Strange Stuff We Sent To Space

Getting into space is hard, which is why it might surprise you to learn about some of the weird, wild and goofy stuff we've sent up there. From action figures to salmonella to Elon Musk's personal Tesla Roadster, we look at a collection of weird things we've sent to space.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. He there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech
are you? You know, if you spend enough time with

(00:25):
a young kid, like you know, four or five, then
you're likely to get pulled into a conversation at which
the kid starts asking about how the world works and
then just keeps ongoing and every answer you provide leads
to more questions. This can actually be funny, It can

(00:45):
end up being confusing, It could be frustrating. Sometimes it
can get intimidating once you start to reach the limits
of your own knowledge and understanding. You've got this inquisitive
child trying to make sense of the world around that
they're looking to you as the authority on all things everywhere,

(01:05):
and you are perilously close to admitting that you don't
actually know how it all works. And we're all just
really doing the best we can, and we're making up
a lot of this stuff as we go along the way.
Maybe I'm projecting here, but my point is that kids
have this deep desire to know how stuff works and
why things are the way they are, and this same

(01:29):
spirit underlies the core of science. You know, we use
this process and we use documentation, and we use hypotheses
and tests to get a better handle on what's going
on and why. But at the heart of it all
are these questions. And sometimes the answers we find open
up a whole new array of questions, and that gets

(01:52):
exciting and sometimes a little exhausting and sometimes scary. Now
that is a why old preamble to this very very
goofy episode, because we're going to talk about some of
the strangest stuff we've sent. Keep in mind, sending stuff

(02:12):
into space is wicked expensive. Every pound of payload you
add requires a certain amount of fuel, and that fuel
is costly, Like it is a non trivial thing to
add to a payload that's going to be sent into
outer space. Privatized space industry has changed this a little bit,

(02:33):
but it's still wicked expensive, which makes it even more
interesting when you have some very weird stuff having been
sent up there. Now, some of this stuff could sound arbitrary,
or it's you know, a goof or it was some
form of promotion or maybe a symbolic gesture, and those

(02:57):
are often fair assessments. There will be cases, as we
talk about in this episode, where undeniably it was not
for some noble cause. However, we also have had some
weird stuff we've sent up that you know, once you
get it out into space, you realize it behaves differently.
And that was the point that we sent the stuff

(03:18):
up in order to see how it's affected, to understand
why it's different, how this could be useful in the future. Now,
as I said, not everything we're going to cover today
is useful. A lot of it's not. But as Little
Red Riding Hood once said, I know things now, many
valuable things that I hadn't known before. And some of

(03:42):
these things include the links to which companies or rich
people will go in order to promote stuff or get
a big pr splash sometimes to the moon is being literal, y'all.
So in no particular order, I'm not going chronologically or
in order of craziness. I guess here are some of

(04:05):
the weird things that have made the journey up to
space for one reason or another. Some of these things
returned to Earth, some of them were left up there.
And we're going to start off with one of the
strangest critters on the planet the tartar grade. Now tartar
grades are tiny. They measure less than a millimeter in length.
Typically you're going to be using a microscope to really

(04:27):
observe these little critters. Now magnified. They kind of look
like puffy, eight legged creatures that you would expect to
see on an episode of Doctor Who. They have a
mouth that looks kind of like a vacuum cleaner attachment.
They're sort of cute. I think it just depends upon
what you think of as cute. I think they look

(04:49):
kind of cute, but other people might think they look horrifying.
And they are resilient creatures, that is putting it lightly.
They can survive an in readibly harsh conditions from extreme temperatures,
either extreme cold, like colder than any normal organism could survive,

(05:09):
or extreme heat. They can survive beyond the temperature of boiling.
They can also survive insane amounts of pressure. They also
can survive exposure to nuclear radiation. They can survive for
long periods without any water, and they do this by
entering what's called a ton state. It's kind of like

(05:31):
suspended animation. They curl up, they tuck their legs in
their head and curl up into a ball, and essentially
biological processes halt. In fact, their cells end up creating
these matrices that keep all of their DNA intact, because otherwise,
if they dried out enough, things like that would deteriorate.

(05:53):
But effectively they put scaffolding in place. I mean they
don't put it. It happens by natural process, but this
sort of scaffolding forms inside their cells that holds everything
in place. While this creature goes into suspended animation and
it can stay like that for ages. Then when it
encounters water again, the water dissolved, these matrix seas from

(06:17):
inside the cells and the cells return to their normal state.
They come out of the ton state. They go back
to being a happy little water bear. Oh that's by
the way. Another name for tartar grades is water bears. Now,
these critters can be found on every continent here on Earth,
including Antarctica. Also, they can be found in oceans, they

(06:38):
can be found in fresh water. They could probably be
found in your yard. And there are thousands of species
of Tartar grades and they're super cool. But then there
was a question if these suckers are that resilient, and
they have shown an incredible ability to survive even the
harshest of conditions. Would they survive if they were exposed

(07:02):
to the vacuum of space, Well, that was a question
that scientists wanted answers too, and so in two thousand
and seven, the European Space Agency sent up a packet
of Tarta grades as one of many experiments conducted during
a mission. And the Tartar grades were exposed to the

(07:22):
vacuum of space, even to cosmic radiation. This is stuff
that could really mess up a human. I mean, the
vacuum of space. If you're exposed to at for any
length of time, you're going to be messed up, to
be certain, and probably dead. Cosmic radiation could cause really
big problems down the road, which is one of the
main concerns we have about designing long term space missions

(07:46):
in a way that's safe for the people who are
aboard them. But sure enough, upon retrieval, these Tartar grades
were found to survive the process with no real ill effects.
Some folks even speculated that maybe tartar grades actually are
not terrestrial creatures, that they had arrived on Earth by

(08:08):
hitching rides on material that ultimately crashed into the planet.
There are a lot of theories that perhaps the seeds
of life on Earth actually came from outer space. However,
scientists have ruled that out for tarte grades. They found
that tartar grades did in fact originate here on Earth.

(08:28):
So while you might hypothesize that they could have survived
a trip through space until landing on a plant that
has water, that's not what actually happened. That being said,
tartar grades might play a part in experimenting with organisms
to see if they could survive on other planets in
the future. You know, a planet that might be harsh

(08:51):
for most organisms might actually be a suitable place for
tartar grades. That's really far off in the future, if
it ever happens at all, but it is a possibility now.
When it comes to unlikely astronauts, dinosaurs, I would say
would be way up there. I mean, for one thing,
they've been extinct for millions of years, so it's really

(09:11):
hard to get one to commit to the strict training
regiment of becoming an astronaut. Now, this has not stopped
dinosaurs from getting into space. They've actually done it a
couple of times, not on their own as it turns out,
had a lot of help from US. So the first
time was in nineteen eighty five, a physicist named Lauren
Acton had applied for and secured the role of payload

(09:33):
specialist for a Space Shuttle mission designated STS fifty one.
F Acton's area of interest was in solar activity. He
was keenly interested in studying the Sun, particularly to learn
if there were ways to predict events like coronal mass
ejections that could potentially impact communication systems back here on Earth.

(09:54):
He was also from Montana, a state that happens to
be rich dinosaur fossils, and that might be why he
brought some fossilized bone and eggshell fragments from a Miasaura peeblesaurum.
And I have no idea if I'm saying that correctly,
but it's a dinosaur that fed their nesting young. So

(10:17):
they would build a nest, they would lay eggs, the
eggs would hatch, and the dinosaurs would continue to care
for their young. This kind of flew in the face
of preconceived ideas about dinosaurs, and a lot of folks
had just assumed they would lay their eggs, wait until
they hatched, and then you know you're out of the home. Kids,
go have some good luck and get out of the house.

(10:39):
That's not how these dinosaurs operated. It's also, by the way,
the official state fossil for Montana, so it kind of
was a representation of home and of science. So it
was a very symbolic sort of thing. I would love
to say that the astronauts did some crazy experiments with
those dinosaur fossils, but again it was more symbolic than scientific,

(10:59):
but really cool a neat gesture. It's also not the
only time that dinosaur fossils have made the journey into orbit.
In nineteen ninety eight, the Endeavor space shuttle carried a
seal a physicist skull to the Mere Space Station. Again,
I could be completely mispronouncing this. At the Carnegie Museum

(11:19):
loaned the skull to the to NASA and the astronauts
promise they would take very, very good care of it,
and sure enough, they returned the skull safe and sound
at the conclusion of the mission. As for why they
wanted to take the skull up there, I mean, I'm
guessing it was to promote science. In twenty fourteen, NASA
included a fossil belonging to a t Rex on a

(11:40):
test flight for the Orion spacecraft. Now as a test flight,
there were no human crew aboard this spacecraft, but it
was the first time that the Orion spacecraft would enter orbit.
The mission lasted four hours. The spacecraft made two orbits
of the Earth before re entering the atmosphere. The fossil
was on loan from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science,

(12:00):
and the Orion capsule is now on display at the
Kennedy Space Center of Visitor Complex. By the way, I
highly recommend visiting the Kennedy Space Center. My partner and
I went there on a whim one year. We ended
up becoming annual pass holders, even though we knew there
was very little chance we would be able to get
back within that year. We just were so thrilled with it.

(12:21):
It was so inspirational. If you are at all interested
in rocketry or space, you have got to go. I
got very emotional just looking at the various spacecraft and
launch vehicles, because sometimes you have to remind yourself that
humans are capable of really incredible things when we dedicate
ourselves to it. That's also not the end of dinosaurs

(12:42):
in space. More recently, Blue Origin, which is Jeff Bezos's
private space company, sent fossilized dinosaur bones to space as
part of the Huntsville Science Festival and an initiative called
Dream Big Alabama. These fossils were on a suborbital flight,
so they didn't get to circle the planet like the
previous cases. They were from a family of raptors, and

(13:05):
this was all part of an effort to promote science
and get people excited about stems subjects, and you know,
inspiration is a really important goal. Okay, we got more
crazy stuff that we've sent into space to talk about.
Before we get to that, let's take a quick break.

(13:28):
We're back and we are going to transition away from
dinosaurs to bacteria. So let's talk about salmonella. This family
of bacteria are perhaps best known as pathogens. You know,
you've probably heard about needing to be careful around food,
make sure making sure that you don't end up contracting salmonella.

(13:51):
Salmonella can invade your cells and make you really, really sick. Typically,
humans can become infected with salmonella through food poisoning. It
gets more specific than that, but it also gets really icky.
Let's just say that if the facility that is processing
your food or preparing your food isn't following good cleanliness procedures.

(14:16):
You have yourself some potential salmonella outbreaks on your hands,
and these can be really serious. They can even be
life threatening in severe cases. So salmonella is no joke, right,
So why did we send it into space? Well, scientists
want to see what affects salmonella might experience in a
microgravity environment, because if we are serious about human space exploration,

(14:41):
particularly long term human space exploration, including colonization, it would
be really beneficial to understand what might happen with infectious diseases,
including stuff like salmonella. It's a pretty long way to
the nearest minute clinic once you're out in space, after all,
So getting an understanding of this is critical to ensuring

(15:06):
success for future missions. So in twenty twenty one, scientists
did a pair of experiments. One of them took place
here on Earth, the other took place aboard the International
Space Station. Now the Earth one was essentially the control
and in both experiments, scientists took some human cells and

(15:26):
they infected these cells with pathogens salmonella. Scientists already knew
that organic cells undergo changes when in microgravity. We had
already made this observation. We know, you know, when people
go up into space and they spend a lot of
time there, they biologically change. Those changes can be on

(15:47):
the macro level and noticeable things like you know, muscle
loss because you're no longer supporting your weight because you're
in a microgravity environment, but they could be all the
way down to a cellular level. So what would happen
with human cells infected with salmonella in microgravity? Well, the
conclusions aren't quite as definitive as we would like. This

(16:09):
is because the experiment itself had a couple of problems
along the way. So not all the samples that were
sent to space came back in good enough condition to
do a full analysis on them. So that's part of
the problem is that we don't have the full collection
of cells to look at. There's another issue because the

(16:31):
International Space Station version of the experiment had a slightly
different but potentially significant different amount of pathogen introduced to
the control sample so or to the human cells, as
opposed to the Earth one. So in other words, if
you haven't used exactly the same amount of pathogen in
the cells that an alone could affect the outcome of

(16:55):
the experiment, So there's you know, you can't have firm
conclusion because you didn't have truly equal experiments on Earth
and in the space station. However, with those qualifiers in mind,
the scientists found that salmonella appeared to be more virulent
in a microgravity environment. That's pretty concerning, right, for bacteria

(17:18):
to become more virulent. But in addition, the human cells
appeared to upregulate, So in other words, the cells were
ramping up their response to infection, primarily by upregulating genes
related to inflammation, which is a response to infection. The
findings have helped expand our understanding of how the humans

(17:40):
would respond to infectious diseases in space. That this could
be very, very different. Therefore, we need to learn more
about it to be prepared for those eventualities that would
be awfully handy once we start sending people on longer
missions to distant places in the future. Another question that
I think everyone has rattling around in the back of

(18:04):
their mind, perhaps not even consciously, but I know that
it has to be gnawing at everyone is how does
the environment of space affect lego minifigs. Okay, again, probably
I'm projecting here, but we have sent lego minifigs to space,
specifically three minifigs, two representing the mythological figures of Jupiter

(18:29):
and Juno, Roman deities who, if you prefer the Greek versions,
are similar to Zeus and Hera. The other minifig represents
the not at all mythological figure and actual real world
historical figure of Galileo Galilei. So why were these lego
figures sent into space? Well, these were actually loaded onto

(18:53):
the spacecraft Juno. Juno was sent from Earth to travel
to the orbit of Jupiter. So thematically there is a
connection because you have the figure of Jupiter and his
wife Juno. These are obviously associated with the planet Jupiter,

(19:13):
and then Galileo historically made some really important observations about
the planet Jupiter. So these minifigs are really symbolic and
kind of a fun touch to include with this spacecraft.
The spacecraft has been in orbit around Jubiter since July fourth,
twenty sixteen. That's not when it launched, that's when it

(19:33):
arrived at Jupiter. It actually took oh, I don't know,
almost five years to get from Earth to Jupiter. It
actually launched on August fifth, twenty eleven. So that is
a very long space journey, right, I mean, you think
most most human endeavors in space can be measured in
weeks or months, A couple in a year or more,

(19:56):
but only a few examples of that. But this was
five years of traveling through space to get to the destination.
The Juno spacecraft continues to make observations around Jupiter to
this day. It's in a polar orbit around the planet.
It has continued its mission beyond the planned seven years scope.
So it's another great example of a NASA mission that

(20:17):
manages to continue to provide US scientific data beyond the
planned mission. Currently, the long term plan here is to
keep Juno in orbit around Jupiter until late twenty twenty five,
and at that point the spacecraft will be de orbited
on purpose to enter Jupiter's atmosphere. The minifigs will truly

(20:42):
enter the realm of myth at that point. I do
not expect them to survive that travel. Godspeed you tiny
plastic heroes. In fact, a lot of different toys have
been sent up to space. Santa probably goes there every Christmas, right,
I mean, that's probably how he's able to get to
all the different people Christmas. He it's orbit. But other

(21:04):
space missions have also brought toys along for the ride.
One such toy was a Buzz Lightyear action figure, you
know Buzz Lightyear from the Toy Story series. In two
thousand and eight, the action figure hitched a ride aboard
the Space Shuttle Discovery as part of an initiative to
get kids excited about space in particular, but science in general,

(21:26):
and Disney and NASA actually partnered together to create some
interactive experiences like games and work assignment type of stuff
that involved Buzz Lightyear in an effort to trick kids
into learning stuff. Buzz's journey brought him to the International
Space Station. He stayed on the ISS for fifteen months

(21:49):
before returning to Earth, and again he hitched a ride
on Space Shuttle Discovery. It's just obviously a very different
mission because it was a year and a half, well
not quite a year and a half later, but a
year and some change later. The toy even got his
own parade Walt Disney World. Upon being once more shackled
with the surly bonds of Earth. I love that I

(22:11):
wish I had been at Disney world when that had happened,
Just to watch a parade with an action figure of
buzz Lightyear, I'm guessing on some sort of vehicle being
celebrated as a returning hero. I wonder if the person
who was wearing the buzz Lightyear costume that day felt
like they were being overshadowed by a figure a fraction

(22:31):
of their height. I guess I should also mention that
the child aka Grogu aka his real name Baby Yoda,
has also made the trip to space for reels. In
twenty twenty, a SpaceX Dragon capsule completed the first operational
flight of a Dragon capsule carrying a crew to the

(22:52):
International Space Station and a cute plush toy, a Baby Yoda,
was tagging along for the ride. It was both a
morale booster and a quote unquote microgravity indicator, at least
according to the reports I read. I guess that means
that when you see Baby Yoda's floating around the capsule,
you're in microgravity, and when he plummets to whatever surface

(23:16):
is down, then you're out of microgravity again. At least
I guess it's what a microgravity indicator is. Okay, I've
got a few more weird things that we've sent up
into space that we should talk about before we jump
onto these final little entries in our Goofy episode today,
let's take another quick break. Okay, so you probably know

(23:50):
that astronaut food is famous for not being terribly appetizing.
I want to say that, for the longest time, the
astronaut meal that was considered the best was the spicy
shrimp cocktail because it had enough flavor to kind of
punch through the perpetual head cold that astronauts develop when

(24:11):
they're out in space. Because you know, all of your
tissues kind of swell a bit when you're out in space,
and this in an intern affects your sense of smell
and your sense of taste, and so a lot of
food just ends up not tasting like much of anything.
So you have to have stuff that has really strong
flavors to kind of punch through it. All. Well, a

(24:32):
lot of astronauts are not super crazy about the foods necessarily,
and you know, you also have to be really careful
with it because obviously anything that would escape a container
could potentially create problems for the electronics aboard spacecraft and
space stations and the like. Well, astronaut John Young got
a real talking to you about his own choice of

(24:53):
contrabrand food that he smuggled aboard the Gemini three spacecraft
way back in nineteen because he got settled into the
Gemini three with his commander, Virgil Gus Grissom, while having
a secret corned beef sandwich hidden away in one of

(25:14):
the pockets of his space suit, and a couple of
hours into their mission, he pulled it out and offered
some to his commander, and together they took a couple
of bites of the sandwich while ignoring the food that
NASA had actually included for their space flight. However, very
early on they realized that, oh, this does mean that

(25:37):
we're creating crumbs, and these crumbs are just free floating
around the capsule and in a worst case scenario, they
could potentially interfere with the electronic systems we have and
then it's crisis by corned beef sandwich. So they tucked
the sandwiches away and they continue the rest of their mission. However,

(26:00):
ASSA was now aware of the contraband sandwich, so when
they did return to Earth safely, they later were required
to attend a very serious debriefing with a whole bunch
of people who were very very cross with them for
introducing corned beef to the capsule of the Gemini three spacecraft.

(26:24):
They said that at the time it was very intense,
but in retrospect, with enough time having passed since it happened,
it's just sort of absurdly funny and I could appreciate
that now. Other food that has been outside the norm
that has made the trip up to space include a

(26:46):
pizza sent to the International Space Station back in two
thousand and one. Now, this really was just a big
old publicity stunt from Pizza Hunt delivering a pizza to
the space station. Reportedly, Pizza Huh paid a million dollars
to the Russian Space program in order to have one
of their pizzas specially wrapped sent up to Yuri Usachov

(27:10):
on the International Space Station. They had to go with
Russia because NASA has a strict rule about not engaging
with commercial brands. NASA does not allow endorsements. They don't
want to do product placement, Like the toy stuff is
a little borderline if you're being honest, but like they
definitely don't want branded foods up there. NASA wants to

(27:32):
maintain objectivity and not be crass in the eyes of
the scientific community, not to lower itself to becoming a
brand placement for various companies out there. But the Russians
were happy to take on the gig once the price
was right. Now, of course, we do have to mention

(27:54):
that one of the strange things that we sent up
to space was a Tesla Roadster, specifically Elon Musk's personal
Tesla Roadster. Musk used his car as a payload for
a test flight of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy launch vehicle. Now
it was like, you know, we're gonna put this in

(28:15):
place of what a normal payload would be to show
you the capability of this heavy launch vehicle. And the
car had a mannequin in a spacesuit strapped down behind
the wheel named Starman and the Roadster and Starman and
the Falcon Heavy took off in February twenty eighteen, and

(28:36):
the car was launched into a heliocentric orbit means an
orbit around the Sun. It's larger than the Earth's orbit
and a little smaller than Mars' orbit. And also the
orbital path crosses Mars's orbital path. A couple of times,
although you know, obviously not having the Roadster and Mars
at the same place at the same time, just that

(28:58):
their paths cross. The mannequin has two songs playing on repeat,
one in each year. One is Space Oddity and the
other there is life on Mars and David Bowie is
far out man. I guess, of course, in space, no
one can hear David Bowie. You know, you don't have
any molecules to bounce around to carry the vibrations. If

(29:21):
it's within an oxygenated helmet, then yes, you've got a
medium through which the music can move. If there's anything
inside the helmet that allows for that, you could do that.
But obviously if you just had it on the car speakers,
you wouldn't hear anything. Anyway. We don't even know if
that music is still playing. It only plays if the
battery is still got some juice left in it. As

(29:44):
I record this, the roadster is nearly two hundred million
miles away from Earth, but it is getting closer to
us at the moment. It's currently moving away from Mars
at this point in its orbit, though depending on when
you're listening to this episode, those conditions could be very different.
There are websites that track the roadster's location, so you
can actually check up on it and see where it is. Reportedly,

(30:07):
the car has a copy of Douglas Adams's science fiction
comedy novel The Hitchicker's Guide to the Galaxy inside the
glove box, and there's also a towel there, which is important.
You always need to know where your towel is. That's
one of the jokes from Hitchecker's Guide to the Galaxy.
There's a sign with don't panic written on it on
the dashboard, another Hitchicker's Guide reference. Really cute, honestly, and

(30:32):
again kind of a publicity stunt, but also just kind
of neat, Like I can't be mad about it. For
one thing. I mean, it's the car from a billionaire,
a guy who, at certain points in history has been
the richest man in the world. If he wants to
shoot his cars off into space whatever, I guess that's fine.

(30:53):
It's not like I expect him to use that money
to really directly benefit humans in meaningful ways. So if
he wants to shoot his fleet of cards into space,
go on. Now we get into the grim part of
the episode, So let's talk about human remains in space.
One of the fringe theories that has made the round

(31:15):
since the early days of the space race is that
there could be corpses in orbit around Earth, specifically lost
cosmonauts Soviet era astronauts who died in midmission. Now, it
is true that the Soviet Union spent a lot of
time and effort concealing various accidents and disasters during their

(31:38):
space program, and some of those disasters included the death
of cosmonauts, but there's no evidence that any of them
were stuck in orbit. There was one case where there
was a depressurization catastrophe aboard a Soyo's capsule as it
decoupled from an orbiting platform, but that Saya's capsule did

(32:02):
return to Earth the terrible, terrible tragedy that happened. And
there was another case where a parachute failed to deploy
and the cosmonaut aboard that capsule passed away as well.
But there's only ever been one recorded accident that occurred
above the Carmen line. This is a boundary that's recognized

(32:23):
by some but not all, scientific organizations, as the boundary
between space and the Earth's atmosphere. Only one accident has
ever happened above that. All the other space related accidents
have happened below that line. However, this doesn't mean that
there have not been human remains sent to space. We
have put some there on purpose as a sort of

(32:43):
space burial. The first recorded example of a space burial
kind of really or remains being brought to space, would
have happened in nineteen ninety two. This was part of
Space Shuttle mission STS fifty two, and it was aboard
the Space Shuttle Columbia. The crew brought along with them
a small sample of the remains of Gene Roddenberry. Ron

(33:06):
Berry is the guy who created star Trek, and a
lot of people who have pursued careers in the space
industry credit star Trek as being one of the reasons
they got interested in the subject of space in the
first place. Interestingly, ron Berry would be buried in space
a second time, as another sample of his remains was
aboard a privately funded space burial in nineteen ninety seven.

(33:27):
Now the ninety two example, the remains went up into
space and returned to Earth at the conclusion of the
Space Little mission. The ninety seven example, the remains were
sent up to space to board a rocket and eventually
returned to Earth when the spacecraft carrying them ultimately re
entered the air's atmosphere in two thousand and two. There
are a few companies that offer space burials that will

(33:52):
transport remains into space. Some of them will go for
suborbital flights, so it doesn't go all the way up
into orbit and it does come back down. But depending
upon your view of where space begins, you can say
the remains went to space, and very few people have
been to space in the grand scheme of things, so
you can kind of see where the appeal is there.

(34:14):
But others offer services that would put remains on the
Moon or into deep space. Some of the people who
have had their remains sent to space include people like
Timothy Leary, James Dewan who played Scottie from Star Trek,
Clyde Tombaugh, who's an astronomer who discovered Pluto way back

(34:36):
in nineteen thirty. His remains, or sample a small sample
of his remains are aboard the New Horizon spacecraft that
ultimately will leave our Solar system, so he would become
the first person to have part of their remains go
outside of our Solar system and there are others as well.

(34:56):
This is just a tiny group of them. And of
course this is not a definitive list of all the
weird stuff we've sent into space. There is so much.
You know, We've sent a lightsaber prop that Mark Hambell
used when he was playing Luke Skywalker in the Star
Wars films. The Voyager has a golden record that, among

(35:20):
other things, as a recording of Johnny be Good on it,
which is pretty awesome. A piece of the Right Brothers
original airplane has gone up into space. Amelia Earhart's wristwatch
has gone into space. There's so much more, including pictures
from Playboy magazine which were sent to the Moon. I
didn't learn about that when I was taught about the

(35:43):
lunar landing. But apparently this was kind of a kind
of a prank pulled on the astronauts, like they weren't
aware that it was in specific mission books that they
were using once they were on the surface of the Moon.
So can you just imagine you're on the Moon. You
can see the planet Earth in the sky above you.

(36:05):
You are further away than anyone else has ever been really,
apart from the astronauts who had actually circled behind the
Moon and come back, and you're trying to complete an
historic mission on the lunar surface, and you turn your
mission book page and there's the centerfold from like nineteen

(36:27):
sixty eight or something. I would have imagined that I
had gone crazy. If that had happened to me, I
would have sat there and thought, this is what losing
your mind feels like. But no, it's a prank, ah,
those wacky NASA folks. All right, Well, that's just again
a small sample of some of the weird stuff we've
sent into space, and obviously there's a lot more. Maybe

(36:51):
I'll do a follow up at some point and talk
about some other examples. But I hope you enjoyed this.
I hope you are well. If you have suggestions for
topics I should cover and tech stuff, reach out to me.
You can let me know on Twitter. The handle for
the show is tech Stuff HSW or you can download
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By putting that into the little search field, you'll see

(37:13):
a little microphone icon. If you use that, you can
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Let me know what you would like to hear in
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Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,

(37:35):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
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