Lost in Space

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[00:00:25] Welcome back to Scared All The Time.

[00:00:26] I'm Chris Kalari, and I'm Ed Vekola. holding your hand or telling you it will be alright. Everyone dies alone, but not truly alone. Not like this. And as you accept your fate, you slowly turn around. No aliens to greet you. No monsters. Just terrible, infinite space. And scare it all the time, because even though you're fucked, your suit still has headphones. What are we? very cool. Thanks so much for reaching out. It's awesome. And let's fucking just get after it because this is a freaking long one. Alright, with that said, 9, 8, 7, 6, we have main engine start, 4, 3, 2, 1, and lift on.

[00:03:01] Lift off, call the 75th face the ocean and space is just the ocean above us. That's a little dismissive of space. No, it's the same fucking thing.

[00:04:21] And the reason I know it's the same goddamn thing

[00:04:23] is take any great movie about a shipwreck

[00:04:26] and make it in space and it's still a great movie.

[00:04:28] I'm not is that the level of void that is space Really isn't infinite in terms of how far we can travel into it or how far you'll be alive to experience your Oxygen depleting or whatever. So I guess it's really no different again than being lost in the bottom of the ocean Well with an oxygen tank depleting

[00:05:41] I still think this is offensive towards the grandness of space No, it's stunning. I mean, like, pace-wise, it may be as age, but like visually, that movie has not aged a day, probably because so many big directors now just rip it off. You know, like... No, I mean, just everything. It's so stunning. The model work looks better than VFX. The lighting is unbelievable. Like when they're in space,

[00:07:00] the hard lighting on the actual model of the craft

[00:07:04] seems so weirdly realistic to, And so for years next up bachelor party just weird double feature at your house about how not to compose yourself in any romantic situation Yeah, here's two movies about that. Yeah, I mean I remember like you know when your dad tells you something like that when you're in fifth grade You kind of take it sort of seriously So I would go back and try to watch the movie and trying to figure out what I didn't understand about girls or sex

[00:08:22] But not realizing which parts were jokes because I knew nothing about girls or sex

[00:09:26] All right, I could see that I could see that that was before animal house because then I was taking the butt kissing

[00:09:33] Knowledge into animal house and not seeing any butts being kissed everyone in that movies of virgin Dude, yeah, no no butt kisses. No kept it PG

[00:09:36] Yeah, so one movie that fucked me up was animal house and the other was was 2001 which in case you haven't seen it

[00:09:42] I'm sorry spoiler alert for like the most famous movie of all time You don't hear Frank screaming. It's Kubrick doing the like, you know in space. No one can hear you scream. There's no sound waves It's silent. So as Frank is like flying off into space. He's frantically pulling at his suit and trying to tie off the air hose There's just no screaming. There's no nothing And I think it's the futility of that of falling into that nothing like you can't even die like an animal

[00:11:00] Like you can't even make noise and scream. You're saw that and I saw Red Planet once. Yeah. Which was the Carpenter one?

[00:12:20] That's Ghost of Mars?

[00:12:21] No, that was the Carpenter one is Ghost of Mars, yeah.

[00:12:23] Ghost of Mars, so I've seen all the Mars movies just Twister, that's just Twister on Mars. That's just Twister. But now that I think about it, I think Tim Robbins also dramatically kills himself in space in that movie. Like, this is not a spoiler-free episode. No, well, again, sorry to those who haven't seen 2001, and if you haven't seen Mission to Mars, I'm saving you two hours.

[00:13:43] Tim Robbins, his wife, is gonna like come after him Space, what is it? Ed knows a lot about space, so he can probably fact check me on some of this, but the first thing that's a real mind fuck to me, and this isn't like a science fact necessarily, but it's the way that I think about it, is that outer space isn't really a place.

[00:15:03] It's the lack of a place.

[00:15:05] It's literally the space between spaces,

[00:15:07] and it might sound kind, you'd say you know where you are. You're between us. You're in the studio. But if you take away the doors and the windows and the walls and everything else, you're eventually, you're just in space. You just don't realize it. If you take away the doors and the windows and the walls, we're just on the street.

[00:16:20] Like it's not, we're not in space.

[00:16:22] Well, we're on earth, but earth is in space.

[00:16:26] Yeah, earth is cruising around the sun estimated 2 trillion galaxies in the universe. So that's too much fucking space. This is what I mean about it. We're guaranteed not alone, but by that virtue, if you're in space and you're going to die up there, almost 100% chance it's going to be from some sort of human error or fucking oxygen issue, then it will be a gray or a little green man slapping you around.

[00:17:42] Like the idea that you're going to run into anything up there is pretty fucking slim.

[00:17:46] But that's my point. Yeah, I guess we're a million years of travel from then Like it's just so crazy even with like the advent of AI and we're gonna need AI for space crap We're just gonna need something that can run the fucking spaceship and time gets all weird But yeah, we're gonna need AI because it's really fucking far away I guess we're gonna need like cryogenics or whatever We're gonna need to like be frozen or fall asleep for a long time

[00:19:02] Basically, we have to jump so many hurdles to get to the next nightmare is also a really apt description of trying to produce and record this show. That's really difficult. It's difficult undertaking sometimes. And by sometimes I mean every time. So all of that is just conceptually very scary, which is why before we even went into space

[00:20:23] there is a lot of study and debate over workable, inhabitable spaceships are constructed, effective pilots can be found to use them. recruiting astronauts, they found the opposite. Many of their volunteers were not impulsive, suicidal, sexually aberrant thrill seekers.

[00:23:01] They were basically engineering nerds

[00:23:03] who were drawn to the idea of spaceflight.

[00:23:05] They were stable men with quote, Well, yeah, you need guys like Alex Honnold who did the free climb up. Yeah, we need that guy, but with an advanced degree. Yeah, true. Yes, absolutely. So even once the selection process turned up sharp candidates, psychiatrists were still worried that seemingly normal sound minds would break when dealing with weightlessness, radiation,

[00:24:20] isolation, fear, and the fact that there's no day and night in space. It's alluz capsules that docked to the ISS. They were only about two millimeters in diameter, but that was enough to cause the whole ship to depressurize within a few weeks if they weren't dealt with. And they were dealt with. They were patched and it was fine, but the finger pointing started immediately over where these holes came from, why they were there, who put them there.

[00:25:42] And at first, the holes were thought to be micromet back to earth faster. I don't even know how that story makes sense, but sure. I mean, there's so much context you would need

[00:27:00] of recordings that would have had to have been done

[00:27:02] to even get to that conclusion.

[00:27:04] Yeah.

[00:27:05] It seems so specific that it must be based on something.

[00:27:08] Yeah, well is equally scary. And then the idea of adding some holes to that is you're already in this deteriorating box. Yeah, yeah. I don't think it's been up there, what, like 20 years? So it's definitely had some wear and tear.

[00:28:22] Yeah, it probably runs on like Tomogotchies and shit.

[00:28:24] It was all like 1990s technology. space madness we've had is that lady not in space just a space adjacent madness space adjacent madness for sure So this cosmonaut named Sergei Kretshefsky became the first person to speak openly about paranormal and or bizarre psychological phenomenon during space flight in the mid 90s now this guy Sergei Kretshefsky is legit

[00:29:40] He was a successful military pilot and then he was a cosmonaut and now he's a researcher at the Russian Academy of Astronautics

[00:30:42] were hundreds of millions of years old. Like he'd look out the window and see Pangea down there.

[00:30:44] No, no, no, no.

[00:30:45] He experienced being reincarnated as a dinosaur.

[00:30:49] Like he witnessed this from his perspective.

[00:30:53] So he walked into a group of reptilian relatives,

[00:30:55] saw his three toed claws,

[00:30:56] and felt the horns standing up on his back.

[00:30:59] You know what's interesting is someone asked an astronaut,

[00:31:01] I was watching something, and they were like,

[00:31:03] oh, sleeping in the ISS sucks,

[00:31:05] because you just stand up in a room and you go to bed. unable to create dreams is still demanding he has a dream. Yeah, the same guy also claimed that the deluge of information that you experience in space during these visions is compressed in time. So in just a few minutes, an astronaut can experience the seemingly long period of another life, also sort of like a dream. Sergei said another time, this guy told him that he turned into an alien creature, visited

[00:32:25] the future, and felt that exactly what it's going to do to you if you have the unpleasant experience

[00:33:41] of getting shot out of an airlock

[00:33:43] or otherwise exposing yourself to space

[00:33:45] without any protection.

[00:33:46] Now, like we talked about movies, a gas. Another word for that is it boils. It boils, in this case, inside our body and any tissue that contains water, which is all of the tissue in your body, would start to expand. And the reason that this won't kill you instantly is because our circulatory system has its own internal pressure. So while the water in your tissues will boil, your blood won't. At least

[00:35:02] not until the boiling water tearing apart water boiling and your blood eventually boiling, the vacuum of space pulls all the air out of your lungs, assuming that like your pressurized suit is punctured or you get shot out without a suit. It pulls all the air out of your lungs, which begins the process of suffocation.

[00:36:20] And while that is happening, the vacuum of space continues to pull Guardians 3, I mean, I think they maybe have like a magic healing machine or something, but if you came back in from space after that long, you would have severe brain damage and muscle damage and probably just be like a weird... I think it happens in number one.

[00:37:41] So he went a couple movies without brain damage, I guess.

[00:37:45] At the end of the third one, doesn't he end up out in space for like... anymore. But somebody had to, especially when it's like we're going to space, somebody had to just sit down and be like, what do you think's going on up there? Yeah. Like what tests can we do? What studies can we do? How can we replicate it? Like, do we send up a loon up there? Do we send up? Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, because sending dogs and monkeys and stuff, like they're not going to send back any good evidence unless you can recover their bodies. They're not going to radio down to you and

[00:39:03] be like, you know, what's cold up here? You're right. They want's a recording of all this that you can see. It's on YouTube. We'll link it in the show notes. And it doesn't look very dramatic because you just you hear a little bit of him being like, Oh, I think it's

[00:40:22] disconnected. And the people outside are like, Oh, actually weirdly not that staggering when you look at like four fucking men have as much money now, personally. $30 billion was spent on the space race through the moon landings. $30 billion in 1967 is equivalent in purchasing power to about 276 a percent in recent years. Yeah, what's 74 as I last year going to the moon I think. So also we're out of Vietnam at that point or Vietnam's wrapping up. Yeah. Because you know, that's the whole point of the space race, right? It was like, just make sure that we have the high ground. Yeah. And then as soon as it seemed like no one else is going to do that, you know, you'd think on the moon by 69, you'd think we'd be living in space by 74.

[00:43:03] But no, that we've completely obliterated the budget for it and just never thought

[00:43:06] back.

[00:43:07] It was like, yeah, no one else is going up there.

[00:43:08] It's just like you can see Earth. You can see Earth right in front of you and you're like, get me to that, you know?

[00:44:21] Yeah, but that's another way to die in space

[00:44:23] that I think is worth talking about,

[00:44:24] which is getting fucked by the atmosphere.

[00:44:26] And the most famous case makes this so scary to me is that they were fucked from the jump. When this shuttle launched, a piece of foam broke off of the shuttle and damaged the heat shielding on the wing. And shuttles need this heat shield to protect the shuttle and the people in the shuttle from the super intense heat that results when a ship reenters the atmosphere.

[00:45:41] The air compresses around the leading edges of the ship so quickly that the air can heat

[00:45:45] to almost 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. So they're probably like docked at the International Space Station or something. Is there not enough room in there for people, enough oxygen? Like we had multiple shuttles. This summer after the accident, there was an investigation board that issued a report and they said that it would have been possible for the Columbia crew to repair the damage to the wing or for the crew to be rescued from the shuttle

[00:47:00] because the Columbia could have stayed in orbit

[00:47:02] until February 15th and the already planned launch

[00:47:06] of Atlantis and other shuttle could have been moved up was the speed of sound, and they pretty quickly knew something was really wrong. This detail haunts me. Witnesses saw streaks of fire in the sky over Texas, and the first pieces of debris hit the ground at 8.58 in the morning. But the last transmission from the crew came about a minute after that. So they were riding a spaceship that was actively ripping the pieces around them as they plummeted

[00:48:25] towards the ground, but seems like a lot of these are pretty quick. It's pretty quick deaths, hopefully. And nothing's not happening quick at 20 times to speed the sound. So pretty good. But I will say this, these few things we've talked about here, whether it's cosmonauts or NASA astronauts,

[00:49:40] any not really.

[00:49:41] What about a garlic knot?

[00:49:42] I think it's pretty good that maybe,

[00:49:45] they're not civilians.

[00:49:46] You know what I mean?

[00:49:47] No. Like it was crazy the level of no empathy for those people. That was like a little disheartening But I also I don't know weirdly get it right like It's like climb a fucking mountain if you want to experience something so anyway Yeah, you get it. It's always a bummer to die But it used to be that like dying in space was you know You're gonna get a folded flag and now we're hurtling toward like the what were you even doing up their status?

[00:51:04] Well, we're not gonna have anyone going to space as a

[00:52:04] that someone who created a space faring organization when they themselves don't go. It's a little bit like, I don't want to get a tattoo from someone who has no tattoos.

[00:52:07] Yeah, everyone should go to space. We're not going to, but go ahead.

[00:52:10] Yeah, I think as soon as it seems safe, they probably will.

[00:52:13] But I think you talk about people who have died as heroes going to space.

[00:52:16] Columbia wasn't the first time something like this had happened to an astronaut.

[00:52:20] The Russians lost a man during reentry over the course of the space race.

[00:52:24] The cosmonaut's name was Vladimir Komarov, watching missiles explode in the sky. Like rockets that they're supposed to be on soon. And they're literally standing there for test launches

[00:53:42] and just watching it explode.

[00:53:44] And it's like, I'm gonna be on a little thing

[00:53:46] on the front of that?

[00:53:47] You, I'm gonna be on that. at this situation. True. Some people have compared sending Comra up on this ship to the Apollo 1 fire that killed three American astronauts because both tragedies occurred. It is a result of working too fast and making mistakes in an attempt to beat each other. The difference is the Apollo 1's accident happened during a launch test and never got off the ground. Comra off got into space and he was orbiting

[00:55:01] for about five hours before he was ordered to return to Earth

[00:55:05] after a number of malfunctions

[00:55:07] started to crop up on the line like this and the reason that he had an open casket viewing

[00:56:22] wasn't so much to celebrate him as a hero. to see what this delay cost us. And to me, that seems, if you think about propaganda and optics, it wouldn't hurt to get a little sympathy on your side. Like, let's say Americans beat them whatever the next task was like the next week. It's like, what would you expect were we're burying a comrade? Yeah. And so it's probably just a little bit of world sympathy. But as there should be,

[00:57:40] I mean, this was an interesting time. I mean, it was nations climbing the tallest mountains.

[00:57:45] It wasn't just adventure seekers. I mean, it was all ultimately the United States government was working on in tandem with the fucking space race and even at the behest of the Scientists working on it being like do not do this like this is really not a good idea It was this weird project that I don't have the name of at the moment But it has been spent declassified so you can totally read about it

[00:59:06] Project a 119 also known as a study of lunar research flights was a top secret plan developed in radio transmission and it is also a very Russian thing that when you listen to these recordings there is some sort of an announcer. I don't know if this was like a there is a whole secret history and conspiracy theory that revolves around that very idea called the Lost Cosmonaut theory. Now before we dive into this, we actually need to know a little bit about the history

[01:01:41] of amateur radio operators, because without amateur radio operators we would have none

[01:01:46] of this interesting inmate Brutus. Yeah, your roommate. Yeah. So they broadcast this frequency

[01:03:00] and anyone could listen to it.

[01:03:02] It basically just made beeps,

[01:03:03] but a lot of people found it mind-blowing

[01:03:06] and really cool that they could intercept but you have like a bunch of dads of these enthusiasts who would have been pretty familiar with radio and the technology. Yeah. So it's like this perfect combination of things in the world that would lead to a bunch of nerds trying to hear stuff in space. Yeah, it did. There were a lot of people doing this. And when the US launched their first radio satellite, the Explorer 1, they also published the frequency

[01:04:22] so that people could listen.

[01:04:23] It just played rock and roll, dude.

[01:04:25] Yeah, just 24, seven Elvis. it's like we could only work from nine to 10 and then take a seven hour break. Well, these guys worked a lot because they love this and they claim to have successfully monitored transmissions from Sputnik 1 and 2 and Explorer 1. And then they monitored something else. On November 28th 1960, the Bocum Space Observatory in West Germany said it intercepted radio signals,

[01:05:42] which it thought might have been a satellite. But the boys knew that no official announcement plane. So I can't even imagine what goes through your mind when you hear like a zero, like a Japanese plane coming. It must have immediately, immediately without even looking up. No, something's wrong. And yeah, not even one. Even if it was just one, I'm saying there's a sensory thing where it's like you don't cook with your eyes, you cook with your ears, you cook with your nose, you cook with

[01:07:01] everything that you know if like it's burning. This If you're Yuri Gagarin, what is your the day before the mission? You're just like, because you must know. If you're Yuri Gagarin, you're doing all the same training with these guys, and you're just like, hey, where's Ivan? And it's like Ivan doesn't work here anymore. Ivan got a new job at the bread factory.

[01:08:21] Yeah, and it's just like, so you must feel a little worried

[01:08:23] about your flight.

[01:08:24] And this might be a fallacy, but I feel American scientists are like actually not cool at all because pencils create lead shavings and lead shavings in zero gravity Can flow into your instrument panels and start a fucking fire. So yeah, actually not that cool Great job with that. Okay, sorry for the aside there I think you were saying that they heard they heard some fucked up wheezing They picked up this transmission and they recorded it they recorded the wheezing

[01:09:42] struggling breathing of what they thought send a Sputnik up with, I guess. I mean, I don't know what it seems small. Maybe not because you're only going to low earth orbit or just earth orbit, but yeah, there's no manifest, I guess. They didn't reveal like, it was just, oh, we sent up a bunch of shoes, you know? Like, it doesn't matter what we sent up. It's our bus to do with what we please. Also, it's Russia, so it might have been

[01:11:01] an actual bus with a rocket on it.

[01:11:02] Yeah, who knows?

[01:11:04] I'm just kidding.

[01:11:04] They had good stuff.

[01:11:05] I'm just joking. The Sevenauts had vanished from the official photographs which were re-released in honor of the 10th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight. Vanished like back to the future where they slowly dissipated as they went into space and then it's like how do we explain this photo? Or that Russian thing of like, no, we only spent five people. I don't care what you heard. Yeah, vanished as in. There's a whole story about this American space historian who uncovered airbrushing in

[01:12:21] the photos and the histories of some of the menth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight, and people noticed that there were guys who should have been in those photos who were no longer in those photos. Like whatever their Mercury 7 astronauts would have been, all of a sudden it's like, oh there's only three here. Yes. So that whole era of that spacecraft seemed to have been erased.

[01:13:40] Yeah, basically.

[01:13:42] And all these other record, like the SOS recording,

[01:13:45] the guy suffocating. We're talking at this point, we're looking between 57 and 61 is when these Italians were building stuff out of noodles and fiat parts. Yes. So then the brothers would go on to record Yuri Gagarin's space flight. And they actually supposedly were alerted a few hours before Kennedy that Yuri had gone up because Kennedy was awoken at like two in the morning to be told that Gagarin

[01:15:01] was the first man in space.

[01:15:02] And supposedly the brothers knew a few hours before that

[01:15:05] because they got tipped off by a journalist.

[01:15:07] So five weeks after the brothers recorded the first I don't know about ladies lives in Russia in terms of like the day-to-day society, but there was never any separation when it came to like huge heroic rad shit. Well, yeah, I mean they were all comrades, so... You know, they got to go up and do all the cool stuff too. Did they got to die in anonymity like the boys? Yeah, exactly, exactly. And then a few days after that, they picked up a few seconds of another transmission,

[01:16:24] which we unfortunately couldn't find any clean audio of, that the Americans at NASA had no idea how they were able to get. It's probably too prong. It's probably these guys are skilled ham radio operators, but also something about when those things go over orbit, where Italy is with the orbit of the Earth type of thing, because there's a great movie that's called The Dish, maybe, I don't know, it's pretty fun, Biopic,

[01:17:42] about during the moon landing,

[01:17:43] we were only able to talk to those guys

[01:17:46] and maybe even show the footage After that, did they come to America? Was it like, hey, Russians are gonna kill you if you stick around here? Did they get some sort of sanctuary visa to work with NASA to save their lives? So what happened was they got brought on to some Italian television show. The Russians showed up, they were a little bit spooked, but they weren't super concerned, and then the Italian spies came to them and said, hey, these guys might kill you.

[01:19:03] And then they got brought on to this Italian television. It's true, they're not Operation Paperclip, got us a lot of German scientists. I don't know if it got us a lot of Italian scientists. Yeah, yeah, I don't think so.

[01:20:21] But then, I mean, these brothers went on,

[01:20:23] they launched Europe's first cable network

[01:20:26] and then one of the Earth before we even sent Alan Shepard or that monkey whose name have not committed to memory, but they just kept fucking dying. They couldn't take credit for any of it because these dudes were just burning up in the atmosphere or blowing out into space and like, yeah, that's unbelievable. Yeah. Yeah. And then they also at one point claimed to have intercepted image transmissions, but and this is one of the technical things I didn't quite understand. People have gone back to look at it and the radio frequencies that they claim to intercept these image transmissions on were not frequencies that could have been used to even transmit

[01:23:01] images.

[01:23:02] Yeah.

[01:23:03] So that seemed like it might have been bullshit.

[01:23:04] But there is shit in the fucking air. million miles from the sun right now. The first human either already has or is about to cross the boundary of our solar system into interstellar space. That body would be perfectly preserved, frozen at negative 270 degrees Celsius, sailing away from Earth at 18,000 miles an hour. And it's unlikely, but I'd like to think, that maybe that mystery man or woman could

[01:24:24] someday crash into another planet. of money you spend to get a satellite in space has gone down so astronomically that it used to be you were very like okay we're setting up just like one thing it's gonna cost a fucking $1 trillion. Now it's pretty cost effective so they can just say fuck it we'll send up a bunch of crap and every we need it and we have I'm making these numbers up but let's say 5% of the orbit of the earth with satellites in like 1999 fuck it in like 2005 it's like 30%

[01:25:46] in 2023.

[01:25:47] Yeah. to make space travel as relatively safe as it is. And that's thanks to a bunch of really smart people who work on making this stuff safe 24 hours a day. And we're really psyched to be able to say that we have one of those very smart people here with us today. The man Ed watched Chris Rock and then the Columbia shuttle disaster with Ray. Yeah, so as Chris said, I was able to track down

[01:27:00] the guy, watch the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster with, which wasn't that hard because he's one of

[01:27:04] my best friends. And I was also able to confirm that it is in fact not his origin story. But sports system with it. That includes water supply, oxygen supply, all the things that keep somebody alive and comfortable in an enclosed environment. So relevant to some of the things we were discussing earlier in this episode, with that water and air supply, would that be for if you were doing some sort of a spacewalk and you were somehow cut free or flung from the ship and spiraling out into space, those things would

[01:28:24] give you the ability to survive until someone would rescue you? Venus here. Yeah, I don't know what the astronaut can actually control while they're in there. They probably have some control over like temperature and stuff like that, but for the most part, it does all the work for you. Another part that we work on is the umbilical. So when they're in the airlock, they're reducing the pressure of the suit in order to go out into the vacuum of space. They don't run it at like the pressures that we have here on Earth. It's down in like the

[01:29:41] single digit pressure wise. They have to spend a lot of time in there and they actually hook up to

[01:29:44] an umbilical that's an oxygen come up with is that kind of fishbowl

[01:31:03] thing. It's like this one solid plastic bowl and actually filling up the suit volume. And the ventilation

[01:32:23] system in the suit pushed that water up into the helmet. This is your piss bag, dude. Stop cating on your own. I mean, that's one of those like astronauts have nerves of steel situations where like, if my windshield starts to fog up on the 405, I'm like, oh God, I mean, I'm all over. Like, I can't imagine being outside the ISS or on whatever spaceship and being like,

[01:33:40] yeah, can't see, can't breathe.

[01:33:42] Gonna just keep my cool here and somehow get back inside.

[01:33:46] I bet it's not for me.

[01:33:47] Yeah, pretty amazing. X and then EMU. You can find some information on kind of what the future is going to look like. There are really two types of spacesuits. There's IVA suits and EVA suits and an IVA suit. It's kind of just a balloon that keeps you safe inside a spacecraft if it was depressurized. So that's kind of like the suit that they wear on the U2 spy plane, which is at super high elevation. Those are kind of the simpler suits that are tough to move around in, but they're protected. They give you pressure

[01:35:03] in case of an emergency. The EVA suits are when you're outside of a spaceship or outside of an ISS like yeah I can lift a Mac truck, but you go somewhere. It's any percentage of gravity I guess now you're feeling all those two thousand pounds of tubes and pipes and shit you got in there

[01:36:21] Oh, yeah, hundred percent now since this is a show about the worst things that can happen see things in an ultra clean environment and basically replicate what's going to happen to them up in space. So we give them the same pressures, the same loads, all that stuff and demonstrate that they're going to be absolutely fine before they leave the building. And a lot of that testing is witnessed by the customers and also government inspectors come in. So before this stuff goes out the door, a lot of eyes have seen these things work and

[01:37:41] feel strongly that there's not going to be any issues.

[01:37:43] It winds up being a ton of effort of if we covered all the elements. So part of the life support system, the backpack that's on the EMU suit that you see floating around, is an oxygen supply to supply oxygen. Yeah, provide a reasonable environment. The fact it will turn for the oxygen supply. Yep. So there's high pressure oxygen in there, kind of moves around through metal tubes and metal passages and everything. And something I never

[01:39:04] really thought about until I was trained in it exactly that would look like. From Earth, I probably just the tiniest candle being blown out.

[01:40:24] I actually heard, I don't know if you guys have ever done spot the station, which is pretty cool. Well, you know me and my mom go watch ISS all the time when I'm home.

[01:40:27] Oh, that's orange. That's just for search and rescue. If a shuttle had a crash land or something like that, you know, had these highly visible orange suits. I think this only came up when we talked about it because, and we'll put a picture of this in the show notes. It's like a black suit with these little orange accents on it.

[01:41:41] And I think because it was dark as fuck,

[01:41:43] you were like, that's not gonna fly.

[01:41:45] Yeah, that just didn't seem right to me.

[01:41:46] I don't know.

[01:41:47] If you're out in space, it got flung off of something and there's no friction and they're moving it 16,000 miles an hour or whatever. Well, I'm just saying it's funny to think of space as the absence of everything including pressure and air But really there's shit up there. There's there's fucking radiation zipping around. Yeah, there's whatever the sun's doing Oh, yeah, how do you deal with that for the space suit? The sun seems real bright

[01:43:02] Oh, yeah

[01:43:03] So the visor assembly on the suit has eye shades and sun visor that are all deployable

[01:44:01] and they do a good job. You can look at the sun without too much of an issue,

[01:44:03] but I don't know what the training to the astronauts is

[01:44:05] as far as, you know?

[01:44:06] Don't look directly at the sun.

[01:44:08] Yeah.

[01:44:09] I feel like if you're an astronaut,

[01:44:10] you probably mastered that early on.

[01:44:12] The sun.

[01:44:13] Well, anyway, that's pretty cool.

[01:44:14] So is there anything that you've worked on personally

[01:44:17] that you're like, that's mine up there?

[01:44:18] Or does everything you work on definitely go to space?

[01:44:21] Yeah, every EMU suit has parts that have come

[01:44:23] from our company.

[01:44:24] And some of those parts, yeah, I personally

[01:44:26] test every one of them.

[01:44:27] Did we put your name on anything? flat files and pull out something from 1957 and be like, some engineer assigned this that said, yeah, this was good to go to Buzz Aldrin. This was good to go to fucking Alan Shepard. Oh yeah. It's a trip to look at some of like the old engineering drawings and the stuff that people drew by hand. And it took them a week to make this gigantic drawing and they smoked three packs of cigarettes when they were doing it. And it's all tinted with tobacco smoke.

[01:45:42] But yeah, we still have a lot of records from way back then.

[01:45:45] And it's pretty cool to look.

[01:45:47] You can see just how many things you'd look at on when I started here. So yeah, it's just such a slow process that it amazes me how quickly they're able to get to the moon. Well, we talk about this a little bit in the episode, but it was just an insane amount of the national budget went towards the space race. Yeah. Yeah, it was like all red tape in the 1960s was cut away and all the money in fluxed into the space program. And it was like, yeah, it's how you get shit done in 10 years. Yeah, 100%. We still have a lot of machinery that

[01:47:04] they bought during the ramp up of the Apollo programest. I think, I think, like, it would be a vehicle crashing.

[01:48:22] Like, on re-entry would be the worst for me, actually.

[01:48:25] Because you can see home five seconds ahead of you. the safety factory. At the safety factory, we won't name. But yeah, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us, because we spend the whole episode talking about how scary it is, but it's nice to talk to somebody who can tell us a little bit about why we've heard of 70 years of space travel and probably less than seven major incidents in those 70 years. Yeah, for all the flights and missions, it's pretty amazing how little has gone wrong over the years,

[01:49:41] but yeah, it's definitely scary to think about

[01:49:43] all the things that can and just such a crazy

[01:49:46] and complicated thing is not an option. But if money wasn't an issue, I would still go, I'm good. I'm good. There's this great line in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek, the first one that Bones says.

[01:51:00] Due to copyright concerns, just make believe I am pronouncing this correctly because I am a machine.

[01:53:42] Yeah, I mean, I 1000% agree. fixed launch pad or some shit anyway. Yeah. But I am even more afraid of what the world looks like if we got a handful of people who can afford to do that without governments than getting on the ships that they send you up in because that means something's really broken here on this planet if we have like 10 people with that much money. So everybody, you heard it here first. Ed has promised that even if you make us billionaires off of the success of this podcast,

[01:53:44] he will not spend that money on going to space.

[01:53:46] But I would ask this question, and you feel like life's not getting any better. Again, hurtling towards this outcome. Yeah. And you get the opportunity to leave all of this behind and not just make history as one of the first people on Mars, but to have an experience that no other human being in the history of human beings

[01:55:00] has had the opportunity to do,

[01:55:02] you just can't come back, would you do it?

[01:55:06] It's interesting, I guess I'd have to look Great outings that are easy and safe. I don't do. Why the fuck would I do the thing that seems okay? Not safe. I don't know. And also there's not gonna be a ticker tape parade on your arrival. I think a lot of people leapfrogging each other to be the next person on the moon, the next person. You come home to a goddamn parade. So at least there's that. Like I'm honestly worried that we're gonna spend a bunch of fucking money sending people to the moon again.

[01:56:22] And honestly no one's gonna give a shit.

[01:56:24] The new generations of people who don't look up

[01:56:27] from their phone, you know, anyway, way because what is it 12 people ever have walked on the moon so yeah and like no one's been up there and knock our flag off this little propped up perch so honestly someone goes up there and you'd have to just go back and pick it up and once you find out that like Artemis is the twin sister of Apollo which is why the Artemis missions are named Artemis because female astronauts will be going to the moon now.

[01:57:40] Oh I didn't know that interesting.

[01:57:41] Yeah I'll look it up to make sure I'm not wrong but when I found out the mythology behind

[01:57:45] Apollo and Artemis and it just seemed like me. So that's where I fall. By virtue of my, the ocean is space, would you get in a submarine? Probably not. Yeah, see what I use a Ouija board on a space shuttle? Absolutely. I don't even know what you'd

[01:59:02] pick up up there. Probably some of these Russians. Yeah, they're need to watch for all mankind. I love it. It's a soap opera, but there's some good moon stuff in that man. Killer, well, I'm gonna go do that right now. So with that, we bid you a do, and we will see you next week right back here. I scared all the time. I'm Chris Clary. And I'm Edvacola, and this has been......Scared All the Time....Scared All the Time. It's co-produced and written by Chris Clary and Edvacola.

[02:00:21] ...edited by Edvacola.

[02:00:22] Additional support and keeper of sanity, Tess Fifell.