Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 68: The Nedelin Catastrophe

Episode Date: May 12, 2021

this is the episode where Liam confuses Albania for Armenia buy tickets for milo's show: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/milo-edwards-pindos-tickets-152386986579 listen to Masters of our Domain: https://domainmasterspod.podbean.com/ listen to trashfuture (obviously): https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/ Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod​ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp we are working on international shipping Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 YOU ALREADY SENT US ANTHRAX so please don't bother in the future thanks

Here, here, here, here, here we are podcasting. What welcome to well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters. What's it has slides. I ruined the joke. I'm just I'm Justin Rosniak. And the person who's talking right now, my pronouns are he and him. Oh, I like that little abbreviated thing, my pronouns.

I am Alice Goldwell Kelly. I am the person who's talking now, my pronouns, she and her. Liam Anderson, pronouns, he, him. Yeah, I am the person who's probably yelling at you on Twitter for the podcast account. Sometimes when Ross and I get drunk, it's both of us. You know, then you guys had to play the detective game of which one of us is drunk tweeting.

I always like it when I'm not drunk tweeting, but Roz is. And people are just like, Liam's at the controls again. I'm like, I see you're not a discerning listener because Roz is using punctuation and he's not tweeting in all caps at the Eagles. Yes. Hmm. We have a guest. Yes, why is dear Milo?

Hello. Hello, it's me. It's me, Milo. It's my pronouns are on you war because I am the fucking Russia. Understand. Yes, right. We have we have Milo here for being the only

Westerner to ever go to Russia and and learn about its culture. Yeah, only person to speak the language. And I include every Russian in that. Your dad hasn't has a bachelor's degree in Russian, Roz. That that is true. Yes, I also took several semesters of Russian. And then I forgot it all. Yeah, but that's both of you are like Western liberal academics.

You don't understand like the soul of Russia, like Milo does. I would say the majority of people I know is from making fun of the last one cannot speak it. The whole word where I couldn't you got to go a lot of time now. Yeah, you got to go one at a time. Sorry, sorry. So it's just lag, I think I was going to say the majority of people I know have bachelor's degrees in Russian cannot, in fact, speak it.

So this sort of makes sense and that sounds about right. OK. Do I have a talking hat? You have a talking hat. Go ahead. You have the conch. I was going to say, actually, when I was in band at high school because I was in band in high school, we would have political debates. And we had to have a ball and you weren't allowed to talk unless you had the talking ball. So it was just a bunch of teenagers who all thought they knew how the world worked,

like a, screaming at each other about libertarianism, B, fighting over a ball. Do you kids want to be like the real you and you just want to score them waste time? But I repeat myself. The other thing is I was going to say is that someone got mad at us for making fun of slobs in the last episode. Yeah, because of our racism against slobs. Apparently, and us, we're doing cultural imperialism. Be a black face.

I forget what we were doing there. I wanted to congratulate that one commenter who made that video, our most common video just by posting for like several hours. All you've got to do is get really in your feelings about me and what I do to this podcast. And you too can have like several day long YouTube comments experience. Yeah, the most offensive thing you can do to slobs is wear a big wig on your back to simulate having a really hairy back.

That's their equivalent of blackface. Wearing my slob, blackface merkin. Yeah, it's it's one of those roster hats, but it's just it just starts at the bottom of your neck. Oh, yeah, exactly. And it's just it's just a leather. Hackets or some bullshit, whatever noise, Roz get continually on topic because we're ruining the podcast.

And why isn't it just Roz talking? Go back to do not eat. Meh, let's listen. Listen, we're even if we wanted to fire Alice, our corporate structure won't allow us to get stuck with me. Yeah, there's always two votes opposed at a minimum. Yeah, I always love when they're just like, oh, fire Alice or even fire Liam. And I'm just like, hey, I know where Roz lives.

Be no somebody. Somebody said replace Alice with Joe Kosavian, which is a good idea. You should do that. No, no, Joe gets enough money from his podcast. You just keep the Albanians down. This is a pro-target podcast now. You say Albury, Albanians. Yeah, Joe, Albanian.

He's a manian. He's a manian. Oh, my bad. You fucked up. You fucked up. Oh, whatever. I blame. Albania is the country that Ukraine should be.

I blame Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey, for all my problems. Every Balkan state should switch. Ukraine gets to move to fucking Albania. Albania gets to move to Moldova. Organizations where they trade names once every decade. Bosnia and Herzegovina, just everyone from the north side of the country goes south. Every from the south side goes north. Sorry, Joe, you're Armenian.

Scotland gets independence, but it becomes England. Everyone just shift to your right. There you go. Keep going. Everybody has to move to Azerbaijan. All of you guys in the Translutia Studio in London, you have to move to Glasgow and I get to move to London. You just have that big office all to yourself. We're all now married to Chris.

I live in Holland Park. Look how fancy I am. My name is Alice. That's right. Oh, Holland Park is pretty fancy. That's the one that I know. Yeah, sadly, the Translutia Studio is very much not in Holland Park. It will not surprise you to learn.

OK, so we're here to talk about a missile today that exploded. Yeah, I see that. Isn't that the point? Ordinarily, it's a good thing when missiles explode. That means they're doing what they're supposed to do, right? Missiles only do this when they're in extreme distress. This is an example. Yeah, this is an example of when a missile exploded, when it shouldn't have.

Oh, no. There's stuff around it. Yeah, it's got all that stuff around it. There were people there, too, which is not good. Not anymore. Yeah, today we're going to talk about the Nettolin catastrophe. Yeah, because of the way it's written, I was really hoping it was going to be pronounced like Nedein, like Medellin.

The Medellin cartel. Yeah, that's right. They make the missiles and stuff in full of coke and just launch them over the US border. I would respect a space-born drug trafficking program. I was like, oh, come on. Oh, yeah, that would be cool. And of course, our friends from cocaine, Hamas.

Yeah, it's like rocket mail. Only the mail is drugs. Yes. Put your drugs in the vacuum tube. But before we talk about this exciting disaster in the field of Soviet rocketry, we have to do the goddamn news. Oh, boy, they really managed to really fuck up on the Mexico City Metro. Yeah, this killed 25 people or something.

26 numbers are going up. She's left. That's that's awful. Doesn't doesn't look good. Yeah, it isn't. In fact, it's not good. You can you can kind of you barely need us to explain what's happened here. One of those pillars. No work no more.

And so the this golden line metro train just sort of took a nose dive off the gap, crushed a guy's car with him in it. So that's the one on the 26th. Yeah, not not great. And this is this is kind of. This line, the golden line, which goes out to a suburb of Mexico City, had been like plagued with problems ever since the earthquake in 2017. They'd shut down this exact section.

And they had like nominally repaired it, finally reopened it again. And this happens. Yeah, it's like it's the newest line on the system, too, like line 12. Yeah, they're going to extend it. Well, we're going to extend it off this. Well, they probably will still extend it. They'll just fix this section. Yeah, but that's what they said last time.

Also, I would love it if this happened in Britain and we would have to then insist that actually when it does this, it's good and we like it. And we've renamed it to the to the Sir Captain Tom line. Yeah, that's just someone's first up to big crying, laughing emoji onto the train. You just can keep running trains over this section of track. This is suspended in air. Trains nose diving into the pavement and tribute to key workers. Yeah, 26 people left triggered by a London underground accident.

Yeah, so the victims families have already like protested at the site because they see it as like obvious negligence and obvious corruption and building the thing and then letting it fall down. We don't know for certain yet because there haven't really been any like reports or inquiries or anything. But it's not that difficult to believe, is it? I mean, corruption in a major public transport system in Mexico City. My god, it never happens.

Never happens. Although they're certainly getting their stuff built out a lot faster than, you know, we are doing here in the USA. That is true. This is this is a big problem for Amlo, Andres Manuel Lopez, operator, the president of Mexico, because he ran on anti-corruption and the two mayors of Mexico City, the current one or the previous one, who fucked this up, are both like his guys, his protege.

And this was their like pet project was we're going to rebuild and we're going to extend the Golden Line. And now it's just like, you know, killed a couple of dozen people. So obviously, they're making noises about doing like a full inquiry. But we don't think that's going to actually happen yet. You're going to have to rebuild this entire fucking viaduct. There's going to be a pain in the ass. Oh, yeah, 100. Yeah.

Well, good news. There's plenty of money to be made in construction. Hmm. A Mexican government official described this as a pain in the ass. Yeah. Yeah. You're not in El Cullo. Yeah. I like that the end of the notes on this slide said this is the worst rail disaster in Mexico since 1975.

And the interesting thing there is, of course, after 1975, there were no passenger trains in Mexico anymore. Yeah. I think it was after after like the 1990s, I guess it was, was when privatization really hit hard. And they're just like, no passenger trains in Mexico. They they ran two trains into each other in 75 killed a bunch of people. And then shortly after that, they were like, yep, no more trains.

Yep. That's the solution. Yeah, it's kind of like a that's it back to Winnipeg approach to public transport. Like, no, you can't have trains anymore. You fucked him up. Gone now. No more until you've proved that you can use your rapid transit system responsibly and not get killed by it. You're going to have to drive. Yeah. Right. Speaking of driving.

Here's a big truck. Cool. So Wyoming has discovered an innovative way to save its coal industry. Is it retraining the coal people as like podcasters? No, no. A new state law has created a one point two million dollar fund to be used by the while by Wyoming's governor to take legal action against other states that opt to power themselves with clean energy such as solar and wind in order to meet the needs in order to tackle the climate crisis

rather than burn Wyoming's coal. So if you don't buy that coal, they're going to sue you. They're going to sue you and make you buy the coal. How the fuck does that work? Yeah, I've been curious about this too. I've been very confused about this as well, but I'm excited to see it work. I just I like the idea that they sue like a solar power operator and make them take delivery of a 200 car unit train of coal every day

and just dumping it in a pile next to the solar panels. They're having to find lots of naughty children to give it to. Yeah, I work in an inverse coal mine in California. We just dig a perfect replica of the shaft in Wyoming and we put that shit back in now that now that's how you create jobs. That's for petrol energy. We've solved it. That's the Soviet solution is I have to buy this coal

because they have to export this coal. So we have to keep the number up. So I'm just going to bury this coal perfectly in reverse. It's it's it's carbon sequestration, but for fossil fuels, you've dug up. Now we need to some guys crushing gasoline back into fish and we're on. Yeah, an extremely high pressure reverse oil well. What it is, it's industrialized weightlifting, you know,

I picked things up and put them down. It's like muscle confusion for the earth. Yeah, I'm excited to see one of these lawsuits happen. I want to see what the outcome is. I think it'd be hilarious for just, you know, they might just force everyone to buy Wyoming coal constantly. Yeah, it would kind of suck to get sued by Wyoming. You'd want to get sued by a better state, I feel.

Oh, no, I'm being sued by like four guys. You're out of text. We're here to sue you. Yeah, yeah, I spent a few months in California once and I once saw a car with a Wyoming plate and it just had like four numbers and then because they just don't have enough cars in Wyoming, they filled up the rest of the plate with like a picture of a horse. Awesome, thanks. Yeah, I got the fifth car in Wyoming.

Yeah, that's right. It's the fun thing about like the Wyoming coal industries because all these mines open in the 60s and 70s. You know, it's not like West Virginia. These things support basically no jobs and no population because everything's so automated. It's like one guy to drive the truck and that's it. Yeah, there's a guy who drives the truck.

Even that some of these trucks, some of these trucks are automated now. Really? Yeah, they put put down. They're not autonomous trucks. They're automated trucks. They use like radio frequency RFID stuff to steer. But yeah, so you're telling me this is a drone? Yeah, that could be that's that's basically a drone. Yeah, they're absolutely gigantic.

Those fucking mining truck. Every time I see one, I sort of dissociate. That's cool when you see the little guys being hauled by 18 wheelers. Oh, it's actually happy. So yeah, anyway, by Wyoming coal or they'll sue you. This is our advice. Yeah, you got to do it. We ourselves are taking delivery of a unit train as a coal.

Yes, exactly. You know, the only thing is you can't it's not even like it's by terminus. It's it's not it's bad by terminus, too. So you can't use it for home heating. Yeah, you have to buy our chassis product or we'll sue you to make you buy our chassis product. Anyway, so we're going to buy a coal mine in Shimokin and we're going to start. Yes, we are.

If they don't see you there, you have to subscribe to our Patreon. And when you do, we will send you a train full of coal. Yes. Yeah, it's it's by it's by terminus because you have to buy two of them. We'll see you very good. Yes. OK. OK. And we have to that was that was the news. I was abrupt. Oh, where'd you get this picture of my dick?

You should probably see a doctor. Yeah, for so many things. I like the like five fire extinguishers on the front, like at some point you're going to run out, you're going to comically run out of fire extinguishers after having run back and forth four times. It's not going to help. Sometimes the pussy heats up and, you know,

you want to be ready when it does. What are the two green ones for that the three red runs are not for? Oh, maybe they're like carbon dioxide ones and the other ones are like foam. I don't know. I guess the green ones are the ones that create fire. And the red ones don't want to use these ones unless you have to. Yeah, that's right. OK, so I thought before we start the episode proper,

we'd ask a question, which is what is an ICBM? And it's this thing here. It's Milo's motorized dick. It's your continental bowel movement. I see bowel. It's just something Alice has. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100 percent. It's called the irritable contibowel syndrome. I don't know. OK.

So it's an intercontinental ballistic missile. Right. Thank you, Socrates. It's intercontinental because it goes between it goes a long way, even between continents. And it's a ballistic missile because it follows a ballistic stuff also. Yes, it follows a ballistic trajectory, right? It goes up and then it comes down, right? Now, why do you need an intercontinental ballistic missile?

Show off, driving a parade, driving a bunch of men, a parade of Soviets, drive it in a parade. Well, let's say let's say you have a friend, right? And you want to deliver that already unrealistic. You want to deliver that friend a present very quickly from a long way away. OK, sure. But because it's friends day,

that friend is also trying to deliver you a present and you want to get your present there more quickly. So it's a surprise. Tell me, am I trying to deliver this present to like airburst above a major intersection of the house? That that is one option for the present. Now, the present is also very heavy, right? And you have to get it a long way away very quickly

because your friend lives a long way away. What you do is you can put the present on top of an intercontinental ballistic missile and you can fire it into the atmosphere and outside the atmosphere, in fact, into space. And it comes back down and lands somewhere in the vicinity of your friend's house, totally radiating your friend in the process.

But who gives a shit about that? I didn't say what kind of present it was. And that's why it's important that your friend lives far away because you want to be outside the range of this present. Yes. When he receives it. And there's some more like tactics here. Like if you maybe you want a second present capability, you know, you want to you want to have these

you want to have these ICBMs and various undisclosed locations or even on the move. I mean, we talked about the train launched ones in the last episode. You're going to feel about talking about presents anymore. Yeah. No, we are. Well, let's just let's just shift metaphors here and say

let's say you want to reveal your friend's gender. Oh, OK. I follow now. I don't I don't I that's that's impolite. You shouldn't do that. Outing, my friend. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's that that's that Russian politics right there. Just trolling people. It's a tough ICBM.

Hmm. In many ways, Hiroshima was the biggest gender reveal ever understated. Yeah. It's a boy. Jesus. Yeah, it was. It was a little boy. And then it was a fat man. That's right. Yes, you grow up so fast.

Yes, really a cancel for that joke. Oh, yeah. So anyway, that's why you have an ICBM. Now, Russia's first successful or the Soviet Union's first successful ICBM was something called the R 16. Right. Is that background supposed to be white? Yeah, it is. So you just have like half of a ruler.

Yeah, I do. There's also supposed to be a little man for scale right here. That's that's your little man. Yeah, that's the radiations fucked him up quite badly. Here, I've made him into an amogus. Oh, boy. Yeah. OK. All right. So anyway, you know, so the R 16, that's not the backwards are backwards.

R is yeah. This is a regular R. So it's a P 16. Yeah, it's P 16, I guess. Yeah. And so this was this is development of an earlier Soviet rocket, which is now used mostly for space launches. The R seven, the R 16. It's a two stage rocket, right?

Everyone remembers Kerbal space program. You got one stage on the bottom. You got another stage on the top. And then I believe from this up here, this is where the present is. Yeah. And the second stage, it's a delicious box of cupcake. That's right. So so your second stage, your boss and rocket, that just drops off and like as China did

or and as SpaceX did the week before, just gets dropped on some guy's head. Yeah, that's all right. That's that's someone you're not friends with. That's the funniest way to get killed by an ICBM is struck by second stage. That's so embarrassing. Didn't the Chinese stage like come down in New Jersey or something? There were a couple of Chinese ones that came down in China

because mostly they launched them eastwards over the Pacific. And so like there were some guys who just got their houses flattened by like rocket boosters. I was like, I was like going to bed two nights ago. Like, you know, I don't know if I'll wake up tomorrow. I might get Donnie Darkoad. I'm not going to get Donnie Darkoad. It's statistically unlikely,

but you were in the potential zone of this and I wasn't. Neither me or Milo were. It topped out at like the middle of Spain. Because Alice and I inhabit an undisclosed location. That's right. A bunker, many, many furlongs beneath the earth. Definitely not in Glasgow. Yeah, no.

And this is how we are beneath the earth. You can't really give it a surface location. No, and that's why you can't give us presents or reveal our genders. Yes, correct. So this guy had about 11,000 kilometer range. You could deliver a three to six megaton nuclear weapon, right? Or any other thing that weighs three to six. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

What does weigh about nine tons? How much is a Tesla way? Nine tons, my old van, maybe. Yeah, we can ship you, Liam's old van very quickly. Yeah, we've shipped you a long wheelbase Mercedes sprinter. Friends day. Yeah, I'm buying a sprinter right now, actually. I'm literally on the website and take this away from me.

You get a like a four minute warning that you're about to get a Mercedes sprints. Yeah. Oh, you're about to be forcibly made friends with Liam Anderson. It sounds like a lift notification. Your friend is Liam Anderson. Mercedes sprinter just crashes through the roof of your house. You're like, oh, they remembered.

So this this this missile was proved for design in like 1956, designed by Mikhail Yangle, right? Who had a big design bureau in the NEPA Popolovsk. Popolovsk. Oh, boy. Didn't you have a Popolovsk? Yes, that's the one. I think the Russian degree really serving you well there.

Just about his Russian degree in Ukraine. So, you know, oh, no, I'm cancelled. Exactly. Liam was really making fun of his dad. Well, at least we didn't call it the Ukraine. Yeah, I'm just going to be like, it's going to be a picture of the ISS tweet on that Ukrainian website. And I'll be accused of assaulting the security of mankind.

Oh, that's right. It's not the Ukraine. It's just a Ukraine. There's like 12. That's right. You see, Rosa, you say it's in Ukraine and I say for now. At the time of recording. At the time of recording. Yes.

I would simply say Greater Armenia. Shut up. That's all right. Shut up. I would say Greater Albania. All right. So there's there were some when this missile was deployed, there were some issues with it because it was eventually developed and deployed. You know, it took a while to get these things ready. They weren't really in silos.

They were in hangars stored sideways. They had to take a big truck and truck them out to a launch pad and then and then raise them up vertically. They couldn't remain fueled for too long. For reasons we'll get into in a second. These were some of the missiles deployed during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yeah, they had about 20 of these at the time. Yeah, which, of course, they exaggerated.

So they, you know, the CIA thought they had a couple of hundred. They actually just had the same missile going back and forth. We can deliver we can deliver the Americans up to 20 Mercedes sprinters. Yes. Yeah. There's a guy pushing those missiles through the hole from the other side. And it is two two kinds of propellants, right? Is this organic chemistry? Yeah, we're back.

Why do you do this to us? Because it's like another gender reveal. Congratulations, it's ginger. So the R 16 missile uses two propellants, right? One of them is unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine, right? Nailed it. That's the fuel. And the other one is red fuming nitric acid.

Well, it's fuming. Yes, it's doing what it's that's more orange to me. But yeah, that that that to me, that fuel is saying, well, it was fucking one years disgusting. So unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine, that's H2NNCH32. So it's got, you know, it's got two Hs, right? It's got an N. It's got an N.

Catch that N are two CH3s, right? Yeah. So that's a it's a methyl, right? So dimethyl, because there's two metals, then there's a hydrazine. Right. Colorless liquid. It smells like fish. It's it's it's a very stable chemical and it can be stored inside rockets for a long time if you need to.

And that's why it's good for ICBMs. But, you know, it's it's only it's fuel. It requires it requires an oxidizer because there's no air in space, right? Despite the space museum. Yeah, well, that's lies from the Smithsonian Institute. Those slots. Yes. They also learned this about dogs, but there's no air in space.

Yeah, we conducted a very important experiment just to make sure. One small problem turns out dog does not like space very much. So this is that's what the red fumic nitric acid is, right? It's a solution of 84 percent nitric acid, 13 percent of a chemical called dinitrogen tech and track side. And then the rest is water, right? So you mix the fish, the fish chemical with the iron brew. And as a consequence, rocket go up, right?

Yes, they are hypergolic, hypergolic, excuse me. If these two chemicals touch each other, they immediately burst into flame. Oh, good. Yeah, well, that's what you want. Because you want to. That's what you want. It's a rocket. Yeah, that's fine. The problem is red fuming nitric acid is extremely corrosive, right? The stuff attacks basically anything.

They didn't store it on board the ICBMs, right? In order to deploy an R16 rocket, you had to, you know, you brought it out to the launch pad, then you had to fuel up, fuel it up with the. Um, you know, the red fuming nitric acid, and then it would be good to go, right? It, you know, it took like three hours to launch one of these things from, like, cold. Hmm, which is not good if you need to launch presents in a hurry. Yes, exactly. I mean, you never know when Friends Day is coming.

No, exactly. And if there are presents coming towards you, then you might need to. Resipric, otherwise you might have like you might be in a situation where you receive presents, but then your friend doesn't. Yeah, exactly. Right. And the presence might be coming directly at you. Say, mutually assured friendship. Exactly. Exactly.

It's a mutual friendship. Yes, really stretching this metaphor to absolute limit. We're going to keep doing it. But of course, you know, we're back to my dick again. Yeah, I was dick when you when you when you pass the milf check, this is what happens. There's a huge team of men and trucks erect my penis. Using a guy who's going to answer Bay. Why does it have an anchor?

So you don't you see, because then it would become to erect and then fall. And then it has pre-opinion of Alice. You know, I say, I'm not 19 anymore. That's basically. So, you know, the R16 has several improvements over the earlier R7 rocket, which, you know, became the basis for the Russian space program, but was a pretty shitty ICBM. You know, the propellants used were more stable and easier to store since, you know, you're you're red fuming nitric acid and you're the other thing.

Dymethyl. Symmetrical dimethyl hydrazine. Yes. OK, so unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine and the neopropavlovsk a bunch of times. No, it's a succession. Time to activate the listener. Must give friend, Mercedes Sprinter. You know, one of the notable.

OK, so these propellants, as dangerous as they are, they're easier to store than what the R7 ran on, which was, you know, a bunch of cryogenic hydrogen and crap or whatever the hell it was, right? Yeah, it's more compact. It's easier to control than the R7. So after development was approved in 1956, after about four years of development, it looked like the first test flight could occur by November 1960 or so, a whopping 10 months ahead of schedule, right?

So, you know, this this this this racket was designed by Mikhail Yangle and his design collective. I'm not sure what that is. It's an OKB. It's a great Soviet invention where you lock a bunch of nerds in a special nerd camp and you make them work for you. It's sometimes called a Shorashka. And it's like it basically you like have a bunch of semi-imprisoned

intellectuals, some of them like former Nazis in the early days. And then just like this and stuff. And you just like say, OK, this this OKB because they're numbered. So OKB one, OKB, you know, 722 or whatever. You guys make planes. You guys make rockets. You guys make posters or whatever. So he has his little staff of rocket guys.

I see. OK. I'll edit design collective makes it sound like some kind of hipster thing. They're going to be featured in like a Helvetica font. It's very nice. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Like, yeah, we went to we went to Shelley Abbots can met these guys who are doing LSD and designing rockets. It's an experimental design bureau. Yeah, they're all wearing like huge wavy gums

like street wear that's eight sizes too big. So but the the program itself was under control of another guy who was Marshal Mitrofan Nedolin, right? He's Chief Marshal of Artillery of the Soviet Union. Yeah, gloves really do be out here being called Mitrofan. Yes, hero of the Soviet Union. You can look him up. Absolutely.

If you've seen a Stalinist military portrait before, you know what this guy looks like. He looks like every other Stalinist general. The hair kind of back to here. Eighteen thousand medals directly on the center of the chest. Yes. And sort of personality to match as a guy. I'm trying to work out what the what the deal is with the name Mitrofan, because I've never heard that name before.

Mitrofan like it feels like it might be one of those fucked up Soviet ones where they like they made up they made up loads of names that they used to give him the like aren't Russian names. They're they're like weird like acronyms and compounds like you meet loads of people who are born in like the fifties who are called Marlion, which is like a compound of Marx and Lenin. But it's not a Russian name at all. It's apparently it's like it's a churchy name.

It's it's Greek. It's metrophonase. All right. So it is. It's it's an obscure ass name, but it is a place. It's not a thing. OK, there we go. Presumably that there was a guy calling this guy Mitrofanushka, which I am told is the hyperchoristic of it.

Oh, wow. Oh, Mitrushka. Yeah. Well, and I'm yeah, OK. But his father was called Ivan, they're just like every other Russian man. Yeah, Ivan was like, fuck this, fuck this is like basic nameshit. I'm going to go into the big book of baby names and then fucking church, Slavonic, and I'm going to pick one that nobody has. Yeah, we're going to go hardcore here. We're going to go with we're going to go off piece, name our son something rogue.

Just give him give him an American name. Some odd. Yeah, it's Steve. It's like this is my son, Brunk. Branson, just naming your kids like Sarah Palin did. Oh, yeah, it's a Frig Nadolin. So it's a Russian name, but you spell it in America in English characters. Right. You know, like, like, like when they replace an I with a Y

in America. Yeah. Yeah. I should point out Haley with like six U's for some reason. If you want a sense of this guy's personality, what he did in the war was, well, he became the Chief Marshal of Artillery, which meant he spent his war firing field guns at the Nazis for like four years until eventually like shelling Berlin. Well, this is the guy who's good at shelling Nazis. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, well, you don't get called Mitra fan for nothing. I also noticed that it lists his place of death as the Baikonur Cosmodrome, which I said for shadows. So he thinks, all right. So Nedolin thinks he can give a great gift to Khrushchev by getting this rocket finished and tested by the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, November 7th, 1960, right? So keep in mind, keep in mind the whole time.

This project was 10 months ahead of schedule, right? There was no reason for any of this rush other than. Yeah, let's get it done before they get it done before November 7th, because he wants his second, his second hero of the Soviet Union is what he wants. My God, I mean, I think one hero of the Soviet Union is enough. I will go for a second for the stars, possibly literally in this game. You see, that that's what a guy who only has zero of the Soviet Union, like Brezhnev had had four and he gave himself three of them.

That's that's that's that shit. Ironically, yeah, it's called self care. Every time I feel a little bit down, I make myself a hero of the Soviet Union. Yeah. Could you have King shit in the Soviet Union? Do you have to say like general secret? General shit, yeah, shock worker shit with darn next shit. Hmm. So after a pretty panicked and rushed construction, Yangle delivered the first test vehicle, LD one dash three T

to the test range, which would later become known as the Biconer Cosmodrome, right? Which is in Kazakhstan. Actually, the Russians still launch rockets from Kazakhstan because they don't have their own launch pad. No, no, no, you're going to need to borrow someone else's rocket pad. Closest, closest bit of the USSR to the Equator. Nice weather, nothing around to smash rockets into. It's perfect. Yeah.

You like to keep you like to keep that shit in Kazakhstan in case it explodes. Yeah, exactly. They used to they named the launch pad after a town three hundred kilometers to the north to confuse people. Makes sense. Yeah. And that's just a little tiny mining town. And then and then for a while after they built it, the people of that tiny mining town used this fact to get just anything they want to deliver to them really promptly.

I really appreciate that like the Soviet Union's instinctive secrecy meant that you could just be like, yeah, I'm on I'm on like a top secret mission and you're just like a minor. Yeah, you use that to talk your way into getting like a nice watch, like a car or something. Oh, yeah, it's like you ain't getting a Mercedes Sprinter. So in late October 21st, 1960, was when the missile reached the launch pad for the first time after being assembled and after checks and tests,

this missile was fueled on October 23rd, right? I should point out when you say assembled, you mean like hurriedly assembled like guys with wooden hammers hitting stuff with stuff. Yes. Well, I think they had a proper assembly building of some kind. But yeah, yeah, that's a job. That's when you hit a big rocket with a big hammer. Yes. So now this was sort of the point of no return here, right? Due to the corrosive red fuming nitric acid,

if the rocket had to be defueled for some reason, it would have to be extensively refurbished before they could launch it, right? Yeah, acid is in a way at the inside of the thing. There is also no procedure for defueling the rocket on the pad. Yeah, that's terrific. Now, Marshall Nettle and for his to his credit, he decides, I'm going to oversee this entire thing myself. Right? I'm going to be there on management.

He's doing hands on management. Yeah. Give me a hammer. Let me out of the rocket. Exactly. You don't you don't get your second hero of the Soviet Union by watching somebody else fire a rocket. Yeah. Yeah, you have to go do it. You I'm going to push the big red button myself. Hmm. With this hammer.

So as a result, everyone who was working on this rocket was under a huge amount of pressure since, you know, Marshall Nettle and had a rank, which is, I guess, equivalent to in the United States, we'd call it general of the army. I mean, he's like, he's like the guy. He's like the main guy, right? Yeah. I mean, like Russia, Russia's always had more marshals than than the US has or Britain has even.

But like it's right after the after the Second World War, like all of these guys who fought their way to fucking Berlin are still around more or less. Just dripping with every medal they could give them. Like, you don't say you don't say no to that guy. He's good. He's been from fucking Stalingrad to fucking West Germany. So but the problem was this missile was constantly having little glitches and technical failures on the launch pad. And, you know, they'd send people up to do real quick patches and fit

fixes and those all started stacking on top of each other, which meant no one knew what was going on anymore. Ever. All the work took longer to do than it needed to. Some people working on this rocket, we're working for 72 hours straight, right? Oh, that's how you avoid mistakes from what I've heard. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, I was I was just working on this rocket normally. And then I had this Nazi chocolate

which enabled me to work for 72 hours. Yeah, but the Americans got all of the Nazi personnel, but the Soviet Union got all of the Nazi chocolate. You can't have one without the other chocolate to my dissident scientist. There were a lot of deviations from the safety protocol. And some of these deviations were astonishingly stupid and dumb. Hit me. All right. So here is an example.

On this rocket, right, in order to allow it to stay fueled for longer, right? The propellant tanks were sealed from the pipes to the rocket engine by something called blowout discs, right? And the blowout disc, the way it works is, you know, it's a disc which is sort of perforated in the tank, right? And when the rocket is ready to go, this disc is blown pyrotechnically with with black powder out of the way, right?

A cool thing to have next to your incredibly volatile chemicals. This is not the only pyrotechnic valve in the system. OK. Right. So that that that black powder charge blows it out, blows the disc out of the way. Then the rocket propellant can reach the engine, right? It can't quite reach the engine because there's another valve, the main valve, which is also actuated pyrotechnically below that, right? Oh, my God.

This is because you only use the missile once. So they wanted to avoid having a real complicated system of electric pneumatical valves. They just decided, why don't we just use? Why don't we just use a little bit of black powder? No, it's a waste of money, because if it gets to the point where you and your friend are exchanging presents, it's going to matter a great deal how much you spent on those presents because you're going to need to, like, you know,

you know, carry on afterwards with your finances. Yes. Yeah. You need it. You need a bomb inside your bomb to start your bomb on its way to explode. That's my understanding. Now, in this test vehicle, these blowout discs were notoriously unreliable, right? So. No. Yeah.

So Neddeline decided, along with some of the other folks, all right, what we need to do is make sure these blot discs work it right. So what we should do is we should manually blow them all before we launch the missile. Hell, yeah. This is while there were a hundred or more people on the launch pad, right? Nice. This is called being cool. Yes. Good idea, machine, baby.

The method by which they would determine whether the blowout discs were, in fact, blown out was to have a guy sit in the rocket next to the blowout disc and listen. OK. All right. Yeah, dude's rock, actually. Yeah, we have a key rock. Yeah, I don't have a problem with this. This is just as Russians doing Russian shit.

Like they deep down, they just all want to die. Like it is the void calls to them is the same thing that makes them go bungee jumping off their nine story apartment block on a Wednesday afternoon. It's the same thing that decides to like, oh, I'm just going to check if the nuclear missile is working by listening for the detonator. Yeah, just using a like a comical air trumpet to put my ear to the missile. Exactly. We every every episode we do of this, we find one guy

who has the worst job in the episode, and I think it's this guy who has to sit inside the rocket like fucking gravity's rainbow. Yeah, I just imagine like comedy shit like, oh, yeah. Well, the only way to tell if the launch sequence has been initiated is if you use the most sensitive part of your body, your anus to feel the tip of the top of the missile. So what we're going to do is going to butter it up and then we're going to you're going to sit up there

and then we're going to hit the launch button. So the, you know, this is obviously not very safe because if there were like an unexpected leak in the fuel supply, you know, it would it would just poison the guy immediately, right? And they did not give the guy a gas mask for this situation because that would interfere with the hearing. Oh, OK. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's rock, it's rock. Yes. So they started this procedure in the evening on the 23rd

and they started with the second stage blowout discs and they hit the button and no one heard anything. It's safe. It was someone. Someone saw some whisp to smoke from the lower stage and they realized, oh, the buttons are mixed up. I told you, I labeled one for the second one. And two for the first one is perfectly straightforward. You shout again.

Listen, it's a simple numerical system, one and a. Obviously, a comes first. All right. So they, you know, they called a meeting. They called a meeting with Nettle in and a bunch of other guys who were in charge of the rocket here and they're like, all right, what do we do? We got to we got to do something here to. Do what's the word? Make sure that the the the rocket is functioning correctly.

Something's wrong with the electrics. What are we going to do? And Nettle is like, well, we'll fix the rocket while it's fueled up and sitting there on the launch pad. And everyone's like, everyone, except for one guy is like, yeah, that's a great idea. Look, Lieutenant Colonel T. Tov. Disagreed. And he said, I want that rocket defueled and off my range.

But I guess Nettle and was able to overrule him, despite the fact that he was notionally in charge of the rate of the the rocket facility. They just like beat him into submission with his grace and number of medals. Yes. When was the last time you shelled Berlin? Same time you did. I got to be honest, man, you sound and really like a guy with who is it? Like a no times hero of the Soviet Union right now.

Now, go put your anus on that rocket. Clubs in the kitchen. Good luck to you. So the rocket was sitting on the launchpad, fueled up with the fuel in the pipes all the way to the engines with only some pyrotechnic valve stopping the whole thing from just going off, right? Um, now the decision was made to replace the main electrical controller and some of the pyrotechnic valves on the rocket while it was fueled up and then commence the test flight.

Um, and then, you know, to prove it was safe, Nettle and decided he was going to direct the operation from a lawn chair right next to the rocket. Oh, God. Oh, well, OK. What's your body weight about this, I guess? I should also point out, like in terms of the proximity required here, this this required guys to go up on ladders against the rocket. Just like put a ladder up against it and reinstall the valve.

I love the Soviet version of Doctor Strange Love. It's very cool, actually. So now along with the hundred personnel necessary to work on this rocket, there was something like a hundred and fifty more unnecessary personnel just hanging around, right? To take a look at the pretty missile, I guess. I don't know what they were there for. There's nothing fucking in Baikonur.

What are you going to do? That's a good point. Yeah. Now, as the 23rd of October turned into the 24th, there were some more problems that started to assert themselves. Wires started shorting from the pyrotechnic charges, right? The the the program sequencers, which we'll get into in a second. They all got out of alignment for mysterious reasons. I think it's really nice.

And like, I'm thinking here of Chernobyl as well, that every piece of Soviet technology responds to being tested beyond any sensible limits by a madman who is determined to like meet some insane artificial target by like essentially telling you that you're taking the piss, right? It's like sparks are coming off of it. Big lights are coming on. Like nothing, nothing seems to just fail.

All you have to do is stop. Yeah, all you have to do is stop and nothing bad will happen. And yet they take it too far every time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it seems like, oh, we've we've we've built all of our technology in a really portentous way. So if you're really going to fuck with it, it's just going to it's going to start making weird noises.

Mm hmm. Did anybody hear the rocket just go? No, it's fine. It's probably fine. But yeah, this this was an unhappy missile. Nittalyn wanted the workers to press on. They had to fly before the anniversary of the revolution. Why?

To commemorate the anniversary of the revolution. Weren't you listening? Listen, listen. You're there 10 months ahead of schedule, but they're all so late. That's the Soviet way. Yes. And with the blowout panels gone, there was no time to waste, right? They had about 48 hours before the nitric acid corroded its way through.

Oh, no spoiler. I'm a spoiler there. Yeah, and I got to find my place again. Right. They had about 48 hours before the nitric acid corroded its way through the pipes and made the whole rocket unusable, right? At that point, they had to send it back and get all that that entire system refurbished, right? You know, Nettalyn is like adding more and more pressure on the guys

to get this rocket fired, right? Sure. So this is this is this is an inner this is a quote I have found from a book called Rockets and People, Creating a Rocket Industry by Boris Chertok, who sort of indirectly worked on this missile. You know, Nettalyn was saying things like the last one to launch this rocket is gay. It was still morning when the NII for chief General A.I. Sokolov approached the Marshal and dared to warn him about the danger

of being on the launchpad in the immediate vicinity of the fueled missile. The Marshal snapped back at him. If you are a coward, then leave. Fucking God, his ass. The offended Sokolov departed the airfield and flew to Moscow. Yeah, I think if I were in that situation, I might be like, yeah, I am a coward. I am also leaving very quickly right now. Yeah, those driving deuces on the way out.

Yes, I am gay. Please let me get on the plane. So on the 24th. Oh, boy. So there they had made a couple of crucial deviations from protocol, right? One of the big ones was in order to. They did one of the problems is in Kazakhstan is cold, right? And what doesn't work in cold? It's batteries.

So the battery on the second side, my dick. Yes. So the battery on the second stage had been activated early in order to warm itself up. This was a weird they had a sort of weird Rube Goldberg machine method of activating this battery on the second stage. Yeah, going knocks a ball down a down a slide, which knocks over a house of cards, which trips a mousetrap. The electrode of the battery is a liquid, right, which is in a balloon.

And the balloon is suspended over the rest of the battery. And when the second stage battery needs to wake up, an air compressor comes on. It inflates the balloon, which inflates until it reaches a knife. I love engineering. It's so cool. This missile is not deadly enough. We just put a knife in there. We put a knife in it.

Yeah, that's all right. The knife pops the balloon and the electrode flows into the battery and starts it up. This is some Russian space pen shit. You know that story about how the Americans like invested millions and millions in a pen that worked in space and the Russians used a pencil. The Russians simply use the balloon full of mercury or something. Yeah, use a balloon full of mercury in a knife. Yeah, that's all right.

My I'm curious about is what is powering the air compressor? It seems to me they have a whole lot of already working. That's the cranking it by hand. Yeah, he's just blowing in that thing. Just opening the little door, being like, I haven't you need anything? No, leave me to my work slabs, tidy door. Yeah, I have no idea what runs the air compressor. That's a good point.

Hmm. There's probably like a whole diesel engine on there or something. So all right. So they had turned on the battery on the second stage and also in addition to turning on the battery, all the controls were connected to the battery, right? You're not supposed to do that until like all the nonessential personnel are away from the launch pad. You know, this is like the last thing you do before the last manual thing

you do before you launch the thing, right? Another issue was, OK, so. They didn't have computers on these missiles, right? But they still need 1960. Yeah, they need sophisticated methods of triggering various things in the rocket, though, right, to have make it happen, right? Sure, a series of balloons and knives. Yes.

So in order to make the series of balloons and knives work, they had something called a programmed sequencer, right? And the program sequencer is a step motor, which can react to some kind of input and a camshaft, which makes electrical contacts that prescribe points to make the missile do things, right? We're getting dangerously close to the diesel generator thing here. It's more of a player piano. OK, we've got a music box.

When you open this, this port in the missile, a little ballerina pops out and it plays like Clair DeLune. Yes. So in order to start the launch sequence, all these program sequencers, the shafts need to be at their zero point, but a lot of them have been turned forward inadvertently during testing for reasons I didn't fully understand when I read the guy steps on them on the way up. Yeah. Guy hits him with a hammer.

Mm hmm. So anyway, at a T minus 30 minutes to launch, about six forty five p.m. October 23rd, 24th, excuse me, 1960, the racket designer who's on the on the scene, Mikhail Yangle, decided to go take a smoke break. Right. Oh, oh. So he went into the smoking bunker, which is off to the side. Yeah. In order to smoke safely, you have to be totally enclosed.

Yeah, that's right. The reverse of usual. OK, someone will try to give you a present while you were smoking. Yes. So he and some of his colleagues were very surprised by the flash that is later generated when when he when he turned when he lit his cigarette. And then the sound hit. Boom. Right. Real big boom, several booms, in fact, because the upper stage of the rocket decided to turn itself on. Oh, boy. Yeah.

It's still attached to the still attached, yes. That didn't last long because, of course, having a huge amount of rocket fuel fire is not good for the top of the lower stage. So it exploded, right? And then the second stage exploded. This is while people are like crawling all over the rocket and unlike ladders and crap, right? Oh, fuck.

So, you know, the propellants flying flying everywhere. There's rocket parts flying everywhere. There's hundreds of people on and around the rocket at the time of the explosion. Some of them were sort of like vaporized instantly. Some of them were burned alive. Some ran for the fences and they made it to the fences. The fences were barbed wire and they got tangled in it. And then they fell on a ditch and then the low hanging

naxious gases sort of collected there and suffocated them. It was pretty bad. This guy in a lawn chair going, these people try to extinguish themselves. They're homosexuals. Burn with pride. Yeah, Nedalyn, Nedalyn himself was probably dead before he even knew something was wrong. So as far as he's concerned, he had a great job. Everything went fine.

Yeah, great job. Yeah. Everything's ahead of schedule. What's the problem? It did so launch ahead of schedule. That's true. That is true. That is true. Even more ahead of schedule than he was.

It reminds me once again of my first stage. Reminds me of my favorite Chernobyl joke, which is the TV news reader comes on and he says in a sort of an aggrieved voice. Last night at approximately seven 20 p.m., the Vladimir Alex Lenin nuclear power plant generated its quota for the five year plan in point one microseconds. You know, another issue is there's lots of nonessential personnel on the launchpad. So, you know, they all got murdered as well.

Yeah, guy in a lawn chair, guy up a ladder, guy hammering stuff with a wooden mallet. Yep. Guy just watching. Bunch of those old Italian men who stare at construction workers. Rocket boomerows. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As I know, he's not supposed to do that. It turned out. That the program sequencer, which controlled the propellant system, right,

the little player piano at a flaw. Oh, boy. Oh, God. When it was reset to zero, the cam passed through the phase that made the rocket turn on. That shouldn't have been a problem. Because it shouldn't have been fueled in the basteries. It shouldn't have been on, except for this guy just decided, oh, no, we'll do that.

Bug it. Yeah, this is the most like this is the disaster we can trace most to one guy since we did the Costa Concordia. Yes. Yeah, so yeah, the battery was connected. The blowout panels are manually blown. The second stage was like, all right, time to go. I'm excited.

And yeah, the whole rocket just. I mean, just systematically removing every single safety feature so that you can get the thing done faster and then parking yourself in a lawn chair next to it is such a strong energy. It's rock. Yeah, suicide by engineering. Yeah. Well.

So yeah, they killed like 120 people, I think, possibly more. I mean, no, no, because everybody's fucking chunky marinara at that point. Exactly. It's a chunky marinara. Yeah. My favorite baseball players of the 30s. Yeah. Chunky marinara has rigged the World Series once again.

He's Russian, so it's like borscht. Now, so what we have here is a picture of the launch pad, which, of course, was totally destroyed and never rebuilt. Um, the bunkers are all still there. They look like clay ovens now because he's got baked. Oh, boy. All they found of Nedlin was they found his hero of the Soviet Union medal because that was gold.

So they found that melted into the fucking launch pad. They found one of his shoulder boards and they found his watch, which is more of him than you'd expect, really. Show that Soviet watches were well made. Yeah, absolutely. You got to buy like a Vostok or something. If you wanted to, if you want to get blown up, then buy a Vostok doesn't keep the guys in the smoking bunker.

Survive. Yeah, yeah, guys in the smoking bunker all survived. Yeah, because they were, you know, they were in the in the bunker where Nedlin's show that smoking is good for your health. That's right. Yes, of course, the Soviet authorities covered the whole thing up. All of these guys died in plane crashes, officially. That's a lot of plane crashes.

Every single one of these guys was on a different secret mission in the interests of the state and all died in plane crashes. Hmm, I buy it now. Chris Jove was, of course, very, very angry about this. So he flew down to Baikonur and one of the things that I found was that he he shouted at Yangle, the guy who had designed the rocket and who had gone out for a smoke, like, why are you still alive? And and he yelled at the guy so hard that Yangle had a fucking heart attack.

He was off work for months. Before this, he was like trying to replace Serka Korolev as the like the scientific lead for the manned space program and not anymore. Also, another another fun consequence of this, since this made the Soviet Union, the Soviet military decided that multi stage ICBMs weren't reliable. Somebody had the bright idea. What if if we need to deliver presence in a hurry? We put a bunch of single stage, shorter range missiles in Cuba.

Ah, smart idea. So this this very nearly became like the one disaster, the one guy that like ended all life on Earth, because it precipitated the Cuban missile crisis. People also think that it stopped the Soviets getting to the moon, but they're confusing it with a different set of explosions which took out the Russian ambassador to the Saturn five. But like there is a broader point here that I want to pull out, which is that the Soviets were never really able to reconcile

the civilian and the military aspect of their space program. Like the US did that poorly enough, right? Like the Air Force was still launching stuff from Vandenberg and he had a bunch of like secret shuttle missions and stuff. But like here, like in the Soviet Union, everything was controlled by the military in terms of spaceflight. And so they had absolutely no interest in stuff that you couldn't use as an ICBM. And so they kept working on this rather than stuff that would have been more

useful for going to the moon. That N1 rocket video, their Saturn Vive equivalent is always entertaining to watch because it literally looks like they accidentally put the rocket in reverse. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what can we learn if anything from this? What does this say about Russia and the Russian character and the Russian soul? Well, first of all, that they be going for a cigarette. And that's right, too. Yeah, it's a good idea.

If these were Americans, they would have been like showing tobacco and they would have all died. Yeah, exactly. None of that. They would have lived because they are tough as nails is what. Yeah, Russians would take this as a vindication of their entire lifestyle. Like, yeah, if I was there, I would also not stand next to the rocket that was built in Russia.

I would go and have a cigarette several, several hundred meters away. Yeah, start smoking, kids. It's good for you. This is the moral of the story. Take a smoke break. I know. Thanks, buddy. I'm Union and just like smoking and then goes up. Right. Soviet rocket builder Union.

That is right. If only if only they had unionized, we could have avoided this. I was about to say, I mean, if you if you if you want to you know, get away from like, you know, an oppressive state like this, you know, you want better working conditions. I think they maybe should have tried communism. Why don't you ever finish out of the Soviets? I know. I know everybody was waiting for that drop.

They were saving it. That is right. All right. Well, you're a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Shake hands for danger. Remember, we do it after a tail, Alice. OK, all right. All right, well, this is spicy.

Hello, there, W.T.Y.P. gang. Hi. Hello. Hi. I assume they can hear us. I'm an electrician with a safety horror story and also why you should always thank your PPE seriously. Oh. This isn't the usual type of story you would usually tell for a safety third.

But the body horror factor later gives me hope it will make it on the show. That that's that's positive. All right. Yes. I was working on a six story hospital that was really behind schedule. We had been working. Well, I should have got some Soviet guys on that. That's right. But I had to say, yeah, they could they could have got it done 10 months early

and then it would go off. We feel hospital with rocket fuel. This becomes very hypergolic. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, all the doors are pirate pyrometrically triggered as I mean, I touch off this black powder charge to enter every fucking door in the hospital. That's right. Yeah.

But you're breaching and clearing into the ward. Yeah, welcome. Welcome to fucking pediatrics. That's right. We had been working 84 hour weeks. Seven 12 hour days for about two months. We were working on the third floor on all the ICUs and CCUs. Right. So it was like, you see, you know, I don't know the cool care unit, I think.

It's like the thing down from an intensive care unit. Got it. The floor of the building was almost done and we were installing the can trims into the pre-installed fixtures. That's these guys, this inverted solo cup. This little this little hat. Yes, the metronome on it. Yes.

There were about eight of us working in the floor and some of us were standing in a circle fucking off, you know, as you do when you haven't had a day off in two months of 12 hour days. When one of our co-workers, a six foot five inch tattoo covered ex-convict, ex-convict fresh out of prison, hobbles out of the room he was holding, hobbles out of the room he was working in, holding his hand over his eye. He stares us down with his uncovered eye for a couple seconds and simply says,

I have an emergency. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Now I have to ask, what is a lighting can trim? Is a cone shaped light fixture made to go into a cylindrical can pre-installed in the ceiling? It's the thing the light the light goes into, right? Yes. OK. Usually, these trims are held in place by two stiff springs with a fight

with five inch rods sticking out on both ends of the spring. These will fit two corresponding hooks in the pre-installed fixture. And with a simple push, the trim will usually suck its way up into the hole. Yeah, I've been there. Just like my dick. That's right. Just like after having two trucks to erect it, yes. Yeah, I get it.

I get it. To erect my dick. And then I like force it into a piece of drywall and the springs come out and it installs there. Yes. Yeah. And then I can't move. It's got locked into the ceiling by my fucking dick. Well, that's what I'm into. So the joke's on you.

It's called King. That's right. Anyway, not on this job, the fuckhead drywallers cut the holes too small. So getting these cans in with a double drywallers makes me pretty happy. Yeah, it's not a band fuckhead drywallers. When you want to install one of these trims, you need to hold the springs close tightly in your fingers and look into the hole to see the hooks and match them up. As previously mentioned, these holes were cut too small

so the hooks were damn near impossible to see. So our friend here decided, fuck this shit, I can't see these damn hooks and took his hard hat and safety glasses off to see the hooks better. Boop. As he was thinking where this is going, put your eye as close to the spring as possible. Yes. See, see that sharp object, that sharp protruding object?

What you should do is you should put your eye right next to it. That's what we mean when we say eyeball something is put your physical eyeball onto it. Yes. Yeah. Sometimes it's an ICBM. Sometimes it's a Light Vic. That's right. These are both equally dangerous. Use your anus to feel the hole. Oh, boy, it has nubbly riches.

I'm going to get hero of the Electricians Union. Yeah, that's right. As he was sticking the trim into the ceiling, one of the hooks cut on the edge of the hole and shot straight through his cornea and into his pupil. How does that happen? It explains to me how that happens diagram that shit. I'm going to be honest, I've been a little bit confused reading this one.

Because I don't I don't understand the mechanics behind this. I need maybe maybe I need to because I. I don't know. I'm going to need some pictures here, dude. Yeah, I'm not going to need to see those. I'm also good. I'm going to take this guy's word for it. Say it.

Turns out the clear fluid rolling down his check is his cheek wasn't tears. It was his viscous humor. Oh, yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Half of us almost vomited when we saw his saggy. I'm pretty close.

He had to be medivac to Little Rockers is the only place ahead of an optometrist capable of this kind of surgery. The hell of a way to go. The dude got to keep his eye and even still has two thirds use of it. How the fuck do you have two thirds use of an eye? I have no idea like like every second month and weekend.

This is the world's worst custody battle. You're going to drop off my eye with my ex-wife. I have to drop it off with the hook. But it wasn't all bad, though, as this guy is now a fucking six foot five inch tattoo covered ex-convict fresh out of prison with an eye patch. I fuck with it. And he's now the health and safety guy.

Yeah. Yeah. If you do not wear your safety glasses, there is a risk that you will become extremely cool. Yes. Hmm. You become like that Republican guy. Dan Crenshaw. Dan Crenshaw. That's Dan Crenshaw lost an eye

by like trying to suck his own dick on top of an IED or whatever. Whereas this guy lost his working. I was about to say this guy is a worker. It's weird that that's how you have to diffuse an IED, but how? Sorry, Dave. Jeff and Francis. A dick. Yeah, all of our veteran friends are going to be very,

very annoyed by us owning Dan Crenshaw. They love him. Love that guy. Yeah. Yeah, that's what that's what Joe DM to me in the middle of the night to tell me how much he loves Dan Crenshaw. Yes, I love Dan Crenshaw in particular in the Navy SEALs in general. Armenia is actually Albania. Shut the fuck up.

This is why this is why you can't replace me with Joe Kasabian is because he loves Dan Crenshaw too much. Famous. That is true. I know that to be true. Like I said, he DMs me once a week. If he had kept his hard head on, the brim would have caught the hook and his safety glasses would have done obvious things.

And you can always wear them like a disgruntled librarian looking for the people talking too loud if you can't see well, right? But you just push them down your down your nose. Yes. Yeah. OK. The real feed the purpose. Yes. Hmm.

OK, OK. Also bad safety advice in this safety advice. I don't know. Actually, that probably would have still helped this guy because if they were down the bridge of his nose, they would just poke back up by the. I guess so. Yeah. Yeah. The real moral of the story is don't work your fucking guys

eighty four hours a week and expect not expect accidents to happen. During the crunch time, we had two shocks, one resulting in half a drop ceiling being torn down and an EKG ran. The other guy had to be kicked off a 10 foot lat. The other guy was kicked off a 10 foot ladder, breaking his arm on impact. Now he can't raise his hands above his head. Long hours have a human cost and buildings aren't worth it. Hell, yeah. Yeah, that's true.

It's all right. Yeah. Fill them all in rocket fuel. Yeah. PS, five months after this hospital opened, a tornado came through town. And the first thing that popped into my mind was I swear to fucking God, if I had to go back to Jonesboro. Yeah, it launched every single one of those cups out of the fucking ceiling. That's the only damage it did. Yeah, hundreds and hundreds of eye surgeries urgently needed.

These things like eye seeking missiles. I have to build an eye hospital next to it. Yeah. Did you just say eye seeking missile? They use a different kind of lighting fixture that are like, I don't know, fuck up people's ears or something. That'd be cool. Well, safety third. Yes. Yeah, I got it on both ends that time.

I'm so proud of you. Thank you. No one said you weren't going to. No, I don't know. Somebody in the somebody in the comments probably will know. There will be like 500 replies. Excellent. Yeah, let's get there. He's kissing and shitting his pants over Alice. No, it's two guys.

Oh, two guys kissing and shitting their pants over Alice. So our next episode is on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster. That's right. Milo, thank you so much for joining us. You have some stuff to plug, right? You have a show coming out. Yes, I do. Yeah. There's, yeah, I have a show on the 30th of this month, May, in London at Voxel Comedy Club.

So if you're in London, you can come to it, but if you're not in London, you can watch it online for which there are also tickets. This is apparently possible now. You can watch things live on the Internet. So if you go, if you go on my Twitter, there'll be like a link to that. Also, I have a podcast called Masters of Our Domain, where we allegedly talk about Seinfeld, but not very much. Yeah, I've been on it before.

It's a great time. Yeah, Alice is coming back on this month. That's right. Well, boy. Yeah, that's right. So you should probably have like these two guys on. Otherwise, it's going to seem like favoritism. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you guys should come up. Don't talk about Seinfeld. Yeah, you guys should come up.

Don't talk about Seinfeld. Oh, that's cool. I don't even like Seinfeld. Yeah. No. I was thinking, we're going to, are we going to get through this whole episode without Liam doing self-internalized anti-Semitism?

Nope. No. Well, Phoebe likes to do that on Masters of Our Domain too, because recently she was, there was one particular episode we were doing where she really wanted a Jewish guest and we booked a guest who turned out to be great, but the whole time Phoebe in advance was trying to work out whether he was Jewish or not. That is a Seinfeld episode.

Listen. That is the plot of an episode of Seinfeld. It's Elaine fucking like it would invite somebody onto a podcast if they had podcasts and then be trying to like feel out whether or not he was Jewish. Liam is 100% Jewish and therefore you can be 100% certain. Sorry.

There you go. I'm just sat in a lawn chair right next to the podcast. I'm just up at the top of the podcast. I'm just checking for the pyrotechnic charges. Pyrotechnically actuated podcast. Exactly. Did anyone else have commercials before we go? Kill James Bond podcast.

Listen to it. Patreon also give me more of your money. I need it. It's probably also Trash Future. Trash Future is another podcast. Both Milo and I are on the podcast. Trash Future. You may be aware of it. Check that out.

Yes, please do. We have a bonus episode coming out when Roz writes it about the cathedral. Yes. I'm going to do that after we finish this, which I think we're finished. Yeah, we're done.

Bye, everybody. Don't cut that out. No threats of self-harm come from this podcast. No, we're awesome. No, open up a lawn chair and sit next to a fueling rocket as the most we can say.

No self-harm, actionable threats of violence to others. Definitely put it up your ass, though. Oh, absolutely. Yes, obviously. Make sure you get an ICBM with a flat base, though. Oh, yeah.

You're getting in trouble that way. ICBM. I think we're done. Bye, everybody. Bye-bye.