Ologies with Alie Ward - Space Archaeology (SPACE JUNK) with Alice Gorman

Episode Date: December 8, 2020

Gaze into the cosmos and wonder at broken satellites, retired rockets and shattered contraptions. Archaeologist Dr. Alice Gorman is a leading expert on orbital debris and chats about what’s up there, how it got there, and how to get it down. Strap in to hear about everything from Sputnik to sports cars, flaming garbage bonking us, alien clutter, collision potential, the most adorable space rubbish, cosmic burials and how one does this type of archeology without boarding a rocket. Also: steaming hot cruise ship gossip. Follow Dr. Alice Gorman at Twitter.com/DrSpaceJunk A donation went to Deadly Science: https://deadlyscience.org.au/ Dr. Gorman’s book: Dr. Space Junk vs. The Universe Sponsors of Ologies: alieward.com/ologies-sponsors More links and info at alieward.com/ologies/spacearchaeology Transcripts & bleeped episodes at: alieward.com/ologies-extras Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologies OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes and now… MASKS. Hi. Yes. Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologies Follow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWard Sound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray Morris Theme song by Nick Thorburn Support the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh, hey, it's that friend who's calls that you always pick up because if they are actually wanting to speak instead of text with their phone, it must be either really good or really bad news. Allie Ward, and that one is very true. Back with another episode of this show called Allergies. Okay, I'm going to try and make this intro speedy as I can. We are raced to get to space drunk. This episode is so good. Thank you to everyone at Patreon. Did you know it cost a dollar a month to join? That's it. And then you can submit questions to Allergies, patreon.com slash Allergies. And then thank you everyone also who rates, who subscribes, who leaves reviews. I read the hell out of all of your reviews. And then I aim a laser pointer at one each week such as

DearWesler who wrote, I'll be honest, I didn't like podcasts, okay, but Allergies has had me hooked since day one. And then Wesler called me an informed closet goblin. And I thank them for that. If you left a review this week or ever, I have read it and I have appreciated it. Okay, onward, space archaeology. Space is a word that's been around since the 1300s. It comes from the Latin spatium, which means room or area. And by the mid 1700s, it meant the cosmic expanse, the stellar landscape, the crushing enormity of nothingness, which is filled with everything, including all of our secrets, and maybe some broken glass and somewhat car keys, which comes from Greeks, archaeologia, the study of ancient things, which TBD to be discussed. Okay, so Patreon,

Kevin Beamer posted this on the patreon.com slash Allergies Community Board. They said, I'd like to nominate three related but distinct allergies, astroarchaeology, the study of how people in the past understood and used astronomy, remote sensing archaeology, the use of satellites and other remote sensing techniques to help with archaeology, stuff on earth, and space archaeology, the study of human artifacts in space. Kevin Beamer, space archaeology, we're doing it. A lot of folks on Twitter also pointed me toward this particular ologist. Her Twitter handle is Dr. Spacejunk. Say no more. And she got her PhD in archaeology with a specialty in stone and glass tool used post colonization and has worked for years in indigenous heritage

management, is a member of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, is the president of the Anthropological Society of South Australia. She's a member of the advisory council of the Space Industry Association of Australia. She's an associate professor at Flinders University in Australia, is recognized as a world expert in orbital debris and launch sites. She's also a TED speaker. She writes the Space Age Archaeology blog, is the vice chair of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics at a late chapter, and is a founding member of the nonprofit organization Archaeology, Science and Heritage Council for All Moonkind Incorporated, which helps protect cultural archaeology sites in space. Oh, and on top of all of this,

she somehow found time to author the book Dr. Spacejunk vs. the Universe, Archaeology and the Future. So we got on the horn when it was afternoon in LA and the future in Australia, and every so often you might hear the delicate tinkling of a spoon against her mid-morning tea, so strap in helmets on for a chat that covers everything from Sputnik to sports cars, cosmic litter, flaming garbage, machines raining down on fields, alien debris, collision potential, radioactive rubbish, cleanup possibilities, the cutest space garbage, burials in the void, and how does one do archaeology without sitting on a rocket to get to work with Dr. Spacejunk, space archaeologist Dr. Alice Gorman.

Oh, so I'm Alice Gorman, and I'm she, her. Okay, cool. Do you think that you may have been one of the first space archaeologists? Was this a thing before? I think I probably was one of the first ones. I wasn't the first one, and I was not the only one back then, and I'm not the only one now. But when I think about it, there was something going on in the year 2000. So sort of around about there, my colleague, Beth Laura O'Leary, who's from New Mexico State University, started thinking about cultural heritage on the moon, and bizarrely, there were actually a few people in Australia who were thinking about space archaeology as well. You wouldn't think Australia would be a big space archaeology hub,

but I had a couple of colleagues who were thinking about the moon and Mars, and also the kind of much broader kind of Xeno-archeological, astrobiological thing as well. But around the year 2000, it kind of all started to come together, like we all met each other, and we started running conference sessions together, and we started sort of developing the ideas and the principles. And more importantly, I guess, we started trying to get a bit of credibility with the broader archaeological community. We all kind of focused on different things. So I started with Spacejunk, and that's continued to be one of my major research interests and obsessions. Others were working on the moon or Mars, or terrestrial space sites, rocket launch sites,

that kind of thing. So I guess this little group of us kind of just started putting stuff out there, trying to build a profile for the idea that this very recent staff actually had things to tell us about how we operate in the world and might have heritage value. And I think, sort of 20 years on, I think we've achieved that. Yeah, it kind of makes me wonder, how old does something have to be for it to be archaeological? Did we have to wait until we had gotten enough junk up there and it was old enough? Does it have to be 30 years, 10 years? Can something be archaeological if it's only 10 minutes old? My answer to that is absolutely it can be. Oh! So there's a couple of interesting things going

on with this idea. One is, when does the past actually start? And Isaac Asimov actually wrote a very interesting short story about this called The Dead Past. A time machine had been invented and there was an archaeologist who was desperate to go back to ancient Carthage and see what happened. And he kept applying for permission to use the chronoscope and kept getting turned back. And in the end, he was so persistent that he found out why no archaeologist or historian was allowed to use the chronoscope to look into the past. And it is because the past could start a millisecond ago and such a machine is actually a powerful surveillance tool. So it's an interesting story, but it makes the point that our definitions of the past are pretty

arbitrary and things that are a thousand years old aren't necessarily more, they don't have more heritage value or more ability to inform us about human behaviour than things that are 10 minutes old. And archaeology really at the end of the day isn't about old things. It's about human interaction with material things. So that means you and I sitting at our desks right now are creating an archaeological layer that somebody could come along and interpret once we got up and lift the desk. Hear that? If your workplace is just a repository of chaos, just type up a museum placard, sling a velvet barrier in front of those moldy coffee cups and unopened bills, those artifacts must remain undisturbed and unjudged. And I have heard that a lot of archaeology

deals with discarded items or shall we say just historical garbage, that garbage is just like chef's kiss when it comes to an archaeologist. Is that true for archaeology and space junk and the work that you were doing with Indigenous cultures in Australia? Well, you're right, Allie, but your standard archaeological site is what's left behind. It's people's rubbish, it's structures and buildings that existed at the moment. People left or died or moved to another location. So you're looking at what's left. But when we're looking at the very recent past, so I guess space archaeology fits into what we're calling the archaeology of the contemporary past, another kind of paradox. It's the past of 10 minutes ago again. So this isn't

always stuff that people have abandoned or discarded. Often it's stuff that people are actually using or living in the International Space Station being a great example of that. Just a side note for context. So the ISS, the International Space Station, is a joint effort by several countries, with the top contributors being NASA, Russia's space program, and the European Space Agency or the ESA. And the ISS launched into the void of eternity in 1998. And it's been taken a low, hovering lap 248 miles above your face, just circling Earth every 90 minutes, pretty much since the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal erupted and Titanic came out. So between three and 10 people tend to be up there at any given time, just defying what our ancestors

could ever even imagine was possible. Just doing experiments, making music videos sometimes, peeing into a suction hose, what a blast. Also, the US had a different space station before named Skylab. But in 1979, five years after the astronauts bounced and left it uninhabited, its orbit started to decay and it got sucked back into our gravitational pull. And because it was so large and chunky and made of some pretty hearty metals, pieces as big as a small car crashed into an Australian sheep field, just scattering parts that were gathered and then put into a modest tourist museum. So these objects and sights are still often active and people have relationships to them. So this does add another ethical dimension, I guess, to doing this kind of archaeology.

It also gives you huge advantages because you can ask people what was going on at a place. But you make a good point. There is an intersection with indigenous archaeology here. And this was my main career before I became a space archaeologist. I was a heritage consultant working with Aboriginal communities in Australia. And for those communities, similarly, you don't say, oh, this is 100 years old, so it has a different kind of value. A lot of the value comes because things are still very present and interwoven in everyday life. So it does give you a different kind of sensibility about stuff that is recent and stuff that, well, definitions of rubbish as well. So something that is not being used or appears to have been abandoned when we're looking at the

present, that's not necessarily the case. So while archaeology means the study of ancient history, that's not always the case in practice. And the significance of an artifact might have everything to do with the cultural significance of its, I guess, its impact, so to say, and how we interacted, whether it was something we accidentally left behind or deliberately abandoned. But what kind of objects are we talking? And how do you define space junk? I picture just like broken satellites and like a booster that's just up there rusting. What is it exactly? But this, my answer to that, I guess, relates to what we've just been talking about, because I'm kind of really uneasy with the term junk. Okay. There's all kinds of other words for things that

are discarded or considered to be waste, you know, we have trash, garbage, all of these kinds of words. There is actually a definition of space junk, a technical definition. And it says, a piece of space junk is an object that does not now, or in the foreseeable future, have a use. Okay, let's repeat that because it's important. A piece of space junk is an object that does not now, or in the foreseeable future, have a use. So that's the kind of engineering definition, I guess. So the kinds of things people routinely think of as junk are all of the old and abandoned satellites and rocket bodies and fragments of those objects that are floating around in Earth orbit. And you could also technically say that places like the Apollo landing sites on the moon

are junk because they have been abandoned or discarded by some definitions. But the way I look at it, our definition of junk is a very cultural thing. So something that one person abandons or discards may actually have very high value for somebody who is from a different place or class or has a different understanding of material objects. Hey, one person's trash is another's treasure. And this applies to everything from old barbecues to romantic partners. And that's beautiful. And we do have examples of spacecraft which ceased to be used, but were still capable of being used. So they did actually have a use in the foreseeable future. And some very clever people have gone out and reactivated old spacecraft, old satellites to repurpose them for,

I know, isn't that amazing? Yes, that's great. That's like when you watch the program and discovery where it's like someone in the rust belt, like putting together an old Chevy and getting it to run again. Some serious technological makeover. How did they do that? Are they able to do it from Earth and just get some codes and start tippy tapping? Yes, well, a lot of the time it is as simple as that. They just need to get the codes. But the really interesting thing is those codes are often lost. And this is the case with the UK satellite Prospero, which had its 40th anniversary a few years back. And a group of students tried to reestablish contact with it. But the codes had been lost in, you know, like an office move or something. Oh, God. Oh, it's like, so they need

last pass or just one of those books. It just is, it's all lowercase password 123. Just try one, two, three, four, see if it works. This, you know, it's such an interesting thing because we kind of have this idea of the space age as something that's very orderly. And when nothing goes wrong, where technology is perfect. And, you know, it's the same kind of thing. You clear out the filing cabinet in your office and you throw out the one file that had the things that you needed in it. And suddenly there's a spacecraft adrift that nobody can use again. So I think around this idea of junk, it's really interesting things that are considered junk may still have social uses, for example. So an example I often think of when it comes to that is

a rather famous red sports car that was launched into space in 2018 by a rather famous space person. Well, I think it looks so ridiculous and impossible. And you can tell it's real because it looks so fake, honestly. We'd have way better CGI if it was fake. Yes. And it was quite controversial when it was launched because people said, why couldn't it have been a proper scientific experiment? We could have got something out of it. And other people said, you know, this is amazing. It's a visionary. It's whimsical and quirky. And you know, I love a bit of whimsy and quirk with the best of them. But it was a red sports car. And we know what red sports cars symbolize, or should I spell it out, Ellie? Oh, wait, am I

missing something? Are we talking about a different kind of space junk? I'm thinking it's just like a very much a midlife crisis in a phallic symbol. But very much. It's also wealth and power representing membership of an elite organization. And you know, there's probably lots of other meanings that you could find. But the point about that red sports car, it didn't do anything. It didn't collect data. It wasn't part of any experiment. But its function was social. Its function was to be a symbol. So for all of the people who said, oh, it's just another piece of space junk clogging up the orbital paths of the solar system. Even though I personally disliked the symbolism, it makes a wonderful argument that the function of a spacecraft can be social.

And if that's the case, then it isn't actually junk, even if it's not working. Okay, just some quick trivia on this. I looked it up and Elon didn't get the idea of launching his Roadster into space while he was like on a cradum bender in a hot tub. Apparently SpaceX announced that they needed a boilerplate or a dummy payload for the Falcon Heavy test launch. And they were looking for the silliest ideas possible. One Twitter user, someone by the name of Evelyn Janity, a 20-something Texan self-described as a Latina writer and poet who's also a trained dental technician, but a cosmos enthusiast and aspiring SpaceX employee suggested launching Musk's swanky commute vehicle into orbit. Musk faved it and the internet took a vote.

The rest is history that will last roughly a billion years. So whether the car is a whimsical nod to human potential or an egomaniacal automotive version of gas station dick pills, just this object existing has a function because we're talking about it and we're thinking about it, which might be its greatest use, it's a marketing tool. And that's a very archaeological sort of way to look at things, I think. Something that we do as archaeologists is to look at everyday objects, sometimes really special objects, but often it's just everyday objects, and look at them beyond their strict function to see what roles they perform in creating social cohesion or supporting certain power structures or undermining

certain power structures. So an artifact or an object is never just that, there's always more going on, because that's how humans work. Yeah, there's context behind every artifact in every museum and that artifact when it's interpreted with context has so much more social and emotional value for sure. And now, when it comes to a timeline here, we haven't been catapulting things into orbit for our entire existence on Earth. So what do you think was the first piece of space debris that was up there? When did we start flinging stuff? There's a rather wonderful story that in I think the early 1950s, a nuclear explosion in an underground cavity which had what is often called a manhole cover on the top

actually caused that manhole cover to jet off the Earth and get into Earth orbit. So this was in the early 50s and many people say this is the first thing that actually made it into space properly. I'm freaking out about that. That's crazy to think that there's a manhole cover somewhere up there that's the first piece of space junk. Okay, there does seem to be some evidence that this story isn't apocryphal and may actually have happened. And of course, we've got a difference here between things that can get high, like they get super high. Now it's time to get super, super high and kind of be in space, but they don't stay in space. So just come straight back down. So really, if we're looking at the first objects that got

into Earth orbit, we have Sputnik 1 in 1957. And I often think about this. So in 1957, the first time that a human object that people can watch for and listen to Sputnik 1 had a little beep, beep, beep radio signal that became absolutely iconic. How extraordinary that must have been to think that there was a human object up there with the stars above your head. And of course, then, you know, later that year, there's Sputnik 2, which had poor little Leica the dog on board. Why poor little Leica? What happened? Okay, so Leica was a Russian dog plucked from the streets and quite literally thrust into fame as the first living creature to orbit Earth. She was launched in the 13 foot tall Sputnik 2 the month after Sputnik 1 went up. And her name means the

Barker. And she only survived a few hours because the temperature controls failed. But her body continued to orbit the planet 2,570 times over the course of five months before a cremation caused by incineration re-entering the atmosphere. Truly a rags to riches to ashes tail. But it got people very fired up about travels unbound by gravity. Then you had the first US spacecraft. So by 1958, it's not an extraordinary thing anymore. You know, there's two or three up there at any one time. And then suddenly it's like boom, this whole thing takes off every year more and more and more until we get to the point here in 2020, where there is going to be a predicted 30,000 Starlink satellites manufactured by SpaceX in Earth orbit in the next 10 years. At the present

time, there are around about 2000 functioning satellites, maybe around 4000 not functioning whole satellites, and over 35,000 bits of junk that are greater than 10 centimeters. So going from 1957, when there's just that one little beep beep beep up in the sky to 2020, when we're looking at the night sky changing so radically that, in fact, the easiest things to see will be human manufactured objects. They will be spacecraft and satellites. And this will be part of people's everyday experience of going out at night. So that's an extraordinary change. Yeah. Okay, I'm going to repeat those figures just to wrap our brains around them. So two to 3,000 working satellites are up there now, plus 4,000 defunct old ones. And there are 35,000

bits of space junk bigger than about the palm of your hand and millions of smaller, shall we say, micro junk. And then soon 30,000 new satellites will join five times the number that are up there now. But SpaceX can launch something like this because as a private cosmos courier service, they have made launches much more affordable for themselves. So why not go into the satellite business itself instead of just being a four higher satellite delivery business for other companies is their reasoning. And astronomer Dr. Samantha Lawler wrote via the website, quote, we're about to undergo a dramatic transition in our experience of satellites. No longer will you escape your city for a camping trip and see the stars unobstructed,

you'll have to look through a grid of crawling bright satellites no matter how remote your location. Star links are lower in orbit and brighter than 99% of other satellites out there, she writes. Other folks justify their presence saying that they're mostly just visible at dawn and my good friend Casey Hanmer is in the rocket science business and he writes a great space blog and said quote, Starlink's world spanning internet will bring high quality internet access to every corner of the globe and highlighting Starlink's enormous power for bringing about positive change. He writes, the internet is able to help people hold leaders to account, communicate with people in other places, share ideas, invent new things and unify the human race.

The history of modernity is one of increased capacity for human data sharing first through speeches and epic poetry, then writing, which enables the dead to speak to the living data storage and asynchronous communication. He continues by likening this development to the printing press. So naturally, these unnatural objects, possibly up to 42,000 of them, have cheerleaders and have detractors. And I keep thinking of the Billy Bragg lyric I saw to shooting stars tonight. I wished on them, but they were only satellites. So maybe we need to just start wishing on Starlink's and hoping for the best. So does technology bleeding out toward the edges of our unknown spaces? Does that rate of advancement rely on these private space tech companies?

Well, there's rights law, which bases the exponential progress of technology on the number of iterations of something produced. But what about Moore's law observed in the early computing days? Moore's law is the idea that I think every two years, computing power doubles. So we're still seeing that hold. And obviously, spacecraft rely very much on computing power to do their jobs. I think one of the interesting things that is going on here is there's a constant tension between the services that can be delivered on the ground using terrestrial infrastructure and the services that can be delivered by satellite. And things like navigation, telecommunications, various other things aren't always best done by satellite.

Now, the terrestrial way we get our phones to light up with essentially portable omniscience is mostly via phone circuits, fiber optic systems, cell towers, and broadband cables. So those long-ass wires have to go over the rivers, through the woods, across the oceans, but they stay on Earth as opposed to circling above. So yes, when we're looking at the movement of telecommunications into Earth orbit, as we're seeing with the proposed Starlink satellites and other massive, massive constellations that have been proposed for the future, that's not a necessity. We don't have to run our telecommunications like that. These are technological and political choices, I guess. So that as an archaeologist, this is the sort of thing that's interesting to me, what kind

of social background leads to decisions being made, which mean we end up being very space-reliant and vulnerable. A massive solar flare, for example, could take out our navigation, communication, and Earth observation satellites, take them offline, which happens from time to time. And so then what do we do if we don't have backups on Earth? What do we do if we're over-reliant on having space delivered internet? So there's, yeah, a lot of repercussions. That's maybe looking forward in the future, but as they exist now, do you have any space artifacts up there that are close to your heart or that particularly vex you? There are so many amazing artifacts in Earth orbit, and so many that deserve to have their stories

told more widely and to be appreciated by a much wider range of people. When people say space junk, I do have some that I feel very fond of. One of my all-time favorites is Vanguard 1, which was the second US satellite and is now the oldest human object in Earth orbit. So I think that's pretty special. Yeah, it's kind of beautiful too. So it's a polished silver sphere with six antennas sticking out, and it's got a very sort of retro vintage feel. And it's kind of friendly and warm. And I think of it, you know, it's been out there all this time. It's seen everything happen. It's seen, you know, once upon a time, it only had a few other neighbors. Now it's part of orbit is starting to look busier and busier with all these new kids on the blog.

I just think, you know, what it's seeing during its time in space. So I'm very fond of that satellite. I mean, how can you not be? The thing is a three-pound shiny little sphere that can fit in one hand and one Russian politician nicknamed it the grapefruit because it's the size of a grapefruit, I guess, but a really big grapefruit, more like a pomelo, which is like a big grapefruit. So I know I had to Google it and Googling I found out that grapefruits are an invention and they're a cross between the pomelo and the sweet orange. Most the world didn't even know about them until 1750 when they were found being cultivated on a Caribbean island and then deemed the forbidden fruit because there's really nothing tastier or sexier than, I guess, a grapefruit. So when America launched

Vanguard 1 in 1958, the year after Sputnik went up, maybe the Russian leader called it a grapefruit but meant a pomelo. I mean, for a size comparison, it would have been more accurate, but I guess we're to call it the baby's head. Another of my favorites is an amateur satellite launched by a group of Australian students called Astralis Oscar 5. It was launched in 1970, but they started to design it and build it in the mid 1960s. And it's part of a whole sequence of amateur satellites that started in the early 1960s and is going today. And I love that story. You know, we think of space as being about the incredibly wealthy nations, the spacefaring nations with, you know, all of their technology and all of their brilliant scientists. I love that there's

a whole tradition of satellites. There's probably this, I don't know, 50 or 60 of these amateur satellites in orbit. These are just people saying, we want to get involved in space or a lot of small nations actually use this amateur program to launch their first satellites as well. So I love this. This is just about regular people getting involved in space. And it's such an important tradition to acknowledge and to talk about, I think, if I think about some of the spacecraft technically called junk that I've become obsessed with recently, I do tend to move through different phases of obsession about these things. There's a series of experimental satellites for testing radar that were launched throughout the 60s. And two of them I love. They're

called dodecopole one and dodecopole two. Okay, these puppies were about the size of an uncomplicated beach ball and just adorable. And their kind of nickname is porcupine one and two. Because they were like Vanguard one, they were a little polished silver sphere. And they had 12 antennas and these antennas were 12 feet long each. So they really do look they're extraordinary. So if you can just imagine that a little silver ball with these incredibly long legs sticking out of it. And to me, they're beautiful. And they're still up there in orbit right now. So they're space jump too. But they tell a story of spacecraft design, those experimental projects in the early decades of the space age when people are just testing equipment and systems and how things work.

I guess, how much is flotsam? How much is jetsam? How much is accidentally like, whoops, there goes a Capri Sun bottle, you know, and how much is like, we got to just we got to cut this thing loose. There's certainly a lot of accidents that happen in space. Okay, so you know, something gets up there, it just doesn't work. Just doesn't work. Nobody can turn it on. Something gets up there and one of its solar panels fails to unroll. So it doesn't have the energy it was supposed to have. And it can't operate fully. Something gets up there and just explodes. So there's all kinds of reasons where things don't work. And interestingly, space insurance is a huge industry. Is it really? Yes, it's a whole space industry. What are the deductibles like? Can you

imagine? They're like full coverage. You're like, yes, please. I can't even imagine what a fender fender on like a falcon is. Oh, God, what a dragon module. We think of space as being about the rockets and the satellites. But in fact, there's this whole web of connected industries as well, which I think are interesting. Usually, a satellite will be launched with an idea of what its mission life is. And everything will be planned around that. And it might get to that time. And everything's going great. So they extend the mission life. The satellite keeps working. It's still got teams of people devoted to keeping it in its orbit, to getting the data, to, you know, sending updates to its codes, all of that stuff.

Mm hmm. Sometimes it gets to the end of its mission life. And there's no compelling reason to keep it going. So they just stop using it, even though it might have fuel and battery, and actually be physically capable of functioning well. But to keep a satellite working in orbit requires teams of people. And those resources are sometimes needed elsewhere. So there could be all kinds of reasons why a satellite just sort of stops being used. And whether you then say it's junk, if technically it could be reused, or how you classify it, in fact, it would be really interesting. As far as I know, no one's ever made a list of satellites which have the capability of being reused. Well, there you go. You just inspired someone's career. I hope so. I hope so. Usually,

when a satellite gets reused, it's by an amateur group. But, you know, there are plenty of people with those skills out there. And putting an old satellite to use collecting new scientific data, you know, would be an amazing thing to do. Well, that leads me to a question that keeps nagging at me. I imagine that as an archaeologist, you do a lot of site work, you collect a lot of data, you go back, you analyze it, you crunch numbers, right? What do you do if the objects you need to study are tens of thousands of miles away? How do you study it? It's true. Archaeology is such a physical discipline. You know, we're camping in remote locations. Well, they're not always remote. Sometimes they're in the middle

of cities. But we're out there walking the land. We're excavating things, getting covered in dirt, doing physical labor. We're walking through gorges and across beaches and mountains. And really, we're present in these places. And part of the joy of archaeology is its physicality, I guess. So you're right. It's a bit of a paradox. I can't go to space. I can't see the objects that I'm studying. I have to rely on proxies. I have to rely on catalogues and data and scientific papers and visualizations and things like that. So it is a bit different to normal archaeology. But I think, I don't know, I spend a lot of time visualizing and imagining the spacecraft that I'm looking at. Like, I will take a dry paragraph from some scientific paper and, in my mind, spin

it into a vision of a particular spacecraft. One example of this is, at one point, I was doing a lot of work on all of the Russian landing craft on Venus. Okay, this was in the 1960s and Venera means Venus in Russian. And it wasn't until right now that I learned that venereal comes from Venus, the Roman goddess of love. They didn't name it a venereal probe. And that's good. Which everybody said, oh, you know, surface conditions on Venus are so harsh that they're just melted puddles of metal. And I thought, well, we don't know that. So I started trawling through all the scientific papers about surface conditions on Venus and what the spacecraft were made out of. And we do have pictures of them before they left Earth. And we also have

artists visualizations of them, the Venera landers, when they got to the surface of Venus. But you'd find little things in the papers that suddenly made you realize that those pictures were very incomplete. So there was one US surface mission to Venus called Pioneer Venus. And the landing craft had little windows made out of sapphires and diamonds. And this is just a little detail in the paper that describes its technology. And exactly you're thinking sapphire and diamond eyes. That's beautiful. That's just an engineering detail. But for an archaeologist, it's that kind of stuff that helps me relate to them as physical objects. And then I hope convey to other people that these are just

so much more than a complicated bit of metal on a planetary surface. I also, I have so many questions from patrons. I told them you were coming on the show. They launched a lot of questions at you. So I'm just going to let them, I'm going to say them in their words. Okay, but before we get to your very good questions, let's toss some money toward a good cause chosen by Alice. And this week, it's going to deadly science, which provides STEM books and early reading material to every remote school in Australia. And it was founded by STEM communicator Corey Tutt himself, a Camelori man who saw that some remote schools had just 15 books in their whole school library. And so deadly science has now shipped over 14,000 books, 500 telescopes

and chemistry sets plus other resources to over 112 schools with more to come. So deadly science wants to ensure all schools have access to our history of science by providing first nations resources to connect back to our first scientists. There'll be a link to deadly science in the show notes in case you also want to throw some dollars their way. And our donation was made possible by the following sponsors of the show, whoms I like. Okay, your questions starting with one that was orbiting a lot of your brains. Okay, one of the most repeatable questions I got. Radha, Vakarya, Anna Thompson, Andrew G. Sokosano, Jen Skrull, Alvarez, Mason Turner, Heather Densmore, Justin McCormick, Matt D, Sebastian Osterbrink, Anjali McDonald, all wanted to know

essentially how often does it fall to earth? Ah, it's a very good question. Okay, so this is one of the other things about space junk. So once a satellite stops being used, its orbit can't be controlled or isn't controlled. So things that are low enough get affected by atmospheric drag. The atmosphere starts to lower their orbit and pull them back in. Oh, dear. So the answer to that question is that every day, bits of space junk get dragged back into the earth's atmosphere and burn up. They're not always large bits, and they're not always whole satellites. But I would say, I don't know, probably once a week, there's a whole satellite or a large piece of space junk that reenters. And you can actually go and find out there are sites which

track these reentries. Oh my gosh, really? Yeah. So it was like forecast bonked by space junk. That is pretty much it. There's two levels of forecast. One is what's going to reenter the atmosphere. And the good news about this is stuff mostly completely burns up. The risks of being hit by a space junk are incredibly low. Okay. And then there's what's looking like it will likely collide actually in earth orbit. That's what's really concerning, because those collisions on orbit create more space junk, which will collide with more space junk and more space junk and all of that. But if people are really interested, they can go to Celeste Track, Astriograph, Heavens Above, CSAT and a number of other satellite catalogs that you can easily

find on Google. And you will be able to get the updates on what's looking like it will reenter. Oh, great. Of course, I look this up. And all those tiny glowing dots sparkling like seed beads spilled over a rendering of earth. It's a bit boggling to see even color coded. So the sheer number of thousands of dead satellites up there is really apparent, just cruising like very expensive ghost ships in the night. And as I was staring at these animations, though, there was this peculiar march and I clicked on it and they were starlings all in a line like a Mardi Gras necklace encircling the planet, just staggering to see. To expand on that a little bit, several different patrons asked Gwen Kelly, who is a terrestrial archaeologist and first time question asker, Pym Bongers,

with a great name, also first time question asker, Julia Churka and Mallory Alby, first time question asker, Meryl Stark, Kasia Wynuski and my buddy J.R. Ralef asked, does space junk want to become bigger and bigger blobs? Or does space junk's orbit decay and just fall into the atmosphere? J.R. asked, is space junk clearing itself more slowly than we're replacing it? Also, why was firefly canceled? He's got a lot of questions. Did you ever see firefly? I guess it is about space junk. I didn't ever see it, but I know it had a very devoted following. So I wish I knew the answer to that. J.R. I got you. And it seems this Joss Whedon sci-fi futuristic western, which aired for just 11 episodes in 2002, had a terrible Friday night time slot,

just unfortunate. Also, Fox aired all the episodes out of order. And then the series finale, titled Objects in Space, haha, I see why you're asking now, wasn't even supposed to be the finale at all. So, R.I.P. Firefly. There's a lot of stuff in there. One is that we are, in fact, putting more things into orbit, which create more junk than is being dragged out of the atmosphere. So that is one of the problems at the moment. I think at the beginning, there was a question about whether bits of space junk tend to kind of coalesce into blocks. And while there are of the really tiny, tiny fragments, so the size of space junk goes from the size of a house down to microscopic submillimetal level. There are little tiny, tiny particles and there are millions

and millions of these. And some of them, depending on their origin, kind of are in little clouds, but it's not really a blob. But one of the big questions, so most of the outer planets in the solar system have ring systems. So we all know Saturn's beautiful rings. But in fact, Neptune has rings. Uranus has rings. Uranus has rings. Yeah, I said it. And I'm not backing down from that either. So most of most of those planets actually have rings. And in the inner solar system, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Earth do not have rings. But there was a paper written in 1970. It's a very famous paper. It's by Donald Kessler, after whom the Kessler syndrome is named, and Bertrand Corpallet. And they tried to figure out if Earth could get its own ring system made out of space junk,

which I actually think could be quite beautiful. Alice says the good slash bad news is we don't have enough space junk to get a ring system that would form naturally. So apparently there's not enough mass, which means blobbiness and clumpiness. It isn't going to sort of, you know, we might not get any mini moons that are made out of space junk or mushed up together like a breccia or something like that. So it's an interesting question about orbital dynamics to think about why that is. And maybe part of that is we know we have to clean space junk up. People often think I'll be upset about this. I say Alice, how can people get rid of these artifacts that you love, you know? So well, if it's part of the sort of

natural evolution of space industry, I would like them to keep the beautiful stuff which has a lot of cultural significance if it's a low risk. But if it's a high risk, then heritage isn't enough to counteract that. But we will have to get rid of some of it. And for some of it, the best solution is to push it higher out of the way of the high density orbits. And we actually have a graveyard orbit at the moment, which is that beyond the geostationary orbit. So which is where telecommunications satellites are about 35,000 kilometers high above the earth. Wow. It's quite a complicated task to get something that high. And then when these satellites get to the end of their life, ideally, they have enough fuel left to boost them just a bit higher, about 500 kilometers above,

into the graveyard orbit. Wow. So we do kind of have a ring, a design structured ring in that graveyard orbit. But without it being controlled, the spacecraft tend to sort of drift out and drift away. There's not enough gravitational weight to hold them together. But maybe in the future, we might think making some kind of structure out of all of this space junk into, I don't know what you call it, engineered art, astro-engineered art. That might be something we could do. The biggest Burning Man installation in the universe. Just welded space junk. Caroline Butler has a very serious question, wants to know, are there 500 billion single unmatched socks floating out there? And if not, any insight on where they might be?

If we're going to take the precedent from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the biropens that have gone missing over the years, all of those socks are not currently in Earth orbit. They are on some other planet somewhere. There haven't been any sightings of socks. So I regret to say, until that planet is discovered, we're just going to have to live with a sock situation. So something is afoot on another planet, perhaps. Now, speaking of extra terrestrial matters, Kate H, Jesse Dragon, and Sadie Baker, Annalisa Ramirez, RJ Doidge, they all had the same question. In patron Samantha Healy's student Peter's words, have you found unidentified space junk from somewhere that is not Earth?

Something that we don't know what it is from somewhere we've never been? A lot of patrons wanted to know, do we ever see any alien space junk? Like what about the Oomua Mua? Oh, yes. So I will probably not pronounce it correctly, but Oomua Mua was an extra solar object that just barreled into our solar system at very high speed, did a bit of a sort of gravity bend around the sun, and then took off again. And its inclination and speed indicated it had come from a very long distance away, somewhere in the galaxy. So there was some speculation, particularly by one astrophysicist. Oomua Mua is the very first interstellar object to have been discovered in the solar system,

sort of like having a guest for dinner. RV log, that this was an alien spacecraft or some kind of alien object. Now, I can't say that it isn't, but scientific consensus is that it is not an alien object. And, you know, we might revise our opinions about that if we get to observe other similar objects. We don't know when they're going to come. The appearance of that object was a surprise, no one knew that it was on its way. But when we have a little bit more to compare with, it might be possible to be clearer about that. Now, there was something, oh, alien things in Earth orbit. There's actually a bit of a conspiracy theory, a bit of a conspiracy theory about an object called the Black Knight. And the Black Knight is supposed to have been in orbit around

Earth for 13,000 years, so it was not made by humans. And this pops up every now and then. I get Black Knight conspiracy theorists emailing me because they think, I mean, I try to be generous and respectful when I get these sorts of queries. But they often see space and archaeology combined and think that I will be somehow less scientific than other space scientists or astronomers they've approached. And I regret to say that isn't the case. But I do get queries about this. And there is no evidence that anything other than objects manufactured by humans has ever been in Earth orbit. One listener, Kathy Flint on that note, asked, is there any type of space junk, real or potential, that scares you to your core? Oh, gosh.

Well, there's one piece of space junk that I and many others find very worrying. I don't know if it scares me to my core. Oh, actually, there is one that scares me to my core. But I'll do the one. There's a European space agency spacecraft called NVSAT, which was Earth Observation Scientific Satellite launched in 1992, I think. And it's huge the size of two double decker buses. It's now a piece of space junk and it's uncontrolled. And if anything hits it, it will create so much space junk that the effects are going to be really, really bad. Oh, no. But we also haven't got any way of getting it out of orbit at the moment. So I find that quite scary. All we need is for something big enough to hit NVSAT and create thousands, hundreds of thousands more bits

of debris. And we have a pretty bad situation in Earth orbit. So that's scary. But what really terrifies me, if we're going to talk about visceral terror, is an experimental space station called Genesis One, or it could be Genesis Two, there are two Genesis inflatable space stations empty currently in Earth orbit, they were made by Bigelow Aerospace. And they're related to the technology of the inflatable module being tested on the International Space Station right now. So these space stations were sent up because nobody was ever intended to live in them. Or, you know, visit them even. They were sent up with various kind of, you know, interesting or funny objects. One of them has Madagascar hissing cockroaches. Now, we know that cockroaches are

basically predicted to be able to survive a nuclear holocaust. Cockroaches are hardy. And cockroaches, and don't tell me I'm wrong, cockroaches are smart. Oh, they are. Absolutely. It worries me that someone deliberately sent cockroaches into space. And at some point, that spacecraft might be deorbited, or maybe someone will go inside, and we will have found that our real problem isn't the space junk. Our real problem is space cockroaches who have evolved in me taters and are coming to take us over. And I'm not even joking. I wonder if they're out there nibbling on tardigrades. And actually, I guess we sent food up for them. What were you thinking?

And apple cores and just cheese rind, a pizza crust just float around. This actually dovetails perfectly into first-time question asker Marie Honoré asked, how dangerous is space junk? Like, is it radioactive or toxic? Monica also asked, is there any special decontamination process after things have crash landed on Earth? Like, can we get space junk down? And do we, what do we use on it? Like, Purell? That's a really great question. Because, in fact, I should say, if anybody is in the situation where a piece of space junk has survived falling out of orbit and has landed near them, don't go and touch it. So the first thing is, some of spacecraft fuels are quite toxic. Hydrazine is one of those. It's very commonly used. Fuel tanks are among the more robust parts of

your average satellite rocket or spacecraft. They're made out of stainless steel or titanium, aluminium alloys. So they're quite robust, but that fuel is toxic. So don't touch it. There's other spacecraft materials like beryllium, for example, which is a metal. People might remember the beryllium spheres from Galaxy Quest. So that is also toxic. Do not touch it. So if a piece of space junk lands near you, it first of all, it doesn't, it's not found as keepers. It actually belongs to the launching state. So you can't take it and sell it on eBay. Don't touch it. Alert your nearest, I don't know, government authority, space agency, if you have one, environmental protection agency, something like that. As for decontamination processes, I would say

don't undertake them yourself. I'm not sure what you would do, but not touching these objects is. This will hardly ever be in this situation, because not that much actually survives down to the surface. But the other interesting question is nuclear fuel. So there is kind of now a standard that nuclear fuel is only used for deep space missions. But there are quite a few satellites in Earth orbit that are powered by RTGs. RTG, you ask? I had the same question. That's a radio isotope thermoelectric generator or a nuclear powered battery. It's just full of that good, good juice. They have plutonium, for example. So it's not the same as a nuclear reactor. We don't have any satellites powered by a nuclear reactor, but we do have nuclear fuel, if you

see the difference. And in 1978, the year before Skylab re-entered, there was a very terrifying and at the time, I think, largely hushed up incident where a Russian Cosmos spacecraft re-entered the atmosphere. It had nuclear fuel. So the cosmos re-entered, broke up, and the nuclear fuel was scattered over a broad area in the Arctic Circle over forests. There were indigenous communities who lived in these areas, and it was highly, highly toxic. And it took a massive international cleanup effort to try and recover all those bits of fuel. The good news is there are still spacecraft in Earth orbit that have nuclear fuel. But as far as I know, none of them are a massive risk, but it is just worth keeping in mind another reason not to go

near space junk. I mean, you could go and look up the predictions and work out if the predicted thing to re-enter near you is something which does not have nuclear fuel. So you can do that, but you couldn't guarantee its toxicity in terms of other products and materials that are used in spacecraft. Right. Are human remains ever shot into space? Oh, you bet they are. But usually, they're already ashes, and they orbit and re-enter the atmosphere and burn up with all the flamboyants and indulgence of a twice-baked potato. Also, it should be noted that Dr. Eugene Shoemaker, one of the founders of planetary science, is just NBD chilling on the moon. Some of his ashes were delivered there by NASA, just the ultimate backstage pass. You got to know someone, though.

And that space funeral question was asked by Felix and Kasein Wally. And on the topic of Wally, Aaron Unson, Michelle Nier, and Felix LaSalle have been harboring questions about it since 2008. A lot of people wanted to know how you felt about Wally, the movie Wally, where there's essentially just like a shell of garbage around Earth. Any thoughts? Are we going to let it get to that point, do you think? What you see in the film, Wally, and in fact, it's an incredibly evocative scene. Little Wally, the garbage robot clinging to the rocket, which punctures this thick layer of space junk, really thick, and Sputnik 1 gets caught in Wally's hands or a bit of the rocket. And I actually show that film to my classes when I'm teaching space archaeology and contemporary

archaeology. It's a beautiful, fun film, but there's a lot going on in there. It's a really graphic representation of, it's not an accurate representation, because space junk, in fact, is very far apart. You would never see something that looked like that in Wally. But the point of that scene in Wally isn't to accurately represent a future situation where space junk is that thick. It's a metaphor, it's a warning. It's part of the degradation of the surface of Earth, as you see it in that film, literally covered in garbage with only cockroaches and robots alive. And then you go to space and you see the devastation that has been created in Earth orbit. So I think it's a very powerful piece of the film. But the thing to remember

is that space junk is, in fact, I couldn't, I can't think of a good visualization. It's slightly, when people see those images that that space agencies have made showing the distribution of space junk, they're usually not to scale. So you do get the impression things are very close together. But it actually isn't like that. I suppose if we did make our own planetary ring out of space junk, it might look a little bit like that scene you see in Wally. Wally is such an interesting film because it's also got a strong heritage theme in it, of course, Wally's little collection of objects that he doesn't fully always know what are for, but he finds aesthetically pleasing or they speak to him in some way. So if you haven't seen Wally, I'm pretty sure most

people would have, but it really is worth looking at. Oh, I haven't seen it yet. So now I have to. I know I haven't seen it yet, but I understand I'll ball my eyes out at some point during it. I'm afraid you will. Yeah, okay. I'll report back as soon as I watch Wally, you will know because I will tell you about my emotional breakdown in the secret at the end of the episode, perhaps next week. Oh, also, I took a Twitter poll and 12% of you had no idea that I tell a secret at the end of each episode after the credits, which is amazing. So many things to go back and learn. Some of them you don't want to know, but have fun. So Matt D, Sofkoceno, Wayne Hovey, Kaisa Vinouski, Star, Misty Dolovich, and Kate H asked, what's the next space junk collision event going to be?

A lot of people wanted to know, are space agencies concerned about collisions with space junk? Oh, yeah. So there's a whole massive area of study and policy and law in the international space community that's called space situational awareness or SSA. And that's basically about how to manage the space junk situation so that we can continue to use satellites for services like telecommunications, navigation, earth observation, weather prediction, all of those things. So this is a massive concern. There is actually an international committee, which is made up of representatives from most of the space agencies whose job it is to look at this. The United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space has this as a major item

on its agenda. So there's no need to be concerned that this is not on the radars of the people making the decisions. But we do have problems because it's not possible at this point in time to just whiz up there and pull out a dangerous piece of junk. There's technical issues with going into orbit to try and remove something. And then there are international relations issues because if you have the capacity to actively remove a piece of junk from orbit, you have the capacity to remove an active satellite, maybe a military one. He's going, sorry, didn't mean to do that. Really sorry. But this could be the cause of very serious conflict on earth and in space. So while we're still very much working on the technology and there have been

a couple of breakthroughs in recent times, that part of it we haven't made a lot of progress on. From my perspective, I think lobbying by the public could have an impact here. How would you even start to do that? So much worse than cleaning out your closets. Okay, well, first off, it costs money to go to space, a lot of it. So that's kind of a thorny business issue first, Alice says. But all kinds of propositions have been made from nets to land based lasers to an 18 mile cloud of fine tungsten dust that sweeps lighter particles into reentry with it, burning as it accelerates toward earth. But what about like a space tugboat? So a little space tug sent up in this way would have to take so much fuel with it to do more

than get just one thing that, you know, it hardly becomes worth doing. But there's lots and lots of proposals for different kinds of methods. So last year, there was a successful test of the harpoon method in which a spacecraft would spear a little harpoon out into space, which would pierce the body of a piece of space junk. And then it could be maneuvered back into the atmosphere to burn up. This was done successfully in space. That was the first time we've had a test like that. But that's what it was. It was a test. It doesn't mean we can go out tomorrow and start spearing all of these objects. There's all kinds of proposals for sails and nets and tethers. What the standard at the moment is that if you are launching a mission, you design the mission

to minimize the amount of space junk that it will create. Sadly, a lot of spacecraft operators don't do that at all, because it often adds weight and expense to the mission. So something that could be done would be to somehow figure out how to enforce compliance across the board, so we're not continuing to create new debris. So it's going to be a while, I think, before we've really got this problem under control. Right. And I was way too many years old before I found out that cruise ships just unload their toilets in international waters. Is that happening on the ISS? Are there space turds? Be honest with me. I didn't actually know that about cruise ships, but can you believe they just open the hatch

once you get like two miles from shore or something? It's horrifying. Okay, it's not that close. It's not two miles. That was hyperbole. It's actually three miles. Three miles from whatever beach you're on, just a floating city could be streaming port-a-potty slurry into the ocean with a fart and a shrug. Now, is it happening over our heads as well? Gloriously, Patron Hollis had the same question, but I wonder, are there freeze-dried poos up there? Well, some of the Russian space stations used to eject liquid waste, as we call it, and there were stories that the mere space station, which was de-orbited in 2001, was surrounded by a little cloud of frozen urine. So, people might be aware that the

space shuttle windows used to be replaced regularly because they had been bombarded by little tiny, tiny, you know, micrometeorites and bits of space junk. Now, very, very expensive to replace, but some of them came back with little tiny yellow streaks where it appears that a piece of frozen urine had plowed through the surface of the window. As for solid waste, I don't think so, but I could be wrong. Most of this stuff would be at very low orbit and is likely re-entered. What they do on the International Space Station is they eject a lot of their waste in spacecraft with the enter and burn up, so it's not up there floating around, and they do have to bring some samples back for biomedical research as well, but the ISS is pretty clean. It's not contributing

to turds in space. That's good to know. Well, I guess on the topic of things that are crappy, what is the worst part about being a space archaeologist, either from something petty to something existential? Like, what sucks the most about your job? I guess I still sometimes encounter people who think that it's ridiculous to look at the social and symbolic and political aspects of space endeavors in the 20th and 21st centuries who think it's just about the technology and I also come across people who think because I might be critical of some aspect of space policy or space industry that this means some unreconstructed Luddite who never wants to go to space. I do find these attitudes quite mystifying. I'm not interested in justifying what I do,

but if people come around eventually and think, oh, well, you know, maybe this is important, that's fantastic, but I suppose there's a sort of a hardcore, hardcore, hardcore of the space community for whom there are no ethical dimensions to what we're doing and there are no negative impacts on anyone and it can be quite interesting getting into those conversations. And what about your favorite thing about it? What just gives you butterflies still about it even doing this for 20 years? Well, we know so much about human space exploration. There's so many books and archives and papers and oral history interviews and documents, you know, there's so much information to work with. But I will still come across, you know, odd little facts or personal

stories or weird things just hiding in some odd corner of an archive or some casual statement that someone makes to me. There's so many amazing stories about the human engagement with space and telling those stories and finding them and communicating and sharing them for me is the most exciting part of being a space archaeologist. And of course, people can find that in Dr. Spacejunk versus the universe, archaeology in the future, I'm guessing. Yes, lots of these stories made it into there. How silky smooth was my segue there? It's just just masterful. Also, it's just an excellent book. And where can people find you? Because I know this is something that I mean, I'm going to have dreams about Spacejunk for decades. Where can people find where you're

writing and where you're telling these stories? So you mentioned my book, Dr. Spacejunk versus the universe, archaeology in the future. So that's a sort of a general overview of the field of space archaeology, also space history and also a discussion about some of the ethical issues and some of those stories that I love telling. So they're all in that book. You can also find me on Twitter at Dr. Spacejunk. So I talk a lot about space archaeology and heritage and cake over there as well. So there will be cakes. You'll just have to live with that. I also write a blog called Space Age Archaeology. And that's often got things in it that aren't quite enough to write into an academic article, but just little thoughts and threads that I want

to follow and investigate. No, amazing. Thank you so much. I'm so glad that you got into my orbit and that I got into yours. Thank you so much for letting me ask you so many questions. Well, thank you, Allie. Your questions were very insightful and so was that of the patrons. It has been a pleasure to talk about this with you. So ask focused folks, spacey questions, because how the hell else would you know about space pee and sacrificial cosmonut dogs? So do follow Dr. Alice Gorman on all platforms and get her book, Dr. Spacejunk versus the universe, archaeology and the future. And there will be a link to all of that in the show notes. You can follow me if you want to at Allie Ward, just 1L on Twitter and Instagram,

or also at ologies on Twitter and Instagram. So do be my friend. And if you need a sweet ologies gift, including a mask, order soon. Go to ologiesmerch.com. The link is in the show notes. Thank you, Shannon Feltas and Bonnie Dutch for managing that. They host a very funny podcast called You Are That. So do check that out. Thank you, Erin Talbert, who admins the ologies podcast Facebook group, full of really good human people. Thank you to Emily White and all the transcribers who help get free transcripts available for anyone who needs access to them. Those are at the link in the show notes. Thank you, Caleb Patton for bleeping episodes so that they are kid safe. Those are also on my website for free at the link in the show notes. Thank you

and happy birthday to Valerina and my right hand lady, Noelle Dilworth, who helps schedule all the guests. Thank you to the wise and wonderful Jared Sleeper of Mind Gen Media, who not only assistant edits, but has also kept the trains running on time and gotten me into a better production schedule this week, which is very exciting. Thank you, as always, to the Mission Control lead editor, Stephen Ray Morris, who puts all my brain debris together. He also hosts the podcast and see Jurassic Wright, two really great podcasts. And Nick Thorburn wrote the launch and reentry music, and he's in a band called Islands. Now, a few stick around past the credits. Maybe this is the first time you've ever heard me tell a secret. Jared and I happened to watch

this new comedy special on Netflix called Nate, which is so good and so weird. And in the middle of it, we just looked at each other because we realized that we looked exactly like the two characters central to the show. And so as a joke, we took a picture and put up a side by side pick, and the star of the show saw it and reposted it and also said that we were the couple that inspired the whole show, which was fucking hilarious of her and also not true. We don't know her, but I had such a weird fangirl moment of being like, oh, she noticed me. But also, I hope no one takes this truth because if you watch the show, you would know why. But yes, the resemblance is uncanny, particularly the hair, but it's a very great thought-provoking

special. It's called Nate on Netflix. Okay, that's it. Don't be afraid to fail. Cut bangs, texture crush, huff some bark. All right, that's enough out of me. Bye-bye. Meteorology, Peptology, Nephology, Seriology, Pseudology.