Stuff You Should Know - Selects: How Space Stations Work

Episode Date: September 9, 2023

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 classic episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sometimes the pop culture we love just teens hits differently in retrospect. Maybe it's a tabloid story we couldn't get enough of or an illicit student teacher relationship on our favorite show. We're Suzy Bannock-A-Rum and Jessica Bennett, posts of the new podcast in retrospect, where each week we'll revisit a cultural moment from the past that shaped us and probably you to try to understand what it taught us about the world and our place in it. You're the first person that I've talked to about this for years and years. Listen to InRetrospect on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your favorite shows. Everyone in our country has a voice. It's something that says not just where you come from,

but who you are. Welcome to MPR's Black Stories Black Truths, a collection of podcasts and a celebration of the host and journalism who've always spoken truth to power. Our voices are as varied, nuanced, and dynamic as the Black experience, and story should never be about us without us. Find NPR Black Stories Black Truths on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello friends, this is Josh with this week's Select, our June 2016 episode on Space Stations. I like to think of it as a far-out look at living in space. I hope you enjoy it thoroughly. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio.

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 Rool. We were just talking about Steve Rool. And that was very Brulesque. Brulesque. Not Brulesque. Right, Brulesque. Brulesque.

You were saying you wish you'd do a movie. I'm surprised you had that. I could watch a continuous loop of Brool's rules over and over. And people thought your don't be done was an homage to that, which, Oh, my's are rip off depending on who it's at. Well, it was neither, but it, it, 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, you know, too great to dental. Too great things that go great together. Sure. Why can't there be both, like, recess cups? Yeah.

They go great with Kit Katz. Oh, man, they'd be good. Sure. Just take two full kit cats and put two Reese's cups in the middle like a sandwich. Uh-huh. I think you just came up with something. The new smore. The Reese cat. Chuckers. Yes. Have you ever looked to the sky at night? Seeing 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 just put in your zip code and it sends you texts or alerts when the ISS is gonna be flying overhead. I thought you were gonna say one of the lead astronauts

would just text you. Be like, Josh, look 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, like, 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 like three in the morning or something like that. Yeah, this really like thrills me to no end. Once I started looking into this, like I never paid a lot of attention and it really just dawned on me.

Like people are living in outer space. Continuous. Full time. The International Space Station has been continuously inhabited since it was launched in 1998. Yeah. In fact, they just took their 100,000th orbit of Earth. That's really neat.

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. Yeah. Humanity is extended at least into Earth's orbit, right? 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 like the mid 70s when the idea of space colonization was at its peak. I mean NASA Ames Research Center was conducting summer studies of 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 like, you know, one day we're gonna 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,

it was gonna be like a space taxi. I remember those words. 60, at least 60 launches a year, which didn't pan out to be the case either. But they thought that yeah, we were gonna 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 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, like 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 till health freezes over. But if we don't get the attention of the taxpayer, we're going, we're not going anywhere. And how do you do that? You start putting people in the moon and start building space stations. Well, even even more basic than that, he started, he wrote like popular articles and popular magazines to get the public's imagination prime for that kind of thing. Yeah, and his idea was it was it was not just like hey look at a neat thing we can do. It's you know You have an Antarctic outpost you have back in the old days yet an out west outpost He was like right 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 a Star Trek, and that's that. The final frontier, right? Sure. That's what we think. That's what we thought back then. I'm sure there's other frontiers. You dimensions to explore. Sure. That kind of thing. Right.

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 public support. You need like space tourism? No, no, not space tourism, but just initially, you know, they needed the support of the popular American right opinion right which is why Vaughan Brown said I'm gonna like reach out to the public directly

through Collier's magazine. He did a three part he hosted a three part show on like the wonderful world of Disney about living in space great show and We really got people jazzed about this back in the 50s. Yeah. 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 to 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 gravity has a weird effect on crystals in the way they form, phlasm, like inevitably.

But if you're out there in microgravity, there are far fewer flaws in the crystals tend to form more perfectly. So, you can do things like make really good semiconductors, right? Yeah. For microchips. Sure. You can also crystallize drugs better to make them more potent.

Yeah, so 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. Yeah. 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. You know, flames here on Earth with our stupid gravity pulling it 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. It's around. Yeah, it's so cool. So you could potentially with a perfect flame like that, that perfect flame has got to be a song. Eternal flame is what you're thinking of. No, I'm saying perfect flame. Mm, now 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 this is just like two things that you could do in space. I'm sure there are a thousand things we could list.

Right. And as a matter of fact some of the early ideas for space stations were concepts that were used like 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 land forms 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. 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 I saw, they're still... I really 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. And let's say I mean, there's sites still somebody still paying for the domain. That doesn't mean much, but it still says like they're going to be they're going to head for the star is in 2012 and then I found another Russian one that was

Look pretty promising, but their site apparently was not updated since 2010, but a Company called big-a-low industries very recently had SpaceX fairy 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 like people are still working on the concept

of space tourism like today. Well, I know the Galactic Suites 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. So maybe, 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, you know, he's trying to fly people into space still. Yeah, I looked at that. I was like, wait a minute. Does this Alaska Airlines merger? Did that kill Virgin Galactic? And apparently not.

It was just Virgin America that Alaska Airlines took over. Apparently in a hostile takeover But Virgin Galactic still at it. Okay. Well, that's good. I guess if you're loaded and want to ride in the space. Yeah, if you're Ashton Koocher or Terry they were on the list right sure they have disposable income Sure send the coach up there the coach either one Sure. It's in the couch up there. The couch. Either one.

I feel like I should take a break and regroup and then we'll start talking about space stations passed. I'll take one with you. This is In Retrospect, a podcast about pop culture from the 80s and 90s that shaped us. I'm very much a product of the pop culture I consumed, and I don't think that's a bad thing. I'm Jessica Bennett, a New York Times writer and bestselling author. I'm Susie Bette-Karim, an award-winning TV producer and filmmaker. Every week, we'll revisit a moment in cultural history that we just can't stop thinking about.

From tabloid headlines to illicit student-teacher relationships, and one, very memorable red swimsuits. I found myself in Pamela Anderson's attic, as you do. I put that red swimsuit in a safe because it seemed everybody wanted it. We're digging deep to better understand with these moments taught us about the world and our place in it. I want you to really smell the axe body spray

that emanated during this time. It was presented more as kind of like a crime topic. Okay, and that's not a long story. Not a love story. It had been branded on the uteruses of every single woman from C to shining C. Listen to In Retrospect on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Everyone in our country has a voice.

It's something that says not just where you come from, but who you are. Welcome to NPR's Black Stories Black Truths, a collection of podcasts and a celebration of the hosts and journalism who've always spoken truth to power. Our voices are as varied, nuanced, and dynamic as the Black experience, and stories should never be about us without us. Find NPR Black Stories Black Truths on the iHeart Radio App or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up? This is Big Long. Check out my podcast, It's Up To. Each and every Monday, It's Up To.

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We had a great episode on the Space Race. It was pretty much a two-love-the-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 yeah, 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 and 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 Super Balls. But do you remember we were talking about the Super

Ball in the Super Ball episode? How Sputnik like made America post-war America, wake up and be like, hey, stuff 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 Saliet one 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. Yeah.

So American astronauts get to the ISS on Soyuz rockets. Oh really? Yeah. What number they had, I wonder. Oh, who knows? Yeah. Who knows? A lot.

They launch them a lot from Kazakhstan, I think. Oh really? Very nice. The Soviet one was the... Three to one. I think. Oh really? Very nice. So yeah one, 45 feet long had three main compartments. Your standard compartments, which are like dining and recreation, food and water storage, you got to have your toilet, exercise equipment, and then your sciencey stuff. Yeah, that's sciencey 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. Okay, 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 we'll just kind of briefly, one of the things that they found so far about living in space is that your bone mineral density decreases by 1% a month, which you're 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. 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 in blood and stuff tend to accumulate in your lower extremities.

Right? In microgravity, it tends to accumulate up in your upper body and 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 because they don't have enough blood for a while until their bodies 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. And that of course was a famous tagline from the first alien movie. Oh really? Yeah. I remember seeing the ad with the big egg space and I was just like, I thought that's terrifying. I'm gonna 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. He leaves his name is Mike and

Mike has been Studied hero on earth. Yeah, I was about to say you got to split those guys up over the same over the same year that Scott has yeah, and now they're comparing him apparently Scott came down and he was like an inch or two shorter than his Identical twin brother. That was just one thing But they're 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 the human body. So you said I'm shorter and more fainty for starters.

He just fell dead away and they just slept 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 like sacrificing potentially, you know? Right. I mean, not just being away from family and stuff, but who knows, feinty might turn into

something really bad in the future. Well, not only that. They're also exposed to solar radiation, just space radiation that the Earth's atmosphere protects us from. Yeah. They're exposed to solar radiation, just space radiation that the Earth's atmosphere protects us from. Yeah. They're exposed to it. And apparently there's a huge possibility that their lifetime risk of cancer just goes through the roof from living 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. They just went. They just hung their heads and put in reverse and the little module went pee.

Yep, all the way back to Earth. So the Soyuz 11 crew actually successfully live there for 24 days in 1971, which is remarkable. But very sadly, they all perished upon reentry coming back to Earth. Yeah, they're capsule depressurized. Yeah. Capsule at the time wasn't designed for them to wear suits, so they were all as fixated. Yeah, just like died instantly, right? Pretty much, yeah. They would have lost consciousness almost immediately.

So after the 11, Soyuz 11, they launched a different space station altogether, the Celiet 2. That one didn't even get up into orbit. So they were like, ah, Nyet, went through 3, 4, and 5, and 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 like 1992 or

1994 and they actually used it as like a, when they launched the mirror which we'll talk about and I think 1996, so I guess it was up there then. They were going back and forth between Sully at seven and the mirror. I guess probably going like, oh, we can use this vodka over here. Gotta go get it from Sully 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 Sully, it, Chuck and the later ones, was that there was a docking, a secondary docking module. Yeah, the first one's only had one parking space, essentially. Right. And so you had the parking space for the crew that was there. Yeah. And if they needed supplies, well, T.S.

No problem. They were to park. But if you had a second docking port, then you can use, well, they use the unmanned ship called Progress to ferry supplies from Earth to the solute stations. Yeah, I'm surprised that it took them up to the solute six to realize they needed another parking space.

Yeah. You know, you're gonna forget something. Right. You left the iron on back home. We're stuck up here. No one can visit us exactly well like you said that they figured out which is wonderful and that all led to the United States in 1973 launching their very famous Skylab 1

space station which has the best patch of any NASA related space based anything Skylab 1 is the best. Yes, 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, it 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 they actually, there were three different crews that were sent to Skylab on Apollo capsules.

Yeah. And the Skylab module itself was actually designed roughly initially by Warner von Braun out of a Saturn V moon rocket. Yeah. The third stage of it became Skylab. And I think at the Aaron Space Museum in Washington, not the one at Dolas, but the one that's in like the like around the mall. Yeah. Yeah, 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 their Chuck, they managed to kind of like put Skylab back together with Duck Tape and Bubblegum. Yeah, that first one, Skylab 2, they just sent them up a week and a half after the, the fit, 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. Right. To cool it down.

And then see that, that solar panel that didn't stretch out, far enough, stretch it out. You see that? Stretch it out. And they did. Commander Charles Pete Conrad, Paul Whites 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. Oh yeah. 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, you know, this is the first time

they were testing these long duration man 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 was about a two week mission. We didn't have any data on what happened to people longer than that. Can we set up shop there, 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 a 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 were a lot of people who were really anxious about it, because NASA very famously said that everybody calmed down. There's a one in 152 chance that somebody will be killed by Skylab. Well, yeah, they think that. Like 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 an asset to admit, we were so excited about getting this thing up there. We didn't really think a lot about how to control its dissent, because that was essentially the story.

We can'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 it would just, it's 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. Sure.

But it's 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 saying it'll probably enter somewhere over this thousand kilometer stretch of Earth. It includes Australia. So heads up Australia. And there were lots of of Skylab parties. Because it's America in the 70s, people went like Skylab crazy.

Disco parties? 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. of it crashing. Yeah. And some kid actually collected. Yeah, an Australian. Yeah. He got on a plane.

He had a little piece of sky lab. Because we're to end up crashing in the Esperance Australia, near Perth. Yeah, I mean, mostly in the ocean. Yeah. 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. You're silly space station can't do it. Right. So yeah, this kid flew over and Sam Francisco and said, here, pay up. He's a Skylab. Yeah, his name was Stan Thornton, he was 17.

And like without even thinking twice about it, he grabbed it, hopped on a plane and went to Sam Zisko, 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. He did.

And hop on a plane for that? That's a salary of a first year teacher, right? Fadley. Yeah. You can also buy pieces of Skylab today if you've got some dough and an internet connection. A legit 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 a 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.

Okay. And then we'll talk about MIR and ISS. All right. This is In Retrospect, a podcast about pop culture from the 80s and 90s that shaped us. I'm very much a product of the pop culture I consumed, and I don't think that's a bad thing. I'm Jessica Bennett, a New York Times writer and bestselling author. I'm Susie Bette Karam, an award winning TV producer

and filmmaker. Every week, we'll revisit a moment in cultural history that we just can't stop thinking about. From tabloid headlines to illicit student teacher relationships, and one, very memorable red swimsuits. I found myself in Pamela Anderson's attic, as you do. I put that red swimsuit in a safe because it seemed everybody wanted it.

We're digging deep to better understand with these moments taught us about the world and our place in it. I want you to really smell the axe body spray that emanated during this time. It was presented more as kind of like a crime topic. Okay, and that's not a love story. Not a love story.

It had been branded on the uteruses of every single woman from C to shining C. Listen to In Retrospect on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Everyone in our country has a voice. It's something that says not just where you come from, but who you are. Welcome to MPR's Black Stories Black Truths, a collection of podcasts and a celebration of the host and journalism who've always spoken truth to power. Our voices are as varied, nuanced, and dynamic as the Black experience, And stories should never be about us without us.

Find NPR Black Stories Black Truths on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, it's your boy Michael Coyle, your world famous. Often talked about a legit comedian. Some of y'all know me as Mr. Whitaker from Martin. Some of you know me as showboat from House Party 3. And yes, I have told Jim crackers for everybody. And some of you don't know me at all, but you can come find out who I am on my new podcast called Michael talks to air by that's right.

They gave my own show y'all. Woo, woo, woo, Michael talks to everybody where every week will be interviewing some of the greatest artists in the game. Also, we'll be talking to ordinary people with extraordinary ideas. It's gonna be off the chain. We're gonna be covered all sort of topics. You ain't heard of nowhere else. We gonna be doing a lot of laughs and a lot of talking. Most importantly, we gonna have a lot of fun.

It's gonna be off the chain. So please check us out. Everybody, I'm telling you, it's crazy. It's bananas, it's Michael talks to Airbombs to my Airbombs. We got T.I. We got, uh, uh, oh, Michael Jackson, it's gonna be just a comeback. He just can be a minute. Everybody, we gonna be talking to him. We gonna be talking on this show. Listen to Michael talks to everybody on December 5th on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.

Hi, I'm Jerry Luggen, store manager of Biowell number 3842, and I wanna invite you behind the scenes to a section of our store that is strictly employees only. Dictor, you didn't bring your co-brother work, did you? Oh my God. Okay, A number one, it's a Burmese Python. This is where we unwind and have a chat

about the news of the day. Looks like Chris Christie might be running. Honey, if you finish one thing, Chris Christie ain't doing it's running. Employees only, that means no normies, keep out buddy. It's just for us by well employees. He did an insurrection. Honey, it didn't work.

You can't hold somebody accountable if it didn't work. I love that so much. We sort of apply that to my criminal record. This is where we talk freely about all the stuff happening in the world. It's employees only. courtesy of Ron Howard, the new podcast from Imagine Audio, pretty fast in iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we talked about the the soliate, which was the Soviet Union's big first success in some failures, but overall I think they saw it as a success. Right, and at the same time,

just 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, Skylab was not supposed to be permanent. No. That was never the intention. But Mirror was, was it supposed to be permanent? Mirror? Yeah. Okay. So we're the later soliates. Okay. So the Mirror definitely was meant to be a permanent one.

All right. Well, the first crew, Cosmonauts, Leonid, Kizim, Vlad the Mirror, Soloyov. Solovyev? Nice. It's a great name. I think it was just those two dudes. They shuttle between the Saliet 7, which

was being retired in mere. And there was some, like you said, there was some cross over there, right, an overlap. They had to get the vodka. Yeah, they had to get the vodka. Yeah, they had to get the vodka. Right. And they spent 75 days on the mirror and it was continually manned over the next 10 years.

And, you know, 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. All right, like they carry pieces of it out there 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, you know, it's everything you would expect. It was a G was space station. Yeah, a lot of science stuff, a lot of modules, living quarters, transfer compartments, docking places, they had more than one parking space, they figured

that old mess out. Yeah. You know, it was like, you know, 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 aboard mirror when the Soviet Union dissolved on December 26, 1991. His name was Sergei Kirka-Kev.

Kirka-Kev, it's hard to say then, 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 mere that had some problems kind of later in its life,

it was a fire one year, and then that, 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 gonna be permanent. The US is talking about this ISS station. They want us to come help them with.

And those big campaign to keep the mirror live, called keep mirror live. And private corporation stepped in, 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 space station, okay? 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 in 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 is 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? Yes, I'm sure. 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 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. That is a dead-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 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. Mm-hmm. I don't know if that was all. Well, no, it's Russia by then. Oh, yeah, you're right. Yeah, you're right. And the Russians said sure Why not? We're not doing anything and not just being friendly, but you know, they they were probably the second leading Well, I don't know by that point. There were other players What in space science? Yeah, but they were still pretty highly regarded at that time. 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 from, it was launched, 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. Yeah. Well, it looks out 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 400,000th, I'm sorry, the 47th, but 100,000th orbit of Earth. And they 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, you know, relaxation, emailing your family. Hang it 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 in microgravity. I think it makes everything taste like styrofoam. Yeah, so apparently they like 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. Gotta go somewhere.

They have two toilets. Go to the other new guys chair. Only two. And oh, there's usually only three or four people up there. My other six right now. Oh, six. Yeah. With two toilets. Yeah. With two toilets?

Yeah. How many hairdryers? Who knows. They keep their hair short though, because there's very few hairdryers in space. Well, there's no showers. I mean, they can wash themselves. They have like water jets, but not the same. Yeah, not the same.

Man, I'll bet that first shower when they get back down to earth feels so good. Yeah. But there's two toilets. You see, you've a fan-driven suction system and you have to latch yourself to the toilet. Oh, yeah, for that too. And they're 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 shuttleship,

like here's all our poop. Yeah, progress is like, thanks. Yeah, I wonder what they call it, progress. And then the peepee is evacuated by a hose that's attached to the front of the toilet. Did 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. It tastes like chicken. And the toilets for PP 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 the second grader. You don't think about this stuff. That's the first thing I thought. I was like, oh man, how do they eat? How do they poop, how they poop? But what 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, you know, all that stuff, but then pictures on board. And one of them, they were, they had this huge flat screen watching the Revenant watch in the Revenant. Yeah, wow It's what it looked like I could see that two guys on a horse. It was hard to tell because it was getting the background But I think it was a Revenant That are cloudy with the chance of meatball

Probably not the movie gravity so yeah, no They were probably like I could never happen. Remember when Neil's regress Tyson lost his mind about gravity? Hey, he's your pal. He went on a Twitter rant about it. Yeah. Then we should talk about the Chinese, because I think it unfair not to you. Sure. The Chinese launched something called Tiongong 1. Back in 2003, they became the third nation on the planet to launch human into space. And they launched their space station in 2011. And there's been two 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 Skyland party for it. Right. But the two missions included China's first two women astronauts, Liu 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 gonna like, get to the point where they're like, well, we need to, if we really want to call on I space, we need to see what space does to them. And I just wonder if they're gonna like, get to the point where they're like, well, we need to, if we really want to call on I space, we need to see what happens when a baby is up there or give birth in outer space. Yeah.

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 of money with a space station by putting it,

what's called a Lagrange point. And there's Lagrange point, L4 and L5. Okay. 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 and 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. Clark was the first to put it in that orbit forever, right? And this is actually like an early idea that I think Arthur C. Clark was the first to put it out there in 1961. And these Lagrange points are like 90, the orbits like 90,000 miles across, 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 Poliochov. Yeah. Record holder, right. Yeah. Oh, one more thing, Valerie Poliochov. Yeah, record holder, right? Yeah. 438 days he did aboard Mir in 1994 to 1995. Man. And he'd done like 238 days before then. Crazy, I bet he's super fainty.

You know. All the time. He's rushing though, he can take it. You got anything else? I got nothing else all right Well, let's it for space stations for now if you want to learn more about him You can type those words in the search bar house to forks and I since I said search bar time for listener mail I'm gonna call this um Oh, 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 is graduated from high school and also the same year my niece Reagan graduated college from Maryland 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 know his 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. And I didn't walk in the college one, so I literally have not been to a ceremony since 1989. Right. And it just stirred up all these amazing feelings. Oh, I thought you were going to say a major math. 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. Don't people, millennials get a lot of crap, but like, 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 very empathetic carrying forward thinking generation. Nice. So it was really neat thing, so I just 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 it. A girl named Hannah, I want to say, wrote in and asked for any advice for graduates. Oh, that's right, and she mentioned you in the speech. We appreciate it. 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 pretty nice. 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 from Brandy and Kansas. Hey guys I want to thank you so much for that Facebook post about, know what's graduation and how you have so much hope for the up and coming generation.

I'm really excited about the world changes coming up and 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? It's a well-documented phenomenon where each generation downplays. The bad things their own generation didn't believe the ones that follow are lazy, spoiled, entitled. There are quotes literally dating back two thousands of years ago of this very thing in the music stinks too.

I'm sure that's the other part of that. Yeah, here we go, but... Or no, no, no. Yeah, the music today stinks. Alright, let's do this 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 a 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 Matt Tyler. Pretty awesome. And his friend Timothy and Sarah. And our friend Jane Janab was in the audience and our old buddy Greg Storken was in the audience. It was something else. Yeah Denver was like these some of our oldest oldest fans were in attendance so. It was 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 from God 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 and Manhattan, Kansas. Thank you, Brandy. Good luck in the pit of despair. If you wanna get in touch with us, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast. at iHeartRadio.com. Staff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app.

Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Sometimes the pop culture we love just teens hits differently in retrospect. Maybe it's a tabloid story we couldn't get enough of or an illicit student-teacher relationship on our favorite show. We're Suzy Bannakarim and Jessica Bennett, posts of the new podcast in retrospect. Where each week we'll revisit a cultural moment from the past that shaped us and probably you to try to understand what it taught us about the world and our place in it. You're the first person that I've talked to about this for years and years. Listen to in retrospect on the iHe Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your favorite shows.

Everyone in our country has a voice. It's something that says not just where you come from, but who you are. Welcome to NPR's Black Stories Black Truths, a collection of podcasts and a celebration of the hosts and journalism who've always spoken truth to power. Our voices are as varied, nuanced, and dynamic as the Black experience, and stories should never be about us without us. Find NPR Black Stories Black Truths

on the I Heart Radio app, or wherever you get your podcasts. On his new podcast, Six Degrees with Kevin Bacon, join Kevin for inspiring conversations with his friends and fellow celebrities who are working to make a difference in the world, like actor Mark Ruffalo. You know, I found myself moving up state in the middle of this fracking fight, you know, and I'm trying to raise kids there, and, you know, my neighbors, like, willing to poison my water.

Listen to Six Degrees with Kevin Bacon on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See that sign? Employees only. That means keep out, buddy. It's just for us by well employees. This is where we talk freely about all the stuff happening in the world. You can keep Meghan Markle for all I care,

as long as I get to take Harry to a weekend in Vegas I'm happy. It's Employees Only! courtesy of Ron Howard, the new podcast from Imagine Audio, pretty fast and I Heart Media. Listen on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.