Stuff You Should Know - How Going to the Moon Works

Episode Date: July 16, 2019

Fifty years ago, the first humans stepped onto the moon. After going back a few more times, humanity lost its taste for moon travel. But it’s being revived again. NASA is planning to send humans back to the moon by 2024 and build a moon base by 2028.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, come see us, because we're coming to see you. Specifically, if you live in Chicago on July 24th, we're gonna be at the Harris Theater, and the following night, we're gonna be

at the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto, and that's just the beginning. That's right, we're also going to our beloved Wilbur Theater, which we own in Boston on October 29th, and then our first visit to Portland, Maine at the State Theater on August 30th. Yep, that's going to be followed in October. We're gonna take a little break

because that's a lot of touring. In October on the ninth, we're gonna be at the Plaza Live in Orlando, and then on October 10th, we're gonna be at the Civic Theater in New Orleans. That's right, and in October, we're gonna round it all out at the Bell House in Brooklyn for three shows, October 23rd, 24th, and 25th.

Yep, so go to sysklive.com for tickets and information, and we will see you starting this July in Chicago. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there, and there's Jerry over there, and this is coming up on the 50th anniversary, Chuck,

of the first time humans ever set foot on the moon. That's one small step for podcasts. Oh, wow. A giant leap for podcasting. That's a really good Neil Armstrong. Oh, boy, that was dumb. I liked it, though. I think this serves as a companion piece

to our June 2014 episode on the space race. Yeah, and was the moon landing a hoax? We did that one, too. Jeez, did we do that in silliness so long ago? 2009, 10. That sounds about right. I think we landed on it not being a hoax, if I remember correctly.

That's right. Yeah, this is a good companion to the space race one. I went back and watched the full CBS broadcast of this. It's like 42 minutes long. Really cool. Yeah, I mean, Cronkite's kind of crying. It's easy. Well, he was a big crybaby.

Everyone knows that about Cronkite. He'd cry at the drop of a hat. Crikite, huh? Yeah, basically. You should have seen him when Prince's die got married. Good Lord. Oh, boy. So, there's nothing wrong with crying, Walter.

No. So, Chuck, I was reading about that transmission, and it's pretty amazing that the world got to see Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bouncing around on the moon. Yeah, in the 60s. Yes, in the 60s. Like at the end of the 60s, but still. This was far and away the first time anybody

had ever done anything like this. But what I did not know until this very day is that the guy who invented basically the whole setup for this, for Westinghouse, that carried this out, when he saw that transmission come through. He cried. He almost had a heart attack.

It was way, way worse visually than it was supposed to be. Okay, so he was upset at the picture quality. Yes, he, come on. I know, that's what I'm saying too, like you see this and you're like, wow, that's really good. No, apparently he had not factored in the compression that had to take place from the signal. Like if you see the raw signal,

like it was just crisp and clear, or you imagine it would be, it turns out NASA lost the magnetic tapes that have the original raw signal on it. Nice. But when it was compressed for TV, it kind of messed it up a little bit, but he apparently went with it and was like, no, that's still good.

We're still broadcasting live from the moon. Yeah, which is beaming it down, then back up, then back down. Like what does he expect? I guess he was a bit of a perfectionist. So he had a heart attack? Yeah. It's a little dramatic.

Well, I said he had a heart attack. Oh, I thought he literally had a heart attack. No, no, no, no. No, you know me, I speak in figuratives. Sure beats Cronkite. He just fell right over. You know what's funny is Cronkite missed the second half of the quote.

He said, he said, that's one small step for man. I didn't catch that second part. And then a couple of minutes later when Neil Armstrong is talking about the, he quickly goes in, you know, he has that great quote. Wait, are you kidding you? No, I'm serious. Wow.

So when Armstrong, he says that great quote and then he quickly kind of goes into work mode. And he's just talking about the surface of the moon, how it looks like a charcoal dust, basically. He's like, just a bit. And Cronkite interrupts him basically and talks over him. He's like, okay, we have the second part. Apparently he said, one giant leap for mankind.

Oh, okay. He's like, all right, well. I have never seen that broadcast. It's kind of cool. Sure, yeah. They have a simulation going so you can, you know, a really kind of corny looking 60 simulation of the lunar module landing.

And then it picks up with the live heat. Does it look like that mountain climber on the- Sort of from the prices, right? Yeah. It was an unlike that. So for those of you who haven't called on yet, we're talking about the Apollo 11 moon landing, which happened on July 20th, 1969.

And there was a lot of work that went up to that. Really? It didn't just happen overnight, you know? And it actually all started, a lot of people trace it back to that speech that John Kennedy gave at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1961, I believe. This is, sure, May 25th.

Yeah, of 1961? Yeah. Yeah, where he said that he basically challenged the United States to go to the moon, to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. All right. Right. He said, we go to the moon not because it's easy,

but because it's up there mocking us when we sleep. He was quite insane. And I'm told it's a made of cheese of the finest quality. Bring me some of that cheese. He turned into Steinbrenner. George Steinbrenner? Yeah, from Science Film. So yeah, this was what really,

I mean, the space race had been going on. And like I said, we did a pretty good show on that. Way better than this. On June 5th, 2014. Sure. But, you know, most of the 1950s were consumed with the Russians and the United States, or the Soviets rather,

just sort of while we were in second place, but just one after the other, like, oh, they're doing this and then we gotta do this. And they're doing this and we gotta do this. Yeah. Or both pursuing the same goal and the Soviets beating us to it almost every time by three months,

which is enough for the world to be like. But boy, we got the last laugh. We did, but that's what Kennedy was doing. Well, you can thank Reagan for that. That's what Kennedy was doing was, he was upping the ante. He's like, all right, enough of this tit-for-tat stuff. We're gonna really stick it to him.

And he said, we're going to the moon. We're gonna put a person on the moon, a man on the moon. But, you know, if it were today, he'd say human. Yeah, and I think, you know, we'll talk more about what's actually gained by a man, like sending a person to the moon. But beyond that, it was a very much a symbolic thing to do this and to beat the Soviets there

and to plant that American flag firmly in that lunar soil. But that's one big reason why it was televised live from the moon. Number one, we were showing, we went to the moon world. It was broadcast around the world. But two, it documented it as proof that we were up there. To most people, it was documented as proof. But then also there was a certain amount of bravado

in the fact that we were broadcasting from the moon live. So not only did we accomplish this one feat of sending people to the moon, we broadcasted it live, which is another feat as well. So we had the US Ranger program from 61 to 65. And these are things that all, you know, like you said, it was a long process. Building up to actually putting people there.

And it's easy to overlook that, that like every mission that was carried out was a test or they were trying to just build it by step by step. Sure. Including like full-on dress rehearsals. Yeah. So the Ranger program for four years sent nine missions.

They're collecting data basically to say here's how we can do this. In 62, Ranger four reached the surface but crashed. But then two years after that, Ranger seven sent back more than 4,000 photographs. Not bad. Ranger six made it but the camera failed. But get this Ranger three and five missed.

It was like, oh, I can't let it out. I mean, it's amazing that we were able to put people on the moon and bring them back safely. In a very short time. Like when you imagine all of the things that can go wrong and what year it was, it's just, it's nuts to think about. Yeah. So you said Ranger seven landed in 1964 and sent America back its own first images of the moon.

Five years later, we put humans on the moon. That's a very short amount of time. Yeah. Yeah. The Soviets were the first to, so these Rangers, they were basically like, take pictures, take pictures, take pictures, crash. Right, right. But the Soviets were the first one to actually land,

gently land a spacecraft on the moon without just crashing into it. They were also the first, so the very first step was lunar orbit. The second one was crashing on the moon. And then the third step was landing softly on the moon and the Soviets beat us every step of the way. That's right.

Which so it was kind of gutsy for Kennedy to be like, we're going to be the first to the moon because we'd been behind every step of the way. I bet the moon was like, WTF, like what's going on? Yeah. I've been up here for a long time and now there's just a lot of activity. I'm getting all pockmarked.

People are crashing stuff on me. Here's a dude, he's coming at me. He's about to jump on me. That was the moon's quote. Okay. Okay. So all this led up to obviously these tests, pre-flight tests on the ground,

which some ended in tragedy. Oh yeah, Apollo one. Yeah, notably in 1967, a fire swept through the Apollo command module and killed Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. And that was, they died of asphyxiation. And after reading up on it, there was like, there were so many things wrong.

Like their spacesuits were flammable. Oh yeah. They had a hatch door that opened in and like took a long time to open. Well, the fire itself created a vacuum that made it impossible for the hatch to open. Like there was, it was impossible for that hatch to open. It was a really, really sad accident,

but it might've been one that was like, like I wish there weren't people involved, but it might've been something necessary to get everything right. It definitely changed the mentality of the space program and that safety became even more important. Yeah, and I think Gus Grissom was the first of the Mercury seven to die.

Oh really? Yeah, very sad. Yeah. 41 years old. Was he just 41? He looked way old. It's crazy like what 41, what age that was back then. I think everyone was like 30 to 60 look the same.

Pretty much. You know, I can't tell the difference. Pretty much. So we've gone to lunar orbit. We've crash landed on the moon. There's a bunch of steps that we were taking that made up the space race. One of the next one was to get somebody

outside of Earth's orbit and into lunar orbit. Big deal. The Soviets beat us there too, but just very shortly after that, I think it was Apollo seven, spent a bunch of time orbiting the Earth. I think they made it to, oh, I know the big thing about Apollo seven.

So we've gone from like pioneer ranger and pioneer ranger and surveyor into now these are crewed missions, the Apollo program. Apollo one ended in tragedy. And then Apollo seven is where it really starts to become significant where things are really picking up by leaps and bounds. This is 1968, less than a year

before we would land on the moon. And Apollo seven's big one is that this is the first time that we're testing the command module that we would use to send Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins up to the moon. Yeah, so they orbited the Earth 163 times, spent almost 11 days in space. So that was a big success.

This was Walter Sharra, Jr., Don Esel and Walter Cunningham. From old serum. And then Apollo eight was a big deal. It was happening so fast. That was seven was in October. Apollo eight was in December of the same year. And this was the first one to use the Saturn rocket,

which was a big, big deal. Yeah, the Saturn rocket is, you can actually see one on its side walk right under it at Kennedy Space Center. It's pretty new museum, right? And it's bigger than I think a 36 story building. It's just this enormously powerful rocket. And when they started testing the Saturn,

this was like when the Saturn showed that it would work, people started to realize like, we're actually, we might do this. Cause we'd already tested out the command module. And now the Saturn was up. And the Saturn came in three stages. There was the first stage that produced like 7.7 million pounds of thrust,

which is a lot more than, you know, you produce when you jump up in the air. I looked for an analogy. I couldn't find any good comparison. No big max. It's just a lot of thrust. Yeah. So this was the thrust that got that. This is the launch thrust.

Yeah. It got you out of earth's gravity or the bulk of the gravity. And then so that first big old stage would fall away. And then the second stage got you all the way out of earth's gravity. And then the third stage, that second stage would fall away. And then the third stage would propel you to the moon.

So it was a three stage rocket. And by the time that third stage had fired and got you up to top speed, you were going something like 25,000 miles per hour in a little capsule at the top of a rocket. Amazing. It was, it was a very amazing rocket. And this test, it was, I will go to my grave saying that.

And this test of the Apollo 8 mission showed that it would work. Yeah. So Apollo 9 follows just two and a half months, three months later. And this one was a big deal because it actually practiced a very important procedure, which was the docking between the command module and the lunar module.

So you've got this Saturn rocket that's providing the juice. Then you have the command module, which is where, essentially where you're, you know, you're, you're flying. What you would think of as the, the spaceship. It's like the crew quarters. Yeah. Yeah. It's where the crew is. It's where they're flying.

It's where they're eating and pooping and, and sleeping. And then you actually need to land on the moon and you don't do that in the command module. You do that in the lunar module. But those two guys have to connect. Right. So the command module and the lunar module for launch are facing the same direction. But once they get out into a lunar trajectory,

I, and I could not find why they designed it like this. Yeah, I couldn't either. But the, the lunar module, that thing that you've seen laying on the moon that looked just totally ungainly, ungainly, had to blast off and it was tethered. It blasted off, turned around, and then redocked with the command module nose to nose.

I don't think, I'm surprised that there had to be something they just couldn't figure out a workaround for. I would love to know. Anybody who knows, please write in because I was looking all over for it. But consider this, Chuck, you had two pieces of equipment that were facing the same direction and you had to turn one around and face the other one

in space at 25,000 miles per hour. So that's pretty impressive that they were able to do in the sixties, right? So this was, this was Apollo nine was the first to show, this is, this is working, like this is going to work. So they did that. And then Apollo 10 was the one, this was the last one in the dress rehearsal.

The Apollo 10 astronauts, you could call them under studies. I guess so. Just really took it for the team. Yeah, I mean, they did everything but touchdown on the moon. Yeah, they brought that. So they did this whole docking procedure where the lunar module was blasted off and turned around

and nose to nose connected to the command module. And then they did the lunar landing thing where they blasted off the lunar module, brought it down within 50,000 feet of the moon service. And then took it back up and redocked again. I wonder if they were like, oh, it's right there. Maybe we should just. I wonder too.

Surely they joked at least. Yeah, probably so. But there's probably a lot of humor going on. I would hope so. But the whole mission though is you've got this, this command module and the lunar module and the command module when the lunar module goes down to the moon and then back up,

the command module is just flying around in a lunar orbit waiting to rendezvous again. So they did everything but touchdown and they came back. When they came back, they said, we're ready. This is it. They said, we're ready. Yeah, hint, hint. And that was like two months before Apollo 11 left it off.

Should we take a break? I think so. All right, let's take a break and talk about the stars of the show, Apollo 11. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're gonna use HeyDude as our jumping off point but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

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Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

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So with Apollo 11, the command module was named Columbia. And the lunar module was famously named Eagle. Yeah. In Apollo 10, the command module was Charlie Brown and the lunar module was Snoopy, which I love. That's pretty sweet. Yeah. So everyone knows the three human beings

that we sent up in Apollo 11, Commander Neil Armstrong, lunar module pilot, Buzz Aldrin, and the other guy. I know, poor Michael Collins. Yeah, command module pilot, Michael Collins. And you really like, we want to sing his praises because it stinks to be known as the other guy. I would imagine. Sure.

Everyone remembers those other two names. Aske Roger Daltry. They got to, what? They got to walk around on the moon while Michael Collins essentially babysat the command module. In the command module, eating ho-ho's, waiting for them to come back. That's unselfish.

Extremely. And I'm sure they were assigned these roles because of what they had trained for. But to be the guy that's like, yeah, you know what? That's OK. I'll be number three. That's what he did, though. He sat up there with the command module

and made sure it stayed in orbit and just waited for the dudes to come back. So hats off to you, Michael Collins. All right, so July 16, 1969, 9.32 in the morning. I'm so excited. Apollo 11 lifts off from JFK Space Center at Cape Canaveral. There's no coincidence there. He said, go get them.

And name it after me. So it was a huge moment for the end of the space race, if it all went well. If it all went well. So remember, we'd practiced everything up to the actual landing. We'll get to the landing in a second. But Buzz Aldrin later said that he was the most worried

about the landing because they were the most unknowns, the most questions remaining. Because it was the one thing that hadn't been studied and practiced and done before. And it was up to these guys. This is the last thing, the last part of this whole thing, and no one had done it. And so when they took off in 9.32,

they went through, everything just went perfectly. The first stage fired fine, second stage fired fine. The third stage got them into a lunar trajectory. And I think they traveled this 238,000 miles over about two and a half days before they started to reach lunar orbit. Oh yeah, so on July 19th is when they enter that orbit. They spend about a day there, sort of, you know,

there's a lot of checking on things. You don't just like plow ahead with your plan. You take a day once you get up there to make sure everything's working. They're checking the communication systems and basically preparing for the big show to come. Convincing Michael Collins that he couldn't come, sorry. Still drawing straws up there in the orbit.

So here was the kind of cool thing that I think maybe if you don't know this full story that's really pretty remarkable is the lunar module was supposed to basically land on autopilot. But they saw where they were headed. They didn't, you know, the moon doesn't have an atmosphere. They had never really done this. So they didn't know exactly how to calculate

their altitude and airspeed and realize in short order they were heading toward a crater with very steep, sharp rims. And landing either on those rims or down in that crater was no good. So Neil Armstrong said, screw it, I'm gonna fly this baby down. He did.

He wasn't even the lunar module pilot. He just took over, I guess, as commander. Yeah. Because if they were gonna crash, it was gonna be on him. I need to see this movie. Have you seen it yet? No, not yet. And there's another documentary,

I think just called Apollo 11 that's coming out. Oh, it'll have been out because we're releasing this around the anniversary. So I think it came out in late June, maybe on CNN or something. All right. Yeah. So Armstrong had to take over the controls.

And again, no one had ever done this before. And this guy is landing a lunar module basically manually. And this was unscheduled. He had to make the thing travel further away from the spot it was going to land. And so when they finally landed, they had something like 30 seconds of fuel left. That's nuts.

It was a little hairy. And there was a very famous quote that came out of the Eagle lander. Said, Houston, this is tranquility base. The eagle has landed. And tranquility, or Houston said, thank goodness. Yeah, Houston actually said, you got a bunch of guys about to turn blue.

We're breathing again. And funny enough, that was Charlie Duke. Who was it? He was the Capcom on the ground in Houston, but he would later be up in the air in Apollo 16. Yep. Pretty neat. And I'll bet he was wearing a tie

with short sleeve dress button shirt. Probably so. That's what all those guys wore. Yeah, the problem back then was, you could never tell car salesman apart from regular people. Right, from an engineer or a teacher. I bet your dad rocked that look.

Oh, well into the 90s. With the old pocket protector. So they landed. And they were gonna abort their mission right there and go right back up. Well, no, they set it up so that they could abort at the drop of a hat if they had to. I think it was part of the procedure.

Oh, okay. I thought they were going to abort. No, no, I think the first thing they did was prepare for an abort. Gotcha. And chase something went wrong. They wouldn't have to prepare to abort. Okay, well that makes more sense.

Like press the button and take off. All right, I thought you got down there and was like, let's go back up. Exactly, I'm having second thoughts about being the first person to walk on the moon. Well, that actually does make a lot more sense than because what they were supposed to do was take a four hour rest for safety,

but they were all itching to go. So they were like, no, we're going to work through this. It still took about four hours just to get out onto the moon, but they were hard at work the whole time. They weren't taking a snooze. Yeah, which I guess men, it would have taken them eight hours, had they taken that snooze.

But they did take a snooze. Later on, yeah, that's something that I didn't realize about the moon landing. They spent a total of 21 hours on the moon and only two and a half hours of it out walking around on the moon. The rest of the time they were in the lunar module, including a seven and a half hours of sleep.

I guess, I mean, they needed it. So I was like, how did they sleep? I bet very so. And I thought, I've got it, drugs. I'll bet they took drugs. Oh, you think? They did not. They had 16 tablets of Seekin' All on them.

They took zero. Although later lunar landers would take a significant amount of Seekin' All. But Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong didn't take any Seekin' All, although they did take Dexadrine tablets during the mission. So they were pepped up.

Oh, okay. Which is hilarious. Which means they probably crashed. I guess so, but they were not in any shape to sleep. But they still slept for seven and a half hours. I bet that's some of the quietest sleep. I don't know, I would be too excited. But yeah, I guess so.

Maybe just being there and having already gone and walked out on the moon, when you come back in, you're like ready for a rest. Yeah, so 650 million people watch this. It's about a fifth of the world's population at the time. Armstrong spent about 20 minutes out there by himself, which I imagine was something else.

It's not like Aldrin crashed his party. He was like, come on. But 20 minutes out on the moon by himself, like it's just, it's hard to even fathom what that was like, or would be like now even. Then Aldrin follows him down and his description of the lunar surface was magnificent desolation.

I never knew that before, did you? Yeah, I'd heard that. That's pretty cool. And they started working. They started collecting samples, surface material, moon rocks, basically taking notations on like what the gravity was like. Because it wasn't no gravity.

It was one sixth of the Earth's gravity. So they were able to hop around and jump around like you're in a swimming pool. Kind of, yeah. Have you seen that footage of Jack Schmidt from Apollo 17? No. He keeps falling down. Really?

He had a collection bag, he was putting stuff in and he'd like drop it and he'd bend over and get it and kind of come back up and then like basically, almost somersault, like he was having a really hard time. And they figured out like pretty quickly, you can't just walk on the moon, especially in these space suits. You have to hop, right?

You have to hop. But I think even hopping is not just like innate. Well, sure. So you can follow over. But it's a learning curve. Right. But I did not see that Buzz Aldrin or Neil Armstrong fell down.

Me, no fall down. Who was it that fell? Jack Schmidt from Apollo 17. Clutzy Jack, that was his nickname. Yeah, just like astronaut falls down on the moon. It's pretty fun to watch. Especially if you listen to Yackety Sax on another tab. So we mentioned that American flag,

that iconic flag drop or flag stick or flag raise. What would you call that? All of the above? I don't know, commie poke? That's a great drink too, by the way. The commie poke? Uh-huh. So the pole went in the first like six inches or so

very easily and they were like, oh, this is a breeze. And then it hit something super hard. And I guess they were like, oh, it's not so easy. So they had to lean the flag back. Well, yeah, they kind of... Oh, just wriggled it back and forth? Right. Thank you, because I realized people

can't see what I was doing. But yeah, and in doing this, this is really important. In doing that, they created ripples in this flag. And that's what moonhooks people point to. Really? It's like there's no wind on the moon. Yeah, they're like, how is there wind, you idiots? Obviously, this is here on earth.

And that is the explanation that when they were wriggling it back and forth, they created ripples, and that you can see in footage the astronauts moving around the flag and the flag's ripples remain static. So no, there's not any wind on the moon, but that's not wind that did that to the flag on the moon. Yeah, and I saw about six years ago, they feel pretty good that most of those flags

what are there, seven and all? Six, I believe. Are still there. They should still be, I don't know how they would fall off the moon. Well, not fall off, but just the temperature swings on the moon. Oh, that's true.

There was a lot of surmising that they wouldn't have survived this stuff. Okay. But really? Yeah, and the solar radiation and everything. We'll get to all that stuff, but it did say that they took a lot of pictures of the various times of day,

and they think they have found, I don't think they found Apollo 11, but it's not like they can get it from the surface. So these are all aerial shots. So they're comparing like shadows basically. Gotcha. And saying, oh, well, it looks to me like this is the flag. Really?

Yeah. Are they still standing up to they think? Well, I don't think you can tell. Oh, okay. But if it's casting a shadow, it must be. Oh yeah, I guess so. Right? Yeah, you need a job at NASA, Chuck.

Come on and be like that shadow, proves it's standing that egghead. But in all for Apollo 11, they collected about 50 pounds of lunar material, took a bunch of pictures, took two core tube samples. And like you said, spent what, two and a half hours out there? Yep. Just romping around, having a good time. Having a good time and 21 hours total

on the lunar surface. And then they, after, well, after about 21 hours, the lunar module went, which no one realizes, but that's the sound that it makes in space. That's right. And it went up in rendezvoused with the command module. It worked.

And a very passive aggressively hostile Michael Collins, who was very quiet for the rest of the trip. But they docked again. They docked like the docking procedure after launch. It went at rendezvoused, it docked with it. They got out and then they said, so long Eagle, thanks for everything. Blasted it off again and just sent it

on a crash course to the moon's surface. And where it's crash site is, no one knows. It's an unknown site, but it's on there somewhere. But that's what they did. They said, they used the Eagle to go down, come back up, and then they sent it back to mama. So what happens on the way back, is that there's two scenarios.

It's either those two guys can't stop talking about it and Michael Collins is just like, yeah, yeah. Right, yeah, that's great. Or Michael Collins is like, what was it like guys? What was it like? And they're like, no, you wouldn't understand. Yeah, we could describe it, but it wouldn't make sense to your brain.

Yeah, those are people like the solar eclipse. Either one of those, that's a bad, right, yeah. You really had to see totality, you know, if you didn't then just forget it. That's a bad outcome for Michael Collins either way. Pretty bad, the long flight home. But it's amazing that they were able to not only read doc,

but they were able to splash down on Hawaii alive. Yeah, there was one other part. So the command module technically had another part, the service module that had like the oxygen and the water and all that stuff. And they scuttled that on the way back in. And then just the command module made its entry back into the Earth's atmosphere,

going again about 25,000 miles per hour and heating up to something like 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. And they had created this heat shield that they knew worked because they tested it on former Apollo or other Apollo missions. But I mean, still every time you've got three guys in a little tiny capsule going 25,000 miles an hour, hurtling toward Earth with the outside temperature

of 5,000 degrees, it's kind of hairy. So yeah, when they splashed down off the coast of Hawaii, it was a big, big deal. Like it had been successful. And actually the stated primary objective, the primary mission of Apollo 11 was to send a human into space, land them on the moon and bring them back safely.

The thing that Kennedy challenged the United States to do. And when they splashed down and they were all safe and sound, Apollo 11 was successful. Yeah, I think that for all these Apollo missions, the reentry is always the biggest, well, I mean, there's tons of concerns, but reentry is just so tough.

And that they made this, they made basically a covering that was meant to be destroyed. It's pretty ingenious. Sacrificial lamp covering. It's like it's supposed to burn. And everything inside should be okay. Should be.

I can't imagine that feeling, man. I can't either. And the fear, like. I'm sure it is fearful, but I wonder also if like, once you hit the atmosphere, I'll bet you can start to feel the speed you're going. Just from the shaking.

You know, out in space, I don't believe you can feel any speed at all. But because of the air pressure from the atmosphere, I mean, that's how you feel that stuff, right? Yeah, they could not have felt anything else, but like we will probably gonna die here any second now. Right, but I'll bet there's at least one or two yee-haws. You think?

Yeah. Should we take another break? Sure. All right, we'll talk about some of the other Apollo landings and then what's going on today, right after this. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the co-classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

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And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen,

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. We make good friends. We make good friends. Stop being so lonely. So, Charles, as we were researching this,

I went and looked, I was like, surely Michael Collins got another shot up in space? No. No. Well, they made a movie about him. They did, as an Irish revolutionary. It was in anachronism. So that's why his name sounded familiar.

They went on to do Apollo 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17. And all of them, after 11, it was like, the mission is now to, I mean, they got stuff done on 11, but each mission after that had very specific goals that wasn't just go up to the moon and come back. Of those six, five of them were successful. Very famously, Apollo 13 was not successful. It was an aborted mission that didn't land on the moon.

But the other five did. And yeah, they were basically really fun scientific journeys. Yeah, should we hit some of these highlights? Yeah. I think Apollo 14 is known for Alan Shepard hitting golf balls. It's funny, all the work they did, and that's like the iconic scene is him hitting golf balls.

Yeah, and some of the stuff that they're doing too. I mean, like that's NASA saying like, go find out how easy it is to move around in these suits. Right. So Shepard's like, I'll hit some golf balls up. Or like a golf course might be nice up there one day. Yeah. See if it's feasible.

See if it's feasible, yeah. Apollo 15 was the first one where they used that cool, super cool looking roving vehicle, the Lunar Rover. Yeah. That was really neat. They tore it up. Yeah.

Remember that cartoon Doom Buggy? It was like Scooby-Doo, but instead of being a dog, Scooby-Doo was a Doom Buggy. I don't remember that. You're not talking about Wonder Bug, are you? No. Okay. I think it was Doom Buggy, yeah.

I remember Wonder Bug. Wonder Bug was a Doom Buggy. I could see there being more than one of these cartoons. Somebody ripping off somebody else. Doom Buggy's were big in the 70s. Remember seeing those around? Oh, yeah. I bet you could buy a Doom Buggy today for...

Speed Buggy. $900, Speed Buggy? Speed Buggy. All right. It was a cartoon from the 60s. Yeah, Wonder Bug was live action. Or the 70s, I'm sorry. Was it?

Uh-huh. Was, did the Doom Buggy talk or something like that? Or... Wonder Bug? Are you thinking of my mother, the car? Maybe I am. Okay. Let me see, Apollo 17, I think is noted for more Lunar Roving

and then a very famous quote as the last one. I love this. Who was it? Gene Cernan. Uh-huh. We leave as we came and God willing as we shall return with peace and hope for all mankind. Yeah, that was something that like, you know,

the moon landings were part of this space race that grew out of this adversarial relationship of Cold War, USSR and the United States. But I do have to say that America did it pretty classy when we got there. Sure. Like there were all sorts of like talk about peace for humankind and that, you know,

this is one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind. It wasn't like USA or anything like that from the moon. Yeah. So I'm really heartened by the fact that that's how it was done. It was meant to be a mission to the moon for humankind. I think there was a lot of camaraderie with cosmonauts and astronauts themselves.

Somewhat, there was a lot of commemorative material up there, commemorating cosmonauts both alive and dead that American astronauts took up with them. Yeah, I mean, let's talk about the stuff that we brought back and left from all these missions. And by the way, that last mission, 1972, that's been back since. No human has left lower Earth orbit, I believe, since then.

It's hard to believe. Yeah. You'd think someone like we would have done it for some reason. No, people, I mean, we'll talk about it, but people just lost interest. It just became like, whatever. Part of it was the Vietnam War.

For sure. But I think it was also just kind of like, okay, we've done that a few times. How many rock samples are you guys gonna go get? Right. Wow me some other way. Well, it was expensive and maybe the public sentiment like how much money are we gonna pour

into getting moon rocks? Sure. Probably had a lot to do with it. So all in, they carted back 2,200 moon rocks. No, just samples. 842 pounds of moon rocks. Core samples, pebbles, dust, sand. And they, it helped them determine how old the moon was.

That's not bad. No, they figured something like 4.53 billion years or something like that. And they also came up with the current hypothesis for how the moon was formed that an object named Thea about the size of Mars collided with Earth early on in Earth's formation and merged but also calved off the moon.

So the moon was born from the Earth? Yes. That's pretty neat. Yep. So we left a lot of stuff though. Yeah, it's kind of like, they didn't listen to the Sierra Club. Yeah, 400,000 pounds of stuff that's up there.

And a lot of it is just gear, equipment. I mean, they have 70 space vehicles. Yeah, we just left our junk up there basically. Yeah, there's a lot of junk up there. And they said that they did that on purpose to see what it would do, see what happened to it. A lot of it, some of it was also that they were, it just made sense to displace stuff we didn't need

to make room for the weight from these samples in moon rocks. And it was also the 60s when you would just go do a family picnic and just like leave. Yeah, exactly. There was a debate and it was finally put to rest, but for a while there, somebody came across some detail that there's 96 emesis bags up there on the moon. And what is that?

An emesis bag is what you pee, poop, or vomit into if you're an astronaut. And so somebody said, oh my God, there's 96 bags of poop and urine and vomit sitting up on the moon, that's disgusting. And that's what everybody thought for a very long time. And then NASA lunar archivist said, no, absolutely not. Nobody's puked on the moon for one.

Only three guys have puked in space and none of them were on the moon. Not only did Aldrin and Armstrong not poop, they actually took a drug to keep them from pooping while they were on their lunar mission. Amodium. Aldrin did pee, but there's no evidence that he left his bag behind.

So they think that these 96 emesis bags are all empty bags that were unused. It's like we didn't need this because we don't vomit. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that makes sense. But that's a urban legend. Right.

Ripley's, believe it or not, websites steered me wrong at first and then I got steered right by, I think, slate. Somebody. Well, good for them. There are some commemorative items besides just the flags. There are plaques kind of all over the place. Aldrin and Armstrong left one that said,

we came in peace for all mankind. Little on the nose, but still a nice sentiment. A disc with 73 messages from countries all over the world. Micro etched. Yeah. Just to show off more technology of the 60s. Like you said earlier, they honored their Russian cosmonaut counterparts,

I guess, with medals and then a symbol of the U.S. Eagle carrying an olive branch. Yep. And then, you know, they all left stuff when they went up there, including Charlie Duke, who I talked about from Apollo 16. I love this one.

He took a picture of his family and left it behind. Yep. So what are you gonna do, NASA administrators? Nothing. Yeah. So he left it behind. They think now that it's probably blank though. That's sad.

From the solar radiation. Yeah. And his family subsequently disappeared. Yeah. This is like going back to the future. That's right. Their souls are trapped on the moon forever. Something else was smuggled too though, right?

A commemorative plaque was smuggled. Right. Apollo 15, David Scott smuggled an aluminum plaque. Why would he have to smuggle that? I don't know. They just had, it was off the charter or whatever? I guess. I don't know why.

I know one guy smuggled a sandwich once. Really? Yeah. One of them that I can't remember. I would pick a roast beef sandwich. My brother at one time smuggled a PB&J into a Dara Straits concert. No.

Yeah. Did he really? Yeah. It's kind of, we still laugh about it. One of the nerdiest things ever. It was like three songs in when he's like, you want a sandwich? He just starts unwrapping it.

That's hilarious. It's great. Wrapped in wax paper. I think it was. Oh my God. What an eagle scout. So neither one of us were boy scouts actually. Really?

Cause my brother would have owned that. Sure. And his son went all the way through of course. What is your brother Envious? Is he like Michael Collins? Yeah, I think so. But here's the deal with all that stuff up there is lunar tourism is going to be a thing at some point.

Yes, it is. So NASA actually had to establish lunar heritage sites and rules like you can't go within certain amount with, like don't go near any of this stuff basically. Right. If you see a rover, just turn around and walk the other way. Which is like, or hop the other way, I guess. Yeah, don't fall down.

Man, can you imagine like seeing a lunar rover? Oh, dude. Can't go over there. But on the moon too, like just see, oh my gosh, frozen in time, it'd be so creepsville, it'd be awesome. Creepsville? Yeah. So what's going on these days?

Well, so you said there, we haven't been back since to the moon, which is really kind of astounding if you think about it, but understandably the political interest, public interest, a lot of it waned. That means funding dried up. And because the moon kind of got left behind, NASA was like, well, we'll just focus on lower earth orbit stuff and really went all in on the shuttle program.

Right. And then also on the international space station, both again are in lower earth orbit, not in what you think of as like outer space, right? And then the Obama administration came, no, I'm sorry, the space shuttle accident that blew up the Columbia in 2003 caused George Bush to say, George W. Bush to say,

hey, let's bounce back, let's go back to the moon by 2020. Right. And that's not happening now. No, so NASA got directed back to the moon and Obama's administration did an audit and found that NASA was so far behind that we wouldn't make it back to the moon by 2030. So Obama said, go to Mars instead.

This is par for the course for NASA. Every few years, they get a completely new directive to somewhere else in the solar system and they have to scramble to like change plans, try to salvage whatever they were working on. And they've gotten kind of good at applying stuff they're working on to basically fudge to say, okay, we're working on this Mars launcher right now,

the SLS, the space launch system. And yeah, it can get us to Mars, but we could really also go to the moon with this thing too. Yeah, they're cross-trained. Right. So after the Obama administration came along and said, forget the moon, forget this shuttle program, go to Mars. That started languishing.

And then the current administration said, let's go back to the moon. The current administration said, what did Obama say? We'll do the opposite of that. Right. So now the current target date is mind-bogglingly tight. Yeah. The target is to put humans on the moon again

in five years, 2024. And four years after that, establish a moon base that is extremely ambitious. Yeah, and I think most people kind of acknowledge, like, you know, we're not gonna hit that date, but hopefully- Well, NASA doesn't. Are they still on? These are outsiders.

So say they're on target. Well, even the outsiders, I think, are saying, hopefully will be within a few years of that date. Right. It's possible. Yeah. I mean, one reason why it is possible is because NASA today has a thriving commercial space

industry to work with, and they are embracing wholehearted partnering with them. Now, how does that work? They just pay those private firms a lot of money to tap their resources? Yeah, if you get a contract to build the lunar lander for NASA, you might as well just be printing money. Yeah.

I think the current administrator for NASA estimated recently that it would be about $30 billion to get back to the moon. Wow. And they put out a call to designs for designs for their lunar lander. And so, Jeff Bezos, remember I went to New York to see the Blue Origin unveiling?

That's right. That's what he was doing, unveiling their thing called Blue Moon. It's a lunar lander. It's got a flat top, like kid in play. And you can put anything on it, a lunar rover, a bunch of scientists, a lab, whatever you want, or pieces to a space base,

a moon base, and build it slowly like that. And it looks pretty good. Nice. And it runs on hydrogen, which is big because they're gonna start landing on the south pole of the moon, which is where they think permanent ice is, which can be mined, right?

Yeah, they haven't been to the south pole, first of all, with any of the Apollo missions. So that makes a lot of sense to go there. And yeah, like you said, they got ice there. They can split that hydrogen and oxygen thanks to electrolysis. And then it can make rocket fuel to use to get back potentially.

Yeah, I mean, the command module, when it was orbiting the moon, it was operating on liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. So this is like an old technology. But the new thing is we would be mining it on the moon. Amazing. And the kind of the logical conclusion of that then is if we can establish a permanent presence on the moon,

that's the new motto. So this program, which I think is kind of awesome, is called the Artemis program. This Return to the Moon. Sister to Apollo, right, which makes sense. But it's also the program that's expected to put the first woman on the moon, which was pretty cool.

But the way that they're saying is now we're going to return to the moon and stay there. Like that's the point. Like we're permanently returning to the moon now. So once we do that, we'll have a new place to launch an outer space. I mean, remember how many pounds of thrust and how much fuel that first stage of the Saturn took.

And then the second stage, this doesn't require any of them. And so the plan is to build a small space station in permanent orbit around the moon that you fly out to. And then just like you keep a boat at your lake house tied up, they're going to keep a lunar lander tied up to that space station. And you just kind of go back and forth

to the moon using that. Amazing. It is pretty amazing. And they're talking about doing this in five years. Can you imagine the quality of video and audio that we're going to get this time? It's going to be great. It's going to be pretty sweet.

And I've seen that there are starting to, like you were talking about with commercial tourism, like I saw something like five million can get you to the moon. It's pretty soon. On the moon or just orbiting the moon? Oh, I'm sorry, to the space station, the ISS. Oh, okay.

Five million. Five million dollars. Which is not bad because they wanted to charge Lance Bass like 30 million or something crazy like that. Remember? It's like the HDTVs back in the day. It's that price is going to just keep coming down everybody. Pretty soon you're going to be able to go to the moon

for a cool $750,000. Even Lance Bass can afford that. Yeah. You got anything else? No, sir. Well, congratulations to the world for 50 years of having been on the moon the first time. Great.

I'm proud of us. And since Chuck said hooray, that means it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this one, I've been meaning to read for a while. We did a show about Live Aid and do they know it's Christmas? And we were like, we love that song.

Who doesn't love that song? Turns out a lot of people don't love that song. Really? Because the message is flawed. Oh yeah? Yeah, when you look at the lyrics. Hey guys, we're listening to the show on Live Aid and the song, Do They Know It's Christmas.

Whoa, that's such a great song. Call me a funny daddy, but what I hear is this. There won't be any snow in Africa this Christmas time. Check. The greatest gift they'll get this year is life. And he went, ooh. I think, okay. He said, where nothing ever grows,

it's like, that's not possible. Africa's a large continent with lots of growing things. Okay. No rains or rivers flow. Ever heard of the Nile? That's North Africa. He said, basically it treats Africa as a single homogenous region when in fact,

it's incredibly large and diverse. I can see that. Ignores the fact that most of Africa's in the Southern Hemisphere. So Christmas is in the summer there. And assumes that lack of knowledge of Christmas is a flaw caused by lack of resources and good weather rather than a reasonable cultural difference

considering that a large percentage of Africans are not Christian. I think this guy's taking the, do they know it's Christmas literally. Well, a lot of people wrote in about this, I gotta say. I think the point of the lyrics was, they have so much hardship in front of their faces. Are they even aware that Christmas time has come?

The holiday spirit and season hasn't even shown up there because there's so much hardship. That's the point of the lyrics. Come on. He finishes by saying this, it's okay if you like the song, it's catchy, but please don't claim that everyone should like it. Everyone should like that song.

And that's anonymous from a bunch of people. I'll bet you're anonymous. Yeah. Well, thank you for writing and we always love opposing opinions, right? Thanks, Bono. Yeah, right. He's like, if my lyrics had been accepted,

it would have been a much better song. Yeah. Well, if you want to point out that something we like is actually heinous, we love hearing that kind of stuff, you can go on to StuffYouShouldKnow.com and there you're going to find all of our social links, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook.

That's it. And you can send us an email, which makes even more sense. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom and send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app.

Couple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.