September 9, 2023 • 48 mins
It seems like we largely take it for granted these days, but the fact that we have humans living in space is the realization of a scientific dream a century old. Visit the space stations orbiting Earth past, present and future in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello friends, this is Josh with this week's select Our
June twenty sixteen episode on Space Stations. I like to
think of it as a far out look at living
in space. I hope you enjoy it thoroughly.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with
Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry. This is Stuff you
should Know.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Okay, you sounded like Steve Rule. We were just talking
about Steve Rule, and that was very Brulesque, brew Esque,
not burlesque.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
All right, brewlesu brew Less. You're saying you should do
a movie. I'm surprised you have.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
I could watch a continuous loop of brules Rules over
and over and over. Yeah, and people thought, you don't
be Dune was an homage to that, which.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Or omasure a ripoff, depending on who's well it was.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
It was neither, but it it was reminiscent of it
in good ways. But I don't think that that meant
it ripped it off, or that you were paying tribute to.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
It's definitely not intentional. It was just, you know, two
great sidental.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Two great things that go great together.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Sure, why can't there be both.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Like Reese's cups.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Yeah, they go great with kit cats.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Oh man, they'd be good. Sure, just take two full
kit cats and put two Reese's cups in the middle
like a sandwich.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Uh huh. I think you just came up with something
the news more the rec cat chuckers.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Have you ever looked to the sky at night, seen
some stars flying by and thought, why don't we live
up there? Uh? Sure?
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Have you ever seen the ISS cruising?
Speaker 1 (01:52):
No? I used to. Apparently you can. I used, Yes,
I used to get either text or emails. I can't
remember that. Would you just put it in your zip
code and it sends you texts alerts when the ISS
is going to be flying overhead.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
I thought you were going to say one of the
lead astronauts would just text you be like, Josh, lo up,
what are you doing? We're over your house right now.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
But I mean, basically it's not from the astronaut, but
it's the same thing. It's saying, like, look up in
this direction at this time, and you'll you should be
able to see the ISS pretty neat. Yeah. I don't
think we actually ever went out and looked at it,
because it was always at like three in the morning
or something like that.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Yeah, this really like thrills me to no end. Once
I started looking into this, like I never paid a
lot of attention, and it really just dawned on me,
Like people are living in outer space.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Continuous full time. The International Space Station has been continuously
inhabited since it was launched in nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yeah. In fact, they just took their one hundred thousandth
orbit of Earth. That's really neat in May of this year.
Expedition forty seven began in March.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
That's so cool, man, And like we just it's like
you were saying, you don't really stop and think about it,
but we're living in space now. Yeah, humanity is extended
at least into Earth's orbit, right, that's where we're living.
And we just kind of seemed to take that for granted.
But that wasn't always the case as actually, And I
(03:23):
think the reason why we do kind of take it
for granted is because the conception of living in space
that we're at right now is remedial compared to where
everyone expected it to be in like the mid seventies. Yeah,
when the idea of space colonization was at its peak. Yeah,
I mean NASA Ames Research Center was conducting summer studies
is what they were called, where they would just get
(03:44):
the public really jazzed about living in space. And the
best you can say, or the least you can say,
is that it bore some pretty awesome artists renderings what
space colonies will look like.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Yeah, it seemed like every other issue of Popular Science
was just some cool new picture of like, you know,
one day we're going to be living out.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
Here, right exactly, but the one day seemed a lot
closer than it does now, right.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
But at the most you can say that that space
calony fever that was going on in the seventies definitely
laid the groundwork paved the way for where we are now,
which is living in space. We just don't have like
Stanley Kubrick esque space hotels that are big rotating wheels
at the moment. Doesn't mean we're not going to, yeh.
(04:32):
It just didn't happen as fast as everybody thought it
was going to. And I was trying to figure out why,
and apparently it's because of the Shuttle program. Like this
space colony fever was based on the idea that launching
the Space Shuttle was going to be way cheaper than
launching any of the rockets had been previously. That didn't
pan out to be the case. Yeah, And that there
would be something like like it.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Was going to be like a space taxi. I remember
those words, sixty.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Like at least sixty launches a year, which didn't pan
out to be the case either. But they thought that, yeah,
it was just we're gonna be going back and forth
to space for like next to nothing all the time,
and that we would be colonizing space pretty quickly. That
didn't pan out. The Space Shuttle program didn't pan out
to be that as cheap or as frequent, and so
(05:18):
this dream of space colony or this enthusiasm for space
colonization was kind of lost. But luckily it wasn't lost
by the actual engineers who were in charge of putting
people in space and figuring out how to live in space.
And that whole idea is probably still coming. It's just
a little further down the road.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
And there are many, many, many, hundreds and hundreds of
people that helped make this reality over the years, but
a lot of this can be laid at the feet
of mister Verna von Braun, who was the architect of
the US space program, and he was the big champion
of space stations early on, like in a real viable way.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Well, he was like the Carl Sagan of his day.
He realized that he had a quote he said that
we can publish scientific papers and treatises till hell freeze
is over, but if we don't get the attention of
the taxpayer, we're going We're not going anywhere.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
And how do you do that? You start putting people
on the moon and start building space stations.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
Well, even more basic than that, he started he wrote
like popular articles and popular magazines to get the public's
imagination prime for that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Yeah, And his idea was it was not just like hey,
look at a neat thing we can do. It's you know,
you have an Antarctic outpost. You have back in the
old days, he had an out west outpost. He was like,
we need an outpost. We need a place where people
can live and work and as their base station.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Essentially, sure, space is a frontier, but you watch a
star trek knows.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
That the final frontier, right, Well, that's.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
What we think, That's what we thought back then. I'm
sure there's other frontiers, new dimensions to explore. Sure, that
kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Right, Well, let's just talk about why. What are some
of the reasons we should do this. You mentioned just
capturing the public, and it certainly would do a lot
to rally people around spending funds on you know, space travel,
NASA allocating funds towards this kind of.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Thing, right, you mean space tourism.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
No, no, no, not space tourism. But just initially, you know,
they needed the support of the popular American opinion.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Right, which is why Von Brown said, I'm going to
like reach out to the public directly through Colliers magazine.
He did a three part he hosted a three part
show on like the Wonderful World of Disney about living
in space, and we really got people jazzed about this
back in the fifties. Yeah, then it peaked again in
the seventies, Like I was saying.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Yeah, but one of the big reasons that you would
want to have a working space station is, aside from
the convenience of you know, having it up there and
not having to go back and forth every time you
want to do so, right, is things are different up
there and you can do different things without gravity. That
you can't do here on Earth, like research, Yeah, like
(08:09):
remarkable things.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
So it turns out gravity has a weird effect on
crystals and the way they form flaws them like inevitably.
But if you're out there in microgravity, there are far
fewer flaws, and the crystals tend to form more perfectly.
So you can do things like make really good semiconductors,
right for microchips. Sure, you can also crystallize drugs better
(08:33):
to make them more potent. You can really knock your
socks off.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
So research up there that can make things better here,
right a point.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Not just research, but figure out how to do it there,
and then build on that by building a manufacturing facility
for semiconductors out in space. Yeah, man, and then bring
them back to Earth and be like, watch how fast
this baby ghess.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Another thing that no gravity or micro gravity does is
it makes flames, you know, flames here on Earth with
our stupid gravity pulling it in every direction, makes a
flame very unsteady and unpredictable, makes studying combustion more difficult.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Remember when we talked about fire.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Yeah, fire in space is very consistent and perfect.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
It's around. Yeah, it's so cool.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
So you could you could potentially with h with a
perfect flame like that, then perfect flame that's got to
be a song.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Eternal flame is what you're thinking of.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
No, I'm saying perfect flaim Now you're thinking of eternal flame.
Such a josh ism. That's one of my favorites. Microgravity, though,
you can have that eternal flame that is perfect and round,
and you can study combustion in a more pure fashion,
and you could build a better furnace maybe or find
(09:51):
out how to reduce air pollution by making things more efficient.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Right, And this is just like two things that you
could do in space.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
I'm sure there are a thousand things we could list, right.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
And as a matter of fact, some of the early
ideas for space stations were These were concepts that used
like moon mined minerals and materials and assembled in space
so that you didn't have to launch them from Earth. Yeah,
so this whole idea of like creating things in space
was even used to form the basis of these places
(10:21):
where we would actually live while we were doing this stuff.
It's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
Yeah. It also offers a unique perspective on the Earth.
If we're talking about landforms and oceans, your atmosphere, speaking
of which they can take much better pictures looking in
the other direction into deep space because they don't have
that pesky atmosphere in the way, right, So lots of
great reasons to be up there, not the least of
(10:45):
which is something you mentioned earlier, space tourism, which is
going to happen at some point, right, Like people are
looking into who is this one company? Galactic suite. Yeah,
they're still at it.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Well, none that I saw there really still says they're
planning on launching in twenty twelve.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Oh I thought that they. I thought they were still
kind of I mean obviously not on that timeline, right
unless they.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
I mean, their site is still up, somebody's still paying
for the domain. That doesn't mean but it still says
like they're gonna be They're gonna head for the star
the stars in twenty twelve. And then I found another
Russian one that was looked pretty promising, but their site
apparently was not updated since twenty ten. But a company
(11:34):
called Bigelow Industries very recently had SpaceX Fairy capsule up
to the ISS. It was an inflatable capsule that was
a habitat module that was meant to be a prototype
for a space hotel, and they couldn't get it inflated.
It was in They just aborted the mission. But like
(11:55):
people are still working on the concept of space tourism
like today.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Well, I know, the Galactic Suite said, They're like, we
think it'll cost four million dollars for a weekend stay,
and our data suggests that there are about forty thousand
people in the world that can and will pay for this.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
So maybe their site hasn't been updated because they got
scared with the end of the World twenty twelve thing.
Maybe and while they were hiding in a cave somewhere,
somebody played a prank on them and they're still too
scared to come out and update the site.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
Maybe Well Richard Branson, you know, he's trying to fly
people into space. Still.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Yeah, I looked at that. I was like, wait a minute,
does this Alaskan Airlines merger? Did that kill Virgin Galactic?
And apparently not, It was just Virgin America that Alaskan
Airlines took over, apparently in a hostile takeover, But Virgin
Galactic's still at it.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Okay, Well that's good. I guess if you're loaded and
want to ride in the space.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
Yeah, if you're Ashton Coucher or Jada Perry.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
They were on the list, right, Sure they have disposable income. Sure,
and the couch up there, the coach either one. I
feel like I should take a break and regroup and
then we'll start talking about Space Station's past.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
I'll take one with you, all right, let's.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
Talk about the first one, Josh. We had a great
episode on the space race. It was pretty much a
two love that one, a two nation race between the
US and the Soviet Union, And they beat us in
a lot of ways as far as first to the
punch Man.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
They really did. You know, they don't get enough credit
around these parts for the stuff that they did as
far as space goes, because they definitely did beat us
in a lot of ways. Sure, like we beat them
to the moon basically.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Yeah, which we pointed out, and our show really got
us going, sure and led to our advancements.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
Yeah. But also what was it There was another show
we did recently, Sputnik led to super Balls. But do
you remember we were talking about the super Bowl? In
the Super Bowl episode, how Sputnik like made America, post
war America wake up and be like Hey, stop being
coddled and lazy.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
Yeah, we need to get back to innovation.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Yeah, innovating again. And it was Sputnik that did that. Yeah,
that's right.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Nothing like the threat of Communist Russia or Soviet Union
to get people going.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
We're being left behind.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
So back then they were the Soviet Union, and they
were the first, as we said with the Saliot one
station nineteen seventy one. Dude, they had people living in space. Yeah,
the year I was born. It's crazy, yep. And it
was actually a combination of a couple of a different
system won the Almas and the Soyas. The Almas was
a military system and the Soyas was the actual spacecraft
(15:08):
that varied people to and fro.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
They're still using that things. How American astronauts to get
to the iss is on Soyu's rockets?
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Oh really?
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (15:17):
What number they had?
Speaker 1 (15:18):
I wonder? Oh who knows? Yeah, who knows? A lot?
They launched them a lot from the Kazakhstan.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
I think, Oh really, h huh, very nice.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
So yet one on.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Forty ft long had three main compartments, your standard compartments,
which are like dining in recreation, food and water storage.
You gotta have your toilet exercise equipment, and then your
sciencey stuff.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
Yeah, that's science the stuff. That's a big deal, sure,
because not only are they looking at how to make
crystals better, they're also studying the effects of microgravity on
the human body, which we're still getting a handle lot.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Yeah, we should do an entire episode on how space
affects your body. Okay, I think that would be like,
I think I got three or four episode ideas out
of this one article.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Well, yeah, we should do one just on the ISS too,
I think so. But well, just kind of briefly, one
of the things that they've found so far about living
in space is that your bone mineral density decreases by
one percent a month, which are like one percent, there's
still ninety nine percent left, who cares. Yeah, right here
on Earth, if you were in a senior adult, you
(16:28):
lose about one percent of bone mass a year.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
Whoa.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
So that's pretty significant. And another thing that they found
out was that the living in microgravity, when you're here
on Earth, your fluids and blood and stuff tend to
accumulate in your lower extremities. Right in microgravity, it tends
to accumulate up in your upper body and your upper
chest and in your head and your brain's like, ohh,
I'm bathed in this stuff. I need to shut down
(16:54):
production on fluids, including blood, so that when astronauts get
back on Earth, they tend to be fainty oh wow,
because they don't have enough blood for a while until
their body's like, WHOA, something weird just happened. I need
to start making blood.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
And they say, I'm fainty because of space.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
Somebody give me some tang. My blood sugar is low.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
The other thing they found out was that in space,
no one can hear you scream.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Yeah, they try it, fifteen after every hour. All the
astronauts scream as loud as they can and nobody can
hear them.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
And that, of course, was a famous tagline from the
first Alien movie. Oh really, Yeah, I remember seeing the
ad with the big egg in space, no one can
hear you scream.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
I know.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
I was just thought, that's terrifying.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
I'm gonna watch it. Yep. Oh. One other thing that
they're learning about effects and gravity. So Scott Kelly, the
astronaut who famously just spent a year on the ISS. Yeah,
he has a twin who's also an astronaut.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
Oh, wow, I leave.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
His name is Mike, and Mike has been studied here
on Earth.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Yeah, I was about to say, you got to split
those guys.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Up over the same over the same year that Scott has,
and now they're comparing him. Apparently Scott came down and
he was like an inch or two shorter than his
identical twin that way. That was just one thing, but
they're they're examining them on a genetic level to see
what differences have happened, so you can get a better
handle on what living in gravity does to the human body.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
So he said, them shorter and more fainty for starters.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
He just fell dead away and they just slapped his
face and poured tang down his throat.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Well, I think what's lost on a lot of people
is that these are real. I mean, human experimentation is
going on, and who knows what the long term effect
is going to be. These people are really like sacrificing potentially,
you know right, I mean not just being away from
family and stuff, but who knows, faint he might turn
into something really bad.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
Well, not only that, they're also exposed to solar radiation
and just space radiation that the Earth's atmosphere protects us
from they're exposed to it, and apparently there's a huge
possibility their lifetime risk of cancer just goes through the
roof from moving out there. So yeah, there's a lot
of questions we have that it's good that we're not
all just living out in space because we can. We
(19:06):
got a lot of stuff to figure out beforehand.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Heroes, sir, is what I say. So the Soya's ten
crew for that very first Saliot space station that Russia had,
they were supposed to live up there, but they couldn't
dock correctly, so they could never enter the space station,
so they never could even get in. Big disappointment.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Yea, they just went. They just hung their heads and
put in reverse in the little module went.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
P yep, that's Earth. So the Soya's eleven crew actually
successfully lived there for twenty four days in nineteen seventy one,
which is remarkable, but very sadly they all perished upon
re entry coming back to Earth.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Yeah. They're capsule depressurized and their capsule at the time
was designed for them to wear suits, so they were
all asphyxiated.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Yeah, just like died instantly, right pretty much.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Yeah, Yeah, they would have like lost consciousness almost immediately.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
So after the eleven, Soy's eleven, they launched a different
space station altogether, the Solio two. That one didn't even
get up into orbit, so they were like, ah Yit
went through three, four, and five in pretty quick succession,
and each one basically they got better at getting people
(20:32):
to and from and they could stay up there longer
and longer.
Speaker 3 (20:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
I think the last one was launched in nineteen eighty
two and it was up there until like nineteen ninety
two or nineteen ninety four, and they actually used it
as like when they launched the Mirror, which we'll talk
about and I think nineteen ninety six, so I guess
it was up there then they were going back and
forth between sali At seven and the Mirror. Yeah, I
(20:57):
guess probably going like, oh we can we can use
this vodka over here. You got to go get it
from Solute and take it over to the Mirror. So
it was up there for a while. They got there,
they figured it out, and one of the big differences
between the early Solutes, Chuck and the later ones was
that there was a docking a secondary docking module.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Yeah. The first one's only had one parking space essentially, right.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
And so you had the parking space for the crew
that was there, and if they needed supplies, well ts
for them nowhere to park. But if you had a
second docking port, then you can use well, they used
an unmanned ship called Progress to ferry supplies from Earth
to the solute stations.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Yeah, I'm surprised that it took them up to the
Salute six to realize they needed another parking space, because
you know.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
You're gonna forget something, right, you left the iron on
back home.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
We're stuck up here. No one can visit us exact well,
like you said, though, they figured it out, which is wonderful,
and that all led to the United States in nineteen
seventy three lunching their very famous Skylab one space station.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
Which is the best patch of any NASA related, any
space based anything. Skylab one is the best.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Yeah, Skylab was awesome, but it got off on a
very bad start, on a bad foot because upon launch,
like just getting it out there, it had these two
main solar panels. One of them was completely ripped off,
the other one didn't extend out like it should have,
and so this thing almost burned up completely initially because
it had very little power and they couldn't control the heat, right,
(22:35):
it couldn't cool it.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
The interior of the capsule went up to like one
hundred and twenty six. Yeah, so they said, hey, guys,
that's hot. We needed to go up there and fix this.
And they actually there were three different crews that were
sent to Skylab on Apollo capsules. Yeah, and the Skylab
module itself was actually designed roughly initially by Warner von
(22:58):
Braun out of a Saturn five moon rocket.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
The third stage of it became Skylab, and I think
at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, not the
one at Dullest, but the one that's in like the
like around the mall.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
I think it has a replica of Skylight you can
walk through.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Oh cool, which is so awesome, dude, I would love
to do that.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
But so the three crews that got sent up there, chuck.
They managed to kind of like put Skylight back together
with duct tape and bubble gum.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Yeah, that first one, Skylab two, they just sent them
up a week and a half after the fail well
not fail lunch, but problematic launch. And it's so funny
how some of this NASA stuff is so simple. They said,
go up there and essentially take this big sunshade like
it looks like an umbrella and pop it open right
(23:47):
to cool it down. And then see that solar panel
that didn't stretch out far enough, stretch it out.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
See that stretch it out.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
And they did. Commander Charles Pete, Conrad Paul White's and
Joseph Kerwin essentially saved Skylab.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Yeah, right off the bat. And not just them. There
were again, there were three crews that kind of did
one after the other. Oh yeah, they didn't overlap, but
they finally got the thing working. And I think the
last crew spent eighty four days in orbit.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
Yeah, the first one spent twenty eight, the next one
fifty nine. In the final one eighty four days in
the seventies, and I remember, and this is a big deal,
you know, this is the first time they were testing
these long duration man missions to see, like, you know,
can we go to the Moon because it takes a
while to get there and back right.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
That was the thing. Like, the only data we had
was on Moon missions, which is about a two week mission. Yeah,
so we didn't have any data on what happened to
people longer than.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
That, Yeah, can we can we set up shop there,
colonize the moon.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
Even so, they called anything over two weeks a long
duration spaceflight.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
And I remember in nineteen seventy nine, I remember being
a little eight year old kid, and I remember hearing
about because this is you know, in the seventies when
families would sit around and watch the news and it's
like how you got all your information? Yeah, And I
remember sitting around and hearing that Skylab is coming back
down to Earth in an unpredictable way, and I remember
(25:16):
being sort of scared and thinking like, wow, this is
a little weird and kind of a big deal. Yeah,
Like even a little eight year old Chuck knew like
something didn't seem quite right.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
There are a lot of people who were really anxious
about it, because NASA very famously said that everybody calmed down,
there's there's a one in one hundred and fifty two
chance that somebody will be killed by Skylab.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Well, yeah, they think like one in one fifty two.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
You want to hear numbers from NASA like one in
a million or one in a billion, one in one
hundred and fifty two.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
Yeah, you're like, I know, two hundred people. I know
one hundred and fifty three people. It also forced NASA
to admit, we were so excited about getting this thing
up there, we didn't really think a lot about how
to control its descent, because that was essentially the story.
They were like, we can't we don't really know how
(26:07):
to guide this thing back down.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
They said it would quote cost too much to have
designed in a way to bring it down safely.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Yeah, and I think they were they were in a hurry.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Well. Also, the problem is is they thought that it
would just its orbit would decay a little bit and
then fall into basically that orbit of space chunk circling
the Earth and would just stay there indefinitely. But it's
orbit decayed more than expected because there was solar flare
activity that NASA hadn't anticipated, and so all of a sudden,
Skylab's on a collision course with Earth. NASA saying it'll
(26:40):
it'll probably enter somewhere over this thousand kilometer stretch of Earth. Yea,
it includes Australia, So heads up Australia, right, And there
were lots of like Skylab parties.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
Yeah, because it's America. In the seventies, people went like
Skylab crazy disco parties.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
Oh yeah. The San Francisco Examiner actually offered ten thousand
dollars to anybody who could bring in a legitimate piece
of sky Lab within seventy two hours of it crashing. Yeah,
and some kid actually collected.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
Yeah in Australian. Yeah, he got on a plane. He
had a little piece of sky Lab because where'd end
up crashing.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
And the espernce Australia when you're.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Perth, Yeah, I mean mostly in the ocean. Yeah, but
they did get a pretty good amount of debris in Australia.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Yeah, like the sizeable parts.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
But it's Australia. They're tough. They're like everything tries to
kill us. Yeah, your silly space station can't do it.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Right.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
So yeah, this kid flew over in San Francisco and
said here, pay up, here's a piece of sky Lab.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
Yeah. His name was Stan Thornton. He was seventeen, and like,
without even thinking twice about it, he grabbed it, hopped
on a plane and went to San Francisco, like you said,
and the Examiner paid him, Yeah, which I did. The
West Egg inflation calculator, Oh that's about thirty three thousand
dollars in today's money. Not bad, No, I hop on
a plane for that.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
That's a salary of a first year teacher, right badly. Yeah,
you can also buy pieces of sky Lab today if
you've got some dough and an Internet connection.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Alleged pieces of sky Lab.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
Well, sure, just like anything, it should be not verified.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
What do you call it? Verified? Authenticated?
Speaker 2 (28:22):
Yeah, authentic.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
Supposedly NASA's instead of exerting its domain over pieces of Skylab,
the debris that was found in saying you give a
back that some people sent their pieces to NASA, NASA
authenticated them and sent them back mounted saying this is
an official piece of Skylab. Are the people who mailed
it in? Good peeps, not bad? Good peeps wearing brown
(28:46):
polyester pants up to their chests.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
All right, buddy, let's take a break and let's go
for a little jog around our gravity office. Okay, then
we'll talk about mirror and iss. All right, all right.
(29:29):
We talked about the Soliet, which was the Soviet Union's
big first success and some failures, but overall I think
they saw it as a success.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
Right And at the same time, a couple of years later,
America had SKYLAMB and then the Soviets said, we can
do better than what we're doing. We can do better
than anybody else. We're going to create the mirror.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
Yeah. And by the way, skylight was not supposed to
be permanent. No, that was never the intention, but mirror was.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Was it supposed to be permanent mirror?
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Okay, so were the later Soliots. Okay, so the mirror
definitely was meant to be a permanent one.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
All right. Well, the first crew cosmonauts Leonid Kazimr, solely
off Solo y Off nice, it's a great name. I
think it was just those two dudes. They shuttled between
the Saliot seven, which is being retired, and Mirror, and
there was some like you said, there was some crossover there, right,
(30:35):
an overlap.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
They had to get the vodka.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Yeah, they had to get the vodka right. And they
spent seventy five days on the mirror, and it was
continually manned over the next ten years. And you know,
manned and built. It's not they build these things out
there or assemble them out there, I guess we should say.
But they don't just launch a space station.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
Were right, like the ready to go.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
They carry pieces of it out there. Right, just like
iss and they put them together.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
Although I think, as we'll see later on, I think
the Chinese launched a full space station.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Oh really, yeah, of course they did.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
I think they did, but we're talking twenty thirteen. Come on.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
So the Mirror had twelve twelve main parts, which we
won't go over all those because we don't like to
just read lists. But you know, it's something you would expect.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
It was a g whiz space station. Yeah, a lot
of everything.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
You need stuff, a lot of modules, living quarters, transfer compartments,
docking places. They had more than one parking space. They
figured that old mess out. Yeah, you know, it's like,
you know, we should have guests.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
And they did have guests. They had American guests. Actually,
they sure did, which was pretty cool. It wasn't until
the nineties after the Soviet Union dissolved, and actually there
was a cosmonaut a board Mirror when the Soviet Union
dissolved on December twenty sixth, nineteen ninety one. His name
was Sergei Kirkvkev kir Ko keV. It's harder to say
(32:02):
than you would think. Yeah, And he was known as
the last Soviet citizen because apparently being in space made
him immune from the dissolving of the Soviet Union.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Oh really, yeah, not really.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
But that's what everybody said about him, whether he liked
it or not.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
Well, the Mirror had some problems kind of later in
its life. There was a fire one year and then
the supply ship was called the Progress I think you
mentioned it actually crashed into the Mirror trying to park
and it's a little parking space, which damaged it. And
at that point they said, you know what, we should
(32:37):
just make this thing space junk, even though you thought
it was going to be permanent. The US is talking
about this iss station they want us to come help
them with and that was a big campaign to keep
the Mirror alive called Keep Mirror Alive, and private corporation
stepped in said no, let us take it over. Let's
privatize this thing. And they said, niett not going to
(32:59):
do it.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
Yeah, we're not gonna just hand over a space station.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
Okay, No, we're going to crash it into the Earth.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
Right If I can't have you, no one can't.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Pretty much, so they had a little bit more advanced
capabilities in Skylab had as far as directionally and in February
two thousand and one. They slowed those endinges down and
it re entered the atmosphere on March twenty third, two
thousand and one, burned up, broke up, and again tried
(33:28):
to kill Australia.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
I know Australia is like what the age?
Speaker 2 (33:32):
I know, why is everyone trying to land their space
junk on us? But it was about on AE, thousand miles
east of Australia in the ocean. Has anyone found these things?
That's what I was wondering.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
Mirror is near at the bottom of the ocean. I'm
sure somebody's found some parts of it.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
Pretty neat. Yeah, talk about like space wreckage at the
bottom of the ocean. That's a movie.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
Who was it? Was it Jeff Bezos that went and
got like one of the Apollo really stages that had
been scull than the ocean recently? Probably? I think I
was Jeff Bezos.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
Or James Cameron. We talked about him too much though, hm.
So that brings us to iss nineteen eighty four, Ronald
Reagan said, you know what, I was about to do
a Reagan, but I thought the better.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
I think everybody wants to hear your Reagan.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
No, I don't want to do it, he said, let's
he said, hey, man, let's get an.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
ISS station going dead on Reagan. Is that good?
Speaker 2 (34:29):
Yeah, we'll call it the International Space Station. And it's
going to be super expensive, so we need some help.
Let's partner up with fourteen other countries, Canada, Japan, Brazil,
and then the European Space Agency, which is the UK, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy,
Netherlands and Mark, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden. And he said,
(34:50):
as a good faith measure, let's invite the Soviets. I
don't know if that was all.
Speaker 1 (34:57):
Well, no, it was Russia by then.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
Oh yeah, you're right, Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
And the Russian said, sure, why not. Weren't doing anything.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
And not just being friendly, but you know they they
were probably the second leading well I don't know by
that point there were other players.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Well in space science.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
Yeah, but they were still pretty highly regarded.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
Sure yeah, big time. Yeah, yeah, probably more than they
get credit for again over here, agreed. So they started
putting the ISS in orbit in nineteen ninety eight, and
the first people showed up from it was launched for
They were launched from Russia. Yeah, in two thousand and
they spent about five months there like basically getting everything
up and running man taking all of the little desecant
(35:41):
packets out of everything, like they do not eat things
that keep stuff dry.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
What is that silica jel?
Speaker 1 (35:48):
Yeah, yeah, and pulling off all of the cellophane from everything.
Uh huh, Well they left it on the lampshades, which
I thought was tasteless.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Oh well, it's shiny.
Speaker 3 (35:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
So they've been living up there. Like I said, they
just launched the one hundred thousandth I'm sorry, the forty seventh,
but one hundred thousandth orbit of Earth, and we'll do
one on the iside.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
I really think we should.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
But I did look a little bit into their day
to day life. They work about ten hours a day
Monday through Friday, about half that on a Saturday, and
then they take Sunday off and then the rest of
the time is you know, relaxation, emailing your family, hanging
out pool side, facetiming. They have sixteen sunrises and sunsets
(36:37):
a day, which is decidedly weird on your body, so
they generally just keep those windows closed so they can
get on a rag skeedu and apparently the food isn't great.
They don't love the food, no, and they have to
overspice it. I didn't know this. One of the things
space does is reduce your sense of taste. I've heard
that in microgravity. I think it makes everything tastes like Yeah,
(37:00):
so apparently they like really overspice everything to try and
make it palatable. And they have to be really careful
of crumbs because oh yeah, remember Homer Simpson.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
Do you remember one of the great.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
All time scenes when he opened the bag of chips
in space? Great great scene and then pooping and peepe.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
Gotta go somewhere.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
They have two toilets, only two, and oh.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
There's usually only three or four people up there.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
Well there's six right now?
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Oh six? Yeah, with two toilets. Yeah, how many hair dryers?
Speaker 2 (37:41):
Who knows? They keep their hair short though, because.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
Because there's very few hair dryers in space.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
Well, there's no showers.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
M hmm.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
I mean they can wash themselves. They have like water jets, but.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Not the same Yeah, not the same, man. I'll bet
that first shower when they get back down to Earth
feels so good.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
Yeah. But there's two toilets. They use a fan driven
suction system and you have to latch yourself to the toilet.
Oh yeah, I've heard that too, And there are restraining
bars to ensure there's a good seal, because you know
what happens if there's not a good seal and microgravity,
things will float away. And then there's a lever that
they hit, a suction hole slides open and a big
(38:19):
stream of air carries a waste away. The solids are
collected actually into an aluminum container, and the they are
then transferred to the progress to take away the little
shuttle ship like, here's all our poop.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Yeah, Progress is like thanks, yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:34):
I wonder what they call it progress? And then the
peepee is evacuated by a hose that's attached to the
front of the toilet.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
Do they drink it?
Speaker 2 (38:46):
They do? I was getting there, but sure, I'm sorry.
Now it's recycled. It's a recovery system and they eventually
recycle it back into drinking water.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
Tastes like chicken and.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
The toilets for PEP are an comically correct. They have
these funnel adapters, So men and women have different adapters
because you know, they have different parts.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
Yes they do. They do have different parts.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
That like a second grader I just you don't think
about this stuff. Like. That's the first thing I thought.
I was like, oh, man, how they eat, how they poop?
Do they watch movies?
Speaker 1 (39:21):
Do they watch movies?
Speaker 2 (39:22):
Yeah? That the they just sit back. I think it
was the Atlantic had a great photo spread of photos
that this new mission is taking of space and the
Earth and you know all that stuff. But then pictures
on board, and one of them they were had this
huge flat screen watching the.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Revenant, watching the Revenue.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
Huh yeah, wow, that's what it looked like.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
I could see these.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Two guys on a horse. It was hard to tell
because it was in the background, but I think it
was a Revenant.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
That are cloudy with the chance of meatball.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
Probably not the movie gravity.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
So yeah, I know they were probably like it could
never happen. Remember when Nils deGrasse Tyson lost his mind
about gravity, he went on a Twitter ran about it. Yeah,
then then we should talk about the Chinese, because I
think it's been unfair not to. The Chinese launched something
called Tiangong one back in two thousand and three. They
(40:19):
became the third nation on the planet to launch a
human into space, and they launched their space their space
station in twenty eleven, and there's been two missions to
the space station. I think it's no longer active, but
(40:40):
it's still up there, but the Chinese admitted this year
that they've lost contact with the space station. It's no
longer under their control. So it may end up coming
back down to Earth and we'll have a new Skylab
party for it. But the two missions included China's first
two women asked intronauts, Lou Yang and Wang Yaping, and
(41:03):
they were in twenty twelve, in twenty thirteen, and they
did I mean, they lived in space for a while,
just like yeah, everybody else had. But the Chinese don't
participate in the ISS. I don't know if they've not
been invited or if they decline an invitation, but they're
doing their own parallel thing, which I get the impression
that's making people nervous.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
Interesting. Well, I know it's important that they've had women astronauts,
female astronauts on the ISS, because you know, you need
to see what space does to them. And I just
wonder if they're going to like get to the point
where they're like, well we need to if we really
want to call an I space, we need to see
what happens when a baby is up there, or give
(41:45):
birth in outer space, or have a ten year old
or a seventy five year old.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
And a ten year old aboard a space station for
a year.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
Yeah, oh man, no, thank you.
Speaker 1 (41:58):
There's one other thing I wanted to mention. There's talk
about saving a lot a lot of money with a
space station by putting it what's called the lagrange point.
And there's lagrange point L four and L five, and
they are the little these spots between the Earth and
(42:19):
the Moon to where the gravity between the Earth and
the Moon is counterbalanced. So all it does is just
go in orbit around the Earth and the Moon and
it will stay in that orbit forever because gravity's not
pulling on it one way or the other, so you
don't have to use fuel to keep it in that
orbit forever. Right. And this is actually like an early
idea that I think Arthur C. Clark was the first
(42:41):
to put it out there in nineteen sixty one. And
these lagrange points are like the orbit's like ninety thousand
miles across. You can put a bunch of space stations
in these things and just leave them out there. And
there's actually something called the L five society that came
about that is all about this kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
I bet their parties are wicked crazy.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
Yeah, well they plan to disband on a space station
in the L five band at some point in the future. Really,
when they all come together there for the first time.
Speaker 2 (43:14):
Sounds wonderful.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Yeah. Oh, one more thing, Valerie Polyakov.
Speaker 2 (43:20):
Yeah, record holder right.
Speaker 1 (43:22):
Yep, four hundred and thirty eight days. He did a
board mirror in nineteen ninety four to nineteen ninety five. Man,
and he'd done like two hundred and thirty eight days
before then.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
Crazy. I bet he's super fainty, you know all the time.
He's Russian, though, he can take it.
Speaker 1 (43:38):
You got anything else?
Speaker 2 (43:39):
I got nothing else?
Speaker 1 (43:39):
All right, Well, let's it for space stations for now.
If you want to learn more about him, you can
type those words in the search part house stuff works.
And since I said search part's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
I'm going to call this oh Chuck's graduation post. So
I put out a post about my nephew graduating high school.
Speaker 1 (44:00):
Oh yeah it did he really?
Speaker 3 (44:01):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (44:01):
Noah Is graduated from high school. And also Noah the
same year, my niece Reagan graduated college from Mayordith College,
moving to New York City like a good girl.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
And my other niece Abby moved on matriculated into high
school from middle school.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
Nothing better than matriculation.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
Nothing better. So I went to Noah's graduation and it
really like affected me much more than I thought it
would because I haven't been to a graduation since my own.
Oh yeah, like and I didn't walk in the college one,
so I literally have not been to a ceremony since
nineteen eighty nine. And it just stirred up all these
amazing feelings.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
Oh, I thought you mad.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
No, it was really really neat just to hear these
kids and their speeches. And I put a Facebook post.
I was like, you know what, we're great, don't people.
Millennials get a lot of crap, But like, talk to
a seventeen year old for a little while, who's doing
it right, and we're headed in the right direction like
this very empathetic, carrying, like forward thinking generation.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
So it was a really neat things. So I just
congratulations to all the graduates. Yeah, especially well, if you're listening,
then I guess you are a listener. What all your stuff?
You should know listeners that have been with us like
throughout high school.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
We appreciate you. A girl named Hannah, I want to say,
wrote in and asked for any advice for graduations.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
Oh that's right, and she mentioned you in this speech.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
Yeah yeah, so pretty mit relations to her as well.
Speaker 2 (45:25):
Pretty great stuff.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
But you're right, all stuff you should know. Listeners who
are graduating or matriculating, congratulations.
Speaker 2 (45:32):
Yes, very big accomplishment. So this is from Brandy and Kansas. Hey, guys,
want to thank you so much for that Facebook post
about Noah's graduation and how you have so much hope
for the up and coming generation. I'm really excited about
the world changers coming up and so rare to hear
someone come out and say how awesome they are on
that thread. Have you considered it doing a show on
Kids Today fallacy. It's a well documented phenomenon where each
(45:55):
generation downplays the bad things our own generation didn't believes.
The ones that follow are lazy, spoiled, entitled. There are
quotes literally dating back two thousands of years ago of
this very thing. And the music stinks too, I'm sure
that's the other part of that. Yeah or no, no, no, yeah,
the music today's stinks are rives better I would love
(46:16):
to hear you explain this nonsense. Help people stop being
so crotchety and instead recognize their role in helping to
shape the future generations. Second request, come to Kansas. You
guys make fun of us enough and it's time to
pace a visit. We top some lists for the most
beautiful sunsets and landscapes and also have cities on national
lists of places to live. It takes more than a
(46:39):
beautiful sunset to get us to.
Speaker 1 (46:42):
Do a live show and listicles.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
We make fun of Kansas because of our good friend
Aaron Cooper and our buddy Isaac McNary is really the
two people that we're targeting when we make fun of
Kansas and the governor, And it's all out of love
because Isaaca and Aaron are great. And we met Aaron
at our show in Denver and he's just as nice
(47:08):
and cool as I thought he was gonna be.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
And we met our pal Tyler Murphy too.
Speaker 2 (47:11):
And Mett Tyler and his friends Timothy and Sarah, and
our friend Jane Janab was in the audience, and our
old buddy Greg Storkin was in the audience.
Speaker 1 (47:20):
It was something else.
Speaker 2 (47:21):
Yeah, Denver was like these some of our oldest, oldest
fans were inattended, so that it was a great show.
It was wonderful. Anyway, we're not coming to Kansas. Thanks
for a great show. Guys, only have a few episodes
left to go before them got up and then I
will enter the pitch of despair, so at least satisfy
one of my requests you can help pull me out,
and that is Brandy and Manhattan, Kansas.
Speaker 1 (47:43):
Thank you, Brandy, good luck in the pit of despair.
If you want to get in touch with this and
you can send us an email to Stuff Podcasts at
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart rate, you visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hello friends, this is Josh with this week's select Our
June twenty sixteen episode on Space Stations. I like to
think of it as a far out look at living
in space. I hope you enjoy it thoroughly.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with
Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry. This is Stuff you
should Know.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Okay, you sounded like Steve Rule. We were just talking
about Steve Rule, and that was very Brulesque, brew Esque,
not burlesque.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
All right, brewlesu brew Less. You're saying you should do
a movie. I'm surprised you have.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
I could watch a continuous loop of brules Rules over
and over and over. Yeah, and people thought, you don't
be Dune was an homage to that, which.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Or omasure a ripoff, depending on who's well it was.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
It was neither, but it it was reminiscent of it
in good ways. But I don't think that that meant
it ripped it off, or that you were paying tribute to.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
It's definitely not intentional. It was just, you know, two
great sidental.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Two great things that go great together.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Sure, why can't there be both.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Like Reese's cups.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Yeah, they go great with kit cats.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Oh man, they'd be good. Sure, just take two full
kit cats and put two Reese's cups in the middle
like a sandwich.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Uh huh. I think you just came up with something
the news more the rec cat chuckers.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Have you ever looked to the sky at night, seen
some stars flying by and thought, why don't we live
up there? Uh? Sure?
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Have you ever seen the ISS cruising?
Speaker 1 (01:52):
No? I used to. Apparently you can. I used, Yes,
I used to get either text or emails. I can't
remember that. Would you just put it in your zip
code and it sends you texts alerts when the ISS
is going to be flying overhead.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
I thought you were going to say one of the
lead astronauts would just text you be like, Josh, lo up,
what are you doing? We're over your house right now.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
But I mean, basically it's not from the astronaut, but
it's the same thing. It's saying, like, look up in
this direction at this time, and you'll you should be
able to see the ISS pretty neat. Yeah. I don't
think we actually ever went out and looked at it,
because it was always at like three in the morning
or something like that.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Yeah, this really like thrills me to no end. Once
I started looking into this, like I never paid a
lot of attention, and it really just dawned on me,
Like people are living in outer space.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Continuous full time. The International Space Station has been continuously
inhabited since it was launched in nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yeah. In fact, they just took their one hundred thousandth
orbit of Earth. That's really neat in May of this year.
Expedition forty seven began in March.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
That's so cool, man, And like we just it's like
you were saying, you don't really stop and think about it,
but we're living in space now. Yeah, humanity is extended
at least into Earth's orbit, right, that's where we're living.
And we just kind of seemed to take that for granted.
But that wasn't always the case as actually, And I
(03:23):
think the reason why we do kind of take it
for granted is because the conception of living in space
that we're at right now is remedial compared to where
everyone expected it to be in like the mid seventies. Yeah,
when the idea of space colonization was at its peak. Yeah,
I mean NASA Ames Research Center was conducting summer studies
is what they were called, where they would just get
(03:44):
the public really jazzed about living in space. And the
best you can say, or the least you can say,
is that it bore some pretty awesome artists renderings what
space colonies will look like.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Yeah, it seemed like every other issue of Popular Science
was just some cool new picture of like, you know,
one day we're going to be living out.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
Here, right exactly, but the one day seemed a lot
closer than it does now, right.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
But at the most you can say that that space
calony fever that was going on in the seventies definitely
laid the groundwork paved the way for where we are now,
which is living in space. We just don't have like
Stanley Kubrick esque space hotels that are big rotating wheels
at the moment. Doesn't mean we're not going to, yeh.
(04:32):
It just didn't happen as fast as everybody thought it
was going to. And I was trying to figure out why,
and apparently it's because of the Shuttle program. Like this
space colony fever was based on the idea that launching
the Space Shuttle was going to be way cheaper than
launching any of the rockets had been previously. That didn't
pan out to be the case. Yeah, And that there
would be something like like it.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Was going to be like a space taxi. I remember
those words, sixty.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Like at least sixty launches a year, which didn't pan
out to be the case either. But they thought that, yeah,
it was just we're gonna be going back and forth
to space for like next to nothing all the time,
and that we would be colonizing space pretty quickly. That
didn't pan out. The Space Shuttle program didn't pan out
to be that as cheap or as frequent, and so
(05:18):
this dream of space colony or this enthusiasm for space
colonization was kind of lost. But luckily it wasn't lost
by the actual engineers who were in charge of putting
people in space and figuring out how to live in space.
And that whole idea is probably still coming. It's just
a little further down the road.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
And there are many, many, many, hundreds and hundreds of
people that helped make this reality over the years, but
a lot of this can be laid at the feet
of mister Verna von Braun, who was the architect of
the US space program, and he was the big champion
of space stations early on, like in a real viable way.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Well, he was like the Carl Sagan of his day.
He realized that he had a quote he said that
we can publish scientific papers and treatises till hell freeze
is over, but if we don't get the attention of
the taxpayer, we're going We're not going anywhere.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
And how do you do that? You start putting people
on the moon and start building space stations.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
Well, even more basic than that, he started he wrote
like popular articles and popular magazines to get the public's
imagination prime for that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Yeah, And his idea was it was not just like hey,
look at a neat thing we can do. It's you know,
you have an Antarctic outpost. You have back in the
old days, he had an out west outpost. He was like,
we need an outpost. We need a place where people
can live and work and as their base station.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Essentially, sure, space is a frontier, but you watch a
star trek knows.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
That the final frontier, right, Well, that's.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
What we think, That's what we thought back then. I'm
sure there's other frontiers, new dimensions to explore. Sure, that
kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Right, Well, let's just talk about why. What are some
of the reasons we should do this. You mentioned just
capturing the public, and it certainly would do a lot
to rally people around spending funds on you know, space travel,
NASA allocating funds towards this kind of.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Thing, right, you mean space tourism.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
No, no, no, not space tourism. But just initially, you know,
they needed the support of the popular American opinion.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Right, which is why Von Brown said, I'm going to
like reach out to the public directly through Colliers magazine.
He did a three part he hosted a three part
show on like the Wonderful World of Disney about living
in space, and we really got people jazzed about this
back in the fifties. Yeah, then it peaked again in
the seventies, Like I was saying.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Yeah, but one of the big reasons that you would
want to have a working space station is, aside from
the convenience of you know, having it up there and
not having to go back and forth every time you
want to do so, right, is things are different up
there and you can do different things without gravity. That
you can't do here on Earth, like research, Yeah, like
(08:09):
remarkable things.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
So it turns out gravity has a weird effect on
crystals and the way they form flaws them like inevitably.
But if you're out there in microgravity, there are far
fewer flaws, and the crystals tend to form more perfectly.
So you can do things like make really good semiconductors,
right for microchips. Sure, you can also crystallize drugs better
(08:33):
to make them more potent. You can really knock your
socks off.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
So research up there that can make things better here,
right a point.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Not just research, but figure out how to do it there,
and then build on that by building a manufacturing facility
for semiconductors out in space. Yeah, man, and then bring
them back to Earth and be like, watch how fast
this baby ghess.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Another thing that no gravity or micro gravity does is
it makes flames, you know, flames here on Earth with
our stupid gravity pulling it in every direction, makes a
flame very unsteady and unpredictable, makes studying combustion more difficult.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Remember when we talked about fire.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Yeah, fire in space is very consistent and perfect.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
It's around. Yeah, it's so cool.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
So you could you could potentially with h with a
perfect flame like that, then perfect flame that's got to
be a song.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Eternal flame is what you're thinking of.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
No, I'm saying perfect flaim Now you're thinking of eternal flame.
Such a josh ism. That's one of my favorites. Microgravity, though,
you can have that eternal flame that is perfect and round,
and you can study combustion in a more pure fashion,
and you could build a better furnace maybe or find
(09:51):
out how to reduce air pollution by making things more efficient.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Right, And this is just like two things that you
could do in space.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
I'm sure there are a thousand things we could list, right.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
And as a matter of fact, some of the early
ideas for space stations were These were concepts that used
like moon mined minerals and materials and assembled in space
so that you didn't have to launch them from Earth. Yeah,
so this whole idea of like creating things in space
was even used to form the basis of these places
(10:21):
where we would actually live while we were doing this stuff.
It's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
Yeah. It also offers a unique perspective on the Earth.
If we're talking about landforms and oceans, your atmosphere, speaking
of which they can take much better pictures looking in
the other direction into deep space because they don't have
that pesky atmosphere in the way, right, So lots of
great reasons to be up there, not the least of
(10:45):
which is something you mentioned earlier, space tourism, which is
going to happen at some point, right, Like people are
looking into who is this one company? Galactic suite. Yeah,
they're still at it.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Well, none that I saw there really still says they're
planning on launching in twenty twelve.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Oh I thought that they. I thought they were still
kind of I mean obviously not on that timeline, right
unless they.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
I mean, their site is still up, somebody's still paying
for the domain. That doesn't mean but it still says
like they're gonna be They're gonna head for the star
the stars in twenty twelve. And then I found another
Russian one that was looked pretty promising, but their site
apparently was not updated since twenty ten. But a company
(11:34):
called Bigelow Industries very recently had SpaceX Fairy capsule up
to the ISS. It was an inflatable capsule that was
a habitat module that was meant to be a prototype
for a space hotel, and they couldn't get it inflated.
It was in They just aborted the mission. But like
(11:55):
people are still working on the concept of space tourism
like today.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Well, I know, the Galactic Suite said, They're like, we
think it'll cost four million dollars for a weekend stay,
and our data suggests that there are about forty thousand
people in the world that can and will pay for this.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
So maybe their site hasn't been updated because they got
scared with the end of the World twenty twelve thing.
Maybe and while they were hiding in a cave somewhere,
somebody played a prank on them and they're still too
scared to come out and update the site.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
Maybe Well Richard Branson, you know, he's trying to fly
people into space. Still.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Yeah, I looked at that. I was like, wait a minute,
does this Alaskan Airlines merger? Did that kill Virgin Galactic?
And apparently not, It was just Virgin America that Alaskan
Airlines took over, apparently in a hostile takeover, But Virgin
Galactic's still at it.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Okay, Well that's good. I guess if you're loaded and
want to ride in the space.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
Yeah, if you're Ashton Coucher or Jada Perry.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
They were on the list, right, Sure they have disposable income. Sure,
and the couch up there, the coach either one. I
feel like I should take a break and regroup and
then we'll start talking about Space Station's past.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
I'll take one with you, all right, let's.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
Talk about the first one, Josh. We had a great
episode on the space race. It was pretty much a
two love that one, a two nation race between the
US and the Soviet Union, And they beat us in
a lot of ways as far as first to the
punch Man.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
They really did. You know, they don't get enough credit
around these parts for the stuff that they did as
far as space goes, because they definitely did beat us
in a lot of ways. Sure, like we beat them
to the moon basically.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Yeah, which we pointed out, and our show really got
us going, sure and led to our advancements.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
Yeah. But also what was it There was another show
we did recently, Sputnik led to super Balls. But do
you remember we were talking about the super Bowl? In
the Super Bowl episode, how Sputnik like made America, post
war America wake up and be like Hey, stop being
coddled and lazy.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
Yeah, we need to get back to innovation.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Yeah, innovating again. And it was Sputnik that did that. Yeah,
that's right.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Nothing like the threat of Communist Russia or Soviet Union
to get people going.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
We're being left behind.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
So back then they were the Soviet Union, and they
were the first, as we said with the Saliot one
station nineteen seventy one. Dude, they had people living in space. Yeah,
the year I was born. It's crazy, yep. And it
was actually a combination of a couple of a different
system won the Almas and the Soyas. The Almas was
a military system and the Soyas was the actual spacecraft
(15:08):
that varied people to and fro.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
They're still using that things. How American astronauts to get
to the iss is on Soyu's rockets?
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Oh really?
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (15:17):
What number they had?
Speaker 1 (15:18):
I wonder? Oh who knows? Yeah, who knows? A lot?
They launched them a lot from the Kazakhstan.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
I think, Oh really, h huh, very nice.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
So yet one on.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Forty ft long had three main compartments, your standard compartments,
which are like dining in recreation, food and water storage.
You gotta have your toilet exercise equipment, and then your
sciencey stuff.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
Yeah, that's science the stuff. That's a big deal, sure,
because not only are they looking at how to make
crystals better, they're also studying the effects of microgravity on
the human body, which we're still getting a handle lot.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Yeah, we should do an entire episode on how space
affects your body. Okay, I think that would be like,
I think I got three or four episode ideas out
of this one article.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Well, yeah, we should do one just on the ISS too,
I think so. But well, just kind of briefly, one
of the things that they've found so far about living
in space is that your bone mineral density decreases by
one percent a month, which are like one percent, there's
still ninety nine percent left, who cares. Yeah, right here
on Earth, if you were in a senior adult, you
(16:28):
lose about one percent of bone mass a year.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
Whoa.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
So that's pretty significant. And another thing that they found
out was that the living in microgravity, when you're here
on Earth, your fluids and blood and stuff tend to
accumulate in your lower extremities. Right in microgravity, it tends
to accumulate up in your upper body and your upper
chest and in your head and your brain's like, ohh,
I'm bathed in this stuff. I need to shut down
(16:54):
production on fluids, including blood, so that when astronauts get
back on Earth, they tend to be fainty oh wow,
because they don't have enough blood for a while until
their body's like, WHOA, something weird just happened. I need
to start making blood.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
And they say, I'm fainty because of space.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
Somebody give me some tang. My blood sugar is low.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
The other thing they found out was that in space,
no one can hear you scream.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Yeah, they try it, fifteen after every hour. All the
astronauts scream as loud as they can and nobody can
hear them.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
And that, of course, was a famous tagline from the
first Alien movie. Oh really, Yeah, I remember seeing the
ad with the big egg in space, no one can
hear you scream.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
I know.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
I was just thought, that's terrifying.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
I'm gonna watch it. Yep. Oh. One other thing that
they're learning about effects and gravity. So Scott Kelly, the
astronaut who famously just spent a year on the ISS. Yeah,
he has a twin who's also an astronaut.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
Oh, wow, I leave.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
His name is Mike, and Mike has been studied here
on Earth.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Yeah, I was about to say, you got to split
those guys.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Up over the same over the same year that Scott has,
and now they're comparing him. Apparently Scott came down and
he was like an inch or two shorter than his
identical twin that way. That was just one thing, but
they're they're examining them on a genetic level to see
what differences have happened, so you can get a better
handle on what living in gravity does to the human body.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
So he said, them shorter and more fainty for starters.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
He just fell dead away and they just slapped his
face and poured tang down his throat.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Well, I think what's lost on a lot of people
is that these are real. I mean, human experimentation is
going on, and who knows what the long term effect
is going to be. These people are really like sacrificing potentially,
you know right, I mean not just being away from
family and stuff, but who knows, faint he might turn
into something really bad.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
Well, not only that, they're also exposed to solar radiation
and just space radiation that the Earth's atmosphere protects us
from they're exposed to it, and apparently there's a huge
possibility their lifetime risk of cancer just goes through the
roof from moving out there. So yeah, there's a lot
of questions we have that it's good that we're not
all just living out in space because we can. We
(19:06):
got a lot of stuff to figure out beforehand.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Heroes, sir, is what I say. So the Soya's ten
crew for that very first Saliot space station that Russia had,
they were supposed to live up there, but they couldn't
dock correctly, so they could never enter the space station,
so they never could even get in. Big disappointment.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Yea, they just went. They just hung their heads and
put in reverse in the little module went.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
P yep, that's Earth. So the Soya's eleven crew actually
successfully lived there for twenty four days in nineteen seventy one,
which is remarkable, but very sadly they all perished upon
re entry coming back to Earth.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Yeah. They're capsule depressurized and their capsule at the time
was designed for them to wear suits, so they were
all asphyxiated.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Yeah, just like died instantly, right pretty much.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Yeah, Yeah, they would have like lost consciousness almost immediately.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
So after the eleven, Soy's eleven, they launched a different
space station altogether, the Solio two. That one didn't even
get up into orbit, so they were like, ah Yit
went through three, four, and five in pretty quick succession,
and each one basically they got better at getting people
(20:32):
to and from and they could stay up there longer
and longer.
Speaker 3 (20:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
I think the last one was launched in nineteen eighty
two and it was up there until like nineteen ninety
two or nineteen ninety four, and they actually used it
as like when they launched the Mirror, which we'll talk
about and I think nineteen ninety six, so I guess
it was up there then they were going back and
forth between sali At seven and the Mirror. Yeah, I
(20:57):
guess probably going like, oh we can we can use
this vodka over here. You got to go get it
from Solute and take it over to the Mirror. So
it was up there for a while. They got there,
they figured it out, and one of the big differences
between the early Solutes, Chuck and the later ones was
that there was a docking a secondary docking module.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Yeah. The first one's only had one parking space essentially, right.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
And so you had the parking space for the crew
that was there, and if they needed supplies, well ts
for them nowhere to park. But if you had a
second docking port, then you can use well, they used
an unmanned ship called Progress to ferry supplies from Earth
to the solute stations.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Yeah, I'm surprised that it took them up to the
Salute six to realize they needed another parking space, because
you know.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
You're gonna forget something, right, you left the iron on
back home.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
We're stuck up here. No one can visit us exact well,
like you said, though, they figured it out, which is wonderful,
and that all led to the United States in nineteen
seventy three lunching their very famous Skylab one space station.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
Which is the best patch of any NASA related, any
space based anything. Skylab one is the best.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Yeah, Skylab was awesome, but it got off on a
very bad start, on a bad foot because upon launch,
like just getting it out there, it had these two
main solar panels. One of them was completely ripped off,
the other one didn't extend out like it should have,
and so this thing almost burned up completely initially because
it had very little power and they couldn't control the heat, right,
(22:35):
it couldn't cool it.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
The interior of the capsule went up to like one
hundred and twenty six. Yeah, so they said, hey, guys,
that's hot. We needed to go up there and fix this.
And they actually there were three different crews that were
sent to Skylab on Apollo capsules. Yeah, and the Skylab
module itself was actually designed roughly initially by Warner von
(22:58):
Braun out of a Saturn five moon rocket.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
The third stage of it became Skylab, and I think
at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, not the
one at Dullest, but the one that's in like the
like around the mall.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
I think it has a replica of Skylight you can
walk through.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Oh cool, which is so awesome, dude, I would love
to do that.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
But so the three crews that got sent up there, chuck.
They managed to kind of like put Skylight back together
with duct tape and bubble gum.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Yeah, that first one, Skylab two, they just sent them
up a week and a half after the fail well
not fail lunch, but problematic launch. And it's so funny
how some of this NASA stuff is so simple. They said,
go up there and essentially take this big sunshade like
it looks like an umbrella and pop it open right
(23:47):
to cool it down. And then see that solar panel
that didn't stretch out far enough, stretch it out.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
See that stretch it out.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
And they did. Commander Charles Pete, Conrad Paul White's and
Joseph Kerwin essentially saved Skylab.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Yeah, right off the bat. And not just them. There
were again, there were three crews that kind of did
one after the other. Oh yeah, they didn't overlap, but
they finally got the thing working. And I think the
last crew spent eighty four days in orbit.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
Yeah, the first one spent twenty eight, the next one
fifty nine. In the final one eighty four days in
the seventies, and I remember, and this is a big deal,
you know, this is the first time they were testing
these long duration man missions to see, like, you know,
can we go to the Moon because it takes a
while to get there and back right.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
That was the thing. Like, the only data we had
was on Moon missions, which is about a two week mission. Yeah,
so we didn't have any data on what happened to
people longer than.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
That, Yeah, can we can we set up shop there,
colonize the moon.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
Even so, they called anything over two weeks a long
duration spaceflight.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
And I remember in nineteen seventy nine, I remember being
a little eight year old kid, and I remember hearing
about because this is you know, in the seventies when
families would sit around and watch the news and it's
like how you got all your information? Yeah, And I
remember sitting around and hearing that Skylab is coming back
down to Earth in an unpredictable way, and I remember
(25:16):
being sort of scared and thinking like, wow, this is
a little weird and kind of a big deal. Yeah,
Like even a little eight year old Chuck knew like
something didn't seem quite right.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
There are a lot of people who were really anxious
about it, because NASA very famously said that everybody calmed down,
there's there's a one in one hundred and fifty two
chance that somebody will be killed by Skylab.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Well, yeah, they think like one in one fifty two.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
You want to hear numbers from NASA like one in
a million or one in a billion, one in one
hundred and fifty two.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
Yeah, you're like, I know, two hundred people. I know
one hundred and fifty three people. It also forced NASA
to admit, we were so excited about getting this thing
up there, we didn't really think a lot about how
to control its descent, because that was essentially the story.
They were like, we can't we don't really know how
(26:07):
to guide this thing back down.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
They said it would quote cost too much to have
designed in a way to bring it down safely.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Yeah, and I think they were they were in a hurry.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Well. Also, the problem is is they thought that it
would just its orbit would decay a little bit and
then fall into basically that orbit of space chunk circling
the Earth and would just stay there indefinitely. But it's
orbit decayed more than expected because there was solar flare
activity that NASA hadn't anticipated, and so all of a sudden,
Skylab's on a collision course with Earth. NASA saying it'll
(26:40):
it'll probably enter somewhere over this thousand kilometer stretch of Earth. Yea,
it includes Australia, So heads up Australia, right, And there
were lots of like Skylab parties.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
Yeah, because it's America. In the seventies, people went like
Skylab crazy disco parties.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
Oh yeah. The San Francisco Examiner actually offered ten thousand
dollars to anybody who could bring in a legitimate piece
of sky Lab within seventy two hours of it crashing. Yeah,
and some kid actually collected.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
Yeah in Australian. Yeah, he got on a plane. He
had a little piece of sky Lab because where'd end
up crashing.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
And the espernce Australia when you're.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Perth, Yeah, I mean mostly in the ocean. Yeah, but
they did get a pretty good amount of debris in Australia.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Yeah, like the sizeable parts.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
But it's Australia. They're tough. They're like everything tries to
kill us. Yeah, your silly space station can't do it.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Right.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
So yeah, this kid flew over in San Francisco and
said here, pay up, here's a piece of sky Lab.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
Yeah. His name was Stan Thornton. He was seventeen, and like,
without even thinking twice about it, he grabbed it, hopped
on a plane and went to San Francisco, like you said,
and the Examiner paid him, Yeah, which I did. The
West Egg inflation calculator, Oh that's about thirty three thousand
dollars in today's money. Not bad, No, I hop on
a plane for that.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
That's a salary of a first year teacher, right badly. Yeah,
you can also buy pieces of sky Lab today if
you've got some dough and an Internet connection.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Alleged pieces of sky Lab.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
Well, sure, just like anything, it should be not verified.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
What do you call it? Verified? Authenticated?
Speaker 2 (28:22):
Yeah, authentic.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
Supposedly NASA's instead of exerting its domain over pieces of Skylab,
the debris that was found in saying you give a
back that some people sent their pieces to NASA, NASA
authenticated them and sent them back mounted saying this is
an official piece of Skylab. Are the people who mailed
it in? Good peeps, not bad? Good peeps wearing brown
(28:46):
polyester pants up to their chests.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
All right, buddy, let's take a break and let's go
for a little jog around our gravity office. Okay, then
we'll talk about mirror and iss. All right, all right.
(29:29):
We talked about the Soliet, which was the Soviet Union's
big first success and some failures, but overall I think
they saw it as a success.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
Right And at the same time, a couple of years later,
America had SKYLAMB and then the Soviets said, we can
do better than what we're doing. We can do better
than anybody else. We're going to create the mirror.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
Yeah. And by the way, skylight was not supposed to
be permanent. No, that was never the intention, but mirror was.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Was it supposed to be permanent mirror?
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Okay, so were the later Soliots. Okay, so the mirror
definitely was meant to be a permanent one.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
All right. Well, the first crew cosmonauts Leonid Kazimr, solely
off Solo y Off nice, it's a great name. I
think it was just those two dudes. They shuttled between
the Saliot seven, which is being retired, and Mirror, and
there was some like you said, there was some crossover there, right,
(30:35):
an overlap.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
They had to get the vodka.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Yeah, they had to get the vodka right. And they
spent seventy five days on the mirror, and it was
continually manned over the next ten years. And you know,
manned and built. It's not they build these things out
there or assemble them out there, I guess we should say.
But they don't just launch a space station.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
Were right, like the ready to go.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
They carry pieces of it out there. Right, just like
iss and they put them together.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
Although I think, as we'll see later on, I think
the Chinese launched a full space station.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Oh really, yeah, of course they did.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
I think they did, but we're talking twenty thirteen. Come on.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
So the Mirror had twelve twelve main parts, which we
won't go over all those because we don't like to
just read lists. But you know, it's something you would expect.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
It was a g whiz space station. Yeah, a lot
of everything.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
You need stuff, a lot of modules, living quarters, transfer compartments,
docking places. They had more than one parking space. They
figured that old mess out. Yeah, you know, it's like,
you know, we should have guests.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
And they did have guests. They had American guests. Actually,
they sure did, which was pretty cool. It wasn't until
the nineties after the Soviet Union dissolved, and actually there
was a cosmonaut a board Mirror when the Soviet Union
dissolved on December twenty sixth, nineteen ninety one. His name
was Sergei Kirkvkev kir Ko keV. It's harder to say
(32:02):
than you would think. Yeah, And he was known as
the last Soviet citizen because apparently being in space made
him immune from the dissolving of the Soviet Union.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Oh really, yeah, not really.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
But that's what everybody said about him, whether he liked
it or not.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
Well, the Mirror had some problems kind of later in
its life. There was a fire one year and then
the supply ship was called the Progress I think you
mentioned it actually crashed into the Mirror trying to park
and it's a little parking space, which damaged it. And
at that point they said, you know what, we should
(32:37):
just make this thing space junk, even though you thought
it was going to be permanent. The US is talking
about this iss station they want us to come help
them with and that was a big campaign to keep
the Mirror alive called Keep Mirror Alive, and private corporation
stepped in said no, let us take it over. Let's
privatize this thing. And they said, niett not going to
(32:59):
do it.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
Yeah, we're not gonna just hand over a space station.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
Okay, No, we're going to crash it into the Earth.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
Right If I can't have you, no one can't.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Pretty much, so they had a little bit more advanced
capabilities in Skylab had as far as directionally and in February
two thousand and one. They slowed those endinges down and
it re entered the atmosphere on March twenty third, two
thousand and one, burned up, broke up, and again tried
(33:28):
to kill Australia.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
I know Australia is like what the age?
Speaker 2 (33:32):
I know, why is everyone trying to land their space
junk on us? But it was about on AE, thousand miles
east of Australia in the ocean. Has anyone found these things?
That's what I was wondering.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
Mirror is near at the bottom of the ocean. I'm
sure somebody's found some parts of it.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
Pretty neat. Yeah, talk about like space wreckage at the
bottom of the ocean. That's a movie.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
Who was it? Was it Jeff Bezos that went and
got like one of the Apollo really stages that had
been scull than the ocean recently? Probably? I think I
was Jeff Bezos.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
Or James Cameron. We talked about him too much though, hm.
So that brings us to iss nineteen eighty four, Ronald
Reagan said, you know what, I was about to do
a Reagan, but I thought the better.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
I think everybody wants to hear your Reagan.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
No, I don't want to do it, he said, let's
he said, hey, man, let's get an.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
ISS station going dead on Reagan. Is that good?
Speaker 2 (34:29):
Yeah, we'll call it the International Space Station. And it's
going to be super expensive, so we need some help.
Let's partner up with fourteen other countries, Canada, Japan, Brazil,
and then the European Space Agency, which is the UK, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy,
Netherlands and Mark, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden. And he said,
(34:50):
as a good faith measure, let's invite the Soviets. I
don't know if that was all.
Speaker 1 (34:57):
Well, no, it was Russia by then.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
Oh yeah, you're right, Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
And the Russian said, sure, why not. Weren't doing anything.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
And not just being friendly, but you know they they
were probably the second leading well I don't know by
that point there were other players.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Well in space science.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
Yeah, but they were still pretty highly regarded.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
Sure yeah, big time. Yeah, yeah, probably more than they
get credit for again over here, agreed. So they started
putting the ISS in orbit in nineteen ninety eight, and
the first people showed up from it was launched for
They were launched from Russia. Yeah, in two thousand and
they spent about five months there like basically getting everything
up and running man taking all of the little desecant
(35:41):
packets out of everything, like they do not eat things
that keep stuff dry.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
What is that silica jel?
Speaker 1 (35:48):
Yeah, yeah, and pulling off all of the cellophane from everything.
Uh huh, Well they left it on the lampshades, which
I thought was tasteless.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Oh well, it's shiny.
Speaker 3 (35:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
So they've been living up there. Like I said, they
just launched the one hundred thousandth I'm sorry, the forty seventh,
but one hundred thousandth orbit of Earth, and we'll do
one on the iside.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
I really think we should.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
But I did look a little bit into their day
to day life. They work about ten hours a day
Monday through Friday, about half that on a Saturday, and
then they take Sunday off and then the rest of
the time is you know, relaxation, emailing your family, hanging
out pool side, facetiming. They have sixteen sunrises and sunsets
(36:37):
a day, which is decidedly weird on your body, so
they generally just keep those windows closed so they can
get on a rag skeedu and apparently the food isn't great.
They don't love the food, no, and they have to
overspice it. I didn't know this. One of the things
space does is reduce your sense of taste. I've heard
that in microgravity. I think it makes everything tastes like Yeah,
(37:00):
so apparently they like really overspice everything to try and
make it palatable. And they have to be really careful
of crumbs because oh yeah, remember Homer Simpson.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
Do you remember one of the great.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
All time scenes when he opened the bag of chips
in space? Great great scene and then pooping and peepe.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
Gotta go somewhere.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
They have two toilets, only two, and oh.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
There's usually only three or four people up there.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
Well there's six right now?
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Oh six? Yeah, with two toilets. Yeah, how many hair dryers?
Speaker 2 (37:41):
Who knows? They keep their hair short though, because.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
Because there's very few hair dryers in space.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
Well, there's no showers.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
M hmm.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
I mean they can wash themselves. They have like water jets, but.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Not the same Yeah, not the same, man. I'll bet
that first shower when they get back down to Earth
feels so good.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
Yeah. But there's two toilets. They use a fan driven
suction system and you have to latch yourself to the toilet.
Oh yeah, I've heard that too, And there are restraining
bars to ensure there's a good seal, because you know
what happens if there's not a good seal and microgravity,
things will float away. And then there's a lever that
they hit, a suction hole slides open and a big
(38:19):
stream of air carries a waste away. The solids are
collected actually into an aluminum container, and the they are
then transferred to the progress to take away the little
shuttle ship like, here's all our poop.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Yeah, Progress is like thanks, yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:34):
I wonder what they call it progress? And then the
peepee is evacuated by a hose that's attached to the
front of the toilet.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
Do they drink it?
Speaker 2 (38:46):
They do? I was getting there, but sure, I'm sorry.
Now it's recycled. It's a recovery system and they eventually
recycle it back into drinking water.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
Tastes like chicken and.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
The toilets for PEP are an comically correct. They have
these funnel adapters, So men and women have different adapters
because you know, they have different parts.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
Yes they do. They do have different parts.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
That like a second grader I just you don't think
about this stuff. Like. That's the first thing I thought.
I was like, oh, man, how they eat, how they poop?
Do they watch movies?
Speaker 1 (39:21):
Do they watch movies?
Speaker 2 (39:22):
Yeah? That the they just sit back. I think it
was the Atlantic had a great photo spread of photos
that this new mission is taking of space and the
Earth and you know all that stuff. But then pictures
on board, and one of them they were had this
huge flat screen watching the.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Revenant, watching the Revenue.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
Huh yeah, wow, that's what it looked like.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
I could see these.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Two guys on a horse. It was hard to tell
because it was in the background, but I think it
was a Revenant.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
That are cloudy with the chance of meatball.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
Probably not the movie gravity.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
So yeah, I know they were probably like it could
never happen. Remember when Nils deGrasse Tyson lost his mind
about gravity, he went on a Twitter ran about it. Yeah,
then then we should talk about the Chinese, because I
think it's been unfair not to. The Chinese launched something
called Tiangong one back in two thousand and three. They
(40:19):
became the third nation on the planet to launch a
human into space, and they launched their space their space
station in twenty eleven, and there's been two missions to
the space station. I think it's no longer active, but
(40:40):
it's still up there, but the Chinese admitted this year
that they've lost contact with the space station. It's no
longer under their control. So it may end up coming
back down to Earth and we'll have a new Skylab
party for it. But the two missions included China's first
two women asked intronauts, Lou Yang and Wang Yaping, and
(41:03):
they were in twenty twelve, in twenty thirteen, and they
did I mean, they lived in space for a while,
just like yeah, everybody else had. But the Chinese don't
participate in the ISS. I don't know if they've not
been invited or if they decline an invitation, but they're
doing their own parallel thing, which I get the impression
that's making people nervous.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
Interesting. Well, I know it's important that they've had women astronauts,
female astronauts on the ISS, because you know, you need
to see what space does to them. And I just
wonder if they're going to like get to the point
where they're like, well we need to if we really
want to call an I space, we need to see
what happens when a baby is up there, or give
(41:45):
birth in outer space, or have a ten year old
or a seventy five year old.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
And a ten year old aboard a space station for
a year.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
Yeah, oh man, no, thank you.
Speaker 1 (41:58):
There's one other thing I wanted to mention. There's talk
about saving a lot a lot of money with a
space station by putting it what's called the lagrange point.
And there's lagrange point L four and L five, and
they are the little these spots between the Earth and
(42:19):
the Moon to where the gravity between the Earth and
the Moon is counterbalanced. So all it does is just
go in orbit around the Earth and the Moon and
it will stay in that orbit forever because gravity's not
pulling on it one way or the other, so you
don't have to use fuel to keep it in that
orbit forever. Right. And this is actually like an early
idea that I think Arthur C. Clark was the first
(42:41):
to put it out there in nineteen sixty one. And
these lagrange points are like the orbit's like ninety thousand
miles across. You can put a bunch of space stations
in these things and just leave them out there. And
there's actually something called the L five society that came
about that is all about this kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
I bet their parties are wicked crazy.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
Yeah, well they plan to disband on a space station
in the L five band at some point in the future. Really,
when they all come together there for the first time.
Speaker 2 (43:14):
Sounds wonderful.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Yeah. Oh, one more thing, Valerie Polyakov.
Speaker 2 (43:20):
Yeah, record holder right.
Speaker 1 (43:22):
Yep, four hundred and thirty eight days. He did a
board mirror in nineteen ninety four to nineteen ninety five. Man,
and he'd done like two hundred and thirty eight days
before then.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
Crazy. I bet he's super fainty, you know all the time.
He's Russian, though, he can take it.
Speaker 1 (43:38):
You got anything else?
Speaker 2 (43:39):
I got nothing else?
Speaker 1 (43:39):
All right, Well, let's it for space stations for now.
If you want to learn more about him, you can
type those words in the search part house stuff works.
And since I said search part's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
I'm going to call this oh Chuck's graduation post. So
I put out a post about my nephew graduating high school.
Speaker 1 (44:00):
Oh yeah it did he really?
Speaker 3 (44:01):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (44:01):
Noah Is graduated from high school. And also Noah the
same year, my niece Reagan graduated college from Mayordith College,
moving to New York City like a good girl.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
And my other niece Abby moved on matriculated into high
school from middle school.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
Nothing better than matriculation.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
Nothing better. So I went to Noah's graduation and it
really like affected me much more than I thought it
would because I haven't been to a graduation since my own.
Oh yeah, like and I didn't walk in the college one,
so I literally have not been to a ceremony since
nineteen eighty nine. And it just stirred up all these
amazing feelings.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
Oh, I thought you mad.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
No, it was really really neat just to hear these
kids and their speeches. And I put a Facebook post.
I was like, you know what, we're great, don't people.
Millennials get a lot of crap, But like, talk to
a seventeen year old for a little while, who's doing
it right, and we're headed in the right direction like
this very empathetic, carrying, like forward thinking generation.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
So it was a really neat things. So I just
congratulations to all the graduates. Yeah, especially well, if you're listening,
then I guess you are a listener. What all your stuff?
You should know listeners that have been with us like
throughout high school.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
We appreciate you. A girl named Hannah, I want to say,
wrote in and asked for any advice for graduations.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
Oh that's right, and she mentioned you in this speech.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
Yeah yeah, so pretty mit relations to her as well.
Speaker 2 (45:25):
Pretty great stuff.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
But you're right, all stuff you should know. Listeners who
are graduating or matriculating, congratulations.
Speaker 2 (45:32):
Yes, very big accomplishment. So this is from Brandy and Kansas. Hey, guys,
want to thank you so much for that Facebook post
about Noah's graduation and how you have so much hope
for the up and coming generation. I'm really excited about
the world changers coming up and so rare to hear
someone come out and say how awesome they are on
that thread. Have you considered it doing a show on
Kids Today fallacy. It's a well documented phenomenon where each
(45:55):
generation downplays the bad things our own generation didn't believes.
The ones that follow are lazy, spoiled, entitled. There are
quotes literally dating back two thousands of years ago of
this very thing. And the music stinks too, I'm sure
that's the other part of that. Yeah or no, no, no, yeah,
the music today's stinks are rives better I would love
(46:16):
to hear you explain this nonsense. Help people stop being
so crotchety and instead recognize their role in helping to
shape the future generations. Second request, come to Kansas. You
guys make fun of us enough and it's time to
pace a visit. We top some lists for the most
beautiful sunsets and landscapes and also have cities on national
lists of places to live. It takes more than a
(46:39):
beautiful sunset to get us to.
Speaker 1 (46:42):
Do a live show and listicles.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
We make fun of Kansas because of our good friend
Aaron Cooper and our buddy Isaac McNary is really the
two people that we're targeting when we make fun of
Kansas and the governor, And it's all out of love
because Isaaca and Aaron are great. And we met Aaron
at our show in Denver and he's just as nice
(47:08):
and cool as I thought he was gonna be.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
And we met our pal Tyler Murphy too.
Speaker 2 (47:11):
And Mett Tyler and his friends Timothy and Sarah, and
our friend Jane Janab was in the audience, and our
old buddy Greg Storkin was in the audience.
Speaker 1 (47:20):
It was something else.
Speaker 2 (47:21):
Yeah, Denver was like these some of our oldest, oldest
fans were inattended, so that it was a great show.
It was wonderful. Anyway, we're not coming to Kansas. Thanks
for a great show. Guys, only have a few episodes
left to go before them got up and then I
will enter the pitch of despair, so at least satisfy
one of my requests you can help pull me out,
and that is Brandy and Manhattan, Kansas.
Speaker 1 (47:43):
Thank you, Brandy, good luck in the pit of despair.
If you want to get in touch with this and
you can send us an email to Stuff Podcasts at
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart rate, you visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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