Off-Nominal - 81 - Foot Bits

Episode Date: October 20, 2022

Elizabeth Howell of Space.com joins Jake and Anthony to talk about her new book, Why Am I Taller, with astronaut Dave Williams.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeECW Press | A Canadian Indie Book Publisher | Publishing Curiously Compelling Books Since 1974Follow ElizabethSpace Writer | Elizabeth HowellElizabeth Howell, PhD (she/her, 🖖💉😷) (@howellspace) / TwitterElizabeth Howell | SpaceFollow 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. We're here. Welcome to the first. This is a bit of a weird one, Anthony. We're doing something a little bit different today. I'm 95% sure I'm doing it right. You're not. Good. Okay. Well, hopefully, we'll find out. So listeners, viewers, if you're watching and hearing this, Anthony did it right. So that's good.

But yeah, so we're trying out a bit of a not live situation. So I think are we going to try and, like, air this when it normally air and and like almost like a simulated live. Is that the plan? That's what we're trying to do, right? We're going to do this like most people do TV. Record it, post up on the time that it goes out. Yeah.

I apologize for my weird schedule. Oh, it's no problem. No, this is really good. This was an opportunity for us to test out how to have Australians on our show by not battling time zones. So when you, when this opportunity presented itself, we're like, we've been waiting to try one of these and we, you know, we're, we just, we appreciate your time zone.

And this is a good time for us. Yeah, exactly. And as a Canadian and as a person who used to be a British colony as well, yeah, you know, I want to help out the Australians and people. So you're here with us today, Elizabeth Howell from space.com. We're really excited to have you today because you wrote a book. We're going to talk about your book today. It has got some funky, funky stuff in this book about what happens to your body when you go to space,

which is always entertaining. Even like, it's one of those topics where like, even if you read a bunch of stuff you already know, you're just like, oh, that's so cool and weird. Like it's just like still fun. Like, you know, it's one of those kind of things. I don't know what it is about, about weird stuff that happens to your body.

But that's what we're going to talk about today. So did you bring a drink, Elizabeth? I know it's like the middle of the day for you, but I don't know what you've got an alcoholic. I'm afraid, but it's good to get a tea to kind of help you through a long day. And look, I have a special mug. This was given to me by my parents after my first book launch for obvious reasons. So it's kind of like my book mug now.

So I guess it's why I got it today. Awesome. I like that. Is that one of those heat-activated ones? No, it should be. Those are the best. Yeah, we have one of those in the kitchen, but not today. They're annoying to clean.

Yeah, because no dishwasher ever. It's like a single-use kind of item. You know, single-lash-only piece of clothing. You're wearing that once. That's never coming back. Oh, man. What you got, Jake? So I went to, like, alcohol light today.

So it's still alcoholic, but it's pretty, it's pretty tame. So this is, uh, this is, yeah, this is called rompope, which is like, kind of like Mexican eggnog. Um, and so it's just got a little cinnamon on top of this. Real light for the rest of the day. Yeah, yeah. I know, no, but it's actually, it's pretty. It's very refreshing. So, like, you put ice in it here and it's, uh, I think what's different is they use just the yokes instead of the whites. Like, I think normally eggnogs got both of it, but this is, that's why it's so yellow. But it's, uh, it's really good. It's very sweet and fun. And so they drink it a lot for the holidays around here, but so. So yeah, cheers. I went with an old steady. We got a perpetual IPA. Nice. Bosses. Can't be mad at me. So.

Can't promise. code quality that's coming out of me later, but no, no, no. Yeah. What I will be doing is, is, uh, you know, it'll be creative. So that's good. Yeah. There you go. That's all it matters. Well, uh, yeah, we don't want to start. Well, this is, um, okay, I'll start you off here, Liz. So like, what the normal question to pretty much any author gets, why, why did you write this book? Where did the inspiration come from? Um, and you, and maybe tell us a little bit about, uh, your co-author as well, which is probably a pretty big story about how this all came together. Oh, 100%. So it's me and it's another space person, although it's a person who's literally been to space,

Dave Williams. He's got this huge resume and it would take me the entire podcast to talk about it. But he basically is a medical doctor. He's been on some shuttle missions, including a very science and a human body focus mission called Neurolab, which has its own textbook. That's how big this mission was. It's like a 200-page textbook you can get. off of NASA's website. And so what happened was we were engaging in conversations about my first book, which I was on your podcast for, I believe, Canada, I'm in collaboration. Four years ago almost now. It's kind of funny, right?

Yeah. So anyway, we were talking about it. And Dave very kindly wrote the introduction to it because that particular group was about the Canadian Astronaut Program. And as we were in conversations, said, you know what? He said, I've had some ideas for books kind of kicking around, and I was wondering if you'd want to join on. And I was at the time thinking about a book for space medicine because we can get into this in the podcast,

but it's basically going to be the thing that we have to be thinking about as we're heading to the moon and to Mars, right? Especially the moon, which is like right around the corner apparently. So anyway, he raised the issue with me and I said, yeah, I think that's a good idea. I went back to the publisher. And it actually took us another book to get out of the way first. You know, there were that many other things to write. But here we are finally with the results in our hands. So what I really love about it, though, is that it's drawing upon a person who not only has been in space multiple times, not only has studied it in space multiple times, but also is a doctor here on Earth.

And so I think that triplicate, you know, really allows for an authenticity of the book. And I hope it will be enjoyable because we did try and have a bit of fun, as you could tell. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's cool. Yeah, because Dave Williams is, I think he's like the record holder for Canada's spacewalks and stuff. Like, he's got some pretty cool. He said he's got a huge resume, but as far as Canadian astronauts go, it's a pretty good one. So it's really exciting to see you continuing that work relationship with him.

It's pretty good. Yeah. The things that he, so obviously he has a background that's particularly interested in this because it's like all parts of his life combined. So was he the kind of like guiding force of like these are the issues that are most interesting to astronauts to talk about? These are the things that drive us kind of mad on the space station because we have to work out for like a billion hours a day. Like what were the things that he was influential on in the topics of the book?

Well, what was really interesting about the conversation was we were coming at it from two people who have been immersed in space for much of our lives, but in different angles, right? And so he's been on the research side ever since, well, ever since I was born basically and probably a bit before, right? Because he was a medical doctor and then he progressed to the space station. And then he actually was very high up at NASA Johnson Space Center managing their life sciences program. So he had a lot to do with from the ground up, essentially, how that was going. And then on my side, I've been a space reporter for about 20 years now. And what that means is that inevitably I did run across health stories because it's a big feature of trying to keep our astronauts healthy up there, just trying to figure out what's going on, how to be helping them out.

And so for me, it was more like, how could I be bringing this to a generalist audience? and then he was really making sure that all the words that I had were scientifically authentic, right? Because you do want to make sure you're hitting exactly that right terminology that you're expressing things also with the right error bar. Because the thing about space, unfortunately, is that somebody looks at a study and they're like, oh my God, there's cancer, right? And you're going, there's some nuance to this, you know? There's some nuance to the radiation issue. Yes, we're not, you know, ignoring it, but at the same time, it's not instantly cancer, right? And so it's just good to have somebody sitting there who actually has the medical degree able to check you out

just to make sure that you're not kind of trumping up things where they shouldn't be trumped up, so to speak, and then making sure that you're still saying authentic. Yeah. So it was a really interesting relationship in that regard because we both were passionate about the topic. We still are obviously wrote a whole book about it. But we just had these two different kind of ways of approaching it me for the generalist and he being like, this is a specialist way of doing it. The radio thing is funny because it's like,

the list, if you made a list of all the things you talk about in the book, it's like, all of them are more annoying than the current state of radiation science about like, what, what happens your body in space? It's like, your body degrades like instantly in bad ways that are very noticeable and very detrimental to your life. And all this time is spent trying to counteract that through exercise or treatments or the gloves that go in, you know, your space suit for spacewalks to like prevent your fingernails from hurting all the time. there's just so much minutia and clearly from like Dave's perspective

that annoyed him probably day after day after day in space and on earth and it's like we have these long drawn out debates about radiation what we ever go to Mars because of the radiation it's like well we might not have fingernails by the time we get there so is that like which one of these things is more

solvable and worse for us in the inner immediate time in front of us and I just find that is an interesting balance well exactly and I mean one of the things that we were pointing out in the book is Some things have been solved. Okay, so you don't solve a big problem in a minute, but at the same time, we have made a lot of progress.

And so one of my favorite examples from the International Space Station. So let's just take a step back before I even answer the question. So as probably you well know, the two of you as well as most of your viewers and listeners, the International Space Station has been in orbit continuously since about 98. Crews have been sitting there since about 2000. And so that means that we essentially have 22 years of continuous human experience in almost a quarter century. of, you know, that orbiting experience.

And that's on top of whatever came before, right? So we had the mere space station, we had the Skylab space station, and of course, all the short-duration stuff that went up in between to simplify human space history in just a few moments. So anyway, I'm going on. You're much like the Chinese space program, just really speed running. Exactly, right? Yeah.

So, it's a really good thing about the space space. Exactly, right? But more seriously, what it allowed us to do, was to be using the same environment and the same types of experiments over and over again for still a small group of people, but not an insignificant number. And so I'll explain how that works in a second. They sent up this device. You can read about it in the book, but basically it was a muscular device to try and get you doing a simulated weightlifting in orbit.

Okay. And the problem with being in orbit is, of course, you're falling on the time. And so you're not going to be able to just bring up your standard set of dumbbells and be done with it, right? You'd have to take a little bit creatively. I mean, you could. You'd look awesome. and it would be very easy. You look awesome, but you're still going to be quite the weakling when you get back

because there's no resistance, right? And so what they did was I set up essentially, exactly, a device. Everyone's looking like Hector Glover up there. Yeah. You know what? I could be heroic. I could go left 400 pounds, no issue, right? Because it's just anyway.

You could do the whole space station. Yeah, through the whole space station, you know, on camera. It would be amazing. But what they decided to do was to send up this device and it essentially used bans. I'm very much simplifying the science here, but it used a very set of a strong set of bands. We had this resistance bands that the astronauts were using in orbit. And what they were doing was that it was allowing you to really be,

just like on Earth, using some kind of resistance to keep your muscles in good shape. But here was the issue. Some of them actually got so good at it up there that they couldn't continue to improve because that's the thing about exercising, right? You've got to continue to improve and continue to work out your body because if you don't do that, they just kind of stagnate. You don't get any better. And so they said, you know, it's doing most of the stuff.

solution, but let's see if we can make it even better. And so now they have a system up there that uses pistons, okay? And there's no way that any human being and possibly many robots would be able to out, you know, maneuver this piston system. So the long story short is what that allows us to do is to have them come back the stronger muscles, stronger bones. And this may actually be a good treatment for people who have osteoporosis or some kind of a muscular disorder here on earth in the future. And so what I love about that example is it not only is showing, us how space science improves in orbit, but also how we may potentially be able to think of ideas here on Earth to help people who really need it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's all kinds of wild

stuff like that where we're just like because of the nature, like the ubiquitous or the, I guess the novelty of the problems that you have in space, just force a lot of really weird new thinking and things like that. And you can you can learn a lot of stuff the way. You know, injecting a little bit of chaos into the thought process is always a great way to spark ideas and get stuff and I don't know. I can't think of anything much more chaotic than taking gravity away. Or, as Dave loves to point out, having partial gravity. And so what's really interesting now is we have 25 years of space station research and obviously everything that came before, but how long have people been on the mood? Right? Just a few weeks. When you really add up all the time, right, just a few weeks. And so

we don't know how systems are going to behave in a six lunar, sorry, a six of birth gravity, which is what's on the moon and on Mars. And so what happens? You fly the person there in what we call microgravity or zero G, and then they land and they can't get out of their spacecraft to go and fix up the habitat or even a dinner. You know, like, what do we do? So these are pressing questions, right?

Especially because NASA does want to be sending people back to the moon along with the big contingent of other nations, and then possibly onto Mars maybe in the 2040s or 50s, whenever that happens to be. So I agree, a bit of chaos, web, good thing to figure the stuff out. Plus then you can solve the gross things too. So the one passage that I read, which stands out to me, was the, was the astronaut describing taking his sock off.

And I almost threw up a little bit when I read it because it was so gross. But basically, you know, like trying to like take the sock off and keep all the like foot bits like in the sock and not floating around in the state because they just go. Or having to take it off in front of that like vent with the air to suck it all. in and then and then you clean out the foot bits later. So I guess this is why. Chris Hadfield was doing a video a few years ago when he was in space and it was about cutting your fingernails in space.

And so if you read his book, he was talking about the outtake of that particular video. So the video did really well. But the problem was he didn't pay a lot of attention to where the fingernails went after he cut them. And so later on, somebody was finding them in the vents and was a little bit on how. happy about that. And so he learned a few things about nail bits or hand bits. I suppose those would be those were, you know, foot bits, but hand boots and foot bits. Yeah. Yeah. No, I don't know, it's just, it's funny. There's always that, there's the story. Is it Peggy Whitson who was telling all of her,

like, like the rookie astronauts who were coming to the station with her. She said, like, you need to go get a pedicure the day before you come or whatever, you know, whenever you can outside of the quarantine or whatever. Because this is, is like, I'm not having all your foot bits all over the space station when you're up here. This is why NASA is making all the private astronaut missions fly with a former NASA astronaut to control. Keep this kind of stuff under wraps. To enforce the ISS pedicure policy. It's like, you see, they see like someone taking a stockoff.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, stop. You're not in the right spot. Gross. That's really bad. To get us away from that, great. topic related to the exercise. There was, for some reason, like, the, you inject fun into the book in ways that I find hilarious. But there's also just all these little anecdotes and little factoids. And some of them just hit different for me. There was the section about the treadmill,

which is called Colbert, as everyone knows. It goes, I don't, I've never heard anyone reference the speed at which that can go. And it can go up to 12, 12 and a half mom. an hour or something like that, which I find hilarious that, like, you can plug in the treadmill and go full sprint in the middle of ISS. And I'm just imagining, like, going up for your exercise, plug it in and immediately going full power. And you're just in other people's workspace at a full sprint. And it's definitely very noisy.

And I just, I had this little scene in my mind of that happening. I'm just like... With the predator run, like the hunting run. Yeah, the same from Dumb and Dumber where they're like, it feels like you're running at an incredible pace. It's like that all over again. Yeah, exactly. And you're bringing up some interesting things about the crew dynamics, right? Because if you have exercise happening in the middle of your living space, it can disturb an experiment if you're not careful, right? You know, or you can disturb somebody's sleep. So that's why they have everything so tightly scheduled up there. And they have to make sure that when they include that, what, two and a half, three hours, whatever it is for somebody to be exercising, it includes a wipe down time because any of us who have been at a gym on a treadmill, know what kind of nastiness may arise from that area, right? And so a lot of it's also about just trying to keep the crew happy because as big. this a space station is it's not much bigger than a house right typical house it is so you know

how easy it is to get on each other's nerves even if you're lucky enough to be in a house let alone an apartment or something smaller right you know those of us with roommates would understand that yeah yeah yeah it's probably pretty cramped up there when you think about it especially now there's like these stretches of time with 11 people on there it's yeah sleeping in the airlock yeah sleeping in the airlock is a real experience Yeah. The section that you have about food and drinks and, like, gastrointestinal digestion and all that kind of stuff was very interesting to me because it's so, it's something that doesn't get talked a lot about. And I find is the thing that I've, that normal people when we start going to space will notice the quickest.

Like, we're not going to be on these crazy exercise regimes for the, the week-long trip that we have to orbit. We'll just go to orbit and come back and whatever. But the food will notice, like, instantly. The bits about if you swallow gas, you can't really burp without other stuff also coming up, which made me think about this announcement from IAC a couple weeks back, where one of the champagne companies was like, we're sending champagne on Axiom 2. And when I read that, I was like, that's a terrible thing to drink in space.

Like, you're not going to drink it because it's illegal to drink on the U.S. segment. Cut the crap. You're going to drink that on the Russian side for sure. What a terrible idea. Like that has to be, do you get the sense from Dave that it is uncomfortable to experience that? Or does you not notice? I don't know how to think about the needing to burp in space.

I think there's a couple of things to understand about the astronaut mentality. So first of all, they are super fit to start with, right? So they have that advantage. But also, sometimes you're scheduled down to five-minute increments. And so you know how whenever you're running, a very busy day at home or even at your workplace and you forget to eat. You know, I'm wondering if there might be that aspect of not even noticing minor digestive issues until you're actually sitting down or not sitting, I guess, floating to do it, so to speak,

right, because they got the toilet there. But certainly if they have any other issues, they can go and talk to their doctor. They actually have this aspect of medical privacy, which is both important and good, you know, because what that allows them to do is to actually raise with a doctor without me, the journalist listening in and just going, hey, you know, I've got this problem. how can we address them? And then they have a support crew on ground. I'm not sure that a lot of people know that,

but whenever something is raised, like it could even be about the workload, let alone about a digestive issues that they're having. And they need support. There's this ground crew that kicks in. There's a dedicated astronaut, for example, who interfaces with the family. And there's other astronauts that interface with everybody

that has to do with the astronaut's workload on the ground. And they just kick it out, right? And they just figure it out because they figure the person in space doesn't have time to solve it. And so then they put 50s, 50 people on the ground trying to fix it on their behalf. And that's how come you can see things happen on time up there. It's simply a huge, huge support team that makes it possible.

So you don't really hear much about the individual stuff, but I was really glad that Dave was able to give us some insight as to just what could happen. Maybe later on in a couple of hundred years with some of these privacy studies are not as much of an issue, right, because a person will have long past. You may have some fun anecdotes for the future generations. I thought you were going to because we've abolished all privacy laws. No, no, no, no, no.

I'm not suggesting that at all. You know how over time. It's not in the Artemis Accords. So, you know. Stuff on the Cold War is coming out now, right? Because it's not a security issue anymore. So maybe the same with some of the studies. We may have more access than we do now for that reason.

Or just more hot mics from astronauts like John Young. Who knows, right? Hot mics always have some good info. Specifically, the John Young missions had great hot mic moments. Yes, they did. I was going to say that the no game. gas thing is really going to put a cramp on our first on orbit off nominal meetup. That's for sure.

We have to only do it in an artificial gravity station. That's the requirement. Well, there is a commercial stations going up in the 2030. So who knows, maybe there might be a little artificial gravity room that you could sit in. Yeah. That's got to happen. To go burping. Yeah.

To go up the burp-pring. I'm actually interested in like some of the engineering things around that. we're getting into a side tangent, but let's do it. Maybe Dave mentions that about this. I planned on going here anywhere, so let's go for it. You know, because I started thinking about, because all these things come up and you're like, well, I feel like gravity helps a lot of this. So let's think about gravity for a minute.

There's a conflicting thing with the design of spacecraft, right, where being in zero gravity is cool because you can use the volume much better. Like you can put stuff on all the walls and on the ceiling and on the floor and in the middle and you can use all the space really effectively, but it's detrimental to your health in all these different ways. And so part of me is like, could we have zero gravity during your workday, and then everyone goes to sleep and we spin up the station and everyone sleeps at full gravity, and then we flip it back on. So like, you have this little mix and it's like, is that enough time to recover some of these bad effects, right? Especially when you were talking in the book about

astronaut recovery, which I would also like to talk about, being almost day for day, how long where you're in space takes you that much time to recover? It's like, okay, so it's like, you know, 10 hours and 10 hours of no gravity and gravity helpful? Does that help you recover and maintain health, or is it, are you still going to, and this is just stuff that we're never going to know until we actually design some of these stations of like, how helpful is gravity. But it's just, I don't know, it's frustrating that that stuff is not, I know it's a huge engineering challenge, obviously. And maybe this is better when we have a moon base that we can live at for lengthy periods of times. We can do the research there instead of designing our own artificial gravity.

But it just feels like something that we don't talk about because it's so hard. And I feel like for people like Dave, maybe it's something he was interested about because of, you know, both half of his brain, the astronaut side and the medical side. What's that, what is the sense that you get from the astronaut core in terms of like that as a problem they would like to see solved or even just experimented with? Well, I think that they're focused more on trying to get to the moon and back right now. They're sort of in that operational mode. But certainly, I would think that researchers are asking that question themselves.

And so I don't quite have the answer. But what I can point to is we do have research that can simulate a little bit what gravity is like or the lack of gravity is like up in space. And so in the book, I believe we talk about bed studies. And so what they do is they put people and they pay people actually to stay in bed for weeks or sometimes months at a time. And so maybe what you could try doing is 10 months, 10 months, it could feel like 10 months in bed, but anyway, 10 hours in bed and then 10 hours out

of bed and then try and simulate it a little bit because you do see a lot of the same changes. It's not quite the same obviously because you're not floating. But if you're there in a head tilted down position, apparently your body almost thinks that it's, you know, relaxed and that there's no reason to be, you know, producing muscle and bones as it usually does. And so we could try that or we could even just try short idea, see about ways of simulating like of gravity here on Earth.

I'm going to be looking into one of those eye fly things. I don't know if you're aware of those, but you know when you're skydiving and you're in free fall, they now have these devices in certain cities where you can go and pretend that you're skydiving for minutes at a time and you could just be floating around on this big bed of air. And so I'm hoping to try

that out in a few months and I'm thinking that maybe if we could do something like that, maybe not as extreme, you know, that might be another way of trying to sink through how to be solving this gravity issue. If you need other people to experiment that with, I would totally go offline for hours on end. No, but it's, I mean, you're banging on, Anthony, because like I noticed that too because I think I got, it was like almost, it was halfway through the book before, like, because the book sort of presents all these different, you know, challenges you face in space. And you had to get halfway through before you found one that wasn't gravity induced.

Like it was, you know, there's so many things. Gravity, gravity, gravity. I didn't even think of it that way, but you're right. I'm just looking at the table of context. You're right. It's pretty far in. Yeah, we get you about shop at 9 before we begin talking about microbes and interplanetary protection. But the rest of it is eyes, balance, food, you know, skin.

You know, a lot of it's microgravity induced. I didn't even think about that. Good job. So I mean, so let me, I'll try and like ask this maybe in a different way because it's interesting. It's like, you know, it does, do you, and this has made me a your opinion thing, not a Dave thing. Yeah. Are we, like, should we be spending so much time focusing all this microgravity stuff? Like, is this the right path like to, like, I don't know.

When I think about if we ever want to go to far out worlds, Mars, wherever, and we have these long journeys, like, is it, is the right idea to solve microgravity so we can float around and not suffer any ill effects? or should we just put gravity back in? Is that an easier problem to solve? And I just like, I can't quite answer that question myself. And I just keep asking myself over and over and over again. And I don't know if you have a thought on it or a stance. I think it's like the Koch versus Pepsi type of debate. You know, there's a lot of ways you could go in both directions, right?

I think that for now we should try and pursue both. And then I guess see which one makes the most sense. And so they make the most sense in terms of costs or infrastructure. But it's funny, too, like you do look at the science fiction. and a lot of it points to artificial gravity. Without giving away too many spoilers, if you look at the latest season of For All Mankind, they're sitting in these vessels that are going very long distances,

I won't say where, but anyway, it seems to be an artificial gravity environment, shall we say, and that actually is a huge plot point in the pilot, not the pilot, but the premier episode of the new season about the effects of gravity on the human body. So maybe go and check that out or something like The Expans, just to get some ideas. And the Expans does it so well, too, especially with like the people that,

grow up on series and then they're all super tall and lanky and they do such a good job of showing extended you know extended periods of time and what the effects are theoretically you can you can torture them just by bringing them to earth yeah like that's yeah or even like when the martians came to earth they take like the drugs to like get them ready for one g like there's so many interesting bits there that's like that's a plausible thing that could exist in 200 years for sure your question of jake is such the such a jake question and i love it because let's like run the run the parallel path there, right? We launched a space station in 2000 and we spent 22 years and $100 billion building on artificial gravity station instead of microgravity research.

Like, if you gave me $100 billion in 20 years, I feel like I could probably do an artificial gravity thing. Probably, yeah. And yeah, it's like, ah, damn. Like, maybe that was the right one, I don't know. That's the sort of like cynical follow-on question, right? It's just like, are we only spending so much time trying to figure out how to deal with microgravity because we have a microgravity station and it's not going anywhere. We're not building anything new. Is this sort of like when you have a hammer, every problem's a nail?

Like, you know, I don't know. It's an interesting, you know, question to bring up in conversation. A little I know would tell me that it just seems to be hard from what we can tell to simulate artificial gravity up there because they have done it in a limited set of experiments. And it just seems to require either a really big beam or a lot of spinning. And people get sick, you know. I'm interested about the sleeping thing because a big part of it is like to spin the whole station up, you need a really long distance, right?

Not the ISS, it's a bad design for spinning it up. But like, think about, you know, two starships attach to each other, spin those up. You need a really long distance because you're moving about within the spacecraft. So you don't want these huge differences. If you're over there, you're in like, you know, one third gravity. And down here, you're in one G. And it's dizzying to go between that. But if you're just laying there, you're just sleeping,

and we design it so that it's like half G at the level where you're sleeping. And no one's moving around. I don't know. Maybe it's a little bit like getting on mission to Mars or mission space or whatever. The ride isn't Disney and like turning your head to the side. You know, like you're sleeping on. And then you're like, oh, my God. This is a terrible experience.

You know what? I feel like we need to be in a Star Trek world where we're not having the economic issue, right? Because it's just a matter of trying to figure out how to be launching. that much stuff into space. So, you know, then, you know, the engineers would probably say, oh, you can do in situ resource utilization, which means using the stuff that you have on hand, or, you know, you can have the robots build out the stuff in orbit. But again, we're only talking small-scale demonstrations at this point.

So I kind of wish that, in a sense, that could be brought back again in 150 years, even, just to see how we're solving this. Like, we're at the beginning. And I think that you're right, we may have to pick a direction, you know, once we sort of see where the engineering is leading us. I feel like the best bet is just get to the moon and see how one-third or one-sixth is. Like, let's see how that works out. Yeah.

I mean, it's not a bad. It's not a bad strategy either, right? It's something you can do now and then go for it. But I don't know, I almost, I almost wonder though if it's just going to take one of these like crazy, you know, newer space companies to just come out and be like, we're doing artificial gravity. And then just kind of plow through it and get it up there and fly it. And then it's like, okay, yeah, this is actually better. And then finally drag everybody else kicking and screaming into that. world, you know.

I don't know. So I guess blue origin and anorax, get on it. I want to see some funky ideas on the, on the, Orbital Reef looks like the one that would look best with a spinning ring attached to one end of it. Like just visually, that's got the vibe. Yeah,

there's big windows. You can watch the ring spin by. One on each side, though, right? Otherwise, you'll get that funky off-ciltre thing. Yeah.

The Zeni Becobb effect, right? Huh. So Elizabeth. So going through all this stuff, all the weirdness that happens to your body, getting taller, your eyes going all funky, what's one that stood out to you as like the weirdest or most surprising? Like what's the one that you had maybe the most joy or interest in researching and writing about?

Well, as somebody who's wearing glasses and entering that phase where my eyes are doing interesting things even here on Earth, you know, I got some questions about how we're going to be managing eyesight and space. because we talk about it at length in the book, so I'm not going to try and replicate, you know, our peer-reviewed, so-to-speak research in there. But essentially the issue was that the eye seems to change shape a little bit. And we're trying to figure out exactly in what way and why and how we can counteract that.

But the practical effect is that people like Bob Thurst, another Canadian, have gone up there and have openly said that when they came back, they didn't have the same reading ability that they did before. Now, I've got to be careful. It's not like you're blind, okay? But they're just seeing little changes. You know, maybe they could retent. 10 point fund and now they're down to 12, you know, or something of that nature, right? And so we are a long ways along the road of fixing that issue because clearly they've been

looking at it for many years and there's a number of studies we cite in the book to be doing that. But I just think that when it comes to trying and help our senior people here on Earth or even those of remote environments that have eye issues, trying to solve an issue like that could be life-changing for a lot of people, like not just a few of us who get to go up there, but also of those of us who are, you know, even just trying to face normal aging. I know people have had cataract surgery. You know, that's a normal aspect of being a human being even here on Earth and up in space where you're exposed to radiation.

It might be that much worse. And so that's something that I just find really fascinating, those little things like that. Like you wouldn't even think about your eyes, right? You're just up there looking at things, right? But it turns out that even that tiny little set of organs can undergo profound changes from a few months in orbit. So, yeah, it was just things like that that struck me and the nails.

but, you know, the little things, I guess is really what got me. Yeah. Yeah, I wrote it down the name of what happens if you get your nail screwed up on a spacewalk. I'm never going to be able to pronounce that. Biomechanically induced spacewalkers, what the hell is that next word? Oinkoschizia. Ongio, Oniikoskizia. Do you remember this word that you wrote down, Elizabeth?

Now, that's a challenge. You know, what I do is a journalist is I always just go and I check with the study again on Google. And so I'm hoping that it's the same spelling as whatever the study we were citing there. And then we're in good sense. And the other thing that I would say is that it's an old joke, but I'm a print journalist. I'm not a TV journalist, which obviously is an aged sort of analogy. But that means that I have the luxury of saying, I don't know how to pronounce things, but I can't spell them. Right?

So true. Yeah. Very accurate. Very accurate. Yeah. Yeah, I know the eyes is like a, I don't know, it feels like it's, it feels bad. I don't know. I, so I have like some like human health anxiety about space travel and eyes are definitely

one of those things where I'm just like, I don't know if we can do this, guys. Like the eyes really get messed up and that seems like an important thing to take with us when we go to Mars. And one that just kind of feels like, it just feels like one of those problems that gets bad slowly and then very quickly. You know, and I don't want to be like 18 months into a very long Mars mission when all a sudden, boom, I can't really see anything anymore. It's like, ooh, I don't, that gives me, that gives me some strife.

Yeah. But maybe one third gravity when you get there is fine. Maybe it's enough. I mean, maybe it might be easier once you get to partial gravity. But again, how many weeks of research have we had in partial gravity with humans? And should be fair, also to the Apollo astronauts, as extraordinary as their missions were, they didn't have a lot of time to be doing medical experiments, right? They were running around collecting rocks because that was their mandate.

So it would be a very different focus these days. And we also have to remember that the measurement tools weren't as good, simply in the 60s as they are today. One of my favorite examples being that they looked at some rock samples because they still have some kind of set aside, and they discover water, you know, evidence of sort of water molecules within them. And they're going, but we looked at these before in the 60s and 70s

and we didn't see anything, but it's because the technology for looking at what's inside of them. them has changed so much. So I think it'll be very, very interesting when they land down. They're just the kind of experiments that they're able to do compared to what the Apollo astronauts were capable of. Yeah, yeah. Well, and that's a really good point with the time.

So even if we have all this Apollo experience, like just what we knew about science back then, you know, because I always think about this, so the rock side of it, the picking up the rocks thing. Like 1960s, at that point in time, plate tectonics were like a pretty new, thing that like there were still like geoscientists probably showing up to the apollo you know science conventions who weren't quite on board with plate tectonics yet right and that's like such a ubiquitous

normal thing for us now and so you know what are all those the versions of plate tectonics that are in human health from the 60s as well it's like pretty interesting to me to to try and understand all the gene therapy stuff that we'd never had back then like all that kind of stuff right there's just like a crazy amount of things we can learn so exactly and if we start to land other jobs on the moon as well because obviously everybody so far has been a man, I'd be really interested to see what happens then, you know? Very limited data set for sure. But we did our best.

You know, again, I grew up loving Apollo. You can't see it because the camera's in the opposite direction, but I got Apollo 13, the movie poster, right in front of me. And it sort of was a constant reminder about what got me. I can see it. Exactly, yeah. Yeah, but I got the Saturn behind me and I got some other. And you got Upgar 5 over there.

Is that right? Just over here. Yeah, exactly. So, but so yeah, you know, I think that they're a leading light. They're a good inspiration about what kind of science can we can do with the state of the art of the day. Because, you know, people in 60 years are going to be laughing at us too and going, oh, my goodness, you didn't know anything about gene therapy back then, right? You know, so I also want to be fair to them. I just say they did a tremendous job.

And I've been lucky enough to talk to a few of those folks. But I'm also just really interested in seeing, okay, we know this part. How much more, you know, can we do? building on their research. And so that's really fun. You know, getting somebody involved in there who's citing papers now from 60 years ago from the Apollo program

and then sort of seeing, oh, yeah, we have come far away because the advances have been tremendous, obviously, since that time. Hopefully the people in 2080 aren't looking back at me like, yeah, those idiots were trying to do microgravity. What were they thinking?

I was going to get into something like that here. I think when I read, you know, a write-up of all these different problems that were figuring out in space. Sometimes I can read each section individually and be like, ah, kind of a bummer that we didn't, we haven't figured this one out yet, like, in terms of how to address it best. But also, like, it's hard to quantify what is the value of the knowledge that we have about what happens when people go live in space for a while? Because if you are somebody like myself who believes in,

like, the long-term vision of expanding humans out into the solar system and whatever else, like, at some point, we need to do that. We need to figure out what it's like to live somewhere for a while. And it's one of the cases where it's like, that shouldn't be like, what is the ROI for figuring out that treadmills and cycles are the things that we wanted to bring the space station. We just had to figure it out at some point. And so when I look at the Artemis program and Jake and I sit here and have all these people dawn to debate, like, why are we doing this program? What are we going to do when we get there? At the end of the day, I'm like, just go live there for a while. Just go hang out for like a month or two. See what happens. I don't know what's

going to happen to you. You don't know what's going to happen to you. If you're game to go live there for a month or two, go live there. Let me know what happens, how it feels. That's a valuable thing, even if you can't quantify, oh, we spent $10 billion on this particular program, but if you're interested in the long-term development, we got to do that. We got to figure out what it's like to live places, and I'm coming to ease with the fact that, like, the value is we went and lived there for a while, and that's as good as it needs to be. That probably rankles Jake a little bit in the why are we doing human spaceflight thing? You're in a dark place again with the human spaceflight. I saw some of your Discord posts.

I saw some of those. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a little bummed right now. But I'm not bummed about the idea of it. I'm bummed about the execution of it. So it's different. I think your thought is good. Because at least then you're defining it.

I mean, I don't know, you can argue how much value that has. But you're still saying here's the value that we want. Let's go do it. Like it's still like it's very, I don't know, it's very declarative and good in that way. Well, it's also for our conversation about artificial gravity, like we could be three into Artemis living on the moon and be like, oh, wow, we don't need, you know, we don't need 1G things to build in space anymore. All of our stuff can be, you know, taken down to like 1-6G, maybe three months is kind of short, but three years, 10 years into it and say, boy,

all the stuff that we had, you know, all these sci-fi movies have to rewrite their stuff because they were all spinning up to 1G and 1-6 is plenty fine. Let's just go with that. And it makes the engineering of the future spacecraft so much easier if that's the case. Well, that's it, right? Because if you want to go all the way back to Mercury, they were asking, can people swallow while they're in microgravity. Yeah, right. These were legitimate questions. Can people swallow? If you go back further, then it's like, will you explode into a million pieces if you break the sound barrier? It was like a thing that we were definitely afraid of, you know? Yeah, exactly. So you're right. We may find something that surprises us. And to get back to humans and robots, remember with Artemis, at least they're going to be working together.

You know, it's not like they're going to be by themselves. It's going to be kind of like perseverance and ingenuity, the rover and the little drone on Mars that are. doing their thing together, but this time you throw humans in the mix. So at least we're not only doing one or the other, just picking one path. We're going to say, let's try and integrate because then we can use the best of both worlds, right? Yeah, yeah. As long as the humans aren't flying the drones, because humans are bad at that. How quickly would we have crashed ingenuity if you and I were driving it, Jake? Like, the thing is I've got an astronaut yet anyway, you know, but I'm sure if we got Dr. Dave Williams in the conversation, he would point out that there are many train pilots.

in the program. That is true, but I have 100% confidence that if you gave anyone a controller to a drone on Mars, they would crash it in like within the day. They would crash that shit. I bet I could fly through that skinny opening in those rocks. Like, let's try to get right through there and slam it right into, you know. In our case, it may be... The continuity flight was like this, right? Just went up a few inches and went back to. They weren't sure. We would never do that. We would go, all right, let's see how high and fast we can go on the first? Yeah. How far can you make it to that ridge and back? I'll race you. It'll just go. So you can argue that it won't be because of incompetence, but it'll still happen.

Oh, no, there would be great pilots, but they would do human things, you know? No, exactly. What you're arguing is the hubris problem, which goes all the way back, at least to the ancient Greeks. So that's a different aspect. Yes, yes, the hubas problem. Huh. Well, I mean, so what else, Elizabeth, there anything about this book that we haven't touched on that you think is like important to tell listeners about it? or if they're going to go get this book,

what should they look forward to? What's the, what do we miss? That's a good question. Well, you know, I think that we already have kind of touched on this, but I do want to sort of hammer on it because for me, when I'm trying to write something, I'm trying to think about how to be engaging somebody new. A lot of the people that come across our website at space.com

are actually new readers. You know, they haven't arrived there before. And so I'm always trying to think about how to be grabbing somebody who's a bit younger. I mean, for me, it was a movie, Apollo 13, that first got me involved. And so what kinds of, games or virtual reality or whatever are going to be grabbing a young person.

And I think that all this conversation we've been having about sci-fi is another way of thinking about it. And so I'm hoping that the aspects that we had in one of the last chapters, which is about tricorders and holodex, is grabbing classic Star Trek stuff. But thankfully, it's still relevant because they're coming out with a series with what feels like every two months now. It's incredible. Or what next anybody?

I mean, I love that. It's just incredible. The inclusivity of that particular series is making the older Star Trek look quite, quite different these days. And so I felt that that was really important to include in the book because I was also trying to think about both about how to future proof us a little bit just to say, hey, even if we don't have the answers, we can see it in sci-fi, you know, and they have some sort of path along the way to answering those questions, but also to be trying to think about how to bring in new people because for me, I always think that space and pretty much anything else, you know, benefits by having

a diversity of folks in here and that we need to get the younger people interested. That way they can come in with their, you know, amazing tech skills that I can't even imagine and go. in here. Like, it's really fun watching my friend's kids play videos, like just, you know, normal videos. So I don't know about YouTube, but I came from the VHS era, right? And so if you went back and forth too many times, you literally break the tape. Whereas these kids, they're watching videos and they actually skip through out of sequence into the areas that they feel are of the most interest and they replay them. It's just a completely different way of, you know, way of looking at things. And so that's why I really like engage it with younger folks and trying

to bring into the sci-fi analogies because it's another way of kind of in your brain or even breaking it sometimes to good. Yeah. Well, and like as sort of a follow on to that, like there, you know, you bring up the example in the book of the, of like nuclear propulsion example as, as like a, uh, today it's, it's still just slightly out of reach, but it's like achievable, you know, like we don't have it yet, but it feels like we can get it if we really want it. And, uh, that is a thing where maybe that solves, you know,

some of the health problems we talked about because if we want to go to Mars, the big challenge just going to be the six months of zero G on the way there. But what if it's only seven weeks or something, you know? And then like if you, you could just, the best part is no part that whole issue, you know, like just remove the whole thing. No, exactly. And it's funny. You just brought up something in my mind.

And so since the book was published or rather written and then published because it's publishing right now, but we finished it about a year ago, right? There have been so many developments in hypersonic vehicles just in the past year that you could almost do another book about that, hint, hint, but anyway, it's just been. incredible. Now, most of it obviously is on the military side for now, but we're going to be seeing, I think, a commercialization of this over time. Because usually what happens is to get a big anchor customer like NASA or the military working on it first, and then it tends to proliferate. Same with rocketry, right? It did have military origins. And so I'd be really interested to see

whether that research could translate into trying to get us some faster vehicles in general for spaceflight. So maybe we get to the moon in 30 minutes, you know, instead of three days, which would be amazing. And then we get over to Mars in a few months or a few weeks, rather. rather than what we got right now. So who knows? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

And if you can figure out a way to provide that thrust on route that's just enough artificial gravity, then you're good. Exactly. You're good. Yeah. Like that solves two problems at the same time. Thrust all the way there at 0.16G. It's your moon ship. Totally different kind of thing.

But yeah. Yeah. Or like to throw back to my. previous scenario, when you're sleeping, you're thrusting. And when you're not sleeping, you're not thrusting. Like, boom, now we're good. Sleep under thrust, you know? It's good.

Run that one through your models, Jake. Yeah, I'm working on it, working on it. Processing. Processing. I feel like there's like a really dirty joke in here somewhere, but I can't put it together. I'm going to let it go right by. Elizabeth, where should people be shopping?

Where are you sending me to be shopping? Okay, well, support your local bookstore first. You'd be surprised. Many of them do have robust websites, but if you can't do that or prefer to really be specific, go to ECW's website. You can see it up there in the video now, and it should be in the show notes. I hope once you're finished. Already is, yep.

And then perfect, yeah, because then that gets a pretty small publisher, some much needed dollars. And, you know, I'm really glad that you all took the time to speak to me because, you know, I think you recognize that I'm just like the person on the cover, but that there were a bunch of other folks at ECW that helped us out. I got to give a shout out to all of the, you know, people doing the cover design, which is gorgeous. I had no, you know, I had input into it, but I certainly didn't have the skills.

I'm a stick figure person, right? But, I mean, look at it. Yeah, isn't it playful? It's great. Yeah, I totally dig it. And the L, you know, stuck on the person's head because he or she were there. It's growing taller, it's great, you know? So, you know, we had the cover design.

We had the people who did the layout. We had the people who did the editing. That was a huge process in itself, right? Just trying to marry, so to speak, two co-author's ideas into one and make us sound like were one person. So really I'm appreciative for everybody's, you know, help. It took a year to get this thing shepherded, even after Dave and I finished it. So next to you, too, and everybody else who was involved.

How was this? This is your, is this your second published, third published? In this form of it. Actually, it's number five, if I may dare to say. Number five, yeah. And Dave is on, I keep losing track, something like seven or eight. And he could do two kinds of books. He can do kids books and he can do adult books.

And those are completely different, as you've, as most people would know. So it was good to have somebody who just knows the industry in that sense. It was able to bounce off ideas because, you know, being like any astronaut, he can do 10 things excellently. So, yeah. It's the requirement.

Just the way it goes, right? You know, yeah. I hate that about astronauts. It's infuriate me. The people that become doctors and they get bored so they also become fighter. I should show you. I had his Wikipedia up earlier. Let's just finish on this.

If you go to his Wikipedia page. I decided to pick up a few engineering degrees on the weekend. Look at how many letters are after this dude's day. I know. What is going on here? What is this? Yeah, I know. Unbelievable.

I don't know what any of that is. And the problem was we had to pick what to put on the cover. You know, that was a trouble, right? You can't fit all of them on the cover. And so for this one, we just went with astronaut. I think it kind of encompasses all the letters. But I think somewhere in here. there probably is all those letters.

It's just incredible, right? So it really does show you. The thing is to be an astronaut, you almost have to be in every person. You have to have done a little bit of everything, and they have to bring that life experience, an engineering experience, a science experience.

So what's scary is sometimes they actually hire someone who's like 28 who has one kind of experience, right? And you're like, what was I doing at 28? Right, right? Not the right thing, apparently, right? I'm still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. So it's going to be, it's going to be interesting. Yeah.

Yeah. What I don't understand about these astronauts too is that like they accomplish all these things, which are like all like just not things you get by accident. They're all like deliberative time intensive, you know, activities becoming a doctor, becoming a pilot, becoming an astronaut, all these things. And like somehow they still have like decent social skills and they can like, you know, go to a party and talk to people. I'm like, when did you get all this practice having friends?

because, like, you should have been reading books for 27 hours a day. I don't get it. I don't understand it. When you're cooped up in a small space with them, believe me, you want social skills, you know, I keep working back to those two weeks I did on a simulated Mars mission a few years ago. And, yeah, social skills are challenging in that situation because you're tired. You know, you're plastered in dust all the time. And there are human beings in there and there's no privacy.

You know, you've got to figure out how to work. It's tough. Yeah. It's much like writing a book with somebody, I'm sure. You know what? It was good to have somebody who's an astronaut in that respect, right? Because we just got it. We just got it whenever the other was feeling a little bit tired or a little bit stressed.

We just knew a little bit about how to step away in those moments. But it all came together. That was the important thing. Like just like any mission, we were saying, okay, we got a deadline. We got to get through these steps and we're going to figure it out together no matter what it takes. And, you know, I'm really, really lucky to have had Dave with my co-author and twice even. And I can even say a third time almost with Canada Armic Collaboration because he was the guy who wrote the forward. And so, you know, it's through collaborations like that, not to, it was unintentionally signing the book.

But anyway, it's through that, that you get mentorship. And then my job now is to go and turn around for somebody else in the future. So that's my challenge. I'm going, oh, my goodness. Now I've got to borrow all this experience from Dave. Now I've got to give it to somebody else. And so I'll have to stay through carefully about what that would be, you know, in the future. But who knows, I may be giving somebody who's, you know, 10 or 12 right now in the 10 or so years, a phone call and say,

hey, let's work on a book together. This is what Dave told me, and now I've got to tell you, right? So, yeah, I've got to take this one through. I'm not doing a book, so you can, Jake can do it. No, no, I'm talking about somebody who's a pre-chain now, right? But Jake still is what I'm going to be, so. Yeah, I've told him what I want to be. He's shapeable still, he's sculptable.

Yeah. Can you tell us real quick, uh, space.com? You are space.com. A staff writer there now. I am a staff writer there. Previously, you were only a contributing writer. I believe. Yes. So I was a freelancer there for 10 whole years. And I was a stubborn one because I was living in Canada and I still am living in Canada. And they cleverly are in the United States, right? Because obviously that's where much of the space industry is. And so for me to become a staff writer for many years, I would have had to leave my life up here, which I suppose wasn't a bad thing. But at the same time, I got a house. I got a husband, luckily. And, you know, I'm kind of tied here. And so we just had these back and forth conversations for a few years about how best I could suit the site. and help them out.

And what ended up happening was, well, a little pandemic, right? And so it's all affected us in different ways, but one of the ways in which just really has affectedspaced.com was they realized, you know what, remote work is a very possible thing. And I mean, it's funny to say, obviously, because they are aware of space exploration of the potential there, but they just changed their modality of working a little bit and said, you know what, some of us could be in the office.

Some of the time, some of us can be away from the office. We can come together as need be, and then we can go back again. And so they generously brought me on. You know, and they said you can stay from Canada. It actually says in my contract that I have to be, you know, based in Canada for the thing to work, which I really like, you know. So that's what I'm doing now. I'm a staff writer full time.

My job is Space Flight. This podcast is running later today, I suppose. So if you go back a few hours, you can see that I on behalf of the organization got to call the International Space Station, which is incredible. That was another team effort between NASA, space.com, myself. I was just a voice on the phone, but there were a lot of other people involved. And then what we're also trying to do is constantly be engaged in the community. You know, thinking of really innovative ways and fun ways to be bringing in new readers and to be talking about stuff, you know, whether it's sci-fi, gaming, Prime Day, which is ongoing right now.

It's another way of engaging people through binoculars, Telescope, Lego sets. There's lots of Lego sets you should be getting right now, folks, because as one of our stories says, some are going to be disappearing. That's Saturday 5 that I got right beside my desk here isn't going to be a thing for much longer. So anyway, it's just a really, damn it. Yeah, exactly, right? So seriously, what I really like about the site, having been there for 10 years as a freelancer and about three months as a person who's full time, is that we do cover a variety of topics.

You know, we're not just in one small pitch and whole of space community. We're always trying to get bigger and think about new ways to be finding people. And so, I guess my takeaway message is that, you know, if in your own life, you just love space in some kind of niche way, understand that, you know, there are folks out there that want to hear about it. you know, even if you really are into space comic books, there's a market for that. Believe me. We know about niches. We do niches.

Yeah, we all do niches, exactly. Yeah. You had one post a couple days ago about No Man Sky coming to Nintendo Switch. Yeah, that's exactly it. I opened this one up and I audibly said, ah, shit. Like, I've seen an impending productivity loss for me right there. I'm like, God damn it. that's the thing right but it's a productivity loss in the surface of space you got to realize that it's a different class of productivity it's for work

it's what i'm going to say that every time i buy a fortnight skin it is for the service of the space community this ten dollars that i'm letting go of right now right kat is like what are you doing i'm like it's for work it's for work it's 100% I'm looking good at the same time too so Jake, do you got anything on the way out here? Well, I'm trying to do the time math for when this will happen and what I will have done. And that's challenging. So I am trying to get an episode out later this week, maybe or maybe next week. I'm on Voyager.

I haven't really done Voyager before. And so I'm trying to do some interviews. And they had like a little bit of attitude control problems. I'm trying to like dig into that. Has it left the solar system yet? You know, I don't know if I know that after. Yeah. It depends on what you mean by solar system.

Left it again. Three times is it left? Yeah. So I'm not going to do this on the air, but I just would say there's a nuance between leaving the solar system and going into interstellar space. Look it up. And boy, do we know every nuance now through Voyager. Exactly, right.

But it's way out there. We can say that much. And I'm glad that it's communicating again, at least somewhat. you know, because nothing launched even before I was born. I don't know about the two of you, but I can't believe that. You know, and it's still going. Like, how many cars are still going after that long? Few.

Not that main. That's a machine. Generally, machines. Yeah, exactly, right? What about you, Anthony? What do you got going on? Well, as I mentioned on our previous show, Jake, the Astrobotic Spectacular is out. It'll be out.

People will be able to hear it. this is going to be a two-hour show, Jake. Jeez. Like, I forgot how much, how many conversations I had at Astrobotic, but I got home when I was like, oh, wow, there's going to be a long one. So it's pretty great. I talked to the mission manager, project managers on different teams at Astrobotic. Talk to the executive director of the Moonshot Museum that is in the front of Astrobotics

headquarters. It's an awesome show. And I guess there were some more recent news that ULA finally officially delayed the launch a Vulcan out of this year. Yeah. Shocker. Yeah. So.

Everyone is so surprised. Yeah. The Astrobotic Spectacular. We talked about it on Off Nominal, obviously, my visit, but now you get to actually hear the people chatting about what they're working on. So it's worth it. So check it out. Peace.

Awesome. All right. Well, Elizabeth, this was awesome. Thanks so much for popping on and sharing your new book. It's a really fun read. It's not a difficult one. It's like not a slog in any way. So it's a really, really approachable book.

Lots of fun. And you can read more about footbits, so I recommend everyone. Stop saying footbits. I will not stop saying footbits. ECWpress.com. Get it. Exactly. Yeah.

Well, thank you both. I really appreciate it. Take care. Yeah. See y'all.