Off-Nominal - 91 - The 240-Hour Cut

Episode Date: January 19, 2023

Jake and Anthony are joined by Ben Feist, Data Visualization & Informatics Software Engineer and Historian at NASA Johnson Space Center, to talk about his work, including the amazing Apollo in Real Time experience.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeApollo in Real TimeFrom Apollo 17 to NASA – Ben FeistFollow BenBen FeistBen Feist (@BenFeist) / 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

DLS and go for main engine, start. Oh, friends, welcome to Off Nominal. The first time that we've been changing up our pre-show format, Jake, where we're tweeting and tweeting, and we were sort of mixed up for a second about how technology works. But we officially made it with our friend Ben Feist. Feist as in Feisty, which I feel like you are about to get a Macedon account, it sounds like, so maybe you should be at Feisty.

Yeah, I'm sure my name's already taken. We'll see. Well, the best part about Macedon is your name's not taken anywhere because you could sign up on anything and then be whatever you want. Oh, okay. I bet there's not a feisty. That's why I sign up for Elon Musk at Space and Space. I bet there's not a feisty.

There's no feisty yet. You could be feisty at spacie.spac. You could just start up your own Macedon server and be feisty at feisty. But then I could never actually say that to anybody if I was at. Well, that was a terrible intro. I'm sorry for derailing us entirely. Hi, Jake. Please help us get back on the rails.

Okay. Well, you want to do drinks? I can do that. That's something I have in front of me. So I made a mescalita today. So I did it all properly with the to gene salt on the edge, some limes in there. A little bit of mescal, a little bit. that owners a cure.

So bottoms up. Thanks for being here, Ben. Ben, what you got? Oh, my pleasure. I'm nothing. I should have gone first because I have nothing to follow that up. I just have a scotch on the rocks. That's pretty fancy, though.

I'm actually jealous of that, though, because I can't drink scotch anymore. I got, I don't know, I became allergic to it somehow. I just, if I have a glass of scotch now, the next day I feel like I have a cold, like every time. So I just like can't do it anymore. Well, I'm going to do it. Yeah.

Yeah, brown liquors don't work for me at all. No. It's a quirk of my system. It just doesn't work with me at all. So that's not what I got. I got a thematic, um, thematic drink, Jake.

Uh, I found this beer at the local beer store. It's called synthetic echoes. Which I feel like is, is a good descriptor of, Ben's projects. Okay. Yeah.

So. That is my brewery. So there you go. It's a very good choice. First state brewery? This is Ben's. He's moved to Delaware and set up first state brewing company. So here we go.

That's a tall boy, Jake. That's nice. I saw 8% on there. Is this going to be a good show? It's a tall boy. And I'm ready to talk about, I'm ready to just the entire time that we're doing this. Ask Ben, why Apollo 12 does. not exists on Apollo in real time, which we covered before the show. It's because he hates

Pete Conrad personally. So now we can move on and actually dig into what has always been, to me, the project I've been most mystified by, so I'm very excited about this. You're mystified by Apollo in real time. Yeah. Oh, interesting. Yeah. It's a, it's a, it's a mesmerizing project. Like, it's just, there's, because there's so much to it. There's the technical side,

there's the historical side. There's, like, there's just a lot that we got to talk about. So I don't know where the right spot to start is, but maybe like, why Apollo in real time? Where did it come from?

Yeah, well, that's a, wow, this is like a therapy session if that's the case, because this is a side project. I did it for fun. because I like making multimedia projects. That's what I've always done for years and years. And early on in the 90s,

I came across the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. I don't know if you guys have seen that website, but it's been up since like 93. It's still up. And it was the richest material I've ever seen. It was like, this is what the Internet is for. It was my reaction when I saw it, because it was through dialogue,

Up in 1995 or so, it came onto my computer and I could read the transcripts of what they actually said when people were on the moon. And it's hard for anybody today to remember that moment back then. But you used to have to go to a library at a specific institution to get access to that kind of material. And hypertext really changed the landscape of that. And this became a very well-developed, and it was already very well-developed back then. archive of the Apollo missions. And I thought, you know, in the mid-90s, I was like, we had a lot of technology and not a lot of ideas of what to do with it.

So we used to have these people who refer to any creative people that worked on the internet as content providers. I don't know if you ever heard that term. How hilarious, right? It's like, we have all this stuff. We just don't know what to put on it. And here was the richest content I could have imagined. And, you know, I probably had just watched the Apollo 13 movie, which had come out, and here's the real stuff.

Right. Anyway, so Apollo Real Time was always an idea of, wouldn't it be awesome to have all of that material together in a multimedia project? So it wasn't just a hypertext project like the Surface Journal. But it was, what if you could read the transcripts while you were listening to the crew while you saw the TV footage and you like it? But it was way too big a project team. even conceive of doing back then. You know, that was the era of like real media player that you were waiting for like 10 minutes for five minutes of audio to buffer so you could hear it over the internet.

You know, it's crazy. Here we are on a live YouTube stream. Through satellites to Jake too. Yeah, through Starlink. Yeah, I'm saying. Anyway, so that like it, it turned out Apollo 17 would have been over 100 CD-ROMs. in size, like if I had built it with CD-Rons, like the 90s technology. So it just kind of followed me around through the years until technology started catching up,

and I eventually took a shot at it. And I didn't want to just do part of the mission. I wanted to contribute to the Apollo Flight Journal, which is the flight kind of companion to the surface journal that was missing Apollo 17. So I kind of took on the effort of cleaning some of that historical data. for the flight journal. And this material in Apollo in real time has been donated back to the flight journal.

So it's complete now with 17. But really, you know, I could have just done like a little example. You know, what if I just did the landing or I did one of the EBAs? Yeah. But I always knew that the cool stuff was like, do it the hard way, you know.

It's going to be so much more impactful to people to check it out if it's everything. So, and I'm not really trying to make a, You know, I had no deadline. I wasn't trying to make anything out of it. I just wanted to do it for fun. So I spent six years doing it before I put it out there. So it was like, do it the hard way and take forever on evenings and weekends.

Not every evening or every weekend, but just keep packing away at it. And then when I put it online, it was 302 hours long and contained all of the photos and everything that you see today. it's gotten better over time as more accurate over time but not a lot more material has been added since it went live in this and it was in 2015 so for 17

for Apollo 17 so I don't know if that answer is why but it was just like you know my dad used to say it demands it demanded to be made you know on its own this theme that we've had like many times

on this show where and I'm going to forget all the examples where like we've talked to Jonathan McDowell who has, like, he is compelled to make a list of every object that has went to space and where it currently is. He can't not do that. And I feel like you just expressed a similar sentiment. It was like, I don't know why. I just, I couldn't not do this project.

And something in my brain made me do it. And then, well, you have kind of this, what's the fallacy called when you've, like, sunk too much time into something and starts to have more value than it should have. Well, I've done that. I did that. I let that propel me through this project. Like I had put in many years and I was just like, what am I doing? This is never going to get finished. And I'd stop for months.

And then, you know, it would slowly call me back as a little thought. Like, what was the last technical problem I was trying to solve? Or what was the, what stage was I in again? And then, you know, next thing you know, I've got it open and I've been working on it for a couple hours. So, and a hobby is a job you can quit any time. So there was no pressure. Like, you know, this has really taught me a lot about. work because if you just do it because it demanded to be done on its own and and you have no

deadline or external pressure you can make anything anybody could make anything you just have to spend the time and like I used it so I always worked in the internet world and I remember thinking things like wow I wish I worked for that other agency that just won NASA as a project as a client so I could work on NASA things and I you know how foolish right like you can work on that I just showed you can work on NASA things. Just do it yourself, right? You don't have to get paid. Anyway, that's kind of the crux of it. Yeah, yeah. Huh. I mean, I love the the brilliance of this thing, of course, is just like you said, having everything together. And it's not just like you go and find the information you want. It presents an experience to you. Like, it's almost every year when

there's an anniversary of one of the things, I just pop it up on that day. And I just kind of like, you know, sit through the launch or sit through the land and just find a spot that I want to just kind of sit and watch almost like it's a you know it's like a tv show almost and you get everything at once and I always learn something new when I do it and that's what I what I love about it so um I don't we said three 302 hours long for Apollo 17 like that's too much to I mean that's that's more than like the that's like more doctor who episodes you know like there's a lot of content to watch you can't just go and sit down and watch it all and so it's like it's almost evergreen in that way and that you can always come back to it and keep experiencing it.

So I love it. I'm really excited that we're able to talk to you about it because this is one of my one of my favorite things on the internet. This is what the internet is for, to me. Thank you. Yeah, the 302 hours long,

I remember the whole time I was making it thinking like, no one's going to watch this thing. Like what? You know, it didn't even occur to me that it was the drop in, drop out audience. Like, you know,

come and, you know, check out the moment a photo was taken, but then stay. accidentally for 45 minutes while you're watching the rest of that period of time on this mission, right? Is it turned into like tweet length, you know, things that you might want to drop in to check out? So it actually had a, it had legs to it that I did not anticipate.

I thought it was just going to be for like, you know, hyper enthusiasts that really wanted to dig in. And actually what it turned out to be was for people that aren't hyper enthusiasts that get to actually see what happened on the mission for however long they want. So that's another lesson for me. It's never going to be what you expected to be. It's just going to turn into whatever it is after you're done and see other people are going to decide what it's useful for. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Isn't the funny things, though, that like, I almost feel bad that, and it might be because it's so hard to actually access this outside of what you've done, is that, like, I feel bad that I haven't watched every second of a human, that has been on the lunar surface. Like, how have I not sat through literally every second of somebody walking on the moon, right? And it's, we haven't because, I don't know what, like, you know, it happened before our time, so we weren't tapped into it at the time, and we've read and watched every piece of media that there is about the moon landing.

So we feel like we know it really well, but yet we don't know every little tiny moment of the mission. And partially, it's like, I don't actually know where to go to find that in its entirety, you know? It's spread through, like you're saying, these sites that have been up since, 93, like the first websites that ever existed were like every bit of transcript. But it's not put out there in an accessible format, which might have been part of the reason that you were like, I need to make this a thing that exists in the world so that I can do that. And that's why, like at the beginning I said this is a mesmerizing project, because I feel like on these missions I have seen the whole thing, you know, but I haven't seen like, you know, every time that John Young was driving the rover around.

I haven't seen all the miles that he put on that thing. And I feel like a bad space nerd because of that. No, but I think that's the, you've caught onto what the same reaction I got when I found the lunar surface journal, right? Which was, here it all is, how do I just absorb all this? And you quickly realize it's impossible, like, because it's just so much material that you're never going to become that. And then, you know, that's my on-the-ground version of learning what a historian is, you know.

Yes, you don't ever know everything, you know, of course. But, you know, how often do we get that? I mean, maybe you and I are just similarly wired that when we see this material, we see it for crazy value, right? Other people don't, right? I mean, there's people in the world that, you know, you stop someone on the street and ask them about this talk. they may not be interested at all, right?

So I think it's important for people to just find the topic that they're interested in and try to do something if they can to dig in like that. Yeah, yeah. Well, and it's a tremendous value from a historical standpoint. Like you said, learning how to be a historian, like documenting this kind of thing. Obviously, it was a well-documented event to start with just because everybody knew it was going to be a big deal. But preserving it and transforming it into new mediums,

It's an important job that's going to continue long after we're all gone. You know, like, it's something that we need to always kind of keep track of. And I know that, like, other historians would love to have something like, you know, someone 200 years from now is going to really be happy that this exists because they're going to be able to use it for to understand Apollo in a whole new way with that much distance. Right. Like, imagine if we had something like this for, I don't know, like the Civil War or go back further. You know, if we could watch the Roman Senate for a day, or does you have all the footage for the inside the Roman Senate? Like, how amazing that would be, how much you would learn from that, right?

And so, yeah, it's great that this exists. And it really changes. Yeah, sorry, I interrupt, but it really, another thing I've learned about is that it changes greatly what history is because this is direct primary material that we can see events happening, right? And we are not reading a book about it. not reading an interview by somebody who was there about it. And maybe we'll get into it, but for the other two missions that are on Apollo in real time,

what we have is this treasure trove of audio that was recorded in mission control. And it's coming for 17, but it's still stuck in the National Archives right now to be digitized. But so for Apollo 11, there's 11,000 hours of audio in Apollo in real time that is everybody in mission control. you can literally sit in any position in mission control and for the whole mission and hear what those people running that positioning in mission control we're doing. So yeah, there you go. That's the interface for it. We said 11,000 hours.

Yes, it's 11,000 hours. It's a lot of hosting. I was just going to say, keeping this. Anyway, so what this does is it, allows us to actually understand what did they do during Apollo 13 to save the mission and mission control. Not the like boombastic generalization of that. And when I put 13 online, actually,

I heard from flight director Jerry Griffin, and I told him that, hey, this is going to go live. And he said, oh, boy, I can hardly wait to see if all the stories I've been telling for 50 years actually happened. You know, like, you know, he was tongue in cheek, of course, but he's right.

Only a little bit. Yeah, you're going to misremember it every time you tell the story. And, you know, all of a sudden you were drinking a glass of scotch while you were in mission control because he told it wrong once and you were like whispered down the land yourself, you know. Yeah, and you add, you know, you add something like the based on a true story movie. And then people started actually remembering things that happened in the movie as events that happened in the mission that didn't happen. You know, we've seen examples of that all over the place.

And this is, I think, a type of correction for historical truth that we get to have now. I mean, for everything. If you think of every Instagram photo that's taken, like, that's kind of a timeline and a location. You know, if Facebook were so desired to do it, they could create a, you know, that bar, that night in real time, you know, based on the things that are being shared and videos being recorded. et cetera, like we could, we could really transform how history is recorded now that we have the technology. It's just we haven't already gone there yet. Yeah, yeah. I heard something recently. Now, I'm going to misremember the details, but it's a grim example,

but what you were saying about, like, memories that have been misremembered, somebody recently wrote a book about Bloody Sunday, and they had, there was this big, like, you know, state investigation into Blueprint. Sunday and it was something about like somebody had placed broken eyeglasses somewhere very specific that they were able to track down as like a piece of evidence and during the investigation of this 28 different people said they were the ones that put these eyeglasses like on the you know on the curb or something like that so nobody knows who actually did it because 28 people remember that they did it and it was because like you know when your brain's in those situations you're

going to rewrite stuff in your head as you like rethink about it, think about it over and over again. But the fact that you have like what everyone said on a mission, I'm thinking about when we're finally back at the moon and we're at one of these landing sites and we're like, okay, let's find what's still here and where they left stuff and where things got blasted after liftoff, you're going to be able to go back through here and listen to, you know, somebody talk about where they placed their tool or where they put the thing down or where like general relativity references. It was to the left of where I was. Where's that orange rock at? And the fact that you can piece that all back together from actual evidence rather than, you know, people that have

written down books from somebody who's told them a story in a bar 200 years ago. Like, that's going to be pretty wild to be able to go to the site and have, yeah, I mean, you've just created the audio tour experience at the Apollo 11 landing site. Like, whether you know or not, You just did it. Yeah. You just described my current job at NASA to try to preserve that context of what's happening on Artemis. And also, how do you plan for things that we're going to do and then relate what actually happened to what was actually planned to do? Because NASA saw Apollo in real time and they said, hey, we'd love to organize our data like you have for Apollo.

How can we do this so that no one has to do what you did in the future? It just gets collected that way. And eventually that turned into, would you like to be a contractor here? And of course, I jumped at it. I mean, I was doing all this stuff because it was very exciting to me. And now I had been offered to come in and help with a return to the moon. Are you kidding me? Yes.

Did you have a sense at any point when you were working on the project that that was going be a thing that occurred in your future? Because I feel, or you had no sense that this was going to be a thing that anyone looked at? No way. No way. This is Ben's fun project that 10 people will see. Well, I mean, I kind of, I was trying to make something that was a cool experience. Like you said, like it was the experience side was what I was trying to make happen.

I didn't know I was making something that would like provide context to, you know, all the lunar samples that were collected, for example, which it has done. And I had that all explained to me after the fact. So I wasn't thinking, oh, if I do a great job of demoing this, then NASA is going to hire me because there's a clear reason for this. Because I was really just going for the something cool kind of impact. And then, like I said, I had to have it explained to me that it actually made a tool. So now that I understand that, I'm making a tool for Artemis. So does that mean we're going to get Artemis 3?

in real time? Is that what's going to happen? Well, yes. But the issue is going to be whether it's in real, real time, or is it in post-mission real-time like Apollo? So there's issues at hand there within NASA about exporting data in real-time and what can be exported. Oh, do we know? Et cetera.

You do? Okay. Sorry to bore your listeners with export issues. Oh, no. I'm just giving you crap because of ITAR. Ar-TAR was the reason we didn't know about like weather constraints or something. I don't remember what the drama was at this point. I put that in the back of my head.

Okay. Yeah, so that has to be carefully managed, and we want to make sure that that could happen. But there is a process right now where EBAs on ISS are live on YouTube, so you could argue that it's the same deal. Yeah. But, of course, this would be more than just YouTube stream. This would be multimedia, if we can get it right.

wouldn't be great to have all the telemetry of you know everything that's happening on the on the surface it's sure wood ben yeah heart rates you know i want to see how victor glover is when he steps out on the moon yeah that's right yeah i want the ar goggle from his head came no crude data no crude data all you get the the historic story of what was it john young who had like a heart rate of like 50 or whatever on liftoff. It wasn't 50, but it seemed like it based on the retelling of that. Yeah. I still remember his old joke about that.

He was like, when I asked about it, he said, yeah, but I told him I was too old for it to go any faster. So, he's not so exciting. Everything. You mentioned about, so lessons learned and how to store this data in or how to capture it today and store it like you have. of what was the process for you to figure out, you know, you had that old website where you could read all the transcript, but did you take all the data you could find

and like transform it in particular ways? What was the, how did you figure out how to actually do this kind of like archival storage system? Yeah, well, it was really just make everything about time, you know, obsessively in both the interface and in the data, is I wasn't trying to like correct too much wrecked too much of the data. I was already just trying to figure out where was that photo taken? When? Sorry, when was that photo taken in the timeline? And then

put it there in its raw form. Like I'm not curating the best photos or something like that. It would just, it was just make, give everything timestamps. So of course, that started with the transcript and all the audio. So that was 99% of the effort. And then the context of that actually helps to place all the TV transmissions where you can kind of stretch and pull. Because you've got to remember this is all analog material. So it's all warbling and moving in time. It's not locked in with a time code or anything. So there was a lot of kind of nudging and tucking.

And it's not exact. I mean, it's just if you look at the time when something happens on Apollo in real time, give it a plus or minus a few seconds, right? Because it's going to be, I had to turn it into a digital timeline. and then force everything into it. For Apollo 11 and 13, those actually are much closer to real time because it turns out all those recordings

of Mission Control did have a time code on track one of those 30 track tapes. And it's the only historical time code recorded that we've ever found anywhere. And it's for the duration of the mission. So we can, there was a long process of correcting those audio tapes so that that actually was like a.

digital because you're still playing back on analog tapes, but they have a time code and we know the spec of the time code so we can twist the digitized recordings back into historically accurate time. And that was a big computer science effort led by other people that are on the team. So that panel you open, that's how we can go to any point in the mission and actually hear it is because we've done that processing on using the time code on track one and then correcting all the adjacent tracks. Anyway, then we can use that as the sort of source of truth. And then when a video recording of TV transmissions or something needs to get placed,

we know precisely where it goes in the actual timeline. And it doesn't matter if that video is like wobbling around because it started at the right time. I imagine that that wouldn't be just a it's probably much worse with analog but it's it's even a problem with digital right because if you get you know some some video at 48,000 hertz and then you get an audio track at 44 whatever it is 441 um those get out of sync pretty quickly right like they can they can fall out of out of line so I imagine analog yeah it must be just wild to try and force into some sort of rigid binary system right huh oh yeah well these were a 16 hour long tapes and they drifted over an hour and a half.

And they didn't drift a linear fashion. They drifted like fast, slow, you know, like it got warm in the room and things changed. Like it was a total wild west. You can see what the H-PAC setting was at. Yeah. Yeah. I love these moments we're watching right now. Who are like to whoever in, whoever in 1968 put the spec in that there was going to be an Irig B time code on track one.

because here we are 50-odd years later using it, and in a way they definitely never anticipated. No. These moments when you're showing the pictures they're taking as it's happening are the coolest part when they're on the surface and you see like, you know, this, here he is hopping around the surface and then here's these very sunwashed photos that they're taking. It's, it makes it, I don't know if it's the fact that the photos are,

like actual resolution versus the video that was broadcast on TV back in the day, but it just makes it feel so like, yeah, I could, you could see how this would come about in this day and age, and yet like it would feel so expected to have that real-time high-resolution imagery of what they're doing on the service, but since we never had that until, you know, somebody like you just, you know, painstaking, we went through 11,000 hours of audio. and joined the time stamp imagery. It's crazy. It's crazy. But now, if asterisk,

if you can get the clock in the camera set correctly, then you get timestamps on every photo that's taken, right? And that asteroid is a big if in space. Honestly, it's a big if on Earth. Yeah. It's like,

you pop the battery out of your GoPro for one second and everything's shot. So it's like, no, I've got to go use the adjust date and time stamp operations in my photos app and then it's all out of whack and you're like I no longer care about this because I'm not bent. Yeah. Well, so that if you can think of it as, you know, if I was, you know, I don't know,

in some position at NASA and I could go around and, you know, suggest that people set the clocks correctly on their cameras. They would all say, what for? They're close enough, you know, like, or sure we will, you know, but it would be, it would be unclear why it mattered. But what's happening is everybody sees this, like they see Apollo in real time, and now subsequently a project that we've made internally at NASA

that replays all the ISS EBAs and everything else that happens on the ISS. And they want to know why the photos aren't lined up exactly right. And we can go, hey, you should set the clocks. And they'll go, great, we'll get right on that because we want this to be better. You know, so it's a, I don't, you know, it doesn't have to be this like medicine coming from an external group saying, please do the thing we need you to do. They're saying, what can we do to make it better?

Which is a wonderful place to be because you've kind of given them enough of a demo. And what the hope is is if this happens across enough groups that there's going to be, you know, spec level mission definition for all the stuff that happens on Artemis so that this is just part of what they do. It is now clear with the value, you know, it's a growing awareness of the value of context with a capital C as something that should be preserved across data. And these tools that myself and the team that I work on have made are doing a really great job of spreading that word throughout the organization. Yeah, yeah. The context part is really big. I don't know how much, like, how much interaction you have with people that are actually leveraging this as a tool, because I know the geologists should be able to absolutely, like, use this as real, you know, real data in a paper and actually publish on something that's be able to say, like, okay, using the data from upon real time, we know this sample was this far from here and blah, blah, blah, blah, and do all these kind of things with it, because that's, like, geology is context. That's the whole point of it, basically is trying to figure out what's happening around it, right?

And this has got to be a useful tool for that. Yeah. And it was the geologists at NASA who originally got in touch with me. The first person was Noah Petro at Goddard. He was the LRO project scientist. And he said, do you know, do you know what you've made? You know, and he was very excited as a geologist that, you know, suddenly there is context for the samples.

Actually, if you, I can give you a live demo if you like. If you go on the website now and type in a five-digit sample number, I can show you how to do that. So the little magnifying glass, if you can find that tiny button, type in like 7-6-1 and see if you can see a sample number. There you go. Those bottom ones are sample numbers. I sure can.

Click one. And then the transcript has a white underlined link in it. It does? Oh, down here. Where am I seeing it? Well, maybe it didn't Can you make it bigger, Anthony? Yeah, I was going to say

You picked a random one I thought you knew a number You were like 7661 I was like damn He knows every sample The bottom one 76, 720 Got it got it got it got it

There it is 46 Yankee Oh great You picked one that has nothing Okay You told me 761 This is what happened to live down

How about 761 3-0. How about that? 47 Yankee. 47 Yankees. 47 Yankees is this bag? Oh, here you go. Look at that. There we go. So it shows all the photos that were taken of these samples after it was brought back to Earth. This is all coming from the curation website

that NASA has. Now we're digging into the 50 years of research that have gone into that sample. But the place you found it in the website was the moment it was picked up. And you can hit, hear what they're saying is they're picking it up and why they picked it up and all those contexts around it right so if you keep scrolling down you'll in the on the right side keep going keep going you should get to academic papers there you go so there's academic papers that have been written over the years that reference that sample ever so everything you just said

it's almost like you knew this existed with what you just said to me because this is the context now these these papers now have context to the mission right um Jake just lost the next two weeks of his work to this finding he's getting nothing done the next two weeks so yeah so the real interest there is that you know the person that wrote this paper I can't see what year that was but you know many years ago 2014 yeah okay not that many years ago um you know probably never saw the moment that that sample was collected, you know, and or what papers were written next to this or like, what sample was collected just before this one? And could that possibly add some, um, some context into what, what it is in our research? Yeah, like this one has a ton. The next sample over has a ton of

research papers about it from 70s and 80s. Uh, it's really interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So that, you know, uh, you know, let's just, so, so I'm, so I'm, really investigating here like or you know playing with the idea of putting post-mission data back in the context in the mission and then you're kind of making the timeline of the mission really an index for everything that comes after that mission so like you were just mentioning about artemus we get to have that preserve before and after you know moment of a sample being collected or action being taken or something is if we can tie in an unbroken chain of data kind of like a paper references are, right, of that moment in time going forward through research.

And then all the data collected in the lab being connected to the moment that it was, you're basically trying to create like forever an unbroken chain of information about that event that occurred on a moon. Yeah. Huh. Wow. That's super cool. Yeah.

And that's, and it's really exciting to think about, you know, thinking about Artemis, having this sort of foresight, which, I mean, it's not like the Apollo people didn't think about trying to like record stuff. Obviously they did. But just, you know, with 50 more years of experience and looking back at what happened with Apollo and knowing what was missing and what was great, you know, what do we keep doing for Artemis? What do we stop doing? What do we add? What are we, you know, all that kind of stuff. It's going to make that even better, I think. So now I'm like almost excited for like the mission to be over so that you can do the post. one so that I can watch it again, like differently, right?

Well, it's also funny to consider the context that, you know, if you were to go and ask Gene Cernan right now when he's on the surface, like, will people study this rock that you just picked up for the next 50 years plus? Because he would have been like, you know, obviously his little speech when they left the moon knew that we weren't coming back immediately, but I don't, like, he was pretty sure we were going to be back on the moon way before now. So these samples seemed at the time. like, yeah, there were, you know, the first couple samples we picked up off the moon,

but there was no thinking that these were going to be as unique as they have remained for 50 years. Like, no one thought that this was going to be the main sample that was researched for 50 years and running. So the historical importance to them is, this is an obvious statement, but like it's not obvious the historical importance of anything until it's actually history, and then it becomes like the most important thing we've ever picked up off the lunar surface. Yeah, and it's also just a rarity. of the material, like that for scientific purposes. So the historical importance is actually less important than the fact that it is pristine

sample from the moon. So that, like, I'm not sure if you're aware of the ANCSA project that is underway and has, it was just a conference about it, but it's the Apollo next generation sample analysis project. And it, they opened a deep core sample that was collected at Station 3 of Apollo 17 for the first time. And this is 50 odd years after them. mission or just under 50 years, I think.

And because they knew at the time of the mission, not just that we weren't going back in a long time, but it was, it was, why open all the samples now? All our technology is only at this level. And we know technology is progressing greatly. Why don't we just save some? Because if we're not going back, at least we could open them later and we'll have better instruments. Like, what an amazing moment of foresight, you know, from so many years ago.

And that moment was this year, this past year, where they did that analysis on that core of Station 3. I don't feel like we have that similar outlook right now. Like, I feel like we're generally, societally, a little bit more like, we figured this out. Like, we have scanning electron microscopes. Like, come at us future. We got all the stuff that we need right now. Yeah. Well, I mean, they did use some of the very latest techniques when they,

We're doing the analysis on the core, including, you know, x-ray computed tomography, you know, 3D internal scans of the core before it was touched. And, you know, the resolution of those things now is so much greater than what it was before. And I think it's always getting better. But, yeah, it, like the amount of sacrifice that took for the scientists at the time that could have just written another pile of, you know, valuable papers at the time. But they went, no, we need to, we need to make this, like, difficult. choice. So I just find that really compelling because it's so smart. Yeah.

I mean, planetary geology is such a young field that it makes sense. I forget the instruments for a second. Just 50 years of learning makes the context in our collective minds that much better. You know, even if you just took like the scientists from 1970 and all their instruments from 1970 and plopped them in today to talk with other, you know, ologists who have now got 50 years of experience, like they'll learn tons of stuff just by by all the collective work gone into that. So spreading it out is more than just instrumentation.

I think it's just getting better as humans. Have we articulated a plan on what we're going to do with the Mars samples, Jake? Beyond broad strokes, I don't think so. I mean, you know, they're going to have a building a facility and there's plans to share it with all the international partners and blah, blah, blah, but yeah. I don't know if we set aside a certain percentage for the future or what the. How do you even figure that out? There's a whole team working on it. So I'm sure they will have some ideas around that.

When I think about that until that rocket takes off the surface, it's all just made up until then. Yeah. Yeah. I was just going to say maybe you could claim that the time it's sitting on the surface waiting to be collected was that time. So just delay. Well, that's not a bad point because if you think about, so we started collecting samples with Perseversevue. and it's a year ago, they're not going to be back till 2033. Is that where it's putting right now?

So we'll have 12 years of geologists doing paper with all the remote instruments in that time. We're going to learn something new about those samples before they get home for year. And that atmospheric sample. And the couple of them, yeah. The witness sample, yeah. Ben, did you... So I can't imagine when you started this project, you were like,

I'm also going to completely capture every research paper that's been written about every rock that was picked up off the surface. How did you build out the roadmap for what pieces you were going to roll into this? And are there some that you haven't gotten to yet that you were hoping to now get into a mission timeline? Yeah. So, yeah, I didn't do the sample thing in the first release. So when I met Noah Petro, he came fast with lots of ideas, the things that could be added. And of course, you know, somebody from NASA is interested in asking for things. I did it as fast as I humanly could.

And I think I got all the academic papers into the interface in literally three days. Because it was like fire lit under me. I know, you know, I just went into like, you know, private sector, you know, consultancy mode. And client asked for something, make it happen, right? So I did that for that. I also rendered all the traverses that happen with the rover using LRO, 3D modeling material. So if you hover around and find a purple segment.

There was some we were just watching. There's some purple stuff. Yeah, purple stuff is a, there you go. So that's LRO data that I've 3D rendered into where was the rover as you can hear them talking and driving, etc. So this was after I initially released the tool, because this was just off because the procedure was turn off the transmitter because the umbrella antenna on the rover is bouncing around anyway. It's not going to be fixed on the earth. So don't waste the power, turn off the transmitter and drive in some cases for like an hour to the next location and then turn the transmitter back on again.

So you can hear them talking, but you couldn't tell where they were. So I thought, well, maybe I could make a 3D. rendering of that. And innocently asked Noah if, hey, do you have any data of where they landed? And he was like, that's literally what my job is. So yes. Boom. And he gave me all this data.

I thought, oh, no, now I have to do something with it. So that I had to Google my way through making these 3D renderings, right? Was there any aspect of the LRO imagery of the tracks left in the Regolith that you used to like figure out which side of the rock did they drive around? Yeah, no. That is not visible in the LRO data. You can see footprints because they, they disturb the surface like they were kicking underneath the dirt and

upturning in some cases the darker material underneath. So you can see where the stations were because you can see some footprints in that area. But the driving to and from the stations is invisible. And there's actually a paper was just done this year on trying to recreate those traverses, but even that person was unable to use LRO data and actually used projection data from the camera photos that were taken. So picture this, a prime lens on the camera on Jack Schmidt's chest,

and he's hitting a shutter whenever he remembers to as they're driving. That was part of the procedure. So he'd take like 40 pictures. Whatever you remember, just fire one off. Yeah, it was like, hey Jack, don't forget to take some pictures. From time to time you'd hear him saying, oh, no, I have been talking so much, I haven't been taking my pictures. So it certainly wasn't like on a timer or something, you know, giving you situation awareness. But it really was for, there's one right there.

That's a rover photo. You can see because of the TV cameras in the front. So Jack's sitting the right and the picture he's taking into driving. So this person actually used the properties of that prime lens and extrapolated it into an orthographic view from the top down and then did crater matching with LRO data to figure out exactly where the rover was at the time of every foot it was taken. Now, you think I'm doing painstaking work. How's that? They probably just gave you a grad student. Yeah, they task rabbin at that.

mechanical Turk is pretty cheap these days honestly there's a whole subreddit right of like where on earth was this taken and people are like that's the sign from the wendy's on route 47 by me like i know exactly yeah yeah yeah that's funny so i would like to know i mean we didn't spend a lot of time talking about tech stuff which surprised me on but i do want to know just like a couple things about like even just the the app like itself and how you put that together Are you a web developer? Did you have to learn that stuff?

What was the sort of the strategy behind, you know, getting once you've gone through the 11,000 hours and stuck it on a database somewhere, like how did you get it into this nice interface? Yeah, well, thank you. So I am a web developer. That's my number one thing that I've done for my whole career. I'm 25 years into my career at this point or so. So I, you know, I dated myself earlier talking about CD-ROMs,

but that was what I started out doing. in the 90s. And, you know, multimedia was actually an amazing thing back then because when the rest of the internet was dial-up, you had like 600 megs of data. You could play off a CD-ROM. Like it was a huge difference. And it took probably 20 years or 15

for the internet to catch up to that differential. So making the app was actually the easiest part. It took me probably four months to make the app. The data, was the years and years of work. So I'm a good, I'm a good user experience person. I'm a good developer. I am not a good designer.

So I did rope in some help from a friend who's a designer. And I kind of gave him my like poorly laid out prototype. Like here it is. And he was like, no one cares about the transcript. You can't make the transcript that big. It's all about these photos. The photos are so gorgeous. Like you look at these things.

And I was like, dude, do you know how long it took me to make the transcript? Years. Sunk-taught fallacy. Anyway, of course, what you see there is my friend Chris Bennett's design for what the layout could look like. I had already made that navigation thing at the top, and he kind of just refined the colors in it and stuff

and made some of the corners rounded, etc. But he didn't, he did the layout, like the bigger component layout, and then he did the fine adjustment. on the visual design. The rest was just app development. It is written in pretty much vanilla JavaScript. It's not using any frameworks or anything. And thank goodness I didn't use a framework

because in 2015, that would have meant Angular 1. And now I would have an Angular 1 app I was carrying and feeding. And so it's kind of like JQuery and vanilla JavaScript kind of horribleness to look at now that I'm a React developer, know about how to do that now. I'd like to do it again and react at this point.

But anyway, it's like fast. It turns out I was making a super lean and mean app because there's no framework. It's just doing the browsers is doing what it needs to do to make the app work. And I think maybe another noteworthy thing is that nav thing at the top is all in the canvas.

So that's not HTML. That's using canvas drawing tool called PaperJS. which is again closer to the way you used to be able to do things in Flash and you know the earlier internet because I you know kind of had an idea of what I needed to make but I didn't want to have to translate that through what CSS allows you to make so this was literally like drawing lines you know I can just I'm sure I can draw lines and make make what I need it to be yeah yeah yeah there is no back end to

this app it's just all front end so it loads the whole mission at the beginning when it loads the page. Oh, really? So all the transcripts, all the index of all the photos, like a bunch of indexes of things. The indexes of all those papers and everything is like loaded in the nanosecond it takes for the page to come up because browsers are ridiculously fast. I really didn't want to pay for hosting.

That's why there's no back end. There was no other reason to not have a backend. It's all CSV data files hosted at, you know, a CDN. in and I just love them all in and your browser does all the work. All the videos are on YouTube because that was free. This feels like the only way to do an app about the past is like to like do it all vanilla and like the simplest like I love it. Jake, you know he's speaking my language.

Music to my ears is all thing. This is a GitHub pages and. Yeah, man. Listen, if they're going to foot that hosting bell, might as well. Yeah. host. Every time you got a free a couple years ago.

It kicks off a workflow. Oh, man, I love it. I had a million visitors, 1.2 million visitors during the Apollo 11 anniversary, and it cost me 400 bucks. That's amazing. How much did it cost

Netlify or whoever's whoever's all those to the front end? GitHub's like, why do we make this free again? Yeah. Cloud player is just like eating up all that. That's awesome. Oh, yeah, cloud player is a big part of this thing. Yeah.

That's amazing. Yeah, I don't know what else to really tell you about the code. It's like I just kept throwing asking the browser to do more and I kept not complaining. And I've since this app built another app that was, it's just insane what it's asking the browser to do. And it's not. No problem. Like cheap, you know, low RAM laptop, no problem. Everything works great.

Like, the embarrassment of riches we have for computers in this, like now in current times is ridiculous. Like you can you can be the most like careless, inefficient coder ever and to no problem. Like it's really remarkable browsers can do. I made this this little library and an NPM that's just a, a little calculator for Mars date. So you give it an Earth date and it turns into a Mars date. And so I made a website for that and it's got a like it loads a live clock. And so as you know, like with a live clock, you just,

you just really just make a new date that second every second and recalculate the math. And the math is like it, you know, it does like 17 operations through all this like crazy stuff. And it's just redoing that every second on the browser every time you load this because I don't have a back end for this either. So it's funny. It's exactly what I'm thinking. And it's doing it seven times because I've got all the missions on there too.

So that's always kind of interesting. I noticed that you had on, I don't know if this was your Twitter or something that I was scoping you out on that you mentioned that you had some part in the Apollo 11 movie a couple years ago. I'm curious to hear about that. Yep. Oh, sure. Yes.

That was a lot of fun. You know, I got to do just enough work that I got to, you know, go to Sundance Film Festival and be part of a film team. But really, I didn't make the film. Other people made the film. But it was really wonderful to work with a group of people that wanted to make something so historically accurate. Because, of course, now I'm a stickler for that. You know, this is what happens after you spend all this time painstakingly assembling historical data

as you start caring about historical accuracy. and my so what I contributed to it was I was a technical advisor which means I could get rough cuts and give notes on stuff I noticed that was not represented correctly which is not like it's impossible on this movie because it's all historical material so the only things I'd catch where you know you can't you can't cut down and edit what somebody said in mission control like you need to give the whole sentence you know things like that because the filmmakers are trying to make something that a whole audience can enjoy

and in this case are only going to use things they are not directing. Like they're not the film team. They're not, there's no narrator. There's no guide. And it's just historical material. So it's just things set in mission control. So I did technical advice on it. And then all that work I mentioned about the 30 track audio and mission control

was basically around this. film too. So I gave all that material back to the film and said, hey, I've time corrected everything. So now we can find things. Like you could, because you couldn't find, like, you just had this pile, this like haystack of, yeah, 13,000 hours of 30 track audio. And now you had a wayfinding, like when and who. And you could kind of using that type of coordinate system, like what console, what time. And this other guy on the team named Stephen, uh, from the UK actually use that to put sound to all the silent 16 millimeter footage that was shot in Mission Control.

So all of that material that's in Apollo 11 that's in Mission Control was all silent. There was no sync sound. Wow. And Stephen figured out who is that, what time would they have been on shift, found it in the 30-track audio, looked around for like waveforms that looked like the lips that were moving. Oh, my God. Oh, got one. And he probably did that for like over 100, close.

clips. I think it was like a hundred and some odd clips. Wow. So he's probably looking at like, oh, that person in the back was talking at the time that I want this other person to be talking in the movie. So let me see when that was and then find this person. It's an unreal job. Wow. Yeah. He got to know like the two film, the two film guys that were the he knew the names of the, I think one was bird and the other was in here or not. But like when were they on smoke break? Which was on shift? What were the roles named? Like, based on the hands. handwriting of the slates and things that are in the historical footage. Anyway, that was a special, special project. I haven't even mentioned the 70-millimeter film that was found in the National Archives and the scanning of that. But yeah, so that's definitely a once-in-lifetime kind of opportunity to work on something

like that. And also then it hit for the anniversary of the mission, and it became essentially one of the primary things people were using to remember the mission. And the other, hopefully, being Apollo in real time, which I jokingly referred to as the 240-hour cut of the film. You want it all that's there. Like, all those sync clips are there. All the mission control audio is there.

Everything is there. If you want a theatrical version, then cut that down to an hour and a half, and you get the Apollo 11 movie. That's 240-hour cut. That's amazing. Man, that was amazing. Apolloin realtime.org, peeps. If you have not checked it out, what are you doing with your life?

And the answer is nothing for the next week as you watch this. Just like Jake, now I'm searching back through all of the sample archives now. Yeah, yeah, got some work to do. That's for sure. Ben, thanks so much for hanging out with it. If the listeners want to follow you somewhere, are you social media? What's your internet presence?

Yeah, I mean, I guess Twitter. At feisty, I guess. No, really, I think it's Twitter, although I have been taking a hiatus from social media. So I generally announce things there, but that's pretty much it. If anybody wants to get in touch with me, that's probably the best way.

Thanks for having me. It's been really wonderful. talking to you guys. It's been long overdue. We, because of scheduling, missed the actual 50th anniversary of Apollo 17, but I'm glad that we made this work.

Shouldn't have launched in December. That really crunched our timeline later on, but, you know, if we could go back and tweak their schedule, say, this is really buttoned right up against the holidays, guys. Maybe we can scoge this back a couple weeks. Jake, you've got some crazy show

coming out in a little bit. I don't know if you want to season. Yeah, on Tuesday I got a show coming out over on Wee Martians that's, it's the wildest story in planetary history, I think, planetary science history. It's the origin story of the founding of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And so there's a journalist in Los Angeles, M.G. Lord, who did a whole series about this. It's coming out every week, they're dropping an episode. It's kind of in process right now that tells the story. And it's just like, it's funny because I was doing the interview this week and there you know she opens up with the kind of a highlight of what it is and I've

it's like such a dense collection of words and expressions I never thought I would say on we Martians like things like sex cults and communist McCarthyism and the occult and like it's just the the wildest stuff you can imagine in the the weird history of JPL so we're going to talk about it it's going to be fun to Jake Propulsion Laboratory the Jake proportion to which are you? Yeah. Hey, next week,

I'm going to be driving down to Virginia for a rocket lab launch. They delayed it right up until I could go again. So it looks like it might be a little windy, so I'm hoping that I actually goes off before the show next week. But I think we'll talk about that.

I'm trying to convince Caleb Henry to drive down with me, but we'll see if he does. Consider this pressure if you're listening, Caleb. Yeah. I can't wait. I'm excited to hear about it.

Yeah. We're going to catch up on small launch next week, I believe, on this show. Yes, we are, yeah. There's been some failures. It's been a bad week for the small launchers. Hopefully,

Rocket Lab turns it around. It doesn't make it three for three. Yeah. Well, there's works generally, so. Yeah. It should be okay. It's a good reminder that this stuff is really hard. Yeah.

I like, we're not going to, we'll get into this next week, but ABL's update. that was like, a fire may have spread into the engine compartment. I'm like, do you think? Do you think it may have spread or did it spread into the engine compartment? I don't know why you're being dodgy about this in the wording, but that's a whole topic for next week, Jake.

All right, sounds good. Anyway, thanks for hanging out. Thanks, Ben. We'll see you all next week. Bye, everybody. One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, into death.