Off-Nominal - 85 - The Highest I’ve Been

Episode Date: November 18, 2022

Mat Kaplan, host of Planetary Radio for The Planetary Society, joins Jake and Anthony to talk about the 20th anniversary of the show, his upcoming retirement, and what it’s been like to cover space in this way for all those years.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 85 - The Highest I’ve Been (with Mat Kaplan) - YouTubeVisibly Loose Nuts - UNISEX | WeMartians PodcastDr. Pete Flavored Soda - SodaStreamPlanetary Radio | The Planetary SocietyInterview with Louis Friedman | The Planetary SocietyPlanetary Society on Twitter: “It’s official: LightSail 2 has reentered Earth’s atmosphere and burned up, as expected. What a phenomenal mission this was! We are proud of everything this spacecraft accomplished, and of all the people who made it happen.”Follow MatMat_Kaplan (@PlanRad) / TwitterPlanetary Radio | The Planetary SocietyPlanetary Society (@exploreplanets) / TwitterFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterOff-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine start. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Off Nominal. How you doing, everyone? Lots of going out there in the world. What a week. It's a big week. What a week.

Big week. Huge week. For so many reasons. The most important news, of course, is that one of my t-shirt designs got scooped up by scraping bots again. Yes. I love when that happens. They moved very, very quickly.

So it's interesting to see that again. But we're here with Matt Kaplan this week. Matt, welcome. I'm so excited to have you on the show. We're going to talk about all kinds of, I don't know, fun stuff about your career because I'm very interested in that and whatever weird stories you have. So welcome. I am so glad to be here with you guys.

All of my colleagues who've already visited the show have given such great reports that I'm just looking forward to having a good time and enjoying my beverage of choice, which I'm sorry, may embarrass you. Oh, let's see it. What are, what you got? Let's do it. Is it, is it a Coke? No, but you're close. What is it?

This is Dr. Pete. Dr. Pete. Is that new to you? Yeah. I don't even know if that's a real thing. I'm going to have to Google that real quick. Yeah, it's a real thing, honest. It's a real thing from a different kind of scraper. It's highest form of compliment, by the way, you know. And what this is, is the Dr. Pepper Ripoff. There it is. Dr. Pepper ripoff from Soda Stream.

I am a recent fervent convert to the Soda Stream community, having read that it saves you a lot of money on soft drinks. And, you know, they have some real stuff like Pepsi, but they don't have Dr. Pepper. I guess they couldn't cut a deal with them. So Dr. Pete, which is like five stars, it's way up there. So, you know, I've just proven that I am exactly as big of a geek and a square as your audience may have already suspected. But yeah, that's what I brought to the party. You love the knockoff doctors. Yeah. Hey, man, I'm in Pennsylvania.

We've had our share of knockoff doctors lately. I'll tell you that much. Yeah, that's right. So this is just nothing new here. Hey, do you get to the beach often in Pennsylvania? We do. We eat some crudette at the beach all the time. There's some local humor here, Jake. I don't know if this made it down your neck of the wits. No, I'm just all going right over here.

What are you drinking over there, Jake? I got myself a beer this week. So I went with kind of an old standby here, Bocanegra from Monterey. It's just a nice, nice refreshing Pilsner. Real simple. Not much pomp and circumstance today. Did a boca-themed drink the week that Artemis won launches. On the day of my daughter's wedding. On the day of my daughter's wedding. Well, then, allow me to be the only one that has a somewhat thematic beer

because I was surveying the options in the old craft beer store to see what was the most SLS-themed thing I could find. And because I'm in Philadelphia where there's no space beer to be found ever, except for like maybe somebody accidentally put one in the truck one time. I have a Victory Cloudwalker, which is Orange themed. And I feel like Cloudwalker kind of evokes the aesthetic of what it looked like as that thing rose on the solids. So I feel like I nailed the thematic, you know?

So there you go. That's what I got. I at least wore the way of it. I wore the, oh, you got the Artemis shirt. Matt's got the orange shirt on. So. Yeah. See, we're all good.

I got an Artemis hat. I forgot to put it on. I have an Artemis hat. They gave me at the cape, so too bad. You went to that first launch attempt, and all you got was a hat. Yeah, that's pretty much true. I had a few good interviews. I get, you know, the boss, the science guy gives me five bucks every time I wear this in front of a crowd.

So it's worth it. I do have a red shirt on, which is also thematic for Artemis after the red team that everyone was all about. See? Yeah. I love the little. interview they did after the launch. That was really funny to me. Yeah, and I said that too, because they, you know, I was like, man, if this, if this rocket goes off successfully, this red team is going to be the best PR that NASA's had in a long time on this program because they're like, what a story, right?

These like heroic people like run out to the fueled up rocket and crank some, that's, I don't know what they did, but, you know, it was. But that's the funny aspect of that is that like, it's a rocket that's made to be approached while fully fueled. So it's like that, it sounds weird because we forget. got that that's how those rockets work, right? And then they went, so like for them, they just drove up and tightened some bolts at a rocket that's meant to be stood next to to when fully fueled, right? Like, when you, but then you think about it, you're like, shit, I don't know what I would do that. That's, that's intense. I have a great story along these lines that from the early days of human spaceflight, which I can tell now or later or never, if you guys

choose. Let's do it. Let's do it. It's kind of like this. We're like, we're doing, we never want to hear this story, Matt. We were doing the very first ever planetary radio live in a local radio station studio, and we had the then head of structural engineering for SpaceX and a

NASA vet on. And this NASA vet was there for John Glenn's launch on the Atlas. And the night before the launch, they discovered that there was apparently a hairline crack

inside whatever the lower tank was. I don't know if that was fuel or oxidizer. So they drained it, took the engines off, or engine, I forget, on an Atlas, took the engine off, elected like the smallest red team type guy on the crew to crawl up inside. And he did a repair job from inside the tank, came out, reattached the engine. And Glenn apparently was never the wiser until after he had made the trip. So there you go. That's secondhand, but as far as I know, that's the case.

So hats off to the Red team. Wow. That's an epic one. I love Jake's face of surprise, as you mentioned, that the NASA event was at John Glenn's launch, and then you said Atlas instead of Shuttle. I was like, oh, yeah. You were expecting a different story. That's right.

That's like, Paul McCartney, wasn't he? He used to be with the band called Wings, right? Yeah. That is. It wasn't a way crazier story if they'd crawl up inside a shuttle to change the engine. Yeah, it's a totally different thing. I do. I mean, it's some stuff that I remember the very first Falcon 9, right, where they cut off the bottom of the engine nozzle that was like dinged a little.

And they were like, man, we don't need that part. And some stuff that would happen in the 60s at NASA and probably no decade after that would that ever happen. But I don't know, skylight was pretty wild. Yeah. Maybe it would happen there. That's true. Yeah, a lot of improvisation. Right, you're right.

Man, so the first Planetary Radio Live is where they got this story, which was how long ago. Yeah, and we did many, oh man, it took us a while to get to a live show. You know, I'd have to look it up. It was probably around 2005, something like that. But then, you know, since then, all interrupted by the pandemic, we did them all over the place.

You know, Italy, Toronto. Air and Space Museum Aquarium of the Pacific where we had a discussion about why. It's a good aquarium. Yeah, why, oh, it's a great place. I actually used to crawl around in there when it was under construction because I was doing

a radio series for them just as a gift to help promote it. But we got into a very good discussion of why NASA gets so much money and Noah gets, you know, pennies. And it's not fair is what my response was. But that was what we talked about there. But, you know, a lot of the time we just did the show locally at KPCC,

the big NPR station in Pasadena. And had a great time doing it. And I'd level at Caltech, we did a show, it was it two days or three days after the Cassini end of mission in front of a standing room-only crowd at Caltech and the biggest auditorium they have, Beckman. And it was just spectacular because you had the three people at the top of the mission come on stage and just a thunderous standing ovation from the crowd. And it's exactly what people with those kinds who do that kind of work ought to be getting on a daily basis. But that's a lot of what the show is about.

Sharing what Bill Nye calls the P.B&J, the Passion Beauty and Joy of Space Exploration and Science. I went, I was having a little fun before this and I went to planetary.org to look up the first episode. I wanted to listen to it to see what had, you know, what had gone, gone through, what had changed and what had been exactly the same. And I have to say, it is like remarkably consistent, remarkably consistent. Yeah, let me read this discussion. Disgustingly, I think, is the word you want. Yeah, it, you were absolutely right. If you, if you heard only that first show and then you heard like this week show, you'd say, oh, planetary radio. Not sure that's a good thing after 20 years, but, but okay. It hasn't changed much. I just love that like this last paragraph

of the description is like straight up, you could totally drop this in any episode right now. Like that's, you nailed it from day one is what it is. Like it's what's up with Bruce Betts. It's Emily Lock DeWalla doing random space facts. Like it is just right on point, you know. And I don't know, maybe, did you have any shows like in the backlog before this first one went up? Did you like bank a couple, see how it was? Or did you just record and start going like most of us do? You know, we didn't care much because, well, I cared a lot. But we were only on one radio station when we started. My old college radio station, KUCI and Irvine, 88.9. At the time, it was I think it was still 24 effective watts.

So, you know, not a huge audience. But we, I think we ran with that pilot. And, you know, sadly, the Challenger disaster came just a few weeks later. And so we were able to do that. Yeah, we, sorry, what am I talking about? Yes, Columbia. We did that live. And we couldn't, I mean, ever since.

then because we had to distribute the show first to five stations and then to 27 stations and then to well over 100 stations where we still are today in addition to the podcast. We haven't been able to do anything truly live, you know, recorded live is the best we could do. But yeah, you know, it hasn't changed that much. We do work a little bit further ahead now, but not by much because so much timely stuff happens that we want to be on top of. I mean, I hit my deadline for this week's show two hours before the liftoff of the SLS. And so I just had to say, you know, by the time you folks hear this, you may know whether it actually happened. So that'll have to be saved for next week.

Yeah, you should never wait on a deadline for Artemis I, honestly. No, you can't. you get. It's unfortunate, but that part's behind us now. That's true. It's funny how, like, I think there's a lot of people who know you through the podcast, right? Through that's, that's a mechanism how they hear you.

And yet, the show started two years before the word podcasting. Like, that's, you know, you were, it's, I don't even know, actually, when it was that you started putting it out as a podcast. Do you remember any of the early days when you were like, hey, what's this new thing going on? that we should get in on. I'm going to have to be, it's like I'm in front of Congress, man. I'm afraid I do not recall. I'll get that for you.

I'll put it on the record. I'll get that answer to you later. Thank you. I think it was a, I think we were only, I think we were about five years in. But maybe that's too late because we jumped in about six months after everybody started talking about podcast being the hot new thing. And I went to management and I said, we got to do this. This is going to be huge.

It wasn't yet. And we did jump in. And it took a while to realize that the podcast was going to give us a lot more freedom. Because the broadcast show from the start has always been 28 minutes and 50 seconds. Because that's the tyranny of broadcast, man. They're going to send it to multiple radio stations they have to know from week to week how long it's going to be because they may be plugging it into their automation. And they don't want to have to reprogram it every week.

So I was constantly cutting it. interviews down and not being able to include everything. And that's, you know, that remains the worst part of the job. And I kept the podcast just with that format for a while. And then people started saying, hey, we like this show, but how come it's so short? And so now, you know, we range between typically it's, you know, 45 minutes to, I start to get a little bit anxious if it runs over an hour, the finished podcast. But we will do that on occasion if it's something special. and it's wonderful to have that freedom. Of course, now, you know, I might do a 40-minute interview with somebody,

and I have to cram that thing into the 13 or 14 minutes that I have for the main feature in the broadcast version of the show. So that's like, that's hell. That's one thing I will not miss about the show. And I wish luck to Sarah, my wonderful colleague who's taking over and our new audio editor that we're about to hire. We're hiring a contract audio editor. Thank goodness.

She won't have to be the one-person band that I've been for 20 years. But, yeah, that's really tough. And it does at least let me say, as we do this week, hey, you know, we had such a great conversation with Linda Spilker about the Voyager mission. You want to hear the whole thing? Here it is. Check out the podcast. Yeah, that's an interesting way to, you're getting, it's almost like a cool funnel that

the people you're catching on radio that might not have really considered like seeking out longer form content like this could be like oh that was a really interesting you know you're the best 10 minutes of talking with somebody and then go oh i should dive in a little deeper and you know that's like just creme de creme of uh content right there although it's a pain to pick which 13 minutes it's like yeah that's got to be tough it's it's a tease it's definitely a tease and uh yeah man from your mouth to uh apple plug us here I don't know, too. Yeah, history-wise, I'm thinking that Steve Jobs decided to add podcast support to iTunes in, like, May 2005. It was when it was announced. Right, we're going into podcast history here, but Adam Curry had this podcast directory that he had been collecting because he was one of the nerds that started it, right? And then Steve Jobs approached him and said, hey, I would like to put this in iTunes. And that's the thing that started the ball rolling down the hill.

So I'm going to guess it was probably 05 when everyone started realizing that it was more than just like nerdy RSS feeds. And there was a place to actually go listen and iPods were hot. So, I mean, like, it's just interesting how it had the early, that probably felt like we're taking the show in a completely new direction. And then here we are like 20 years later and like, well, that was the most of the lifetime of the show was like this format. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, we didn't. I knew we had to go in this direction. But nobody had any idea back then how bigger was going to be, except for the biggest boosters of the format.

But they were right. And, you know, my gosh, all hail Steve Jobs once again. He was dead on. Yeah, and strangely, like, Apple has been very benevolent. Like, I don't know. It's the one weird thing that Apple is very benevolent about. That's like, it's this free directory. They've always ran in a free way.

That's like, there's so many apps, not even on their platform built on. on top of this directory, and, like, they never, they only recently started adding, like, premium Apple podcast stuff. So it's the, the, like, we're doing tech history instead of Matt's interesting podcast history, but I'm just, like, ruminating on the fact that if that was not treated as weirdly with an Apple, like, that whole side of the industry would never have flourished in the way that it did. And that's, I find that quite interesting. Yeah, absolutely. And certainly it would have taken much longer for podcasting to catch on the way it had. Yeah. We would just be doing

YouTube shows like this probably. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, go ahead. Sorry, we're lagging here. Oh, I'm sorry. No, I'm just, I'm a microphone freak in addition to, you know, other ways. So there's my Electro Voice RE10, which is the other classic broadcast microphone. the other one being the one that SM7 looks like that you've got there.

But I can't tell what the other one is there. Anyway, I can't tell. Anyway, classic. Let's do as little space content as possible in this hour. I'm sorry. Ask me, ask me anything. I like, I mean, the fact that we thought this wouldn't get inside baseball immediately. Like, is, yeah, yeah.

That's kind of the point, though, because we waited as long as possible to have you on this show. right up until the 20th anniversary is what a week from today and you're retiring like two months from then or a month. So, you know, we're definitely, we're waiting as long as possible to get any wisdom from you. And then 20 minutes in the show are still avoiding it. So that's good. Okay, I'll take it there. I'll take it there. Go for it. We are celebrating the 20th anniversary of the show in two weeks on the third. That's the closest episode of ours to the 20th anniversary. And so I'm bringing back the first guest we ever had, our executive director, Emeritus, Lou Friedman, the co-founder of the Planetary Society with Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray. And then we'll have the science guy and our great COO, Jennifer Vaughn, will come on as well.

So, yeah, that'll be, I thought it would be the very last show. But Sarah's just too busy doing her digital community stuff for us. So that's why we're, you know, she will take over on the first show of 2023. Okay, cool, cool. Yeah, no, I wanted to ask, you know, so 20 years of covering planetary science and planetary exploration and all the wonderful stuff that the planetary society does, I love to hear the non-scientist, you know, the journalist's perspective on how you think that field has changed because that's like an interesting sort of sub meta story that I like to follow of how it's been, you know, evolving over those years. like planetary science is so new and it changes a lot pretty quickly. And so I like to hear kind of how you've seen that with all the great interviews you've been able to do. Yeah, I have seen changes. Fortunately, we were well past the bad times of the 1980s, which is when

there were no missions in the pipeline. That's why Carl and Bruce, And Lou got together and said, we need a public interest forum to promote planetary science and space science in general because they knew that people were behind this, but there was just not enough of a voice of it. Well, by the time the show started in 2002, and I had been on staff for two years by then, although I was still part-time. I remained part-time for what is still the majority of my 22 years at the society because I was also working full-time for a couple-time. university and doing largely media stuff there, community relations, things like that. But by the time we started the show in 2002, the Mars Exploration Rovers were already underway, at least in terms of being put to piece together at JPL. So there were good times.

Lots of other missions going on. Voyager is still very much underway, as it still is. The only thing to outlast planetary radio. Now, I can name a few other things, but you're right. It's, yeah, I mean, as we heard from Linda Spilker this week, she's hoping that we'll be hearing from the Voyager spacecraft into the 2030s. So, wow. But I'll tell you what has changed most of all is when you get 100 random planetary science scientists together, you're going to see a lot more women.

and at least a few more people of color than you would have in 2002. It would be most impressive in terms of the representation of women, where now, you know, it wasn't that long ago, there were no missions that had as a principal investigator or as a project scientist, a woman. And now it's not quite a parody yet, but we're getting there. And that's something that I think that, you know, my former colleague, Emily Lockdawalla,

and a lot of the rest of us at the planetary society, I think that that's something that we've pushed from the start. And it has only been to the benefit of not just planetary science, but science altogether. I also, it's just amazing when you look at what we have revealed of, not just the solar system, but the universe across the last 20 years. You know, we had Hubble. that that that that's great

but so many other things happen since then I mean just a single out one Cassini my gosh you know we'd only really seen Saturn and its moons up close once because of well sorry twice because it was visited by both of the Voyager spacecraft right it was in fact that's when they changed

the trajectory to get the good look at Titan that sent Voyager 1 out of the solar system. I think it was Voyager 2. Do I have it backwards? Oh man. I always mix it up to you every time because they launched them out of order and stuff. Yeah, I get all of them mixed up with them.

Right, right. One of them zagged. One of them zagged. Yada yada. You figured out. You know, I was going to say, you're right. It's like a twix. It's like Linda Spilker.

I asked her, do you think, you know, if it hadn't been for Cassini, and Hoygens, revealing what they did of Titan, because Voyager showed us essentially nothing of Titan. It couldn't look through the fog. It couldn't look through the fog. Do you think we'd be looking forward to dragonfly today? And she said, probably not,

because we wouldn't know enough about Titan to feel confident that we could send an octocopter to land and then zip around and taste stuff. And so, you know, all of that over the last, 20 years. But then, you know, I've been very lucky with planetary radio, pardon me, because, yeah, we're the planetary society. So we pretty much stick to planetary science, but not exclusively. And particularly, I have been given the freedom on planetary radio. I can talk cosmology now and then. You know, we had Brian Keating of UCSD and the Simon's Observatory on a couple of weeks ago talking about, you know, looking back to the beginning of the

the universe and learning, you know, what the hell dark, dark energy is to say nothing of dark matter. And that's great fun because, man, that's, I want to explore all this stuff, which is why I always open the show by saying, you know, across our solar system and beyond, because we get to do that. I hope that Sarah, who is an astrophysicist, will also have that freedom that she'll be able to, you know, venture a little bit beyond the art cloud now on, man. It's a good tagline. Man, dragonfly is going to be the goat. I just want to mention, that's going to be the goat for sure.

Like, come on. That's just, every time I think about it, that's mission is going to be the goat. Another great mission led by a woman, too. Yeah. And at this point, I can say, thank God APL is riding that one because, oh boy. APL, here's the thing about APL. APL, they have Christmas parties all the time, Jake, so they swap mission details nonstop. They love their upstart reputation there, you know, the space folks there.

And they say, oh, no, we're not JPL East. They're APL West. It's not entirely fair, but it is amazing the work that they're doing. And, yeah, Zibi Turtle is just terrific. You know, we were talking to her years and years ago. And I am so happy to see her. running that mission that I said, man, that's just, there's so much that, hopefully I'm still going to have the chance, not only to be heard on planetary radio occasionally, not too often,

but other stuff that the society is going to ask me to do, like things in our new member community, which would be starting up really in earnest early next year. We hope to do a lot of live and interactive stuff there. And I hope that that's going to give me the chance to continue to talk to some of these people because this is really the selfish reason why I do this. Don't tell anybody. But it makes me credible so that I can call up these heroes

and bring them on the show and have conversations with them. And it's what you guys get to do too. Yeah. You know what I mean. This is the secret here. Yeah. Don't tell. Look, don't broadcast this. Well, do you want to talk more

about what your plans are? Because I've been saying, retiring, but I guess that's not exactly true. You're retiring from show, but you're not retiring, retiring. So what other kind of plans do you have in terms of what you're going to do once Sarah takes over? Well, first of all, the number one thing I'm looking forward to, I kind of hinted out already, and it's the fact that I won't have this deadline hanging over me every week because, you know, we're now, what, approaching my epic, I think, 1,200 shows. Every single show has had new content. Every single show has had a new what's up segment with Bruce Betts at the end, our chief scientist.

And I'm proud of that, but I don't really want to continue doing that. And so that'll be really fun, but I was surprised. I mean, I hope to eventually cut back my hours a little bit, which have been well past full time, I can tell you. but I'm really, I'm very pleased because our C.O, the aforementioned Jennifer Vaughn, has had several things that she has asked me to start working with. We have a very distinguished advisory council at the Planetary Society. A lot of these people are past guests of Planetary Radio. And I'm going to be doing some work with them as sort of a liaison with management of the

society. And I'm excited about that. We just had another of our meetings with the advisory council last Friday, where this was kind of announced, this new relationship. My friend and our board member, Bob Picardo, the good doctor from Star Trek Voyager, is sort of the head of the chair of that group. He was on our advisory council before he was appointed to our board of directors. And that's going to make it, you know, even more of a joy to be part of that. That's one thing. The digital community that I mentioned, which we're now, I think we're more calling the member community is really exciting because we have, you know, 50,000 members. And of course, we love it when we could get to interact with them, but we have not provided as many opportunities to interact with them or for them to interact with

each other as we really have always wanted to. And this is going to give us that opportunity. And this is really great credit to Sarah. Sarah Alamette, who's coming in as the guest host, the new host of Planetary Radio, because she is the primary person along with a lot of other great people on staff like Kate Howells, who have been working their tails off, putting this thing together. And it's tough, because there are a lot of issues to work out, many of them technical, but we'll have a great app and all kinds of other ways, channels where people can set up their own little subredits and things like that. But within our community for our members, it's going to be very, very exciting, and I really look forward to participating in that.

We're going to do some live events continuing beyond that. One of my favorite events every other year, and I haven't been able to go to the last couple, is the Planetary Defense Conference. You know, Planetary Defense is a big, big, core initiative of ours. I just had Linley Johnson, Kelly passed from the Planetary Defense Coordination Office's NASA. They were just back on the show a couple of weeks ago, putting the DART mission in context with all of our other efforts. Hey, there's another thing that I've seen a huge difference in 20 years. We've gone from like, yeah, planetary defense, that would be a good idea to, hey, we're really, really working on this now. It's like there's money behind it. There's an office

at NASA. There are missions. There are, you know, big sky surveys being funded. And we're finding these things. If we could just get Neo-surveyor up there, then, you know, then we might actually be able to survive. But anyway, that's another digression. Every other year, the entire world's planetary defense community gets together somewhere around the world. And this time it's going to be in Vienna, Austria. And there's usually a public event attached to that. And I will be out there to moderate that public event, bringing in some of these international planetary defense stars.

And hopefully, you know, we'll have a nice audience for that show as well. So I hope that we're, you know, as we see the pandemic, hopefully ramping down, continuing to ramp down, that we'll be able to get out there and be in front of more people as well. That sounds really fun, being able to do sort of like the, yeah, well, exactly what you said, right? Because the journey of the weekly schedule can constrain you in a lot of ways, right? And so this sounds like we're going to be like unleashing Matt into the more bespoke. Go outside, Matt. The more like the more like special one-time things, right?

You know? Yeah, watch out for Mr. Hyde. It's going to be great. And there is nothing like there is nothing more fun than what you guys do. You know, this live interaction. I do a lot to, I always tell my guests, you know, I'm going to work really hard in post-production.

to make all of us sound our best. But there is nothing like the excitement of live, especially when you're on a stage in front of a whole bunch of people. And, man, it's just, it is so enlivening to coin a phrase. And I really look forward to doing more of that stuff. There are some other things that they've talked about me being involved with, but, you know, we'll see how it works out. There was a comment in the chat here from Bradley that you now get to

sit in the independent podcaster corner for big events, which sounds like a demotion. But let me introduce you, Matt, to having no responsibility at an event. And all you can do is just sit there and have fun because that's what Jake and I do. We're going to these rooms, everyone's tweeting up a store, I'm trying to cover every little detail. And we're just like roaming around chatting with people and, you know, gathering future content in our minds. So it's not all bad. That's often my experience. I mean, yeah, I may have, you know, headphones on and a hand mic and a little recorder.

my hand picking up interviews where I can, but it's a blast. Not to, you know, I, first of all, I suck at social media. I should have, I should be tweeting several times a day. I don't. You know, I am so sorry, Elon. But, uh, I feel like he's not, probably not currently worried about your Twitter feed. No. Yeah, he hasn't been in touch lately. Yeah. Which is probably a good thing. I just, I'm not good at it. And so it's really fun. You know, what you've just described that you guys get to do. I mean, I think the last time I did this kind of stuff, well, I did it.

I can know, I've done it a little bit since then. I was at the, I got to moderate the NIAC symposium, NASA innovative advanced concepts, which is great fun. And I have a little table there and I'll pull people aside. But I was doing the, you know, their live webcast as well. but Yuri's Night great fun and I was I'm very proud by the way

to be one of the founders of Yuri's Night I produced the podcast the first three years sorry the webcast the first three years and it's so much fun they get a little table

in the VIP area and I can just you know grab people and you know say hey can you do you have 15 minutes come over and we'll talk a little bit and then use it on the show later so

yeah yeah yeah I am rambling. I have a, I have a secret. Again, for yourself from having an outline. I thought this is going to be you giving us wisdom. All of a sudden,

we're just here saying, stop with the agenda, Matt. I'm not having fun, though. I was going to say, I have a secret career ambition of being able to moderate panels kind of the same way you do. I'm trying to figure out how to break into that scene.

Like, that would be really fun to do that. Because it feels like it's doing this but live and, you know, kind of having a little bit of a even more of a captive audience, right? And I think that's pretty, pretty exciting. We just need to make sure any conference organizers only listen to our other shows then. Not this one. Yeah. Not this one in particular, it's the one with Matt, but just like listen to we Martians and Miko because not like, you know, if they're like, this is what we're getting to monitor at the panel, this seems like hijinks.

We don't want this. I think smart people like, you know, like, you know, like. like the Explore Mars people, Chris Carberry and his team. It's like what we do with the last session every year at Explore Mars, where we just take on some question like why Mars, you know, and have a great time with him and put a huge crowd on stage. Don't get Jake started like this. Just don't get him started. I'm telling you, Jake, go for it. This is, it is such a blast, man. It is like it is surfing the wave. That's what it feels like because you are just trying to feel every little current and, you know, just stay slightly ahead of it.

And there is nothing like that feeling of being live, which, you know, we are experience a bit of here. This is definitely an example of that, but doing it in front of a live crowd and then hearing them, you know, applaud and laugh hopefully appropriately at appropriate moments, is just, there's nothing like it. It's the ham in me all the way. Yeah, we should do that, Jake. Yeah, yeah.

We should do. You guys have to go do that. My problem is I'd want to get it. I'd want to get too involved in answering the questions and not just asking them. That's my problem with that one. I'm too opinionated to go on a panel like that. That's the trick. That's like, you know, if I'm on the other side of the microphone, as I appear to be now,

it's like I'll just ramble on, man. But if I'm asking the questions, I'm a little bit more disciplined. hope. But man, now it's like you just, I'll just ramble on as, you know, you guys can go get coffee if you want. Just do this. Just do this one shot. It's the Matt show. Welcome. Yeah, I'll just just just just get. He's retired from the other show and taken over this one. Yeah. Oh, that's great. Yeah. All right. Well, we'll have to put, yeah, I'll have to put in the gears in motion for off nomcon or whatever. We'll just host our own. We can have all the

the panels on. I love that. Off nom con. Our ultimate plan is to fly out to what we always call the Kansas Cosmodrome, even though it's called the Cosmosphere, which is this museum in, like, Hutchinson, I think. Hutchinson, yeah, that sounds right. They have a shocking amount of good stuff there. They have Apollo 13. I think they have Liberty Bell 7. I had a conversation this week with somebody about the Cosmosphere, so I feel like it may be in my near future. But we've always talked about how we should, it's geographically, basically the center of the U.S.

I think that's like, it's just slightly exaggerated from what I just said, but it's pretty much like, I mean, flights right now suck, but everyone could fly there reasonably cheap because it's so in the middle. And then we just have a little conference in the middle of nowhere. I say road trip. But yeah, boy, that's ripe for it. That I have always heard that that is a wonderful place to visit. And I bet they would go for it, man. I just got, how far is that from Kansas City? It can't be too far, right? I think it's like three hours from what I hear. That's not too bad. Yeah, I just got, apparently the Kansas City Royals are doing a STEM event before a game that they're doing in May, a home game, obviously. And I got invited to it. I have recently been talking to somebody about the Cosmosphere. We should chat, Matt.

I wonder if that's happening at about the same time because that would give me another excuse to make it out that way. They wanted to get in touch with our poet laureate on Planetary Radio, Dave Fairchild, who sends us a poem every week to answer the space trivia contest question. Because he lives not that far away, and they wanted him to come up. And so I said, yeah, I'll be happy to tell Dave. Well, it turns out Dave and his wife kind of met because of the Kansas City Royals, and they're both Royals fans. And so they're going to be there. That's what we're all about on Planetary Radio, bringing people together. And so, yeah, I would just be, I would love to go.

Wouldn't that be a blast? You know, STEM and Major League Baseball. What a great pairing. Keep it in mind, everyone. You know when the baseball season starts, right, Jake? Super tuned in on that. Now it's not with me. We've done baseball content the last couple of weeks on the show here, Jake.

So, you know, pull this together. Yeah, well, I'm not paying it out very quickly. I'm sorry. Oh, man. Huh. Okay. All right. Well, yeah.

So I can't stop thinking about baseball now. I'm like, when does the season start? I don't know when it starts. April. April is when it starts. It's all derailed now. It's basically my birthday, pitchers and catchers report. And then April is the real season.

You know who's a huge baseball fan? I'm not as big a fan as I used to be. Bill Nye. Big baseball. baseball guy? Bill Nye loves him a Major League Baseball game. Bill Nye has a patented device. I hope he doesn't mind my saying. It is patented, so it should be safe. He has a patented device. It's a patented device. I kid you not, you put it over the end of your bat. And like if you're doing fungo and you get tired of picking up baseballs, you just use your

bat, stick it over the ball that's down there in the turf. little rubber fingers pick up the ball, pick up the bat, pull the ball off, boom, like that. And I don't know how many of them he is sold. I don't even know if they're for sale. But I know that this is like an early invention of Bills. And he loves going to baseball games. Wow. I'm looking this up. This is amazing. Talk about inside. Inside baseball.

Bill Nye the baseball guy. Who knew? Who knew? Who knew? There it is. There's the boss. I have to salute. It's all physics, man. It's all physics. Excuse me. I have to salute. We're in the hat, Bill. Who's his team? I've got to figure this out now.

Oh, man. You know, I'm not sure anymore. I think it might be the Mariners because he lived in Seattle for so long. He's from Washington, right? Because he used to work for Boeing up there, I think, right? He's more a DC guy. That's where he grew up, mostly. But then he went to Staddle to be an engineer. Yeah, if you ever are with Bill Nye and a 747 is anywhere within sight,

he will point out to you, he will mention the piece of the tail assembly on a 747 that he had some responsibility for. In fact, Sophia, the flying infrared observatory that just retired, very sadly, that plane, that exact 747, Bill and I worked on. And so when he and I went out there together, I'm not kidding you, when he and I went out there together, he was so proud. And he was climbing, we were climbing all over and got to climb around inside where the telescope is. and then they had a bulkhead that they had reserved for VIPs to sign, and Bill signed that bulkhead. He was the first person to get to sign it. No wonder y'all are the only ones trying to save Sophia.

Well, we did go back. We were on a flight. It was our great video guy, Merk Boyan, and Chief Scientist Bruce Betts. We spent an entire night on Sophia. That was a blast. Yeah, I remember that you did a show in there, I think, right? I feel like I remember that's in my foggy memory of you just chatting while you're flying in that thing. That's awesome.

We got a couple of great videos. Bruce did some really good random space fact videos, which is his really wonderful and hilarious series. My grandson, my six-year-old grandson is a huge fan of random space fact. And then there was a video that kind of centered on me. And our Merck is just a brilliant video guy. And God, we had a good time. That was so much fun being in that airplane. It's the only time the WhatsApp segment became What's Out.

Yeah, right. It's pretty probably got to be loud, right? You were really putting the noise dampeners to work in there, I'm sure. It's really loud. It's very loud because, to save weight, they've pulled out all of the nice-looking interior insulation that is inside the fuselage. And you still have, they were like warm. out old, grotty seats, but they were the original seats from when it was a passenger plane

or a cargo plane, I guess. And so we sat in those. And, you know, I think Bruce and Merck got a little bit of sleep, but it's very noisy. So we had to wear headphones with the intercoms, which was cool because, you know, we had the cool looking military style headset microphones and all that. And that's how we were able to talk to each other and record. But yeah, we got up into the cockpit and yeah, I had a really good time. I'm trying to think, no,

that's the highest I've been on the show. The second highest. That we know of. Yeah. The second most altitude that I've achieved on planetary radio was in the Andes when, you know, I went to see.

the Alma array, out of comma large millimeter array. And we were at 5,000 meters, 16,500 feet. And I just love showing people my business card because it's up there at the high side and I got a big smile. And in my hand, you can see the little cans of a can of oxygen that they issued to each of us. Because if you didn't take a hit off of that can of oxygen, you were going to be on the ground within two or three minutes. You had to take a hit like every two or three minutes.

Otherwise, you just... I'd take a hit. You're mainly high for you. The highest he's ever been on the show. That's right. Yeah, in every way. I'm telling you, man. We got there.

It took us 48 minutes, but we got there. This is where we were trying to go in this show. I'm not going to say that hypoxia is a recommended habit that anybody should pick up, but it was kind of fun. man I would love to go out there since I'm a place that's definitely on my bucket list yeah probably really hard to get too I've gotten like the the closest I've been anywhere like that would be like the Haliakala in Maui right which is like it's like it's only three thousand meters I think and but it's a similar idea where it's like it looks like a different planet you're just like what what is this place like this just all

bizarre and red and dry and cold and you're in Hawaii and it shouldn't be cold, but you're, it's, everything's just weird about it. And yeah, it's a, I imagine that at my time is. Yeah, it's super cool. Yeah. Yeah. So I got to get up to. So it's on the list, Jake. It's probably better than Joshua Tree. Probably better than Josh. I thought. I love Joshua Tree. We're not getting it into it. I love going on there. Monacoa. I got to get up on a some day. I've had several invitations. I just have, I've never been to the big island. But when I

go, that'll be my excuse. And we hope I've always wanted to do a planetary alive in the big auditorium that they have down at the base of the mountain, which just seems like a great place to do that kind of thing. But yeah, especially now with the Inouye Solar Telescope

up and running, the Kecks, of course. I mean, those are my shrines, man. I love going to those places. Have you guys ever been to the hail to Palomar to see the hail telescope and go under that dome? Nope. It's a masterpiece. You need to do that someday.

It is so cool to be under that dome with that 200-inch scope, which was for, you know, it's kind of dwarfed now. But for so many years it was the biggest telescope on the planet. And it's just a beautiful facility. It's just, it's like I'm in tears when I go there. There's something about telescopes. The telescope thing, I don't know what it is about it, but like they're just, the facilities end up kind of being like, like you say there, it's your, your chapel or whatever. Yeah, they're churches. They're churches for space nerds for sure.

There's churches for space nerds, right? You get the same kind of thing when you walk into a cathedral, right? Yeah. Even when you go to like Greenwich and it's like, it's going to an old church for space nerds because it's like, a place you wouldn't want to do stargazing right now, but you still are like, wow, look at this thing. It's awesome. That's exactly, that is exactly how I felt when I went to Greenwich.

And I was there to see, I think it was H2 or H4, you know, the first chronograph that really was accurate enough to use to figure out longitude. And that's exactly how I felt, man. And they bring you into the little observatory there where it's like the, the astronomer royals have worked for centuries. It's just, oh my God, it's just, it's such a wonderful feeling to be in a place like that. It's so inspiring. I don't know why my photos search is failing me right now, but I did walk by, I feel like I sent you a picture, Jake, and I don't know why it's not in my photo library, but when I was in Milan, I didn't get to go in the building, but I got to walk like up to where Skiaparelli, where his dome was, that he did all the famous sketches.

of Mars. And it's an awesome looking building. And you can walk by and see the dome from the street, even if you can't get in. They were closed when I was there. But like, it is funny to put it that way, that like there's the immaculately constructed churches on the tops of mountains. And then there's all the old ones that were built like wherever, you know, cities were back in the day when it was when there were no lights. Yeah. Yeah. And so many of these great cathedrals of science, you know, built in large part by, you know, with money from old rich people who want to well remembered for good stuff. And it was that way with the cathedrals of old as well, you know. And that gives me another reason to go to Milan. I've been to Italy a couple of times.

And I've got to tell my wife, who's an Italian American, who lived in Italy for a year, that's, we have to go to Milan. I didn't know that you could go into the dome there, or at least see it. I forget, we were flying, the last time we were there, we were flying home from Milan, so we stayed a night there, and whatever day it was, like, the one day they were closed. And I was like, God, damn it, I wanted to schedule trip. But hey, we got quite a Matt on tour schedule we're building out here. Hawaii, Milan, where else are we going?

We got to go back to Atacama. Where else didn't you go to? Yeah. Were there other places that you were like, I should have went there when I was running this podcast or this radio show? Yeah. That's a great question. I'll tell you, I'll tell you one for sure, Erescebo. I wish I could have gone.

I've known so many great people who worked there, got their start there, some of them, amazing stuff that was done there. Just maybe the saddest thing that happened across the 20 years of doing the show is the collapse of that dish. And, you know, right now it does not look like it's going to be replaced. I still have hope. It's so important to that community there in Puerto Rico. I hope that that happens.

Another one that's very related, Green Bank. Yeah, yeah. I'm trying to think of. Yeah. Another place, another real shrine of science that I would love to visit. Yeah, that's a fun one because of the whole like the National Radio Dead Zone or whatever it's called. Yeah. The quiet zone.

Right. Yeah. And there's that like community of people that think it's bad to live near Wi-Fi and they live like right nearby. Do you ever read about that? I hadn't heard that. Wow, that's a great story. Don't go too far down that. No, I'm not. No. There's a community there. Probably love Starlink. I'm trying to think. You're super pumped about Starlink. I, okay, I told you Monacaa. There must be other places that I've considered that I really would love to, that I've thought about going to, that I have. haven't made it to yet. But those... I'm assuming orbit. It's pretty good.

Oh, orbit, of course. No question about it. Yeah, absolutely. I just, in fact, I'm going to talk next week. There's a good friend who is with one of the companies that wants to build a big orbital hotel, basically, big orbital station with gravity, artificial. And I've said, man, if you can get me up there, I think you need to put me up there with a microphone.

Maybe you do a panel? Can you do a panel and maybe Jake can host it? Yeah. I could be on it. Yeah, as long as I'm on it, as long as I'm on it. I just, you know, the closest I have come is sticking my head up inside spaceship too.

That's about it out at the spaceship company. But I still, my dream as, Nah. Well, it wasn't. They hadn't put in the interior yet, but no, man, I was thrilled, man. I literally, that's all I got to do is stick my head up inside the hatch and kind of look around. And that was pretty exciting. But my dream years ago before I knew better was to someday get out as far as Jupiter and be able to look down on that mind-boggling surface, you know, not realizing.

back then that I'd be dead within half an hour. But now I would absolutely settle for a nice suborbital flight. But yeah, getting up in the lower Earth orbit and spending a couple days up there, I'd give pretty much anything for that, short of a child. Short of a child. And they're both adults now, so they probably would object. the line. They have legal standing to object if I tried to trade one of them for a ride.

Oh, dear. Okay. Well, there we have it. Well, that's, yeah, that's, I can't think of a better place to end the show than that. And Matt's love for us, children. Oh, oh, breaking news, maybe. We may just have the news. Okay.

I do have the news. I'm going full frame. Okay. It actually came three minutes ago. I was hoping that it would happen during this show. You are very likely, guys, the first podcast to be able to share the news that our dear light sail, too, which is why I'm wearing this shirt, is no more. Lightsale's dead.

Long-lived light sale. You knew it was coming. You guys told me you had heard the preliminary word from Aerospace Corp that it had re-entered. We knew this was coming. It's been three and a half years. It actually took much longer to re-enter than we expected, but we now have the official word from the chief scientist, Bruce Betts, that our light sale has met its demise. What is no longer up light sale too? You did. So good. I did see it early this week. Jonathan McDowell was tweeting, hey, everybody, keep an eye on the light sail orbit. Like things, it's coming down quick now. So I was like,

But the number seemed like, is it really going to come down that quick? And then I was like, oh, I guess based on the shape of that spacecraft, yeah, that's going to be, that's going to be quick once it starts picking up some drag. If you look at the curve on our website, let me make sure I'm in the frame here. It's like this. Shoo, down, down, down, down, down. Because, man, the deeper you go, the more drag, then takes you deeper, the more drag. And, you know, as Bruce says, we have this itty-bitty spacecraft with very low mass. these gigantic wings.

And yeah, it was faded to happen quickly. Yeah. Right. Especially with all the solar activity picking up. Man, what a success. We have been very emotional over this. I can tell you that a lot of my colleagues, I'm sure, are in years right now. Among them, maybe Bruce, I wish I had video of that.

But it's been a hell of a run. I mean, when you consider that we started in 2005, oh, look at the, that image of the Middle East and those beautiful sales. Thank you for posting that, for putting that up. We started with Cosmos I. We tried in 2005, and here we are 17 years later, more than 17 years later. It has been a hell of a run. I'm very proud to be able to share that with you guys and be able to, I'm sure,

be the first to mention it to a live audience. That's awesome. That was such a cool mission. Yeah, yeah, I'm bummed. I went to go, I ran off to grab. I have this bag where I keep all my mission patches sewed on and stuff. And it's a new bag and I was transferring stuff over. I think I haven't transferred my light sail patch over.

So it was not on here. I thought I had a really good moment. But yeah, I have the mission patch somewhere. So. So to hear, we're going to get that status. Yeah, you got to go find that, Jake. That's very cool. I love it.

Yeah. I'll find it. I'll post a picture. We'll do that. I got a great jacket that has patches from all of the Apollo missions, and the center is the main Apollo program patch. And it was given to me one of my brothers, my craziest brother. He loves it when I'd say that.

And it's like, where can I wear that? I knew I was going to see Rusty Schweikert, who I know pretty well, Rusty Schweikert of Apollo 9. and I said, Rusty, will you do this for me? So I put the jacket on at some event. And I had a sign all made for Rusty to hold up next to me. I turned around so that my back was in the shot. And there's Rusty with a big smile holding a sign pointing at the jacket that says,

nice work, Stephen. And it was my, that's my brother pointed to the jacket. And it was fun. Amazing. It was like the best thing I could ever do for my brother, Stephen. He still owes me. Give him up for the flight. Yeah, there we go.

Yeah. I can do. You're right. Well, Matt, this has been awesome hanging out. I appreciate all the wisdom and the hijinks that you share in here. So that's going to be. And 20 years of Planet's May radio. We appreciate that a lot.

Paving the way. Whenever we tell people, we do space podcasts. They're like, oh, yeah. I listened to a couple, mostly just planetary radio. We're like, yeah, that's good. Keep listening to that one. Ours are good, too, but that's fine. We're not mad about it.

You guys do an outstanding job. You have a well-earned reputation for, I don't know about for this show, but. No, this one, I've had a blast. This has been such fun. Planetary Society's second favorite podcast is this one, mostly because we just force everyone to come on the show and hang out. That's probably fair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there are a lot more. You have to have Sarah now. And she'll be great fun to talk to. But you guys have done terrific work. Keep, you know, getting us out there working toward the red planet. And because that's what we all want to see. Boots on Mars, right? As I said once at Explore Mars, I don't want to see boots on Mars. I want to see a shoe store on Mars.

That solves the Y. You're right, commerce. Thank you. You've humored me. Thank you. Thank you for a lot. laughing at that. It's been fun, guys. I love this. Jake, do you got anything going on lately here? Yeah, not quite. I'm cooking a few things up. So like I said last time, I'm still working on getting ready for the end of Insight. So that's a Mars mission that's coming to an end here pretty quick. So I'm going to have a good interview for that. And other than that, I think we're going to take a break for Thanksgiving next week, right? Because I think that's when

is it's a turkey day next week. That's when it is. That's when you guys do it. Yep. And no big space events have happened recently that we need to talk about on the show. So we'll just wait until December 1st to have another podcast. Nothing big going on. Honestly, I have nothing to say about Artemis 1. It was a beautiful launch. And I have no analysis for you beyond that at the moment. Like, we talked about it forever and it's finally launched.

It's great. Yeah. Go Artemis. Exactly. So we'll catch it when it's coming back around. Yeah. By the time we talk next, it'll have been on closest approach and all. And the images are going to be awesome as that thing goes, you know, past the moon.

It's going to be the solar array selfie cams are great. They are. They're really good. Any space image with the spacecraft in the shot, as we just saw with Lightsail? Yes. Perfect. Yes. Just instantly the best shot.

All right, everybody. Thanks for hanging out. Matt, thanks again for coming on. This is so much fun. Thank you, guys. Great fun. See you. Take care.

One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, and the test.