Off-Nominal - 83 - Bubba the Rocket Scientist

Episode Date: November 4, 2022

Photographer Roland Miller returns to the show to talk to Jake and Anthony about his newest book, The Space Shuttle: A Mission-by-Mission Celebration of NASA's Extraordinary Spaceflight Program, out next week.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 83 - Bubba the Rocket Scientist (with Roland Miller) - YouTubeRoland Miller PhotographyAbandoned In Place — Roland Miller PhotographyInterior Space — Roland Miller PhotographyThe Space Shuttle — Roland Miller PhotographyThe Space Shuttle: A Mission-by-Mission Celebration of NASA's Extraordinary Spaceflight Program: Miller, Roland: Amazon.com: BooksOrbital Planes: A Personal Vision of the Space Shuttle: Photographs by Roland Miller: Defibaugh, Denis, Miller, Roland: Amazon.com: BooksFollow RolandRoland Miller (@space_ranger) / TwitterRoland Miller PhotographyFollow 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. Welcome to space. Oh, Jake's back for the Philly song this time. How's it going, Jake? Welcome back. You were groaning that I put that on again. I was like, oh, it's another sports thing that I don't know anything about. It's going to be some neat Philadelphia American sport thing that I've just, like, clueless about. But you did love the last time I did this, so. The song was pretty rock, and I'll look at that.

Come back. Don't worry. Things that also come back. Roland Miller is back on the show the second time. How's it going? Good. Good. Thanks for having me back. We're excited. We've got the new book sitting here on the desk in the B-Cam. We always got a B-cam slot. You know, it's going to be a good show. So we'll crack into that. Crack into that in a minute. Crisp cover, I have to say. It looks like it's a very professionally made book. Wait until you see the secrets within. Okay. How was your little stint away from the show there, Jake? It was great. Yeah, I had my mom was visiting me from Canada.

I was doing all this Dia de Muerreta stuff here in Mexico. It was the first year back post-COVID. So there was like a whole bunch of crazy activities and it was super wild and fun. And I had a lot of, had a blast. It's a great week to take off. I might do this every year. We'll see. I guess I should have pulled up those picks.

I feel like that's some content. Put a few pictures up there. You can see me in a face paint. You got that one up there? What do you got? There I am. Look at that. The glasses make that picture, by the way.

I had to be able to see the parade. So, you know, I couldn't just. My son, Will was loving this because he's all about Coco. And he was like, oh, like Coco. And I was like, it's exactly like Coco. Actually, yes. Oh, yeah, yeah. I was worried about the paint,

because I was like, I wanted to, you know, have a drink and stuff. And it was like, I might just be drinking paint, like as this rubs off. But this stuff was wild.

They're like, dried into like this, like very thin kind of crust. And it was like, you could touch it and it wouldn't smear or anything. It was, it was pretty cool paint. Maybe it's like just real makeup and I have no idea because I don't worry.

It's your first experience doing that. Well, did you bring any fun drinks back? Hmm. Not too much. No, I'm taking it easy today. I just have some pineapple coconut juice with a little bit of dark rum in it.

I'm just being like super chill, you know. Sounds it. I mean, it sounds fairly fancy. But I guess that's like you've now hit cruising altitude on your cocktail fanciness that it's like just whipping up a little something here. Yeah, that's how. Roland, what did you bring today? My sister-in-law, Kathy, bought me this beer and I thought it would be in a

appropriate. It's space goat from a big sky brewing in Missoula, Montana. Ooh. It's a pale ale. It's kind of hoppy for a pale ale, but it's good. Spacego. I have it in a space glass here. Oh, shit.

I got to. I don't think this is one of those kids jelly glasses. Yeah. It's kind of rockets and stuff. That's legit. I'm making a gin and tonic right now because it took me too long to set up my B cam. So I get to make it before the show. So I'm going to put that on hold for a second.

Well, no, you know what? I'm not going to show the book yet while I make my genitonic. We're going to talk about where this book came from because I feel like there's some interesting story behind this. The story behind the last one that you were on, you were on a couple months ago with me and Tim Dodd. It was back in January. Yeah, and we were talking about the work that you did with basically being a remote photographer

from here to the ISS and all sorts of stories. And then we talked about abandoned in place. This one's got a different tack to it. So I'd love to hear where the idea this book came from. Well, so actually, when I was doing the book with Paolo, when we were doing that, I did a Kickstarter to help. It's kind of the best way I can make money off some of the books, at least up to that point. And I got contacted. I was getting a lot of media contacts when we were promoting that.

And I got contacted by this one company that I thought was just another. they wanted an interview or something, and I wrote back and said, sure, let's do it this time. And I wasn't, and then I went back and re-read the email, and they were actually a publisher who thought I didn't have a publisher. And so I wrote back and said, oh, I'm sorry, I think you think I need a publisher,

and I thought you were a media outlet. So we can just cancel it. She goes, well, let's just, you know, why don't we just talk anyway. So I said, okay. So I talked with them, and she said, well, what other spacebook ideas do you have? And I said, well, you know, I,

I've had this idea to do a book of, it started out years ago, like decades ago. It's like the best 100 photographs of the space shuttle. And that morphed into when they finished the program, maybe I could do like one photograph from every mission, you know, that was like the best. And then that kind of morphed into this book, which has a lot more writing than I normally do. And it doesn't necessarily have a picture from, it has a picture from almost every mission. There's a couple from certain missions. but it basically tells the story of the program through each mission, through a photograph,

and then some writing about the mission, some of the highlights. So it was really fun to do. But you're right, it's very different. Well, my other books are kind of art-based books. It's about, you know, one photograph on every page with a caption, and that's generally it. Where this is a, the book itself, I think, is kind of an art piece on its own. The press, Artisan Press, that published it, did a beautiful. beautiful job designing it. Nina Simon was the designer and she just did a fantastic job.

So it, you know, it really, it really kind of grew out of that mistake happening. Scheduling mishap. I may have said this before, but my mom would say, you know, more luck than since. And that's so true all the time. All right. So before I open this up, my head canon was that this was going to be an orbital planes book, but that I think that already exists. and I'm out of one rolling book behind in my library. Oh, oh, shoot, okay. So I need to update that. So can you tell me about orbital planes and give me some context so I know how to think about all these?

So, you know, I've been, so I was a, I was a photography professor and then I kind of accidentally became a dean when we'd had six deans in six years and they asked me to be the interim dean and that lasted for, I got the permanent job when I was dean for a total of 10 years. So I didn't have a lot of time to do photography, to work on a book. I did abandon place during that time, and I would stay up until midnight 1 o'clock, nine after night after night, which you can only do for so long. So I had all this work.

I'd shot all this stuff of the space show. I thought I'd really, you know, it'd be great to do something with this. So Damiani, Editor, the publishers of Interior Space, I approached them with this idea, which they really liked. So that resulted in interior space, probably orbital planes, which is a book of, it's really all my photographs of the space shuttle program, different aspects of it. Let's see if I can hold this up. I don't have a B-cam. Sorry, I have to fake the B-can.

And it's photographs of the orbiter, but I also did work at a bunch of the different, did kind of the OPM. to try to document the whole the overall thing as much as possible. This is out at Palmdale. This is Stennis Space Center. That's actually the... Like the structural test article thing? Propulsion test article, which they took down...

They were actually taken that apart while I was there. They stopped working on stuff and make a few photographs, which are nice. Just give me a minute to get in there. Yeah. They're always really, you know, that was the one where I told that story and I think an abandoned place where we, we saw them do a main engine test up for the shuttle. And the next day we were up on that B1, B2 test time, which is massive. It's just the most amazing thing. And they were checking the engine out.

And over the intercom, we hear this. Well, somebody please bring. Bubba the test results from yesterday's firing. Somebody, big, Big Bubba, the test results. And we're like, Bubba, the rocket scientist. We'll, you know, Alabama or Mississippi. Yeah, it's like a mascot, you know. Yeah, it's not the real name.

And then we met Baba. Bubba came by while we were looking at, he was a really nice guy, you know, really smart. We're in a camo jacket, of course, but, you know, breaking the stereotypes, which is great. So it was really, you know, so it was really, you know, amazing to do that work. And I concentrated on the last five years of the program.

And then the decommissioning of the orbitors. And so I got to go in the three remaining orbitors and photoref inside and out. And so that's all, everything in that is my photography. While the space shuttle, the new book, nothing is my photography. Not a single one of those photographs are mine. So it was more editing, you know, picking out. I looked through probably three quarters of a million photographs to a million. I quit counting after about 500,000 because it was, you know, I just thought this is silly.

So just looking at, you know, not, you know, just looking at a lot of thumbnails and stuff, but still just to try to find stuff. That's how that kind of came about. Was this like, for that amount of photos, were you going somewhere to get access to like a full library or were you scraping through NASA.gov? Because that sounds like a slog, if that's what you were doing. Well, my plan was to go to the National Archives and go to any NASA archives I could get to, but it was right in the thick of COVID. So the archives were shut down.

You couldn't get in. So I did it all online. It's how you know you really had nothing to do during the pandemic. Your pandemic hobby was going through NASA.gov and Flickers. It was. Actually, I, you know, I feel a little guilty because I just kept kind of doing the stuff I was doing during most of the best. that. But, you know, NASA has, they've got these old kind of legacy sites that are, some of them are still out there, and they've got their sites on the media, on the media platform. And then

they've got their whole flicker thing, which I'm not sure that while they went to that, but, but there isn't one like one, and then a lot of stuff in the National Archives. And there's other, you know, there's all these weird little, if you, you know, so my goal was to, to, to get highest quality original as I could, which took a lot of, you know, I'd find an image and there were a few that I just couldn't find anything. I was high enough quality, so I couldn't use them. But for the most part, I was able to find things. Then I, quote unquote, remastered them. So I processed them to clean them up and fix the color, you know, because some of the scans, a lot of it was shot on film, you know, the early part of the shuttle program.

So, you know, the scans weren't always as accurate or as sharp as it could be. So that was part of my goal, too, was to clean things up as best I could make a really beautiful product. Yeah, my Jen and time is done, so I'm ready to go to it, but Jake has questions. No, you go ahead. What's your questions? Let's talk more story before we get into it. That must have been an interesting post-processing situation because, like, the shuttle spans such a large period of time. that the look of the images would be so different in the 80s and the 90s and the 2000.

Yeah. Yeah. You can see a little bit of that in the book, where they're grainy and they're not as sharp. And the digital images for the most part, especially toward the end of the program, were much better. They just, you know, resolution of cameras kept getting better. And so it all, you know, it improved. But I wanted to try to, without, you know, changing, quote-unquote, the image information, make them look as good as I could. So I was happy with how that worked out.

We have Kurt in the chat with some Roland prints on the wall, which is awesome. So this book, by the way, it comes in a little box of its own, which I find delightful, especially looking through the window at Bruce McCanness, which is great. So you get this, the nice reveal of him in space, which is a pretty awesome. I don't know. What's the deal with these little box things? Well, the slip cover, you know, this publisher has done some other books. They did a book called A Man in His Car and a book called The Man in his watch, which have beautiful slip covers. So I think they just like that presentation.

It's really a, you know, beautiful way to get the book. And it protects the book. It's a nice, you know, it's a nice, classy kind of. Yeah. I'm not sure I was, you know, worthy of a. worthy of a slip cover, but I'll take it. It was fun. Again, the design team, just fantastic. I started flipping through this book, and even I showed Jake a little

bit earlier, we were chatting. And he was like, oh, that looks like an Anthony book in terms of design, because I love these. The way it's broken up is the different phases of shuttle history with this. I mean, it looks a lot better in person than in my crappy B cam here on my desk. But, I mean, you broke it up into sections that that feel like the right kind of of breaking it up. But what went into like figuring out phases of the shuttle program that you wanted to highlight? You know, to me, that's always the structure of a book is always, it's tricky because you know, you want to do it.

So it makes sense and it flows properly. You don't have a tiny little chapter and then a huge chapter. So I just look, you know, I kind of had an idea like, I kind of first look to major events. Like, what are some major events like the Challenger accident, the, you know, the ISS construction, John Glenn's return to launch? And it happened to work out where those really kind of broke it out into fairly even sections and things kind of shifted after, you know, the end of each chapter.

There was something generally that shifted into a kind of a new phase of the shuttle program. So I was, you know, I just sat down and. did it and, you know, I tried a couple different things, but it came, it became pretty obvious how I wanted to do it pretty quickly. You know, it's, and of course, the, the, the free flight test, that's a shorter chapter because there were just five, and they, I felt they had to be kind of on their own, but, yeah, it just, you know, it's just a matter of thinking it through, and, I mean, that's a really good question, because I, I think that makes a big difference in, you know, how you, how you portray it.

And there's still, you know, every mission is still in sequence. So, you know, I just had, it wasn't. I remember with the band in place struggling literally for years while I was working on the photography. Like, I'm going to, I'm going to do this because there were stuff that didn't fit into Mercury, Gemini, Apollo. You know, there were stuff that I wanted to show that just, and I finally realized if I did it by the rocket program and not the, not the crude program, I could work it out. So that's how I did that. So it's just, I was like, I woke up at like four in the morning thinking, figure, that one out. My subconscious is way smarter than my conscious mind, which may not be saying much, but.

I found it interesting on the, there's, you know, so people understand there's, there's, every single mission has some content, written content about it as well, in addition to the pictures that you selected. Did you try to work through each mission in terms of like, what was the particular theme of this mission or like the notable unique element? I mean, I noticed, like, the ones that were DoD missions. I was just flipping through one a second ago. That was, like, a DOD mission. And it's like, I guess I'll talk about solid rocket boosters this time.

Because it's like nothing to talk about. Yeah, here's the one. It's like, oh, it's a DOD mission. Here's a picture of the cape and solid rocket boosters because, yeah, that, that, that, we got nothing. Well, you know, people, there's a little bit of information about some of those, but for the most part, all those DOD missions are still classified. And people have conjectured, and they probably have figured out exactly what some of them are. But to me, it was like, this is a book.

This isn't, you know, if I put something in there that isn't right, it's wrong forever. And I'm sure there's some mistakes somewhere of this. I have no doubt because it's a lot of information. But to consciously say, well, I'm going to guess because this guy says they did this. I'm just not going to say anything. And I wanted to talk about those other things anyway. So it was a great, you know, I'm glad you picked up on that because that was a very conscious decision, again, kind of out of the gate.

How am I going to handle that? So I thought, well, I can talk about some of the main elements of the system and how it worked and highlight those instead of just saying, oh, you know, leave a blank page there. It seemed kind of, it's kind of tilt your roots with one stone. Yeah, yeah. I should have, I could have redacted the whole thing. I also had it had it in white on the black pages. It's weird.

It's weird. It's about ITAR. What a weird thing to pick. Yeah I do just want to give a little love to the West Coast launch site Maybe like the most You know One of the biggest bummers of the program

That nothing flew out of there Just The red launch towers are such a vibe Like there's nothing that sets the scene For the red launch towers of You know The 80s 70s and 80s space infrastructure So good

So good When you try to go through and pick photos, like one thing that I come across just in like trying to find pictures of rockets is like there's like a few like kinds of shots. Like there's like some some like pretty common shots, you know, like the lift off with the smoke coming out the side. You have like the really, really wide shot where like you have the, you know, the arc of the solid rocket exhaust and the shuttle at the top. You know, all these different kind of shots that we've seen a few different different

times. How did you like decide, okay, well, this shot is good for SDS, whatever, and now I can't use it for the other ones? Because then it would be like, you know, back in the picture, even though they're different flights. Like, did you have to make some weird decisions about that? Yeah. So what we did was I really worked with the designer where I gave her like three to five pictures for every mission. And then we kind of worked through what would work best and the whole thing. Like there's a couple, like there's two pictures of the account. external tank floating after it was released. And I wasn't sure about that, but I think they work in the context of the design of the book. But yeah, and I did put in some, you know, there's a few kind of standard pictures, but I tried to find something that related to the mission specifically, but not make that a very literal thing in every one. So sometimes I'll be talking in the text about something, and the picture is something totally unrelated. But other times I'm talking about something in the picture does relate to that.

So it wasn't a firm and hard rule to go either way with that. It's just kind of what felt good. And to give a variety and to also show you, you know, I didn't want to do simply the greatest hits, but then there's some pictures that need to be like the Bruce McCandless picture. You know, how can you do a book on the shuttle and not show that? And some other ones. So it's partly greatest hits,

but then with some less known images. Yeah. Turn off this light. I'm getting too much glare over here. There we go. Yeah, I love the free floating external tanks, though. That always looks rad.

I don't know why you're doubting that. That's always a cool part of... I'm not. It's just something, you know, and there's a lot of pictures of things in the payload bay. But that's partly because that's the only place that could really photograph things is from the, you know, the flight deck looking out the back window. So, and those are very different.

Canada arm logo right in the way there. Yeah. I think you were telling us that story. Blame Canada. Blame Canada. Sure. Yeah. I'm trying to find some other ones that were related.

But so you wrote all the blurbs about each. Yeah. Yeah. A book in its own. Like you did two books in one book. It was. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And the thing you have to understand is I was working on Orbial Plains at the same time. So I just want to say, I don't recommend that. It's a little. You're doing three books. Schizophrenic, yeah, yeah. Well, that's an interesting, like, collision between those things, though,

because you're doing a work that you are so intimately familiar with, like, being where each one of these photos was taken. And I'm sure that puts some perspective on, oh, that's an interesting part of the space shuttle. I wonder if I can find something like that in an mission context. Is that some of the, like, the interplay that you had between the books? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know, so it was nice because, like, when I was photographing the shuttle, my goal is to try to generally not do what other people are doing. Now, there's, you know, there's certain photographs. You know, you walk up on the launch pad and you see the shuttle against a bright blue sky.

You're like, well, I have to photograph that. I just have to, you know, it's a beautiful, it's just a beautiful object. I'm not going to not. So there's some of that. But my work, I get a little more into the abstract. I, you know, I do some. See, if I can find one in orbital planes, it's a little more. in that vein.

So, you know, I'm trying to do, oops. Whereas with the, like, so here's, you know, here's the one. So, you know, when you see that, you kind of have to take that picture. If you walk by that and say, oh, I've seen that before. It's kind of in your bones. But then the opposite page is this one of,

if I can do this side with, you know, the back wall of the pillow Bay. And so that, you know, just a little more detailed shot and some are more, even more abstract than that, like this one of the side of the shuttle with the T-1-0 um, bill of course. That's always a fun spot to go to museums and look at what's going on in that part of the space shuttle because, yeah. And so that to me is about the design. And, you know, I was, how would I think no matter what part of the space program I was photographing. Like, I remember like the launch of biblical towers, like somebody had to lay out where every little pipe and every little wire and all this stuff went. And the same thing with that. Somebody had to, somebody at some point

had to say, well, you know, we're going to have 27 ports. And this one's going to go here. And this one's going to be this big. And it's like, who does, you know, I can't decide what shirt to put on for a, you know, so who does, who, who's, you know, who's, and I know they use math and science to do thankfully. Yeah, but you know there's somebody out there still mad that their port was on the one side and they should have been on the left side because I had to cut all the way across all that hardware and they're still pissed off about it, you know, 40 years later. They had to run a pipe 30 feet.

Yeah, yeah. True. We've all been in those meetings. So yeah, we're, but so then, you know, looking at all these pictures. So I didn't, I didn't, I wanted to try, you know, it's a little bit like interior space and the fact that, you know, I was directing Powell, but I wasn't physically. making the photographs. Here I wasn't directing anybody or making the photograph. So, you know, I wanted to try to show things, to show us complete a

picture of what went on as I could. So that was really the, you know, the plan there. And, you know, tied into the design, again, the book itself is an object and sort of makes it really beautiful. And Nina did, you know, just a fantastic job, you know, our back and forth on what to do with things. And I deferred to her because I, the other books for the most part I laid out the order of the photographs and I didn't do the design work of the font and other things but the actual

order of the pictures for the most part was me and I this one the order was dictated by the mission so it was not the same but she also put you know pictures on opposing pages and just had a whole different feel than I could even

comprehend so I deferred to her design knowledge that's cool I was thinking to those close-up shots that you have like that's like a that's what I do when I go see a shuttle like if I go to you know the Kennedy Visitor's Center you walk in you take in the whole thing and you kind of drink that up but then you then you go and you just stand as close as you can at it for like you know an hour and you just look at like stitches and bolts and a wire that goes up like this with a little piece of tape holding it up and then a little joint here. Like, those are the fun kind of, yeah, the hidden, hidden beauties of these incredibly complex machines. Like these, I don't think of many machines that are more complex than a space shuttle orbiter, right? No, no. And that, you know, the weird thing when I was, when I was photographing the shuttle, this is kind of hard to explain.

But, you know, I would afford to my work as this documentary abstract combination. So I'm doing some of the shots like this shot against the blues guy. Then I'm doing the team on a zero billboard, which is much more. abstract and out of context, although it's still documents what that was, but to me it's more about the design and the visual relationships. But after a while, not from

the visual part of it, from the technical part of it, like the abstract and the documentary kind of flipped, because if I looked at a little piece like the T-monous zero empirical port, I could understand, okay, yeah, I get how that works and what, but if you step back and look at the whole thing, it's like, this is overwhelming.

How does this thing all, you know, How on earth? No pun intended. Do they get this into fly? Yeah, exactly. You know, so that was, you know, I tried to include a little bit of that subtly in both books, actually. I have stumbled upon a photo of Mir from the space shuttle that is like, I don't think I've ever seen this particular angle before. And I feel like these are the ones that you probably were in the depths of NASA.gov.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. going to and it you know there was a lot of stuff that I would have liked to have used but especially a lot of the early film stuff it just wasn't high enough quality or like you know it was out of focus a little bit or there was something you know and I could have you know I could have done this book a thousand different ways and with a thousand completely different photographs it's

so it was it was not that I didn't have anything to choose from it was there was so much to choose from what are you what are you going to do and so you you know you again think about the overall story you're trying to tell and pick out photographs that fill in gaps. And that was really the, you know, things that, and things that just like, wow, I've followed this for, you know, decades and I didn't know that thing was that, you know. So, you know, you just kind of have to let it, let it wash over you

and then kind of see where things fall. Yeah. Man, I'm just thinking that shuttle mirror part of shuttle history is like, I feel like that's a really forgotten part of the history. We don't seem to talk about it a lot. Like, shuttle went to a bunch of times. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was American astronauts staying on Mir and everything.

It was really, like, pro-I-S. Yep, I agree completely. And I, that was, so I learned a lot. You know, I knew a lot about the shuttle, but I learned a ton doing this. And that was one of the things was, I think there were nine shuttle missions to be or seven, I think seven docs, and there were seven astronauts, if I'm remembering correctly, close to that anyway. And it was really a critical part of working out what the ISS would be. I mean, that was really part of it.

We wanted to see what, you know, get more experience. And thankfully, we were getting along with the Russians at the time and they worked out, you know. Plus the crazy crash and the fire. And, you know, I mean, there were some just, you know, we're lucky that, you know, the whole thing didn't just blow up at some point. You know, that one's. Yeah. I like watching.

And I talk about those things. because, yeah, and I agree completely. I think that mirror, that's why I wanted to be one of the beginning, I think it's the beginning of chapter four, you know, because I think it, I agree completely. I think it's, it's importance in what came from there is overlooked to a great extent. Yeah. It was, it was, it was, it was,

go ahead. I was to say, there's all these great videos of mirror of, like, you know, the Americans going through it and, showing the station off. And the, the, the, the,

the, the, the, the, the, the, like, you know, that older,

so you style hatch to connect all the modules, and they have all this tubing running through it. And so, like, you kind of have to, like, force yourself to do that hatches like

on the foot through, like, there's so much storage. It was so clutter. Like, it was very, very, you know,

not a great place to live long term, I don't think. So, thinking about the U.S. improvement to the U.S. segment where they had the bigger modules and the hatches, right?

And it was a big deal. Have you seen the photographs of the Chinese station, which looks so that I've seen this several times online where it's picture of which all the world's walls are white and perfectly clean. And then they show, you know, the destiny module with just wires and stuff everywhere. And it's like, oh, okay. And somebody's like cable management. I mean cable management.

That means you got to go into that wall and redo all those cables. I don't think it was, it wasn't like, what's an act? accident, you know, you don't want to have to dig in. I don't know, you know, I don't know what the context is of that picture of the nice, clean, shiny station, but I don't think it's necessarily a good thing. I think, you know, it's like, oh, cable management. I think, I think, I think most is that they just haven't started yet, because, like, this is when they were unpacking it, and they were just like shit everywhere. It looks like you're moving into your new house and you haven't unpacked anything yet. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, just wait, wait a few years and we'll

see how that looks. But if they have to be my favorite. thing to track. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Just, you know, so, you know, the ISS, yeah, it looks crazy, but it's very functional. It's very, you know, it works very well. I mean, they have to, they do have to manage all those cables, you know, Paulo and he was photographed. And he, you know, talk about how you can't just, you know, put a tie wrap on one because it'll just still spread out. They have plastic bags. They shove all the cables into when they're not using them. So they're not just flying out everywhere. Right, right. Were there other things that you, like, were big surprises and learning about the shuttle as you went through this project? Like any other big, like, wow, I had no idea that was a thing? I think the number of foreign, international, I shouldn't say more, but international astronauts will participate. It was really phenomenal, the number of countries, the number of people. And, you know, Germany basically controlled the degree.

on the D2 mission, they were dedicated to pretty much German things. Yeah, which was great. And of course, the shuttle program was the beginning of diversifying the astronaut corps, and that I think was a really important thing. And I did try to highlight that without hitting people over the head to show that diversity, especially with women in their roles. So I think those were two of the things that, especially the number of, international astronauts that really flew on it. It was, the other thing I think that surprised me was

the close calls they had with, you know, tile damage. I mean, SDS 27, SDS 27, you know, probably had more tile damage than STS 107 to Columbia. It was just not in this bad place, you know, but it was, they lost a complete tile, but it happened to be over an L-Band antenna where the, where the, the arrow body of the shuttle was thicker, so it didn't burn through. I mean, and then there were some after Columbia. There were,

you know, there were, there were just a, you know, a lot of, there was some, like if SCS 27 had been lost, well,

that would, you know, it was two missions after, um, Challenger, that would have been it. There's no way they would have kept flying.

And then we wouldn't have an international space station, or we wouldn't have had one as soon as we did. And 26 also had tile issues. Same deal. And then 27 had it the worst. It's just like that moment is so, yeah, fickle that like they didn't actually saw the issue. No. And they, and, you know, people got so mad on again.

And I always say, don't want to start any wars with the shuttle lovers. But, you know, people got, I remember people during the last launch is just like so upset. I think, why are they ending this? This is a great thing. Why are they doing this? And it was a great thing. But that's a problem they couldn't fix, you know. And they were going to lose another shuttle.

you know, and to do it now with the kind of knowledge they had would have just been criminal, you know, at that point. So it was sad, but hopefully, you know, better things will come from, you know. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, and then, I mean, even on that point, wasn't it the, I just pulled it up, thanks to your wonderful writing, that, yeah, the mission after 107, yet again, they had more foam come off and it just happened to miss the shuttle that time. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I think I read a Wayne Hale post about that, that they, like, had, you know, determined what was causing the foam to break, and then they realized, like, soon after, actually, we didn't solve that at all. And it was the fact that they were filling and draining certain tanks so much that it would start cracking. Makes you think. Makes you think. It's no shovel-derived tanks that keep getting filled and drained, right? It's a little, a little stressy. Yeah. I think of one right now.

Weird. So, this shot is spectacular. this is my non sequitur at the moment. Like, maybe this is a good time to talk about something that I read in, in the acknowledgement section that you talk about how you're almost unable to find who took any of these pictures. Yeah. I'm curious to hear about that a little bit. Well, you know, there's so many good photographers like Kim Schifflett and, and, oh, gosh, I came to think of Ben Cooper.

I don't know who, you know, was taking all these, Bill Ingalls, Great Nass photographer. but only in rare cases do they list who the photographer is in the data. And so, you know, it was just really impossible to credit people. So we knew some of the astronauts were that, you know, that took the pictures. But I think, did Hoot Gibson take the man-maneuvering unit pictures? I think he did. I think that's right, yeah. You know, but I credit some of the astronauts because it was known.

but yeah, you know, I'm one of my concerns, and it's one of the reasons I didn't include any of my photographs. I had a couple I probably could have used, but, yeah, I just wanted to keep a clean break between orbital planes and this. I did, you know, and I've already seen some press about it where they say Roland Miller's photography. Like, no, it's not my photography. You know, it's not. I didn't go to space on every single shuttle mission. None of them. Right, right.

None of them, yeah, well, that's, you know, I remember when I was teaching in in Brevard Community College, I had a still frame poster. up in my office of a shot from an IMAX camera in the back of the payload bay. And people go like, oh, did you take that? I'm like, yeah, I took that. Sure. I was up on the last time. What do you think? No.

So, you know, people just. Like, if I took that, don't you think there would be more pictures of me in space around here? Or do you think that's the one I would have hung up? Yeah. So, yeah, exactly. You got to get like some stable diffusion going and be like, Roland on STS 118, you know, and get yourself some AI-generated Roland in space and hang it around, see if people fall for it.

They might. You know, back to the credit, you know, I wish in a perfect world, there would be one NASA website with access to every single image and it would have the photographers, who would have all the information. Like the whole, the whole flicking. thing when they shifted to put a lot of stuff on flicker i just don't i don't i mean nothing that's flicker but it doesn't seem like the right platform for that you know it's just not the same thing and so if there was you know if i had a magic wand it could fix it all i just

collect it all in one spot you know make sure everybody's getting credit for the the work they did but maybe someday that'll yeah i'll i feel like that's just like a perennally underfunded nassah history office project you know like totally should exist and i just don't know if they're ever going to peel a couple of dollars off for that. Well, not just history, but also the media people should have, you know, and that's, you know, I think part of the problem is, I don't really know, but I would assume that there's different entities that have different sites, and that's why it's kind of all spread out everywhere.

It's interesting, though, right, because so much, like everything that comes out of a NASA camera is public domain. So it's not like they have rights management to battle, which is good. It's just almost a cataloging issue at that point, especially It should get better now, like now that we've got, we're a little more digital than we're in the 80s and 90s, right? Well, yeah, and maybe I'm just not, you know, hip on Flickr, but I just found out really. Roll and hates Flickr, is what we're discovering. No, no, no, no, I don't hate Flickr, no, nothing.

It's just that other people were posting their pictures and stuff. Well, wait a minute. I couldn't even tell it. I probably don't get it. I'm an old, you know, dadgummit. It's so funny because I have been multiple episodes of this show going on and on about how good flicker these days for space photography because all but and it's honestly because bizarrely like all the space agencies are on it for no reason like I don't know why everyone but it's it's only almost

like it's almost the only photo platform that has sustained being a photo platform for I mean at this point 25 years like I don't remember when Flickr was founded but I don't remember my life before Flickr you know like it's been around that one so it just just that gum what I do it was a better time It was a better time back then. I'm sorry. The reason I said that to be clear about it is like when you go to the National Archives, they'll have the date.

They'll have like an identifier number. They'll have a little caption about what it is. Sometimes I'll have a whole bunch of information about what it is. You know, that kind of detail, that kind of level of historical documentation is what I crave. And so I just wish that, you know, there was, I just kind of wish there was, I just kind of wish there was one spot where everything was. I know I'm dreaming, but. Yeah.

I'm sure there's a whole bunch of people at NASA. They're like, we would love to do that, please. I'm sure they would. I don't fall down. I think you're absolutely right. I mean, the personnel, just the cost and personnel to do all that. You know, I can't even keyword my own photographs. So I don't know why I'm complaining about NASA.

But, you know, it's just, I have my own filing system, which works pretty well. I'd love to do someday, you know, keyword everything and just be able to go, oh, you want a picture of a green dog? Here, look. We can maybe apply for like a NASA Sibber or something and get a little grant money going and we can, me and you can collab on this. Maybe Jake and you should since I love Flickr. I'm a pro-flickr guy over here, but maybe we get, I have an idea.

We just get the Flickr team. I hadn't seemed to have pushed out a lot of new features in the last 10 years. Maybe just shift them over to the NASA side. I don't know. There you go. We'll fix it all. We'll get them all straight now. But there's still an amazing amount of stuff out there, too.

That's the thing, you know, like, especially the National Archives. There's really obscure stuff. And it was fun to just, like, go through a mission. And there'd be, you know, there'd be 4,000 pictures from one mission that they scan, that somebody scanned. Well, maybe, yeah, 2,000 that they scanned in, you know, that were there. and it's really, you know, interest to go through. There's a lot of just stuff that wasn't going to work, but it's really, you know. And that gave me this other perspective of everything that went on.

You know, when you look at what they did on the missions, they did a lot of stuff with flame experiments in space. They did a lot of stuff with grown crystals. You know, there were some ubiquitous themes that ran through so many, of the missions, it was interesting to see how often they would do different but similar experiments. Yeah. I also, it was funny in the early days, like how many times they were just spacewalking on a

satellite? That's a thing that doesn't happen that much anymore, you know? I'll go ride on this satellite for a little bit and see what happens. My favorite one is the sale, the facility. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that one. My favorite one is, though, it was, I think. Wait, Jake's getting cut out. What happened, Jake?

This one? Well, no, so that's a classic one because they went and got the two, it was like the two little spinning sats with the Star Motors that had failed, so they went and got both. There's another one where they went, it was like a giant huge satellite. I think it was like an Intel sat. It was very, very big. It was.

It was Intel. Until 6, and they grabbed it. They just, they just. Oh, yeah, by hand. Like, at one point, there was an astronaut grabbing the entire satellite. It was SGS 49. Well, this one, shout out to past guest, Christian Fisher's mom, who was driving the arm when they captured this one. That's a good one.

Oh, yeah. 49. Let's get to it. There it is. Yeah. They kept trying to grab it. You're back one. No, 40.

Those are the mission number. Don't let the mission numbers really. Yeah. So, yeah, they were trying to grab it with the, you know, with the arm. and it wouldn't engage. So they just, they took up, they had a,

like one of those experimental platforms they were trying to build things in space. They took that and made this little platform that wasn't part of the plan.

And then the three of them just grabbed it. You know, it's just, you're thinking, man, what if you slice your glove open on something sharp?

I'd be like, I don't know if I want to do that and be sailing off into the point. If it came up in for all mankind, people would be like, this is so unrealistic. I mean,

I guess it was a point in several episodes of For All Mankind. In fairness, they have a little bike thing or something, too. It was like a space bike where they like, you like you have like an apparatus that would like mount into the bottom and they were driving.

Yeah, they had a little, it wasn't, I don't think you drive around, but it would clamp into it. And that's, they kept having trouble with those, you know. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of interest. You know, the stuff that was interesting, too,

was like they, they had a blanket come loose. So one of the astronauts had to. go out and stitch it back together. They had the kind of torn solar panel where the guy who was a doctor, he went up and took some basically zip ties and zip tied it back in place and fixed it. But, you know, they're doing that stuff. They haven't practiced that. That's me, everything else they practiced 100 times or more. That stuff was so cool because they're like, well, we've got to go do this and we don't know how it's going to work. And, you know, I mean, it's, no pun. It's not necessarily rocket science, but it's such an extreme environment. You know, you need

think through everything you're doing, otherwise you could get in serious trouble. So I was very impressive in their ability to adapt to what was going on. The improv days of space. Yeah. Russians are still doing it. Yeah. The Russian. The shuttle period, though, was very much like that.

Like up until, you know, I mean, I guess a lot of it was pre-Columbia, but like that sort of early 80s, 90s-ish time when they were still working with a lot of commercial sats. It was a little bit of a funky time. They were trying to. Yeah, yeah. Get all that. Yeah. The whole concept of they were going to,

it was kind of going to pay for itself with satellite retrieval and, and, and, you know, that up until Challenger that, you know, they were doing pretty good job with some of that stuff. I don't,

I can't, you know, I can't imagine, you know, they were charging people what it actually cost to launch a shot. But, you know, I mean, one of the things I talked about, I didn't really think about this before, and there are certainly other ways to do it. But, you know, when you use the shuttle, like especially building the ISS, if you use just a regular rocket,

you'd have to launch the thing up there, then you'd have to launch a crew to go connected to whatever you were building. With the shuttle, you had the crew and the piece, and you could do it all in one shot. And that's, you know, the, again, the shuttle was expensive to launch. sure that there wouldn't have been a cheaper way, but it was certainly an efficient way to do it. Yeah. It's worth to all for sure. It's tough, right. Yeah.

The concept that, you know, the, you know, the space station wouldn't exist or certainly wouldn't have existed as soon as it did without the shuttle. I think it's pretty solid. I mean, that, you know, and that was, again, people that poo-poo the shuttle program. If they had only built the International Space Station, I think it would have been worth it. because it's such an important step in going farther into outer space to learn about microgravity and living in microgravity, that it really allowed that to happen in a way that I think it would have been difficult to do. Although there's then the people like me who are mad that shuttle was late, so Skylab died.

And we could have had, like, imagine if the shuttle started in the Skylab era and the first years of shuttle were space station based. would be really interesting to know what that would have done to the trajectory and honestly even what it would have done to the industry because like you're saying there was this weird moment when everything going to space from the US was going to go on the space shuttle we made a national space bus and everything had to catch a ride

like no other options Air Force commercial people you're all going on there but if they were busy with Skylab they wouldn't have really had the bandwidth to do that and what would that have done like I don't know That's the miss moment in space flight history, as Jake knows, is my always, it's my big thing. And it probably would have also sucked to get down that rabbit hole, right? We would have been stuck on Skylab. We'd all be complaining for years that we were stuck on Skylab.

Like, we'd be having the same argument, but I'm just curious if we would have been having the same argument 20 years before we were having the argument. Yeah. It would have been interesting to see what would have come out of that. You know, and I think Skylab is also greatly overlooked in its role and everything. It was pretty amazing that they were able to do that on such a short time frame and pull that off. And I know there were issues, but it seemed like it was a great beginning for all this stuff. We still have a Skylab show to do, Jake. You have a Skylab show to do.

It's wild to think about how close Apollo and Shuttle are in history. Like just, you know, thinking back, what if Shuttle went to Skylab at first? I was like, what do you mean? Like, that was a different era. But then I'm like, no, there was like, there was like six years between the last Apollo capsule in the first shuttle. It was not that big of a gap. Dude, it's 20 years to the day from Yuri Gagarin to the first shuttle is a stat that will always blow my mind. Yeah, it's crazy.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Because that's one that bums me out. Like, darn. That's ridiculous. space, you know? It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So what's next? Now that you've done two books and three books and two books, what's the next book? Because clearly you can't just sit still for 10 minutes. You know, I don't have anything nailed down. I'm working on some. I would like to call it. Yeah, Skylab. I'm actually working on the thing that's a little more farther out there. I would loosely refer to it as astrophotography, but it doesn't include any telescopes.

I'm doing some images of exoplanets that are, obviously, I'm not going to exoplanets. So it's a very unique thing I'm doing, and hopefully it'll pan out to be something. It's really fun to do. And it's totally, you know, I can do whatever I want to these images because they're not real. So it's like all the shackles.

are off. I don't have to worry about what I'm doing. It's, it's kind of a, we'll see what comes of it. You know, and I'm always, I'm actually working on a big project here out West on the, on the, kind of the, the status of the West at this point versus the myth of the West. And so that's been really fun. And hoping to get, I still am not getting any cred with NASA lately. So hopefully I can get back. I'm not sure what they want me to do. I'll just keep doing books on old programs until they let me back out. Things are looking up. I got off the wait list for Artemis 1 as like the little indie podcaster. So maybe there's some movement in this department. All right.

Well, I'll believe it when I see it from my standpoint. But yeah. So, yeah, that's the, you know, that's really it. And just there's, you know, there's so much going on in spaceflight right now. It's, you know, I can't even keep up with it. It's just, I'm almost glad I don't live down there because I'd feel like I'd have to be out at every single thing. And I'm not trying to, you know, if you've never, like, done a launch at 3.30 in the morning that gets scrubbed a couple times. You're like, you're like, you know, by the third night, you're like, oh, I know if I can keep it.

It's moving an hour or whatever later every morning. So, not to complain. Yeah. So, but it, you know, it's just, you know, it's really great that so much is going on. I want to get back involved in it as much as I can. I want to do a real quick plug because Roland won't himself. But I know some friends that have released books. And right now, this book comes out next week, right?

You're still the 8th, November 8th. Yeah. So if you right now, pre-order on Amazon, this is a fun fact about Amazon. If you pre-order all of those orders, get assigned to launch day, which means on November 8th, Roland goes way up the charts. Oh, cool.

I do see that he's already the number one release in aeronautics and spaceflight, so he probably doesn't need much of our help. But if you want this book, and you absolutely should, because it's absolutely glorious and beautifully designed, that's a super cool thing to do

is pre-order it, unless there's somewhere better that you want them to pre-order it. That gives you more money. No, no, that's fine. No, that's fine. And check out audible planes, too. it's a, you know, if you like the more artistic side of it, less, the writing in Orbital

Plains is really my anecdotal writing about my experiences, which are, are fun. You know, just a lot of crazy stuff happens when you're at these unusual places, so. Well, I am one rolling book behind, obviously, so I need to get on this as well. So, do it, people. Great books. And the other ones, interior space, abandoned in place. I could probably grab them off my shelf. Let's see.

It's got the rolling. Yeah, I'm flattered. I'm in your background. You are. Pretty prominent. I praise. I don't know why I'm doing this. I have a B cam for Christ's sake.

Ben in place. Amazing book. Interior Space. Jake bought this one for me. We talked about it last time. Still amazing. You got to get all this stuff because it's like, if you're a nerd, I'm Jake, you're a nerd.

You need to have these books. I'll send you them. A little present for the other Mertes. Outrageous shipping costs. Yeah, you're not to go buy them on yourself. Bank off of Jeff Bezos is shipping money on that one. Jake, you put out an episode. I did, yeah, this morning.

So I had an interview with Scott Bolton, who is the principal investigator of Juno. So Juno went by Europa last month and did a super cool flyby. You talk about photography. So one of the cool things we talked about is that the spacecraft goes behind Europa from the sun. And so some of the photos are on the night side of the moon. And they were really struggling like, how do we take pictures of this? Because it was just like, you know, it was basically eclipsed.

And so they use the star tracker, which is designed to navigate. just and it's like it's built around photographing black space and picking out little specks of stars and when they turned that camera to Europa they were able actually to get photographs of the nightside so there's some pretty cool stuff on how they did that in there it's pretty neat so yeah check it out talk about the one of the coolest moons of Jupiter is this is this the thing you're talking about that's it that's a that's a that's nighttime on the back of Europa so wow pretty wild I don't think we've done that before, right? That seems like a new thing.

Well, they've used the Star Tracker a couple times already on the mission. So they've done it. But yeah, it's a reasonably weird thing because it's an engineering camera. It's not a science instrument. And so they were able to kind of use it for some different stuff. They're so clever. Yeah, they are. What about you, Anthony?

Got any new stuff out recently? I'm trying to remember what the last show was. I think I do. I think you still what? I'm still trying to catch up. I'm trying to see where you are here. Oh yeah. Some Polaris.

Yeah, the last time, last week I talked about how I had Jared Isaacman on. And then shortly after last week's show, I had the rest of Polaris Dawn crew on. So Scott Petit, Sarah Gillis, Anna Menon, talking about the mission itself and some of the, like, more nerdy bits of what they've been training on. trying to get some information about them about the spacewalk that they don't want to talk about yet because it's all secrets. But I think in reply to a tweet, Jared Isaacman unveiled the call signs for the crew and I think Anna Menon's. If he put it in the same order there's in the suite, Anna Menon's is Walker, so I'm going to assume that she's going out on a spacewalk. So I did confirm with them. I did have a gatekeeper segment on each of the shows where I just confirmed with all of them that everyone is doing an EVA because they're venting the entire spacecraft to vacuum.

So I just want to get ahead of the gatekeeping that happens with these Jared Isaac missions of like, well, you weren't the first because X-Mars, like everyone's doing a spacewalk. They're all vented a vacuum. You go wear a spacesuit in a vacuum and tell me you're not doing a spacewalk. Like, come on. Yeah. So that's good. So be there for that content.

It's totally worth it. So anyway, Roland, you're the best. Thanks for hanging out with us, as always. Hey, thanks for having me again. Appreciate it. Absolutely. Good to meet you, Jake. I miss Mr. Lassie.

one but glad you're here the story last time so we never got to talk but glad we caught up this time it's good yeah I had to bring in the photography ringer of Tim Dodd last time but you did yeah yeah I remember what I was doing I was away I was at a conference it's always at a conference that's what he says he's just like trick at bar just on the beach all right everybody see you later one thanks everyone Thanks. Bye.