use for these kind of maneuvers before it stopped. Same exact failure mode. They were really tricky with the language on this one, though. So this is our second off nominee, Soyuz MS-18. And it didn't run out of fuel. It hit the propellant limit, which I think is different. Okay, right. Because they still put people back into that ship and undocked and went home.

So it definitely had something left in the tank, but I don't know. I don't know, man. It's a little iffy. So two of these four nominees are Russians trying to spin the space station. So that's interesting. Our third nominee for the category of Best Russia is the Rogosin flip-flop after so many years of complaining about how bad the SpaceX crew dragon vehicle is. And how dangerous it is when docking, importantly. Yeah, and how danger it is when it comes up to the station.

he has decided that it's okay to put cosmonauts on it. So we're going to nominate the Rogos. No, no, no, no. One more. One more on top of that is that not only is it okay to put cosmonauts on it, but who are they assigning to the flight, Jake? They're assigning the one and only, the very singular cosmonaut in their core that is not a man.

Yep, and why are they assigning her to this mission? Oh, my God. I don't even want to repeat what he said on the air. it was so egregious, but... Oh, I don't even know. I forget the official quote, but... It was along the line of, uh, she is a very, very nice, fancy lady astronaut ambassador who will do this terrible, terrible job of having to ride a crew dragon while all the manly space cosmonauts who are men get on the real vehicles that are so used.

It was... But isn't there like... Is this some BS? I'm picking up from the CIA from the 60s or something, but wasn't it that like back in the original Soviet era, women on a space flight was bad luck or something? something like that? Wasn't that like some lore from the Soviet? Because this is where I went with it. I was like, oh, okay. So like they have to... Sabotage? They have to send bad luck, right? Like in their lore. Sabotage you do. Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. So Ragozen gets that. But not, did he not stop there?

He did not stop there. He's also our fourth nominee for the category of best Russia. And this is the time when Dmituio goes on. The head of Ross Cosmos, the head of the National Space Agency in Russia, accused our friend Eric Berger of war crimes. It's when he said, it is very weird that you do not have sanctions against you when you invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, and destroyed Libya. So that one was a little at a left field because, I mean, I've met Eric Berger. He's a pretty nice guy.

I think he spends most of his time writing and researching, talking to interesting people. I didn't know he was personally responsible for the invasion of Iraq, but that is... Well, not only that, let's let's have a little deeper on this particular accusation, because Rigozan also said that Eric Berger was a propaganda journalist, pushing state propaganda, which I would like to ask Dimitri personally, to go ask literally anyone that works at NASA, whether Eric Berger is publishing propaganda out of the NASA offices, because I'm pretty sure if you go on many subreddits,

that's exactly the inverse of what Eric Berger is doing, according to all of them that work there. This is the journalist who writes an article about the ingenuity helicopter. It includes one paragraph at the end that reminds you how much SLS costs. Like this is this journalist, right? So, yeah, I don't think he's exactly delivering the propaganda that NASA is hoping for. Strong year from Dimitri. Yeah, strong year from Ross Cosmosin, Dimitri.

Matt, what are you thinking? Best Russia, Matt. That's some pretty wacky ones. Best Russia. you know what right at the beginning i was going to go for norka but because that it just kept getting waited so long for that as well i remember talking to someone about that years and years and years and years ago and and going when is it going to go because it's got the european arm in there as well that's right no offense no offense don't bring that up yeah and the but it's like i i have to say i'm

going to go with the Ragozin one at the end. Calling Eric a war criminal is fantastic. I mean, he did throw me the birdie in French Guiana once. I wish that was short enough to be the title of this episode. But yeah, I don't, not sure he's a war criminal. Not sure he's, and he was very impolite about the British teeth with a French journalist. They were, they were talking as if I wasn't there. It was awful. It made me very embarrassed. But the, no, yeah, that, that, that fourth one, Rigozin, Ragozing, war criminal. Okay. All right, all right. Anthony, what are you feeling? I can't not pick Nauka here. I can't not. Because the thing that I love most about the story is we all forget that it almost didn't stay in orbit. Like, we, there were so many issues with it that we forgot that

Jake merchandised the crap out of it and sold a bunch of Save Nauka shirts while this thing was about to plummet out of the sky. And then we were going to have another Long March 5B incident with the couple on the Maldives with Nauka coming out. And I think that to me, like, we thought we had gotten over that part. We thought we were past the issues with this. And then it gets to station. It's very similar to Starship S&10 where everything's cool for one minute. And then all of a sudden, the station's out of control, it's aggressively undocking, and it runs out of fuel. It's like, you couldn't write that sequence better for those two days of space news. Yeah. I will also vote for Naoka, and I will add a reason for it, is because the Nauka story was so crazy that a couple weeks later, when they did it again with Soyuz, it didn't really make headlines.

It was written about it in the New York Times and everyone else went, eh, not that bad. Yeah, it's fine. Pretty normal, I guess. So any other year, the Soyuz spinning the station would have been the winner of the Off Nominal Award. it's not even going to win this category. Nope. Also, I do, there are people are mentioning in the comments that it having issues staying in orbit potentially saved the ISS even more so

because it had less fuel to flip the station out of control. So even that part's good, that its issues eventually muted its other issues. It's too good. I mean, can you imagine if it broke the International Space Station? I can't imagine it. Then what?

then what? Yeah, no, oh my God. I think, I mean, the astronauts were never in danger. Let's remember. That's what they said. That can't be true. Completely inaccurate. It can't be true.

Yeah, I mean, this literally, we would have canceled all of the podcasts that we do if this spun the International Space Station out of control. That's the end of space news right there. Yep. Yeah, it would not have been good. So, okay. So now it could take best Russia. Yeah. All right. And our final category, which I think is the simultaneously the most fun, the funniest and the meanest of the categories. But we're doing the best Jeff Bezos cringe moment because there were multiple. And we think that they've earned their

place here in the Ochnomini Award. So Jeff Bezos, we're sorry, but you just, you need a little bit of criticism on this one this year we think so the first off nominee is the open letter to administrator bill Nelson from Jeff Bezos that promises cross my heart hope to die we will spend all this money on the lander and then what did they do with that somebody uploaded an image of Jeff Bezos's signature to this website that's how serious they were about this and they and this was in July and then we just continued to have lawsuit after lawsuit. He didn't sell the $2 billion of stock.

I don't think. I don't think I saw that news hit any of the major financial websites. New. Where's the follow-up, Jeff, on this one? Yeah, I'm not thinking there was any. So that made it for sure. So that's an off nominee. Second one is, this is after the flight, his flight to space on New Shepard.

and he did a press conference where I guess it was, Brian Cornell asked him a question, and he had to respond with some thanks, which was a little, it's a little cringy. Let's play this. Every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer, because you guys paid for all this. Oh, no.

Seriously, for every Amazon customer out there. Oh, no. Oh, Jeff. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Oh, he thanks us too, Jake. He thanked us in that. I forgot. He did thank us, yeah.

As Amazon customers. All the Amazon customers. Half the Internet that pays for AWS. Yeah, the Internet. Exactly, yeah. Yeah, yeah. We're probably streaming through AWS somehow right now. So, Bezos thanking Amazon employees for his flight space.

Definitely won. Third off nominee, immediately following the flight, where William Shatner was pouring his heart. heart out to him and wanted to tell him about his experience in space. I guess, sorry, this isn't after his flight. This is after Shatner's flight. After Shatner. And William Shatner was having an emotional moment.

But Jeff Bezos had some other plans about what he was interested in. So let's play that clip too. Is this queued up at the right, the exact right moment? It should be. If you play it, but he's like looking at him, but he can't keep attention. Well, there's the first moment where you're like, what's going on? Why are you looking away, Jeff? Here, I want one.

I want one. Oh, man. Oh, man. It was brutal. Here. Stop telling me how epic that was, that I made a spaceship, and you went and loved every second of it. And then spraying the girls with the champagne was just, yeah. It's a perfect moment.

It's a rough moment. All right. All right. One more hit for old J.B. here. The final off nominee in this category is, of course, a nomination for the book. Blue Origin infographics team for their stellar work in making Starship feel like the best spaceship ever made. Yeah, my favorite part about the infographics is that if I read any of my friends that

aren't that into space, all of the text off of this infographic in particular, which I will read in a dramatic fashion in a second. The only thing they would be left with is how freaking cool Starship is and how they want to go to the first launch of this. So let me read the text word for word out of this. This, okay, here's, what's the title this one? What immensely complex, immense complexity and heightened risk looks like. Launch from a space port that does not exist.

Each moon landing requires 16 starship and super heavy launches. The lander is a modified second stage of a launch vehicle. It uses unprecedented cryogenic fuel storage and transfer that won't be demonstrated until at least 2023. And it's a launch vehicle that has never flown to orbit and is still being designed with 32 booster engines. taller than a Saturn 5 and is 3 to 4 million pounds heavier than a Saturn 5. Just rad. Every word of that, you're like, I want to go see that happen. I want to go, this is the future I want.

Yeah. So good. Yeah. So we love, you know, and I love this infographic in particular because I sold some shirts on this too. Yeah, a big feature of the all nominees is years, Jake's ability to merchandise them, it turns out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So thank you to everyone who purchase. just an immensely complex and higher risk t-shirt.

We hope you had fun, as much fun as we did, consuming this news. So those are our four Jeff Bezos moments. What's the best Jeff Bezos for you, Matt? It has to be, it has to be Shatner, because as you know, Jake, other than you, Shatner is my favorite Canadian. He really is.

Genuinely, I absolutely love William Shatner. And so anyone who does a dickish move on William Shatner, that is that's that's that's not on that's not on so yep it's got to be that one has to be that one and it is so intensely cringe it's just ridiculous especially this body language right here of shatner oh my god okay i guess i'll stop i guess i'll stop talking about spaceflight and i'll just stand over here with my hands in my pockets while you are having the time you're like yeah yeah do you know how is it like is it kubrick that um the whole thing where like you can pause any frame of any of his movies and it's always a good looking frame or whatever who's who's is that kubrick

well or lynch somebody somebody famous did that this is the inverse this is like you can pause any frame of this and it looks just as bad as any other frame like this every moment of this is rough Jake i'm i was leaning i was leaning infographic but matt's i think doing some good work to convince me here yeah and i think i have to back up my countryman as well so oh wow canadian canadian strong yeah i think it's that first is that the first one where we've all agreed? Yep. Might be.

Yeah, might be. Standout winner. Yeah. Oh, no, we all agreed about the toilet. Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Toilet, shatner. All right, so those are the five off-nomany categories. We've got a couple of kickers.

And we have some bonus ones. Yeah. And we bring up the bonus ones because we're not going to nominate these ones because they're about Anthony. But we do have to show them because they are some pretty amazing moments that did not go as planned. I'll put that way. Anthony, do you want to introduce these? Yeah, so there's two good ones that I had.

This would be the category of worst age takes that Anthony ever put out onto the internet. One of them I had, this was not too long ago. and people were asking why this one was not included in the off-nominees. Russia conducted an anti-satellite operation of sorts, and I had Brian Whedon on the podcast, Main Edge Cutoff, to talk about this. I didn't find the audio clip in here, but I should have, where I jokingly say to Brian, I mean, what are they going to do, take out every GPS satellite that there is?

Like, is that what they're going to do with this tech? And I was talking about how, in the era of constellations, a single anti-satellite attack is not that useful. So I jokingly brought up GPS as an example. What I didn't know was that a week before that, and this only hit the American press the day after I did the podcast with Brian Whedon, that is exactly what Russia said they would do with this technology. So little did I know at the time when I did this podcast.

In Russian media, this was already picked up, but it did not hit, well, I'd said American, but here's the Daily Mail, just throwing him out of bone here. It did not hit the English and American media until the day after. after I put that podcast out, which is a real problem that that age, that, that, that take aged so incredibly poorly. But I think I have a better one that aged even worse, uh, than that. On April 18th, uh, I was discussing the fact that Lockheed Martin purchased a bunch of launches from a company called ABL, uh, space, who is a small satellite launcher.

They bought like 50-some launch vehicles. Uh, and, and here was my, I'm just going to play a little clip from my Miko headlines from April 18th, 2020. You can play the harp. Yeah. Lockheed does have the ability to market Atlas 5 commercially. We've seen how that went. Not great.

But, you know, it's a tough vehicle to sell. I'm not sure best salesperson in the world could sell an Atlas 5 commercially these days. And so I woke up to the next morning. Not only did they sell an Atlas 5. They sold nine of them. literally less than 12 hours later they sold nine Atlas fives to Amazon so you know I don't know which which take aged poorly quicker I think the Atlas five one's fun here the Atlas one is the winner of the Anthony poorly aged takes category as they bring it up in their comments it wasn't that

they sold nine of them they sold all of the Atlas fives that were left in one go yeah that implies If there were a 10, they may have sold the 10th. Yeah, the only upper bound was the RD-180s. It wasn't their willingness to sell Atlas 5 or their ability to do that. It might have been. They listened to the podcast, and then an email went around saying, there's a fire sale on Atlas 5s. Who wants them?

They're like, I got to prove this guy wrong. Yeah, it's like, let's just get rid of them now. We're doomed. I think you forced that sale. I think it was actually, you know. I'm going to take all credit, man. I appreciate that. your hand on that sale, for sure.

I think you should get the commission. Then I would definitely have quitting my job back then. You know, I wouldn't have waited this long. Yeah, yeah. So we've got to pick a grand winner here. So to recap, we have Best Dunflite, Astra, launch vehicle six. We have Best Performance, the Dragon Toilet.

We have Best in Planetary and Science, Ingenuities, flight. Best Russia is NACA spinning the space station around one and a half times. And best Jeff Bezos moment is the champagne over Shatner. So those are the five category winners. Champagne over Shatner is actually where Matt grew up in England. Champagne upon Shatner. Yeah, yeah. Oh, man. That's great. So I don't know. How do we decide this? Like, do we vote on this one or what are we going to do? Are we going to that. Well, I think those are all the winners of the categories, but I think they need to, they need to, we keep talking about the essence of off nominees, right? We need to decide, is it the astristic tuativeness and eventual success that they had this year? Is that,

does that award them grand champion? Or is it the, how many things went wrong and as many things that went wrong ended up having a happy ending to the ISS Nowuka story? Like, there were so many failures that it actually turned out okay which is i think that's kind of that's that's a strong editor you know where like the dragon toilet i don't know it's got that extra extra kick over the edge right if if i want to go for the naoka story because i rejected it in the category but it is for me i think that's the space that's the funny space story of the year or potentially the most ridiculous space story of the year for me like when you when you mention this show that's the very first thing that came into my head.

As in that, it is... That's the ones. It's so nuts. It's so nuts. And that thing, yeah, the astronauts, you know, the astronauts weren't in danger is always one of my favorite quotes. Yeah, you're like, really? Because they opened a hatch and then the thing tried to undock while the hatch was open.

Like, that's what they were at in that process. Oh, man. I think there was actually a radio call up to the ISS to tell them to back away from the hat. because they were working on it when it started, which makes it even worse. Yeah, that would be a terrifying, yeah, guys, can you get away from the hatch? Okay, now I'm really. Why am I doing that?

Yeah. Yeah. All right, okay. So sounds like we're leaning either Astra or Noka here. So we're prepared to put the Bezos one to bed, mostly because I don't think he deserves to be a winner of that. He's going to sue us, though. Yeah, he is going to sue it. Um, and protest the off nominees.

Oh, that'd be so good. Okay. Uh, and our ingenuity is just too, that's too good of the story. It's not off nominal enough. Yeah, it didn't go that bad. Yeah, yeah, okay. I mean, that's just epic. I mean, that's, that's true.

That's natural and it's best. Well, we got to decide. So, all right, put your, put your name down. Naoka. Naoka. Naoka. Naoka. Naoka.

Naoka. I don't know why we do this now when we vote. We put our hands up, but. Let's make it. That's the international sign for Naoka. That's the sign language for Naoka. This is it. Podcast listeners, you have to check out YouTube.

Yeah, you need to go look at YouTube, but it's really funny. You've just got to come and watch what I'm doing with my hand. You're very good at it. The international sign for Naoka. So I believe that gives Russia a two-time-off nominee winner, because they, two years ago, won for the daggering of, I believe that was Soyuz MSO-9. The plus one space dagger, yeah. I believe that was them.

And then last year, of course, the boaters around Dragon DM2 during the recovery of Bob and Doug with the Trump flags and everything, they won last year. And then this year, no, we have to make a site somewhere, Jake, to list all the awards. Yeah, okay. Well, we have this nice new site now. I guess we need to check a website. We have a website. We can make pages as we wish. So we're going to have one for your happy hour cocktails and one for the off-gras. I think one of you should make a little award and give it to Ragozan at some point.

That would be so good. I mean, you need to rush Ragozun and say, here's your... I have no problem tagging Ragozum in the tweet. Oh, 100%. Yeah. Oh, God, it's quality. He might engage. He might engage.

He's a total lunatic. Well, he might call you a war criminal. I mean, let's face it. If I blame an aspirin. You two definitely are. Admittedly a lot of content to go on, but maybe he shouldn't be the one talking these days. I don't know. Okay.

So that's great. That's a 2021 off nominal award. Congratulations, Ross Cosmos. Congratulations. You've done it again. Ross Cosmos, you've did it again. So what else we got here? I think we should eat some picks?

Yeah, we should do some picks. Okay. Do you want to start? Yeah, I was lamenting to Jake in our pre-show meeting today. that I'm not sure I have one that's better than what I usually do in all Decembers, but this is the last December I can do this, I think. Is that correct? That the Expans has returned for season six?

The sixth season? The last season is what it is, yeah. Yeah, the last one. The final season of The Expans started. I watched the first episode last week. Real nice, Clark, just to keep this on theme with our Christmas show, I'm into it. I'm loving it. You know, the expanse, I've had a weird history with the expanse.

It started out, and I was like, this is the ultimate space show. This is exactly what the future of space looks like to my eyes. And then it got more sci-fi than I was ready for, not being someone that hasn't read the books or anything like that. It got more sci-fi, but I feel like they've been returning to the straight-up, like, war in the solar system, which is really what I'm there for. So I'm really loving this final season. oh yeah I really I loved I love season five that was great I wasn't expecting it to sort of go back after the you know interstellar shenanigans of the bit before it's like yeah

yeah yeah yeah so that's mine yeah I'm excited for it I'm excited for the end of it yeah cool okay Matt you got a pick oh what for what's what's coming up well it would have been that well I'm kind of waiting for Is there going to be a new season for all mankind? I believe there is. I think there is. I don't know.

I'm still so into that program. I think that's one of the, I think that's the best space program for years and years and years. I think it's amazing. Okay. Do you two not fans? I'm getting, I'm, I'm just looking up if I know the,

it looks like they wrapped production on it or or shooting of it on. back in October. For season three? For season three. Is there going to be a time jump in this one again? Yeah, because the last one, no spoilers. It's just the end of the season thing shows Mars.

Right. So we're getting into Jake's territory here. He might start covering it on the show. Yeah. Yeah, I am really looking forward to that. I just thought it was brilliant. I just thought that without everything, it wasn't, you know, it was a good pro.

could watch it even if you went into space I think but it was just about it was super cool but if you are into space it's got that cool thing where like they use they use all the historical stories as influences for different small storylines within you know they're kind of like speed running the known history of space flight in the first two seasons yeah I mean I love things of like controversy that it's definitely a love letter to space history like it's yeah yeah oh it's brilliant there's like all those like that having sally ride in it and things like that as a kind of like some characters are real and some aren't and you just don't know which one's going to come up and it's like oh it's brilliant yeah it's really good love it yeah space shuttles around the moon

yeah space shuttle to the moon classic james i don't argue with that learn that one from james bond i think right yeah moon raker uh so i am going to plug the 2017 science fiction end of the world thriller geostorm uh which is a movie starring gerard butler And Anthony, I sent you a link to a tweet. I did a tweet thread on this. This is how passionate I am about this movie. Okay. This is the bad movie about space that you want to watch.

Like, this is the next, the core. Okay? Like, this is, this is perfect. It's got everything you need in it. Okay. So we're going to link this, this tweet here, and you can enjoy it all you want. But this has got so much stuff in it. We got like, what does it say?

Okay, we got artificial. gravity, Anthony, this is your thing. This is not only artificial gravity, but is that a gigantic Canada arm as well? There is a giant, and I tweet about it later in the thread, but it is an evil candidate arm. Okay. It does evil.

That's pretty cool. We got hacker typeer stuff. We haven't loved a good hacker scene in a movie. We got deadbeat dads. No natural disaster movie is complete without a deadbeat dad. Okay. It's got gratuitous CGI destruction of like. iconic world cities. Oh yeah, this one's great. One of the classic, you know, just a wall of water that's like a hundred feet high or something. Yeah, I don't know how it stays vertical. What's this tower on the beach that's presumably like into the water? This is Dubai, I think. I think it's Dubai. Does that one exist on the beach? I don't know, man. I didn't fact check this. Come on. Okay. Um, we got we got bad, bad, uh, lines and they're all, you know, overacting just the terrible stuff you expect. This next one is incredible. Look at all these space shuttles.

Okay, there's like 30 space shuttles. We were talking about space shows around the moon. Look at all these space shuttles. You have to watch this movie. The best part about this image is that you're like, oh yeah, look at all these space shuttles. And then you realize on the right side of the frame, there's a whole other row of space shuttles

that are lined up with the one you're already looking at. And the one of the left is like three deep. You can see all the ones way in the other one there. Oh, yeah, look at that. You can see way in the back. There's tons. Okay. Way over here.

Look at that. Way in the back. Wow. Wow. We got ASAT levels of Russian debris, okay. Lots of stuff going on there. Here's the evil Canada arm. You can see that,

but it's smashing around the satellite. Oh, wow. It's intense, man. This movie is intense. The women in this movie are awesome. They kick ass, and they don't take any shit from anybody. We got Richard Schiff.

Okay, so West Wing fan here. I had to put in Richard Schiff because he's my favorite. And then there's a bonus tweet in here as well, which is that he flew up to the space station just in his own shuttle he just got one so well there's enough of them yeah if we showed up for shooting we probably would have our own that day too it's like when you get on the bus and you're the only person on it but that's that's really what happened there so you need to watch geostorm and I need to tweet at us about all the things you love to hate about it because this is your holiday movie to watch I am there

longer than case. You've absolutely, you've absolutely won me over with that. It was on Netflix for me. I don't know where it's on for, I mean, every country's different. It's probably one of the BBC's or something.

It's somewhere, so. If I'm having a second choice with film, everyone, anyone who hasn't seen Event Horizon, that was mine and James' favorite. Aventorizon. Oh, God, that's brilliant.

That is. So good. Okay. 1997? Is that the one we're talking about? I haven't watched that in a long time. Yeah, it's one of those things. It's not the film that you think it is. It's kind of like...

We're talking about this one here? Event Horizon from 1997. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's more of like a horror movie, right? Like it's like a... Yeah, yeah, it's not a space. Yeah, you think it's a space movie and then it turns into just, yeah, full-on horror movie.

It's closer to aliens than it is to Geostorm. Yeah. It's actually close. it's a heart of darkness or something like that. It's brilliant. Jake, how did you find Geostorm and why did you find Geostorm? Honestly, I think so like I, when it came out, I remember seeing it and being like, oh, this is going to be bad and I just never watched it.

And then I don't know, the other night I was just sitting on the couch. Like I had like an hour and a half to kill because my wife was out like an art class or something. And so I was just like browsing Netflix and I saw it. I was like, I have nothing to do. And I put it on. And then like 10 minutes into it. I was like, oh my God.

I'm like, this is going to be, this is a thing. This is it. is one of those things. Yeah, famously the core. The core is being mentioned in YouTube. The core is one that you love. If you're in the off nominal discord, you know our love for the core, which is the other, in off nominal lore, there are now two movies that are very bad.

You must watch. The core and Geostorm. Jake, we should get some people on that made these movies. I know. It's long enough away at core, especially we should be able to get people, right? Yeah. I think we can do it. We got a lot of spots now with Happy Hour.

That's true, yeah. Geostorm looks like it's being written by an AI. That's what it's got that kind of vibe about it. I'm definitely watching it. It typed a space disaster movie, and it was like, this, that, this, this, boom, it's all together. You got it. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Okay. Let's hear, that's it. Yeah, let's, the picks. We're talking about the plugs now. We're doing the plugs now. Matt, what you got coming up, that people should be paying attention to. If these people that are listening right now

are not already Matthew Russell fans, which they should be, tell them where to go. Well, you can go to www. interplanetary.org. And obviously, we've been, at the beginning of the year, we interviewed Matthias Maura, who's, of course, Matthias Maura, I should say, who's on the International Space Station right now.

So that was absolutely brilliant. And we had some, because of Julio, and his great connections. Julio runs a Spanish version of it as well called Interplanetario. Wow. Yes. So that's pretty cool. So you can go check that out.

There's always links to Julio's one as well. So I do a Queen podcast as well. So anyone who's into the music of Queen should check out my recovering queen podcast because that's actually taking up far too much time where we do a Queen cover each week. We do a Queen cover. so yeah i am the rubbish version of brian may basically okay and i know less about space it's is this your actual website that i got to yeah yeah you got it you got it there i didn't know if these are one of the ones that scrapes scrapes things i didn't want to be giving them false false credit

the show notes yeah so yeah there we go it's uh the current track features my drumming bass playing and guitar playing so there we go wow okay yeah it's it's full-on on. Yeah, that's kind of going back to my roots as actually a musician rather than a space nerd. I haven't gone. I've got to get back there. You've got to get back there. You've got to go back. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, that's my two plugs. But yeah, there's some interesting shows coming up. We've hopefully got an interview with someone from the Ariane group talking about this launch coming up soon. Are you not going to go to do the actual countdown announcing at French Guiana this time around? And they've got it on recording so they can use it whenever they want. It's the best, apparently it's the best anyone's ever said,

top, like that. Stop. Other point. Yeah. Yeah, that's good, isn't it? That bit. Yeah, yeah. Okay, awesome.

Jake, what's got going on? Are you going to do me? Okay. Yeah, all right. Well, so we're in our. holiday break for Wee Martians. Okay. So we had the, we had, our final episode was a week or two ago with Chris Mason, who was

the geneticist who did the Mark and Scott Kelly twin study for NASA. And he blew my mind with stuff I did not know about. There's some pretty crazy things we can do to help bodies exist in space through gene therapy. So it's, it's pretty intense. So it's definitely like a category of science that I'm not super well versed in. So it was pretty fun to be totally humbled by an expert in the field. So that was fun.

And yeah, so we're basically just, you know, I'm preparing for the next year. And if you listen to our happy hour, you'll know that I'm toying with some new ideas for we Martians, you know, maybe taking some of the guardrails off and seeing about exploring other topics that aren't just the planet Mars. I mean, it's a big world of exploration out there. And I haven't quite figured out how it's going to look yet, but maybe we've been. do a little bit of moon stuff maybe we do a little bit of Venus stuff I don't know we'll see what we could tighten maybe a little bit of Titan stuff

Dragon Fly is the best mission so yeah Anthony just wants me to start a Dragonfly podcast but I'm not going to go that far but it's gonna be a fun year for me Martians and I'm excited to take a break over the holidays and unpack that figure out what's going on we planetarians yeah yeah I don't I'm not changing the name first of all Oh, really? That's your, no. We'll work on that one next. That's a lot of work.

Well, good luck with that one. I am so jealous that you're both full-timers. That's just insane. Yeah, that's the thing that I get to figure out now. Is that how this works when it's a full-time situation? So, as Jake said, check out the happy hour if you have not, because we go into both these topics at length. So much detail, yeah.

I'll probably talk about this on Miko eventually. But I do want to plug the new. Nico that I just did with Phil McAllister, the director of commercial spaceflight at NASA. My favorite show I've done, full stop. Oh, way. It's, uh, we got into some interesting areas. And even I've seen in Discord, people are agreeing that the honesty and the openness that Phil has is like unnatural for people from NASA because they're pretty guarded typically.

Not that he was, you know, talking some hot shit about NASA or anything like that, but just being introspective about history and lessons learned and stuff like. that about commercial cargo and crew and then talking about commercial space stations. We get into to if their international partners are going to chip in on this. So both of you might want to write some letters to your respective space agencies to ask for a little cash. Because I don't know if you noticed, but it's kind of hard right now in the U.S. political system to get cash for things. You should try everything. You can Brexit the ISS and chip into these commercial space stations, though, if you want.

true yeah you got your own satellite constellation so yeah that's true um yeah i i you know me personally as well yeah yeah that's why you kick jamie off you you hit you hit struck gold with the satellite constellation here yeah that's it it's like we we're we're done now we've got it so that's what i've been up to jake yeah you had some good ones man it's been a good couple interviews recently it's awesome just imagine that i quit isn't it great when you get a good interview and you're sitting there and you're just going oh i'm loving this i'm killing it yeah you're like i'm killing it and no one knows it yet but me yeah yeah because the get doesn't know it they're just being them and then you're just like oh my

god this is this person's dynamity yeah great i love the universe is funny too but yeah yeah the inverse is very funny I can't get us in the Lensra. Will I publish this? All right, everybody. Well, Matt, you're the best. Thanks for being here. Yeah, like I said, thank you so much for inviting me.

I need to get you back on the interplanetary at some point. Space is doing a lot without its ace these days because Jake and I have not been able to put it back. It's been a while since either of us put it back. There we go. That's how we got to go out. Can you say it? Can you say it? Can you say it?

And I'll do the outro right as you say it. Oh, yes. The interplanet. The interplanetary podcast. Putting the ace back into space. One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, into death. No standing. All of that's neighbors are awake now.