Stuff You Should Know - How Space Stations Work

Episode Date: June 21, 2016

It seems like we largely take it for granted these days, but the fact that we have humans living in space is the realization of a scientific dream a century old. Visit the space stations orbiting Earth past, present and future in this episode. 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.

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Go to squarespace.com and set your website apart. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from House of Works.com. And I'll see you next time. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry. This is Stuff You Should Know. Okay? You sounded like Steve Ruel. We were just talking about Steve Ruel. And that was very brule-esque. Brule-esque.

Not brule-esque. Right, brule-esque. Brule-esque. You were saying you wish you'd do a movie. I'm surprised you have. I could watch a continuous loop of brules-rules over and over and over. And people thought your Don't Be Done was an homage to that,

which... Or homage or a ripoff, depending on who it's from. It was neither, but it was reminiscent of it in good ways. But I don't think that that meant it ripped it off or that you were paying tribute to it. It's definitely not intentional. It was just too great to dental. Two great things that go great together.

Sure. Why can't there be both? Like re-syscopes. Yeah. They go great with KitKats. Oh, man, that'd be good. Sure. Just take two full KitKats and put two re-syscups

in the middle like a sandwich. Uh-huh. I think you just came up with something. The new S'more. The re-sycat. Chuckers. Yes. Have you ever looked to the sky at night,

seen some stars flying by, and thought, why don't we live up there? Sure. Have you ever seen the ISS cruising? No. I used to. Apparently you can. Yes.

I used to get either text or emails. I can't remember. That would you just put in your zip code and it sends you text alerts when the ISS is going to be flying overhead. I thought you were going to say one of the lead astronauts would just text you. Be like, what up?

What are you doing? We're over your house right now. But I mean, basically, it's not from the astronaut, but it's the same thing. It's saying, look up in this direction at this time and you should be able to see the ISS. Pretty neat. Yeah, I don't think we actually ever went out and looked at it

because it was always at three in the morning or something like that. Yeah, this really thrills me to no end once I started looking into this. I never paid a lot of attention, and it really just dawned on me. People are living in outer space. Continuous.

Full time. The International Space Station has been continuously inhabited since it was launched in 1998. Yeah, and in fact, they just took their 100,000th orbit of Earth in May of this year. And Expedition 47 began in March. That's so cool, man. It's like you were saying, you don't really

stop and think about it, but we're living in space now. Humanity has extended at least into Earth's orbit. That's where we're living, and we just kind of seem to take that for granted. But that wasn't always the case, actually. And I think the reason why we do kind of take it for granted is because the conception of living in space that we're at right now is remedial compared

to where everyone expected it to be in the mid-70s when the idea of space colonization was at its peak. I mean, NASA Ames Research Center was conducting summer studies, is what they were called, where they would just get the public really jazzed about living in space. And the best you can say, or the least you can say, is that it bore some pretty awesome artists' renderings

of what space colonies will look like. Yeah, it seemed like every other issue of popular science was just some cool new picture of one day we're going to be living out here. Right, exactly. But the one day seemed a lot closer than it does now, right? Yeah. But at the most, you can say that that space colony fever that

was going on in the 70s definitely laid the groundwork, paved the way for where we are now, which is living in space. We just don't have like Stanley Kubrick-esque space hotels that are big rotating wheels at the moment. Doesn't mean we're not going to. It just didn't happen as fast as everybody thought it was going to.

And I was trying to figure out why. And apparently, it's because of the shuttle program. Like, the space colony fever was based on the idea that launching the space shuttle was going to be way cheaper than launching any of the rockets had been previously. That didn't pan out to be the case. And that there would be something like a space taxi. I remember those words being used.

Like, at least 60 launches a year, which didn't pan out to be the case either. But they thought that, yeah, we're going to be going back and forth to space for next to nothing all the time, and that we would be colonizing space pretty quickly. That didn't pan out. The space shuttle program didn't pan out

to be that as cheap or as frequent. And so this dream of space colony or this enthusiasm for space colonization was kind of lost. But luckily, it wasn't lost by the actual engineers who were in charge of putting people in space and figuring out how to live in space. And that whole idea is probably still coming. It's just a little further down the road.

Yeah, and there are many, many, many hundreds and hundreds of people that helped make this reality over the years. But a lot of this can be laid at the feet of Mr. Verna von Braun, who was the architect of the US space program. And he was the big champion of space stations early on in a real viable way. Well, he was like the Carl Sagan of his day. He realized that he had a quote.

He said that we can publish scientific papers and treatises until hell freezes over. But if we don't get the attention of the taxpayer, we're not going anywhere. And how do you do that? You start putting people on the moon and start building space stations. Well, even more basic than that, he

wrote popular articles and popular magazines to get the public's imagination primed for that kind of thing. Yeah, and his idea was it was not just like, hey, look at any thing we can do. You have an Antarctic outpost. You have back in the old days, you had an out west outpost. He was like, we need an outpost.

We need a place where people can live and work and as their base station, essentially. Sure. Space is a frontier, but you watch the Star Trek. Knows that. The final frontier, right? Well, that's what we think. That's what we thought back then.

I'm sure there's other frontiers. New dimensions to explore, that kind of thing. Well, let's just talk about why. What are some of the reasons we should do this? You mentioned just capturing the public. And it certainly would do a lot to rally people around spending funds on space travel, NASA, allocating funds toward this kind of thing.

Right, you mean like space tourism? No, no, no, not space tourism, but just initially, they needed the support of the popular American opinion. Right, which is why Von Braun said, I'm going to reach out to the public directly through Collier's Magazine. He hosted a three-part show on the wonderful world of Disney about living in space.

Great show. And it really got people jazzed about this back in the 50s. Then it peaked again in the 70s, like I was saying. Yeah, but one of the big reasons that you would want to have a working space station is, aside from the convenience of having it up there and not having to go back and forth every time you want to do something, is things are different up there.

And you can do different things without gravity that you can't do here on Earth. Right, like research. Yeah, like remarkable things. So it turns out that gravity has a weird effect on crystals in the way they form. Flows them, like inevitably. But if you're out there in microgravity,

there are far fewer flaws. And the crystals tend to form more perfectly. So you can do things like make really good semiconductors for microchips. You can also crystallize drugs better to make them more potent and really knock your socks off. So research up there that can make things better here. Right, and not just research, but figure out

how to do it there. And then build on that by building a manufacturing facility for semiconductors out in space. Yeah, man. And then bring them back to Earth and be like, watch how fast this baby goes. Another thing that no gravity or microgravity does is it makes flames here on Earth with our stupid gravity

pull in in every direction. Makes the flame very unsteady and unpredictable. Makes studying combustion more difficult. Remember when we talked about fire? Yeah, fire in space is very consistent and perfect. It's round. Yeah. It's so cool.

So you could potentially, with a perfect flame like that, then perfect flame has got to be a song. Eternal flame is what you're thinking of. No, I'm thinking perfect flame. No, you're thinking of eternal flame. Such a joshism, that's one of my favorites. Microgravity, though, you can have that eternal flame that is perfect and round.

And you can study combustion in a more pure fashion. And you could build a better furnace maybe or find out how to reduce air pollution by making things more efficient. Right. And that's just two things that you could do in space. I'm sure there are 1,000 things we could list. Right.

And as a matter of fact, some of the early ideas for space stations were concepts that used moon, mind, minerals, and materials and assembled in space so that you didn't have to launch them from Earth. So this whole idea of creating things in space was even used to form the basis of these places where we would actually live while we were doing this stuff.

It's pretty cool. Yeah, it also offers a unique perspective on the Earth if we're talking about landforms and oceans, your atmosphere. Speaking of which, they can take much better pictures looking in the other direction into deep space because they don't have that pesky atmosphere in the way. Right.

So lots of great reasons to be up there, not the least of which is something you mentioned earlier, space tourism, which is going to happen at some point. Right. Like, people are looking into, who is this one company, Galactic Suite. Yeah, they're still at it.

Well, another that I saw, their site still says they're planning on launching in 2012. Oh, I thought that they, I thought they were still kind of, I mean, obviously not on that timeline. Right. Unless they also are planning to build a time machine. Somebody's still paying for the domain. Well, that doesn't mean much.

But it still says they're going to be, they're going to head for the stars in 2012. And then I found another Russian one that looked pretty promising. But their site apparently was not updated since 2010. But a company called Bigelow Industries very recently had SpaceX Ferry capsule up to the ISS. It was an inflatable capsule that was a habitat module that

was meant to be a prototype for a space hotel. And they couldn't get it inflated. It was in, they just aborted the mission. But people are still working on the concept of space tourism like today. Well, I know the Galactic Suite said, they're like, we think it'll cost $4 million for a weekend stay.

And our data suggests that there are about 40,000 people in the world that can and will pay for this. Maybe their site hasn't been updated because they got scared with the end of the world 2012 thing. Maybe. And while they were hiding in a cave somewhere, somebody played a prank on them. And they're still too scared to come out and update the site.

Maybe. Well, Richard Branson, he's trying to fly people into space still. Yeah, I looked at that. I was like, wait a minute. Does this Alaskan Airlines merger? Did that kill Virgin Galactic? And apparently not.

It was just Virgin America that Alaskan Airlines took over. Apparently in a hostile takeover. But Virgin Galactic's still at it. OK, well, that's good. I guess if you're loaded and want to ride in space. Yeah, if you're Ashton Kutcher or Katy Perry. They were on the list, right? Sure.

They have disposable income. Sure. Send the kooch up there. The kooch. Either one. I feel like I should take a break and regroup. And then we'll start talking about space stations past. I'll take one with you.

I'll take one with you. I'll take one with you. 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. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop 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. OK, 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. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yeah, we know that, Michael. 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 Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, let's talk about the first one, Josh. We had a great episode on the space race. It was pretty much a two. Love that one.

A two nation race between the US and the Soviet Union. Sure. And they beat us in a lot of ways, as far as first to the punch. Man, they really did. You know? They don't get enough credit around these parts for the stuff that they did as far as space goes,

because they definitely did beat us in a lot of ways. Sure. We beat them to the moon, basically. Yeah, which we pointed out in our show really got us going. Sure. And led to our advancements. Yeah, but also, what was it? There was another show we did recently, Sputnik,

led to Superballs. But do you remember we were talking about the Superball in the Superball episode, how Sputnik, like Made America, post-war America, wake up and be like, hey, stop being coddled and lazy. We need to get back to innovation. Yeah, innovating again. And it was Sputnik that did that.

Yeah, that's right. Nothing like the threat of communist Russia or Soviet Union to get people going. Or being left behind. So back then, they were the Soviet Union. And they were the first, as we said, with the Salyut-1 station. 1971, dude, they had people living in space.

The year I was born, it's crazy. And it was actually a combination of a couple of different system. One, the Almaz and the Soyuz. The Almaz was a military system. And the Soyuz was the actual spacecraft that ferried people to and fro. They're still using that thing. That's how American astronauts get to the ISS

is on Soyuz rockets. Oh, really? What number are they at, I wonder? Oh, who knows? Who knows? A lot. They launch them a lot from Kazakhstan, I think. Oh, really?

Very nice. Soviet-1 with the zone. 3-2-1. 45 feet long, had three main compartments. Your standard compartments, which are like dining and recreation. Food and water storage, got to have your toilet. Exercise equipment, and then your science-y stuff. Yeah, that's science-y stuff.

That's a big deal. Sure. Because not only are they looking at how to make crystals better, they're also studying the effects of microgravity on the human body, which we're still getting a handle on. Yeah, we should do an entire episode on how space affects your body. OK.

I think that would be like, I think I got three or four episode ideas out of this one article. Well, yeah, we should do one just on the ISS, too. I think so. But just kind of briefly, one of the things that they've found so far about living in space is that your bone mineral density decreases by 1% a month, which are like 1%.

There's still 99% left, who cares? Yeah, right. Here on Earth, if you're a senior adult, you lose about 1% of bone mass a year. Whoa. So that's pretty significant. And another thing that they found out was that living in microgravity, when you're here on Earth,

your fluids and blood and stuff tend to accumulate in your lower extremities, right? In microgravity, it tends to accumulate up in your upper body, in your upper chest, and in your head. And your brain's like, oh, I'm bathed in this stuff. I need to shut down production on fluids, including blood, so that when astronauts get back on Earth, they tend to be feinty.

Oh, wow. Because they don't have enough blood for a while until their body's like, whoa, something weird just happened. I need to start making blood. And they say I'm feinty because of space. Somebody give me some tang, my blood sugar's low. The other thing they found out was that in space, no one can hear you scream.

Yeah. They try it 15 after every hour. All the astronauts scream as loud as they can, and nobody can hear them. And that, of course, was the famous tag line from the first Alien movie. Oh, really? Yeah.

I remember seeing the ad with the big egg. Yeah. Space, no one can hear you scream. I know. I was just thinking. I thought, that's terrifying. I'm going to watch it. Yep.

Oh, one other thing that they're learning about effects and gravity, so Scott Kelly, the astronaut who famously just spent a year on the ISS. Yeah. He has a twin who's also an astronaut. Oh, wow. I believe his name is Mike. And Mike has been studied here on Earth.

Yeah, I was about to say you got to split those guys up. Over the same year that Scott has. Yeah. And now they're comparing him. And apparently, Scott came down, and he was like an inch or two shorter than his identical twin brother. No way.

That was just one thing. But they're examining them on a genetic level to see what differences have happened. So you can get a better handle on what living in gravity does to the human body. So he said, I'm shorter and more feinty for starters. He just fell dead away. And they just slapped his face and poured

tang down his throat. Well, I think what's lost on a lot of people is that these are real, I mean, human experimentation is going on. And who knows what the long-term effect is going to be. These people are really sacrificing potentially. I mean, not just being away from family and stuff, but who knows feinty might turn into something really bad.

Well, not only that. They're also exposed through solar radiation and just space radiation that the Earth's atmosphere protects us from. They're exposed to it. And apparently, there's a huge possibility that their lifetime risk of cancer just goes through the roof from moving out there. So yeah, there's a lot of questions we have

that it's good that we're not all just living out in space because we can. We've got a lot of stuff to figure out beforehand. Heroes, sir, is what I say. So the Soyuz 10 crew for that very first salient space station that Russia had, they were supposed to live up there. But they couldn't dock correctly. So they could never enter the space station.

So they never could even get in. Big disappointment. Yeah, they just hung their heads and put it in reverse. And the little module went peeeeep. Yep, all the way back to Earth. So the Soyuz 11 crew actually successfully lived there for 24 days in 1971, which is remarkable. But very sadly, they all perished upon reentry,

coming back to Earth. Yeah, their capsules depressurized. And their capsule at the time wasn't designed for them to wear suits. So they were all asphyxiated. Yeah, just like died instantly, right? Pretty much, yeah. They would have lost consciousness almost immediately.

So after the Soyuz 11, they launched a different space station altogether, the Salient 2. That one didn't even get up into orbit. So they were like, ah, knit. Went through three, four, and five in pretty quick succession. And each one, basically, they got better at getting people to and from. And they could stay up there longer and longer.

Yeah, I think the last one was launched in 1982. And it was up there until 1992 or 1994. And they actually used it when they launched the mirror, which we'll talk about in, I think, 1996. So I guess it was up there then. They were going back and forth between Soviet 7 and the mirror. I guess probably going like, oh, we can use this vodka over here. Got to go get it from Soyuz and take it over to the mirror.

So it was up there for a while. They got there. They figured it out. And one of the big differences between the early Soyuz, Chuck and the later ones, was that there was a secondary docking module. Yeah, the first ones only had one parking space, essentially. Right.

And so you had the parking space for the crew that was there. And if they needed supplies, well, TS for them. No were to park. But if you had a second docking port, then you can use, well, they used an unmanned ship called Progress to ferry supplies from Earth to the Soyuz stations. Yeah, I'm surprised that it took them up to the Soyuz 6 to realize they needed another parking space.

You're going to forget something. Right. You left the iron on back home. We're stuck up here. No one can visit us, essentially. Exactly. Well, like you said, though, they figured it out, which is wonderful.

And that all led to the United States in 1973 launching their very famous Skylab 1 space station. Which is the best patch of any NASA related space base to anything. Skylab 1 is the best. Yeah, Skylab was awesome. But it got off on a very bad start on a bad foot because upon launch, like just getting it out there,

it had these two main solar panels. One of them was completely ripped off. The other one didn't extend out like it should have. And so this thing almost burned up completely initially because it had very little power and they couldn't control the heat. Right. They couldn't cool it.

The interior of the capsule went up to like 126. Yeah. So they said, hey, guys. That's hot. We need you to go up there and fix this. And actually, there were three different crews that were sent to Skylab on Apollo capsules. And the Skylab module itself was actually

designed roughly initially by Warner Von Braun out of a Saturn V moon rocket. The third stage of it became Skylab. And I think at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, not the one at Dulles, but the one that's in like around the mall. And I think it has a replica of Skylab you can walk through.

Oh, cool. Which is so awesome. Dude, I would love to do that. But so the three crews that got sent up there, Chuck, they managed to kind of like put Skylab back together with duct tape and bubble gum. Yeah, that first one, Skylab 2, they just sent them up a week and a half after the, well, not fail launch,

but problematic launch. And it's so funny how some of this NASA stuff is so simple. They said, go up there and essentially take this big sunshade, like it looks like an umbrella, and pop it open to cool it down. And then see that solar panel that didn't stretch out far enough? Stretch it out.

See that? Stretch it out. And they did. Commander Charles Pete Conrad, Paul Weitz, and Joseph Kerwin essentially saved Skylab. Yeah. Right off the bat. And not just them, there were, again,

there were three crews that kind of did one after the other. They didn't overlap. But they finally got the thing working. I think the last crew spent 84 days in orbit. Yeah, the first one spent 28. The next one, 59, and the final one, 84 days. In the 70s. And I remember, and this is a big deal.

This is the first time they were testing these long duration manned missions to see, can we go to the moon? Because it takes a while to get there and back. Right, that was the thing. The only data we had was on moon missions, which is about a two week mission. Yeah. So we didn't have any data on what

happened to people longer than that. Yeah, can we set up a shop there? Can we colonize the moon even? So they called anything over two weeks a long duration space flight. And I remember in 1979, I remember being a little eight year old kid. And I remember hearing about, because this is in the 70s

when families would sit around and watch the news. And it's like how you got all your information. And I remember sitting around and hearing that Skylab is coming back down to Earth in an unpredictable way. And I remember being sort of scared and thinking like, wow, this is a little weird and kind of a big deal. Yeah. Like even a little eight year old Chuck knew,

like something didn't seem quite right. There are a lot of people who are really anxious about it. Because NASA very famously said that everybody calm down. There's a one in 152 chance that somebody will be killed by Skylab. Well, yeah. One in 152. You want to hear numbers from NASA like one in a million

or one in a billion, not one in 152. Yeah, you're like, I know 200 people. I know 153 people. It also forced NASA to admit we were so excited about getting this thing up there. We didn't really think a lot about how to control its descent. Because that was essentially the story. They were like, we can't.

We don't really know how to guide this thing back down. They said it would cost too much to have designed in a way to bring it down safely. Yeah, and I think they were in a hurry. Well, also the problem is, is they thought that its orbit would decay a little bit and then fall into basically that orbit of space chunk circling the Earth and would just stay there indefinitely.

But its orbit decayed more than expected because there was solar flare activity that NASA hadn't anticipated. And so all of a sudden, Skylab's on a collision course with Earth. NASA's saying it'll probably enter somewhere over this 1,000 kilometer stretch of Earth that includes Australia.

So heads up, Australia. And there were lots of like Skylab parties. Yeah, because it's America in the 70s. People went like Skylab crazy. Disco parties. Yeah, oh yeah. The San Francisco Examiner actually offered $10,000 to anybody who could bring in

a legitimate piece of Skylab within 72 hours of it crashing. And some kid actually collected. Yeah, an Australian. He got on a plane. He had a little piece of Skylab. Because where did it end up crashing? Esperance, Australia, near Perth. Yeah, I mean, mostly in the ocean.

But they did get a pretty good amount of debris in Australia. Yeah, like sizable parts. But it's Australia. They're tough. They're like, everything tries to kill us. Your silly space station can't do it. Yeah, this kid flew over in San Francisco and said, here. Yeah.

He's a Skylab. Yeah, his name was Stan Thornton. He was 17. And without even thinking twice about it, he grabbed it, hopped on a plane, and went to San Francisco, like you said. And the examiner paid him, which I did the West Egg Inflation Calculator.

That's about $33,000 in today's money. Not bad. No, I'd do that. I'd hop on a plane for that. That's a salary of a first year teacher. Right. Sadly. Yeah.

You can also buy pieces of Skylab today if you've got some dough and an internet connection. Alleged pieces of Skylab. Well, sure. Just like anything, it should be not verified. What do you call it? Verified. Authenticated?

Yeah, authenticated. Supposedly, NASA, instead of exerting its domain over pieces of Skylab, the debris that was found and saying, you give us back that. Some people sent their pieces to NASA. NASA authenticated them and sent them back, mounted, saying this is an official piece of Skylab to the people who mailed it in.

Good peeps. Not bad. Good peeps wearing brown polyester pants up to their chests. All right, buddy. Let's take a break and let's go for a little jog around our 100% gravity office. And then we'll talk about MIR and ISS. All right.

All right. On the podcast, HeyDude, 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. 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 HeyDude, 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, OK, 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. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. 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, 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 podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, we talked about the Soviet, which was the Soviet Union's big first success and some failures. But overall, I think they saw it as a success. Right.

And at the same time, a couple of years later, America had Skylab. And then the Soviets said, we can do better than what we're doing, we can do better than anybody else. We're going to create the mirror. Yeah. And by the way, Skylab was not supposed to be permanent. No.

That was never the intention. But mirror was, was it supposed to be permanent? Mirror? Yeah. OK. So were the later Soviets. OK. So the mirror definitely was meant to be a permanent one.

All right. Well, the first crew, Cosmonauts, Leonid, Kizim, Vladimir, Solovyev, it's a great name. I think it was just those two dudes. They shuttled between the Soviet 7, which was being retired, and mirror. And there was some, like you said it, there was some crossover there, right, an overlap.

They had to get the vodka. Yeah, they had to get the vodka. Right. They spent 75 days on the mirror, and it was continually manned over the next 10 years, and manned and built. It's not, they build these things out there, or assemble them out there, I guess we should say.

But they don't just launch a space station. Right, like ready to go. They carry pieces of it out there, just like ISS, and they put them together. Although I think, as we'll see later on, I think the Chinese launched a full space station. Oh, really? Yeah.

Of course they did. I think they did. But we're talking 2013. Come on. So the mirror had 12 main parts, which we won't go over all those, because we don't like to just read lists. But it's everything you would expect. It was a G-Wiz space station.

Yeah, a lot of science stuff, a lot of modules, living quarters, transfer compartments, docking places. Right. They had more than one parking space. They figured that old mess out. Yeah. It was like, we should have guests. And they did have guests.

They had American guests, actually. They sure did. Which was pretty cool. It wasn't until the 90s after the Soviet Union dissolved. And actually, there was a cosmonaut, a board mirror, when the Soviet Union dissolved on December 26, 1991. His name was Sergei Kirkev. Kirkev.

It's harder to say than you would think. And he was known as the last Soviet citizen, because apparently being in space made him immune from the dissolving of the Soviet Union. Oh, really? Yeah. Not really, but that's what everybody said about him, whether he liked it or not.

Well, the mirror, they had some problems kind of later in its life. There was a fire one year. And then the supply ship was called the Progress, I think you mentioned. It actually crashed into the mirror, trying to park. And it's a little parking space, which damaged it. And at that point, they said, you know what?

We should just make this thing space junk, even though we thought it was going to be permanent. The US is talking about this ISS station. They want us to come help them with. And there was a big campaign to keep the mirror live, called Keep Mirror Live. And private corporations stepped in and said, no, let us take it over.

Let's privatize this thing. And they said, yet, not going to do it. Yeah, we're not going to just hand over a space station, OK? No, we're going to crash it into the earth. If I can't have you, no one can. Pretty much. So they had a little bit more advanced capabilities than Skylab had, as far as directionally.

And in February 2001, they slowed those engines down. And it re-entered the atmosphere. On March 23rd, 2001, burned up, broke up. And again, tried to kill Australia. No, Australia's like, what the H? Why is everyone trying to land their space junk on us? But it was about 1,000 miles east of Australia, in the ocean.

Has anyone found these things? That's what I was wondering. Mirror? Yeah, is the bottom of the ocean? I'm sure somebody's found some parts of it. Pretty neat. Yeah. Talk about space wreckage at the bottom of the ocean.

That's a movie. Who was it? Was it Jeff Bezos that went and got one of the Apollo really? Stages that had been scuttled in the ocean recently? Probably. I think it was Jeff Bezos. Or James Cameron.

We talk about him too much, though. So that brings us to ISS, 1984. Ronald Reagan said, you know what? I was about to do a Reagan, but I thought the better. I think everybody wants to hear your Reagan. No, I don't want to do it. He said, hey, man, let's get an ISS station going. There's a debt on Reagan.

Is that good? Yeah. We'll call it the International Space Station. And it's going to be super expensive. So we need some help. Let's partner up with 14 other countries, Canada, Japan, Brazil, and then the European Space Agency, which is the UK, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy,

Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden. And he said, as a good faith measure, let's invite the Soviets. I don't know if that was all. Well, no, it was Russia by then. Oh, yeah, you're right. Yeah. You're right.

And the Russians said, sure, why not? We don't do anything. And not just being friendly. But they were probably the second leading. Well, I don't know. By that point, there were other players going. In space science? Yeah, but they were still pretty highly regarded.

Sure. Yeah, big time. Yeah. Yeah. Probably more than they get credit for, again, over here. Agreed. So they started putting the ISS in orbit in 1998. And the first people showed up.

They were launched from Russia in 2000. And they spent about five months there, like basically getting everything up and running, taking all of the little desiccant packets out of everything, like the do not eat things that keep stuff dry. What is that, a silica gel? Yeah.

And pulling off all of the cellophane from everything. Well, they left it on the lampshades, which I thought was tasteless. Yeah, well, it's shiny. Yeah. So they've been living up there. Like I said, they just launched the 100,000th, I'm sorry, the 47th, but 100,000th orbit of Earth.

And we'll do one on the ISS. I really think we should. But I did look a little bit into their day-to-day life. They work about 10 hours a day, Monday through Friday, about half that on a Saturday. And then they take Sunday off. And then the rest of the time is relaxation, emailing your family.

Hanging out poolside. Face timing. They have 16 sunrises and sunsets a day, which is decidedly weird on your body. So they generally just keep those windows closed so they can get on a reg sketch. And apparently the food isn't great. They don't love the food.

No. And they have to overspice it. I didn't know this. One of the things space does is reduce your sense of taste. I've heard that. And microgravity. I think it makes everything taste like styrofoam. Yeah, so apparently they really overspice everything

to try and make it palatable. And they have to be really careful of crumbs. Because, remember Homer Simpson? I do remember. One of the great all-time scenes. When he opened the bag of chips in space. Great, great scene. And then pooping and pee-pee.

Got to go somewhere. They have two toilets. Goes in the new guy's chair. Only two. Oh, there's usually only three or four people up there. There's six right now. Oh, six. With two toilets.

How many hairdryers? Who knows. They keep their hair short though. Because there's very few hairdryers in space. Well, there's no showers. They can wash themselves. They have water jets. Not the same.

Yeah, not the same. Man, I'll bet that first shower when they get back down to earth feels so good. But there's two toilets, they use a fan-driven suction system. And you have to latch yourself to the toilet. Oh yeah, for that too. And there are restraining bars to ensure there's a good seal. Because you know what happens if there's not a good seal

and microgravity, things will float away. And then there's a lever that they hit. A suction hole slides open. And a big stream of air carries the waste away. The solids are collected actually into an aluminum container. And they are then transferred to the progress to take away the little shuttle ship.

Like here's all our poop. Yeah, progress is like thanks. Yeah. Or no other calls, progress. And then the peepee is evacuated by a hose that's attached to the front of the toilet. Do they drink it? They do.

I was getting there, but sure. I'm sorry. No, it's recycled. It's a recovery system. And they eventually recycle it back into drinking water. Tastes like chicken. And the toilets for peepee are anatomically correct. They have these funnel adapters.

So men and women have different adapters. Because they have different parts. Yes, they do. They do have different parts. That's a second grader. You don't think about this stuff. That's the first thing I thought it was like, oh, man, how do they eat?

How do they poop? Do they watch movies? Do they watch movies? Yeah, they just sit back. I think it was the Atlantic had a great photo spread of photos that this new mission is taking of space and the earth and all that stuff. But then pictures on board.

And one of them, they had this huge flat screen watching the Revenant. Watching the Revenant, huh? Yeah. Wow. That's what it looked like. I could see that. It's two guys on a horse.

It was hard to tell because it was in the background. But I think it was a Revenant. That are cloudy with a chance of meatball. Probably not the movie Gravity. So, yeah, no. They were probably like, pfft, that could never happen. Remember when Neil deGrasse Tyson lost his mind about Gravity? Hey, he's your pal.

He went on a Twitter rant about it. Then we should talk about the Chinese because I think it'd been unfair not to. Sure. The Chinese launched something called Tian Gong One. Back in 2003, they became the third nation on the planet to launch a human into space. And they launched their space station in 2011.

And there's been two missions to the space station. I think it's no longer active, but it's still up there. But the Chinese admitted this year that they've lost contact with the space station. It's no longer under their control. So it may end up coming back down to Earth. And we'll have a new Skylab party for it. But the two missions included China's first two women

astronauts, Lu Yang and Wang Yaoping. And they were in 2012 and 2013. And they did. I mean, they lived in space for a while, just like everybody else had. But the Chinese don't participate in the ISS. I don't know if they've not been invited or if they declined an invitation.

But they're doing their own parallel thing, which I would get the impression that's making people nervous. Interesting. Well, I know it's important that they've had women astronauts, female astronauts on the ISS. Because you need to see what space does to them. And I just wonder if they're going to get to the point

where they're like, well, if we really want to colonize space, we need to see what happens when a baby is up there or give birth in outer space. Or have a 10-year-old or a 75-year-old. Man, a 10-year-old aboard a space station for like a year? Yeah. Oh, man. No, thank you.

There's one other thing I wanted to mention, Chuck. There's talk about saving a lot, a lot of money with a space station by putting in what's called a Lagrange point. And there's Lagrange point L4 and L5. And they are these little spots between the Earth and the Moon to where the gravity between the Earth and the Moon is counterbalanced.

So all it does is just go in orbit around the Earth and the Moon, and it will stay in that orbit forever. Because gravity is not pulling on it one way or the other. So you don't have to use fuel to keep it in that orbit forever, right? And this is actually like an early idea that I think Arthur C. Clarke was the first to put it out there in 1961.

And these Lagrange points are like 90, the orbit's like 90,000 miles across. So you can put a bunch of space stations in these things and just leave them out there. And there's actually something called the L5 society that came about that is all about this kind of thing. I bet their parties are wicked crazy. Well, they plan to disband on a space station in the L5 band

at some point in the future. Really? When they all come together there for the first time. Sounds wonderful. Yeah. Oh, one more thing, Valerie Poliakov. Yeah, record holder, right? Yep, 438 days he did aboard Mir in 1994 to 1995.

And he'd done like 238 days before then. Crazy. I bet he's super feinty, you know? All the time. He's rushing though. He can take it. You got anything else? I got nothing else.

All right. Well, that's it for space stations for now. If you want to learn more about him, you can type those words in the search bar, how stuff works. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this, oh, Chuck's graduation post. So I put out a post about my nephew graduating high school. Oh, yeah.

Did he really go out? Yeah, Noah has graduated from high school. And also, the same year, my niece, Reagan, graduated college, premiered a college, moving to New York City, like a good girl. Wow. And my other niece, Abby, moved on, matriculated into high school from middle school.

Nothing better than matriculation. Nothing better. So I went to Noah's graduation, and it really, like, affected me much more than I thought it would, because I haven't been to a graduation since my own. Oh, yeah. Like, and I didn't walk in the college one. So I literally have not been to a ceremony since 1989.

Right. And just stirred up all these amazing feelings. Oh, I thought you were going to say you made you mad. No, it was really, really neat, just to hear these kids and their speeches. And I put a Facebook post. I was like, you know what, we're great. People, millennials, get a lot of crap,

but talk to a 17-year-old for a little while who's doing it right, and we're headed in the right direction. Like, this is very empathetic, caring, like, forward-thinking generation. Nice. So it was a really neat thing. So congratulations to all the graduates, especially, well, if you're listening, then I guess you are a listener.

But all you stuff you should know listeners that have been with us throughout high school, we appreciate that. A girl named Hannah, I want to say, wrote in and asked for any advice for graduates. Oh, that's right. She mentioned you in the speech. Yeah, yeah.

So congratulations to her as well. Pretty great stuff. But you're right. All stuff you should know listeners who are graduating or matriculating, congratulations. Yes, very big accomplishment. So this is from Brandi in Kansas. Hey, guys, I want to thank you so much for that Facebook

post about Noah's graduation and how you have so much hope for the up-and-coming generation. I'm really excited about the world changers coming up. It's so rare to hear someone come out and say how awesome they are. On that thread, have you considered it doing a show on Kids Today fallacy? That's a well-documented phenomenon

where each generation downplays the bad things their own generation did and believes the ones that follow were lazy, spoiled, entitled. There are quotes literally dating back 2,000s of years ago of this very thing in the music stinks, too. I'm sure that's the other part of that. Yeah, oh yeah, but.

Or no, no, no. Yeah, the music today stinks, ours is better. I would love to hear you explain this nonsense, help people stop being so crotchety and instead recognize their role in helping to shape future generations. Second request, come to Kansas. You guys make fun of us enough and it's time to face a visit. We top some lists for the most beautiful sunsets

and landscapes and also have cities on national lists and places to live. It takes more than a beautiful sunset to get us to do a live show. And listicles. We make fun of Kansas because of our good friend Aaron Cooper. And our buddy Isaac McNary is really the two people that we're targeting

when we make fun of Kansas. And the governor. And it's all out of love because Isaac and Aaron are great. And we met Aaron at our show in Denver and he's just as nice and cool as I thought he was going to be. And we met our pal Tyler Murphy too. And met Tyler and his friends Timothy and Sarah.

And our friend Jane Janab was in the audience. And our old buddy Greg Storkin was in the audience. It was something else. Yeah, Denver was like these, some of our oldest, oldest fans were in attendance. That's a great show. It was wonderful. Anyway, we're not coming to Kansas.

Thanks for a great show guys. I only have a few episodes left to go before I'm caught up. And then I will enter the pit of despair. So at least satisfy one of my requests so you can help pull me out. And that is Brandy in Manhattan, Kansas. Thank you, Brandy. Good luck in the pit of despair.

If you want to get in touch with us, you can hang out with us on social media. We're on Instagram and Twitter at S-Y-S-K podcast. And on Facebook at facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,

visit howstuffworks.com. 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 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, 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

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