SciShow Tangents - Spaceships

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green, and joining me this week, as always, is science expert, Sari Reilly. Hello. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hello. What a time in the history of our universe where you can take a picture of a galaxy 13 billion miles away. And also, you can have any guest host of your dreams on SciShow Tangents. Who is it? It's not actually true, but I want to know who would be your absolute thrill of the moment to be on the podcast. Has to be a living person. No Abraham Lincolns.

Starting point is 00:00:58 No ghosts on the pod. They're too scary. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We can get them, but give me the heebie-jeebies yeah i'm so scared of everyone i respect that it's worse than ghosts uh i will say that i have a fantastic idea for if we can ever get john on the podcast oh yeah okay it's a great idea oh i can see what i can do about that. Do you want me to go first?

Starting point is 00:01:26 Yeah. Because you guys are so afraid. I think it's not impossible to get Alf. Who is? Yay, Alf. Yeah. He's got a literal, like a totally different view on science being from another planet. He's from Melmac.

Starting point is 00:01:42 He's from Melmac. He's from Melmac, and I think it has just a wildly different sort of outlook on the world. But I feel like he'd be quite a classic guest host for SciShow Tangents, especially the video version. Yeah, that would be essential. Do you know Alf's real name? I did at one point.

Starting point is 00:02:04 I think that I did a trivia about alf once and i knew it for that reason but it's the best fictional name of all time i think gordon shumway yeah i love that all right so i didn't mind alf who's yours oh shit that's such a good answer so the closest i can come up with is just taika ytt because i would like to have said that i would have a conversation with him and i think he'd be good he's so good at it he would carry the entire 30 minutes with comedy we would not get a single joke in and if one of us made him laugh that would be a story we tell for the rest of our lives that's the best that's better than elf i'm gonna just like uh slide into his dms right now i'm sure they're open to me. No, I'd throw up if a famous person was on our show.

Starting point is 00:02:48 Don't do this to me. You don't want us to succeed, Sam? No. He seems like a down-to-earth famous person, too. He naps all the time. He doesn't have that many more followers on Twitter than me. Oh, yeah, you're famous. I forgot about that.

Starting point is 00:03:03 Alf follows him. Really? That's it. We get him on and then we get Alf on. It's a one-two kind of deal. Alright. Every week here on Tangents we get together to try to one-up a maze and delight each other with some science facts while also trying to stay on topic and failing. Our panelists are playing for Glory

Starting point is 00:03:19 and for Hank Bucks, which I will be awarding as we play. At the end of the episode, one of these people is going to be crowned the winner. And yes, I did call you people. We've come to the end of Kids Month, a month and some change of celebrating the childlike wonder of science. We hope you enjoyed, and we hope that you will also enjoy SciShow Kids, our YouTube channel for early elementary learners.

Starting point is 00:03:39 It's hosted by Jessie Knutson Castaneda, who you may know from her channel Animal Wonders, and Anthony Brown and Squeaks the Robot Rat. Now, as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from Sam. On TV, spaceships look like fun and games, like when flown by George Jetson or his wife, Jane. They can zip all around the Milky Way in ships with fake gravity and advanced sick bays. But in real life, when you're on a spaceship,

Starting point is 00:04:06 you put your ass on a vacuum just to take a shit, and artificial gravity isn't real. You float around when you sleep and eat goo every meal. You and four people all trapped in a can, and you can't take a shower until you get back to land. And though there's universal splendor wherever you look, there probably aren't even video games. I bet you have to read books.

Starting point is 00:04:25 So astronauts are cool, but spaceships are no fun. Get back to me when they have warp drives and sweet laser guns. That's great. Our topic for the day is spaceships. I don't want my spaceship to have laser guns because that means that somebody else's spaceship has laser guns. You're shooting asteroids with it. Come on. It's just to clear up the asteroids.

Starting point is 00:04:46 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. All right, okay all right all right all right yeah you're right uh spaceships have the biggest gap between what it's actually like in real life and what it should be like based on what the name is yes it's like a submarine but worse oh a submarine's pretty bad too but yeah you're not floating around in the submarine hopefully if you are you're in big trouble but that's the oh my god uh so sari what is a spaceship well if you try to google spaceship or you look in any academic paper the the stuffy scientists no one writes about spaceships it's solidly in the world of fiction okay so there are no spaceships is what i'm hearing so they don't exist at the end no all these terrible spaceships we have now those don't count those don't count because

Starting point is 00:05:36 no one ever calls them a spaceship um they call them spacecraft instead and i i like started speculating as to why but uh it seems like uh this is the rabbit hole that i fell down instead of the normal etymology because spaceship is pretty standard like it's space as an outer space and ship as in a boat and then you squish them together and then you got a spaceship but the earliest known use of the word was from 1879, a passage in the book, I think, Progress and Poverty by Henry George, who was talking about spaceship Earth. So the Earth as a spaceship, which Disney World has really capitalized on. But the idea that we are hurtling through space and have all our necessities and we are the crew spaceship then this is a great spaceship yes like amazing spaceship it doesn't even need a lid it's open air it's like a space train more like though it don't get

Starting point is 00:06:37 to go anywhere it's just true it's stuck on the rails same place yeah yeah So we got a space train there. Space train Earth. We got a change of the name. And then a writer named J.J. Astor wrote a novel called A Journey in Other Worlds, published in 1894. And the word spaceship is generally credited to in the sense of a spacecraft that is piloted in outer space. As opposed to like something that was fired out of a cannon or autonomous in some way. Because science fiction writers have dreamed up all kinds of scenarios. So that's where the word came from. And as far as I can tell, this is where it gets into Sari speculation. There's a lot of nautical stuff going on. There's been a lot of nautical stuff for a while in like a big ship, a big tankard,

Starting point is 00:07:36 you travel across the ocean. And so it made sense to science fiction writers and in communicating these speculative fictions to draw comparisons between space and the sea because they're both vast, they're both scary. You go off into the unknown and you can kind of visualize it with similar mechanisms. Like you have little ports and then you go to and from various destinations. And in between there's this vastness that you have to navigate. And planes really weren't a this vastness that you have to navigate. And planes really weren't a thing until the 1900s. So when we started dreaming of space travel, we didn't have space plane. Couldn't come up with that word.

Starting point is 00:08:13 We had the word ship around, so it was easy. So you're telling me that we were thinking about spaceships before we had planes? I think so. I don't know about flying machines. It was before the wright brothers we had earlier planes but we had the idea of a spaceship before sure we had regular bullets getting shot into the moon's eye and stuff what i'm getting though is the vague sense that we've never made a spaceship just because our spaceships aren't quite cool enough. No, I don't think we've ever made a spaceship. And the thing that is closest to it is like a crewed spacecraft.

Starting point is 00:08:49 So any spacecraft, which is like a thing that we send into space. Well, like the space shuttle. The shuttle got pretty close. Yeah, the shuttle. Yeah. It looks right. Or like a space station. There are people inside and it's floating around.

Starting point is 00:09:01 It's not really being piloted, but it's moving in space and it has a lot of accoutrement. One of the things that our spacecraft don't have is the ability to go somewhere at will. Yeah. That's where the space shuttle kind of seems like a spaceship because it could go to the space station or it could go to Hubble

Starting point is 00:09:18 or it could go various places in a relatively low Earth orbit. It almost seems like a spaceship to me. And it can go back down and land on land, which is cool. The space shuttle didn't just orbit. It could jet around? No, it just went up to the orbit that it wanted to go to, but it could go to a variety of different orbits. Okay, okay.

Starting point is 00:09:38 Well, it's easier to define what our topic is when it doesn't quite exist yet. to define what our topic is when it doesn't quite exist yet uh so like the the topic is well covered and now we're gonna play a game you guys are you ready for a game yes yeah we're gonna play that game called scientific definition do you remember that game yeah you say words and we tell you what they mean as best we can so it's taken a lot of ingenious engineering and smart people to figure out how to create giant vehicles that can launch into space and do stuff. And it's also taken a lot of parts. So today, we're going to play Scientific Definition Spaceships Edition. I'm going to give you the name of a spaceship part, and it is up to you to guess what that part does. Whoever comes up with the closest to the actual definition wins a point.

Starting point is 00:10:25 Are you ready to play? Yes. You're going to have to stretch your brain muscles to tell me what is a yo-yo weight. Oh, man. I've played a lot of Space Team, but that has prepared me none to do this. I love Space Team. So these are things that are real? This is a real thing.

Starting point is 00:10:43 A yo-yo weight is a real thing. I think a yo-yo weight probably has something to do with getting the satellite out of the back of the space shuttle. You know, when that thing opens up and the thing goes out of it? Somewhere in there is where it's happening with the yo-yo weight. Yeah. Some kind of counterbalance for lifting a thing out of a thing. Sounds good. I don't know if you need a counterbalance in space, I guess. Sure you do.

Starting point is 00:11:07 You do? Okay. There's mass up there. Okay, okay. I'm going to do the opposite of that, but maybe not opposite enough for you to clearly decide a winner. A yo-yo weight is something that you, it's like a grappling hook in space where if you want to go somewhere, you kind of throw your yo-yo and then drag yourself along oh that's cool so you throw out your yo-yo and you drag yourself along the yo-yo it's like a bladed yo-yo it's a magnetic yo-yo i think you can hook the yo-yo onto things or i don't know how physics works enough to really visualize it but you were you're using the yo-yo's weight to heft yourself around and when you say yourself

Starting point is 00:11:46 who who is who is on the other end of the yo-yo must be close because you guys you guys are both a little close so i'm getting granular i think it's um someone in who's doing extra vehicular an eva so a human a human being a human being yes not okay not an object all right well then it's going to sam because no human being is involved in yo-yo weights. So it's a part of a mechanism. It's called a yo-yo d-spin that helps stop the spin of satellites and spacecraft after they launch. So when they launch, they might be launched with something called spin stabilization, which keeps them spinning around their axis. It reduces the effects of wind or drag or other variables that might apply torque to the spacecraft and get it off course. So this acts like a gyroscope and it

Starting point is 00:12:29 works pretty well, but it also means that the spacecraft keeps spinning after launch. It does nothing to slow it down or stop it from spinning, and that might mess instruments inside up. So to slow the spin down, the yo-yo d-spin is deployed. The idea is sort of like the opposite of a figure skater who brings in their arms to keep spinning faster. Instead, the yo-yo d-spin is deployed. The idea is sort of like the opposite of a figure skater who brings in their arms to keep spinning faster. Instead, the yo-yo d-spin extends weights out on cords and then releases them, increasing the moment of inertia and slowing the spin until it's really easy for it to slow it the rest of the way. And yes, that means that there are yo-yo weights just floating up there in space. Oh, they let go of them. They let go.

Starting point is 00:13:06 Yeah. So it goes out until it slows down and then it's like pop and then it stays slow. We have no respect for our orbit at all. Just full of junk up there. It all falls back eventually. There's a lot of space up there. I guess so. We have very little respect for our Earth, too.

Starting point is 00:13:25 Have you seen someone finish a sandwich and just go to the piece of paper? All right. So our second part on a spaceship that is real and you don't know what it does is the Rapid SCAT. Oh, God. I've heard of this one. Have you? Yeah. Rapid SCat.

Starting point is 00:13:46 I bet it's something to do with, like, a detection. So it's an implement that's on the, like, tool control module of whatever a spacecraft is. Is that a thing? I don't know. Yeah, the TCM. Oh, okay. Yeah, the TCM. Oh, okay. Yeah, you know.

Starting point is 00:14:07 If I use more fancy words, then it sounds more real. Yeah, yeah. But it's like the less cool equivalent of the little green radar that goes bloop, bloop, bloop if an asteroid's coming towards you. It just like rapidly scans around you

Starting point is 00:14:23 and tells you if there's anything of note. Okay. Or like the general status of your system. I think it's some kind of little propulsion system that makes tiny adjustments to push you around just a little bit. That one's going to Sari because it is in fact a detection, kind of, but does not do what you said it did. But it's a scatterometer, which is apparently a thing, on board the International Space Station. It was launched in 2014. Its job was, it's not there anymore, to measure ocean winds, which made it very important to a lot of agencies as

Starting point is 00:15:05 a way to keep track of weather patterns and detect big storms. The Rapid SCAT was actually created to replace NASA's Quicksat Earth satellite, which had stopped working in 2009. JVL needed to find a way to quickly and cheaply replace it, so they found a way to reuse hardware that had been used to test the Quick SCAT to assemble the Rapid SCAT and send it to the ISS. The Rapid SCAT ran forat and send it the iss the rapid scat ran for two years before it was decommissioned what happened to it just got tired i think they i think they found a uh they launched a real replacement for the quick stat okay okay they launched better

Starting point is 00:15:37 scat uh thanks for not guessing a poop thing you guys the next one we have is a whipple bumper no oh i'm not kidding it's a real thing the whipple bumper whipple bumper can you can you use it in a sentence yeah so they they they they used the whipple bumper on the space station okay um okay so when you're on stuff like that there's got to be like some kind of arm or something that's going moving around and when you're spacewalking if that hit bumps into you you're in trouble that's where the whipple bumper comes in so you're the whipple yeah if you get the whipple bumper protects you from getting bumped i suppose it's some kind of skirt or some kind of something with air inside of it to prevent

Starting point is 00:16:26 damage to spacewalkers. From being bumped. From being bumped. Which is kind of the only thing that can happen to you in space really, isn't it? Just bumped by various things in variously serious ways. Life is just a series of bumps. That's kind of all that can happen to you period, huh?

Starting point is 00:16:41 Yeah, even here on Earth we're just bumping into the floor. That's a great Will Smith're just bumping yeah yeah into the floor that's a great will smith song i'm bumping we're here on earth we're just bumping um yes sari um i think a whipple bumper is like when when one space station module and another space station module love each other very much, and then they're like, you know, want to become a bigger space station, and then they Whipple bump together, and they like lock, interlock, and become one larger space station. You guys got sharp brains today.

Starting point is 00:17:19 The Whipple bumper is neither of those things, but it does, it's closer to what Sam said. It's a Whipple bumper, also known as a Whipple shield, is an aluminum shield around a spacecraft that breaks up approaching debris to distribute its impacts and lessen the damage to the craft. It gets its name from the inventor of it, Fred Whipple. Oh, fun. Who designed this shield in the 1940s. So it's like the Enterprise has its deflector shield, but it's just some piece of metal. Yeah, it's a particularly crafted, layered aluminum thing that's really good at spreading out the impact of impact. All right, we've got one last thing here.

Starting point is 00:17:58 It's called Sherlock. Okay. It doesn't have a K on it, so you know it's an acronym. They love to name these things roughly after what they do, I feel like. Sherlock. Okay. It doesn't have a K on it, so you know it's an acronym. They love to name these things roughly after what they do, I feel like. It is the super... Oh, God, you're going to do the whole acronym? Oh, you're going to actually do it? Heavy, exciting, rock, locator, or crusher.

Starting point is 00:18:27 Well, you could have just been locator and it's like LOC. Oh, you're right. Yeah. Well, I said or crusher. It's documented, so now my shame is public. So you think it both locates and crushes rocks. Yeah. Well, like hypothetically.

Starting point is 00:18:42 Yeah. They like fist bump it and go, you crushed that, Sherlock. There's at least a bump because of how everything bumps. Yeah, there can't not be a bump. Yeah, there can't be a bump. You just establish that. Yeah. And so what it does is it locates rocks.

Starting point is 00:18:57 It's like, oh, and then they say, good job, Sherlock. You found cool rock. That's like the same. Oh, it's not warning it about rocks. No, it's like detecting the, so let's say it's detecting the the rock rocky composition of asteroids or the moon i don't know anything nearby rocky bodies nearby that's almost exactly what i was gonna say i was gonna say it was like a sample analyzer but now i can't say that. So it is a health monitor of some sort for humans on something, on a speed station. Strap it on your belly and it tells you how you're doing.

Starting point is 00:19:34 Yeah, exactly. It says, you're going to have to go soon. Yeah, you're eating too much goo. You got to get back to Earth. Well, congratulations to both of you sam i don't know why you didn't go for it i would have tried to find some way in which your sherlocks were different but the sherlock indeed is a tool on the perseverance rover and it's tasked with searching for organic compounds minerals and other signs of past microbial life on mars and it does

Starting point is 00:20:02 that with a whole bunch of cameras and spectrometers and a laser. So it bumps with light, at least, which is another kind of bumping. And it does that with its co-investigator, Watson. So Sherlock stands for Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals, and Watson stands for

Starting point is 00:20:21 Wide-Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and Engineering. I was going to say I love how they can always make it work. But they didn't really make it work. So, yeah, great work, Sari, and also Sam. But you should have just committed and fought for it. I wanted to, you know, Sari needs a win. Thank you. Well, you came out of it exactly tied so well done on that next up we're going to take a short break and then it'll be time for the fact off i thought some people i want on the show can i just interrupt real quick hit me hit me i want bill oakley the man who invented steamed

Starting point is 00:21:03 hams from the Simpsons. Do you know what I'm talking about? Is that a real person? Yeah. Like the steamed ham he wrote for the episode? He does like a pretty popular TikTok reviews of food. So you and him would have a lot to talk about. I mean, Alf is also not really a real person. Well, Bill Oakley is literally a real person.

Starting point is 00:21:19 Okay. I want Joel from Mystery Science Theater. Okay, that's actually maybe doable. Yeah. I know people who know him. And I want John Hodgman. I Okay, that's actually maybe doable. Yeah. I know people who know him. And I want John Hodgman. I think John Hodgman would be fun. Oh, I know people who know John Hodgman.

Starting point is 00:21:30 I know John Hodgman. I know someone who knows John Hodgman. It's you. Okay, now we can go to break. All right, everybody, it's time to get ready for the fact off. Our panelists have brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. And after they have presented their facts, I'll judge them and award Hank Bucks to the one that I think will make the best TikTok. And to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question. One of the most important tasks of building the James Webb Space Telescope was figuring out how to actually get it into space.

Starting point is 00:22:20 In the early 2000s, decades before the actual launch of the telescope, NASA settled on a launch vehicle, the Ariane 5, which belongs to the European Space Agency. They picked the Ariane 5 because they considered it to be one of the world's most reliable launch vehicles, and the only launch vehicle that met the Institute's requirements for transporting the telescope. Between 2003 and 2017, the Ariane 5 had a very impressive string of missions that launched consecutively without failure how many missions did it launch in that time oh i have no concept of how many missions humanity does in any time this is a good question um i want to say less than one per year that feels too expensive and fast but it's all of europe sari i'm gonna guess 10 a nice even 10 i'm gonna guess 25 82 whoa that's so many space a lot huh yeah so a lot of uh successes but the mission that broke the streak of success was in uh 2018, and they figured out that it happened

Starting point is 00:23:26 because the rocket was given the wrong coordinates. Oh, no. So it was not really the rocket's fault. It's not his fault. That sent it 20 degrees off course and caused the rocket to lose contact with ground control, and that was bad. Human error.

Starting point is 00:23:39 Doesn't count. It worked so well that the Jet ABST launch that it saved the telescope a bunch of fuel extending its operational time from 10 years to 20 years so that's not bad yeah uh as long as as long as it's fairly safe from those micrometeoroids which are now my biggest fear oh yeah what happened it got hit by one it got hit by so like they knew it was going to get hit by a little technically micrometeoroid because micrometeorites only happen when they hit the planet i guess yeah when they hit our atmosphere anyway there's dust in space and it's moving real fast uh the and they expected

Starting point is 00:24:16 this to happen but it got hit by a piece that was bigger than they expected which is concerning because if it's going to get hit by pieces that big like basically if it took six months before that thing hit it if this happens every six months it could over the course of the mission significantly degrade the ability of the telescope to get you know the same quality of science that we're getting right now though it would still be better than anything that we have by a wide wide margin she needs a whipple bumper wide margin. Shoot. Needs a Whipple bumper, huh? Well, you can't really put a Whipple bumper on your giant beryllium gold-plated mirror. Okay.

Starting point is 00:24:52 Because it needs to see. I guess so. But yeah, exactly. If only we could have built a Star Trek-style Whipple bumper made out of... Light or whatever it's made out of. I have no idea. Yeah, deflection feelings all right so well that means that sam gets to decide who goes first i'm gonna go first

Starting point is 00:25:14 i had an off week so i'm just gonna i'm sorry when humans launch things into space we basically make a big old mess from satellites to manned spacecrafts launches leave different rocket stages in orbit and even the craft and satellites themselves can become space junk eventually and in earth's orbit this is getting to be an issue according to nasa there are about 23 000 bits of man-made space junk orbiting earth and each of those things is a potential hazard to other things that are launching into space and people because something might squish them someday or something like that there is of course another heavenly body that we sent people and other stuff to the moon and junk accumulates in its orbit too right now there's estimated to be

Starting point is 00:25:54 a couple dozen bits of debris orbiting it but the moon he's just a little guy and with several governmental and private entities interested in getting back to the moon in the near future, an estimated 50 missions in the next decade, the concern is that there's going to be just a big dangerous mess up there in pretty short order. And on top of that, the moon is so bright that it's long been considered impossible to track things that orbit it because you just look at it, it's a big orb of light. big orb of light impossible that is until 2020 when a scientist named vishnu ready was observing china's chang e5 lunar probe using a regular backyard telescope and discovered sort of accidentally that he could see a slight flicker at the edge of the moon as the probe orbited and he figured out because of these flickers how to track it within 100 miles just from his own observations with his backyard telescope then Then he gathered more data and brought it to his colleague Roberto Ferfaro to develop an algorithm that could accurately forecast

Starting point is 00:26:51 the orbit of the satellite. And this got the attention of the Air Force, who gave the team a $7.5 million grant to develop what will be, in essence, an air traffic control AI that can track all of the crap that's orbiting the moon and help map out safe routes so manned ships aren't getting hit by stuff. So right now the team is like cataloging all the junk up there before they start writing the AI. And that leads me to my real fact, because this was all just a preamble. The facility these researchers are working out of is none other than Biosphere 2.

Starting point is 00:27:21 The program is run by the University of Arizona, which I guess owns Biosphere 2. The program is run by the University of Arizona, which I guess owns Biosphere 2. And Biosphere 2 apparently has an observatory, or like an array of sensors called the Space Domain Awareness Observatory, which I looked up and all I could find about it was this article, basically.

Starting point is 00:27:40 So, wacky old Biosphere 2 could become the space air traffic control tower of the future. And I think they should invite us there to look at it and do an episode of tangents. So doctors for faro and ready. If you're listening, please. I want a podcast or biosphere two. Got to get in a plane with our microphones.

Starting point is 00:27:58 That sounds a little humid, but very fun. Thank you. It'll be great. We could sit in, we would sit in the desert room. We could sit in there and do it. We could sit in, we would sit in the desert room. We could sit in there and do it. We could sit in the, we could sit anywhere as long as I get to act out

Starting point is 00:28:08 scenes from Biodome. Yeah, I'll watch it and we can do it together. Oh my God. Oh, and then we could do a, we could do a commentary

Starting point is 00:28:15 for the, for our Patreon patrons. We could do a commentary for Biodome and Biosphere 2. That's the best idea I've ever heard. It does, it seems achievable.

Starting point is 00:28:24 The biggest problem is getting Sari on a plane. I can go to Arizona, please, for this, for something this important. I'm there, immediately. It's good to know. We'll replace her with John Hodgman for that episode. No! Me and John Hodgman in Biosphere 2

Starting point is 00:28:39 doing a commentary of Biodome. That's very weird. I would think that people would just know where their satellites are. They had to look. I don't think anybody cared to keep tabs on them. So it's like stuff left over from all of the missions that have landed and stuff like that. I like that thing hit the moon recently and everybody was like, what the heck? What the heck was that thing?

Starting point is 00:29:01 Nobody was keeping track of any of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is weird that we had a big rocket booster fall on the moon and everyone was like, oh, yeah, yeah, I guess that... I don't know. It was some thing that was up there. Okay, Sari, what do you got? Like Sam mentioned in his poem, an important part of all kinds of sci-fi spaceships is artificial gravity. So instead of floating around like astronauts in the ISS,

Starting point is 00:29:25 our imagined fictional space travelers are walking around with their feet on the floor of the ship, also making film sets a lot more convenient for everybody. But real-life engineers are also interested in artificial gravity to possibly combat some health effects from sticking human bodies in microgravity environments over long periods of time, like, say, a journey to Mars.

Starting point is 00:29:46 So there have been a handful of hypotheses over time and one absolutely wild experiment on September 14th, 1966. It involved the Gemini 11 spacecraft, which had a crew of two, and the uncrewed Agena target vehicle, which was a modified rocket stage that had been used in a variety of experiments like practicing docking. The goal was to unravel a 100-foot tether between the Gemini 11 and the Agena, keeping it nice and taut. Then they wanted to fire thrusters to spin the whole system, generating a center of gravity in the middle of the tether

Starting point is 00:30:25 and a force that pushes outward like those Gravitron fair rides. And theoretically... There's people in one of them? There's people in one of them. They were firing the thrusters. And theoretically, if the capsule spun fast enough,

Starting point is 00:30:38 the astronauts would be able to walk along the edge as if it was the ground and experience some artificial gravity like in 2001 A Space Odysseyyssey what could go wrong turns out that whipping two objects that weigh thousands of pounds each around in a circle while they're connected by rope is pretty chaotic there were a couple hiccups during setup like the tether getting stuck at 50 feet and then at 90 feet and then the tether not pulling taut as and then at 90 feet and then the tether not

Starting point is 00:31:05 pulling taut as nicely as they had hoped and so then they were instructed to fire the thrusters a little to pick up the slack but then the tether started whipping around like a jump rope between the agina and the gemini 11 capsule which was definitely really fun not scary at all even with that terrifying sight they kept firing the thrusters and straightened out the tether until they got a comfortable 38 degree per minute rotation going through the night. And because scientists can be both smart and dumb, the folks on the ground then asked the Gemini crew to spin faster. They were like, you got it stable. Now hit the gas again. Let's go.

Starting point is 00:31:42 Yeah. Let's go. And that tightened the tether and started slingshotting the astronauts around, at which point one of them yelled, Oh, look at the slack. It's going to jerk this thing to heck. Oh, no. I'm glad he didn't swear. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:32:07 somehow those weren't his last words and they the astronauts stabilized the whole system to a speedy 55 degree per minute rotation which doesn't seem worth the trouble uh which generated a whopping 0.00015 g of artificial gravity so very small so like you basically if if if you put if you put something on the ground it might not come back up. Yep. And that's exactly basically what they did, which was they couldn't feel it, but they placed a camera against the instrument panel of Gemini 11 and let go. And then it moved parallel to the direction of the tether and hit the back wall. And they were like, well, that's artificial gravity, I guess. That's the last time we're gonna try that yeah and then they released the tether and got a safe distance from the gina capsule

Starting point is 00:32:52 hooray question mark um and there are a lot of hypothetical problems with spinning spaceships and practical ones if you count the chaos of this mission and i don't think we've tried anything since but i'm sure it is just one of plenty of other wild ideas brewing when it comes to artificial gravity that we'll experience someday maybe the the idea that you do that with a craft that had people in it yeah like you could do that without people in it yeah it's not like you have people who are like oh i'm feeling maybe in 1969 it was a lot easier to do with people in it because you had to have somebody to push buttons literally because the computer uh could only add i don't know like because it was because it was significantly less advanced than your phone is, of course. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:33:47 But, like, now I feel like we should try that out. Like, we have a lot more control over things now than we did then. But still, I wouldn't want to be on one end of that tether because if anything goes wrong, what did he say? It's going to jerk this thing to heck yeah you don't want that i feel like it's going to jerk that thing to heck and when that happens you just shoot off you just shoot off at once that it gets jerked to heck if you're lucky enough to keep your vacuum seal you just get flung off in whatever direction you happen to be going in when you when it broke.

Starting point is 00:34:25 Couldn't they have done it tiny with like an ant or something also? Couldn't they have put like an ant in a ping pong ball and been like, all right, dink, spin it around. Inside the thing, just like a hamster wheel. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:34:39 Yeah. It's amazing that it all went as the old early space missions went as well as they did. All right. So now I have to choose between these two things. I got two excellent facts. I've got air traffic control for the moon from Biosphere 2, which could be a great place to record an episode of Tangents.

Starting point is 00:34:58 Or is Sari a really ridiculously dangerous, but ultimately ultimately I guess successful artificial gravity experiment during Gemini. Ah, gosh. I'm gonna go with Sari. It's just a slightly better story because the people were almost

Starting point is 00:35:18 killed. Well, okay. I feel like you have a bias, but that's okay. What do I have a bias towards? What's my bias? Towards Sari. Towards Sari. Oh. Not toward like space or toward death.

Starting point is 00:35:32 Toward weird historical missions. No, just towards Sari specifically. Okay. I'm okay being your fan favorite. I can be pod favorite. Hank's favorite? Yeah, I can be Hank's favorite. I'll be Hankanks favorite podcaster

Starting point is 00:35:46 and that means it's time to ask the science couch we've got uh one from muhammad ml eng who asks how does a gyroscope help compensate for the rotation of tape reels tools etc it's just a spinning top right it's just a spinning top right right? It's just a spinning top, right? All I know is if you're holding a fidget spinner and you move it, you can feel the force of the spin, whatever

Starting point is 00:36:15 this force is. And so, a gyroscope wants to stay in one position, and if you push on it, then it will push back and you can use that push back to change the orientation of stuff in space am i right yeah that's the bet i it took me probably an hour of research to get to that point where i could explain it that simply i was like i gotta digest all this physics i I got to make sure. Watch these videos.

Starting point is 00:36:45 In incomprehensible, I'm going to say it good, and then you just said it good. That's why I picked this question. Remember I said Hank's going to know the answer. I know, but I was prepared to not embarrass myself. Well, I can tell you I don't really understand the physics of it. Like, it is only because of fidget spinners that i have any intuitive understanding of how a gyroscope works without that i wouldn't like

Starting point is 00:37:11 it's real weird that uh that that momentum creates um a fort because i mean i guess it's because like it's spinning away and it has inertia in that direction. And when you change the direction, you are changing the inertia. You're pushing against the you are forcing it to go against where its inertia wants to go. And I've also seen astronauts in space do stuff with gyroscopes where they're like they put it there. And instead of like doing what anything else would do, it's just like float around. It's just like. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:37:45 Oh, weird. I think in answer to the end part of this question, which is it's just a spinning top. Right. So the gyroscopes you on it which is that once it's spinning fast enough it wants to remain spinning around that axis like i think was saying but a gyroscope like the ones that you see in the space videos or the ones that are little desk toys are a spinning wheel that are mounted onto those rings around it called gimbals, so that as forces are exerted upon it to switch how the gyroscope would be spinning, it remains around the same axis, and instead the gimbals spin around it.

Starting point is 00:38:41 It exerts a counterforce onto the gimbals, and then those move around it. And so that is how the gyroscope, like, the flat surface of the gyroscope remains spinning on the same plane. And it can be readjusted by, like, a human poking it, but as space is moving around it, it will stay moving. moving and the gimbals are going to be the things that switch because the the spin like that angular momentum is what is maintaining the the orientation of it and this is something we're using a lot in space oh yes yeah so we use it in a lot of different technologies um it's they're they're collectively inertial navigation systems and they use a combination of gyroscopes and accelerometers to get information about which way a thing is pointing and how fast it's moving in that direction to make little corrections and and it's how like uh so if a satellite wants to change orientation in space, it doesn't have to use reaction mass.

Starting point is 00:39:46 It doesn't have to, like, throw stuff out to change its orientation. It can use the gyroscopes to actually alter the way it's pointing. It can't, like, move in a direction, but it can move, it can change the direction it's facing. Whoa, I never even thought about how they would do that. Thanks to everybody for your hard work. We are podcast hosts. I'd just like to see him

Starting point is 00:40:14 try to do our job, though. Come on. That's right. Well, if you want to ask the Science Couch your questions, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents. We tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week and then look for questions. Or you can join the SciShowTangents. We tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week and then look for questions. Or you can join the SciShowTangents Patreon and ask us on our Discord.

Starting point is 00:40:29 Thank you to at Mukulepticon, Napoleon on Discord, and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode. If you like this show and you want to help us out, super easy to do that. First, you can go to patreon.com slash SciShowTangents to become a patron and get access to things like. First, you can go to patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents to become a

Starting point is 00:40:45 patron and get access to things like our newsletter, our bonus episodes. And second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's very helpful and helps us know what you like about the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Sam Schultz. Our editor is Seth Glicksman. Our story editor is Alex Billow. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz Bezio.

Starting point is 00:41:13 Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tunamedish. Our executive producers are Caitlin Hoffmeister and me, Hank Green. And of course, we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you! And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But, one more thing. The first U.S. spaceflight program was Project Mercury, so NASA was figuring out a lot of stuff from scratch.

Starting point is 00:42:04 And of course, one concern was keeping astronauts as comfy as possible while they experienced the extreme 3G or so force during launch. So some of the astronauts that were selected for Project Mercury over the years had a personalized butt mold made so engineers could design spaceship seats that would perfectly cradle their butts. That's nice. Why didn't all of them though? Some of them just don't care about their butts? They were like, turns out it doesn't matter that much. Just stick a big pillow down there and it'll be uncomfortable no matter

Starting point is 00:42:28 what you do. Yeah, yeah. Get a memory foam pillow.

SciShow Tangents - Spaceships

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