Brandon Fibbs talks 9 Days in July

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Joe chats with Brandon Fibbs, host of the new podcast "9 Days in July," which explores each of the nine days of the Apollo 11 Mission, day by day, in nine 60-minute-long episodes. Listen to "9 Days in July" on the iHeartRadio app and everywhere podcasts are found: megaphone.link/9daysinjuly

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
My welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production
of I Heeart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Joe McCormick.
My normal co host, Robert Lamb is out of town
this week, so I am bringing you an interview episode.

(00:23):
It's an interview with Brandon Fibbs, who is the host
of a new podcast on the I Heeart Radio network
called Nine Days in July, which is as a profile
of each of the nine days of the Apollo eleven
mission in nineteen sixty nine, the mission that landed on
the Moon. I've started listening to this podcast and a

(00:44):
few episodes in and I'm hooked. I think Brandon is
doing an excellent job with this and it goes into
some really incredible depth. So I had a conversation with
Brandon about the Apollo eleven mission and about this podcast
that he's put together. It was a really fun conversation
and I think you're really going to enjoy it. Before
we jump into the interview here, let's just play the
trailer for Nine Days in July to give you a

(01:05):
taste of things to come. Ignition sequenced. You think you
know the story of Apollo eleven. But you don't what
you know is only a small part of the most
profound human achievement in history. I believe that this nation
should commit itself to achieving the goal of landing a
man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.

(01:27):
Less than three weeks after launching the first American into space,
a trip that lasted only fifteen minutes, the President went
before Congress and charged the country with landing on the
Moon before the end of the decade. And why so
that we could wallop the Russians, he d look. This

(01:50):
was one of the most tumultuous eras in American history.
The profoundly unpopular Vietnam War was raging on without an
end in sight. Back home, at the Democratic Convention, thousands
of demonstrators clashed violently with police. They said they were
there to protest the war, poverty, racism, and other social aliens.
Some of them were also determined to provoke a confrontation.

(02:13):
The United States seemed to be coming apart at the
seems America needed a reason to reach for a greatness
beyond our misfortunes. We needed Apollo god Spade. Pulling off
Kennedy's audacious vision required hundreds of thousands of people, tens
of thousands of companies, and tens of billions of dollars

(02:36):
to go to the moon and discontay and do the
other things, not because they are easy, because they are
on Using never before heard mission audio, I'm going to
take you through the family lives that fueled the astronauts,
the political intrigue that cleared the way, and the collective
drive of the country that pushed us into the future.

(02:57):
This is Nine Days in July. New episodes arrive every
Thursday through February six. Listen to Nine Days in July
on the I Heart Radio app, on Apple podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts. Well, without any further delay,
I think we're going to jump right into my conversation
with Brandon Fibbs. Hey, Brandon, welcome to the show. Thank

(03:19):
you so very much. So I guess first of all,
would you like to talk a little bit about your
own background, maybe introduce yourself and talk about how you
got so interested in spaceflight. Yeah, my name is Brandon Phibbs.
I am uh. I've spent the last roughly ten fifteen
years in film and television. I actually began as a

(03:41):
film critic writing about other people's films and television shows,
and then realized, I want people to write about mine.
I'm gonna go get into production myself. So moved to
l A and stumbled into science documentaries. I went to
l A like everyone wants to go you want to
make big movies, and my first production was Cosmos of
Space Time Odyssey with Neilo grass Tyson. And then I

(04:01):
realized working on that, I don't want to this is
the kind of stuff I want to do. I want
to I want to light people on fire for for
amazing science. And so I was able to buy and
large work mostly in science documentaries. Worked with Morgan Freeman
on Through the Wormhole for a couple of seasons, and
the Story of God with Morgan Freeman, and a number
of Science Channel specials and whatnot. And that's that's really

(04:22):
where um, that's really what you know. I found a
lot of tremendous satisfaction in that. And then recently I've
kind of been migrating to podcasts. There's just so many
ways to tell extraordinary science and history stories. So I'm
one of these people who if I could go back
in time and tell my young self Hey, Brandon, here

(04:43):
are the things. They're gonna light you on fire, and
you're gonna be passionate about. When you're an adult, you're
gonna probably want to change your life trajectory right now.
You're gonna want to change the stuff you studied, and
rather than study English literature and filmmaking, you're gonna want
to study science. Um, but I didn't. And so now
I'm at the place in my life where I'm like, Okay,
I if I could go back in time to be

(05:04):
a scientist, I would. But all of my all of
my work, experience and stuff is in in television documentaries
and whatnot and now podcasting. And so let's find the
Vinn diagram of life where science and entertainment overlap. And
let's drop right down in that little section there, and
let's make amazing things that popularize science and basically, you know,
let's find extraordinary stories that are gonna warp people's minds.

(05:27):
And uh so that's kind of my like life goal
these days. Wow, I can really identify with you there.
Actually I also am from a humanity's background, but like
later in life, got the science bug and in some
ways kind of wished I've done things different, but also
I don't know, it helps to be able to bring
that kind of storytelling sensibility to science as well well.
And the and the longer I've done it, the more

(05:47):
I've realized, and the more like actual scientists that I
speak with an interview or befriend, the more I realized
that this sort of advocacy is so critical for what
they do. The there's they're busy being scientists, and so
you know, it needs people like us to say, look
world at what the incredible things that they are doing. Yeah. Absolutely,

(06:11):
Now I know I've read that you also have experience
as a pilot though were you were piloting an S
three Viking? Is that right? Not a pilot? So to
use to use a film metaphor, um, I was a
combination of Goose from Top Gun, the guy who sat
behind the pilot in three, and I was a combination
with jones Uh with jones E, the guy from the

(06:32):
Hunt for October who was calling crazy ivans. My job
was to hunt submarines. So the S three Viking was
a patrol aircraft, a sub hunting aircraft, and we would
fly in the ocean and we would drop Sona buoys
and these SONA buoys would release hydrophones and we could
deploy them to various depths, and we would listen for submarines,
and based on the mathematical logarithmic transcripts that would come

(06:55):
up on my screen, I could tell you, if I
was very lucky, you know exactly what kind of submarine
we were flying over, whether it was turning left, turning right, diving, ascending, whatever,
and sometimes specifically specific submarine we were flying over, so
that I was I was the backseater. Okay, Now, uh,
how did you end up doing this? Like a lot

(07:16):
of these people who ended up in the Apollo program,
did you long have a passion for for flight? I
think that, you know, like any red blooded American kid,
you know, you grow up loving dinosaurs and space and
and flying and these sorts of things. I actually, when
I got out of I had started college and then realized,

(07:37):
you know, I'm gonna need some more money for college
and blah blah blah, and I had taken an internship.
I've done an internship in Washington, d C. Congressional internship
working for my congressman on Capitol Hill. And I was
just surrounded by military guys and just all kinds of
different things, and I thought, hey, this, this looks fantastic.
This would be a way to kind of give back
to my country but also get what I kind of

(07:58):
need to further my life and my me for school
and whatnot. And so it was actually there that I
kind of came up with the idea joined the military,
and then spent most of my uh, most of my
time in the military was actually overseas. It was in Sicily.
Spent three three years in Sicily and three extraordinary years,
I should say, and just spent all of that time

(08:19):
in Europe and traveling all over Europe and even West Africa,
and it was an extraordinary thing. But yeah, I thought
at the time actually that I might be pursuing um
flight and then perhaps even hey, lot, what if I should,
you know, should I try to become an astronaut? And
then I just realized, and this kind of goes back
to what I was saying earlier in terms of like

(08:39):
I should have been a scientist. There are also certain
things that I realized I can't do that my mind's
not exactly made for. And a lot of that is
complex math and and some really complex you know, physics
and stuff like that, the kind of things I would
actually need to become an astronaut. And uh so I
was like, Okay, let's just stick with the let's stick
with the story telling, and uh tell the stories of

(09:02):
these people who can do those complex math and stuff
like that you can't do, Brandon. That's interesting. Well, so
to turn to that story, I guess can can you
start off just by giving us the top line on
nine days in July? Tell us you know, you know what,
what do you want people to know if they remember
one sentence about this podcast? Yeah, my my friend and
our executive producer, one of our executive producers, Andrew Jacobs,

(09:23):
came up with the idea and he basically said, we
are so familiar with the sort of sound bites of
Apollo eleven. We know like some sound bites from launch,
we know a lot of sound bites from the landing,
but that's about it, Like nobody knows the story of
Apollo eleven. And so our idea was, it's a nine
day mission. Let's have nine episodes, and each episode is

(09:44):
going to focus as real time as possible on each
day of the mission, and let's tell that story. Now.
Of course, most of what goes on in a spacecraft
traveling to and from the Moon is incomprehensible techno babble,
and so once you strip that out, the is a
lot less story going on, particularly on those transit days.
And so we knew that we needed to tell more

(10:05):
than just that story. And so the idea was that
we came up with, Okay, let's tell the story that
is going to contextualize everything that we're going to be
hearing on that spacecraft. Let's tell the biographies of all
of these astronauts. Let's learn who the people in mission
control are. Let's talk to scientists about what the moon
is made of and how it was formed. Let's learn

(10:25):
about the political dynamics of the space race and and
and communism and fighting against Russia to to beat everyone
to the moon. Let's let's take all of these stories
and tell these stories and bounce back and forth between
them and the spacecraft, so that when you walk away
after nine episodes, you not only understand intimately what happened
on this mission, and you know these guys who worked

(10:46):
on this in a really profoundly human way, but you
also come away with a much greater understanding of how
we got to where where we were when we went
to the moon, who everyone was and and and what
the political sort of impetus was to to do it
in the first place. Yeah, it's a really engrossing approach.
I'm a couple of episodes in and I've been really
enjoying the show so far. So maybe we should uh

(11:10):
turn to these these figures like Neil Armstrong, buzz Aldrin
and Michael Collins. Can you give a brief sketch of
of who these three astronauts were? Yeah, So Neil Armstrong
and a lot of people who didn't kind of know
more of his story were kind of introduced to him
recently in the film First Man last year, and that

(11:30):
was a really good kind of examination. You know. I
had a lot of friends who who said they they
found Neil Armstrong really inaccessible because Ryan Gosling's portrayal was
such that he kind of kept the audience at a distance,
at an arm's length, and didn't really he didn't feel human.
And what I told them is that's who Neil Armstrong was.

(11:51):
Neil Armstrong and buzz Aldren were kind of what we
what we would have described at the time as squares.
They were sort of very straight laced and uptie eight
and and it's one of the things that ruined, frankly,
both of their marriages in the long run. Um. They
were just so singularly focused on what they did and
their jobs, um that they to the exclusion of everything else.

(12:15):
And then you have Mike Collins, who was jovial and
and quick witted, and he was the jokester, he was
the prankster, he was always he was the one that
you'd want to go have a beer with. And and
none of these guys actually even really got along. I mean,
they got along just fine, but they weren't friends. They
didn't have some sort of like you know, off campus
sort of relationship in which they hung out. Um. Any

(12:39):
of the pictures that we have in Life magazine and
stuff like that showing them all hanging out was completely created,
fabricated for you know, the magazine. It was just like
to sell copy. But what we needed were three men
who are at the top of their intellectual game, who
worked together, who are professionals, who are the best people
suited for this particular job. And that's what these three
guys were. They all came, they were all aviators, they

(13:01):
all came from flight experience. Neil was in the Navy,
the other two guys were in the Air Force, and
they all came out of the Korean War, and some
of them from test flight experience, and just basically pushing
the boundaries to do the most extraordinary things possible until
the most extraordinary thing human beings have ever done was
presented to them and dropped in their laps. Now we

(13:21):
know that it wasn't just the three astronauts, of course,
could you talk a little bit about the cathedral, about
the flight controllers and the mission planners and all of
the you know, the thousands of of support figures who
made the mission possible. You bet you know. And I'll
just keep doing what I'm about to do just because
I think it's a really a really accessible way for
people to identify what's going on. But you know, if

(13:44):
you've ever seen the movie Apollo thirteen, you know that
did a wonderful job of kind of setting up. As
much time as you spent in the spacecraft, you also
spent in mission control and mission control what had four
rotating teams of two dozen people at all of these consoles,
and every console oversaw a different aspect of the flight
at different aspect of the spacecraft, or you know, you'd

(14:05):
even have doctors who are monitoring the health of the
astronauts themselves, and these shifts would just these guys would
just rotate through the ships. But even within mission control,
you had whole offices, whole squadrons of people who are
supporting each one of those consoles so large, you had hundreds,
if not thousands of people. Technically, especially thousands when you

(14:26):
consider that all of the companies that built the spacecraft
and did all these things were we're only a phone
call away. You have thousands of people supporting the mission
every single day, UM, and it was an extraordinary Basically,
in many ways, some of the people in mission control
will call were referred to as the co pilots of
Apollo eleven, and that's in many ways very true. They

(14:48):
were monitoring every aspect of the flight. They were there
for every aspect of the flight. And yet the only
voice you ever hear, however, UM on any of these
tapes is Capcom. Because none of these mission controllers talked
to the spacecraft. That would just get too confusing, So
everyone went through CAPCOM, the capsule communicator, who was also
an astronaut so that he understood everything that was going

(15:11):
on in mission control, and he intimately understood what it
was like to be on the inside of that spacecraft.
And so he was the funnel through which all the
communications ran. Uh. Yeah, you can imagine how chaotic it
would have gotten otherwise. Um. Now, among the flight controllers,
one of the strange facts mentioned in one of your
early episodes is that, uh in that room, the average

(15:32):
age was about twenty six. Why so young? What's going
on there? So you have space flights and new science
right like we we we've have these visions of like
the Mercury program and the Gemini program and then the
Apollo program. There was not a whole lot of years
between all of those programs. Um, you know, you're talking

(15:52):
less than ten years of human space fight. By the
time we landed on the Moon, we'd only been going
into space for a couple of years. And more than that.
At the things that got us there, the things that
enabled us to do it were computers, and computers were
brand spanking new. And so it's just like today if
you um, you know, when we were growing up, our

(16:12):
parents who were always telling us, hey, how do you
stop the flashing twelve, you know, twelve o'clock on the VCR, kids,
and need you to fix that for me. And the
reason they were calling on the kids is because it
was effortless for young people to integrate with technology. And
these days, of course, it's you know, how do I
fix Facebook or Instagram's acting up or you know, TikTok
or whatever. You ask your kids, or you ask your grandkids,

(16:33):
because they just get it intuitively. Um. And that's exactly
what it was like here. Younger people were the ones
who understood computers. Computers were brand spanking new, and so basically,
if you want to go to space with new technology,
you need people who understand that new technology, and so
mission control had was made up. Like you said, twenty
six years old was the average age, and for some

(16:56):
of these guys, for a great many of these guys,
it was their very first job, read out of college,
and they're thrust with, like you know, into this being
responsible for the most extraordinary thing humans have ever done. Yeah,
it's kind of hard to imagine, actually. Um. Now, another
thing that you talked about in the podcast is the
fact that, of course uh NASA was a very male

(17:17):
dominated work culture at the time, but You also mentioned
the story of these like math experts who would check
the work of the engineers, many of them female mathematicians,
sometimes called the time computer rests like Poppy north Cut,
can can you talk about that experience? Poppy north Cut
was one of my favorite interviews on this show. And
unfortunately time constraints and different things have have trimmed what

(17:40):
you're going to hear from her. But Poppy was Poppy
needs her own podcast. She was someone who yeah, she
she got degrees in mathematics, and she was brought in
to check the men's work. And of course, you can
imagine in this time frame in the mid sixties and
in late sixties, there were a lot of guys who
did exactly think they needed their work checked and if

(18:01):
it did that, it certainly didn't need to be checked
by this young twenty seven year old blonde in a
miniskirt sort of situation. And the amount of sexism that
she faced. There's a moment that I mentioned the podcast
of I believe it was in the ABC anchor was
interviewing her and he specifically said that, like, what's it
like being a beautiful young woman in a mini skirt
around here among all these men, and it's she persevered

(18:25):
like she she had this mindset of I recognize that
if I'm going to make a difference, I have to
push through this. I have to be stronger than this.
I have to tolerate some of this. The stuff I
don't have to tolerate, I'm gonna call out. But she
was extraordinarily important, and not only Apollo levin getting them
to and from the Moon. Her calculations helped them with

(18:48):
all of their orbits and getting out of orbit and
returning back to Earth. She also played a key component
in Apollo thirteen when they had so many problems going
on their spacecraft. She was there for many of the
Apollo missions. Now now she is a advocate. She became
a lawyer. She got out of doing science, then became
a lawyer, and she advocates for women's rights and feminism.

(19:08):
And she took on the Houston UH Police and the
Houston Fire Department and made sure that women could integrate
into those uh those institutions. And even today she is
just on the front lines of women's rights issues um
as a lawyer and advocate. And she has, like I said,
she needs her own podcast. She's extraordinary, all right, we
need to take a quick break, but we will be

(19:29):
right back with more than and we're back all right.
Maybe we should talk a bit about the hardware and
the technology that made the mission possible. One of the
first things I think that would deserve attention here is
the Saturn five rocket, which I remember I don't recall
which astronaut it was, but it was somebody who had

(19:50):
been lifted up on it describing it as a living,
breathing organism Underneathan, Uh, what what's um? What? What makes
the Saturn five so special in the history of space exploration?
The Saturn five is the largest, heaviest, most powerful rocket
human beings have ever created. NASA is currently building the SLS,

(20:11):
the Space Launch System. This is the rocket that's going
to be returning us to the Moon in a couple
of years and eventually setting us on a path for Mars.
But until that is built and tested and first run,
the Saturn five remains, fifty years later, the largest, most powerful,
heaviest launch vehicle humans have ever built. We we've nothing
comes close to touching it yet. UM, And it was

(20:34):
something that was designed and built UM was the brainchild
UM of Werner von Braun An ex Nazi. He was
one of the Nazis that, uh, the Americans kind of
grabbed out of Nazi Germany when when Germany was falling
after World War Two, we brought our thousands of Nazis
as part of an Operation paper Clip. So Operation paper
Clip was this was this government program in which we

(20:57):
seized thousands of of ex Nazi scientists and engineers, brought
them back to the United States and basically said, hey,
you were making some pretty devastating technology like the V
two rockets and stuff like that that was raining down
fire all over London and lots of other parts of Europe,
and hey, we want you to make those for us too.
And a lot of these guys weren't they weren't died

(21:21):
in the woold Nazis. They were conscripted. They were you know,
told to build this or else sort of situations. And
once they were out of that, they were able to say, hey,
you know what I what I really want to do
is build rockets to send people into space. And the
government US government wasn't interested in that. They wanted to
be able to, you know, after World War Two, we
suddenly found ourselves in a Cold War with Russia. We

(21:41):
just a couple of years later stumbled into a second
war again with within Korea, and so basically they just
wanted these guys to design missiles. But it wasn't until
sput Nick suddenly kind of changed the dynamic. And once
Russia launched sput Nick and we suddenly realized. And then
Sputnik two, just four weeks later launched a dog into space.
The dog's name was like It, which is also the

(22:02):
name of my dog. Um. That dog into space suddenly
made people realize, oh wait, that's possible to launch like
living creatures into space. And then suddenly people started turning
to people like Verna von Braun and others and saying, okay,
you have permission now start designing real giant, big rockets,
not just missiles. And so the Saturn five is is yeah,

(22:23):
it's the most complex thing that we've ever built. It's
the reason we got to the Moon. Well, I want
to come back to some of those political implications and
just a little bit, but to go on with some
of the more some of the other technology from the mission.
So we've got the Saturn five rocket, and that is
that's sort of the launch delivery program that that NASA

(22:44):
came up with to get us to the moon was
only one of several options that were considered, right, well,
what were what was some of the thinking about how
to get to the moon and back, and what were
the other options that we could have tried. Well, so
they had a number of different options, and the first
one was the one that's been popularized in every silly
nineteen fifties sort of sci fi movie you've ever seen,

(23:05):
and that is you see, you see like sort of
a prototypical rocket and the rocket is fully formed and
it lands on some on the moon or some outer
space planet. People climb out of it and do their thing,
climb back into it, and it launches back off again.
But you you can imagine, you've, you know, everyone's seen
pictures of the Saturn five, something that big, going in

(23:26):
one piece, going into space in one complete piece, and
then landing on the Moon again like something like that's
never gonna happen. The weight would just be prohibitive. The
size is just so big. And yet people consider that
that was one of the options, and then then they
just realized there's no way that Saturn five in that
size and weight is even going to get out of
orbit much less land on the Moon and get back

(23:48):
off of it. Another option was, okay, we launch multiple
launches with all of the various little spacecraft and once
they're in Earth orbit, we docked them all together and
we do all of these things and then we take
off for the Moon. Um and that was also seen
as clearly cost prohibitive. We have numerous launches, blah blah blah.
What they ultimately came down to was lunar orbit rendezvous,

(24:09):
and that is, let's put everything in a single rocket,
let's make it build big enough to launch into orbit,
and then let's do all of our docking that's needed
around the Moon. And that terrified people at the time
because at the time we came up with that idea,
we hadn't we hadn't even docked anyone in orbit around Earth.
Gemini hadn't even yet achieved that. So everyone was really
terrified of hundreds of thousands of miles away doing all

(24:30):
of this docking, so far away from any sort of
help that could be rendered if they were closer to home.
So that kind of terrified people. But ultimately they realized
cost effective, size effective, gas, gas fuel, everything just made
that that one made the most sense. And so they
kind of went with it, and that's how we came
up with lunar orbit rendezvous. Now, do you think that

(24:52):
the lunar orbit rendezvous was really the only way we
could have reached the Moon and the time frame we
did it was very likely the only way we could
have reached the Moon in the timeframe we did. Yeah,
it's not necessarily the only way we could have done it.
Um And in fact, there were One of the other
options I didn't mention was that option of basically launching

(25:14):
certain elements of your mission, landing those remotely without human
beings on the surface of the Moon, then launching your
crew and then they land on the Moon and what
they need is already there waiting for them. That version
is already what we're pretty much thinking about. In terms
of going to Mars. The recognition that a long trip

(25:35):
to Mars, the long you know it's gonna take, I
believe it's like six months to get to Mars. You'd
have to be on the Martian surface for more than
a year before this the planets were to align for
you to even come back again for another like six
month trip. So there's like when human beings go to Mars.
It's going to be a year's long effort, and that
can't all everything, all that infrastructure, all of that hardware,

(25:58):
can't be contained in a single space craft, and so
the idea is that is going to have to be
requiring multiple launches. You get to Mars, you start generating
new rocket fuel for the return from the Martian soil.
This is all being done automatically, uh, with robots and whatnot.
And then so by the time that the Martian astronauts
actually land and start doing their exploration, they have habitats

(26:20):
set up and everything has been going on. That was
an option that people considered for the Moon as well,
but people realized Kennedy said, by the end of the decade,
I want people walking on the Moon by the end
of the decade, and not just walking on the Moon.
They have to come home safely, and to do that
they this mission, uh profile made the most sense. Yeah,
now thinking about that, that impetus from Kennedy. Of course,

(26:43):
the moon landing was, you know, this great scientific achievement,
but your show frequently stresses the political motivations of the
Apollo program. You know that it was framed in the
words of Kennedy, I think in the ninete that he
said it was a contest between freedom, which for him
obviously meant the United States and tier any, which for
him in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. How
do you think this framing of the uh of of

(27:07):
space exploration as a kind of um, kind of a
war mobilization almost How did that affect how the Apollo
program progressed? And do you think the same achievements within
the same time frame would have been possible if it
were just treated as a kind of peaceful scientific project.
More the way we think of space exploration today, I

(27:28):
don't think we would have gone to the Moon if
we had done it just for peaceful purposes, uh, in
the exact same way, for the exact same reason that
we haven't gone to the moon since, for the exact
same reason that we are not on the moon now
that you know, for the exact same reason that we've
tried to go to the Moon in the past and
everything fell short that we've tried to you know, do
moon missions um and those fell apart. We need the

(27:51):
competition aspect is the thing that drove us. And you know,
you when you grow up, you have this kind of
simplistic view of the space program. And you know, when
you're a kid, you have a simplistic view of lots
of things. And of course it was just this, yeah, okay,
there's the Russian element of this, but we did this
for science and exploration and blah blah blah, No we didn't.
And Kennedy's tapes that were you're gonna hear on episode seven,

(28:15):
in which we focus specifically on the space race itself.
There are tapes that didn't come uh to light until
two thousand and one of Kennedy in the Oval Office
in the White House talking to various scientific advisors in
the head of NASA, James Webb, and basically and he says,
I don't care about space, guys, I don't I just
want to beat the Russians. Give me something that will

(28:37):
allow us to embarrass the Russians and and elevate America. Um,
and let's do that. But I don't care what it is.
I don't care about space only in so far as
it's a political gamemanship sort of thing. And of course,
for most of us growing up, Kennedy is this shining example,
this this cheerleader for space, and he was that publicly, privately,

(28:58):
he didn't give a damn about it. He just wanted
to eat the Russians. Wow. Uh, Now, so you're talking
about something that would be a sort of symbolic achievement,
like you that would show the world that we were
better than the Russians, That would you know, something to
to efface them. But I wonder also, I mean, what's
the role of of uh people trying to to imagine

(29:20):
forward into future military conflicts, because obviously they would have
had in their recent memory UH air superiority as a
decisive factor in World War two and and that kind
of thing. Were they thinking also along those lines? But
just going to the next level up? Sure? I mean,
the Cold War was at its essence, space was basically
just the example that we used to demonstrate to the

(29:43):
world and to the Soviet Union that we were more
technologically advanced and more powerful. It was all about technology.
It was to to you know, do it in a
kind of a crude sort of way. It was a
measuring contest, using technology as a yardstick and basically saying,
you know, hey, our technology is bigger than yours, our
technology is better than yours, and we just proved it. Um.

(30:05):
But of course, out of all of that, you know,
there's so much US military hardware that we used to
this day that came out of the Apollo program, be
at the rockets, or the satellites, the spy satellites, the
you know, there's so much that that it wouldn't be
here if it wasn't for the Space program. There's also
a ton of personal stuff. I mean, you wouldn't have

(30:27):
your cell phones, and you wouldn't have your GPS and
satellite TV and and half of the medical advances that
have been made over the last fifty years and stuff
like that also came out of the space program. And
you certainly wouldn't have your laptop. So it's not like
there wasn't it was a purely military effort, But the
military was more than happy to take the things that
NASA learned going to the Moon and say, hey, how

(30:47):
can we use these for for war fighting? We're gonna
be able to piggyback um a lot of stuff off
of this and uh and be able to use it
against our enemies should should have ever become necessary. Yeah,
I know several things you mentioned in the podcast to
make it clear how in meshed the space program was
in the nineteen sixties with the Armed forces. I remember
initially a problem with I don't remember which of the

(31:09):
three astronauts from eleven it was, but that one of
them was not eligible to apply to be an astronaut
because they were not active duty military. Is that correct? Yeah,
that was Neil Armstrong. He got out of the military
and when he became a test pilot UM and was
still working with the military and flying all these military aircraft,
but he was out of the Navy by that point.
He got out of the Navy when he left Korea

(31:31):
after his years spent in the Korean War. And Yeah,
at that time when Mercury, the Project Mercury, and even
into the early days of Gemini, they were only taking
military UM personnel because there were so few people they needed,
you know, pilots who were on the cutting edge of things,
and you didn't really have civilian pilots flying cutting edge aircraft.

(31:51):
So it made sense at that time to pull people
from the military. That's NASA still does it to this day. Um,
it's not. It's not restricted to the military anymore. Uh.
And you certainly have various scientists and stuff like that,
But in terms of your pilots, you know, when you
were flying the Space Shuttle. I would bet the vast majority,
if not all, of those pilots for the Space Shuttle
still came out of the military. Oh yeah, so do

(32:13):
you do you want to say anything else about this
was something that that caught my interest in those early episodes,
the role of um cutting edge aircraft like the X
fifteen in our sort of escalation towards later space flight. Yeah,
the X fifteen was one of those aircraft that Neil
Armstrong flew uh in his test flight experience. The X
fifteen is basically rocket. It's basically a missile that has

(32:35):
these tiny, little stubby wings and a cockpit on the
front um and it is it can't is not capable
of taking off from the ground. It has to be
attached to the wing of a bomber and then taken
up to altitude and then it is dropped and you
kick on that engine and then you can can head
up by The X fifteen will fly basically at the
edge of space. And uh, the control surfaces on the wings,

(32:57):
those wings are so tiny because it doesn't need them
to fly it. It needs thrusters and and and uh
a little like micro jets that are embedded across the
spacecraft's body of the aircraft's body, because it acts like
a spacecraft once it gets up there. To control it
just uses these little puffs of thrusters to to maneuver
once it's up at high altitude, and then it comes

(33:19):
in for landings. That glides down in lands in these
gigantic um salt fields, these in California, flat flat field.
I think there's a terrifying story you tell about. I
believe it was Neil Armstrong who's flying in one of
these and is like trying to descend, but the nose,
it won't descend because the nose keeps bouncing off of
the top of the atmosphere. Yes, yeah, it wouldn't. He

(33:41):
couldn't get it down. He was he was running low
on fuel. It was time to come back home. He
tried to angle it the plane down. It wouldn't do it.
It kept bouncing off the atmosphere and bouncing back up.
And he was finally able to get it under control,
but he completely ran out of fuel and he was
coming back towards Edwards Air Force Space, which is outside
far outside Los Angeles. But he was coming down so

(34:05):
fast and so out of his flight zone that he
was coming like straight down into Pasadena and was able
finally to get controls and and bring himself back in,
but he landed. It was one of dozens of times
that Neil Armstrong practically died um doing that job, because
he barely eked it back home in time. And that

(34:25):
was that was something that so many of these guys did.
You know, if anyone seen the movie The Right Stuff,
you realize how many people there's that. There's an amazing
scene in the beginning of The Right Stuff. I think
it's Dennis Quaid's character comes in to the bar that's
out there in the middle of the desert, and there's
the wall is covered with all of these smiling faces
of guys in uniform and posing in front of planes,

(34:46):
and he tells the bartender. He's like, he's he's new
to tow Edwards Air Force Space. He's like, I'm going
to be up there someday. You're gonna you're gonna know
who I am. And the bartender says, every single one
of the people on that wall have died. They were
all killed in this in this program testing new aircraft,
and that kind of really humbled both him and the audience.
You suddenly realized, Man, all of the technological advances we

(35:08):
have made have come um at the expense of a
lot of injuries and a lot of death. Yeah. Uh, well, well,
to discuss another edge of your seat descent, maybe we
should switch over to the lunar module and his way
of introduction to that. One of the things I always
remember thinking when I was younger was when I saw
pictures of the Apollo eleven lunar module. I thought, that

(35:28):
doesn't look like a space ship? What what? What? Was?
What was wrong with my thinking? They're like, why, why?
Why is it that that doesn't look like a spaceship?
And that's okay. Yeah. So if you look at the
command module, that's the module in which the men spent
most of their time, that looks like a gum drop
and has a it's a triangular shaped thing, and it's
triangularly shaped because it's first part of its voyage has

(35:52):
to get from the ground on Earth up to orbit
and then onto the Moon, so it needs to be
as sharp and angled as possible, and then when it
comes back down, it needs to blend in forward and
land in the ocean. So everything needs to have sharp edges.
You know sports cars. Your hummer is not a sports
car because it doesn't have the angled lines of a Porsche.
You need something that's going to go through the atmosphere

(36:13):
needs to be sharp so that it can cut through
the atmosphere. The lambs not doing that, the lunar module
can look like an ungainly monstrosity because it's never going
to fly in earth atmosphere. It's only ever gonna take
taste the vacuum of space, and so it doesn't need
to be sharp, it doesn't need to cut through anything,
and so you could basically make it look however you want.
And so the joke was they always called it the bug,

(36:34):
and it really like the two little tiny triangular windows
on the front and then the hatches and various things
you can it's got eyes, it's got a mouth, it
looks like it's got a nose, and yeah, it's it's
it's so ugly. It's beautiful. It's not certainly something that
was designed to look pretty. Was designed purely for functionality.
And they could do that because it was never going
to ever taste atmosphere. Alright, time to take a quick break,

(36:57):
but we'll be right back with more than and we're back.
You tell some excellent stories about the design of the
lunar module, about what company was doing It was a
Grumman that was making it, or north of north of Grumman. Yeah, yeah,
I think it wasn't North of Grumman at the time.
That was a later fusion of two companies. I believe
it was just the grum incorporation at that time. But yeah,

(37:19):
you talk about like the all the design phases and
all all the problems they encountered as they went through.
Do you uh, do you want to get into that
a little bit? Yeah. Mike Lisa was the guy that
we interviewed at Grumman who was one of the test
engineers who basically helped build and test this thing before
it went to space. He was another of my favorite interviews.
He was just so infectiously excited to talk about this it.

(37:42):
Even to this day, he worked Grumman for his entire life.
He still lives in the exact same New York house
that he lived in when he was working on building
the lemb Um, And even to this day he's retired
and he's a docent in a museum, and he still
just kind of like, is there to answer questions about
one of the ludder. They have one of the lunar
modules um at his museum in New York, and I

(38:03):
believe it's Brookhaven Um because that's where they were they
were all built. He was so just his his gushing
enthusiasm for this program was so much fun and when
you go through his wonderful New York accent, it just
made him made him so memorable. But yeah, the things
that they had to do to make sure that this
thing could survive blast off for one and then lunar

(38:25):
descent and take off for another. They they built and
there's some stuff that again, and I'm sure you can
understand this with your own podcast. There's so many things
that get cut for time or whatever, and you're just like, oh,
I wish I could share this with the world and
some of the stuff, and we do share this to
some degree. But they built these shakers basically massive, massive

(38:46):
speakers UM. And just like if you have a speaker
in your house and you put something fragile on top
of it and you crank that thing up to eleven,
it just starts shaking everything off and shaking everything in
your house. Well, that's basically what they did to the
lunar module. They tested every little component individually and then
constructed the lunar module and then put this thing basically
on top of this giant speaker for what isn't all

(39:06):
intensive purposes, a giant speaker, and shook it and shook
it until it fell apart, just to see how long
it would last. Where were the where were its strengths,
where were its physical weaknesses. They would turn it upside
down and shake it to see what fell off. And
every time something fell off, you know, production stopped and
they would go and remachine that piece and fix it again,
because it had to. It had to withstand both the

(39:29):
stress of a launch and of course getting to and
from the Moon. And the lunar module, of course, is
two separate spacecraft, right It's it's got its ascent stage
and the descent stage, and the bottom, the decent stage,
stays on the Moon once they blast off and basically
becomes the launch platform for the ascent stage when it
when it takes off. And so there's just so many

(39:49):
the the amount of technical difficulty and complexity in all
of these machines is breathtaking. It's why the HBO series.
From the Earth to the Moon is a spectacular series.
But my favorite episode is the episode called Spider, and
that's the episode in which you follow the guys along
as they're building louder or module. It's not even doesn't

(40:09):
even really take place in space until the very end.
It's just about a bunch of the guys on the
ground trying to figure out how to build something no
one had ever built before. These guys all designed and
built aircraft. They designed and built the kind of aircraft
that you know that the guys are flying when they're
flying over Korea, or that they're flying as test pilots,
and now all of a sudden, they're building a spacecraft

(40:30):
that is never gonna taste atmosphere, and no one's ever
done it before. Like so much of APAOLA was, we're
building and doing things no one had ever done before.
We don't even know necessarily what we're doing. We're just
we're kind of flying blind and giving our best guesses
and and using really nascent science and technology to kind
of okay, fingers crossed, hope this works. And we of

(40:50):
course we pulled it off not once, but you know,
a dozen times. Yeah. Uh well, speaking of from the
Earth to the Moon. That reminds me of something I
wanted to ask you about. So a lot of times
on the show we end up talking about the interaction
between science fiction and real cutting edge exploration or experiment.
Uh there's just one example that's stuck in my memory

(41:11):
from years ago. I remember reading that. I don't know
if you came across this, but remembering that during the
planning phase there was at least at some point someone
had a concern about the lunar regulth and the idea
that uh so, like the soil covering the surface of
the Moon, that it might be so fine grained that
it would function as a kind of quicksand and that

(41:32):
the lunar module might sink into the Moon or become
stuck in the soil after landing. I don't know if
you get into that later or or if you encountered
that concern, but that was like a gym in my mind,
because it of course turned out not to be the case.
But I'm struck by how much that sounds like a
scene from a pulp sci fi story, like from you know,

(41:53):
something that might be published in Amazing stories. Yeah, and
it was something it was so uh speaking one of
the one of the astronauts, one of the moonwalkers I
spoke to for this podcast was Harrison Schmidt, who flew
aboard Apollo seventeen, and I brought those very things up
with him, and we do address those in episode five,
which is our the actual moon landing mission, the day

(42:15):
we landed on the Moon, and he said those things
were concerns for for several scientists, they were not really
concerns for NASA. They didn't buy into all of that. Um.
He said. It was actually one particular scientist who wasn't
who was an eminent astrophysicist UM whose name eludes me
at the moment, but who kind of went off on

(42:35):
some crazy rabbit trails when it came to landing on
the Moon. But yes, they did think that the lunar
module might hit the lunar surface and then suddenly just
sink beneath it like quicksand they were concerned that the
lunar regular might, when exposed to oxygen um, spontaneously combust.
And so even though I say that almost everyone at
NASA didn't think that was going to happen, I should

(42:58):
also say that Neil's arms Neil Armstrong's mom was convinced
it was going to happen, and when he climbed off
the ladder, he tethered himself and when he took his
first step, he kind of bounced and then stepped back
and then realized, Okay, nothing's happening. I'm gonna be okay.
And then later before when they got back into the
into the lunar module, they took some of that regulars

(43:19):
with them and put it on top of the ascent
engine cover and then started slowly bleeding uh an atmosphere
oxygen back into the into the cabin. But they only
had a little bit of it exposed because they wanted
to test is this thing gonna catch fire? Are we
going to explode? If it is, we want to make
sure that it's just a tiny bit and then we
can determine but if this is gonna go wrong. But

(43:39):
nothing caught fire, and of course they were fine, and
of course they were covered in lunar regular and it's
not you know, so all of that stuff we'd already landed.
The Russians had already landed spacecraft on the Moon, onmanned
spacecraft on the Moon, and those didn't sink, and of course,
the lunar module when it sat down didn't sink, so
I'm sure Neil was pretty convinced it wasn't gonna happen.
But yeah, that was absolutely a fear with a lot

(44:01):
of people. They you know, it's one of those like
I said, we've never done this before. You had no
idea what was going to happen. Uh. Yeah, And as
far as combustion goes, I mean, I can't imagine how
much the specter of what happened with Apollo one would have,
you know, haunted everything that came after. They're sure, and
it's not as if regular isn't scary stuff. So regulars,
like you said, is the is the powdery surface that's

(44:23):
on the on the top of of the of the
lunar surface, and it is fine grain. It is like
talcum powder. It is is ash. It is so incredibly fine,
but it is also so incredibly sharp. Because on Earth,
you have erosion, you have wind, you have water, you
have all these things that take the sort of stuff
that the sort of fine grain sand and stuff like

(44:44):
that and wears off all of those edges over time.
On the Moon, that doesn't happen. There is no wind,
there is no erosion. There is no water, and so everything,
if you look at it under microscopes is incredibly sharp
and incredibly jagged. And while Neil and Buzz were pretty
conservative when they were walking on the Moon, later cruise
started to get much more I should say, when they

(45:07):
were doing their exploring, they were they were bouncing around,
they were jumping, they were falling, they were rolling, blah
blah blah. That regular started actually cutting open their space
suits and releasing oxygen. They later found um and it
would get into the equipment and start ruining equipment. I mean,
it was just it was dangerous stuff. It's still something
that you know, on return missions to the Moon we

(45:29):
have to be very careful of. You don't want to
trape this stuff around because just a little of it,
too much, too much of this, you know, talcum powder
on your on your flight suit, are on your astronauts
uh e v A suits, and it's going to start
cutting cutting holes in it. It's horrifying. I mean, yeah,
I've read about that something before, like the idea of
creating a permanent lunar habitat. You need some kind of

(45:52):
like clean room or something in between two uh to
get them out to deal with the regular problem, but
to bring it back for a second to the idea
of science fiction. One thing that just crossed my mind
earlier today was how strange it is that Uh so,
of course, you know, you had a long tradition of
stories about spaceflight and going to the moon. You know,
the astronauts themselves made reference to Jules fern and and uh,

(46:16):
what's voyage to the moon or or that's how we
got the name Columbia for the for the commandment. That's right,
straight from straight from Jules Verne. Yeah. But the other
one that was crazy for me to be to believe
was that two thousand one of Space Odyssey came out
in nineteen sixty eight, a year before the Moon landing,
and I'd always had it the other way around in
my mind. Um So, do you have a sense of

(46:38):
how the public's view, or maybe even with some of
the people involved, how their view of space exploration in
the late nineteen sixties would have been influenced or colored
by their engagement with science fiction. Oh, it absolutely drove
people like VERNR. Von Braun and even his Russian counterpart
korliev In in Russia. These guys were avid consumers of

(47:01):
science fiction. And this was back in the time, even
before like the movies really started getting big. You had
pulp science fiction. You had all of these um, not
only books, but you'd have magazines that came out with
short stories that Isaac Asthmov and Ray Bradbury and all
of these like science fiction giants were writing at the time. Um,
those guys were eating those things up, and it absolutely

(47:22):
drove them to do what they did. I have a
dear friend who works at NASA, and I once told her,
you know something about how much I love science fiction,
how it's my favorite genre, and how Star Trek specifically
is my my all time favorite piece of art that
humans have ever made. Um and and I said, And
she said something like, well, you know what you play

(47:45):
in You play in fake space. I worked in real
space and I and I told her, yes, but you
are surrounded by people the only reason they are working
in real space is because they were inspired by this
fake space. That this drove so many people, whether it
be the people who designed the Saturn five and all
these rockets, where it inspired them to become astronauts. You know,

(48:07):
for the last fifty sixty years, people the space program
is populated by real people who were entirely energized and
inspired by the thoughts and imaginations and and sort of
wild fanciful stories that were created by science fiction. So
in addition to just motivating people to want to explore space,

(48:28):
do you ever get the sense that the science fiction
at all colored people's assumptions about what would happen in
space and space exploration? Oh? Yeah, absolutely. I mean I
don't know if I have any specific stories, but yeah,
you certainly, in doing this kind of research come across
those sorts of things. I mean, even like you brought
up earlier with the regular thinking people were going to
sink and stuff like that, you know, going Apollo eleven

(48:50):
landed on the moon in July of nineteen sixty nine,
we already have two decades of of really heard of
not hard sci fi, not in the in the technical
term of that sense, um, but you have you've got
a lot of science fiction movies by this time. And
those science fiction movies are you know, go everything back
from some of the early sort of French filmmaking in

(49:12):
which you have little you know, jewels verne ships being
shot out of cannons and landing on the Moon and
little guys popping out and encountering all of these crazy
space aliens, and of course they're not wearing space suits.
But nobody knew. Nobody knew what what was on the Moon.
I mean, obviously, in the late sixties and stuff like that,
we've been studying it. It did, but back in the
early days, nobody knew. People thought that there were People

(49:33):
thought they saw vegetation and rivers and and and animals
and stuff on the Moon when they started to look
through like proto nascent telescopes and stuff like that. So yeah,
absolutely you had science fiction that was coloring the assumptions
of everybody going forward, and you you know, that kind
of had to run smack dab into science and people
going Okay, that's that can't possibly be true. Or you know,

(49:55):
we know there's no atmosphere. Okay, that's going to remove
any sort of ideas of life at least as we
know it existing on the surface of the Moon. So
you know there's that. But yeah, it absolutely colored colored everything.
It's one of those things that, like in any enterprise
in human life, once you do the thing, once you
make that exploration, so many of those assumptions. Of course,

(50:15):
fall away in the face of facts and evidence and
science and whatnot. But before someone is bold enough to
make that first step and can either confirm or disprove it, um,
you know, it remains an open possibility. There was one
quote that I may have been in your first episode
that I really liked. It was I believe an astronaut
named Dick Gordon or was he an astronaut or did

(50:37):
he just work with NASA? Were he anyway? Sorry? The
quote is uh, he says, what did we discover when
we went to the Moon. We discovered Earth? Uh. And
this seems to be a common sentiment among a lot
of astronauts that they have a different kind of view
of of life on Earth after being in space. Yeah,

(50:57):
Dick Gordon was an Apollo astronaut, and his impress Shian
was almost universal. Um. Even even the Apollo eleven astronauts
talk about that seeing the Earth from a distance um
was more life changing than even walking on the Moon. Um.

(51:18):
And almost to a man, every single one of them
said that they just their lives were transformed. Harrison Schmidt,
ironically is one of the only ones who didn't kind
of have some euphoric experience, and I don't know if
that's because he was much more of a grounded scientist
or whatnot. But everyone kind of came back. Their lives changed.
Some people found God. Some people came back and became artists.

(51:39):
They just wanted to try to communicate via their art
and their painting and sculptures and stuff like that, what
they what they learned from seeing the moon and from
seeing the Earth. Um A lot of them came back
very seriously engaged in and promoting uh conservation and and
and environmentalism and stuff like that. The environmentalism movement pretty

(51:59):
much kicked off when Apollo eleven took the first picture
of the Earth rise from the Moon, and all of
a sudden we realized, Wow, the Earth is this tiny,
fragile little thing sitting in the middle of this gigantic
black void, and it just seems so fragile. And another
asteroat I can't remember who it was, described it as

(52:20):
a as a Christmas ornament hanging in the binky black
of space, and you suddenly realize, oh, okay, this is fragile.
We need to take care of this. And the other
thing that so many people realized is hey, from orbit,
there are no borders. This is not like a globe
where you recognize where one country starts another country ends.
This is ludicrous, the sort of fights and political infighting

(52:43):
and stuff that we have. We are human beings and
we need to be human beings first, before we're even Americans,
before we Russians, before where anything you get, as Neil
Degrass Tyson would call it, the cosmic perspective. Interesting how
that intersects with what we were talking about earlier with
John F. Kennedy and the you know, the motivations of
the space program being almost purely geopolitical to begin with.

(53:06):
You know, there's so much about human life and so
many of the things that humans do that even if
it's done pursuing one particular thing, we come out of
it realizing so much more. It's such a larger experience.
It informs so much more about what we are and
who we are, and how we live and how we
should relate to each other. Um And that's just that's

(53:26):
a exactly, it's a that's a terrific example of that.
We may have done something for one reason, but what
we got out of it was so much deeper and
so much richer. But it's still a lesson we need
to take on board today. I mean, it's clearly something
that we haven't listened to enough. You know, we're we're
not taking care of our planet like we should. We're
still having the same sort of petty political squabbles and

(53:48):
one up and shipped like you know. But at least
now we have something to refer back to and say, hey,
knock it off humans. All right, Well, it's been really
great talking to you, Brandon. I really enjoyed this, and
again I really do enjoy with the show. Um, I'm
glad to be glad to be able to recommend it
to our listeners. So so thanks so much, Thanks so much.
I I hope I hope they enjoyed two. I think
they will. All right, Well, that does it huge. Thanks

(54:12):
again to Brandon Fibbs for joining us today. If you
haven't checked out nine days in July yet, you should
give it a listen. I've been really enjoying it and
I think you will too. In the meantime, if you
want to check out any other episodes of our podcast,
you can go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot
com that will get you there, or you can just
look up Stuff to Blow your Mind on wherever you

(54:32):
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app or um you know you know all the places.
Big thank you as always to our excellent audio producer
Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in
touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello,
you can reach us by email at contact at stuff

(54:53):
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