Off-Nominal - 72 - Our Interest in Trash

Episode Date: August 5, 2022

Dr. Justin Walsh, co-PI of the International Space Station Archaeological Project, joins Jake and Anthony to talk about how to do archaeology on a space station and what they’re up to on the ISS.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 72 - Our Interest in Trash (with Dr. Justin Walsh) - YouTubeBOLDLY GOING WHERE NO ARCHAEOLOGISTS HAVE GONE BEFORE - ISS ArchaeologyInternational Space Station Archaeological Project (@ISSarchaeology) / TwitterDr Space Junk vs The Universe | The MIT PressFollow JustinJustin Walsh (@jstpwalsh) / TwitterJustin Walsh – Humanities CommonsFollow 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. Hello, we're back. I'm back, at least. You've been here the whole time. You've been working hard without me. Anthony has been behind the scenes, running shows. You've been booking guests nonstop. He's been just on a role of getting stuff done.

Well, I have been gallivanting all over the Great White North. I've been mostly being a full-time dad. I've been there's been school closures. There's been my wife had COVID for a week. You're doing real superhero stuff over there in the Colangelo Household. But I did. So the homework that I've done for this episode was booking Dr. Justin Walsh a long time ago. This has been on the calendar for a little while because, as we were talking about,

you were just on a little world tour of sorts, Justin. So how's it going? Tell us about where you've been recently. Yeah, I spent about five weeks in Spain in Granada working with a team on a terrestrial archaeology project at a site called Kostolo. We're working to publish that. We did four seasons of field work from 2014 to 17 and then a couple of things. study seasons and now we're hoping to get those results out. And then I went from there to Athens

for the Committee on Space Research biennial meetings to talk about ISS archaeology. And then I flew back to L.A. where I live for 48 hours and then went to D.C. for the ISS Research and Development conference for three days. And then I flew back here to L.A. So I think I finally now, like a week back, I finally have a sense of where on the planet I am and approximately what time it is. You've done laundry, like things are looking at up. But don't quote me on that. Yes, I have clean, clothes. Yes, that's also a positive. This is part of your research to live as ISS astronauts doing. You just threw your clothes out each time you got to a new city and just got some new ones. Right. And this summer, yeah, this summer I almost did an orbit. A couple summers ago, I actually

did do an orbit because I did from here to Australia to Spain to here. But yeah. Yeah, the life of a jet set archaeologist. I feel like I can't complain about my just a quick trip up to Canada and back now. I don't know if that's anywhere near what you had to go there. It was probably cooler there. Yeah, it was a bit cooler, I'm sure. Were you there during the whole big heat wave? Because it was rough in Spain for a bit.

Normally I would say Granada is probably a great place to hang out. But, whof, I don't know. Not when like tarmacs are melting. Yeah. Spain is a little better at handling it than the UK, I think, and it's a lot more normal for them. But the last day of my dig in 2017 was the hottest day in the history of Spain, and it was 117 Fahrenheit, 48 Celsius. Wow. That was no fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I know exactly what that's like bizarrely, because we had this weird heat dome in Canada last year.

And I was moving. I had to move during a day when it hit that temperature. And everyone canceled on me. And so we were just like sweating buckets down my stage. it was gross. It was not fun. Yeah, not in an area quick to handle it. Yeah. No, not in any way. Okay, well, that's the weather report here on phenomenal.

So we can move on to the next segment now, I think. Did you bring any good drinks back from Canada, Jake? Usually you bring an import or two. Although you did have some problems at customs, I think, right? Yeah, well, because I've been in the process of moving to Mexico for the last year, it feels like. So we had a whole bunch of stuff.

you know, in suitcases from our old house that were bringing down in customs, decided they wanted to tax it all. So that was really fun. But I didn't have space for any drinks. So I had to get one down here. But I've got this one called Montana today, which is from, I was going to go in focus? There we go. Cerveza artisanal Bosque de la Montagna from Morelos.

So it's a blonde ale. I wanted something just a little light today. Beer company? It's pretty toasting around here. Yeah, it is. It's from the beer company. Nice. Yeah.

Your favorite beer storements. I love the beer company, man. Yeah. Justin, you've got something nice and early out there. What do you? Yeah, I am on vacation. So even though it's one o'clock in the afternoon, I'm having a gin and tonic in honor of the podcast. Also right here.

I made some gin comics last week and my last couple of limes are holding on. So I'm like, I got to use those before they go bad. So it's looking good. What kind of gin is in yours? Bombay sapphire. Nice. I've got this stuff. You ever had this gunpowder Irish gin?

It's so good. You should try this sometime. It makes a delicious gin tonic. I'll check it out. It's not that expensive either. There we are. I realize that in our intro, we completely bury the lead as to why Justin is here with us on the show. We did not mention it all.

I think he mentioned it. You've been doing this ISS archaeology project. And I forget why or how I interacted with it at some point on Twitter. I discovered it a while back and then we had Roland Miller on a couple of months back. And right after we got off with him, he emailed us, hey, you should talk to this crew. And I was like, yeah, they've been on our list. So, you know, this has been something I've been thinking about for a while. I've been following along.

I'm really excited to dig into it. So maybe we can start with like what this project is. Dig into it. Jeez. I've been derailed entirely. That kind of that kind of. punnery is endemic to the field, unfortunately. I imagine it is, yeah.

This is a, it's actually, it's a preview of the, it's a, it's a clapback for me because we, we have an interview recorded Anthony and I that's coming out next week that we've already done, and he made a dig joke at me, so this is just payback at retribution. So that's your teaser. One thing I want to mention before you give us the intro on this project, Justin, is that you have another half, which is Dr. Alice Gorman, and she has the unfur. fortunate pleasure for all phenomenal live streams of living in Australia at which it would be like 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. or something. And so Jake and I have not yet developed a strategy for having

Australians on the show now that we are weekly at 4 p.m. Eastern. So we're still working on that, but we should mention Alice up front as well. Yeah. The inimitable Dr. Space Junk is my co-PI on this project. Yes, definitely. I think she would be great to have on the show. I think it would be a fantastic opportunity. She'd love to do it. Is there a good story? Is there a good story? Yeah, yeah.

Is there a good story behind Dr. Space Junk? What's that all now? Oh, I think it just came from the years and years that from, I mean, she really started thinking about space archaeology. It's something like 2002, 2003, and really worked her way into the space industry in Australia through her work and really made an effort to make a lot of contacts there. And I think somehow in that, in that milieu, somebody started calling her that and it stuck. And I think she's thrilled with it.

And it's, of course, it's the title of her book, Dr. Space Junk versus the universe. So, yeah, I think it's, I think it's great. And I think she loves it. I need someone to give me a good nickname like that. I don't have one of those cool badges of honor that I can just turn around. Listeners, it's your job. She now has an asteroid named after her, too. So she's doing pretty well in that department.

Oh, man. Okay. All right. Goals. I remember when we had John and the McDowell on the show and I asked why his Twitter handle was a bunch of weird numbers. And he was like, that's my asteroid. And I was like, oh, cool. Yeah.

Totally. I get it. What else? Of course. Of course. Anyway, Justin, what the hell are you doing up there on the ISS from down here on Earth? Yeah, that is kind of the issue. We actually are not up there on ISS.

But, yeah. So this project started in 2015. It was really kind of inspired by the fact that I was, you know, I'm a little too online, a little too on Twitter. And I was following NASA at the time. And they announced their latest call for new astronaut candidates. It was like early November of 2015. And they published their guidelines for people who wanted to apply.

And among the things that said in those guidelines was, you know, you have a degree in engineering or or science, you're, you qualify to, to apply, even if you only have a bachelor's degree. But then there were a whole series of fields they listed that they said were, you know, kind of adjacent to or related to science or engineering that were non-qualifying. And among those were the social sciences. And then a parenthesis, it actually said, geography, comma, anthropology, comma,

archaeology, close parenthesis. And I was like, what? It was kind of amazing because it's like, are we even on their radar enough?

Like, why did somebody think to write that down? Has this come up before? I kind of didn't think so. But then at the same time, it was also like, this is sort of ridiculous

because, you know, the fact is that there never has been any real social science research on long duration space flight. I mean, there's been like one small study that was done by an anthropologist Jack Stooster

where he had astronauts to do journals on ISS. That was really informative and really important, but that's about all there had been at that time. And it really seemed important if you were planning to send people to a lunar base or to Mars, and it's going to take three years around trip, to understand the social and cultural aspects of life in space. And so that seemed like a real research gap. And it also seemed like there was a bias in the space agency. And I don't want to just call NASA out on this. Actually, there is no space agency that has ever allowed non-scientists, non-engineer types to apply until right now the current Jaxa recruitment is open to any educational background.

We still don't know whether they're actually going to choose anybody who doesn't come from a science or engineering background. So there's never been a social scientist astronaut. There's such a posity of research in the area. And it's really critical as we've started to show with the results that we've been having with this project. So I was thinking, like, what would you study if you could study it? How can I show them what they're missing out on? And so ISS seemed like the clear choice. To date, something like 42% of all the people have ever been to space have been visitors to ISS, 255 more.

people. I don't know what the exact number is right at this moment, but a huge number of people from a wide variety of countries and space agencies. It's multi-gender. It's multi-ethnic, multilingual. There's a lot going on there. And also, ISS was created entirely to help us understand what the impact of long-duration spaceflight is on humans. So I was thinking like, okay, I want to study this site, but how can I do that? There have been people like me and like Alice who've been thinking about space archaeology for more than 20 years. Beth O'Leary, who did the first project, started in 1999 and did a project on tranquility base. But without being able to go to a site, that seemed really a problem because, you know, typically archaeologists are present at the sites that they study are present in the landscapes they're surveying. And we obviously can't do that because NASA just told me I can't be an astronaut on the one hand.

On the other hand, I don't have $55 million to pay somebody to let me go. And there are not grants for that kind of thing. I have a feeling that price is going to go up too, because now NASA is making all private astronaut missions have a former NASA astronaut as like the captain of the mission, which is another kind of ridiculous. So you might, 55 might be low, especially now with inflation. You're going to have to bump that up a little bit. Yeah, exactly, right.

So it's increasingly far away. But what happened at the exact same time, it was kind of perfect synchronicity was that a colleague named Jason De Leon, who won a MacArthur Genius Prize for this work, and is now at UCLA. He has a project called the Undocumented Migration Project, where he was studying the effects of U.S. border policy on the lived experience of migrants who are crossing from Mexico into the United States. And he'd come up with all these incredible innovative techniques. He's an archaeologist, but he was using both archaeological and anthropological techniques to kind of get at some of these features of the experience. And one of the things he did, this book that he wrote, which was published at exactly the same time, it's called The Land of Open Graves, Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail.

Highly recommended. It's not technical at all. It's an incredible book. One of the things he did was he gave disposable cameras to migrants on the Mexico side of the border and retrieved them on the U.S. side of the border so they, they could take photos of things that he couldn't observe otherwise. And that was like light bulb clicking on for me. They've been taking photos on ISS this whole time.

And not only that, but the habitation of ISS in 2000, November of 2000, coincided with the rise of digital photography so that there's millions more images than there ever were of any previous space habitat. And because they're born digital, they actually have metadata that say when they were made. So we can actually put them in order. So if we could get access to those images and we could catalog, for example, who's in what picture, where they're located, and what other items are in that space with them and connect them to specific moments and time, suddenly we can map out arcs of behavior, arcs of association over the entire history of ISS. And that's a major part of what we're working on. That's kind of like the core of our project.

And we've done pilot studies that have shown the important. of this kind of work. For example, looking at visual displays in the Russian segment or looking at the distribution of different groups of people across the space station. We can get into that, I'm sure, later on. Yeah, there's been no relevant recent topics of visual displays of anything in the Russian segment, for sure. Exactly. Exactly. This is the thing. I mean, it's, it doesn't make me happy that we've had these controversies over, you know, what is being shown in what parts of the space station. But the fact is, we had already started to do that research in 2017.

We published two articles on it in 2020 and 2021. And here we see, in a really public way, with Olegartemya, if yes, exactly. Well, this is actually a different display. There was a previous display where he was holding up the Donetsk Republic flag, right? And so he was really demonstrating that the Russian sentiment towards towards Ukraine or the so-called breakaway republics of Ukraine, et cetera. And the fact is that those kinds of displays have been happening in the Zvezdaa module from the beginning of ISS, maybe not in such a provocative way.

The Russians undoubtedly know what kind of reactions are going to get when they do these kinds of things. The one you just showed was also interesting because that was actually, well, Russ Cosmos claimed it was a personal effort on the part of our Temia, where, but I mean, you can see what a rich cultural landscape has been created here. So, you know, starting from the lower left, we have the Soviet flag in Uriga Gagarin, directly above that. I know it's hard to see, but there's a black and white portrait of Konstantin Tzeilkovsky, who is the first kind of the year.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. It's on the wall rather than kind of facing out. And so it's actually the 165th anniversary of his birth. I believe in September. But he's the first person to come up with the idea of multi-stage rockets as a way of getting into orbit. He was the first person to think about what life would be like in microgravity.

So he's one of the three major Russian space heroes besides Yuri Gagarin and the original designer of the Soviet space program, Sergey Korolev, whose image we do not see in this. But there's actually a small black and white image that's just above and to the right of that. It's a group photo. No, I couldn't figure out what that. Yeah, right there. Yeah, right there. Can't figure out what that is.

Then you've got these icons. including the icon of St. George, which is the one that's really visible there in front of the yellow canisters. St. George is one of the patron saints of the Russian military, and in fact, the highest decoration given by the Russian military, is the Order of St. George. So that's really interesting there. Then we've got the flags of Ross Cosmos with the red stars and the blue flag of the Bauman State Technical Institute, which is, you know, the origin of the yellow jump-suits that we also saw a few months ago. They had to get this flag in there to keep the cover story going, right? Yeah, yeah. I'm pretty sure that that's what it was, and they had no intention of making any pro-Ukraine statements.

Do you think they put them on, though, and they were like, oh, shit, like, we didn't, we forgot, we packed these. Somebody made a mistake. They were unpacking the cargo bag. They're like, go for a cargo unpacking. of Section 305 panel B, and they were like, oh, shit, we forgot to tell them which ones we brought. Right. Yeah, no.

I mean, it was clearly meant to send a message about the university, and it was easily misread by everybody else. But yeah, so then if you go around, then you've got another image of your Egaran, you've got an Orthodox cross, you've got a Russian flag, you've got another icon on the right-hand wall, which is the most common icon actually do appear on ISA. and there have been lots of icons that have been sent to ISS. It's called the Mother of God of Kazan type. And then you've got a flag about Seilkovsky's 165th birthday right there,

which it hasn't happened yet, but is coming up. And then Artemiev himself is holding an icon. And the icon he's holding, according to my colleague Wendy Salman at Chapman, she's a Russian art historian and collaborated on the research that we did in this area in those articles. She identified this as an icon of St. Catherine. And it's specifically, according to the news reports in Russia, it is an icon that was given to Artemiev by the Metropolitan, who's like the chief priest, of the city of Yacaterinberg, which is named for St. Catherine, right? And this particular event, so he's doing it, he's got a microphone, he's doing a video, a live video feed down to the people of Yatatirinberg telling them that he received this from the Metropolitan and that he will bring it back when he returns. and I think September, October, before the Saints Day.

But he's doing this thing on this day because there was a procession happening in Yucaterinberg to commemorate the 1004th anniversary of the murder of the Romanov family. And that happened in Yucatareneberg. So this is all, like, this is like all fitting together. You can do a lot with one photo. Wow.

It's very complicated and dense, but this is what's going on, right? So the Romanovs have now received kind of a rehabilitation post-communism, and especially under Vladimir Putin, the nationalism of the Russian Empire, et cetera. So that's what all of this is playing into, in addition to the increased prominence of the Russian Orthodox Church, which we see in the cross and the various icons, and the relationships between the crew members and the clergy. So we've actually tracked the display, which this is an unusual and very temporary version of that display, but there are always things on this wall. In fact, I was able to catalog 78 different items that appeared over 14 years.

We were able to see that different crews are more religious and some are less religious, but also that the displays go along with moments of national importance. So the celebration of the end of the 60th anniversary of World War II in 2005, the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, or the buildup, because we only did up to 2014, but the buildup to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014. And we could see the rise in religious items, particularly associated with those moments. In addition, actually, we were able to even look back at Mir and the Salient Space Station and see that there was a tradition. Going back, yes, going back decades. In fact, the earliest example we saw of a visual display goes back to Sally at 5 in 1976 of a portrait of Yuri Gagarin. So he's like this secular saint, a hero, maybe he's protecting the crew or, you know,

kind of, you know, somebody they can look up to and build an identity around. So that's happened frequently. And the architecture of those space stations is what the Vesdaa modules architecture is derived from. There's a cultural tradition that's happened and that's been developed among cosmonauts that this is an appropriate place to do this. Even though there are no actual accommodations like hooks or fasteners or anything like that in this area, it's just some empty space that's also visually prominent that they

were opportunistic about, right? It's basically their YouTube wallpaper is what it is there, right? Or your refrigerator door, I would say. Like, I think that that's kind of apt, right? Like, what do you put up the things that you care about or things that you as a family bond over, right? So I think that that's a little bit of the phenomenon there. That's fascinating. I mean, this is like—

I feel like this five-minute segment was exactly like why your project is so awesome and why NASA should care about this. Because like purely as like an opposition research type situation that you just unpacked for us, like you can figure out all these things about, you know, it's quite literally Kremlinology to some extent. You know, like you're doing what that word was derived from, which was like, whose pictures hang and where and why is, why is Corlev not in this? And why is this guy in this? It's very interesting how you can draw all that out from, you know, what Jake and I ridiculed because we don't understand the language and don't know what he was talking about. It's just a very ridiculable image, you know.

Right. So before we go any further, I do just want to say, we're not in opposition to anything as researchers. Oh, I didn't mean you. I'm not like, like, NASA should care about it from like just keeping tabs on everyone. No, I understand. I just wanted to clarify that, you know, for the public audience that's watching this. We did actually look at visual displays in the U.S. orbital segment. There's actually been for some period of time, we don't know how long. It was actually thanks to Roland and Roland Miller's and Paulinezbole's photos that we were first able to identify that there's actually a crew memorial that is located on the hatch of Node 1 that commemorates deceased colleagues. colleagues. You've got his book there, Orbital, or sorry, interior space. Yeah, exactly. Such a

fantastic book. Such a fantastic book. And we actually, at Chapman, we did the premier exhibition of these photos. I was really pleased to be able to do that. But so, yeah, so one, is that where it was? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you can see up on the door that there's like a, there's different photographs of crew members, including from like the Columbia crew that, that died in the tragic accident, but there's also even like a nameplate from an office door at JSC of one of a fellow astronaut who actually never flew, but who clearly the crew felt strongly about and wanted to commemorate him after his death. So there's stuff like that in the U.S. segment, but it's not like Is this the, yeah, exactly. You see it. That's exactly it. That's exactly it, right? So you see

Frank Caldero's name there. You see a astronaut patched there with a name on it. I can't read it, But you see other items up there that commemorate different figures. And sometimes that's up there and sometimes it's not because NASA actually doesn't want the public to see those kinds of displays. So the crew is actually told to sanitize areas of public displays before they take images, which is not what happens to the Russian side at all. So that's a really interesting cultural difference. You're talking about who appears and who doesn't appear. Alice and I have and Wendy have noted Valentina Tereshkova does not appear

the first woman in space does not appear on the Zvezda wall. Well, but Alexei Leonov did appear but only after he died in 2019. So it may be the case that the Russian crew says you can only be here after you've died. Valentina is still alive and so maybe... She's like in the Duma still, I think, right? She is as far as I understand.

And doing work. And, you know, when she does pass away, and if ISS is still a going concern at that point, maybe her portrait will then be added to that. That would clarify things for us about what the meaning is. But we did notice that. I mean, that's a perfect example, how interesting the difference is, that they will only display deceased people, and we are like, please take that down. We don't want to remember a CS107 in the Space Station.

So I have a question kind of related to that. So it seems like there's two big factors. You have, we talked about, which is like there's, you know, the ISS is a huge political symbol. And so, you know, the Russians are using it for their own propaganda and the astronauts taking stuff down for some other, you know, public outreach communication issue that NASA can, you know, perceives. So there's like, you know, there's a lot of extra geopolitical attention on this. And then you have the other factor, which is space is such a special, you know, unique place that I imagine that humans are more likely. than normal to put trinkets and symbols and objects in that place to give them value, right?

Because that's always what you hear. You know, let's look one of the most common question astronauts get. What are you taking a space and then bringing back? And so they always get like a little stupid box. So it's always just these tiny little things they can bring or whatever, right? So as an archaeologist, like does that, how do you process that? Because it's not just like someone's kitchen. It's like a very unique, interesting place that probably has very little analogs on Earth

in terms of, you know, the kind of stuff you would stick on the walls, right? How do you handle that? Yeah, that's a really important point because this is, it is unusual in that they live where they work and they relax where they live. And, you know, they don't have, they have hardly any control at all. This is actually turning out to be a major focus of our work is the lack of autonomy and agency that astronauts and cosmonauts have. over the place where they're spending significant amounts of time, right?

They're spending six months or a year and ultimately eventually longer in these environments, right? But they don't get to choose where to work, when to work, how to work. They don't get to choose where to sleep. The births are fixed. They can't, like, just pull them out of the wall and put them in some other place if they would prefer to be some other place. Until it gets really busy, then they're just sleeping everywhere. Yeah, when there's a lot of people.

Yes, that is exactly. They're, you know, they just put up a sleeping bag, right? At the moment, there are eight crew berths on board. Two of them have been added in the last year, one in Nauka module and one in Columbus. And before that, often there was a disjunction between the number of people and the number of births that were available. Often there was at least one more person on board than there were births available. And what does that mean for the experience of that person who's kind of the odd person out, right?

They don't get the same privacy. Even though the privacy we're talking about is incredibly limited by the fact that it's the size of a telephone booth and it's made of fabric, you know, it doesn't even have hard walls for the most part. Like the two in Zvezda do, but the four in Node 2 do not. And like, and they're all connected. Like they're basically touching each other. Those people have more privacy, however, than the person or people who don't even get that. Right. So one of the things we are interested in is privacy and what the experience of the crew again is.

And so we've proposed experiments, and we can talk about the one that we did later. But one of the other experiments that we proposed was about acoustics. Now, the acoustics of ISS are pretty well understood from the point of view of what the decibel rating is in each location. Like, what is the volume in each location? Where is it louder? Where is it quieter? But what nobody knows at the moment is how far away do you have to be from somebody else to have a private conversation?

So, like, some astronauts in their memoir, Samantha Christofauretti who's up there right now, wrote about this in her memoir. She said, you know, you're basically on the honor system when you're having a video conference back home with your loved ones or your friends or family and that somebody's not listening in also because they share radio channels. so anybody could just click a radio channel on and hear what you're talking about. Right. So that means that you can't be as open and honest as you might otherwise want to be or feel like you even need to be.

That's kind of like being able to confide in somebody else is an important part of being human. And so what we'd like to do is have a scripted conversation where two crew members are speaking and they've got microphones. And there's a third crew member off to the side who's far away and gradually coming closer and also with a decibel meter. Like how close do they have to come and the measure? it before they hear what's being said in the scripted conversation. So for the first time, space station designers will be able to understand that phenomenon, as opposed to just saying, oh, it's really loud here or it's quieter here, right? Those are different kinds of questions.

And those are social and cultural questions that are the kinds of things that we're well equipped to ask and answer and that you don't see, for example, I don't know, biologists, doctors, or even necessarily psychologists answering. And I feel like it has major impacts for crew makeup as well, especially, you know, long-duration missions. You always talk about, like, how does the crew work together and do they like each other? But it's like, are they okay talking about family issues around the other person? Are they okay sharing health details with the other person? Because, yeah, you would feel stifled by that if you could never talk about any of that.

If you're up there for six months, if you're going to Mars for a couple of years, it's really interesting now that we're here. and we can talk about that kind of stuff because we've figured out enough of the basics of space that we can survive up there, but now how do we actually live is still being figured out. Which actually brings up, in my mind, a tweet I sent the Jake last night that you tweeted about.

I forget the exact wording of it, but there's always this saying that goes around that, oh, the ISS is 20 years old and we're just now hitting our stride with research, and we're just now have all this crew time available commercial cruise online. And I don't know if it was you tweeting or somebody else under the ISS Archaeology account, but you're talking about how, like, does anyone ask why it took 20 years? Because most space stations don't last 20 years. So like, what are we doing

that it took 20 years to get here? Do you, I don't know if you have any more than that rant that you put up on Twitter last night. But I'd be curious, pick your brain on that. Yeah, I think it was actually something I said during the ISS Research and Development Conference because it was something that it was repeatedly said by the NASA administrators. who were present at the conference, they were so proud that now we're talking about a decade where we can just do research. In other words,

the first decade was building, the second was kind of learning how to live with it, and now we're in the real research phase. Because they're really trying to encourage also both academic and commercial research on ISS in the time that remains with this platform. And I do think that it's worth thinking about how it took so long. There's no doubt that they're geopolitical research,

There are economic reasons why it took so long. The ISS doesn't really, doesn't entirely look like it was planned, like even when the first modules were launched in 1998. There were changes, like there are some modules that were never launched. Some modules arrived very late and were attached in places that they weren't supposed to be, etc. Right? So there are reasons, understandable. But as I said in that tweet, you know, the commercial Leo destinations folks don't have 20 years to get that right.

right they they don't they need to get that right straight out of the gate and they need to be able to start to make money honestly right they need to be able to utilize the station the way it's supposed to be and i know i understand that several of them have said like we're a one launch space station right everything's going up all at once and we'll be ready to go um but even so you know there's going to be there is going to be a learning curve for them but what what has what lessons have been learned from i s that's a really really important question. And one of the things that I like to think about our project doing is that, you know, NASA and the other space agencies are always so focused on the present and the future

that they are rarely looking at the past to understand what they could be doing better. And we see that, for example, in forensic documents, or actually documents that we made forensic, like the inventory management system, which is the database that they use just to know what's on board. If you look at this database, like it'll tell you what's on board, but it's very, it's almost impossible to search because like the same thing, a five inch by five inch Ziploc bag has written six different ways. So there's no data validation and it's very, very hard to actually know what all of those things are. Like what was used and where did it go? Yeah. Where is it located on the space station? There's stuff obviously both in Russian and in English in it. And those things are not necessarily

translated the same way. One of the things that we did with the Australian Research Council grant that we had from 2019 to 2021 was we hired a database engineer to make that into a forensic document that could be queried properly and that has built-in translation and stuff like that so that we can actually track trends. It's not just a question of what have you got right now. It's a question of like what do we learn about the patterns? And of course, as archaeologists, the past is everything to us, right? So that's another way in which we have a different perspective and ask different questions that can be illuminating and provide novel information that's data derived, right?

Insights that are derived from hard data as opposed to, you know, anecdote. You know, it's all well and good to listen to the astronauts tell you, but there is just as fallible and unreliable as witnesses as any other human. So this is where we try to come in. I mean, the astronauts are their own data points when you get down to it, right? Like you can't, you can't necessarily treat them just as data sources. They are data. So you'd have to probably take that into account.

I don't know. I guess this is making me all grumpy again about the last astronaut corps. Because I had this same thought is, you know, with this most recent one that was announced and they were billing it is very diverse because. And if you looked at it racially or gender based, and it was, it was pretty diverse. Like great work on that. But then you pull up the resumes and like there was whatever, you know, 12 astronauts. And like 10 of them were fighter jet pilots that went to. test pilot school, of those 10, nine of them were mechanical or electrical engineers.

And then the other scientists were either biologists or physicists. And that's like, basically all our doctors. Like that was, that was the palette, right? And I was like, okay, diversity is a big word. And if you're going to throw it around, you need to kind of mean it in all sorts of different ways, right? And yeah, I guess, you know, this feels like something NASA should be addressing like tooth sweet here. Like if we're going to have these, these commercial companies building space stations right now, They're on the, you know, there's drawings on the board right now about how to design these things.

And like having this information feels like it would be very, very valuable to them. But now we're behind, right? So I don't know if there's a question buried in that. Well, so I absolutely agree with you. There's no doubt that we face challenges in trying to, particularly in trying to gain funding support for what we're trying to do. because that same bias that you're identifying is kind of interwoven throughout the agency at the level. For example, if you look at what's called the human research program, basically what they want to do is make sure that the crew survive, first of all, but also that they have good and healthy lives before and during and after their missions.

And they lay out all these risks that they see for different kinds of missions, including going to Mars. And then they say we want to try and mitigate those risks through research. But the only research that they fund is biomedical and psychological. And there is no room. I mean, I've asked them point blank. They say, if you want funding, you have to put yourself under some larger biomedical proposal. We're not equipped. And the same is true of what's called the ISS National Lab, which basically manages all the non-NASA,

of the external research on the American part of the space station. Likewise, they're interested in the life sciences, physical sciences, remote sensing, education to a certain extent, those kinds of things, and commercialization. And we don't fit into any of that, even though the kinds of things that we want to do could be really helpful. For example, we would love, this is going to sound kind of weird, but it gets actually towards the tweet that you guys put out to promote this, dirty stuff, gross stuff. We want to see IS a trash. we want to get actual trash a sample of ISS trash. Let's say three days or a week. What gets,

what's getting discarded? Would you believe that nobody has ever really studied that? And when I say that, I mean that- Just throw to the sickness. We're getting rid of that. Well, yeah, so that's part of it. But even so when we had shuttle up until 2011, that stuff, some of it would get brought back to Kennedy.

And so our question was, well, did you like put it in a landfill? and Kennedy Spence Bay Center. Can we go dig it? Can we go find it? Because we would love to do that. Ourchaeologists would happily dig up the garbage. Yeah. No, no, no.

That's our gold. No question. And whether it's in the ancient past or the present. So it turns out all of it got sent to the Brevard County waste disposal facility. And so it's in a public landfill and we would never be able to find it. And it was never studied. It was just considered trash, right? And what can you do with trash?

So as the Grinch said, one man's trash is another man's potpourri. I believe that's a direct quote for the movie. So sign me up, right? But the other thing is that since we've had cargo dragon 2012 and after, obviously most trash goes back on the other cargo resupply ships, Cygnus, progress, etc., etc., and it's designed to incinerate in the atmosphere during reentry. sometimes trash does come back on Dragon. It's often wedged in to kind of stop stuff from moving around. And that could be like old clothes or old food containers, stuff like that. But the cargo mission contract specifies that the contractors are not allowed to even open the containers that it's in.

They have to destroy it without opening it. So again, nobody really knows what it consists of. And I would suggest to you, like how much food is left at the bottom of an average food pouch, right? That's a good question. Because if you're trying, if you're going to have an unresupplyable mission to Mars, you want to know how much you need to put on board. And if that waste can somehow be reduced, reused, recycled, diverted into use again, so much the better. Right. And that goes for clothes. And it goes for all kinds of consumables. And the fact is that we don't really know the scope of it because it hasn't been studied. So I would argue that,

Our interest in trash is absolutely a relevant one to doing future space better. I see the question, can you FOIA trash? I don't think so. I don't think I haven't gotten that route yet. But I'll check it out because, you know, if that's my root, that's my route. I will say I have a meeting at JPL in a couple of weeks with somebody with the microbiology team there who is able at least to get the food samples. and we may be collaborating on a proposal with them about that, but stay tuned. Yeah.

They may not show it to you, though, because of the ITAR, right? And so that Australian on your team is going to be a real bummer. ITERTAR. Yeah. What if somebody scribbled a rocket nozzle on one of those food containers? Yeah, that's a potential issue, but we won't know until we cross that bridge. Maybe you, we could put you in contact with Mike Gold, who might be able to add a line about trash openness to the Artemis Accords? I'm just thinking. We're all going

to be up there together. Maybe we should have crashed him last week. Yeah, you should. Yeah, that's right. He was at that thing. He's everywhere, I think. He's literally everywhere, I think. Why is it trash? Maybe he'll be an IAC in Paris and I'll talk to him there. Yeah, you got to get the trash accords going. The trash accords. Well, you know, hey, look, let me put this a slightly different way as far as our sustainability. Something else that we were interested in was, you know, they're planning to deorbit ISS, right, in 2031, which is sad. I mean, because it's such a, it's the, literally it's the first permanent human habitation site in space. And, you know, so not to be able to have access to that going forward will really be sad. We are actually thinking about, and we've started to suggest

to certain NASA folks who are engaged with these issues about items that maybe could be brought back that would be evocative of the history and be able to tell public stories or be important for scientists to study, et cetera. But the other thing is that it's a 450-ton space station that they're going to try to put into a relatively small spot of the Pacific Ocean. And there's only been one space station that anybody's tried to do that with before, and that was Muir. Right. So Skylab went into Australia. Sally at seven went into Argentina, right? Tian Gong won. was not controlled and by sheer chance ended up in the Pacific Ocean. That was just luck, right?

The mere example, which mere was a quarter of the size of ISS, didn't work perfectly. It had too long of a burn and it actually landed 2,000 kilometers short of where it was supposed to. And we don't know what landed in the, what actually survived reentry and landed in the water. This is a little bit like the Long March rocket body that just came in right a couple days ago.

But on a much larger, five times larger than that, right? So we would like to go and look on the ocean floor for the remains of mirror because it's important for NASA to understand as well as they can what is likely to survive from ISS. And the fact is that they're architecturally identical parts like the Zvezda module between the two space stations. So that's one aspect. But again, to come back to the sustainability,

issue, how sustainable is it for us to keep throwing space stations and other space stuff into the ocean? This stuff is often toxic. We don't have a good understanding of exactly what survives because of the remoteness of where we're sending it. We do know about things like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Is that, should we be concerned? I'm serious with them because we've got four more space stations that are being built by U.S. organizations that are not planning for this. necessarily. I mean, their plan presumably

is also to do orbit. We've got the Russians talking about a space station. The Chinese have their own space station right now. Where is all of this going to go? I got two up there. Oh no. Did the one,

Tangangang two come down yet? The Tangangang one came down. But two is still up there, right? There's a, yeah, two is still up there and it now has two modules. No, that's three. There's another one. There was a sequel before the triple.

There was Yonggong two. That was a little test one. They did it a little. just a little test. So where is this stuff all going and how much longer can we continue to do this? Should we as a matter of environmental ethics be taking this into account? I mean, the ocean's big, but it's inhabited too, not by us, but it's inhabited. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's a gentleman who has a shitload of money that once pulled up some rocket engines for the bottom of the ocean from a very historic space mission that I feel like might be interested if you told him that he could have a piece of mirror hanging in his. headquarters somewhere. So. Well, it would still belong to the Russians. That's a good point. It would still belong to the Russian. And not only that, but we have no interest in picking it up. We would leave it where it is because, in fact, actually, best practices in heritage management are to leave things in situ if they face no other threat.

And so that's specifically that's part of actually the UNESCO underwater cultural heritage convention. So we would certainly abide by that. So you're saying we should send Richard Garriott down to Mir. Well, I mean, or actually Go in a heartbeat. Actually, we've been talking about underwater autonomous vehicles. There's a company in Austin called Teradep that we've been talking about with this.

And so, you know, but we would want to, we would want to map that. I mean, like, what is the debris trail? If you look at the Columbia report, that stuff was spread over hundreds of miles. And those were approximately the same size, Columbia and Mir. So, you know, what is the actual threat? that's the only the Columbia accident is the only example where we have actually identified 80,000 individual pieces of a spacecraft that that deorbited so you know there's lessons to be learned here and I think we should we have verifiable proof that there's at least one individual from every company that is bidding on commercial leo

listening to this podcast right now and so you have a direct line into at least somewhere in the hierarchy of these companies and I'm curious if you're able to tell them, like, you need to talk to us about this particular thing to better inform your space station design. Is it living quarters? Is it work sites? Like, what are the things that you're finding on ISS? Or maybe it's things that you found from the past stations to ISS that have been improved? Like, where are the areas of improvement that they should focus on from your work? Right.

So, in fact, actually, we've already been talking to these folks. I mean, I don't know about the individuals who are actually present. here today, could be. We've been talking to these folks, and that's exactly the message that we're trying to get across, is that there are, there's not only things that we are interested in that should interest them, whether it's things like the visual displays, or I mentioned very briefly, we actually were able to use the photographic data from ISS for the first time to actually show what the distribution of populations across all of the modules of ISS are. by gender, by nationality, by space agency. And the results are a little bit surprising. So, for example, you know, we're able to show that women do not appear very frequently in the Russian module. Maybe that's not so surprising because they've only sat in one female cosmon up far. Wikipedia had me on that one.

But women also do not appear in the photographs very frequently in the eating or hygiene exercise areas. and yet they appear 50% more often than their numbers would suggest in the cupola. So that's kind of interesting. Why is that the case? With nationality, what we see is... Zero G hairs is hard to pass up. It's very photogenic. If they happen to have long hair, yes, exactly.

But for nationality, for example, we've been able to show that there really are nationalized areas of what purports to be an international stay station. So the number two group in the Japanese module is the Japanese. The number two group in the European module is the Italians. The U.S. is number one in both of those. But that's because their numbers are so much larger than every other group in the U.S. Or no second. Don't have a crew member on every flight. It's like one or two a year at our current rate, which is higher than it was in the past, yeah.

Where do all the Canadians hang out? By the arm controller. No, no, that's true. That's true. The Canadians are more or less evenly distributed around the U.S., primarily in the U.S. segment, again. But then the Russians really dominate in the Russian segment. So for as much as this has been talked about as an international project, what we really see is the effect of the governance systems, the management systems of ISS, which, again, like, this is not necessarily a huge surprise, but what it points to is important. So each agency kind of controls its own facilities and decides what's going to go on there and who's going to be working in those areas.

And so that's not. This is a project that cost $150 billion or more, the most expensive building project in the history of humanity, perhaps. And it's not being run in a way that everybody is using it equally according to their proportion of the population. In other words, there are real inefficiencies there. And so it will be to the detriment of these private space station operators if they don't figure out a way to make that better, to make it as efficient as it possibly can be so that everybody is available and has the opportunity to work wherever. That's really going to be a key issue. And what it means is, and also for future international projects like Gateway, right, is the same thing going to happen? on Lunar Gateway? Is the same thing going to happen at a Chinese Russian lunar habitat? That's not

efficient. How are you going to get the most out of the resources that you're expending? And that's the sort of thing that I would suggest we can provide insights about. We're also interested, for example, in what are called restraints that is to say attachment points. So like hand drills, bungee cords, Velcro, Ziploc bags, all this stuff. Alice says this great phrase. She calls them gravity surrogates. Because in fact, that's what they are. You know, we're not adapted as a species to anything other than 1G. We're not used to anything other than 1G. So when we put something down, we assume it's going to stay there.

That obviously doesn't work in space. So what do we do? We use these affordances like Velcro to make that happen. And if you look around the space station, there are areas where Velcro has, and you can see this particular. So this is a great image. I'm glad you put this up. So we have this workstation in Node 2. and you can see that blue panel that has 40 pieces of symmetrically arranged pieces of Velcro

to be used to stick there, right? So that was planned from the beginning. That was done on the ground. It was sent up that way. But if you can look just below that, the white area down below, there's other Velcro that was not attached in the same way, not symmetrically, not at the same time. It's obviously, this is what archaeologists do, by the way. We notice, for example, that you've got square pieces,

and then you've got pieces that have their square where the corners cut off. And then you have the two rectangular people. Those were not put there at the same time. And they're not arranged in the same way. And sometimes... But they didn't even care to line up where they started, which just really drives me nuts. Absolutely.

Absolutely. But they just needed gravity in that location. If you go up a little above... I want names on this, Justin. I want to know who did this. If this was Victor Glover, my just world will be shattered. That he is not as... Do you go up to the top?

Oh, up to the top. Actually, no, it looks like in this picture, there's some Ziploc bags there. Baby wipes up on this space station? They have baby wipes everywhere. That's what they use everywhere. I can pack those. That's great. Unfortunately, because of the stuff that's actually stuck to the wall up here, you can't see it.

But what I can tell you is from our observation of these images, there are spots where there's residue from removed Velcro, the glue from the backing of the Velcro that's there. So we can actually see traces of where there were patches of Velcro and then they were later removed. So that's, it changes in the gravity, the quote unquote gravity of this location. So it builds up in areas where you need it, where you suddenly decide, no, I have to put something here. I can't work otherwise, right? And then sometimes it'll get removed because it's like, no, we're not using that anymore. Okay.

So if you are a future space station operator, how do you understand that going forward in order to mitigate positions before they become issues? How do you provide the accommodation, the affordance beforehand? because that's much more efficient and cost effective than jury rigging some kind of solution afterwards, like, we'll just stick some Velcro wherever, right? So those are the kinds of things that we're currently studying. How does that accrete? Where does it accrete?

What activities is that associated with so that we can actually provide that exact kind of advice to these future operators? And I do want to point out, like this is an unusual archaeology project, no doubt, because it's happening on a site that's still, you know, still being occupied. It's in the present. It's floating in space. Obviously, that's unusual as well. But another way in which what we're doing is unusual is that we are one of the very few instances of an archaeological project that has the opportunity to provide real insights that can help improve life in the future.

And that's something that I find really exciting and gratifying about this project. Because it's so rare that we get to do that. And yet here is a prime example of where the social science. can contribute. And I often say, you know, that for every, this is our pinned tweet on our project, for every technical problem, every engineering problem, every scientific medical problem, whatever it is that people are trying to solve for space, there are social and cultural components to those problems as well. And if you don't, yep, there it is. And if you don't account for those problems, you're not going to get good results, right? And this is, we can see this,

for example, on Earth, and we look at different health care outcomes for different socioeconomic This is like basic stuff that we should recognize already. And it's why research like ours really should be funded. It can make a big difference. It's not just like a luxury. Like, oh, we figured out how to make people survive. And so now we can do, no, no, no, you need this. It's going to be important.

It's going to save you money. Yep. By the way, we're cheap. We're cheap. I was going to say, compared to other kinds of research in space, it's incredibly cheap. I just feel like 2030, like, you know, before they turn the lights out, we got to, they got to just send Justin Alice, whoever else they want to send up there. Like, go up there and spend them on.

Oh, we'll go. Yeah, we'll totally. We can hold a camera. I got lenses. I got good stuff. Roland told us they have all of the lenses up on ISS, so if they keep them there, will be good. But like, go up, spend a month, document that hell out of that place before we sink it. Or, you know, maybe at that.

I mean, at that point, I'm hoping we've got. some capability to do a better rebust than Cygnus can do. And I don't know, I feel like it would be awesome if this was up there in the future as like you could go. It needs to be. It needs to be. It belongs in a museum. A little ahead of its time, probably. Maybe not.

130's far away. 100%. Yeah. But like, great questions for the heritage aspect are like, what does it smell like? What did it smell like? Like, thinking of the future, right? How can we preserve those aspects of the experience? We know it smells terrible, by the way.

I've been there when they've opened a cargo transfer bank. And it's gross. It's absolutely middle school locker room plus, like, doctor's office. Well, nasty. But I shouldn't be the only one to have that experience. You don't want to be the only one that's smelling the ISS? No, but seriously. I mean, that's like future space stations hopefully will solve those problems

and it'll smell, you know, more like what we, what we're used to on Earth. But it's, like, that's an important stage in our development as a species moving off the earth. people should be able to know what it meant to live in places like this. All right. This has been amazing. This is awesome. Yeah, that's great. We've got to have a part too because I'm like, there's so many more things we didn't even get to.

So we have to have a bit on to talk more about it. We love to do it anytime. If people aren't following along, what would you send them to? Send them Twitter website. Anything else in particular you would point them to? Yeah, absolutely. Our website is issarchology.org. and so you can check out our blog posts there.

You can check out all the news reports that we've been featured in various news reports as well. So please check that out. And our Twitter feed is where we're most active at ISS Archaeology. And I'm at JSTP, WALSH, JSTP Walsh, JSTP Walsh. So feel free to follow us there. We're seven followers away from 3,000.

Get us there. Come on. Do it off nominal listeners. Do it anomalies. Yeah, yeah. Jake, what's you got? What do I got? Well, I'm just getting back up to speed. But I recently just put out an episode with,

we Martians, with Abby Freeman, who's the Deputy Project Scientist for Curiosity, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary tomorrow. So it's a big day for curiosity. We talked about where the mission came from and, you know, some of her favorite moments and what's coming up. So that was a really fun episode. I love Abby.

She's great. And next week, I have a very special guest on the show. You might know him. It's you, Anthony. It's here on the show. And you make a dig a digging in the dirt joke about me, which I both thought was very true and also didn't appreciate. So we will get into that.

We're going to talk about clips, commercial lunar payload services and some of the funky stuff going on with that. Yeah, we should also talk, Anthony, about Artemis I. So just before we head out your listeners, we're going to see this rocket launch. So this will be the first post-pandemic meetup. So we don't have any of the details yet, but if you do want to, you know, be notified as like,

what's happening and where you should go, if you're going to be in the Florida area around the, whatever this rocket launches, go to the site. Yeah, go to this site, offnom.com slash events. You'll see this Artemis 1 launch events link. And you can put your email in there. And that way you'll get the emails for like, here's the venue, here's the time, all that kind of stuff.

So feel free to sign up there. going to be around the Port Canaveral, Cape Canaveral area for that launch. And if you end up in Florida around the launch and you are on this email list, check your email a lot because we're likely to just send out an email. Like, we're going to this place. We change the venue and then, yeah, and then we move it and then we cancel it. We change the time. That's us.

This is not going to go smoothly. It's also 20-22. And like my wife was supposed to fly today and she just got to text to like two. Your flight's canceled. Have fun re-booking. Like I'm not re-booking you on by myself. You got to figure this one. one out. So like, there's going to be highly variable. The rockets are going to move. The planes aren't

going to work. I have to go to a wedding basically at the same time as the launch. Like, it's going to be an extremely variable situation. But, uh, yeah, we're going to see what happens. I guess you won't have time to go to the landfill and look for ISS trash then. I might dig around. I can't promise. I know, I don't recommend it. I honestly, I shouldn't, I shouldn't joke about that. I don't recommend it. Like, why are you here? You have to say something. Justin sent me wearing a shirt. Bob Cabano is going to be very mad at all of these listeners that are out there digging in. He's in Washington now. He's in Washington now.

He's the reason we found out about where the trash was, actually. He was very helpful with that. Good, good for him. Thank you. On tip from Bob. Awesome. All right, folks. That's it.

That's all we got. We're out of here. Thanks a lot. This is awesome. See ya. Thanks. Thanks, thank you. Great. One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one.

End of death.