Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 75: The Space Shuttle

Episode Date: July 14, 2021

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I Hear thunder I'm hearing thunder. Yeah, too. This is gonna be a we have a dramatic dramatic setting today full of both haman thunder Well, God willing, we don't fuck it up as bad as the spatial program. Oh God Well, I get I get here we are In the middle of the storm of the century Mm-hmm here to record a podcast our first podcast about

space Podcast about so we've done the Nadellan disaster. That was about space. That's Gently about space. Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. What what kind of rocket blew up. What was it? Was it a land rocket? Did it make it to space? Where was it supposed to go? Space didn't get but that's a land disaster. It only it doesn't go to space Listen, if you try and kill someone they charge you with attempted murder, right? So if you that's an attempted space flight that still counts. That's a space disaster. No No, absolutely not

I This is the first this is the first podcast where we talk about something that stays in space for an extended period of time With some thunder for dramatic effect and that's some humming that we don't know what it is humming I think the humming might be related to the the storm Possibly. Yeah, so let me just get out ahead of all the commenters and shut up Well, at least at least at least I'm back and we won't have any disco beeps this time. Yes. Yeah Yeah, we got some feedback Welcome to well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rosniak

I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him Okay, go. I am Alice Koldwell Kelly. I'm the person who's talking now my pronouns. She and her Yeah, Liam. Hi, Liam. I'm Liam Anderson. My pronouns are he him and today we have a guest Yeah, I have a guest Guest, uh, my name is Clark Newman. He him Why are you here Clark? What the fuck do you know? Y'all ask y'all tell y'all ask me to be here What special qualifications? I I've not doing the cat mouse. What qualifications do you have to be on this podcast?

Well, okay to be fair. I I my job title is advanced mission design engineer I work on site at Johnson Space Center doing spacey stuff um with a contracting company and Yeah, so I know about space I I know not too much about the shuttle Other than I worked a couple shuttle missions very early in my career before

It went by by but remotely kind of from Goddard Space Center. So good stuff. Um, it almost doesn't count in in a way. It does too. It's like What what is it about space people? What is it about space people that makes them humble like this? Like you talk to any astronaut, right? And you'll be like, hey, was it cool and you saw the earth from space and they will always Always affect this like fucking folksy ohio when simple country dirt farmer bullshit Who's like, well, yeah, I guess it was kind of cool and I saw the earth from space when I saw the earth from space

Yes, when I achieved a miracle man has jumped up Yeah When I held put shit in orbit around a like a moving Astronomical body that was yeah, I wouldn't really count that as like, you know, subject matter expertise Yeah, yeah, well, I'm just a simple country astronaut Yeah I actually looked at uh pronouns from a dot matrix printer of these things called uh, inter range ranging vectors um

It would I don't really want to get too deep into it because it would be extremely boring, but um It was very uh, like lost every 108 minutes. You got to push the button. So um, a lot of nothing is automated You know with respect to that program and lots of fingers were in it. Um, lots of jobs were impacted by it But um, yeah, let's get into it So, uh, today we're gonna talk about um, a railroad company That's right on which you can see over here But they also do something else which is launch The space shuttle

Yeah, our favorite class three railroad nasa Oh, yes, it's side gig, of course listening Well, this is actually the This is actually the the crawler that we're looking at right now. Isn't it or wait, which one are we looking at? Yeah, the crawler guy Oh, but you've also got their railroad highlighted. I'm sorry. Yes Yeah, no, this is like in this economy. Everybody's got to have two jobs. So railroads uh, space light

Ride never sleeps, baby Had to grind for this view and it's just the earth from space Yeah, today we're gonna talk about the space shuttle program whole thing the whole damn thing Start to finish. Yep. Obviously at some point we'll probably go more into detail about certain parts of it Yeah, two aspects of this is a whole broad overview of the space shuttle program Shuttle 101 Yes But first we have to do the goddamn news

This man I nearly sampled and used the audio of you guys trying to do the news noise yourselves for this You should have I should have been funny. I should have but instead instead I was too mad at Richard Branson for not dying in space That's very understandable Did he really go to space? No If you were to ask me, I've I've uh taken a firm controversial stance on no He went to like how high up did Richard Branson? uh telecoms entrepreneur private island owner and like general dipshit go guy

Yeah, yeah go into space. It was like 50 kilometers up, right? Failed operator of the west coast main line Don't forget that one. That's also true Uh, yeah, he he has failed at uh going into space much like he has failed to operate british british trains By going to like sort of 50 kilometers above the the earth's surface and like the lowest Sort of like more controversial definition of the boundary of space is 80 kilometers And then the like sort of more more accepted one is 100 kilometers just for nice round numbers Uh, but he didn't do either of those you got a sort of a private spacecraft

owned and operated by himself And uh did a did a sub orbital flight so that is high as a weather balloon Yep, yep after A mere you know 60 years We've come back to mercury redstone and doing doing sub orbital flights just to say that we could

Um, which is great. I love this. This is cool. He's gonna like probably try and sell tickets on these um I mean lance bay didn't lance bass of nsync go to space or was his mission cancelled? There's been a bunch of weird space tourists Yeah, I I know this like this is just a thing when you get too much money like jeff bezos said That like the only thing he could think to do with the money that he has is like spend it on on on space flight, which is Possibly the worst thing I've ever heard. Yeah, so It's very confusing to me because like like, you know, these these two guys bezos and um, richard branson are both competing

You know, they were competing to be the first billionaire in space. Elon musk could do it tomorrow if he wanted to I Lance bass was rejected. Yes. He was he was going to go to uh, like, um Star city and do it and then his financial sponsors backed out Yeah, he he couldn't raise the uh, the 20 million dollars. And so uh, ross kosmos the russians face agency was like no ticket Damn, which is cool. Mm-hmm went through it went through all the training. They were just like nah And yet Uh, what if what if the tip ticket was remote revoked after they lift it off?

They'd have to take them to the back of the spaceship and just kick them off That's why you're expressive. Yeah, you just I guess the alternative is you're just like in in the Soyuz and you see a little sticker up there that's like, you know Penalty fair, uh, if for no ticket and you're just like sweating just doing like Fuck they're gonna fucking ticket inspectors gonna come to They're gonna put me off at the space station Do you live here now? Yeah, just washing dishes at the space station trying to earn passage back Well, that's that that's space news. What about that's space news

The opposite of space which is trains Hmm. Uh, yeah All right, I'm logging off for the next hour and a half. Justin. So are you Yeah, ross go m tracks buying new trains and they're fucking stupid Why are they stupid ross? All right. So what they're doing is they decided we have this whole nice electric fleet of locomotives, right? And they're gonna replace them with dual mode electro diesel locomotives right So what they're doing at the the logic here is well now we can run through trains from electric territory

Into non-electric territory seamlessly Um, but what you know, what they're actually just doing is they decided well, we're america's only passenger railroad We're gonna commit the fossil fuels until at least 2050. This is the dumbest fucking thing i've seen in my entire life They're also spending all together too much money on it. Um, I I can't believe they're they're getting away with doing this Um, but I this this is this is it's crap. Uh, it's very bad Um, it's just bizarre you you go from electric locomotives to Sort of electric locomotives Step backwards, but we got we we got an amtrak guy in the white house for all that availed us, you know, I was about to say, yeah

Um, we've got peed boosted. Yeah, just secretary of transportation. That's progressive. Right. Yeah, exactly We have we have a we have a a game We have a a gay cia train guy making sure I think it's a gay cia bike guy first. You take what you get I guess. He's a bike guy as well. Yeah uh, yeah, so that's

This this isn't credible. I could talk for an hour and 30 minutes on this but I will save that for a future episode People have been complaining that the episodes are too short. So frankly go off, you know I don't want to do it on the news The goddamn news plus 10 seconds about the shuttle All right, so we need to ask a question here. Hmm. What what is space? It's really big. Yes. It's it's not earth checking out. Yeah. So yeah Uh, space isn't it's it's a thing or there isn't a thing Or possibly there are some things we can't detect those things or those things are like the inverse of things that we can detect

Yes, um, it's it's got a lot of weird shit in it. Yes, it has um trees shape like exes Like, uh, you know like fucking uh, like, you know, the planet's made of diamonds, uh, like underground lakes of like, you know Hydrogen merger or whatever. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Just go to i fucking love science and they'll tell you where it's at. Yeah Well, my understanding is space is up That's where it is. That's like hardy b I suppose if you go down far enough you would also be down space. Oh, that's the hollow earth

Um, so why why would you go to space? It's cool. I should not mind our uh asteroid mining astronaut mining Yeah, I'm mining Mine the shit out of this astronaut He knows what he did. Yes Uh embarrassed communists that seems to be the main reason honestly embarrassed capitalists conversely. It's another another reason to do it uh Because there's stuff up there that you want to like, uh

Look at but you can't like photograph it very easily So you just like run a thing into it or shoot a probe at it or You know, that takes a little loophole to go over it without being in its airspace Yeah, exactly. Yeah, if you want to point that telescope inwards you can like you can do all kinds of shit You can see what the soviets are up to Uh, yeah, you can read newspapers over people's shoulders allegedly Am I not allowed to sue for a satellite encroaching on my airspace? I thought property rights went all the way to the heavens and straight to hell. This was my understanding

Well, we're getting into a sort of a theological discussion about where the heavens is currently outside of space, I believe Yeah, exactly. Yeah Exactly. It's like but also space isn't airspace. It's space space space space space space Space Some call it final frontier That's true. No, that's Alaska. Well, okay Yeah, space space is space is a difficult place. Uh, almost as inhospitable as Alaska. Uh, only uh, no, all are berries in space

Fewer things Alaska has in common with space. Uh, the government might pay you to live there Uh, it's relentlessly hostile to human life. Yes. Hey, me too Space also commonly called seward's folly It's got like a bunch of secret military shit in it that nobody really knows what it's for Right. Uh, all right. Yeah, all right button space over the horizon. Yeah, you can put ballistic missiles through it It's cold Yes I mean really the similarities rarely, you know, that they go pretty far

There's lots of water, but it's ice Mm-hmm ice, baby. Yes Um, so yeah, there's lots of reasons you would go to space or to go to Alaska Um, let's not go that far. Yes So, well, I've been to Alaska. I haven't been to space So maybe I should maybe I should go to space Yeah, um, Richard if you're listening Um

Get if you have a spare seat on the virgin galactic and also you don't you don't mind like me Yelling at rose and calling him a class tracer the whole time Consider taking sign us up. Yeah, so you're so so you're gonna sit in the seat next to me and yell at me the whole time Yeah Yeah, that's that you can take it in space. We can take it in turns. Yeah, that's what the well That's your problem tour experience is It is getting yelled at a lot. Yeah. No, I can't confirm Now one thing I would like to note when you go to space make sure the rocket is in forward

It's loony toons Thomas. Yeah, you don't want to you don't want to nudge the rocket into Into reverse Yeah, not good. Not good. You go underground then you can you can do science in space You can like throw some like dogs or rats or like mold up there And then you can look at them and see what they do. Uh, and you know, sometimes that's interesting You'd see what it does to a person You can see what it does. You could you could just send a dog up there and then it dies and you're like, this was a great success I feel I feel like I'm gonna get quite past as that if I point out that most of the dogs that the soviet union put in space lived

The first one they didn't even try to bring it down. Okay. No, they did. Okay. They did fully like murder like it But like otherwise like if we're talking about like belka and stroka and stuff No, they those dogs survived because they that was part of the reason for putting them up there was to test whether you could like Return a like living, uh, like a mammal To earth alive from space. So didn't we send like the united states sent a bunch of monkeys up there that died? Yeah, sure. We brought some chimps back, but um, I always wonder why chimps versus dogs. What was the um driving behind those animal choices? Sentimentally attached the chimps, maybe

Who's to say we need higher order life to murder Somebody announced it was like, yeah, we got to make sure that like none of these are the higher primates get any ideas. Yeah, exactly It's just an astronaut holding a knife to a chimps throat. Don't get any fucking funny ideas All right, and the right stuff they says they they actually would shock their feet to get them to push the buttons that they want That's rude. That's rude. Yeah, man. Okay. Well There's not quite a knife to the throat. Hmm. Well, all right. Um Whoever wrote the notes for this one. What are we looking at? We're looking at a satin five rocket, which I have chosen to make the point about what we did before the space shuttle

And what we did before the space shuttle was big rocket goes to space This is very simple and very intuitive. I say very simple. It isn't but like it's intuitive Just so everyone's aware because it's a big tube of explosives, right? Like that's that's it. It's not simple, but it is straightforward in that sense if you follow me um There are however some limiting factors to putting stuff in space on top of a big rocket First of all, you have the Chorkowsky rocket equation or sometimes called the tyranny of the rocket equation Uh, which is that you have to carry all of the fuel that you need

um And then you have to carry all the fuel that you need to carry that fuel And then you need all the fuel that you need to carry to carry the fuel that you need to carry the fuel to carry the fuel And then you need to carry the fuel which carries the fuel that you need to carry the fuel the carries So it yeah, there's there's like that's a limiting factor another limiting factor is that like You can sort of like you have to build a new rocket if you want to put something else in space Like you can kind of maybe recover and refurbish some some bits of it that like jessison and fall back to earth But like not reliably

um So that's sort of that's sort of a problem, but we have a solution to this because we have planes We already have planes plus Most of the guys who are like doing this rocketry stuff are all air force guys anyway So they're all thinking in the back of their heads like okay Can we apply the principles of aircraft to uh to put thing in space next slide, please Talk about the uh the bowing x20 dinosaur. I love this thing Dinosaur here is d y n a hyphen

Nice. Yes back where the future was cool 1966 they planned this first um And the idea is that like this sort of like this this plane thing it like It bolts on it's the top stage of a rocket you launch it like a rocket And then it like it separates those uh those stages and then once you're done doing whatever you need to do in space this this vehicle re-enters the atmosphere separately

Uh and glides to a runway Which you have a certain amount of control from like having like you know like a lifting wing and like control surfaces Um, let me get this straight. So this bit has all the expensive stuff in it Yes, and you bolt it on top of the big fuel tank bullshit that has the cheap stuff in it, right? okay Then you don't have to re-manufacture the expensive shit. Exactly. Exactly. Uh There are a bunch of like Technical let's say challenges. Let's be generous and say challenges here. Sure

uh Like if if you if you do some very very very very complicated maths wrong Then uh, you skip this thing off the atmosphere like a you know a stone and a pond and everybody dies in space Uh Or if you do it wrong in the other way you just plunge this into the atmosphere it melts and everybody dies in the atmosphere And then if you do some more maths wrong, then you like get it through re-entry and it lands on a runway a tire explodes And everybody dies on ground Wrong comes back to tires

Pretty much make a more rigid pretty much now. I there are a bunch of these projects Most of them got cancelled pretty quickly the the dinosaur only lasted like two years um And I my gut feeling is and I'm I'm begging to be corrected on this one That it's less that those problems were like technically insurmountable even in 1966 and more that like There wasn't really that much of a reason to do this um Because the stuff that you were trying to do in space in the 60s was you know, go to the moon land on the moon

Return a man safely to earth from the moon Uh, it requires different different tools and you don't really like you're not doing a lot of like repetitive stuff Which is what you would ideally hope to use a space plane for Uh next slide, please Now I've been there's one thing I'm confused about Please which is skipping off the atmosphere, right? I don't know much about space I have played carbo space program though And it's my understanding that when you hit the atmosphere you slow down

Yeah, which then makes you sort of, you know um D orbit, right? Typically, yeah But you you can with enough if you generate a little through an oopsie daisy generate too much lift as you're barreling into the atmosphere You could Go back up or if you come in with too much energy and you don't bleed it often time

You will go back into space one one fun thing about the dinosaur Is that they actually intended on paper to for it to be able to do this on purpose Um that they genuinely intended to like to be able to like track Uh different satellites and satellites changing course in orbit they intended to be able to like bounce it off the atmosphere purposefully and um

I will say that like one of the reasons why this didn't get off the paper stage is that the g forces that were supposed to like happen to the crew at this point were Substantial and I'm doing air quotes Yeah, it's got it's got a bit of a kick when you you bounce off the air You know, you know, it's bad when a bunch of like right stuff guys Who like smoke unfiltered cigarettes all day every day? No, I like now this is too dangerous Yeah, you're gonna go you're gonna go to uh, you're gonna go from mach 32 to mach 75 by way of mach two and a half So

Only the x20 Only the x20 dinosaur reduces an entire marine lieutenant colonel to a soup like a margin Give me that give me the next slide because this one I love This is this is a landing test vehicle that the soviets made called the mig 105 and I include it only because it's adorable This was that this was their attempt to do the same thing, but they only used it for like Test landings if I love it. It looks like a gym shoe. It's delightful. It looks like a little What is this thing sticking out the side? Is that a sled? Yeah, because this was their solution to uh one of the well to the tire problem

Yeah, the same the same for the dinosaur in fact was that Every every tire that they could build at that time would just be destroyed whenever it landed at the speed the minimum speed It could have done So their solution was we put it on like little little skis Um, and we make those out of the same thing as the hull And this is gonna be fine. This is gonna be fine. Don't worry about it. All right, my dinner's here. I gotta go on mute Oh boy Um, could you uh, uh, it was it landing on like snow?

Was it no no a paved runway and a really long one too It's oh man. Did you so it must have just been a show of sparks? Oh, yeah 100 percent. Uh, how did you steer? I don't know how much that how much that was a concern. What if there what if you have to do a crosswind landing? Oh my god There there is also another alternative to like making making a spacecraft That's more like a plane and that's you attach the spacecraft to a plane Uh, that fly is like very high and very fast and you launch it from the plane and then try and go to space Uh, nobody really does this the air force the us air force tried it. Um with like sort of an unmanned like missile thing

Uh, but like apparently the benefits of doing that are like pretty marginal And it's also like insanely complicated even for like space standards It's done for small scale. It's it's done. Uh, there's a pegasus. There used to be a pegasus There's for the the richard branson flight was done with a with a big airplane dropping a rocket um, but yeah, you wouldn't want to be unless You you're pretty limited in the size that that monster airplane that drops the uh virgin rocket That's the thing it drops is the verb. That's pretty much as good as you can get It went with regards to putting people in space that way

now Also, it's like a ton more more dangerous because if something goes wrong you also manage to lose a plane into the into the bargain, which is fun All right, I always like the school of thought that says you elevate the launch pad Ten thousand feet or so by way of a large tower It's like it's like the first step of a space elevator. Yeah I'm I'm still I have not done the math. I need to work on this but slingshots From the ground if they need to attach giant winches to start the first 10 seconds of liftoff I think you could save a lot of fuel that way. I have nothing to back this up, but I think it's possible

You just see you do see the crawler just hauling in a bunch of trebuchets Now, I thought maybe you could have some kind of large gun To shoot things into space and I intend to find some kind of tin pot dictator to fund my idea And this will not go wrong in any way. No, you you certainly will not be killed by massad And another fun option, uh, what if we detonated a nuclear weapon under the spacecraft that we wanted to send to space? You're supposed to do that in space Yeah, you'd think but it has been seriously mooted that no, we just we just do it on land and stay far enough away from it Oh, good lord. Well next slide please because

In case in case you're unfamiliar if yours who are joining us light may not be aware Um, the the united states did in fact send people to the moon. Uh, they went to the moon They they played golf on the moon There wasn't a lot going on on the moon is the thing. Um, it's kind of like After a while the american public Kind of sailed on the moon. I'm bored of the moon. Um, yeah, not much up there kind of boring The next thing was to go to mars, but instead of doing that, uh, one of the one of the things that sort of like became more popular largely because it was you know

Cheaper it was to like build space stations like permanent, uh, like encampments in in low earth orbit Where you could do science like skylab uh, where you could um Operate a spy camera yourself instead of using it as a satellite that was a plan That was a a plan that both the u.s. And the soviets did was to have a manned spy station Uh, the soviets also armed theirs. They they tried putting an aircraft cannon on theirs. Mm-hmm Did it work? Uh, I I don't actually know if they ever fired it or not in space

Is the fact I believe they did I remember hearing about this and I believe One of they did some parting shots with it just out there And nothing in particular Yeah, we just when humanity is obliterated It's going to be because the soviet union accidentally shot an alien over like several several light years Some guy permanently manning the uh anti air gun just hoping to see an asteroid or something So I mean I don't mean to be too down on space stations, right because you can you can do a lot of like useful stuff

The idea is not like a bad one, especially if you're planning to like use them to like Uh as like a sort of a waystation to do longer spaceflight But the problem is that like They need a lot of stuff. They need a lot of logistics Not only do they need like an entire room full of people working 24 seven to make sure that they don't die Uh, but they also need like regular supplies of stuff food water And conversely, you know taking trash back home Taking people who want to get off mr. Earth's wild ride back home

If there's an emergency you need to like be able to evacuate people. So you need uh a spacecraft that can do a lot of like broadly pre-planned Uh very similar source of profiled space flights on a regular basis with like Uh very little deviations so that people don't you know stuff to death in space But as we have seen from sat and five spacecraft are expensive Uh, and you got to drive those costs down because governments don't like spending money

Uh, there's two sort of ways of solving this problem, right? There's the there's the soviet way which is you make a spacecraft That's very simple very reliable and very cheap Um, the you know, you sort of simplify and add weight, but you know without the adding weight part or You try and make a reusable spacecraft Uh next slide, please. I have two fun facts Uh before we go since you talked about uh, okay. This is skylab, right? The interior was designed by raiman lowey

Same guy who did a bunch of streamlined trains including the gg one. Huh Um, no, the sky lab's weird. This is weird 1970s moment in nasa history where they're like sort of semi went on strike for a bit um Like all wearing orange coveralls. It was very like I don't know. It was a lab strike. Yeah Yeah The worm I think that's when the worm started Hey, the sky the sky lab astronauts still deny that they were on strike which to my mind makes them cowards

It's true Is it cowardice or is it are they just not snitching? Well, none of them ever flew in space again because nasa is a very vindictive agency like all the federal government They defected to the cosmonauts God you just know that when they did the first apollo apollo soyuz docking there was serious plans on both sides for What if one of these guys wants to defect to us, right? Oh Yeah, so we've got the man side. There's also the unmanned side. It's my next slide. I have another another fun fact

Oh hit me with the fun fact. There is a bishop of the moon Is this one of those things you can pay a hundred dollars and like get yourself ordained bishop of the moon? No, no, it's a real bishop of the moon Hmm because the first man to mission to the moon Uh departed from the diocese of orlando Uh, the diocese of orlando has jurisdiction over the whole moon Excuse me That's uh, that's how it works. That's how that's a

Quite the quite the promotion Well, I mean there are very few people on the moon in the last in the last 10 years The moon has uh has settled with more than five million dollars worth of abuse lawsuits Yes, but there's there's very few people on the moon So they haven't found a reason to split the diocese yet There's a confessional up there covered in the gold foil from the lake descent macho Oh, that's another fun fact from the uh from the skylab is when uh, there was an issue And they just had to with a plate

Some exposure causing a thermal issue and they just unfurled some gold foil And you can see it in some of the photos of it Where they literally just unfurled some foil in space just to cover it up As if as one would a broken window to their car put a top on it. What a tarp on it. Yeah, exactly So as far as religion in space, I will also point out that uh the buzz aldrin Took communion on the moon But he was not a catholic. He was I think a presbyterian so that doesn't so like the first Celebrant of of like a religious sacrament on the moon was not a catholic

I was about to say that would be um That I think you would actually need to send a priest up to do uh To do it. I mean, that's that's protestant for you. It's like the brotherhood of all believers kind of things Just like, you know, just do it yourself Um, we're bringing we're bringing up a person to celebrate the mass up there just so we can bring some booze up, you know I mean, you have you have seen that like occasionally russian, uh, Like ross kosmos will have orthodox priests to bless spacecraft by like Anointing them with holy water from a brush, which is cool. Nice. It's wonderful

Yeah, the cosmonauts also used to be able to bring vodka up on mirror. They can't do it on the international space station It's a dry count. That's lame. It is a dry space station. Just keep it on the servietse army on the russian side Yeah, on the russian side Tape down the middle. Yeah Just put one of those little signs no drinks past this line You are now leaving the american sector All right All right, we're gonna talk about uh satellites and like

There are several uses for satellites. Most of them are boring like they can they can sometimes tell you what your position is on earth They can sometimes give you bad television, but more importantly, they allow you to spy on your nation's enemies um, uh, yes This is this actually corona or is this some other spy thing I'm not actually sure if it is Uh, like this is the thing. It's all similar. These are the these drop off the physical film canisters Yeah, uh, like the the thing that I wanted to highlight is that like spy satellites used film until

Surprisingly recently and the recovery of those is is really fun because as you say they would just like shoot them back off D orbit them and they were intended to be recovered in flight too You just have like a c-130 like hook the parachute and just like reel them back in So there wasn't any chance of there's some pictures of those but um, I guess we don't have it, but that's okay Uh, yeah, they would did just a big hook out of the back of an airplane. Just snag it right by its parachute lines Yeah, and could you could you re could you restock it with film? No You don't have a big spaceship from kodak That shows up

When you when you're out of rolls of film on on a keyhole satellite, you just had an expensive brick satellite Uh, which was also like too risky to d orbit in case it d orbited somewhere. You didn't want it to uh, so like For all we know they're still up there You got a big big uh big space station floating by that says fedex kinko's on the side I said we'd develop it in one hour or less And spice satellites are fun, uh, you know more more recently we have like ones that are able to like Upload imagery directly and like are able to like maneuver themselves significantly more efficiently

And if you believe some people online able to sort of like hide themselves from like direct visual contact from earth, which is fun um But like that that's like a large large part of what you what you want to put in space is especially during the cold war You want to put one of these like permanently on station? Like it's doing a rotation of of the earth such that it hits, you know You know the dockyard and and and letting grad every however many hours Um, so you can just like get sequences of images Uh next slide, please one of these whole canisters is just photos of one dockyard in leningrad

And it's like, you know, and nothing of note happened and that's one quarter of the way to breaking the satellite I genuinely think that would not be far from the truth Especially in like the dying days of the cold war is like a lot of like sort of intelligence estimates were more by inference of What the soviets weren't doing and what they were Uh, so yeah a hundred percent It it it came back to earth and then that was like right after right after uh, kodak stopped processing kodak rum Yeah The national reconnaissance office has to get really into like developing their own film when previously

They've just been sending it off. Well, I don't believe anyone's managed to Why the kodak rum process because it's so damn complicated um I think they stopped developing about a decade ago. There was like one camera shop that could still do it and then they closed God damn So we're going to talk about the space shuttle. Ah, yes, that's what we're here to talk about 41 minutes into the episode. Yes Yes

Because the space shuttle is something that you develop if you if you don't have another crack at having a space plane and also you want to like Uh, you know Go back and forth to a space station whose location, you know, or launch a bunch of satellites often for spying Or and this is the fun one if you want to kidnap a non cooperative satellite And return it. Yes. Yes. Oh, yeah, this is mine now Singing wailing songs as you just like Wristled back with a rogue satellite in tow. That's what they needed was a harpoon gun More than anything now, I want to hear a space shuttle themed version of the wellaman

What if you can record that yeah, that's right, that's right Justin, I think you wrote this slide I did write this slide and and what I did was I put down some notes about stuff Which I was going to research and then didn't oh, it's fine. I'll do it. So yeah, exactly So what is it space what is a space shuttle made of it's the same ideas that like as the dinosaur basically It's you you launch off of a rocket because that's straightforward But you have a plane bit that like separates and then that reenters the atmosphere Um, so we have an orbiter which is the big plane looking bit

That's this guy Yep, and then we have views with this. This also looks like a plane, but that's because it is a plane I'll do it. Thank you. I'll do it Then we have a gigantic fuel tank Like attached to the orbiter and either side of that to solid rocket boosters So the middle one is liquid fuel and the outer to a solid fuel So solid fuel solid rockets are fun because once they're going they're just going That they are not like you don't have like a variable thrust kind of thing as I understand it

Don't need it. That's some that's some fucking kami bullshit So fast one straight line These are a very efficient way of getting you out of like Sort of low altitude and up into high altitude and then the higher you get before you can like touch off a A liquid Rocket engine the more efficient it's going to be Yeah, they're cheap and they're cheap and part of the reusable, you know aspect Mm-hmm. Yeah, these good

This is foreshadowing the chief, you know what that buys you Yeah, I always thought like the thrust seems unbalanced with the orbiter just hanging off the side Yeah, that actually shoot if you kind of get an angle on it You can see they they uh, the three main engines are actually shooting off at an angle and the whole thing kind of goes at a walky angle Not straight up. It's gimbled Yes, and I love it And so there's a little bit of uh Wasted thrust, you know, you don't put all your thrust in the same direction

But you know, I guess they swallow that and they're okay with it and there's lots of other things Uh, you know compromises and it's designed. Yeah, you go on and on about And and we will and we will yeah I don't want to overload it frontload it, but you know, yeah I guess I guess start to finish I should say the idea is right you You build a bunch of these orbiters. You have a bunch of them on standby And then for each for each mission you build and supply that liquid fuel tank and the solid rocket boosters You assemble them all together

Uh in a sort of easy sort of insert tab a into slot b process that only takes like 10 minutes and five guys You move the whole assembly onto a launch pad. You launch it up like a rocket off of off of that sort of launch infrastructure Uh that you ideally recover the solid rocket boosters if you can Probably give up hope for the for the liquid fuel tank. The orbiter does whatever it needs to do in space comes back from space Uh, like re-enters earth's atmosphere doesn't skip off doesn't burn to pieces lands on a runway like a plane with tires Because we invented like tires that could do that or more important like shielding for those tires

Really big big tires big tires And then while while you're sort of uh, like then you go on and do the same thing with the next orbiter And while that's happening the orbiter you just got back goes to the back of the queue to be refurbished So you can just like do that progressively Uh and therefore you have like an extremely reliable schedulable repeatable, uh like series of space launches

Like a bus like a like a shuttle if you will That's why they call it the space shuttle Because it's a shuttle to space. They could have called it the space bus Space bus space bus. I like space bus more That's kind of it's kind of more fun. Yeah, I like space bus a little bit But it's really more of a space truck When you think about it, it is true space SUV in other ways Um, yeah, because it's it's like it's kind of a bus. It's kind of a cargo truck

Uh the stuff that you want this to do is to like launch satellites off of the back of the truck build A space station off of the back of the truck or like Put people in space for a bit and then take them back down again Much like an SUV seat seven is surprisingly delicate Prone to dangerous rollover All right, I think we have a slide here about the solid rocket boosters themselves The solid rocket which is mostly about how nasa is a railroad. Yes. This is true NASA is a class 3 railroad

Yes, and one of the reasons nasa is a class 3 railroad is because Morton thaiacall, which makes these solid rocket boosters or made them I should say Ship them by rail across the country And then nasa would get them delivered to a rail yard and then have to move them Across 13 miles of nasa track from the nasa rail yard to the vehicle assembly building Uh, which is a train carrying like Millions of tons of explosives as I understand this Yeah, sounds right. What's that sign say do not eat?

It says do not hump Oh I'm not sure why humping would be like a concern on like a closed track Well, uh, there's always a risk that one of these cars somehow gets misrouted onto the main rail network Oh, no. Oh, no. Now we've got a srb going up the east coast Yeah, even srb. That's like, I don't know been routed to selkirk somehow And someone someone wants to classify it over the hump

And then it's just rolling free down the hill Slams into I don't know a car full of molten sulfur or something and then you have a situation Holding a mile through but yes Uh nasa nasa has three locomotives and when they had to haul solid rocket boosters They had to do it across a drawbridge Like shitty rickety looking drawbridge over a swamp because this is florida And in order to like make that work, they had to double the length of the trains And so like going at like two miles an hour you'd have one of these cars with solid rocket booster parts in it

And then like an empty spacer car to spread the weight out across this bridge. So you didn't just collapse it That's surprisingly common though Really? Yeah, spacer cars are like, you know You know high demand on industrial sidings because they're all shit And then of course nasa interchanges with the florida east coast railroad, which i'm sure was great because the florida east coast has historically and currently run by

insane people Just the craziest craziest people in railroading You know, they're the only people who were crazy enough to say we're going to start passenger service up again in 2015 And they're going to compensate by running all their freight trains at 80 miles an hour regardless of the cargo The result of which has just been Okay, very very good on time performance

Also, lots of people being murdered at grade crossings They should look out for the trains. They should probably should look out for the trains. Yeah They're not allowed to say that though. I'm being censored cancel culture. No, this is true Next slide, please. I wanted to ask a question. Shoot. This is a large refrigeration unit on the back of this srb car Why would you need that? a solid rocket fuels are incredibly dangerous chemicals Which do not like they react vigorously with

Everything that's why they're good fuels. So probably my guess is you want to keep them very cold I guess it'll do it. Yeah until you don't and then you can just do whatever with them because I'm just gonna like react vigorously Uh, I do like the the placard here high explosives 1.3 c That's pretty good mildly. Yeah, just a little bit little spicy load Uh So we've we've got the solid rocket boosters out of the way for now Uh, we have to talk about the world's largest glider Uh, the orbiter the like the plane bet

Uh, this is the plane. So did about the srbs real quick. Um, they were Part of the reason they were there. I've I've researched is a nod and a hand I don't want to say hand out but a hand in to the ballistic missile folks Who uh rocket guy is getting sad if they don't have their rockets. They gotta play. Yeah, you gotta you gotta let everybody play That's a part of part of the whole nasa ethos really Incredible so

The orbiter is it's a big glider. It's got two a two whole floors of of Crew stuff up front and then a big payload bay in the back Uh with a big empty space for the thing you want to put into space or take home from space Like if you want to kidnap a satellite um And if you do if you do want to kidnap a satellite what you do is you roll up on it and then you use uh the canada My favorite Canada

I love the canada arm so much canada built the arm for for the space shuttle and they called it the canada arm And it had a big canada on it. So you knew that it was canadian Uh, and that that was like a remote manipulator and also like a thing to tether astronauts to Um, yeah, you just I guess like grab the thing with the canada. I'm stuff it in the back and go home Oh, you want this satellite, eh? Oh, yeah, I'll help you with that. Oh, there it is In in atmosphere the orbiter apparently flies like a brick. Uh, it's like it's a pig It's unpleasant to fly but then it's you know, it's supposed to be it's it's coming in at like

some obscene velocity and altitude and trajectory and then you have to like land it on a runway um You may also notice that it's covered in bathroom tiles Uh, you can see here in in white and black These are extremely heat resistant ceramic tiles to make sure that it doesn't like like just burn on reentry um And the black ones are like for more uh more heat prone areas than the white ones

And if you wanted to annoy a shuttle engineer back in the day, I think the question you would ask would be If you have to retile large parts of your spacecraft after every flight, is it still reusable? Because that was a serious concern because you would just lose tiles on reentry or you know on launch every time And every time you would have to inspect every single one of these millions and millions of tiles And replace the ones that were missing or damaged I just I just liked that our our um You know our premier spacecraft is uh built out of masonry That's it's a brick structure. We got Philly city hall floating up there. Yeah lies like a brick

Is a brick is a brick several bricks Uh Now uh some things that are interesting are the uh the bay doors The interior of the bay doors are big radiators that Once you got into space you had to open them And if they did not open then you had to come home immediately um Without the radiators uh all the life parts, you know the part conducive to life would overheat

Um in in addition to lots of other subsystems and so there's all kinds of fun What ifs, you know, what if it didn't open you got to come home? What if only one opens and then and then really fun? What if it doesn't close before you come home? And they included uh some some I guess you would call them contingencies Where someone would have to manually Go close them and both them shut themselves and then sit in and then sit in the cargo lab In the cargo bay during re-entry. Oh my god. No, thank you

That never happened How are you doing back there not great, Bob? Yeah, just being the jump seat great, you can't can you imagine riding outside on the space shuttle Speaking of jump seats, I mean they did have like a procedure for like a sort of like a mid launch abort for like the 20 seconds when they could still like Parachute out of this was seriously like mooted, I believe Uh And then like due to like flight characteristics that was kind of like abandoned because

Well, so when it goes up and then it actually does this kind of dramatic roll So that the shuttle is actually on the underside So I guess in theory you could shoot them straight down At the earth and then but you know that that's that's just all a conjecture on me waving my hands in the air Yeah, I'm still I'm imagining, you know some some guy trying to shove these doors closed like a dented hood Just holding it shut like spider-man or something as they're screaming into the atmosphere God so they they built six of these with a branch like They built five and a half of these and

Another way to annoy a shuttle engineer would be to to say, okay Well, this is something you intended to produce In series reusable and replaceable. Why is each one of these different? Um, because none of them like they are of a series But on the inside like they they incorporated new developments and new improvements on each one Like That's like any short run large industrial machine. You don't really figure out how to build it until you build the last one And then sometimes I yeah, not even then like a a small technology called interchangeable parts

Which does not occur in a lot of places here Uh, so something like just, you know, obvious to say, but it's also incredibly complicated There's a lot of stuff that needs to be happening all the time to make people not die when they're in this Uh, you know Several several miles of computers all of which are going into like, you know something It's not quite as bad as the apollo program where you're like, yeah You can either have an entire apollo life support system or part of a mario game from 20 years ago But it's like it's getting up there, you know, sure. Oh, yeah, there was a lot of advancement during its lifetime and uh

Yeah They started out with the, you know, crt monitors with green text and ended on flat screens in windows Well, we can also talk about the big liquid fuel tank Uh, which is big. It's very large On the ipsy daisies Yeah Uh, you see that that texture what what the liquid fuel tanks got on it

That's spray on insulation. Yeah, that is uh, it's an eclair. It's uh, there's a large eclair Tasty It's covered in foam on the outside gigantic foam dildo Yeah, it's very unsafe because it doesn't have a flared base Honey, look what came from adam and eve and it just crushes your house

Oh, this one didn't burn up on reentry. Oops We're gonna have fun with this tonight Yeah, this is also like one of the one of the largest and most complicated parts of the shuttle And it's also the like definitively non replaceable parts Which is fucking great. That's very funny to me They start in space for quite a while before they come back Yeah, and then they just like, you know land in rural Australia and people like poke at stuff that's covered in hydrazine or whatever Nice

Yeah, yeah, uh, but you have to build a new one of these every time um Which is again another kind of a limiting factor on your very usable spacecraft Next slide, please The the one we showed earlier was white They figured out at some point that you didn't have to paint them. They'd be fine if you didn't paint them It's right over the first flight. Yeah, yeah, you know arguably I don't know what the structural characteristics of paint are but if paint could possibly possibly keep the foam on the the

Tube, you know, maybe the paint would have been worth it. Yeah, but then you'd lose that cool like iconic Uh, orange. Yeah The paint was uh, I believe 600 kilograms of weight This is my f1 space shuttle you gotta you gotta think about these spacecraft like, uh, you remember need for speed underground too Yeah, all the way You gotta you gotta take the speakers out, man. You gotta take the air coming out. Yeah, exactly You gotta have the uh, you know, the same philosophy, right? so

This slide this slide I I tentatively have is like problems with the shuttle versus single use Disposable rockets and we have On on screen A couple of like sort of speculative ideas for what we could have been doing With rockets like the the u.s. Postal service shipped mail by rocket once Uh, and fully expected to ship it by mail ship mail by rocket more than once I like this early osprey here

Yeah, yeah Somehow it's the safe one So who's flying helicopters next to rockets which are taking off this is a good idea This is this is like a one vision of the future where we like drive the cost down And we try and make rockets as disposable as possible instead of you know The opposite of that where we try to salvage as much as we can from them all the time We have a large rocket catcher

Yeah, we have a lot of tracks rocket condom My question is the rocket's coming in from space not be just coming down from a few miles down the Yeah, I like that it's right next to a farmhouse Imagine the noise that that makes No, it's it's safe enough. We can do it So like I suppose my sort of general philosophical points on this slide was that like We should talk about boringness and we should talk about good boring and bad boring, right because

The space shuttle kind of coincided with and was symptomatic of NASA's sort of like Like sort of narrowing of horizons, right? Like going to Mars stopped being a priority and instead Priority started to be things like satellites and space stations um, which is like it's it's fine, but like It also meant that it kind of like space launches became kind of quotidian to a lot of people like people sort of

became bored of space if that's fair to say um Like was was earlier. Yeah I feel like there's there's a sort of a material difference to Something that's boring because it works well and it's like Unexciting in in that sense like it's like yeah, you tell terry and exactly

Uh as opposed to something that's boring because it represents something that's like less imaginative Like I feel like if you're able to suck the joy out of Again, much with billionaires if you're able to like sort of suck the joy and awe and wonder out of going to space Then that's a serious problem, right? um But like prestige natural space program. Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly and like even just on its own terms if I've been kind of leading up to this but like

I feel like you can make an argument that the space shuttle is not the successful reusable spacecraft, right? It's supposed to be Quicker and cheaper to build and refit than it is to just build a new rocket But it isn't because you have to go over every single tile and every single bolt and you have to build The the liquid fuel tank from scratch every time um, and you you also had to uh, unhook the engines from the back and refurbish them and they would just switch them out and You know, you you would see you it would not always be the same three on each uh, each orbiter and also

Conversely while while the us was doing this the soviet union was sort of in its own way doing the rocket mail thing uh, because they built the More and more versions of the soya's Which is I I have jokingly described it here as a spacecraft designed by men who didn't own shoes. It's like It's it's it's very cheap It's very very simple relatively speaking for a complicated machine. It's very reliable Um, and it kills way fewer of its passengers in general

um Like and it can abort it can abort if you if you want a bus It turns out that the bus is sort of shaped a bit like an onion and it goes from kazakhstan Uh, yeah, it's uh, you know based off of uh onion domes Orthodox churches, which means they're protected by god Or conversely it's protected by communism because as we know first word of the soviet national anthem So Yes, thank you

thank you Love to be deaf until my editor disasters podcast. Excellent. Next slide please So Justin I put this image in for you specifically Uh, very very uh, very reliable and boring much like the f 40 ph s So, yeah, what what what the shuttle is supposed to do in space Versus what the shuttle actually does in space, uh, and what the shuttle is supposed to do in space is Kidnapper satellite, right?

What it what it actually ends up doing in space is uh Launching a bunch of satellites in this very american very fun technicality sort of way Where you have a civilian space agency with civilian administrators and civilian oversight and civilian astronauts Uh, all of whom are military officers Who are putting a classified payload for the national reconnaissance office in low earth orbit for military purposes from their civilian spacecraft But it's not a military operation and also it's classified

Um, I I have a shout out there to sts 38. It's the most interesting one Oh, they dropped they dropped off two things and one of them was a diversion Uh, and we actually don't know what the other one was Um, uh, they're probably returning some alien technology You know, they were like, oh Don't need batteries It was it was code named prowler and what they did was they like They did some really interesting sort of orbital maneuvering to try and disguise

Exactly where it was going to be and when they were launching it, which is very interesting. So yeah, it probably was an electric soundtrack train Yeah, exactly. It was uh, it was um, they were returning, uh, the the completely alien Technology of a train that takes, uh electricity from wires I can't have that in America. We're giving that back to um Um, I don't know. Yeah, the goreplar lorps of zeno marf five I have included another like inaccurate but too sarcastic to pass up thing, which is uh, one thing that the space shuttle did Um, build the international space station and then retire in time to stop americans from using it

Nice And just generally sort of being being a cargo truck like it makes it's a bus It's a cargo truck. It puts stuff in space. It Doesn't really take stuff out of space because that turns out to be more difficult than people gave it credit for Uh, but it launches a lot of satellites some of which we can talk about it builds a lot of space station Um, it and it takes a lot of people to space, uh, who aren't just sort of in that sort of right stuff mold anymore because There becomes this sort of both elements of national competition in terms of like

Opening up access to spaceflight, but also like a sense of like Maybe we should make this something more accessible like now that we have this method of space travel that is Reliable and and safe and boring You know, it's it's boring enough and safe enough that a teacher could do it next slide, please I like that the fuel pipe here is just diagonal And goes straight into the engines back here. This is very Kerbal space program more struts More rigidity, that's right

um so We got to talk about uh, your your childhood trauma if you were too old for 9 11 to be your childhood trauma Uh, my dad went to high school with uh, christina mackael fey Mm-hmm. Uh, my husband remembers seeing this on live tv in his classroom as a kid. Uh It's this is traumatized the whole generation because The teacher Yeah, but I was about to say they would have broadcast that in classrooms everywhere

There's actually been studies about How it affected east coast versus west coast children? Because if you were on the east coast you saw it on live tv And if you were on the west coast you weren't at school yet Yeah, I am that this was going to be the the flagship of the teacher in space program Uh, christin mackauliffe was going to do like science lessons from space She was going to inspire a generation to spaceflight and nasa fucking killed her Largely because I mean this is an episode on itself, right? Um, but to rush through it

Uh, the short version is that nasa developed an organizational culture due to both budget pressure and Also just engineers being engineers that demanded more launches more quickly than they could deliver safely Uh, nasa managers pressured engineers to launch and weather conditions that were too cold They were told it was dangerous people told them it was dangerous constantly. They knew it was dangerous They did it anyway and they killed a bunch of people including a teacher and then after they did that they tried to cover it up um because Just embarrassing

I mean there was there was an inquiry and you know Again, this is sort of like an hour and a half to talk about but my short version here is that like uh, one of sort of American spaceflight unsung heroes an air force an air force general called don kutina and richard feinman who I i've put here richard feinman was a piece of shit to women but ensuring the truth about what happened to uh, the space shuttle challenger god out Uh, is like a big mark in his in his credit for me

Uh, it was like and it's it's still like an engineering and a management study today of like How this was sort of something that was like forced to happen through a kind of uh, extreme culture of arrogance uh, which like Had had terrible results and also traumatized the generation of school children And this is just from like an o-ring, right? Yes, uh, so Yeah, long story short. They want they wanted to launch and uh,

Sub-freezing temperatures And the o-ring design in the srbs were just not up to par for that And so when uh, these things they flex and bend quite a bit Um started flexing and bending on launch. Uh, it It started leaking past the o-ring as in hot gases from the boomstick from one of the srbs And uh, it almost uh worked um, but uh, it started to flex some more later on and uh, that is when it

Uh burned a hole into the uh main tank and then that that's when you see the rapid disassembly right here Mm-hmm. And if you really want to depress yourself as if this wasn't enough Uh, I will point out that the the crew compartment of challenger survived that explosion and like descended to Ocean where uh, it was destroyed Uh, during which time at least some of the crew were conscious at least some of the time So, yeah, I just it's a it's a great way to be extremely angry at nasa and a nasa managers

uh, and in terms of like actual Consequences for this it's very very vague right like It's sort of a lessons learned thing now, but if you're talking about like, uh, you know Did anyone actually like Lose their careers over this besides the people who were killed it's much fuzzier than it should be um But this this this having happened, uh sort of

After a lot of a lot of inquiries and a lot of refits the space shuttle fleet went back into service doing all of the same sort of everyday stuff that we've we've previously identified until Just just another day going to space Just another day riding the space bus. Just my job five days a week Uh, and then the second

Extremely rapid extremely unplanned disassembly and loss of crew and vehicle the columbia orbiter And this this was Funnily enough also In many ways attributable to nasa managers Insisting on launches when they had been warned against launches because the bureaucratic costs of delay were too were too high um And so a piece of the foam that we uh, like That we identified on the giant foam dildo the liquids the liquid fuel tank

Uh separated at launch. I I think because it was too cold. I'm not sure about that It's it Then it's a problem that they had known about it happens from time to time Um, the inside the tank is hydrogen and oxygen which are kept very cold So that it requires the foam so being cold outside I don't know the the main tank should be okay with that because it's very cold inside Um, but just the dynamics of launch will cause these things to come off and they they have video Uh, where of the what the actual trunk that they suspect you can see it

Uh break off hit the wing and then shatter Yeah, yeah And and so it's something that that has happened before and they just kind of They gave it. Uh, I guess a watchful waiting response where they they're aware of it. Um I'm sure analysis was run and just nothing, you know, just inertia had kept anything from really being done about it And also like the the sort of the remedy here of You stay in orbit and you go out and you check every single one of these ceramic tiles individually uh is

so so inconvenient and so Disproportionate to the risk or the perceived risk Uh, that yeah, they just they they went ahead As far as I know the crew never even like knew this was a concern because there's no reason for them to I think there was something where they reviewed the footage shortly after launch and like, oh, yeah, that thing fell off Well, um, you know, I would think it hit something but we don't know where so we're not going to do anything about it Yeah, and it turns out that where was uh, one of the leading one of the leading wing edges

where it took out a clump of Uh of ceramic tiles and these are these are small tiles anyway So it's like a tiny tiny hole. Um But when you're dealing with sort of atmospheric reentry forces, it just uh gets in there and it More or less just tears the tears the vehicle from the inside with its feet Yeah, and I mean this one this one you can kind of take some comfort and like nobody knows anything about it because it's more or less too fast to process um

and it's like essentially instant which is If if if I'm picking my way to be killed by nasa, uh, then I'm then I'm taking that one um Rather not be killed by nasa in the first place partial ideally ideally Um, and I I feel like this this is sort of like these two slides have sort of elided a bit of You know, we did we did 20 years of unremarkable space flight in the sort of in the interim, right? um

It's not to say that this was like uh Sort of a universally successful program obviously But in terms of doing the stuff that it was meant to be doing Uh, like it worked Significantly more often than it didn't Uh, it's just that what it was meant to be doing was well

It's sort of relatively narrow brief compared to You know go to moon or whatever. Yeah, and it's kind of like, uh, well, you know, we had uh, we had what? 130 140 space shuttle missions and then uh, yeah Yeah, only two of them killed the whole crew Yeah, I mean this is this is the one thing where I kind of like sympathize with the sort of the right stuff guys And I'm I'm gonna get into that a bit in like the next slide more or less, but like Gus grissom right before he was killed Uh was kind of like they asked him about the the risk and he was pretty blasé about this and and one of the things

He said was that you know, it's a dangerous business spaceflight is is is a risky activity Uh, and like at some point it may be made as safe as stuff that we do every day But it certainly isn't now and probably not in like the foreseeable future Is astronaut a more dangerous job than police officer? That's actually a great question I'm The thing is right like Being being an astronaut if you go to space because it's so

Inhospitable because it's so like hostile to human life. There are a bunch of like health complications you get anyway Like even if everything goes well um, but the fatality of astronaut rates is 3.2 percent uh, which is like That's pretty bad. That's a lot bad in in the face of other things that You would talk about and deliver kinds of percentages for like, I don't know like like battle casualties Yeah, the the the fatality rate for police officers is uh

0.018 percent, so yes, it's much more dangerous than police officer. Yes. Yes. Yes Uh Thin orange line Oh god, we're putting a subdued flag on the orbiter It's uh, it's the thin worm line for the naso worm logo You know The good one

So I it's been on the screen long long enough that we have to talk about. Um, what I believe is matt lauer Um, discussing how we are Going warp 18 with the shot. Yes Shadows traveling nearly 18 times the speed of light Yeah, I mean Oh, I'm not sure. I don't know. That's like dad glasses. Everybody. Everybody. Yeah. All right. Yeah, I kind of cool My dad still wears those glasses They're good glasses

My dad also wears those glasses Actually, yeah, I kind of like the aviator Yeah, I like it. I like it Yeah, it really does. Um You should see like tactical guys wearing them too There's like photos of like Delta force in the in like the iraq war and like the first one And it's like a bunch of guys and like button downs and those aviator glasses carrying m4s. It's great

Like aviator glasses I think are still for nerds aviator sunglasses became cool again recently But these weren't the sunglasses. They were just the regular glasses glasses. That's like dad glasses And now are they transitions? That would that would be the Oh, that's yeah transition lenses are mostly, uh Worn by just insane people

I see quite a bit of that work When you want to look at the shot wearing like slightly slightly underpriced sunglasses indoors all the time Like maybe you belong in the columbine massacre I just happened to be at the columbine massacre. I wasn't involved That's good rose. You were six Columbine isn't columbine down the road from a giant missile plant incidentally Yeah, I think so So anyway, um

The space shuttle, uh, you know, it is served faithfully only killed two of its crews And then, uh, i'm gonna fucking cry despite how much I hate the space bus because we cancelled it I know what i'm saying. Yeah, what we can't it's been cancelled A victim of cancel culture victim of cancel culture. Yes victim of me too yeah I feel like the the thing that I've put here right is that if

If commissioning the shuttle in the first place was a step down the about the only thing worse I think you could have done is just like cancel it and not replace it um And that's that's what happened It's like really uh, really well, I mean this this is just a fun puck polka dot obama but uh Before shuttle died they um were spinning up the constellation program Which uh would have been the fault that would have been the successor and then the kind of bastardized

brainchild of the constellation program has now become the sls um, which is which could be its own uh episode but uh The uh the constellation program wanted to put a capsule on top of a single srb booster and um put people just put people on top of that firework and send people to space that way Um as a kind of stop gap like uh, oh, we know the space shuttle can't go on forever Here's here's just like a a a capsule on a stick. Um, but that plug got pulled by uh, obama and so That's not much long after that became became the uh

Or I guess things started going towards a private long private lifters not long after that obama Thanks, obama I guess this is also like the thing is like NASA's greatest asset in uh, its entire career was the union of soviet socialist republics Uh, because yes at any time you needed to justify either civilian military or the sort of gray area in between expenditure All you had to do is go to Ronald Reagan say a guy who hates funding absolutely anything Uh and and say yeah, but the russians

um And once you sort of lose that military utility once once the sort of once the red fleet is sold off to pepsi or whatever then uh, you know, it's it's all bank Yeah, I I feel like there are like two narratives that we can present here the smart one for brain geniuses like us and Like the fucking idiot one, right and the fucking idiot one

Is we used to have the right stuff guys We used to have guys in aviator sunglasses with buzzcuts and they used to like do the business, right? But then america became soy and cucked and owned And we like we stopped wanting to do cool based stuff like go to the moon and go to mars Uh, because we wanted to like do science and whatever and just kind of like float around and like the Like the shallow end of the pool, right? We should go back to being have space shuttles because we spent all our money on genders Yeah, and we should go back to being like cool masculine test pilots again That's the fucking idiot narrative the other narrative that I want to present to you

Is that nasa is this sort of like this Enduring tragic story of a federal agency that's nominally intended to do this purely speculative Outruistic public good for all mankind, right? right Right and and then and then it turns out like it was actually it was all ideology and Like from start to finish whether it's like hiring in guys straight out of the vaff and ss All the way through to like just giving it to jeff bezos because we don't have like a

Lenin grad shipyard we need to take photos of anymore. It's it's all been entirely at the mercy of Just this this sort of like terrible political impulse um I I've put this I put this in later slides, but i'm gonna i'm gonna shift it forward a little bit but Like my sort of my general point here is that humanity's journey into space continues to be an experiment and how much How much altruism we can get the worst and most cynical people on the planet to subsidize by accident um

and in order to do that we've had to like You know swallow various amounts of Of bullshit like whether that's putting spy satellites in space or whatever the fuck else, but like Lately it seems that Don't even like have that usefulness because you can just get a guy from you know Who got rich off of making guys pee in bottles to do it instead? Now I mean now that i've depressed this again Yeah, thank you. Thanks. I gotta I gotta talk about the greatest tragedy in human history. Um next slide please

um A disaster for the human race that collapsed at the soviet union Uh because Okay, so this the soviet union made this this is buran. Uh, this is the orbiter part and it's it's attached to an antonov cargo plane um This gets kind of like derided as a shuttle copy a lot and it is um like in terms of like design concept But at the same time, it's not like the soviet union didn't possess rocket scientists

Right, like they had spaceflight experts. There are there is quite a lot that's innovative about about buran and about that whole program Uh, not least the rocket it was attached to the energy, which is still a going concern, but um it like This made an uncrewed test flight. They they piloted one of these remotely orbited the earth and then landed it successfully That's right, and then and then I think the osa star collapsed not long after that Yeah, yeah, it's really fucking it I was so happy we got them in an underwire Yeah, yeah, exactly and I they built I think it might have been like either two or three orbitors, right? and then

After the collapse of the soviet union one of them was crushed when a neglected concrete hangar collapsed on top of it and by kanoa cosmodrome Um, and the other one is still there. It was getting graffitied recently um And what it was graffitied with was uh, it was a russian A russian guy graffitied on it that we shouldn't go to space until we had like Unfucked ourselves at home a bit more which is you know recently Trenching criticism I think um, that's uh, it's just russian for whitey on the moon More or less. Yeah

Now I was going to throw something in there about whitey on the moon and then I forgot to do that Yes, so the the brand had uh some changes from the Shuttle, uh, I think the biggest one is there are no main engines on the back All of the thrust was delivered by the energiea rocket And so this actually improved its cargo carrying capacity because they did not Carry those main engines from the ground all the way into orbit and then just you know Just to show the cool photos of them in orbit

So it it had and this one doesn't show it. So I'm not sure There there were models that had air breathing Jet engines on the back just in pods And uh, I'm not sure if it could or if the design at one point Yeah, two, uh, one of them had four and they couldn't quite get it working right Um, but it might have been able to actually take off from a runway which to me might be the minimum Uh definition of an airplane Hmm now

I don't know it's something that we only really saw and it's like it's infancy and I think like that's right If if if this had had the lead in that the shuttle program had had because if you look at like early shuttle prototypes Some of them are fucking wild stuff. Oh, yes Uh, then you know, who knows apple trees on mars, but it's impossible for us to know because uh boris yeltsin Yes, another one, uh For between boris yeltsin and ronald reagan. They really uh fucked up the soviet union. Oh boy um, that was uh, definitely definitely um As much as okay ronald reagan wants to spend money on the space program. He's only doing it to bankrupt the soviet union

Um worked. I'm one Uh, well, so at least um, yeah, I guess, uh, I don't know how much we want to get into Uh, the space station. Well, I guess earlier we were talking about and this is just a little bit of a side Probably the one thing that the shuttle Did that that probably could not be done and the probably the biggest, you know Feather in its cap was delivering and then servicing Hubble Um, so going that was the one time it actually went back and grabbed something that it had put into space It didn't bring it back down, but it replaced its wheels its mirror or you know

light collection stuff and so that was The you know, I would argue that was the coolest thing that the shuttle did And it's it's it's so funny Go ahead It's it's it's so funny and it like ties into my point about like the this sort of like useful labor We can extract from people who are determined to like turn it to sort of the line ends that like the reason why the Hubble worked the reason why it's like Uh, like technology that's available is that it's just a spy satellite pointing in the opposite direction

It's it's the exact same thing. It's just 180 degrees They have nasa is actually sitting on more of them And wants to launch more spy satellites pointed in the other direction Didn't the dod just hand over a couple of spy satellites that were like declassified to nasa Uh, just I point these the other way go look at some planets or some bullshit. We don't give a fuck Yeah, so, you know, it makes you question, you know, what what did they actually launch versus what did they just hand off? You know versus, you know as we we're handing over spy satellites to nasa

Like we hand off our tanks to the cops, I guess Yeah, what what sort of like and at least like unlike a a tank like there's a productive use You can put a spy satellite too. So it's just like productive uses for tanks like trafficking force Yeah, how much we're wasting on nothing of use to anyone Um, you could uh, you could create the most um most dangerous job out there space cop exactly It's not oblique. I don't want to leave us on a downer, right?

There's this is a bold new age in in human spaceflight and human space travel and space exploration Um next slide, please Oh boy. Oh boy. Oh boy No, I'm not I'm not I'm not I'm gonna control myself. I'm not gonna yell for an hour and a half about this slide. Um The thing is right yeah I I think I've already sort of expressed quite a cynical view of of space and of like

Human spaceflight, right? I don't think that like you can realistically say Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Richard Branson are like Unworthy of space when half the guys who put the first uh, the first, you know Vehicles in space or had a bunch of like ss blood group tattoos and shit But it's not a positive development that it's just sort of this toy for billionaires now um Both because like we should hate and spite billionaires and all things that they do and we shouldn't allow them to be happy But also because like this is this is supposed to be something that should be done on like a national or ideally

international level uh It it's something that like, you know, if you want me to get sentimental about it There's something that like should speak to our our broader impulses towards, you know, uh the advancement of human knowledge and like a sort of a shared Respect and dignity for you know, our our planet galaxy universe, whatever Which is somewhat undercut in my opinion When a guy gets to like make a giant dick rocket as a way of getting over his divorce. Yes

Yeah, yes Yeah, what's interesting is just how much is built privately upon That was you know, as these things tend to go no surprise that a lot of these private, you know getting across the goal line required a lot of public doing the rest of the work and so Things like the the only one that I really care about is the falcon nine that actually goes to orbit all these other guys are pretenders

But that one actually has delivered people to the isis and it really does land its first stage and so You know, there are things to be said that yes, it really is doing these things and we could have More of the argument that I would like to have is was that the only way it could have been done versus A lot of people say, uh, you know, well, he's getting it done. NASA didn't get it done, but it's you know There are other ways besides the way The way musk does it the way nasa does it and then there's that's just uh, a false You know false choice. There's there's other ways to do it

Yeah, and I mean listen, it's not it's not all bad Because as you'll see on the next slide my final slide I have a question. Yeah, please. Which is why does space x seem to be so far ahead of everyone else? you know, because theoretically this blue origin crap has a lot of funding on account of Jeff Bezos and stuff like that, but they just seem not be able to do anything whereas space x is like Oh, yeah, we're in the land of racking on a barge. No problem. Yeah, fuck you There's actually what it said of the mission notes too Yeah, I wish I had a I wish I had a straight answer for that

I I've worked for another company. So I could not tell you, you know I feel like if we're giving Elon Musk credit for anything, which I'm really loath to do It is that he knows when to buy a successful company and then like It demand credit for everything that it does He mostly stays out of space x management, which probably helps them a lot. Absolutely I think you could hand a lot of the success to the wind shot. Well Yeah, well I guess I guess my sort of my

My closing slide here is that it's not all bad because there does remain hope for state-based state-based space flights Conducted by friendly accountable liberal governments Oh, man, I've seen this. I've seen this picture. We we've looked at this picture at work and made speculations on what's going on here

I have there's some interesting things to note just by looking at it. The one thing is this engine bell That is not centered in the back. Why is there only one engine and why is it not centered? We're thinking that's that's for test bed reasons. It's not an operational engine that's expected to really command the thing Some capabilities of this thing is a kind of rumor to do is change its orbital plane With an atmosphere maneuver Meaning it will dip into the atmosphere Turn its wings and then change its mode of flight and or change its direction and then go back into space

And we made the dinosaur thing of like Like the dream that the u.s. Air force had way back in the the 60s of like very rapid course changes Oh, well it turns out all you have to do to avoid murdering people with huge g forces is not have people aboard Yeah, yeah, absolutely. This is this is the x 37 b which is uh presently, you know Up and down doing Stuff see secrets girl stuff if I told you I'd have to kill you kind of thing um people take pictures of it and um, it's it's pretty interesting that You can find online people will point their telescopes at it snap photos of it

And then kind of compare it to a cat image and then screw up the lighting on the cat image to kind of prove that Yes, I'm looking right at the x 37 b in orbit Yeah, so there's there's always this whatever we're using it for and uh, we did get Where are the people wearing hazmat suits? Hydrazine, yeah, I guess I'll do it Uh, also like we did get um the Hubble the Hubble uh the iss velcro and tang out of the out of the shuttle program um What else what else did we get out of the shuttle program?

What else is a good note like a happy note I can I can end on we got the canadarm Yes, um, if you want like I guess you can already a large part of the iss is was delivered by the shuttle Although I could argue that the construction I of the iss did not necessarily necessitate the shuttle um the the russian half of it was Not built with a shuttle. They were uh, just Modules placed on a rocket put directly into orbit and and docked with its own

Uh control systems to the rest of the structure um, and so there there's a uh, there's a kind of a Cost there where each module would have its own Uh control system that then becomes inactive once it is on the station Uh versus delivering a more of a dummy module that all it can do is be attached to the station But I still don't know if that necessitated the expense of the actual, you know, monster truck shuttle Delivery via monster truck Shustlesaurus

And if you if you want so you can go and see an orbiter in a museum now Which is you know, you can you can have a look at it and you can have a think about, uh, You know how the history happens and oh, yeah You can go you can go to the udvar hazy center by delas airport and you can see the space shuttle and the concord Uh, both relics of an earlier time And you know the game Man if that isn't yeah, well So, uh, um

I guess so every it's it's interesting. There's When billionaires get involved if it can become a lot more Paired down and direct When the government does it, um with the way what happened with the shuttle and its Ruition and development Was that it used to be part of a much larger more ambitious project that was then pared down because

Richard Nixon said I just do this part right here And so the shuttle off the get-go was uh, originally supposed to be part of a larger Infrastructure and so now it becomes a shuttle with no mission And I think we kind of talked about that a little bit, uh, where you know, we kind of Put we put the cart in front of the horse and so far as we built the shuttle and then said, okay Now go make a space station and go do the Hubble, um, you know, which uh You could have done some of those things without the actual shuttle

um, but it it started out as kind of a and then from there, there's lots of Uh different changes to uh a mean to the air force who NASA decided to play nice with For pr reasons and just to get enough buy-in to make this thing happen They brought the air force on board as kind of a you know poison chalice And so that created some more compromises where they did some more design changes to

be able to do the capture the steel satellite bit and I think in some of those in some of these design changes and compromises created some of the uh inherent safety issues With the shuttle such as the way it's positioned right low and on the side of a massive fuel tank As opposed to on top or anywhere near the top But to put it move it up The tank would mean you would have to remove the main engines Which means they would have to go to the bottom of the fuel tank

Which means they would no longer be reusable and so it's all these uh compromises you've had to make Um that eventually put the shuttle with these solid rocket boosters low on the tank on the side and that Just the geometry of that design was probably a lot of most of the problems If the shuttle were higher on the fuel tank things would not crash into it It could possibly abort away From an srb, of course the srbs would not leak onto the shuttle um So, uh, it's it's just interesting, you know, I could we could go on I don't have any, you know, grand point to make other than

When a billionaire does it they seem to sign a contract and do the thing At least in in the falcon nine case Um when the shuttle seems like a kind of now what do we do? Yeah, like a design by committee. Yeah. Yeah, and so it it a kind of uh And or a metaphor I was going to use is the giant spider from wild bog west That seemed really cool, but knowing the technology at the time You have to know that that spider is not actually working You know, it's working on screen for the 10 minutes. It was on screen. It breaks down the boilers have to be replaced

Um, so I kind of feel the shuttle is similar, you know, maybe you could use say a wizard of awe situation Hmm It's like this the main issue of this the steam spider is probably that it it has enough steam for You know 10 minutes of running and then you need to stop it and then you got to build up ahead of steam It's like old Yeah, well, I guess I guess my My only thing left to say is that like You have to find some way of resolving this tension between like civilian and military impulses if we're ever going to get anything done

Space elevator No, because then somebody's going to be like, what if we put marines on it? Why don't what if we didn't Just give just like three of us do it. We'll do it fine. More of us do it like uh anarchist space elevator. Yeah No, you can go up. You can go down But not in a hierarchical sense Well, that's the story of how our favorite class three railroads Uh made a bus and then cancelled that bus. Yes

It's very sad and uh, I hope you're all upset now Well, that's probably what they needed to do on the space shuttle is they should have put some railroad tracks in the back So you could put a put a 50 foot boxcar back in there and start delivering to uh, You know various uh space uh industrial customers Just go ahead and kind of like the idea of putting an oil tanker in it space shuttle as high as uh high rail vehicle Try to coax that fucking thing in for a landing on the rails. It's more of a car float, but for space. Yeah You could deliver oil from the tar sands with it

Mmm, you could you you could deliver a whole bunch of plywood And then you could build the iss real fucking quick Yeah, that's true Go set a framer up though. Get a bunch of carpenters up there. Yeah Well, so it's the other thing that's interest. Well, I don't know if the interesting or depressing I don't know how anybody feels about the iss. It's Oh, I've had some thoughts. Yeah, it is another compromise. Um Arguably good or bad depending on uh, who you ask, um

And you know the closer you get to the to the program I I is the big the biggest compromise is its inclination so that the russians can play um and uh if if the space station as originally, uh envisioned space station freedom god bless Is uh was uh equatorial then you could use it to get to the moon rather easily and it could become a refueling depot but at its current inclination that benefit is largely

diminished I mean the the answer here clearly is we got to give russia an equatorial colony Actually, yeah Yeah, go let them launch out of florida. Yeah or like split florida down the middle Yeah Give them a give them a like we have a gontanamov egg Americans launched out of Baikonur with russian like on russian rockets. Why the fuck not? Yeah Just just give them a launchpad

I think orlando would look a lot better with some big krushevskayas In the suburbs, you know I think maybe we could give them the villages too, you know, just replace all that shit with um big prefab concrete buildings Uh, you know, this this is um, this is a this is a solution. I support. All right, so yeah We're gonna give florida to the russians and have a better space program Now we found a good note to end on yes All right All right, I'm excited for this and speaking of the russians today's

safety third Comes from russia I'm surprised they even bother talking about these this is just a day in the life. I would think I Hello to lovely. Well, there is your problem podcast listeners Hello. Hi raz. Hi alice. Yay. Liam. Thank you. Hello to guests if there are any Fuck you transphobes Very good

I am going to tell you a story about how we do automation in russia. Oh, no No As many of you know the best way to make money in russia is digging up its natural resources I've heard that in the game It's not just oil though russia is pretty rich on minerals or mineral fertilizers in this case Those things are contained deep below the earth's surface to the so to get them You have to create huge mines with very long and dark galleries In which you have to transport workers tools and shit

right So not open pit that we're going down shafts going going down a hole going down in the hole You lose 16 tons The simplest way to transport workers and tools inside those galleries is a uaz pickup truck. Oh, yes Yes, love these guys Yeah, that's a that's a that's a uaz 469. I believe uh In brackets here yay fumes inhalation Moving through those galleries is very speed restricted due to safety reasons

Uh-huh the thing is you cannot really enforce those restrictions If drivers are gonna put a cop down there Well, you got to go faster than the fumes build up If the drivers are not supervised and also of course the void calls for them That's the most russian line in this so far is like Sometimes there is a void Sometimes sometimes when you're driving in mineshaft you must contemplate on we Because of the uh because of the french influence and um russian culture going to you know, thanks pieces are great

Now all of our like mineshaft guys have on we yeah, congrats on lapel de vid Not willing to pay fines every time when one of those trucks crashed into something or someone Owners of one of those mines decided to do something about this nasty speeding habit Okay Put a cop down there put a cop down there. No No, this is rasha Uh roundabouts, uh fucking chicane's traffic calming measures The first thing they did was remove the gear shift sticks from the trucks

What Shift This was pretty naive since you could still drive the trucks up to 60 kilometers an hour in first gear Have you ever played the game snow run? This is actually adding a lot of um, uh Credence to my idea of giving uh florida to the russians because the culture is very similar Well, if you're screaming in first gear now, you've got you're making the fumes problem only worse. That's true Also, this added a lot of engine wear since the rpms really went up

The owners of the mine thought fuck this shit. Let's get rid of the drivers altogether I like to imagine I like to imagine that in between there were several intermediate steps So they just took more shit off of the car. They're just like, oh, we we permanently apply handbrake So now This is just connect the brakes so they just can't go fast unless they want unless they can't stop No, because then you gotta get you got a flintstone stop it with your feet You are the ebrake

We have a removed floor like in american documentary flintstone Is similar to ice fishing vehicle They couldn't use any existing solutions to the problem because after the kramia annexation in 2014 Quote western unquote companies were prohibited to sell to russia any goods that could be used in military applications Hmm Yeah, I know it's also a way paypal won't let you pay a russian guy directly to buy some camouflage gear from him Something goes in the opposite direction. I know

Paypal is such a pop These sanctions can and are being worked around but these particular mine owners did not have the right connections Never heard of an unconnected russian mine owner I I there's gotta be different tiers of russian mine owner, right? I suppose And also these sanctions created a propaganda trope called import the dimension Import import substitution, right us. That's yeah, okay So

Basically every propagandist here makes great a great proud fuss every time when something in russia Someone in russia creates anything high tech related no matter the quality of the product or its usefulness Uh, which is usually something completely shit and or bonkers Look up robot fjodor I've seen some of these i've seen like Rt news will put out a big thing being like khalashnikov announces like self driving Quad bike and it's like it's a quad bike with a robot version of the stick from top gear riding it

And yes, it is pretty easy to get some government money to do some shitty or even non-existent work Oh tech grounds. We don't have anything like that here. Yeah, it certainly would never happen in the united states Yeah So naturally mine owners contracted a firm with the task of creating a self driving uaz truck right Sure Since no one in that firm had any skill or a wish to use anything more high high tech Then you know anything more high tech than a welder that firm

Subcontracted another firm in which I worked to make the uaz actually self driving. Oh, no You don't want to just put it on a rail like uh, like like you would do at amusement parks Like uh, like are you suggesting a really old-fashioned technology a train? Yeah, I would think that the rails are pretty ubiquitous in mind shafts, but who knew Yeah, apparently not this this needs to be high tech How are we gonna make an autonomous uaz and the thing is it was really fucking fun and easy Yes, shake hands with danger. No shake hands with success Basically we had to replace the gas and brake pedals with corresponding electrically controlled parts taken from western cars

Uh replace the steering wheel with a step motor which was produced in china stick Stick a lidar sensor on top bought in california um And uh put a pc Made in china inside and connect all those with some cables suck it tesla And a raspberry pi

And a single circuit board which we designed and produced This this It's such a shame again that the soviet union collapsed because this person deserves the like little hero of socialist labor Oh, yeah, if anything that uaz was made less russian Most of the code was open source so programmers mostly worked with sticking it all together Uh, time-wise all it took was a team of three programmers one hardware engineer and one guy with Sotter with skill at soldering Well guess which one is me?

Uh, it took them less than a year um I don't know how much harder it is to make a self-driving car Which is safe enough to be released in the wild without supervision But elan is a fucking slacker The Product type car was creating a map of its surroundings properly moving between chosen points basically was a fucking uaz rumba It never hit anyone or anything this car was a fucking success

Money changed hands business owners profited all reports were nicely written and no one went to jail This is incredible The uaz was even filmed, but I am not sure where that film went But Since producing a mine rumba automated self-driving robot apocalypse truck in mass turned out to be to cost more and uh It turned out to cost more than paying fines for production related trauma and replacing some dead impoverished workers with slightly less dead ones

After producing this first prototype the whole project was successfully shelved And on a personal note kevas is a fucking supreme drink It's not a soda though. It's naturally fermented. So it's closer to a beer make some of your own Add some sugar to make it alcoholic. Drink it up. It's a fucking drink. It's the fucking best drink for our heating climate This all I could think of is nice. This joe and nick from hell of a way who tried to make their own kevas And nearly died to the profits Yeah, fucking try and make your own kevas try and make your own self-driving truck Yes, uh, drink the kevas while driving yourself driving

The cops the mine cop stops you in the autonomous truck and you like roll over to the passenger side Open the door and a bunch of empty jars of kevas fall out. That seems to be the officer problem As you can see I was not driving This is my robot shake it Otherwise love you all keep up the great work. Thank you all. Goodbye. Goodbye Shake hands for danger. It was a really shaking hands of danger, but I appreciate it. It was really good. It was a good one It was good. Yeah, I was wondering where the turn into danger was, but um, I I did not none of it seemed to be especially dangerous Except except for brewing your own kevas. No, but it's very dain. It's very difficult to make an alcoholic drink that will kill you

because of the alcohol I mean we'll certainly kill you slowly over a long period of time. Yes, it won't it's not going to give you an infection of some kind Hmm, right well All right, well That was safety third That was safety third. That was the space shuttle program. Yes our next episode We'll be on the Tacoma Narrows bridge disaster

And our next bonus episode which I started writing if you guys want to look at slides is country Country country, especially country music post 9 11 Yes, we're gonna talk about we're gonna talk about trucks and god and girls and beers And going to the lake and why a little not sexist country because of lord of georgia line is country Little not sexist country I have to hop off because I have to go watch the black rifle coffee company movie Oh my god, dude Um, does anyone have commercials before we go?

Why is that by donkeys till jazz bonds trash future trash future you got anything to plug I I don't Write your congressperson about uh nasa and say there should be more of it. Yes. Do you want people to follow your twitter account? Oh, I mean Possibly. Yeah, no promises, but I'm okay settled down Uh, you can find me there Thanks so much for coming on. Yes. Oh, yes. I I feel like uh, this is really a case of a fan being pulled up on stage

I appreciate it I'm out of pleasure. I have one announcement before we go. All right. Um, if you're a friend of ours No, this is serious. All right. If you are a patreon of ours, um, one of our patrons Was charged quite a lot of money as opposed to the amount of money they thought they were being charged I just refunded them today. So if for some reason your bank account is much lower than you thought it would be Um, check how much money patreon took from yeah Yeah, um, that's that's that's about all I can say on that but from from what I can tell I think it may have just been that one guy, but I figure since it happened

We should probably mention. Yeah, just as long as we're not like sitting on top of like a heap of ill-gotten gains here Yes, exactly. I mean, we are Definitionally, that's what ill-gotten gains exactly sure ill-gotten gains Thank you so much for supporting the patreon guys, but the surgery fund proceeds at pace. Yes Yeah, uh, ross email that lady. Uh, Alex get your goddamn passport. Yeah. Yeah Uh, close captions. When is franklin happening? International shipping is a thing now. Um, yes

Good night, everyone. Good night everyone