Off-Nominal - 73 - Podcast is Not an Option

Episode Date: August 12, 2022

Jake and Anthony are joined by Gary Jordan, NASA Public Affairs Officer and host of the official podcast of Johnson Space Center, “Houston We Have a Podcast.”TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 73 - Podcast is Not an Option (with Gary Jordan) - YouTubeCrew Demo-2 | Launch - YouTubeNASA's SpaceX Crew-2 Returns Home: Splashdown - YouTubeAxiom Mission 1 Launches to the Space Station (Official NASA Stream) - YouTubeExpedition 65 Multipurpose Laboratory Module Nauka Docking - July 29, 2021 - YouTubeFollow GaryGary Jordan (@G2Nasa) / TwitterHouston We Have a Podcast | NASAFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterOff-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

DLS and go for main engine, start. Hello, friends. Happy Thursday. Welcome to Off Nominal. Jake, we've got a real professional on the line today. Oh, you're muted. You've muted yourself. This is how unprofessional Jake is.

Jake has muted himself. It says, on my screen, what I'm reading right now, it says, guest has muted themselves, is what I'm... No, all right, here, let's see, I can't unmute you. So you worked that one out. I'm going to go over to the real professional that we got with us. Gary Jordan of NASA, how is it going? Jake has left the stream.

He quit. He totally quit. He's just completely left the stream. My back? Am I back? You're back. The mute, it had like the little mute sign over my face and then the mute button did nothing.

Not clickable. Right after we got them talking with Gary about how we were so good at remote interviews. We're just like, yeah, we got us figured out. This is, this is the kind of. a day I'm having. So this is a very long move right now. I think that plant in his background is the only thing left in his house other than the microphone. Yeah, there's like this microphone, this computer, that plant, the whole house is empty. There isn't there isn't even a bottle opener. So that's that's one. He opened two boxes, the microphone box and the plant box.

That's it. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, so we're here. Thank you. Lee. Oh, man. Okay. I'm excited to get this started because yeah, this has been it's been hard for me. So I am, Yeah, so I'm moving and I don't even have a fridge in this house. So I was like, how do I get, like, how do I come here in the morning to work and then have a cold drink for three o'clock in the afternoon? Like, what do I do? So I just, I have an hour beforehand. I'll just walk out to the store right before and then walk back and bring it cold from the store, right? Because there's like a convenience store.

And I realized that my wife took the car and she has my mask in it. I'm the only mask in the house. And here where I live, we still have a mask mandate. You can't go into stores without one. I was like, oh, no, and it's like 20 minutes for the show. And I'm like, what do I do? Anyway, I solved that one way or another. And then finally brought, I brought this home.

So this is no creativity today. No creativity at all. This is maybe similar, you know, this is not as, not as quite well known as the tecate that you used to drink down there. No, no. Well, yeah. In some places. That very small beer brand, Tacote. Yeah, the very small unknown.

Anyways, I have a Corona. I'm excited to be hanging out with you today, Gary, because this is going to make the day go better, I think. So, cheers. Oh, yeah. Good, good. Yeah, cheers to you guys. Yeah, I heard you know. Let's see.

I brought, yeah, I brought, so I brought a hot drink, right? I have a long night. So this is just a, this is a single source Colombian espresso mix. So I got a hot drink. And then, well, I'm on the clock, so I can't participate with the beer yet. So I got just regular sparkling water too. just as a backup. So two drinks, yeah. I like the fancy hot drink.

I have some Kianti, and I know I poured a lot into this place. Nice. That's good. This is a pretty cheap one. This Rufino, Kianti, is, like, very cheap, and it's very delicious. So there's a couple different lines of Rufino, right? There's like Kianti Classico and whatever. This one, that's a blue label that's just Kianti, I think, is the cheapest, and it's the best. That's the best combo is cheap and good.

Oh, yeah. I'm going to say this, though, about this particular show between the Corona and the cheap Kianti and the sparkling water. This is the lowest we've spent on drinks on any episode of Othominal. By far. It's like we're all saving up for some near future travel that's going to be very expensive or something. I'm so happy to have set the bar so low, guys. This is great. A commercial off-the-shelf drinks edition of Off-Nominal.

Oh, boy. I saw that one, Jake, Jake, I saw the one episode you did where you had like a mix of like, it was like vodka and it was like a Coke with milk. What was that fancy drink that you did? He said you had to like for it just right. Yeah, it's called a paralyzer. It's like a Western Canadian special. So if you go to Alberta, everyone, like you can, everyone will know what it is. It's very normal.

You can totally just walk up to any bar and order it. You leave Alberta and everyone's like, I'm sorry, a what? Well, that was my expectation. and then I got a Corona extra over here. He changes it up. He's a man of mystery down there. We'll see when he moves into the new house how fancy his drink setup becomes again. Yeah, this is the last show in this house.

And next episode, I'll be able to return to my liquor cabinet and build something nice again. So we'll see. All right, where are we digging in? Because we got a lot of topics about being space communicators generally, I would say. But Gary, I'm curious to dig into your role a little bit because when we were thinking of like, all right, which topics are we digging into with Gary? I find it interesting when people always compare, because we're in the, we're humans, we compare things, right? Everyone's comparing NASA streams to SpaceX streams to this stream to other streams, whatever.

But I find it interesting in that a lot of cases, it's less common these days to have people that are, like, your full-time role is public affairs and communications. And I find that difference, like, pretty drastic in that what you spend your days on are different than what the SpaceX commentators spend their days on. And I'm just curious to dig into like, what is your day-to-day as somebody who's focused on that full-time at Johnson Space Center? Like, what does it actually consist of versus the tip of the iceberg that we see when you're wearing cool jackets on a live stream? I love that question because to frame that, I think it's more, it captures a little bit more

probably than you think. Because you're right, my focus is really human spaceflight and everything that that is. So most of my career has been stuff in low-worth orbit. So space station, SpaceX flights, Boeing. I'm starting to, right now, I'm working real hard on Artemis. So it's just, it's, it's, it's, it is very focused in that sense, not as broad of a, you know, focusing on like the different aspects of space. Like you guys do a lot with SpaceX. And then I saw you had, you were talking to someone on James Webb.

I don't deal with like anything that's like not anything that doesn't have a human in space. I don't typically touch it. But how we communicate is... We're lucky that James Webb Space Telescope did not require human in space, so we would have been more concerned if you did have involvement on that one. I know. I would be concerned too. So, yeah, but the thing is, like, for this role, the communication, the ways that we communicate, there are just so many different ways.

So you got, you see me right on the live streams with the broadcast. That's probably like 15% of my job. A lot of it is dealing with like talking points, a lot of writing, a lot of meetings. The podcast is just a gig that I, despite my manager saying like, this is not something you have to do. I just love doing it. So it's just something that I actually like dedicate time to. But there's just like there's so many things that we're involved. I was involved in a large capacity with like the communications and negotiations between like SpaceX Axiom and NASA.

whenever we were putting together the AX-1 mission, right? Like how that whole strategic communications plan was going to work. And I was like, that's where I spent a huge amount of my time, was like building the foundation for which we can do, you know, eventually get in front of the camera. But it was like, you know, you're in front of the camera for just like a couple of days where really it's months and months and months of planning. So that's really, yeah, it's a, it's a huge mix of just a lot,

like a lot of different things. Yeah. That must be really interesting to have to like the AX1 is a really good example of like having to coordinate so much stuff because you have one provider who's running the mission. Another provider who's flying the mission and then you guys were hosting it, I guess. I host, I don't know if the right word is, but you're the destination. And so you're involved too. And and you know, there's all this like stuff playing around like is, I assume it takes up a ton of time. But like what do you, how do you approach a problem like that? Like do you have any like kind of new strategies that you're working on? in terms of, you know, dealing with this new world where that can happen now all of a sudden. It's not just all NASA all the time. 100%. In fact, a lot of my job was trying to get a lot of the folks at NASA to understand that this is a completely different thing from what we normally do. Like I have a lot of guys in our office that are just our shuttle veterans.

They've been at NASA for 30 plus years. They have a lot of experience with shuttle. And shuttle was just was a great program. It was a massive program. but it was very NASA focused. Then you take this whole new model where it's like, for example, the AX-1 mission was just so, so different because it was a, the vehicle was a commercial vehicle that we, of course,

helped out to eventually bring online and test and fly, you know, the first flights were all NASA astronauts, but it's a commercially owned vehicle. It's not a NASA vehicle. And then the customers are our AXEM customers, but their destination is space station because, as NASA enabled all of that. So it's like, exactly to your point, like, who owns this?

You know, like, what is, like, what, like, what do we do? It was, it was definitely, I mean, I know, right? The thing that Jason Davis said one time when we were doing the show, where he was like, what if Kennedy didn't hand over control of the shuttle to Johnson after it cleared the tower? Like, then what happens? And it's just a thing I've never thought about. It's like, you know, completely arbitrary.

But like, yeah, what if, what if SpaceX was like, no, we're doing the communications from launch all the way through, and it's like, well, you're only so much in charge until they get up to the space station, because then it's all of our stuff. And like, so it's, I don't know, it's like one of those things like any part of the economy that's like, it exists more in our mind than it does in the real world. Yeah. Yeah, well, ultimately what it came down, like, we all set, like, we all got together and we were meeting on an almost weekly basis, which was really cool. You know, NASA and Axiom and SpaceX all in these weekly tagged, like, let's figure out how to tell this story. But ultimately, like the launch, for example, we, we just,

from a practical perspective, the launch was the responsibility of SpaceX and Axiom. It wasn't necessarily like a NASA responsibility. But then when you got into the vicinity of the International Space Station, when you started to join operations, like the Space Station flight control team was in charge of that operation. So naturally, like, we need to be not only folded into that mix, but really, really own it. And then it was just a matter of collaborating on how we all tell the story together. So ultimately, you know, it looked like to skip all the way ahead to the final product, we ended up coming up with a way where we could all be a part of the storytelling. And we distributed it on NASA.

We distributed an axiom streaming, SpaceX streaming. Everybody was, you know, for the most part, happy. Everybody got their story told. But it was just a matter of just bringing that, bringing that all together. And because it's totally different. It's a, it's a commercial era. So it wasn't NASA's place to come in with a position of, you know, forceful strength of saying like, no, this is NASA, you know, this is every, we're doing everything. You know, this whole mission is enabled by NASA. That's not, you can't, you can't come in that way because it's just everything's changing, right? I mean, this is a commercial industry is investing so much into this. It is a commercial industry. They have customers. They have different stakeholders that NASA doesn't have. So ultimately, we came up with a model. And I think, it worked out. We did a very detailed review afterwards of just, you know, how did it go?

A couple of tweaks here and there, but I think for private astronaut missions going forward, you're going to see the same thing. Yeah, yeah. I thought, like, you know, to NASA's credit, I remember the first time I sort of noticed that things were going to be different was either DM1, I think it was DM1, but either DM1 or DM2, both, you know, which was like the first really kind of go at it. And there was, it was like a cool moment because I remember like the Space Extreme would fire, up and then there was a SpaceX employee on one side and then a NASA employee standing right next to them right and there was like the COVID screen between them but yeah and then and then

that was in Hawthor and then vice versa over in Florida right they had you know the traditional NASA agreement that some would say yeah it was it was a crew exchange exactly I remember thinking at that moment like wow this is really cool like this is really because I think everyone was sort of wondering like is NASA going to like you know bring down the gauntlet and be like no this is You know, because that kind of was their mission, even though it was a commercial provider. It was a NASA customer and a NASA mission to a NASA destination. Like, you could have, you could have put the gauntlet down there, but it was kind of nice to see sort of the, I don't know, the partnership. So I guess it seems to me like.

It wasn't like that for a while, right? There would be the original cargo missions where like SpaceX was doing a stream and NASA was doing a separate stream. And even, you know, you can look at the launches out of Bikinor that kind of have like the Ross Cosmos stream and the NASA stream in that similar vein. but what Jake's talking about is that moment when it was like, oh, no, let's just do the co-stream thing. So maybe you can peel back the onion on like when the co-streaming idea came about and like, what was the driver there? Was it just like, this feels dumb to do two different streams or was there something more behind it? Yeah, I think that was sort of the core of it is we were approaching this time where we knew there were going to be more eyeballs on these launches and these missions than any time before, right? You talked about like these parallel streams for cargo missions.

Yeah, that sort of existed, especially in this infancy. We didn't put like, we didn't have a lot of time dedicated to figuring out that, you know, that approach where we can do something together. But with a launch like DM2, DM2, DM2 was just enormous. I mean, like what ended up when we actually like did the stream, we counted, I think somewhere around the order of 12 million concurrent viewers for that launch on the NASA streams. It was just we knew it was going to be big. right so honestly the beginning of that approach like okay this is going to be big we have to do it together so

that was like we have that we set into the into the talks with the end goal being like this has got to be this has got to be the same thing we have to have one voice right and the thing is like you know NASA has one way of doing things and commercial industry has a completely different thing and then on top of that there's a lot of challenges with NASA being a technically a federal government distributor of information. And with that comes a lot of restrictions on what we can and cannot show, right? Like we can't, there's a reason we don't run ads. It's because it's illegal, right? We can't do that. So, yeah. And with that at that moment. Yeah. Yeah, like the podcast, NEP can't run an ad. So it's all, it's completely ad free. So, so it's, you know,

though I would, I would like to. That'll be nice. Anyway, um, maybe just get some free stuff, but I can't, I can't legally do that. Kirkland. Sparkling water. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So there was challenges with that, right?

I mean, like, if SpaceX wants to do a stream, in order for that stream to go concurrently on nassad.gov, they have to realize a lot of the restrictions that go into that. And so some of the language they use, right? We obviously want to share the SpaceX story. But then, like, there's these restrictions when it comes to distributing information that we can't necessarily, like, endorse space X story. So the language has to be very carefully coordinated because we are technically, you know, we don't want to be seen as like propaganda, right?

Taxpayer funded, taxpayer funded endorsements of a company. That's just a no-no, right? So we, and there's really good logic behind that as to why we have to enforce those things. It took a long time, but eventually we settled on the approach. So the program you see now where we cover, I think it's like four hours prior to launch. We start with suit up and we go all the way up to launch. That program was very carefully coordinated with all of the language reviewed and approved so that it was sound on both ends. SpaceX was happy, NASA was happy.

And honestly, you can see that there was, that yielded good results because whatever we used for DM2 has been, a lot of it has been continuing all the way up to, you know, the crew four launch. And we'll see a lot of the same for crew five. We're talking about sustainability, right? because a lot of resources go into the streams. So what makes the most sense? Where are our viewers listening, watching most?

Where can we push the most amount of resources and then pull back a little bit where we don't necessarily have as much viewership, right? Because 12 million was DM2. That was huge. And obviously, you know, what we put into it had significant payoff. But let's talk about a sustainable approach

where we're being very smart about the resources we're putting into how many viewers we're actually getting. So you might see a couple of tweaks in coming up here. But you can tell like the messaging from the, from the joint perspective of NASA and SpaceX that that's going to stick. Yeah, yeah. I imagine there has to be like there has to be extra care put into,

you know, if something goes wrong. And thankfully the SpaceX flights have all been pretty flawless. But I know that from your end, you probably have to at least put some kind of plan into place like, you know, what happens if there's a, if there's a big problem, right? And then coordinating that with SpaceX has got to be a whole new thing

because at least before you were 100% in control of the information, right? But now theoretically, SpaceX can go and say things that, I don't know, maybe Natha doesn't like that. Built into the structure of our broadcast, and I'd say I'd even go as far as to say half of that time I talked about, which was the months and months of planning

to actually execute that joint. mission with SpaceX, I'd say about half of it was really keeping in mind what do we say, how do we approach this if things go wrong? And so even to this day, like we just, earlier, earlier today, 10 o'clock today, we just had a massive call with about 80 people from different companies and even international partners on the communications aspect of things specifically for Artemis I. And what is the core messages? What is the phone trees, the, the, the, the, the talking points if something were to go wrong. You need to have everybody 100% on board with that,

especially the commentators. Anyone you see, anyone whose face you see in front of the camera is fully prepared for a bad day with and is known exactly what to do. That's most of our training, really. I mean, ahead of a lot of these launches, it's one thing to have like an on-camera presence

and to know how to talk and engage in audience. But a lot of the training is sitting down in the Sims with the flight controllers and going through bad days and knowing exactly how to communicate that. Understanding the vehicle, like I know the SpaceX Dragon so incredibly well because of how many Sims I've gone through and all the intricate systems and what that means for what decisions the flight controllers may make, I have been in the back of my mind. So I can whenever they're talking about all of these things on the loops, I can regurgitate that in an informed fashion and go through our contingency response plan.

It's very carefully coordinated. And that's a ton of our planning is specifically for that. You also have that balance to like, you know, of the 12 million people that were watching that DM2 stream, they weren't all nerds that are watching this show. So you have that balance between the, you know, who's watching. You've got like Gen Pop watching that's tuning in because they saw the launch mention on the Today Show in the morning, and you would need to explain things to them, whereas there's like people that we're friends with that are like, Tell me about the coolant loops.

I want to know about the coolant loops. I don't have time to tell you about the coolant loops, because I knew to explain why there are people flying to space today. But I don't know, like, do you have, like, different personas that you write to, or do you try to just do the best common denominator across the board? Yeah, it honestly depends on the medium. I think for launch broadcasts, you sort of, like, for anything you do, you, of course, try to capture the widest possible audience,

But to your point, you know, you want to cater to the folks that want to get into the details. And so we have certain sections in our broadcast that are catered exactly to those people. Like we did like a detailed look at like an engine, a flown engine. And we detailed the Draco thruster one time and show the different components of it and got into a little bit of nerder your details than we typically typically do. But it's got to be balanced, right? Like a lot of the people, for example, that just want to see the long. and they just a high level they just want to see the smoke and fire you know we you know we we show that and that's that's perfectly fine ooh look you know a cool rocket but um

but especially in that time where it's like oh look cool rocket you have to think about really what we think about in terms of our approach to that and the reason you see the way that we do the broadcast where we're focusing on the rocket a lot of that number i was talking about like a lot of of our design is for that bad day. Like that's why that is. You do like we don't, purposely you don't see a face during that whole assent profile because you don't need to see the face.

You need to see the rocket. I have to be doing the assent commentary and actively listening to flight control loops to hear to make sure everything looks good. Everything's nominal. And when I hear those words, I spit them right back out because I'm like, this is good. This is a good day. The flight control teams are happy, you know,

but I'm listening for those key things. Um, like, and then, and then for example, like, uh, there was one, there's one moment that comes to mind then I'm thinking about it. If you guys remember crew two, I think it was crew two. Yeah, crew two splash down. Do you remember when only three of the, of the four parachutes inflated like fully? They have the four inflated. But we should maybe circle back to the boaters, but we should. We'll circle back to, uh, I think what was referred to as the pleasure voters, but we'll circle back to. Um, but we'll circle back to that. Um, Yeah, that was the, that was the, I was on commentary for that. And it was, that was an interesting one because that like the flight control team, I was just listening. When I saw that image of the fourth shoot, I was just waiting to hear. I was listening to the flight control team. And when I heard, you know, descent rate nominal, you know, the inflation is a little slow, but descent rate nominal, uh, splash down is expected on time.

That to me told, uh, told me that, you know, everything was okay. And I needed to regurgitate that immediately. Right. So when you hear me, when you heard me come on that says like descent rate is nominal, that was, that was really right after we heard from the flight control team that they were looking at this image. They're studying the trajectory. They're making the calculations and I'm like, okay, everything's fine. So that was like, it's really important to stay right fully engaged. Yeah, like that's kind of wild when I think about it because you're basically like you're listening to a loop and then you're processing all that information through like a little algorithm in your head. is like thinking about, okay, what is what is this person saying? What does it actually mean? Is, you know, is this bad but long run okay or bad and long run bad as well?

What am I allowed to say as a federal government agency? What is proprietary information from SpaceX? No four letter words. Exactly. You have to process that in like real time and then say it like because we're all, you know, we're on top of that. We see the parachute. We're like, what is happening? I need, I need to get. Gary Jordan to tell me something right now. What is going on? Right. That's, I don't know, that's pretty wild. The four-letter word we're all saying, is Gary? Gary? Gary? Tell me words, Gary. No. But yeah, no, it takes a lot of training.

It's, yeah, it's, it's a lot, but you just have to, like, a lot of our time as, like, in the, you asked about, like, one of your initial questions was, was, like, this role is a lot of it spent like studying like a lot a lot of studying studying the like what can have what can go wrong getting to know the vehicle getting to know the operations getting to know the people right because the people are a lot smarter than you are when it comes to this stuff and they can they can inform you a lot of the flight directors like the early flight directors for for demo one and crew one they sat down or demo two rather and crew one they sat down with us the commentators and like we did like an hour long like deep dive and got to ask all the questions that we wanted to ask you

They dedicated time for us to learn. Whatever gaps we had in our knowledge at that time, we filled in like a couple weeks at a launch. That was huge. They were very generous with their time on that. But, yeah. How tricky does that get in certain instances that may or may not have happened in the last year

in which the Space Station did an unexpected backflip? And you have because of the nature of the partnership with SpaceX and Boeing and North of Grumman and all that, You have insight into their process at a level that you're never going to have with Ross Cosmos or even some other partners on the ISS. What was going on then? Like that, I'm sure it was bewildering to try to figure out what actually was happening there. But like, how does that process differ when you don't have the hours sitting down with somebody who's worked on that? You know, maybe you did talk to somebody that worked on Nauka's systems.

But I doubt it was the same amount of time that you spent with the people that worked on Dragon. It's all about the people, man. That's another part of the job is another thing to know is this job is absolutely 24-7. I remember there was for the leak a couple of years ago. I got a call at three in the morning. Gary, the space station is Lake and we need you to come in. And I was there like, you know, 20 minutes later, I was in Mission Control at the PAO console and it's all about the people, right?

So I have to work in that instance, I was at the PAO console. I was listening to the loops. And any time there was anything. about an update, I go over to the flight director and make sure that the flight director approved every word that I was going to say out to the public because I was actively listening and I was writing blog updates, but I needed the flight director to carefully look at those words because it's not it's not just me that has to like listen and interpret, right? That's that would there would be probably misinformation if I did that. I need to check with the flight director. A lot of the times I

need to check with the programs and that's another complicated thing is, this is an international space station. So we need we were looping in our colleagues at ESA, at Jaxsa, at CSA, the entire time and letting them know exactly what we are doing and keeping them informed so they can keep their stakeholders informed. So a lot of times when you see delays like that, when you see like something happened and you want to know like really badly, like what's happening? We are we are deep in information gathering. We are trying to find out what is the truth. What is the story? What is the accurate piece of information?

There's like this interesting balance with trying to get information out quickly, but when it comes to space, space is so complicated and includes a lot of different players and stakeholders. That level of accuracy has to be very carefully considered before you rush something out, right? Make sure that leadership knows exactly what you're saying because they are going to be some of the first people that have to answer to some high level folks, right? So it has to go through up this chain. it's a massive organization so a lot of people have to have eyes on these things before they actually go out and there's a really good reason for that right that i mean the public is obviously one of our key stakeholders

the public needs to know this information that's why we do what we do that's why we write these updates and get them out but there's a lot of other people that need to know and everybody's got to be on board with the same information and have accurate information that we're going to put out and that sometimes takes a lot of time so it's all about people that's that's the saying about where if you're highlight, there's that saying, avate, navigate, communicate, where, like, make sure you're still flying your plane, make sure you're flying in the right direction, and then tell people where you're flying it. And in your case, you're like,

you can't be like going right up to their console being like, what's going on? You know, like, why? It's a space station upside down. Like, you can't be doing that when they're trying to make go the right side up? You know, it's like, can you? You're not, you're not big. Are you? I just got a blog. Yeah, it's like, I don't know. Send your tweet later. I'm trying to flip the station back over. Just give you a second. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And if you get it wrong, we will be all over you on Twitter.

Like, let me tell you. We will know, and we will be very upset and critical and tell you all the ways you messed up. So that's good. No, are you kidding me? Twitter's so nice and gentle. Yeah, it's very kind and patient, right? Why is the space station? If I knew it wouldn't be upside down right now.

Like, there's not, I didn't mean to do this. Yeah. Exactly. If Tom Cruise ends up making this movie in space, he needs to do the top gun, uh, inverted, flipping the bird scene. but with the space station. It's all the same.

They can call. We'll give our adco folks a heart attack with that shot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, all right. I guess maybe we should talk a little bit about Artemis, because this is one that's coming up. I think this is obviously a pretty exciting one. So first of all, do you expect Artemis to be bigger or smaller than the DM2, 12 million?

What do you think? What's your gut on this one? Are we thinking this is a bigger or smaller event? Bigger. I think it's going to be bigger, really? Yeah. Ooh, all right. Yeah, I do. I do. I mean, like, the guest, the guest list for Florida is, is astounding. I think all the hotels are set out, are sold out.

We have confirmation that it's astounding. Yeah, see, it's just like, I don't even know how they have the bodies to support as many people as they're supporting. But it's just, like, imagine, I can, I need to, in my lifetime, go to an Artemis lunch. I have to work in Houston for this one. but this is it like this is going to be absolutely incredible to see the SLS like you're going to feel it like you've never felt any launch before like we've all missed the Saturn 5 so this is like our Saturn 5 where you're just going to actually like feel the earth shape kind of thing it's just it's going to be unbelievable and I know there's no humans on it right now I think like Artemis 2 and Artemis 3

are just going to be I mean they're going to be worldwide events they're I mean I would anticipate hundreds of millions of viewers for some of these things. This one, I think, might top demo too. Now, there's no humans on it, so I don't know. But it's going to the moon. It's like this, even though there's no humans on it, this is like kicking off something, something very real and something very imminent and soon,

that I think a lot. And there's just worldwide support and excitement for this mission. Because, I mean, it's a test mission, right, but it's like it's happening it's real we're going to the moon so i think it's going to i i have a feeling now i mean i'm saying it so i guess you have to quote me but i don't want you to quote me but um i have a feeling it's going to exceed demo too in terms of viewership i mean i like that that's good yeah to equate it you know if t1 um it was a weird time because um titusville down there was kind of out of their reps, right? It had been a couple years since the shuttle

flew. They didn't, a lot of stuff shut down after the shuttle left because they just weren't having millions of people flood in every couple of weeks for a launch. And I remember being there for it, there was people that, you know, you'd talk to like people running hotels or restaurants and being like, yeah, this is wild. Like I, this broke all of our operations for everything that we have going on in this area. And it has now been more time since that. And there's been some big events, Falcon Heavy, DM2. There's been some things that drew crowds, but not to the same scale. that shuttle launches did certainly. So, like, if that gets to that same level again,

it's, now it's been, like, 10 years since that, and no one, all of those muscles have atrophied. Like, I don't think people really remember how long it took you to drive home from Titusville after a launch and how much those roads can't handle. And that's the part that I'm interested to see, especially now, like, after all these years of people not being able to go to in-person events.

And, you know, like the imagery from Space Ghost the last couple years, on the bigger events has been wild. Even amidst the pandemic at DM2 was like, you know, the shots of people on the causeway was just unreal. So having that within the visuals of Artemis 1. And even like Jake and I remember from being at Falcon Heavy and seeing the way that the trees had been cut down

between the press site and where 39B is, the visual is so much different than what it used to be where there was like a bunch of trees in the way. Now it's like, man, that thing is sitting right there. I feel like I'm way too close. to this rocket. I'm not quite Richard Gary at range at this rocket, but I'm like a little too close to this giant thing.

It's going to be spectacular. Yeah, yeah. It's going to be great. I feel like you should book your ticket for August 2 and beyond. I don't even, but it's, you know the date, then hit us up. We'd love to get a reservation on that one. Yeah, it's funny too, because you mentioned that

we, Anthony and I've been trying to like read the tea leaves. Like, like, how confident is NASA on this August 29th? We're like we're pouring over every press release you put out for like keywords. We're highlighting words in blog posts and sending each other like what does this one mean? So I'm actually, I'm taking the fact that you had a very large meeting about communications. I'm taking that as a good green checkmark in my like like the confidence scale is sliding towards the. Charlie Day thing that you've got in the background.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that's good. I like that. It's a long mission. This is what's weird. I want to talk to you about. It's a 40-day mission.

That is, I don't know if you know about news cycles, Gary. That's a lot of news cycles. So what did? Well, it's funny. It's funny because so another one, like another big project I worked on very recently was Johnson Space Center hosted Media Day just last week. It was last Friday. We invited a bunch of people here. I think we have like 60 plus media come out and we showed them everything going out at the Johnson Space Center.

And I was pulsing them about like, you know, what? what are your stories, you know, what's your angle, like, who do you want to talk to kind of thing? Because we have a lot of subject matter experts and a lot of things to show. And they were like, you know, a lot of people don't even know this is happening. And I guess, like, you have to pull back a second and kind of realize that because all of us are in this world. And I think we're so excited for Artemis I. But I guess I didn't really consider that, like, outside of this space bubble that sometimes we always operate on, Some people have to be approached about this mission from like the very beginning.

Like Artemis is a mission where we're going to be returning humans to them. Like we have to start at the very ground level for some of this stuff. So I think like a lot of that, I think a lot of people are going to watch the launch, right? You asked about like sustaining the different new cycles. I think a lot of people are going to are going to just watch the launch and then they're going to forget about it. I think a lot of people, especially at that level where they don't even know that this is happening right now and the only thing they're going to hear is that there's a launch coming up. I think they're going to watch the launch and they're going to forget about the

splash down. But there's a lot of people that care about this mission all the way through. And so a lot of our communications that we're planning for is really continuous, like day to day support and coverage to make sure the folks that want to know the most get all of it. So that's really what we're catering to. So it's, I guess, you know, like you're going to have 40 days stream personally. You're going to sit there on camera for the days. Just like keep my eyes.

Fast food is being delivered right to your console. It's like a telecon, it's like a, you know, like a telecon where there's like a number to dial and you can order food for Gary and it's like what does he want next? Vote here.

Does he want a hoagie or a pizza? What is he getting next? Not only our polls, our social media polls when we're doing the coverage. What kind of food is Gary getting today? I mean, you must be able to score. some pretty good moments with like a live stream from the moon. Like, you know, I don't, I don't really know what the video capabilities are going to be on Orion,

but you'll at least get some pretty nice shots of the moon. Yeah, there's a camera out on one of those solar arrays, I think, right? I'm pretty sure. Got it's right. Multiple. Multiple. Yeah. Like, Orion's going to take selfies and stuff like that, but it's all competing for data.

Because once you get on the deep space network, you know, I don't think that we don't have, a lot of people are fighting for data and there's a lot of stuff that wins over a continuous stream. like, you know, like spacecraft test data is going to win over like a nice continuous stream. And, and. For now. Don't let them win in Artemis, too, though. Come on. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the Deep Space Network is not all exclusively Artemis, too.

So there's a lot of other users of that, right? So we just, we have to share and be nice to that. But we picked our moments and there's going to be like key, key times where we're going to be getting streams and nice, like, high resolution. photos and stuff. One of the key moments that we definitely don't want to miss is Earthrise, right, or Earthset, depending on which day we launch, but that's going to be spectacular. We don't want to miss that. So we'll get some of those, and we'll be sending out updates and share it as much as we can. But it's not, it is not going to be continuous. And in fact,

our commentary is not going to be continuous either. We'll staff for all of the different, like, key moments, like big critical burns, big maneuvers, make sure everything's okay, kind of thing, but we'll be sending out regular updates, but, you know, 42 days. You're right. If you had 24-7 coverage for 42 days, that's going to be a lot. Now, here's the thing. When we get to crew admissions, it might look like that. But they're going to be much shorter, typically, I think.

I think for Artemis 2 and beyond, they're not going to be 40-something days. I think it's like 20 at the highest. So, but it'll be continuous. Yeah, 24-7. Yeah, yeah, that's good. Everyone is screaming at us to ask this question, but will NASA be, will NASA be upgrading beyond 720P in time for Artemis 1? What's the situation? It's like, as soon as we said, we were talking to a comms guy, they were just like, when is it going to be, when is it going to be HD? We're trying so hard. I can't, I can't promise you that we're going to make it, but I can promise you that we are trying very hard to give everybody the best experience. Like, I think, think I think one of our key goals as communicators is to have like at least 4K by the time we get to Artemis 3, right?

At least 4K streaming so you can get like the most pristine views of people walking on the moon. Now like there's engineering concerns with that. And of course I was talking about like competing on the deep space network for data and stuff like that. So we'll have to, it's going to be like a whole infrastructure thing. But I mean like our current streaming capabilities is rooted. Like all of the hardware is for 720 people. and it has been for years and years and years, which I understand is like, you know,

we're like, we're well past 720P. But I can, I promise you we are trying. And that's the best that I could probably report it this time. I think that's all they want to hear. That's good. I think that that's fair.

I know. I saw, I can't remember who it was now, but there was someone who works at Kennedy who was in, I wasn't a communications person, but it was someone in charge of like, the wires, I guess, whatever you want to call it.

But they were, they were talking about how, they were really trying to toggle the switch over to 4K for Artemis 1. And so they were upgrading whatever boxes and cables you need to upgrade to do that down at the Cape. So hopefully we see some good stuff. It also definitely is harder than people think. I mean, two or three weeks ago, Jake was away and I had Tim Dodd and Joe Barnard on the show. And professional, capital P, capital Y, professional YouTubers that like randomly devolved in the middle of the show to talking about how to stream their 4K content and like what hardware they use.

and all of a sudden they were like doing tech support for each other. And I'm like, all right, if these two are doing this, then like, it's clearly hard because they are very proficient and they spend a lot of money on this hardware. And so like if they could buy their way out of this problem, they probably would have already. And so I know that at even like, you know, add a couple of zeros scale that is any NASA operation, I'm sure it's Herkulean to turn, you know, a big ship because it's a gigantic ship when it's, you know, operating at that level. Yeah, and you guys coordinate with so many other groups, too. Like, it's not just like there's one camera on the ship you need to upgrade and then everything's good, but you've got all these different NASA centers and then you've got different commercial providers who are, you know, taking care of different parts of the vehicle.

Like, you know, we were watching the James Webb release, right, with all the photos, and they were trying to coordinate with all those space agencies and, you know, some things, yeah, you know, poor Canadians got, got to the, and I know, I'm sure you've, you've had discussions internally about it, but like it didn't go as well as everyone hoped it would, right? There were some, there was some pretty large hiccups in there. But I was thinking about it. I'm like, man, this is such a project. Like, you're trying to, like, bring in. And there was all these, like, crowds in different auditoriums around the world.

And then all these space agencies. And they're all connecting up with different software and different languages. Like, it was a nightmare. Like, I was like, you know what? I'm actually pretty happy NASA even got the stream started, to be honest. So, like, this is pretty good in my book. Yeah, you started this one off with your mic muted. So, you know.

Yeah. There's just a problem with the Canadians, I guess. That's the real issue. We can't get it working. I'm curious about the way that you, like, the way that you learn lessons now and try to transmit them to your future self. You were talking about Axiom 1. And I feel like that is just a little sampling of the difficulty that you will find yourself

in in like 10 years when the space stations are commercial and the way you get there is commercial. There's still NASA astronauts flying to these places, but at that point, none of the hardware is like a NASA-owned thing. Are you trying to, like, write down some lessons from Axiom One and these other private astronaut missions? And I don't even know how you're conceptualizing what it will be like at that point. I don't know if you have insight into these commercial space station programs or what, but that seems like a problem for future Gary that I feel like Kurt Gary is probably thinking about. That is so true. I probably will be going back to the commercial world after Artemis 1.

I'm focusing on the Artemis 1 now. But that is definitely something to think about. After at AX1, I spent probably about a month talking to as many stakeholders as I could from all the different NASA centers, from the commercial providers to all these different people on lessons learned. I mean, seriously, like a whole month after AX1 was all data gathering. Because I mentioned, like, you probably will see something very similar in terms of like how we coordinate for AX2 or in like all the different future private astronaut missions if we get if we get other providers to do some of these things. But you're right.

The goal, the ultimate goal is a completely commercial landscape, which means, you know, we'll have to start building on this lesson. We'll have to start building on what we've what we've created for AX1 where Axiom and SpaceX and Navixt and Navi and now. all have a story to tell. How do we tell that story? And who's the owner of different things? Now, I mentioned, like, for example, like, once we get into the vicinity of the International Space Station, that is, like, the authority goes to NASA for the safety of the crew and the vehicle and everything. That totally changes when you have a commercial space station, right? I mean, then, like, the authority would have to go to some other commercial company, whoever is running their space station. But at the same time, NASA has a vested interest in the safety of their crewmen.

We're obviously going to be flying NASA crew to these commercial stations. So we'll have to figure something out. So we're, so the answer, this is a long way to answer, but I definitely don't have it figured out. We're at baby step number, number, I guess, two, because for CCP, for commercial crew, that was, that was integrating the NASA and SpaceX story, a commercial vehicle flying government, civil servants, and astronauts. Like we did that. Then we took it one step further for AX1 with the, it's a private citizens on a private spacecraft going to a government facility. So that's like step two.

And then we'll, you know, we'll figure out the next step. Hopefully that's not future Gary. Hopefully that's somebody else. And I can. Well, it's future Gary, but you'll be the associate administrator of communications. Yeah. It's clearly he's right. Oh, we'll see.

Yeah. I'm taking my way to the top. I just find that interesting because it's going. going to take, it's going to flip like where communications lands in the, in the architecture of these missions. Because right now it's like, NASA's doing missions, so they, they hand you a bunch of stuff and like figure out how to communicate this. Now you're going to have to, like, I hate to break it to you, you might have to write some paperwork for requirements that these companies have to meet for the requirements of NASA has for how to communicate

stuff since they're beholden to communicate, you know, data the public. So it's not even that like you're just going to leave it up to Axiom and Northrop and Blue and Nanomansansans racks to figure out how to communicate, that's going to be a legitimate requirement of the next round of the commercial space station program. And I just find that very curious that like, I don't know, all the stuff that you're talking about about the requirements of a individual stream, that's going to have to get passed on to like the requirements of an operational program or else you're just going to have NASA astronauts like TikTok and from commercial space stations and hoping that the Wi-Fi is good enough. And I don't know that that's like a legitimate

strategy that you can rely on. But maybe they're good TikTokers. I don't know. Well, luckily, when I was brought into... I'm sorry. Yeah, luckily I was brought into the negotiations for contract between NASA and Axiom really early. Whenever they were first starting that relationship,

and we actually have built into the contract, a public affairs clause, which is very well thought out. And we spent a lot of time putting a lot of the requirements for what NASA would need in terms of communications from the commercial provider. And that was so important because we defined our expectations as a government agency to the commercial provider. And they, through the agreement, we're pretty much required to do that. So that will be, I mean, we did it for commercial crew in a sense. We expanded upon it a lot for

AX1. That agreement, exactly what you're saying, Anthony, will be exactly what we put into commercial like stations when flying crew like here's the agreement between the government and the commercial provider like here is your public affairs requirements and there will be a clause in there for for different streams and different like different capabilities but we it'll be on us it'll be on us to define that as like as essentially a customer of the commercial station it's interesting though because the as jake was commenting about you know those who tweet earlier um the expectations that we as the outsiders have of what what should be communicated out what should be streamed what we should be able to see like we've taken that to heart and we've roasted SpaceX and

inspiration four over the outreach that they did during their mission and they had to deal with that about like no the crew's fine like everything's okay we just weren't planning on tweeting this way or sending out imagery so like we've taken all of the you know we've taken for granted all the work that you guys are doing on the other programs and like have now applied that to everything else that like we demand high-res streams of what's going on inside the space I'm like yeah but they bought the flight like they can do whatever they want up there they could fly up there and never tell you anything because they're not beholden in the same way so it as much as it is going to be NASA's requirement like now we are as the public holding them accountable for

that outreach because we're just expecting that now and I and that's like another interesting aspect that so keep keep bumping up those requirements so we can hold the other guy to the fire we I really appreciate that. Well, that's my job. You as a taxpaying citizen have the right to see what government civil servant astronauts are doing on a commercial station. And so it's my job to fight for your right to see everything that they're doing. I mean, that's why we share what we share is because, like, you know, it's not a private

flight. They're not private customers. They're doing pretty much a government mission, right? And you as taxpaying citizens have the right to see that. So we show because you have, that's our job is to give you as much. as you deserve. So we'll continue to fight for that. Absolutely. It is kind of funny to think about, though, right? Because if we send our minds into like 100 years in the future, like, I don't really have the right to know what you were doing on

your flight to Kennedy Space Center when you were flying from Johnson to Kennedy to Artemis One or something. Like, Gary, what movie did you watch on that flight? Like, I don't, I don't care, and I shouldn't have to know what Netflix series you're binging while on route to Kennedy Space Center. But like, where we are in Space Flight right now, it feels that way because they're so rare and there's only a couple of them a year but when there's a thousand of them it's like we can't possibly even if we wanted to care it's not possible for all of us to care about all those details and when does that flip over it's kind of i don't know maybe you want to just tell us what you're watching on these flights though isn't that fantastic though

your Netflix history next time you're on your main four flight oh man isn't that fantastic though like where we are if you think about like like there's so much going on on in space that it's hard to keep up with all of it. There's just like commercial providers. There's so many international, like, there's so many countries that we're gonna be working with and we're bringing on, like there's more and more that wanna be involved in spaceflight, more like people.

And it's just, it's so cool to see that much activity. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, like just very seriously, like we, I especially really appreciate that, I know that you're kind of like legally required to do it, some cases, but to work to, to, to, to, to, to, to be transparent is awesome because one of my pet peeves with like

you know, I don't know what you call it, just chatter out in the world, Twitter, internet, wherever you want to call it, but just like people that complain about NASA being slow and bureaucratic and can't get anything done and we should give everything to Elon Musk to do it because it's better and then Elon Musk does it and we don't get to see it and then they complain about that. I'm like, well look, this is, it's one and the other like you can't have

you can't have a cake and eat it too. So it's important, I think, to talk about how good it is that as a government agency, NASA has to tell us all this cool stuff. When we get to learn about it, we get to see, we get to have access to you. You know, as journalists, we get to go and tour facilities. We get to listen to your podcasts and all this kind of stuff and hear all this kind of thing because it's government funded. So I don't know. That's my way of saying, I guess, thank you to you. I know everyone that does the work to you do because it is pretty cool.

Yeah, we try. We're trying to make it better too. So I mean, I know like we can't move as fast. And I explain the reasons why. Like there's just so many people and so many stakeholders and that's what the thing. It is, it is, it is relatively slow. It's just a massive, massive operation. There's so many players. You can't be as as nimble if you have like very few stakeholders. But I don't know. Yeah, I think I think it'll be a never evolving thing. I think if you guys keep demanding to the private industry of your expectations of what you should see, you know, I don't know. maybe the landscape will change. So it's good that we're talking about this. We're having these conversations. So we set those expectations for what we expect because the landscape is going to change. There's going to be private industries. They're going to be doing certain things. And I don't know.

I feel like everybody should be sharing as much as they can. I know we have to, but it's also like we want to, right? I mean, this is really cool stuff that we're doing. A lot of people that I work with are that it's not really just. a job doing this, like the public affairs job, it's like a passion. A lot of people really like love doing this kind of work. It's, it's really hard. It's a lot of hours, but it's, there's a lot of passion. And it's like, it's definitely apparent with like doing this, right? You guys have this podcast because you're passionate about this kind of stuff. So, and this show. So I don't know.

Yeah, I just keep fighting for it. Tell us about your podcast because you mentioned offhandedly that It was maybe not even sanctioned by those around you in the organization. So where did that come from? Why did you start it? Tell us about it if people have not listened to it yet and give them the little pitch. Yeah. Well, one of the things I love about, I loved about this job is there's like a crazy amount of freedom when it comes to trying and exploring new ideas and things.

And we have a small group at NASA that sometimes that gets together every once in a while and thinks about which ways are we not telling stories that we should tell stories. So like we explore new like social media, like things that people are doing and maybe we're not caught up on. And at the time, I had moved into the more towards downtown Houston and my commute got up to 45 minutes. So I started exploring podcasts. And that was like the first time I really dove into it. First thing I looked for was like a NASA podcast or like a space related podcast. And I didn't find like any at NASA that were that any at least anything that I really wanted to listen to.

So that's when I thought like, I'm going to go ahead and make this. And so I pitched it to this group and I got some support and I got a small team and we started making these episodes. And it was like, you know, I came up, I had a lot of shows that I really liked at the time. Like nerdist and StarTalk and some of these like some of these spacey shows. And I started thinking about like how to structure it. thought we would do a weekly cadence, and I thought I'll just reach out to folks at NASA and see if they want to do it. And I started having these conversations, and it just sort of like, it just sort of took off. Like, it got way more attention than I was expecting it to.

And I just have, like, a lot of fun with it. Because I have a ton of access to people at NASA. I think that's really the, like, the unique thing that sets the podcast apart is I can just, like, email any one of my coworkers and be like, hey, you want to come up my show? And they're like, absolutely. And then they, like, they come down for a little bit. And so we just have like this unprecedented access to all these different people and all these different stories. I thought for sure I'd run out of stories after a while just because I was hitting a lot of the high level stuff at the very beginning. I was like, what is the International Space Station?

What is Mars? What is, you know, spacesuits? But then we just like started diving into like deeper and deeper topics. Like we just do all like I have a whole podcast on like subsystems. You know, like I have a whole podcast on just the imagery component of the Orion vehicle. the Artemis mission. And like it's like an hour with that guy. And we just dive really deep into just just the imagery part. And it was like, it was really good. Tell me about the coolants. This is where those people go. Exactly. But it's just fascinating and I have a really good time

with it. So I don't want to give it up. No matter how busy I get, I never want to give it up. But, well, as long as I can, as long as I can keep having conversations, I want this to be a thing, you know? Did you come up with the name? Because it is a great name for a podcast. It only you could do, really. That's exactly right. I came up with about 30 to 40 different names, and this was, unfortunately, not mine. This was, this was someone else came up with this idea. And it didn't really click with me when I first heard it.

I was like, oh, okay. I was like, that's a really good idea. But I sat on it. And then to your point, Jake, it was just like, there's literally no other name that I could, that I could have. It was just like, at first, it's just like, it's perfectly puny. and it captures exactly who we are. But also, like, on a more serious note, like Houston, we've had a problem,

like is really the core of just the best and the brightest of NASA Johnson. And like there's this huge problem that happens and we got our guys home safely. And it just like, it captures everything perfectly. And I was like, yeah, there's really no other name. Yeah. Failures not a podcast.

Didn't work as well. podcast is not an option. I don't know. The other ones don't work is great. Yeah, I love podcast. It's not an option. It's like, wait, then what? I'm going to start a new one, competing.

Love it. We have the episode title now. I think that's pretty good. Set SCE to podcast is also pretty great. in the chat. That's good. That's pretty good. We're going to need everyone to just tweet their failed podcast names at Gary for the next week.

Wow. Okay. Jake, what you've been? Oh, I was going to throw it to you. Yeah, we just co-opted each other. This is what happens.

If you ever want to know what happens anytime two Canadians talk each other, this is what it feels like. No, no, you go. No, you go. It's you. That's fine. That's fine. Okay, I'll go first. I'll go first. I'm trying to think. So I think the only since we last talked, we put her an episode with you in the Wee Martians feed. So we talked about clips. It was very fun. Commercial lunar payload services, which is a pretty interesting program.

We checked in on how some of the people are doing. Some are doing great. Some not so much. That's how that goes in a program like that. So it was a good conversation and I'm excited about it. I may not have one for a week or two. We're going to see how my internet connection holds I'm out in the country now and I got Starlink thing going on and it's very interesting. So we'll see how it goes. Yeah, I'll see how your streaming does the next couple weeks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to come up with a lot of backup content just in case.

Yeah, we're going to have to have a call with all the stakeholders about the communication plan once once Jake drops up the call. We had to move the time slot based on like satellite movements. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we'll need to get everyone to tweet at Elon Musk when I drop out. That's going to be out. Yeah, what are you working on, though? I had two conversations recently.

Neither of them are on the podcast feed yet, but they'll be coming out soon for uninteresting scheduling reasons. One, I think I mentioned on the show I did with you. I talked to people from space exploration engineering that do trajectory and flight operations. They worked on the photon side of the Capstone mission that just went out. So they were flying, helping figure out trajectories,

flying the photon on its way to drop off Capstone that's heading to the moon. And they just worked on the KPLO, that Korean orbiter that's going to the moon right now. So really cool talking about trajectories to get to the moon. They're refuting some of the, like, oh, this is a very low energy way to get there. And they're like, no, what that means is it just you didn't pay for that energy. Somebody else did. So there's some really good stuff in there.

And then just this week I talked to Rick Mastrakio, who is a legend of an astronaut, but now works at Northropin, and is running the commercial space station program there. about their, I'm doing the, this might completes the circuit of the commercial space station offers. Yeah, you've been going through them, right? Yeah, so this will be completing the four circuit, although Axiom has had a couple episodes, but, uh, and I told you this, Jake, this is the first time I've talked to somebody who I watched fly off the earth in person, uh, which I felt like was a cool milestone. So I saw him fly on STS-131. I finally got to chat with him, so, uh, that was a pretty good one. So that's coming out soon. You should see in the next couple days. Okay, cool. Oh, we're going to be in Florida.

Gary won't, but we will. Sorry, Gary. Yeah, yes, yes. Just as a reminder, Artemis 1, we are going there. We're going to go to Florida to watch it, and we love to hang out with everybody. So if you want updates on any kind of the meetups that we're planning, the details are still in motion, but just head to offnom.com slash events. You'll see that link there. It takes you to Artemis Warm Launch Events.

And you can put your email address right in there, and we will send you all the information you need to know about where to go, what time, all that kind of stuff. So we hope to hang out with a lot of people and it should be lots of fun. And we should also mention we're taking a break next week. So this is our second summer break, partially because I'm moving and partially because it's summer and everyone should go outside and have a barbecue and have a hamburger. Get some fresh air before it gets cold again, I guess. And that's it.

So back to 25th. Yeah. So thanks, Gary, for hanging out with us. This is an awesome conversation. feel like I learned a lot. This is good. So, yeah. Good. Yeah, I had a blast. I knew I would. Thanks guys for having me. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, end of death.