Off-Nominal - 78 - John Grunsfeld’s Babysitter

Episode Date: September 30, 2022

Jake and Anthony are joined by Kristin Fisher of CNN to talk about Artemis I, and the coverage out there in the world in all the places us space nerds aren’t.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 78 - John Grunsfeld’s Babysitter (with Kristin Fisher) - YouTubeArtemis I rocket rolled back inside as Hurricane Ian treks toward Florida | CNNVideo: Why NASA had to scrub Artemis I rocket launch due to engine issues | CNN BusinessWatch: The NASA mission that could 'potentially save all of humankind' | CNN BusinessFollow KristinKristin Fisher (@KristinFisher) / TwitterCNN Profiles - Kristin Fisher - Space and Defense Correspondent - CNNFollow 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, everyone. Welcome to not even a named episode of all phenomena. Wow, right out of it. Oh, man. I'm not even a named episode. Wow. We name them at the end.

It's actually, you know, it's pretty quick. So, yeah. Like, we might have already just named it right now. I don't even know if we left it. That's a solid point. Yeah. have a great guest with us today. Kristen Fisher from CNN. Kristen, welcome to the show. We're really excited to have you. Thanks for having me, guys. I've been listening to you all for a while,

so I'm pumped to be on. Amazing. It always warms our heart when we find out that someone listens to us and we don't, we didn't know it before. So it's really, really good things. I really like, I like talking about space very casually and conversationally. And, you know, the fact that you guys add a cocktail into the mix, I'm a big fan. We mostly like it because our little corner of horseshit internet sometimes can make its way into larger audiences, such as when we got Miriam Kramer to ask SpaceX if they were inspired by McDonald's Playplace to build the cupola. So we try to be a generative source for tidbits that make their way out. So I feel like we have a good opportunity to plant some things in your brain here that will be unveiled whenever our next one actually happens. So great point.

It could be well. So speaking of cocktails, I guess. What do you got today, Kristen? Well, I'm a wee bit embarrassed. I feel like for some craft beer lovers like both of you, cocktail bartending gurus that mine is going to disappoint. But I was running home late from work. I didn't have time to stop and get anything better.

But I feel like this is kind of a tribute to Florida with Hurricane Ian hitting. Love it. It's a Pacifica. I would drink this on the beach. So, I 100% wish to Florida during this difficult time. I'm a beer girl. I have a great at on the beach. Yeah.

Several different beaches, in fact. That's awesome. Yeah, Pacifica. I have a memory of Pacifica actually when I was, really? Parts of my family have been going to Mexico in various capacities for as long as I can remember. And I remember my uncle one point asking my other uncle who lived here. yeah the last time I visited you you know we drank some beer I don't remember what it was but it was so so good

and they were like looping through all these beers in this conference I was like seven or something I still remember this conversation and then when my uncle finally said it was pacifico and he was like pacifico I just remember I'm like shouting to this guy and how excited he was you remembered that beer so yeah that's a core memory would only be better if it was tecate and you just like have to forget that it was a beer these years later yeah yeah yeah Well, the other thing I like about it, my daughter pointed this out to me, my daughter's name is Clara. And I was drinking one, and I had it out. And she said, look, mommy, there's my name. It literally says Clara right there.

That's why you're named that. We named you after the Pacifica's from. You're named after Pacifica, sweetheart. Awesome. Anthony, what you got? I have a Lawson's little sip, which is a great local beer. but I have it in a fresh pint glass that I bought from Snake River Brewing. I was out there last week.

So I thought I, when we go to breweries, we like to buy a glass. Only if they brew the beer at that place, we don't buy them if we're going to like the tap house of the brewery. We buy them if we're at the actual brewery. And we were in Jackson. So as I know a running bit on this show, Jake, is my rankings of national parks. Yes, yes. much how many of the 60 are better than Joshua Tree. And I'm happy to say Yellowstone and Grand Teton above Joshua Tree firmly, my number one and two

spots. So I agree with that. Joshua Tree is spectacular. I am pro Joshua Tree. Wow. You're judging me hard already. Jake is. He has no dog in this fight.

I've never been to Joshua Tree. So both of you could be lying to me. And it could be this most medium middle of the road national park is far. It probably would be for you, honestly. No, I would put Yosemite. I would put Yosemite above Joshua Tree. Oh, for sure. I would not be knocking on Joshua Tree.

Oh, I am. I do love the desert also, but my only contention is that's the worst of the deserts that we have in America. So, yeah. That's it. That's where I'm at. And publish, yeah. What about the desert of West Texas? You're telling me, like, the Van Horn parts of Texas.

I don't know. I've been to that one, so. Oh, well then. But notably, there's no national park that's just the desert down there. They have caused caverns and they've got, what else they got, Guadalupe Mountains. Big Bend, I think, is close to there, right? That's pretty far. Texas is a giant.

Yeah, it's giant. Anyway, what did you got, Jake? Do you go to the beer company? Did you make a fancy cocktail? No, I made a cocktail. So I've got a, this is called a tequila sour. I don't know if this is like made up or a real thing. But I found it on the internet.

and it's got tequila with like a bunch of lemon and lime juice and some syrup syrup. But then the weird thing, I guess, is there's an egg white in it, which I've never done it in a cocktail before, but I wanted to try it today to see how it goes. So it's all foamy. You can see that's from the egg white and some garnish in here. So yeah, tequila sour. It's very sour. Man, some of these you put a lot of effort into.

Not that much effort. It looks like more effort. But once you build the cabinet up and you have all the stuff there, it's just like, Like egg white, though. That's the part that made me go. The cherries are a nice touch. Yeah, yeah. So I'm excited for it.

Yeah, it's good. All right. Where do we even start? Where do we start? It's been a week. It has been a week. Yeah, there's been some news the last like a little bit. And we have live news to come about 24 minutes.

So I'm tracking that. Are you guys going to be monitoring that? Yeah, yeah. How are you going to know what's going on? We got Twitter up. We'll do live. hot takes. So we can't have a TV personality on here and not do live hot takes. That's kind of a part of the bit.

Oh gosh. Are we starting with Artemis One stuff? Are we starting with Kristen's coverage of Artemis One stuff? Which is more fun here, Jake. Yeah, well, I mean, we should talk about, we should talk about the hurricane a little bit first and just kind of what's going on with all that. So, you know, so Kristen, you've been talking about how your network is all hurricane all the time now. So my first question would be like, Is any of this Artemis stuff even going to matter after this hurricane has passed? Like, has this been all completely overshadowed by the weather news? What do you think?

Well, I think it's a really good thing that Artemis did not try to launch anywhere near close to this hurricane because, you know, I mean, it's a really serious storm and people in Florida are going to be hurting for some time. And, you know, I think clearly the folks at KSC and the Artemis program made the right call, albeit a bit of a late call, but made the right call to roll the rocket back. So I don't know. I'm just glad to see the storm pass over head rocket safe inside. Hopefully no more fires.

I mean, this rocket has had to deal with a lot over the last few weeks. So hopefully this is the end of its troubled road and it can get back on that launch pad pretty soon. Yeah, yeah. It's had a her own history too. Fuck, yeah. What do I have thoughts about? What do I have thoughts about? You have thoughts about the fire coverage, the fire coverage, remember?

Oh, it was just another one of the, like, the rocket and spacecraft were never at risk. And I'm like, you, you had to evacuate the VAB. Like, even if they, even if a rope was smoldering, at some point in there, you were acting like they were at risk. So, like, even if eventually they weren't, you know, and you mentioned, this is the same as when the ISS was doing, you know, cartwheels in space. And they were like, the crew was never at risk. I'm like, I don't think. they would agree with that when they were like, oh, I've never faced this way in the space station before. So I just, I hate like, I always think of things like you have a, you have an account of goodwill.

And when you debit from that, you need to be damn sure that that's a good time to waste a little goodwill. And a little like one sentence, you know, flipping, oh, they weren't at risk is just not really a useful spend of goodwill when you're a couple of launch attempts and a couple of tests into a launch campaign. It's like, what is that even doing? You know, that's making nobody feel better. I just can't really get my head around that part of it. Yeah, no, I thought it was silly too because it was just like all you had to say was that there was a small fire. All of our emergency procedures worked exactly as we had planned them to. Everyone is safe and there's no damage.

Yeah. And the press release. And then there's like, there's no questions about it at all, right? But then you put in a weird sentence like that. Yeah. Silly. You guys really dissect these press releases, you know. We're really going into, you know, every line and word.

I like it. All right. What else are we supposed to do? I mean, we have two specialties. We have reading every last line of a NASA press release. And then the single paragraph in every article that Jeff Fowse has ever written that just calmly eviscerates whatever the subject of the article is with it like no opinion expressed, but just like our favorite. the Starship ones. They were just like, you know, six months ago, they said he'd launch next month.

And the month after that, it was three months from then. And then it was, you know, a year from now. And it's like, there's always this one succinct paragraph. And those are our two favorite written material, pieces of written material. Pink Mountain every story. They're always there. You got to look for him. So, I mean, so, Christian, we want to really pick your brain about this Artemis stuff.

Because, you know, as Anthony just alluded to, we, we dig deep into this stuff. And most of our, most of our palette of reading material is like super focused space, you know, outlets. So it's like Boston Space News or, you know, Erica at Ars Technica or stuff. But you're at a big news organization that deals with a lot of stuff that, you know, is beyond Artemis and stuff. And so your audience is also, you know, obviously very different. And I think that's really interesting to kind of talk about. So do you want to maybe just, I don't know where to start with. that, but like, how do you approach covering something like Artemis or any kind of space story

when you work at CNN instead of, you know, off nominal.com? So I probably read the same stuff as, as y'all do, right? But so the way I like to think of it is every day we have a 1030 meeting. It's our beat meeting. And it's started off in Zoom, you know, like everything else. But now it's all in person, most of it. And, and, And everybody in the D.C. Bureau gets together and you go around in a circle and you talk about what's happening on your beat that day. And so, you know, it's the White House has their own meeting. Cap Hill has their own meeting. But this meeting, it is everything from your national security team to your justice team and Supreme Court team to your agencies and transportation team.

At the very end, they go to me, space. And, you know, everybody in the CNN Bureau, they are dialed in on politics and justice and Natsakh and all that. Like, they know everything about all of that in minute detail. But space, I mean, you know, they just don't follow it, you know, like they do all the other normal traditional DC beats. And so I love this meeting because I can kind of use it as my. testing ground to see what people know, what they don't know, what words they're familiar with,

what words they're not. And I always come away from it being like, man, I either I really sold that or I need to do a better job. But they, I have found like people have no idea what I'm talking about the Dart mission. I told them about Dart for the very first time. And they were like, what? that's so crazy, you know? And it's just these people who are so, my colleagues who are so plugged in to so much, you know, even they a lot of times don't know about these very technical things, Leo, lower orbit, I mean, just like the basic stuff that you guys talk about all the time. And so then you zoom out and you look at, you know, the American public as a whole. And, you know, I look at what I do as a lot of it is, you know, educational.

Like you have to educate people on what private companies and the U.S. government are doing in space. But it's also getting them excited about it, getting them interested. And so that's kind of what I'm thinking about when I do it. I try to, when I'm framing my pieces and like getting ready to do a live report, I obviously try to like get, you know, the news first, like get that off the top. But it's so important to just kind of provide a bit of background education context. And it's really hard to not like, you know, use the acronyms and the lingo and the stuff that we're used to. But like you really, like people will tune out.

People will not listen to you. People will not understand. People won't care. And so a lot of my job is really. trying to figure out a way to, and this is where I can kind of like test it out in that 1030 meeting, figure out what people do know about, what they don't know about. And from there, you can kind of, you know, moderate how in the weeds you go. But I mean, most people don't know what Artemis is, you know, I would venture to say most people don't know that NASA just

crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid. So I like getting people excited about it. I feel like I noticed that you talked about the language a lot in there, which is one I had specifically in my head of like to ask you about about, I felt like your reports always have one piece of jargon up front and then you can like use, then you would go in and explain like you're very selective about which space jargon makes it into your report because he can't, like all the names are pretty dumb to be honest. Like if you just talked about the technical issues that Artemis 1 had, you're like fill lines and valves and quick disconnects and, you know, all the things. these the soft goods is my favorite that they keep saying soft goods it's like just say seals like they're so

dumb they say soft good um so i i feel like you do a great job of figuring out what word should i explain today it's like oh a sesame street word of the day like which space word should i have is the word of the day today yeah and i feel like that's that's a good way to go about things especially in an era when if people are interested they can look it up otherwise like just explain the one that matters the most. Well, and perfect example of that was during like the, well, the first and second Artemis launch attempt where they were having, you know, these hydrogen leaks and like having to explain that and they were and you know, CNN to their credit, they were super into it. I mean, they were coming to me for live shots every 30 minutes and they were like, explained to us

this this hydrogen leak problem. And they really were. wanted to get into it. So how do you do that in a way that, you know, your average viewer can still follow and understand when they're, you know, cooking breakfast for their kids and trying to get them out to school and still kind of make it interesting and make them feel like, you know, they actually can follow what you're talking about. So on big launch days where you're doing a bunch of reps like that, that's definitely one of the things that I think about the most. Like, is the average person at home understanding the words that are coming out of my mess? I'm kind of reminded.

We had Lori Garver on the show, and we were having this hypothetical about how weird it is that the NASA administrator reports right to the president, right? Like everyone else is all like under like a cabinet secretary or something. And so now I'm imagining like if the president has a meeting of all of his or her direct reports. And there's like all these cabinet secretaries. And at the end of the table is the NASA administrator. And they're all been like, what's on your plate? It's like, okay, well, we have this thing going on with Russia. okay big okay and what's on your plate well we're going to try and reinvent all of health care okay great

and what's on your plate mr administrator and then you're just like oh we crashed into an asteroid let me tell you all about the the the ejecta plume of this like you know it's something weird like that so you're saying Kristen is specifically uh certified to be a NASA administrator is what I'm getting at this sitting at a table of uninterested individuals that you need to explain But that's the thing. They're genuine, like all the people that I sit with at this meeting, like, and I'm going to speak for them. I'm going to speak at a turn. But they're, they like to save me for the end because I usually, you know, tell them something that's, like out there that they didn't know about that's, you know, kind of cool and interesting and fun.

And, I mean, that's part of the reason I wanted to, you know, get into covering space full time anyway. that would be an interesting thing to talk about for a second because not that long ago you were not covering space full time and I would love to know if like were you headed this way always because I think if people read like how you ended up where you're at they probably have different feelings on how you got there but you have space in your family very deeply and was this like something that was always on your roadmap that you just were now getting around to or was it just a good opportunity like how'd that come about I, well, first of all, as a kid, I mean, both my parents were NASA astronauts, flew shuttles in the 80s, and I just think there's something about, for me at least, there was something about both my parents being astronauts. Everybody would ask me, do you want to be an astronaut? Are you going to be an astronaut when you grew up? And like, as a kid, I don't know.

It just like, I was just like, I just wanted to prove people. wrong kind of like I just wanted to do my own thing there was just such an assumption that I would go into that's a tough spot too though because when you're a kid like every kid wants to be an astronaut at some point and you're like probably in this like I guess I guess but like should I should I don't know yeah and I was always really interested in space but I kind of just always wanted to you know pave my own path in the world and I was really into I mean I had to watch every space shuttle launch on TV and back then you know every launch was actually carried on the nightly news. So I think I kind of got into news that way. But I had been pushing people to hire me as a

space correspondent for a long time since about 2012, 2013. And this is right after space shuttle retired. There wasn't a ton of interest in space at the time. I actually interviewed at CNN back in 2013 for an aviation correspondent job. And I was trying to make, like, hire me as a space reporter too. I was like, I can do aviation space. And they ended up hiring somebody else, a wonderful internal candidate who is still at the network. But, you know, around that time, I was just, I was looking for a job. And Fox News offered me a job. I was living in D.C. at the time, I covered politics. And I took it, worked my way up, and ended up spending four years covering the Trump White House, but I just got burned out.

That takes a toll on everybody, I think. I mean, shocking, I was just, I was super burned out on politics and some of the things that, you know, happened during my time there. And I really wanted to cover something that I felt was, you know, contributing to the betterment of humankind. And I didn't feel like politics necessarily was still doing that. So when my contract came up, I repitched CNN on the need for, you know, another space correspondent. And I am ever so grateful that they took it.

So that's how I ended up here. It's not like there's a shortage of news to be covering these days. So, yeah. Right. Yeah, it's really picked up. We talk about that a lot. It's like even, you know, we started doing this six, seven years ago. And even in that time, it's like, it's like, it's really picked up.

It's really amped up to a point where like, we cannot keep track of all the stories. There aren't enough slots in our weekly schedule to cover things even on top of all of a podcast we make aside from this. And it's a pretty, it's a pretty hectic beat these days. So that's cool. That's good to see that, you know, CNN is interested in that. Yeah. And they've, they've formed like their own space beat, you know, back when, I mean, they've got like a huge digital team now. And then when you look at, I mean, one of my favorite things that I was doing with CNN Plus, rest in peace.

They had this. They were letting me do, they were letting me host these like hour long shows for launch. I hosted like a 45 minute show on a Soyuz landing. And I was like, man, I don't know if I, like, if I know enough to talk for 45 minutes about a series landing. But I had so much fun doing that. And I get like, you know, what... I think NASA spaceflight would really use someone like you to cover the most of

scarce space events. It was so much fun, though. I felt like I was like commentating like a, you know, a sporting event. Like I really saw the appeal of the doing it live. I'm trying to imagine. You're like, here comes the Soyuz, of course, invented by OKB1 in the 1950s with the The lead designer, Suezaii's return. And so there were all these, yeah, there were all these, you know, geopolitical implications.

Yeah. How is he going to get back to the U.S.? Are they going to, you know, when the cosmonauts just going to wave goodbye to him and leave them there? There's been some great space for this year. Yeah, I mean, you mentioned like even in the Trump White House time, like there was a lot of space stuff going on at the White House level in that administration. So maybe you got a little sampling of that since there was enough going on and, you know, more Pence and Brianstein than Donnie himself. Absolutely. Well, that was actually kind of how I started like, you know, going my way into this.

It was, you know, with Pence and, you know, the National Space Council, Artemis Space Force. I mean, they really did, they did a lot to make space more mainstream. And yeah, I mean, you can say they made, you know, the phrase Space Force, the butt of some jokes, but they did it. It's there. They created it. And, you know, one thing I like to point out is somebody who covered both the Trump and the Biden White House was, you know, this was, I mean, how many policies carried over from. the Trump administration to the Biden administration. Space was one of the few areas where they actually maintained in the civil sector and in, you know, the military sector from Space Force to Artemis,

they not only allowed them to continue, but really championed them. So I don't know, I just thought that was pretty cool in a Washington that's usually so divided. Yeah, yeah. When you were doing like White House coverage for the Trump administration. So you would have been approaching these stories not as a space correspondent. Like how did the space stuff seep into the mainstream news? Like what are some of the like the things that help you decide? Like, okay, well, Pence announcing Artemis is important enough to transcend past whatever the space correspondent is into the, you know, into the general White House coverage.

the general the coverage of the Trump White House. Like, yeah, I'm curious to kind of hear how you parse that. Because I guess that's even still applicable today because you're still CNN. And so at the end of that meeting, you've got to be able to say something that is, you know, that's going to lead to a good story versus like, you know, where I can, I can lead with like, oh, there's a, there's a supply shipment error going to JPL. It's a big, you know, I can do that on my show, but you probably can't do that on your show. So I'm curious to know how you make that decision. Well, a lot of times it's not left up to me, right? You know, there's higher-ups that, you know, say, yes, you can cover this.

No, you can't. But, you know, a lot of back at Fox and at CNN, you know, it's my job to pitch my bosses on why they should let me do something, right? Like, so it's up to me to be like, this is super important. People are going to be interested in this. Or if they're not, we should make them interested. And here's why. At the White House, if something, I mean, because I was at the White House, if, if, If something was even remotely space related and Pence was doing it, that I would definitely

get to cover it because, you know, I was there and I've, you know, given my background and just kind of the things that I like to cover space stories on the side at the time, they would let me do it. Here, you know, I mean, Biden hasn't done, at CNN, Biden hasn't done a ton of space stuff, right? I mean, he announced the first picture of the Web Space Telescope. A great event. Rock solid 10-minute event. If I'm the folks at Webb who have been working really hard on this release,

the day before you find out that, you know, you're going to get big footed by the White House. You're getting a TikTok worth of event coverage the day before. Right. But, you know, it is the president, you know, elevating your, you know, your baby to that level. If you ever work on something that the president wants to talk about, you're like, yeah, I'll do that. You do it.

Yeah. Yeah. No question. But, you know, I mean, Kamala Harris, she, you know, she obviously tried to go to Artemis, but there hasn't been, this administration hasn't felt as space focused as, you know, the previous one, obviously. Even the National Space Council stuff, I feel like they remember every three months that they're supposed to do one of those and then they do an event.

Yeah. Like, it's not, the other ones, I feel like there was so much pomp around the original National Space Council meetings, original as in Pence era. Right. Well, and they actually, like, remember, they used to, like, do sprays where they would bring the press in and, you know, we'd all cover it. And then we'd leave and they'd have like a private real meeting. A meeting meeting, yeah. A meeting meeting without, you know, us little shits, you know, standing and listening to their every word. So, you know, I think it, you know.

that's where the real stuff gets done, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and hardly any VP appearances at IAC so far, right? That's been a little dry in the IAC run. Yeah, but like, I don't know. In D.C., that's like,

I could hop in a in the car for 10 minutes and do like a whole event. That was irresistible for Mike Pence. And we got to hear the theme song live, which was great, the little vice president theme song. One of our favorite little bits of, yeah, it's like, I don't know, that's the funniest thing to me still.

Imagine if every time you went somewhere, you got a little theme song played. It's amazing. How about that Space Force theme song? Yeah, I didn't even listen to it yet. I saw the lyrics. Oh, it's real bad. It's real bad. You got to listen to it.

Should I pull it up? It's good. I think you should pull it up. I don't even who, what source has this? Oh, here you go. He's Space Force Anthem. Wow, I'm going to take a swig of beer for this. Yeah, yeah.

You better prep yourself for this one. Oh, it starts off. Starts off pretty. Are we going to get a takedown notice for this? Probably. Yeah. You receive a takedown notice from the U.S. Music is the YouTube account.

Is this so loud? I can't tell how loud this is for everybody out there. Oh, I haven't seen the music video. Is this a legitimate music video? I don't know if this is the right one. Is this the wrong? I don't know. Now we're definitely going to get a takedown notice.

from someone who had their own custom version of the Space Force theme of day and they have written. Let me go to Space Force. Don Mill. Give you a second to pull this up. This looks more right. It's dangerous. There we go. CNN's Jeannie Moose did like this whole piece on the Space Force song.

And she was like, I was trying to think of like what it reminded me up. And she had like a little scene of Mighty Mouse at the very end. you know the first of all we wanted a song that spoke to our darkness that brought to life this is like a whole thing

does it get to the song there it is nice oh baby wow I'm just imagining this in like a at a football game you know I see it

yeah I guess it's you know Similar to the other range of From this, you know? Okay, so I will totally like admit that I didn't even know the branches of the military had theme songs

and I didn't know what they sounded like. So that was my first exposure to one. Okay. But I just thought it was like, I just felt like it was very, I don't know, it was just like, we need a theme song and someone, okay, we are, we are space force

and we are mighty and strong, and we are really high up and you can't even see us and we are good. and go Space Force. Like it was like like that kind of like lazy level of lyric writing. I don't know. Yeah, I guess. They spent a long time writing it though.

They spent like, oh, I bet they did. Yeah. It's been like a year in development. This is like when, when North of Grumman hired that design firm to redesign their logo and they probably went away for like two years and they came back with a little line that

goes like this. And that was like, and then they got a bill for like $300,000 to design that logo or something. 300,000, Jake. Boy, how do you not interact? with major branding agencies. Some ungodly number to design. It has seven digits at a minimum, yeah.

A Chevron. So, yeah, that's what I'm imagining. Yeah, I guess I didn't realize you would probably, knowing your Canadian national pride, like, you probably weren't in tune with the whole theme song thing. Whereas the Army Navy game was in Philadelphia many years in a row, and I went to like every single one of them. And so, yeah, I was used to the theme songs, you know.

Who's the Space Force going to play? I guess Air Force. Aren't they part of the Air Force? on Space Force basic training. Their very first ever, their first class of like full, you know, only guardians, no airmen, full, you know, guardian instructors and drill sergeants and everything. And I asked them that question. I said, you know, could we maybe, you know, see a Space Force, Air Force football game in the future?

And, you know, they didn't say no, but none in the works now. But right, there has to be something like that down the road. They'd have to have their own school, though, right? Like, they'd have to have to have their own school. And I think they need more. People. People. They need more people.

Yeah. The Space Force football team would look like a pickup football game right now. Like, it's like, whoever's available, we'll take them. It's like, yeah, it's fine. Boy. Oh, wait, we should check Twitter. Is this when the announcement's happening? Oh, yeah.

It's almost time. What's going on? Nothing's happened. I think they're going to fix Hubble or something. Or go see Hubble? I mean, the list of press conference participants are, pretty you have you've you've Jared Isaacman from yeah uh

hilarious projects SpaceX Hubble NASA Kathy's gonna be on I mean but are they gonna does it need to get fixed I guess the gyros are done right they're like three of them are two or three of them are dead or something I don't know would you hire

Jared Isaacman to go fix your space telescope I wouldn't like I can go see it if you want but I wouldn't hire them to fix it But I was imagining If he's paying to go fix it If he's paying To go fix it I mean

If he's going to pay to go fix it I mean What's he going to do though Are John Grunzfeldt Like bring him in I guess Maybe He could be a trainer

He could train Yeah Yeah yeah Who would you bring up to fix Hubble If you were going to do this Kristen Your parents Probably No Grunsfeld

I mean he would be a I used to babysit for his kids, actually. Lived in the same neighborhood. So why not? Yeah. Was he good at fixing stuff? I mean, he was busy, you know, fixing Hubble. What was the state of repair of his home?

Strange didn't really get that cold. The doors weak when you open them. This is how we're going to over. All focused on the, on Hubble, right? Amazing. Oh, man. So they're saying it looks like they want to boost Hubble to a more stable orbit. That's what it's looking like.

All right. That's fun. That's what we're seeing here. That's fun. So you wouldn't have to do that. Yeah, he's going to throw it. Just push it. Your mom was involved in catching satellites by now.

She was. So maybe I'm still, I'm fine on a spot on the next mission for it. That's all I'm saying. Right? And she never got to do a spacewalk. Only my dad did. So. Jared, I don't think you're listening, but if you are, here we are making the connections.

He's ready. Yeah, I was really hoping this was going to be like the NASA showed up to the press conversation and they just told us to show up and we didn't know what it was about. And Jared's like, listen, I'm just here to tell you in person that we're bringing it home. And if you're mad about that, you can come at me, but we're going to get a hobo and I'm going to put it in my living room or something. Now he's a real billionaire. It's pretty smart, though, when you think about, you know, I mean, I, the first stories I covered

at CNN were the Branson launch, then the Bezos launch, and then the billionaire backlash and all that. So if you're Jared Isaacman going up and helping out something that benefits all of humanity, hard to knock that. I mean, it's super smart. We've said this before. Yeah, we've talked about this before, but he's like a very strategic billionaire. Like he's, he walks the line of like not being a terrible evil billionaire really, really well. Like, you know. I think that's a difference to have like nine and 140 billion though. Like, you know, I think that the extra two digits changes it a little bit.

That's all I'm thinking. Listen, I'm not, no, though, because everywhere, this is the first time in my life. I went all over Yelston National Park and Grand Tito National Park. All the payment terminals had the Shift 4 logo on it. Like that's where I was paying. So I was like, look at this. nobody even know yeah

I really hadn't I hadn't started noticing that until I'd heard about Jared Isaac win too either yeah so anyway secret billionaire well should we get back to regular topics we're like way off here probably yeah

I wanted to talk about Dart more Dart was one of the ones that broke into like popular culture oh my god there was a Google thing there was like everyone was talking about it do you have a sense like are you good at this now christen of like oh this one's going to be the popular culture icon yes and and it's it's i actually felt like at first i wasn't i was having a hard time like reading what would break through uh you know with cnn producers like what

which ones would like really you know they would really take to and want to get on their show um they were super into all the like you know russia you know, I mean, the implications, the fact that like Russia and the United States, was Cosmos and NASA are still so tightly intertwined up at the ISS is pretty remarkable. And that story really penetrated, so to speak. But dart, I mean, dart's a no-brainer. I will never forget, like the first time I talked about it to, you know, some of my, you know, bosses at CNN, and they were just like,

this is, this is crazy. This is actually happening. And even being there, the night of, I was at APL for Impact Night. And I mean, it's just neat to be where history is happening and where they're, you know, doing something that truly betters all of humanity. So I do think my only complaint is that I feel as though NASA and APL should have allowed us into the actual watch party as opposed to the sanitized media room. We were very vocal about, you know, vocalizing our displeasure on that. I understand why they didn't let us in, but it would

have been better if they had. That was the big room where they all cheered on the big screen. Is that the one you're talking about or is that? Well, that's, that's mission control. I under the mission operation center, I understand why they didn't want to let us in there. That's where you're actually doing work. I'm talking about the watch party where all the employees all the people who'd worked on Dart they had you know they had a watch party and you know

I wanted to so this was like the Virgin Galactic launch all over again I wasn't at that one but I saw the pics you were you were like stay over there you go all that's far away they get this far away you know it's as you know

as a reporter yeah you want to be in with the real the real people not just with the other media. No offense. I love the space reporters. They're great. But you know, you want to be where the action is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Isn't Dark kind of amazing that this is the first time we've done this? Because this one, I was thinking about this the other day. Like, of all space missions of all time, this was the one that we could have done like the second year we've flown to space.

Like just smash a thing into an asteroid? We could have done that many years ago. Isn't it wild that it took to 2020 to do that? And it's also wild to me that we were looking so far, like this is a government agency actually doing something proactively, right? I mean, I mean, I mean, the fact that you have a government agency doing something before there's a need. Yeah, way before based on our current, I mean, there's a, there's definitely a need.

We just don't know about it yet, which is the crazy thing, right? Right. Like, we're not like in red of imminent. No, that we know of is all my only point. Yeah. There's, they did the deep impact mission in like 2005 or something. But that was still like to see what happened, right?

That wasn't like a change. I think it was like a science instrument. Yeah, it wasn't a deflection mission. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

And you could count the Ranger missions too. I mean, it was the moon. So it wasn't going to go anywhere. But they were still smashing stuff into it if you really wanted to get down to that. It's true. Yeah. Harder to measure. I mean, the one good thing about DART is that we got a little

nervous after Ryugo and Benu that this was going to go right through and it didn't. So that's good. That we know of. Yeah, we don't know yet. It's pretty big the tail.

Yeah, well, I'm excited to, you know, see if it actually worked. Like, it looks like it did, but, you know, it's going to take a while before we actually know if it actually moved it off its orbit by what, 0.8%. Yeah, when you think about it, you're like, okay, I can see how that works.

And then you watch, like, the visualizations of the relative size and you're like, oh, I don't think that could work. Like, that seems like really bad, bad math on that. Yeah, yeah. But they think they can take 10 minutes off the orbit. So you should be able to know that like, you know, pretty soon. I would think, you know, within six to 12 orbits, you'd have an hour to two hours of change and that.

So it should be pretty, I think they should be able to figure it out. The scale of math. I'm struggling at that, though. Like, how do we make? Time, man, just time. I guess. Spacecraft big enough to slam into it. Game over time.

scale over time. Scale over time, like hit it way early, you mean? Exactly, yeah. Yeah. If you hit it five, ten years out, and then that little millimeter adds up over time, right? Yeah. But like I feel like we'd have to do bigger

than the satellite bus that we just sent at this thing. That's what I'm talking about. You can do all starships. There's enough around. Like, we could do all starship, no problem. I think it was only 600 kilograms, so I'm pretty sure NASA could muster, you know. Another zero.

600 kilograms sent to basically Earth orbit, like not really that much different. Alken 9 did it. Yeah, that's true. So if we can put a, you know, if we can put three tons on Mars, I think we can probably scale that one up, an order of magnitude at least.

I'm voting a whole starship. Yeah. Starship with a new shepherd and it's fairing. Just have like an unmanned star ship crash into a mastride. Just full of concrete. Just fill it up with concrete. 100 tons of it. It's the theory, right?

That's the working model of Starship. Yeah, basically. Looking forward, Kristen. So what do you guys think? What's going to launch first? Starship or Artemis? I used to be less about this. Yeah, I was like really confident that Artemis was going to beat it.

And it still might. I think it's probably still leaning towards Artemis, but it's not a sure thing. It's really close now. Yeah. All right, let's do some tactics on this, right? We're late September. Artemis not rolling out until early November. Great band from South Jersey, by the way, at best.

I think it has to be. I mean, this is if you want me to bet, I think it's Thanksgiving. We get Thanksgiving because Jim Free has said that he doesn't want, it's not their preference for a nighttime launch. And that whole week in mid-November is launching at, you know, midnight or 1 a.m. So maybe they need to go. Though I think this. And it's a holiday.

Of course it's going to happen on a holiday. All right. Thanksgiving for our, all right. So we got two months until Artemis. SpaceX is up to seven engines on the booster. They're rolling it back in for my new favorite phrase in space robustness upgrades, which either means we didn't finish it the first time or we broke some shit and need to fix it. And it's my favorite phrase, because you can say that about anything.

Like, robustness was going to Hubble for robustness upgrades. You know, like, that's exactly what I was doing up there. It's like the direction of goodness one. That was a good one, too. So presuming, like, two months is a long time in Starship years. So could they do a full 33 engine firing by then? Presumably. I think so.

Yeah. Wouldn't be shocked if 33 engines fired up in October. I'm still betting Artemis, but like by a month. Yeah, it's like 60-40, Artemis, you know. It's like it's not that far from a coin flip. How many times do you think that you could be doing these live hits from Kennedy Space Center for Artemis 1 before either the public or your producers start getting annoyed? How many more times? I was down there for like two weeks for the first and second launch attempt, 10 days.

I mean, I'm blocking off the last half of November, really, right? I mean, you kind of have to. And that is, you know, we talk about getting, you know, folks internally at CNN excited about the space stories. That's the other thing is you also have to kind of, you know, inform folks about the realities of a first test flight and how this is, you know, well, very delayed, also quite, quite normal. So I don't know. I'm going. I'll be there. Are you all going to be there?

Oh, almost certainly not. Yeah. Certainly not. Almost certainly not at this point. We don't have CNN travel money. All the travel money comes out of our pockets, Kristen. So I have to say, though, I heard that you all... Unless you need like an extra YouTuber in tow, then let us know.

In one of your previous podcast, y'all were talking about a beach house that you all rented for... You did? For Artemis. I don't think we're going to do this at CNN, but I think it's a great idea. Because we're staying at, you know, your generic hotels in the Hilton or the Marriott over in Titusville. Right. I think it's not a bad plan because if you put enough people in it, I bet you the cost per night was below whatever airport hotel style thing you know you end up getting into. Yeah.

Yeah. And we could walk the cancellation policy, though. That's where it gets you, right? Like you got to be flexible with those cancellation policies for a space launch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The one I had was like cancellation. You know, so I checked in the 28th for that first launch attempt. And it was free cancellation up to the 24th or fifth or something.

Like it was really not bad. Like I was pretty impressed with it. So, yeah. I don't think they knew there was a launch going on. So they weren't watching CNN. So they didn't know. I can't promise that we'll do the beach house for Cape Canaveral again. But I feel like a Boccahica.

Beach House is not too distant in the future. We'll let you know for the long gaps in the schedule next time. There you go. Jake had nothing to do. No, I did not. That was a tough week. Are there other particular stories that you foresee in the next year or two that you have marked off as like, that's the one that I can convince everyone about? Yeah, Artemis flies.

What's next? Well, the one that I keep going back to that CNN was really cool about and let me spend like a week and a half in Canada filming is just, you know, mega constellations and their impact. This particular story was about the impact on astronomy. But just megac constellations in general in low Earth orbit, all of that debris. You look at, you know, the GAO just put out a report today. you have Congress trying to stop the FCC from putting up its own rules about orbital debris and getting these satellite operators to get rid of their junk within five years. So I just think that whole aspect of the private sector just rapidly outpacing government regulation at a global scale

and the impact that it has on all sorts of things. But the thing that just really gets me is the night sky, the astronomy angle, right? I mean, this is one of those last frontiers of environmentalism. And I think it's so cool what SpaceX is doing with Starlink satellites. And how do you balance that with the needs of astronomers? And eventually, you know, the needs of, you know, launches, humans, crude and uncreuthers. just getting to and from Leo. So that's one story that I keep going back to.

And it's kind of in the weeds. But it seems to really break through the mainstream audience as well. It's in the weeds now. But now people's cell phones are going to be hooking up to satellites. And that's a obviously Apple just announced their thing. But I'm looking at these AST space mobile satellites. And I'm like, damn, if we thought Starlink was a bright object, like wait until that thing unfurls its antenna. I have no

idea what's going to happen, but I feel like it's going to be brighter than Venus. It looks wild. If you've seen the fully unrolled, and not even this, they have this prototype. That's like 64 square meters or something. And then their next one is like four times that? I don't know. It's huge. It's

crazy. And don't the, E-Sills doing all that space power stuff. Aren't the space power satellites supposed to be like really, really big panels and stuff too? Because you're basically moving a solar farm to space. Like, don't they have to be. It's a stupid, stupid project. He's mad about it.

I don't want to talk about space powers. And the other big thing that interests me, and this kind of ties into my old political reporting days, is just the relationship with Russia just fascinates me. I mean, here we are talking about nukes in Putin using nukes on the world. And yet we have, you know, a Russian cosmonaut about to launch on a space. SpaceX rocket. Like, and a NASA astronaut launching on a Russian Soyuz rocket last week.

Like, I think that that never ceases to baffle me, that this partnership has survived that. And I'm just so curious where it goes in the future. Like, is ISS, is that at the end of it with Rose Cosmos and NASA? Do they, yeah, that's it? Does the Chinese actually play nice and let Rose Cosmos in? on their fancy lunar base. It doesn't even seem like that.

Last week at IEC, they did this presentation about their lunar plans, and they're not anywhere in there. And maybe it's because they were in France and they didn't want to mention it, which is a great decision if that's what it was. I don't know. It's like, yeah. It's wild, though. But also, again, to bring out my Russian space hawk take here, Jake,

like, if you're a China hawk, let them go to China. They're going to just, like, cut holes in their spaceships and dock them to Chinese space stage instead of ours. what are they going to lose at that point? It does make you wonder, though, like, what has to happen before NASA is like, okay, yeah, we can't, we can't do this anymore? Because if he's annexing territory and mobilizing Belarus and blowing up pipelines and army. Like if he went for Cuba again. Yeah.

How would that do? But I mean, there are so many red lines that have already been crossed over the last few months with Ukraine. Like, I remember back in, you know, March, like, this is it. This is the thing that like, severes the tie. How do you, you know, and it just keeps going on. And, you know, you have, you go from Ragozin to Yuri Borisov and all the, we're pulling out. No, we didn't mean it. That was a mistranslation.

Like, how many times does this go on? And I'm just, that whole element of it, I'm just. amazed that it's it's really it's stayed intact it survived and I'm just I'm surprised it I mean in our world we make a a big deal of it but that's just one that I love talking to people about I'm like did you guys know this this is happening well and you didn't even mention that like Kazakhstan and Russia are not in a good spot right now either like they have they have started going against you know Russian dictates and stuff so I don't know.

What if their lease is up? Then it doesn't matter what we think about the space station. But like, you know, their lease isn't up for like a billion years or whatever. Yeah, it's a big long lease. But a lease is a piece of paper,

you know, like that could change. So, yeah, you can, if you're, if you're, if you're in Kazakhstan,

you can make life difficult for the Russians pretty, yeah, without touching the lease. Yeah, exactly. You don't need the paper for that part. No. It's just crazy.

And I'm sure Russia could make life difficult for Kazakhstan. Yes. Oh, yeah. They don't, they don't care about paper. Making life difficult is a Russian specialty, so Nick Hague is like, I told you all.

Oh, boy. Yeah. Well, Kristen, if people do not partake in the Kristen Krifisher Cinematic Universe, what's wrong with them? And where should they go to fix that? Gosh. CNN.com? I've been really bad about Twitter lately.

I just, I don't know, I had a, I'm not the most prolific tweeter. I had some bad experiences during my, my previous life and previous jobs. And I just, I stopped doing it then. Yeah, I did. You were really close to somebody really good at Twitter. It's so strange that you just didn't pick that up at all. Yeah. So, yeah, so I'm on Twitter, but I'm not the most prolific tweeter.

But anytime there's a big launch or a big space event, I'm on TV all the time. With, oh, my, I forgot to put this in earlier. My favorite moment from you covering Artemis I was the time when you got, you got so meta and probably didn't even know about it when you were like, this is the best model I can find. It's a space shuttle, so bear with me. And I was like, yes, that's exactly the, you nailed it. So the full disclosure, we tried to get a, um, an SSU, LF model and it like didn't show up on times.

We're like Bill Nelson's office and you're like, what do you got in here? He got a space show. We went to the gift shop. We went to like an old gift shop near KSC. I didn't know that. It was amazing. It was like a space shuttle model. Yeah.

And then it was like nice. It was like a very high quality. It looked amazing. It was huge. I was trying to find the clip when we were talking. It was a giant like you were you needed somebody else to help you with that. It was huge. We had to have a stand.

But then we had to figure out like, do we leave it here? for the second launch attempt. Do we get a storage unit for it? Should have put it in the beach house. Do we ship it back? Do we check it? Like, what are we going to do with it?

So yeah, if you have a beach house, I could leave my models at, that'd be great. Oh, I'm so glad I brought that up. That's a better backstory than I hoped. Yeah.

No. I figured you went into like the CNN archives and we're like, oh, they still have this around. Like, that's great. No,

we just, we needed one. But then I was like, like, shit, like, how are we going to explain this? Like, people are going to, like, see that we, like, haven't gotten, we haven't got the right model. So I was like, all right, it's all good. It's basically, SLS is basically shuttle anyway.

I thought it was a great moment. You got to, you like dove into the depths of nerdery and no one knew, you know, it's great. Hey, until now. Jake, what's you got cooking these days? So I finally put out my episode about the Artemis launch. it was a long time coming. I had severe writers block after that trip, like trying to put this together because I was trying to like say something interesting and new about SLS, which is like pretty hard to do

because they, you know, a lot of words have been written about that rocket. So but yeah, I put it out. So that's behind me now. And working on some Venus stuff coming up here. So there's some interesting drama with the now. a call for New Frontiers 5 and how Venus is not so much a part of it and why shouldn't it be? And there's some fun stuff going on there. So we're going to unpack that pretty soon on the next episode.

The Venus community, always the, you know, they're always grumbling. Rightfully so. I'm not saying that's bad or that they're wrong. They're always persecuted. Yeah, yeah. They've got a storied history of being left out. Yeah. Amazing.

What about you? Last week I talked to Bob Pierce, who's the associate administrator for aeronautics and NASA, and that was awesome. We talked about this little bit in advance of the show. Between this one and the one I did about space insurance, I've got a lot of really uplifting comments lately about these two very obscure topics that have almost nothing to do with what I usually talk about. And I'm like, oh, maybe I've got this all wrong on all the other shows that I do. but if you're curious about aerospace, Bob Pierce was really cool to talk with. It was like an hour, too.

It was great. Yeah, it's a long one. Yeah. So do we have a name for this episode yet? Are you guys going to have to think about it? Oh, people put in suggestions. Not a named episode was really, really rough. We got a couple suggestions about soft goods.

We got some about the Space Force theme song. We have to sort there. I mean my models at. We got a lot to sort through. there, but. Kristen, thanks for hanging out with us. This is amazing. Thanks for having me.

I had a great time. I guess next week, Jake, what are we doing? I really didn't do much, make a bunch of a dent, but, you know, cheers. Oh, we did get carried away. Yeah, talking too much. Yeah, that often happened. What are we doing next week on this show, Jake? I don't even remember.

I'm going to be totally honest with you. On Tuesday, Wednesday, I'm going to be at Astrobotics. factory and going to see myself a moonlander. And I'm going to look around to what parts are missing from that moonlander so we can talk about it on Thursday so that we know when the moonlander will fly. You're going to be like, let us tell you about our plans for space power on little cubes at rovers. And you're just like, and I just have a little checklist here.

Propulsion module. Yeah, okay. All right. I'm going to print out like the Apollo go around the horn for go or no go decisions and just shout him out and see who perks up. That's the plan. All right. I'm looking forward to it.

All right, everybody. Thanks for hanging out again, and we'll see you soon. Bye. 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 1,000, end of death.