June 21, 2016 • 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 episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode of Stuff You Should Know is sponsored by Squarespace.
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House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
(00:27):
I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry.
This is Stuff you Should Know. Okay, you sounded like
Steve Rule. We were just talking about Steve Rule and
that was very brulesque, brulesque. Not brulesque, right, brulesque brulesque.
You're saying you we should do a movie. I'm surprised
(00:49):
to I could watch a continuous loop of brules Rules
over and over and over, and people thought, you're don't
be done. Was an homage to that which omas are
rip off depending and it was well, it was it
was neither, but it it was reminiscent of it in
good ways. But I don't think that that meant that
ripped it off, or that you were paying tribute to
It's definitely not intentional. It was just, you know, two
(01:11):
two great things that go great together. Can't there be both?
Like ESA scuts, Yeah, they go great with kit cats.
Oh man, they'd be good. Just take two full kit
cats and put two ESA's cups in the middle like
a sandwich. I think you just came up with something
the news more the reci cat, Um chuckers. Yes. Have
(01:35):
you ever looked to the sky at night, seen some
stars flying by and thought, why don't we live up there? Uh? Sure?
Have you ever seen the I S S cruising? No?
I used to, Um, apparently you can. I used, Yes,
I used to get either text or emails. I can't
(01:56):
remember that. Would you just put in your your zip
code and UM it sends you texts alerts when the
I S S is going to be flying overhead. I
thought you're gonna say one of the lead astronauts would
just text you be like, h are you doing? We're
over your house right now. But I mean, basically it's
not from the astronaut, but it's the same thing. It's saying, like,
(02:18):
look up in this direction at this time and you
you should be able to see the I S S
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. Yeah,
this really like thrills me to no end. Once I
started looking into this, like I don't I never paid
a lot of attention, and it really just dawned on me,
(02:39):
like people are living in outer space continuous full time.
The International Space Station has been continuously inhabited since it
was launched. Yeah. In fact, they just took they're one
hundred thousand orbit of Earth. That's really neat in May
of this year and Expedition forty seven began in Mark.
(03:00):
That's so cool, man, And like we just it's like
you were saying, you you don't really stop and think
about it, But we're living in space now. Humanity is
extended at least into Earth's or of it, right, that's
where we're living, um, And we just kind of seemed
to take that for granted. But that wasn't always the
cases actually, And I think the reason why we do
(03:22):
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, when the idea of space colonization
was at its peak. I mean NASA Aims Research Center
was conducting summer studies is what they were called, where
they would just get the public really jazzed about living
(03:44):
in space. Um. And the best you can say, or
the least you can say, is that it bore some
pretty awesome artists surrenderings and space colonies will look like
It seemed like every other issue of Popular Science was
just some cool new uh pick of like, you know,
one day we're gonna be living out here, right exactly,
(04:04):
but the one day seemed a lot closer than than
it does now right. Um. But at the at the
most you can say that that space colony 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.
(04:29):
It doesn't mean we're not going to. 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 the these the
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 have been previously. That didn't
pan out to be the case, and that there would
(04:50):
be something like, um, it's gonna be word like at
least sixty launches a year, which is which didn't pan
out to be the case either. But they thought that, yeah,
it was just gonna 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. Um. The Space Shuttle program didn't didn't
(05:12):
pan out to be that as cheap or as frequent, um.
And so 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,
(05:32):
it's just a little further down the road. Yeah, And
there were 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 Mr. 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
(05:55):
viable way. 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
health freezes over. But if we don't get the attention
of the taxpayer, we're going We're not going anywhere. And
how do you do that? You start putting people in
the moon and start building space stations. Well, even even
more basic than that, he started he wrote like popular
(06:18):
articles and popular magazines to get the public's imagination prime
for that kind of thing. Yeah, and his idea was
it 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 outwest outpost. He was like, we need
an outpost. We need a place where people can live
and work and as their base station. Essentially, sure, space
(06:42):
is a frontier, but you watch the star trek knows
that the final frontier, right, Well, that's what we think,
that's what we thought back then. I'm sure there's other
frontiers ner dimensions to explore that kind of thing. Right. Uh, well,
let's just talk about why what What are some of
the reasons we should do this. Um you mentioned um
(07:05):
just capturing the public, and it certainly will would do
a lot to rally people around spending funds on you know,
space travel, NASA allocating funds towards this kind of thing, right,
you mean space tourism. No, no, no, not space tourism.
But just initially, you know, they needed the support of
the popular American opinion, right, which is why Von Brown said,
(07:29):
I'm gonna like reach out to the public directly through
Collier's magazine. He did a three part he hosted a
three part show UM on like the Wonderful World of
Disney about living in space and we really got people
jazzed about this back in the fifties. Then it peaked
again in the seventies. Like I was saying, yeah, but
one of the big reasons that you would want to
have a working space station is, um, aside from the
(07:52):
convenience of you know, having a having it up there
and not having to go back and forth every time
you want to do something, is to thinks are different
up there, and you can do different things without gravity
that you can't do here on Earth, like research. Yeah,
like remarkable things. So it turns out gravity has a
weird effect on crystals in the way they form, flaws
(08:13):
them like inevitably. Um. But if you're out there in
micro gravity, 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. Um. You
can also crystallize drugs better to make them more potent.
(08:34):
You can really knock your socks off. So research up
there that can make things better here, right a point,
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 and then bring them back
to Earth and be like, watch how fast this baby goes.
(08:54):
Another thing that uh, no gravity or microgravity does is
it makes flames. Um, 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.
Remember when we talked about fire. Yeah, fire and space
is very consistent and perfect. It's around. Yeah, it's so cool.
(09:17):
So you could you could potentially with uh, with a
perfect flame like that, that perfect flame that's got to
be a song. Eternal flame is what you're thinking of. No,
I'm saying perfect flame. Now you're thinking of eternal flame
such a Josh is m It's one of my favorites. Uh.
(09:38):
Micro gravity, though, you can have that eternal flame that
is perfect and round and uh, you can study combustion
in a more pure fashion, and you could build a
better furnace maybe or find out how to reduce air
pollution by making things more efficient. That's just like two
things that you could do in space. I'm sure there
are a thousand things we could list. Um. And as
(09:59):
a matter of fact, some of the early ideas for
space stations were these. There were concepts that were that
used like moon mined minerals and materials and assembled in
space so that you didn't have to launch them from Earth.
So this whole idea of like creating things in space
was even used to form the basis of these places
(10:19):
where we would actually live while we were doing this stuff.
It's pretty cool. Yeah, it also offers a unique perspective
on the Earth, if we're talking about landforms and oceans,
your atmosphere, uh speaking of which they can take uh
much better pictures looking in the other direction into deep
space because they don't have that pesky atmosphere in the way, right,
(10:39):
So lots of great reasons to be up there, um,
not the least of 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?
Um Galactic Suite. Yeah, they're they're still at it. Well,
another that I saw there still says they're planning on
(11:02):
launching in two thousand twelve. Oh, I thought that they
thought they were still kind of I mean obviously not
on that timeline. Somebody's still paying for the domain, but
it still says like, um, they're gonna be They're gonna
head for the star the stars in two thousand twelve.
And then I found another Russian one that was looked
(11:24):
pretty promising, but their site apparently was not updated since
two thousand ten. But um, a company called Bigelow Industries
very recently had SpaceX ferry capsule up to the I
S S. It was an inflatable capsule that was a
habitat module that was meant to be a prototype for
(11:45):
a space hotel and they couldn't get it inflated. It
was in Uh, they just aborted the mission. But um,
like people are still working on the concept of of
space tourism like today, well, I know, the Galactic Suite said, um,
they're like, we we think it will cost a four
million dollars for a weekend stay, and our data suggests
(12:06):
that there are about forty people in the world that
can and will pay for this. So um, maybe maybe
their their site hasn't been updated because they got scared
with the end of the world two thousand twelve things
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. Maybe well Richard Branson,
you know, he's trying to fly people into space. Still. Yeah.
(12:29):
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 that
Alaskan Airlines took over. Apparently in a hostile takeover Um,
but Virgin Galactics still at it. Okay, Well that's good.
I guess if you're loaded and want to ride into space. Yeah,
(12:49):
if you're Ashton Couture, they were on the list, right,
Sure they have disposable income. Sure, send the cooch up there.
All right, either one, I feel like I should take
a break and regroup and then we'll start talking about
space stations past. I'll take one with you, all right,
(13:35):
let's talk about the first one, josh. Uh. We had
a great episode on the space Race. It was pretty
much a two I love that to 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. They really did. You know, they don't
get enough credit around these parts for the stuff that
(13:59):
they did as far as space goes, because they definitely
did beat us in a lot of ways, like we
beat them to the moon basically, Yeah, which we pointed
out in our show really got us going, sure and
led to our advancements. Yeah. But also what was it? Um,
there was another show we did recently, Sputnik led to
Super Bowls. But do you remember we were talking about
the Super Bowl In the Super Bowl episode how Sputnik
(14:20):
like made America, post war America wake up and be like, hey,
stuff being coddled in in lazy. We need to get
back to innovation. Yeah, innovating again. And and it was
spot Nick that did that. Yeah that's right. Um, nothing
like the threat of Communist Russia or Soviet Union to
get people going we're being left behind. Um. So back
(14:43):
then they were the Soviet Union and they were the first,
as we said with the saliott one station. Uh one?
Do they have people living in space? Yeah? The year
I was born. It's crazy. And it was actually a
combination of a couple of different system one Mas and
the soyas The Almas was a military system and the
(15:04):
soyas Is was the actual spacecraft that ferried people to
and fro. They're still using that thing, so American Astro
not to get to the I S s is on
Soya's um rockets. Yeah, what what number they had? I wonder? Oh,
who knows? Who knows? A lot? A lot they launched
them a lot from the Kazakhstan. I think very nice.
(15:26):
Uh uhtt long um had three main compartments. Um, your
your standard compartments, which are like dining in recreation, food
and water storage. You gotta have your toilet exercise equipment,
and then your science e stuff. Yeah, that's sciences stuff.
That's a big deal because not only are they looking
(15:49):
at how to make crystals better, they're also studying, um,
the effects of micro gravity on the human body, which
we're still getting a handle lot. 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 of this one article. Well, yeah,
we should do one just on the I S S too. Um.
(16:09):
But well, just kind of briefly, one of the things
that they found so far about living in space is
that your bone mineral density decreases by one percent a month,
which you're like one percent there's still left he cares
here on Earth. If you're in a senior adult you
lose about one percent of bone mass a year. So
(16:29):
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 Uh, in microgravity, it tends to
accumulate up in your upper body and your upper chest
and in your head and your brains, like, oh, I'm
I'm bathed in this stuff. I need to shut down
(16:52):
production on fluids, including blood, so that when astronauts get
back on Earth, they tend to be fainty because they
don't have enough blood for a while until their bodies like, WHOA,
something weird just happened. I need to start making blood.
And they say, I'm fainting because of space. Somebody give
me some tang My bloodcher is low. Uh. The other
thing they found out was in space, no one can
(17:13):
hear you scream. Yeah, they try it fifteen after every hour,
all the astronauts scream as loud as they can and
nobody can hear him. And that, of course, was the
famous tagline from the first Alien movie. Oh really, yeah,
I remember seeing the ad with the big egg space
No can you scream? I know. I was just though,
that's terrifying. I'm gonna watch it. Uh. Oh. One other
(17:37):
thing that they're learning about affects and gravity. So Scott Kelly,
the astronaut who famously just spent a year on the
I S s um he has a twin who's also
an astronaut, leave his name is Mike, and um, Mike
has been studied here on Earth. You gotta slit those
guys up over the same over the same year that
(17:57):
Scott has, and now they're comparing Apparently Scott came down
and he was like an inch or too shorter than
his identical twin. That was just one thing, But they're
they're examining them on a genetic level to see what
differences of have happened, so you can get a better
handle on what living in gravity does to the human body.
He said, I'm shorter and more fainty for starters. He
(18:19):
just felt dead away and they just slapped his face
and poured tang down his throat. 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. Well,
(18:41):
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 um, apparently there's a huge
possibility of 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.
(19:03):
We got a lot of stuff to figure out beforehand. Heroes, sir,
That's what I say. So uh, the Sayas ten crew
um for that very first uh Saliott space station that
Russia had. They were they were supposed to live up there,
but they couldn't dock correctly, so they could never enter
(19:24):
the space station, so they never could even get in,
big big disappointment. They just hung their heads and put
in reverse in the little modulant. So the Saya's eleven
crew actually successfully lived there for twenty four days in
which is remarkable, but very sadly they all perished upon
(19:49):
re entry coming back to Earth. Yeah, there um capsule
depressurized and they there capsule at the time wasn't designed
for them to wear suits, so they um, they were
all asphyxiated just like died instantly, right pretty much. Yeah,
they would have like lost consciousness almost immediately. So after
(20:09):
the eleven soy is eleven they launched a different space
station altogether, the Sliot two. That one didn't even get
up into orbit, so they were like, uh yet uh
went through three, four and five h and pretty quick succession,
um and each one basically they got better at getting
(20:29):
people to and from and they could stay up there
longer and longer. Yeah. I think the last one was
launched in two and it was up there until like
nine two or ninety four, and they actually used it
as like um, they they 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
(20:51):
going back and forth between Soliott seven and the Mirror.
I guess probably going like, oh we can we can
use this vodka over here. You gotta go get it
from Salute 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 in the later ones was
that there was a docking a secondary docking module. Yeah.
(21:15):
The first one's only had one parking space essentially, right,
and so you had the parking space for the crew
that was there, and if they needed supplies, well t s.
But if you had a second docking port then you
can use um. Well, they used an unmanned ship called
Progress two ferry supplies from Earth to the Salute stations. Yeah.
(21:35):
I'm surprised that it took them up to the Salute
six to realize they needed another parking space. Yeah, because
you know you're gonna forget something right, you left the
iron on home. We're stuck up here. No one can
visit us. Well, like you said that, they figured it out,
which is wonderful. Uh. And that all led to the
United States in nineteen seventy three launching their very famous
(22:00):
guy Lab one space station, which says the best patch
of any NASA related space based anything, Skylab one is
the best. Yeah, sky Lab was awesome, but it um
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
(22:21):
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, it couldn't cool it
the interior the capsule went up to like a hundred
and twenty six. So they said, hey, guys, we need
you to go up there and fix this. And they
(22:43):
actually there were three different crews that were that were
sent to Skylab on Apollo capsules and um. The Skylab
module itself was actually designed roughly initially by Warner von
braun Um out of a Saturn five moon rocket. The
third stage of it became sky Lab, and I think
at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, not the
(23:06):
one at Dullest, but the the one that's in like
the like around the mall, and I think it has
a replica of Skylab you can walk through. Oh cool,
which is so awesome, dude, I would love to do that.
But so the three crews that got sent up there, chuck.
They managed to kind of like put Skylight back together
with duck tape and bubblegum. Yeah, that first one, Skylab two.
(23:26):
They just sent them up a week and a half
after the fit, 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 to cool it down. And then
see that that solar panel that didn't stretch out far enough,
(23:49):
stretch it out, and see that stretch it out. And
they did. Uh, Commander Charles Pete, Conrad, Paul Whites, and
Joseph Kerwin essentially saved sky Lab. Yeah, right off the bat,
and not just then. There were again there were three
crews that kind of did one after the other. They
didn't overlap, UM, but they finally got the thing working.
(24:09):
And I think the last crew spent eighty four days
in orbit. Yeah, the first one spent the next one
fifty nine in the final one eighty four days in
the seventies and I remember, UM, and this is a
big deal, you know, this was the first time they
were testing these long duration man missions UM to see, like,
(24:31):
you know, can we go to the Moon because it
takes a while to get there and back right, That
was the thing, Like all the only data we had
was on Moon missions, which is about a two week mission,
so we didn't have any data on what happened to
people longer than that. Can we can we set up
a shop there colonize the moon? Even so they called
anything over two weeks a long duration spaceflight. Uh. And
(24:52):
I remember in nineteen seventy nine. I remember being an
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? And I remember sitting around
and hearing that sky Lab is coming back down to
Earth in a unpredictable way, and I remember being sort
(25:14):
of scared and thinking like, wow, this is a little
weird and kind of a big deal. Yeah, Like even
little eight year old Chuck knew like something didn't seem
quite right. There are a lot of people who are
really anxious about it because NASA very famously said that, um,
everybody calmed down. There's there's a one in one hundred
and fifty two chants that somebody will be killed by
(25:36):
sky Lab. Well, yeah, they like one in one fifty two.
You want to hear numbers from NASA like one in
a million or one in a billion, not one in
a hundred and fifty two. You're like, I know two
hundred people, I know a hundred and fifty three people. Uh.
It also forced NASSA to admit UM, we were so
excited about getting this thing up there, we didn't really
(25:56):
think a lot about how to control its descent UM,
because that was essentially the story. They They were like,
we can't, we don't really know how to guide this
thing back down. They said it would quote cost too
much to have UM designed in a way to bring
it down safely. Yeah, and I think they were there
in a hurry. Well. Also, the problem is they thought
(26:16):
that it would just it's 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, sky Labs on a collision course with Earth.
NASA saying it'll it'll probably enter somewhere over this thousand
(26:40):
kilometer stretch of Earth that includes Australia. So heads up
Australia and UM. There were lots of like sky Lab parties, UM.
Because it's America in the seventies, people went like Skylab
crazy disco parties UM, and the San Francisco Examiner actually
UM offered ten thousand dollars to anybody who could bring
(27:03):
in a legitimate piece of sky Lab within seventy two
hours of it crashing. And some kid actually collected Yeah
in Australian. Yeah, he got on a plane. He had
a little piece of sky Lab. Because where to end
up crashing and the esperance Australia when you're perth, Yeah,
I mean mostly in the ocean. Yeah, but they did
get a pretty good amount of debris in Australia. Yeah,
(27:26):
like the sizeable parts. But it's Australia. They're tough, they're
like everything tries to kill us. You're silly. Space Station
can't do it right. So yeah, this kid flew over
in San Francisco and said here sky Lab. His name
was Stanthorpe and he was seventeen, and like, without even
thinking twice about it, he grabbed it, hopped on a
(27:46):
plane and went to San Francisco, like you said, and
they examined or paid him, which I did the West
Aig inflation calculator. That's about thirty three thou dollars in
today's money. Not bad, No, I'd do that, hop on
a plane for that. That's a salary of as your teacher,
right badly. Yeah. Uh, you can also buy pieces of
sky Lab today if you've got some dough and an
(28:07):
Internet connection. Alleged pieces of sky Lab. Well, sure, just
like anything, it should be uh not verified, what do
you call it? Verified? Authenticated? Supposedly NASA's instead of exerting
its domain over pieces of sky Lab, the debris that
was found in saying you give a back that some
(28:30):
people sent their pieces to NASA, NASA authenticated them and
send them back mounted saying this is an official piece
of sky Lab to the people who mailed it in.
Good peeps, Good peeps wearing brown polyester pants up to
their chests. All right, buddy, let's take a break in um,
let's go for a little jog around our gravity office,
(28:57):
and then we'll talk about mirror and I s all right,
(29:26):
all right. We talked about the Soviet which was the
Soviet Union's big first success and some failures, but overall,
I think they saw it as a success. Right And
at the same time, a couple of years later, America
had sky LAMB and then the Soviets said, we can
do better than than what we're doing. We can do
(29:48):
better than anybody else. We're going to create the mirror. Yeah.
And by the way, Skyla was not supposed to be permanent. No,
that was never the intention, but mirror was. Was it
supposed to be permanent? Yeah, okay, so were the later
um soliots Okay, so the mirror definitely was meant to
(30:08):
be a permanent one. All right. Well, the first crew
cosmonauts Leonid Kasim Vladimir solely off off nice it's a
great name. Um. I think it was just those two dudes. Uh.
They shuttled between the sally At seven which is being
retired in mirror, and there was some like you said that,
(30:31):
there was some cross over there, right and overlap. They
had to get the vodka. Yeah, they had to get
the vodka. 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 they
build these things out there or assemble them out there. Um,
I guess we should say. But they don't just launch
(30:52):
a space station right like ready to go. They carry
pieces of it out there just like I S S.
And they put them together. Although I think it was
we'll see you later on. I think the Chinese launched
a full space station. Of course they did. I think
they did, um, but we're talking. Come on. So the
(31:13):
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. It was
a ge whiz space station, a lot of everything, a
lot of a lot of modules, living quarters, transfer compartments,
docking places, had more than one parking space. They figured
(31:34):
the old mess out. Yeah, you know, I was like,
you know, we should have guests, and they did have guests.
They had American guests actually, which was pretty cool. It
wasn't until the nineties after the Soviet Union dissolved, and
actually there was a cosmonaut aboard Mirror when the Soviet
Union dissolved in December. Um. His name was Sergey Kirkov
(31:56):
Keev Kirkakv, it started to say, and you would think, yeah, uh,
And he was known as the last Soviet citizen because
apparently being in space made him immune from the dissolving
in the Soviet Union. Oh really yeah, not really, but
that's what everybody said about him, whether he liked it
or not. Well, the Mirror, they had some problems kind
(32:17):
of later in its life. There was a fire one
year uh and then that pro 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, Uh, we should just make this thing
space junk, even though you thought it was going to
(32:37):
be permanent. Uh. The US is talking about this I. S.
S Station. They want us to come help them with uh.
And there was a big campaign to keep the Mirror
alive called Keep Mirror Alive uh. And private corporation stepped
in and said, no, let us take it over. Let's
privatize this thing. And they said, yet, I'm not gonna
do it. Yeah, We're not gonna just hand over space station. Okay, No,
(33:01):
we're gonna crash it into the Earth. If I can't
have you, no one can't. Pretty much, so um, they
had a little bit uh more advanced capabilities in Skylab
had as far as directionally um. And in February two
thousand one, it uh. They slowed those engines down and
it re entered the atmosphere. On March two one burned
(33:23):
up broke up and again, uh, tried to kill Australia.
I know, Australia is like, what the eight Why is
everyone trying to land their space junk on us? But
it was about a thousand miles east of Australia in
the ocean. Um has anyone found these things? That's what
I was wondering, mire at the bottom of the ocean.
I'm sure somebody's found some parts of it. Pretty neat. Yeah,
(33:46):
talk about like space records at bottom the ocean. That's
a movie. Who was it? Was it Jeff Bezos that
went and got like, uh one of the Apollo really
stages that had been scuttled in the ocean recently? Probably?
I think it was yep Asos or James Cameron. We
talked about him too much though. Uh So that brings
us to I S S. Ronald Reagan. I said, you
(34:09):
know what, I was about to do a Reagan, but
I thought the better. I think everybody wants to hear
your Reagan. I don't want to do it. He said,
let's let's he said, hey, man, let's get an A S.
S station going. Is that good? We'll call it the
International Space Station and it's gonna be super expensive, so
(34:31):
we need some help. Um, let's partner up with with
fourteen other countries, Canada, Japan, Brazil and then the European
Space Agency, which is the UK, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Netherlands,
did Mark, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden. And he said, as
a good faith measure, let's invite the Soviets. M hm,
(34:53):
I don't know if that was all Russia by then,
Oh yeah, you're right, Yeah, you're right. And the Russian said, sure,
why not, we don't doing anything and not just being friendly,
but you know, they they were probably the second leading
uh uh well, I don't know by that point there
were other players in space science. Yeah, but they were
still pretty highly regarded yeah big time. Yeah, yeah, probably
(35:17):
more than they get credit for again over here. So
they started putting the I S S in orbit, and um,
the first people showed up from it was launched for
They were launched from Russia in two thousand and they
spent about five months. They're like basically getting everything up
and running, taking um all of the uh the little
(35:38):
descant packets out of everything, like they do not eat
things that keep stuff dry silica jel yeah, um, and um,
pulling off all of the cellophane from everything. Well they
left it on the lamp shades, which I thought was tasteless.
It's shiny. Yeah. Um, so they've been living up there.
(35:59):
Like I said, they just launched the one I'm sorry,
but one orbit of Earth and um, we do one
on the I S. But I did look a little
bit into their day to day life. Um. They work
about ten hours a day, uh money through Friday, about
(36:19):
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, face timing. Um.
They have sixteen sunrises and sunsets today, which is decidedly
weird on your body. So they generally just keep those
windows closed so they can get on a reg sketch.
(36:43):
And um, apparently the food isn't great. They don't love
the food. Um, and they have to overspice it. I
didn't know that one of the things space does is
reduce your sense of taste. I've heard that in microgravity
tastes like styrofun. Yeah, so apparently they like really over
everything to try and make it palatable. Um, and they
(37:03):
have to be really careful of crumbs because oh yeah,
remember Homer Simpson, do you remember one of the great
all time scenes when you opened the bag of chips
in space? Great great scene. Um, and then pooping and
pp I gotta go somewhere. They have two toilets, only
(37:27):
two and um oh there's usually only three or four
people up there. There's six right now? Yeah, with two toilets. Yeah,
how many hair dryers? Who knows? They keep their hair
short though, because because there's very few hair dryers in space. Well,
there's no showers. I mean they can wash themselves. They
(37:47):
have like water jets, but not the same. Yeah, not
the same, man. I'll bet that first shower when they
get back down on Earth feels so good. Yeah. But
there's two toilets. They use a fan driven suction system
and you have to latch yourself to the toilet. Oh
yeah for 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
(38:09):
float away. Uh. And then there's a lever that they
hit a suction whole slides open and a big stream
of air carries the 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. Progress is like, yeah,
(38:32):
I wonder what they calls progress. And then the pp
UH is evacuated by a hose that's attached to the
front of the toilet. Uh 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 waters.
(38:53):
UM and the toilets UH for PPR anatomically correct. They
have these funnel adapters. So men and women have different
adapters because you know, they have different parts. Yes they do,
they do have different parts that like a second grader,
I just you don't think about this stuff. Like that's
(39:14):
the first thing I thought. I was like, oh, man,
how they eat, how they poop? But what do they
watch movies? Do they watch movies? Yeah? That the they
just sit back. I think it was the Atlantic had
a great photos spread of photos that this new mission
is taking of uh space and the Earth and you know,
all that stuff. But then pictures on board and um
(39:35):
one of them they were that this huge flat screen
watching The Revenant watching the Revenue. Huh, that's what it
looked like. I could see the two guys on a horse.
It was hard to tell because it was in the background,
but I think it was a Revenant that are cloudy
with the chance of meat pall. Probably not the movie Gravity.
So yeah, no, they were probably like that could never happen.
(39:58):
When Neil Degrass Tyson lost his mo about gravity, hey
he's your pal, he went on a Twitter ran about it. Um,
then then we should talk about the Chinese, because I
think it's been unfair not to. The Chinese launched something
called Tangong one UM back in two thousand three. They
became the third nation on the planet to launch human
(40:20):
into space UM and they launched their space There's space
station in two thousand eleven, and there's been two UM
two missions to to the space station. I think it's
it's it's no longer active, but it's still up there.
But the Chinese admitted this year that they've lost contact
(40:43):
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 um. The two missions included China's first two women astronauts,
Liu Yang and Wang Yaping, and um, they were in
two twelve and two thousand thirteen, and they did I mean,
(41:05):
they lived in space for a while, just like everybody
else had. But the Chinese don't participate in the I
S S. I don't know if they've not been invited
or if they decline an invitation, but they're doing their
own parallel thing, UM, which I would get the impression
that's making people nervous. Interesting. Well, I know it's important
that they've had uh, women astronauts, female astronauts on the
(41:28):
I S S because you know, you you need to
see what space does to them. And I just wonder
if they're gonna like get to the point where like,
well we need to if we really want to call
an ize space, we need to see what happens when
a baby is up there, or give birth in outer space,
or have a ten year old or a seventy five
year old man a ten year old aboard a space
(41:50):
station for like a year. Yeah, oh man, no, thank you. Um.
There's one other thing I wanted to mention, Chuck. There's
the there's talk about out UM saving a lot a
lot of money with the space station by putting it
what's called lagrange point And there's La grange point, L
(42:10):
four and L five and they are these um, these
little the spots between the Earth and 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 is not pulling on it
one way or the other, so you don't have to
(42:30):
use fuel to keep it in that orbit forever. Right,
And this is actually like an early idea that that
I think Arthur C. Clark was the first to put
it out there in nineteen one. And these lagrange points
are like orbits like ninety 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
(42:52):
L five Society that came about UM that is all
about this kind of thing. Crazy. Well, they they plan
to disband on a space station in the L five
band at some point in the future when they all
come together there for the first time. Sound wonderful. Yeah,
(43:15):
one more thing. Valerie Polyakov, record holder right, four hundred
and thirty eight days he did aboard mirror in n
and he had done like two d and thirty eight
days before then. Crazy. I bet he's super fainty, you know,
all the time he's rushing though he can take it.
(43:35):
Do you got anything else? I got nothing else? All right, Well,
let's say for space stations for now. If you want
to learn more about him, you can type those words
in the search part how stuff works. And uh, since
I said search parts, time for listener mail. I'm gonna
call this um oh Chuck's graduation post. So I put
out a post about my nephew graduating high school. Oh yeah,
(43:58):
did he really is? Grad way from high school? And
also the same year, my niece Reagan graduated college Premiorwood College,
moving to New York City like a good girl, and
my other niece Abby moved on matriculated into high school
from middle school. Nothing better than matriculation, nothing better. So
(44:19):
I went to know his 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, like,
and I didn't walk into college one, so I literally
have not been to a ceremony and it just stirred
up all these amazing feelings. No, it was really really
neat just to hear these kids and their speeches, and
(44:43):
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, talked to a seventeen year old
for a little while, who's doing it right and and
we're headed in the right direction like this very empathetic, carrying,
like forward thinking generation. So it was it was really
neat things. So I just congratulations to all the graduates,
(45:04):
especially um, well, if you're listening, then I guess you
are a listener. But all the stuff you should know,
listeners that have been with us, like throughout high school,
we appreciate. Um. A girl named Hannah, I want to say,
rode in and asked for any advice for graduation. That's right,
and she mentioned you in this speech. Yeah yeah, so
pretty to her as well. Pretty great stuff. But you're right,
(45:24):
all stuff you should know listeners who are graduating or matriculating. Congratulation, Yes,
very big accomplishment. So this from Brandy and Kansas. Hey, guys,
want to thank you so much for that Facebook post
about now it's graduation. 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
(45:45):
that thread. Have you considered it doing a show on
Kids Today, Fallacy. That's a well documented phenomenon where each
generation downplays the bad things our own generation didn't believe.
The ones that follow are lazy, spoiled, entitled. Uh. There
are quotes literally dating back two thousands of years ago
of this very thing. Uh. And the music stinks too.
(46:06):
I'm sure that's the other part of that. Yeah, yeah,
oh no, no, no, yeah, the music today stinks our
rights better. I would love to hear you explain this nonsense,
how 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 topped some
(46:28):
lists for the most beautiful sunsets and landscapes and also
have cities on national lists the places to Live. It
takes more than a beautiful sunset to get us to
do a live show. Analystic goals. We make fun of
Kansas because of our good friend to Aaron Cooper and
(46:49):
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 and cool as I
thought he was gonna be. And we met our pal
Tyler Murphy too, and met Tyler and his friends Timothy
(47:11):
and Sarah, and our friend Jane Jenabel was in the audience,
and our old buddy Greg Storkin was in the audience.
It was something else. Yeah, Denver was like these some
of our oldest, oldest fans were in attendance, so that
was wonderful. Anyway, we're not coming to Kansas. Thanks for
a great show, guys, only have a few episodes left
to go from got up and then I will enter
(47:32):
the pit of despair, so at least satisfy one of
my requests who can help pull me out? And as
Brandy in Manhattan, Kansas, thank you Brandy. Good luck in
the pit of despair. Uh, if you want to get
in touch of this. You can hang out with us
on social media. We're on Instagram and Twitter, s y
s K podcast and on Facebook at Facebook dot com
(47:53):
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House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
(00:27):
I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry.
This is Stuff you Should Know. Okay, you sounded like
Steve Rule. We were just talking about Steve Rule and
that was very brulesque, brulesque. Not brulesque, right, brulesque brulesque.
You're saying you we should do a movie. I'm surprised
(00:49):
to I could watch a continuous loop of brules Rules
over and over and over, and people thought, you're don't
be done. Was an homage to that which omas are
rip off depending and it was well, it was it
was neither, but it it was reminiscent of it in
good ways. But I don't think that that meant that
ripped it off, or that you were paying tribute to
It's definitely not intentional. It was just, you know, two
(01:11):
two great things that go great together. Can't there be both?
Like ESA scuts, Yeah, they go great with kit cats.
Oh man, they'd be good. Just take two full kit
cats and put two ESA's cups in the middle like
a sandwich. I think you just came up with something
the news more the reci cat, Um chuckers. Yes. Have
(01:35):
you ever looked to the sky at night, seen some
stars flying by and thought, why don't we live up there? Uh? Sure?
Have you ever seen the I S S cruising? No?
I used to, Um, apparently you can. I used, Yes,
I used to get either text or emails. I can't
(01:56):
remember that. Would you just put in your your zip
code and UM it sends you texts alerts when the
I S S is going to be flying overhead. I
thought you're gonna say one of the lead astronauts would
just text you be like, h are you doing? We're
over your house right now. But I mean, basically it's
not from the astronaut, but it's the same thing. It's saying, like,
(02:18):
look up in this direction at this time and you
you should be able to see the I S S
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. Yeah,
this really like thrills me to no end. Once I
started looking into this, like I don't I never paid
a lot of attention, and it really just dawned on me,
(02:39):
like people are living in outer space continuous full time.
The International Space Station has been continuously inhabited since it
was launched. Yeah. In fact, they just took they're one
hundred thousand orbit of Earth. That's really neat in May
of this year and Expedition forty seven began in Mark.
(03:00):
That's so cool, man, And like we just it's like
you were saying, you you don't really stop and think
about it, But we're living in space now. Humanity is
extended at least into Earth's or of it, right, that's
where we're living, um, And we just kind of seemed
to take that for granted. But that wasn't always the
cases actually, And I think the reason why we do
(03:22):
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, when the idea of space colonization
was at its peak. I mean NASA Aims Research Center
was conducting summer studies is what they were called, where
they would just get the public really jazzed about living
(03:44):
in space. Um. And the best you can say, or
the least you can say, is that it bore some
pretty awesome artists surrenderings and space colonies will look like
It seemed like every other issue of Popular Science was
just some cool new uh pick of like, you know,
one day we're gonna be living out here, right exactly,
(04:04):
but the one day seemed a lot closer than than
it does now right. Um. But at the at the
most you can say that that space colony 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.
(04:29):
It doesn't mean we're not going to. 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 the these the
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 have been previously. That didn't
pan out to be the case, and that there would
(04:50):
be something like, um, it's gonna be word like at
least sixty launches a year, which is which didn't pan
out to be the case either. But they thought that, yeah,
it was just gonna 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. Um. The Space Shuttle program didn't didn't
(05:12):
pan out to be that as cheap or as frequent, um.
And so 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,
(05:32):
it's just a little further down the road. Yeah, And
there were 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 Mr. 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
(05:55):
viable way. 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
health freezes over. But if we don't get the attention
of the taxpayer, we're going We're not going anywhere. And
how do you do that? You start putting people in
the moon and start building space stations. Well, even even
more basic than that, he started he wrote like popular
(06:18):
articles and popular magazines to get the public's imagination prime
for that kind of thing. Yeah, and his idea was
it 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 outwest outpost. He was like, we need
an outpost. We need a place where people can live
and work and as their base station. Essentially, sure, space
(06:42):
is a frontier, but you watch the star trek knows
that the final frontier, right, Well, that's what we think,
that's what we thought back then. I'm sure there's other
frontiers ner dimensions to explore that kind of thing. Right. Uh, well,
let's just talk about why what What are some of
the reasons we should do this. Um you mentioned um
(07:05):
just capturing the public, and it certainly will would do
a lot to rally people around spending funds on you know,
space travel, NASA allocating funds towards this kind of thing, right,
you mean space tourism. No, no, no, not space tourism.
But just initially, you know, they needed the support of
the popular American opinion, right, which is why Von Brown said,
(07:29):
I'm gonna like reach out to the public directly through
Collier's magazine. He did a three part he hosted a
three part show UM on like the Wonderful World of
Disney about living in space and we really got people
jazzed about this back in the fifties. Then it peaked
again in the seventies. Like I was saying, yeah, but
one of the big reasons that you would want to
have a working space station is, um, aside from the
(07:52):
convenience of you know, having a having it up there
and not having to go back and forth every time
you want to do something, is to thinks are different
up there, and you can do different things without gravity
that you can't do here on Earth, like research. Yeah,
like remarkable things. So it turns out gravity has a
weird effect on crystals in the way they form, flaws
(08:13):
them like inevitably. Um. But if you're out there in
micro gravity, 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. Um. You
can also crystallize drugs better to make them more potent.
(08:34):
You can really knock your socks off. So research up
there that can make things better here, right a point,
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 and then bring them back
to Earth and be like, watch how fast this baby goes.
(08:54):
Another thing that uh, no gravity or microgravity does is
it makes flames. Um, 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.
Remember when we talked about fire. Yeah, fire and space
is very consistent and perfect. It's around. Yeah, it's so cool.
(09:17):
So you could you could potentially with uh, with a
perfect flame like that, that perfect flame that's got to
be a song. Eternal flame is what you're thinking of. No,
I'm saying perfect flame. Now you're thinking of eternal flame
such a Josh is m It's one of my favorites. Uh.
(09:38):
Micro gravity, though, you can have that eternal flame that
is perfect and round and uh, you can study combustion
in a more pure fashion, and you could build a
better furnace maybe or find out how to reduce air
pollution by making things more efficient. That's just like two
things that you could do in space. I'm sure there
are a thousand things we could list. Um. And as
(09:59):
a matter of fact, some of the early ideas for
space stations were these. There were concepts that were that
used like moon mined minerals and materials and assembled in
space so that you didn't have to launch them from Earth.
So this whole idea of like creating things in space
was even used to form the basis of these places
(10:19):
where we would actually live while we were doing this stuff.
It's pretty cool. Yeah, it also offers a unique perspective
on the Earth, if we're talking about landforms and oceans,
your atmosphere, uh speaking of which they can take uh
much better pictures looking in the other direction into deep
space because they don't have that pesky atmosphere in the way, right,
(10:39):
So lots of great reasons to be up there, um,
not the least of 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?
Um Galactic Suite. Yeah, they're they're still at it. Well,
another that I saw there still says they're planning on
(11:02):
launching in two thousand twelve. Oh, I thought that they
thought they were still kind of I mean obviously not
on that timeline. Somebody's still paying for the domain, but
it still says like, um, they're gonna be They're gonna
head for the star the stars in two thousand twelve.
And then I found another Russian one that was looked
(11:24):
pretty promising, but their site apparently was not updated since
two thousand ten. But um, a company called Bigelow Industries
very recently had SpaceX ferry capsule up to the I
S S. It was an inflatable capsule that was a
habitat module that was meant to be a prototype for
(11:45):
a space hotel and they couldn't get it inflated. It
was in Uh, they just aborted the mission. But um,
like people are still working on the concept of of
space tourism like today, well, I know, the Galactic Suite said, um,
they're like, we we think it will cost a four
million dollars for a weekend stay, and our data suggests
(12:06):
that there are about forty people in the world that
can and will pay for this. So um, maybe maybe
their their site hasn't been updated because they got scared
with the end of the world two thousand twelve things
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. Maybe well Richard Branson,
you know, he's trying to fly people into space. Still. Yeah.
(12:29):
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 that
Alaskan Airlines took over. Apparently in a hostile takeover Um,
but Virgin Galactics still at it. Okay, Well that's good.
I guess if you're loaded and want to ride into space. Yeah,
(12:49):
if you're Ashton Couture, they were on the list, right,
Sure they have disposable income. Sure, send the cooch up there.
All right, either one, I feel like I should take
a break and regroup and then we'll start talking about
space stations past. I'll take one with you, all right,
(13:35):
let's talk about the first one, josh. Uh. We had
a great episode on the space Race. It was pretty
much a two I love that to 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. They really did. You know, they don't
get enough credit around these parts for the stuff that
(13:59):
they did as far as space goes, because they definitely
did beat us in a lot of ways, like we
beat them to the moon basically, Yeah, which we pointed
out in our show really got us going, sure and
led to our advancements. Yeah. But also what was it? Um,
there was another show we did recently, Sputnik led to
Super Bowls. But do you remember we were talking about
the Super Bowl In the Super Bowl episode how Sputnik
(14:20):
like made America, post war America wake up and be like, hey,
stuff being coddled in in lazy. We need to get
back to innovation. Yeah, innovating again. And and it was
spot Nick that did that. Yeah that's right. Um, nothing
like the threat of Communist Russia or Soviet Union to
get people going we're being left behind. Um. So back
(14:43):
then they were the Soviet Union and they were the first,
as we said with the saliott one station. Uh one?
Do they have people living in space? Yeah? The year
I was born. It's crazy. And it was actually a
combination of a couple of different system one Mas and
the soyas The Almas was a military system and the
(15:04):
soyas Is was the actual spacecraft that ferried people to
and fro. They're still using that thing, so American Astro
not to get to the I S s is on
Soya's um rockets. Yeah, what what number they had? I wonder? Oh,
who knows? Who knows? A lot? A lot they launched
them a lot from the Kazakhstan. I think very nice.
(15:26):
Uh uhtt long um had three main compartments. Um, your
your standard compartments, which are like dining in recreation, food
and water storage. You gotta have your toilet exercise equipment,
and then your science e stuff. Yeah, that's sciences stuff.
That's a big deal because not only are they looking
(15:49):
at how to make crystals better, they're also studying, um,
the effects of micro gravity on the human body, which
we're still getting a handle lot. 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 of this one article. Well, yeah,
we should do one just on the I S S too. Um.
(16:09):
But well, just kind of briefly, one of the things
that they found so far about living in space is
that your bone mineral density decreases by one percent a month,
which you're like one percent there's still left he cares
here on Earth. If you're in a senior adult you
lose about one percent of bone mass a year. So
(16:29):
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 Uh, in microgravity, it tends to
accumulate up in your upper body and your upper chest
and in your head and your brains, like, oh, I'm
I'm bathed in this stuff. I need to shut down
(16:52):
production on fluids, including blood, so that when astronauts get
back on Earth, they tend to be fainty because they
don't have enough blood for a while until their bodies like, WHOA,
something weird just happened. I need to start making blood.
And they say, I'm fainting because of space. Somebody give
me some tang My bloodcher is low. Uh. The other
thing they found out was in space, no one can
(17:13):
hear you scream. Yeah, they try it fifteen after every hour,
all the astronauts scream as loud as they can and
nobody can hear him. And that, of course, was the
famous tagline from the first Alien movie. Oh really, yeah,
I remember seeing the ad with the big egg space
No can you scream? I know. I was just though,
that's terrifying. I'm gonna watch it. Uh. Oh. One other
(17:37):
thing that they're learning about affects and gravity. So Scott Kelly,
the astronaut who famously just spent a year on the
I S s um he has a twin who's also
an astronaut, leave his name is Mike, and um, Mike
has been studied here on Earth. You gotta slit those
guys up over the same over the same year that
(17:57):
Scott has, and now they're comparing Apparently Scott came down
and he was like an inch or too shorter than
his identical twin. That was just one thing, But they're
they're examining them on a genetic level to see what
differences of have happened, so you can get a better
handle on what living in gravity does to the human body.
He said, I'm shorter and more fainty for starters. He
(18:19):
just felt dead away and they just slapped his face
and poured tang down his throat. 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. Well,
(18:41):
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 um, apparently there's a huge
possibility of 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.
(19:03):
We got a lot of stuff to figure out beforehand. Heroes, sir,
That's what I say. So uh, the Sayas ten crew
um for that very first uh Saliott space station that
Russia had. They were they were supposed to live up there,
but they couldn't dock correctly, so they could never enter
(19:24):
the space station, so they never could even get in,
big big disappointment. They just hung their heads and put
in reverse in the little modulant. So the Saya's eleven
crew actually successfully lived there for twenty four days in
which is remarkable, but very sadly they all perished upon
(19:49):
re entry coming back to Earth. Yeah, there um capsule
depressurized and they there capsule at the time wasn't designed
for them to wear suits, so they um, they were
all asphyxiated just like died instantly, right pretty much. Yeah,
they would have like lost consciousness almost immediately. So after
(20:09):
the eleven soy is eleven they launched a different space
station altogether, the Sliot two. That one didn't even get
up into orbit, so they were like, uh yet uh
went through three, four and five h and pretty quick succession,
um and each one basically they got better at getting
(20:29):
people to and from and they could stay up there
longer and longer. Yeah. I think the last one was
launched in two and it was up there until like
nine two or ninety four, and they actually used it
as like um, they they 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
(20:51):
going back and forth between Soliott seven and the Mirror.
I guess probably going like, oh we can we can
use this vodka over here. You gotta go get it
from Salute 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 in the later ones was
that there was a docking a secondary docking module. Yeah.
(21:15):
The first one's only had one parking space essentially, right,
and so you had the parking space for the crew
that was there, and if they needed supplies, well t s.
But if you had a second docking port then you
can use um. Well, they used an unmanned ship called
Progress two ferry supplies from Earth to the Salute stations. Yeah.
(21:35):
I'm surprised that it took them up to the Salute
six to realize they needed another parking space. Yeah, because
you know you're gonna forget something right, you left the
iron on home. We're stuck up here. No one can
visit us. Well, like you said that, they figured it out,
which is wonderful. Uh. And that all led to the
United States in nineteen seventy three launching their very famous
(22:00):
guy Lab one space station, which says the best patch
of any NASA related space based anything, Skylab one is
the best. Yeah, sky Lab was awesome, but it um
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
(22:21):
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, it couldn't cool it
the interior the capsule went up to like a hundred
and twenty six. So they said, hey, guys, we need
you to go up there and fix this. And they
(22:43):
actually there were three different crews that were that were
sent to Skylab on Apollo capsules and um. The Skylab
module itself was actually designed roughly initially by Warner von
braun Um out of a Saturn five moon rocket. The
third stage of it became sky Lab, and I think
at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, not the
(23:06):
one at Dullest, but the the one that's in like
the like around the mall, and I think it has
a replica of Skylab you can walk through. Oh cool,
which is so awesome, dude, I would love to do that.
But so the three crews that got sent up there, chuck.
They managed to kind of like put Skylight back together
with duck tape and bubblegum. Yeah, that first one, Skylab two.
(23:26):
They just sent them up a week and a half
after the fit, 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 to cool it down. And then
see that that solar panel that didn't stretch out far enough,
(23:49):
stretch it out, and see that stretch it out. And
they did. Uh, Commander Charles Pete, Conrad, Paul Whites, and
Joseph Kerwin essentially saved sky Lab. Yeah, right off the bat,
and not just then. There were again there were three
crews that kind of did one after the other. They
didn't overlap, UM, but they finally got the thing working.
(24:09):
And I think the last crew spent eighty four days
in orbit. Yeah, the first one spent the next one
fifty nine in the final one eighty four days in
the seventies and I remember, UM, and this is a
big deal, you know, this was the first time they
were testing these long duration man missions UM to see, like,
(24:31):
you know, can we go to the Moon because it
takes a while to get there and back right, That
was the thing, Like all the only data we had
was on Moon missions, which is about a two week mission,
so we didn't have any data on what happened to
people longer than that. Can we can we set up
a shop there colonize the moon? Even so they called
anything over two weeks a long duration spaceflight. Uh. And
(24:52):
I remember in nineteen seventy nine. I remember being an
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? And I remember sitting around
and hearing that sky Lab is coming back down to
Earth in a unpredictable way, and I remember being sort
(25:14):
of scared and thinking like, wow, this is a little
weird and kind of a big deal. Yeah, Like even
little eight year old Chuck knew like something didn't seem
quite right. There are a lot of people who are
really anxious about it because NASA very famously said that, um,
everybody calmed down. There's there's a one in one hundred
and fifty two chants that somebody will be killed by
(25:36):
sky Lab. Well, yeah, they like one in one fifty two.
You want to hear numbers from NASA like one in
a million or one in a billion, not one in
a hundred and fifty two. You're like, I know two
hundred people, I know a hundred and fifty three people. Uh.
It also forced NASSA to admit UM, we were so
excited about getting this thing up there, we didn't really
(25:56):
think a lot about how to control its descent UM,
because that was essentially the story. They They were like,
we can't, we don't really know how to guide this
thing back down. They said it would quote cost too
much to have UM designed in a way to bring
it down safely. Yeah, and I think they were there
in a hurry. Well. Also, the problem is they thought
(26:16):
that it would just it's 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, sky Labs on a collision course with Earth.
NASA saying it'll it'll probably enter somewhere over this thousand
(26:40):
kilometer stretch of Earth that includes Australia. So heads up
Australia and UM. There were lots of like sky Lab parties, UM.
Because it's America in the seventies, people went like Skylab
crazy disco parties UM, and the San Francisco Examiner actually
UM offered ten thousand dollars to anybody who could bring
(27:03):
in a legitimate piece of sky Lab within seventy two
hours of it crashing. And some kid actually collected Yeah
in Australian. Yeah, he got on a plane. He had
a little piece of sky Lab. Because where to end
up crashing and the esperance Australia when you're perth, Yeah,
I mean mostly in the ocean. Yeah, but they did
get a pretty good amount of debris in Australia. Yeah,
(27:26):
like the sizeable parts. But it's Australia. They're tough, they're
like everything tries to kill us. You're silly. Space Station
can't do it right. So yeah, this kid flew over
in San Francisco and said here sky Lab. His name
was Stanthorpe and he was seventeen, and like, without even
thinking twice about it, he grabbed it, hopped on a
(27:46):
plane and went to San Francisco, like you said, and
they examined or paid him, which I did the West
Aig inflation calculator. That's about thirty three thou dollars in
today's money. Not bad, No, I'd do that, hop on
a plane for that. That's a salary of as your teacher,
right badly. Yeah. Uh, you can also buy pieces of
sky Lab today if you've got some dough and an
(28:07):
Internet connection. Alleged pieces of sky Lab. Well, sure, just
like anything, it should be uh not verified, what do
you call it? Verified? Authenticated? Supposedly NASA's instead of exerting
its domain over pieces of sky Lab, the debris that
was found in saying you give a back that some
(28:30):
people sent their pieces to NASA, NASA authenticated them and
send them back mounted saying this is an official piece
of sky Lab to the people who mailed it in.
Good peeps, Good peeps wearing brown polyester pants up to
their chests. All right, buddy, let's take a break in um,
let's go for a little jog around our gravity office,
(28:57):
and then we'll talk about mirror and I s all right,
(29:26):
all right. We talked about the Soviet which was the
Soviet Union's big first success and some failures, but overall,
I think they saw it as a success. Right And
at the same time, a couple of years later, America
had sky LAMB and then the Soviets said, we can
do better than than what we're doing. We can do
(29:48):
better than anybody else. We're going to create the mirror. Yeah.
And by the way, Skyla was not supposed to be permanent. No,
that was never the intention, but mirror was. Was it
supposed to be permanent? Yeah, okay, so were the later
um soliots Okay, so the mirror definitely was meant to
(30:08):
be a permanent one. All right. Well, the first crew
cosmonauts Leonid Kasim Vladimir solely off off nice it's a
great name. Um. I think it was just those two dudes. Uh.
They shuttled between the sally At seven which is being
retired in mirror, and there was some like you said that,
(30:31):
there was some cross over there, right and overlap. They
had to get the vodka. Yeah, they had to get
the vodka. 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 they
build these things out there or assemble them out there. Um,
I guess we should say. But they don't just launch
(30:52):
a space station right like ready to go. They carry
pieces of it out there just like I S S.
And they put them together. Although I think it was
we'll see you later on. I think the Chinese launched
a full space station. Of course they did. I think
they did, um, but we're talking. Come on. So the
(31:13):
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. It was
a ge whiz space station, a lot of everything, a
lot of a lot of modules, living quarters, transfer compartments,
docking places, had more than one parking space. They figured
(31:34):
the old mess out. Yeah, you know, I was like,
you know, we should have guests, and they did have guests.
They had American guests actually, which was pretty cool. It
wasn't until the nineties after the Soviet Union dissolved, and
actually there was a cosmonaut aboard Mirror when the Soviet
Union dissolved in December. Um. His name was Sergey Kirkov
(31:56):
Keev Kirkakv, it started to say, and you would think, yeah, uh,
And he was known as the last Soviet citizen because
apparently being in space made him immune from the dissolving
in the Soviet Union. Oh really yeah, not really, but
that's what everybody said about him, whether he liked it
or not. Well, the Mirror, they had some problems kind
(32:17):
of later in its life. There was a fire one
year uh and then that pro 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, Uh, we should just make this thing
space junk, even though you thought it was going to
(32:37):
be permanent. Uh. The US is talking about this I. S.
S Station. They want us to come help them with uh.
And there was a big campaign to keep the Mirror
alive called Keep Mirror Alive uh. And private corporation stepped
in and said, no, let us take it over. Let's
privatize this thing. And they said, yet, I'm not gonna
do it. Yeah, We're not gonna just hand over space station. Okay, No,
(33:01):
we're gonna crash it into the Earth. If I can't
have you, no one can't. Pretty much, so um, they
had a little bit uh more advanced capabilities in Skylab
had as far as directionally um. And in February two
thousand one, it uh. They slowed those engines down and
it re entered the atmosphere. On March two one burned
(33:23):
up broke up and again, uh, tried to kill Australia.
I know, Australia is like, what the eight Why is
everyone trying to land their space junk on us? But
it was about a thousand miles east of Australia in
the ocean. Um has anyone found these things? That's what
I was wondering, mire at the bottom of the ocean.
I'm sure somebody's found some parts of it. Pretty neat. Yeah,
(33:46):
talk about like space records at bottom the ocean. That's
a movie. Who was it? Was it Jeff Bezos that
went and got like, uh one of the Apollo really
stages that had been scuttled in the ocean recently? Probably?
I think it was yep Asos or James Cameron. We
talked about him too much though. Uh So that brings
us to I S S. Ronald Reagan. I said, you
(34:09):
know what, I was about to do a Reagan, but
I thought the better. I think everybody wants to hear
your Reagan. I don't want to do it. He said,
let's let's he said, hey, man, let's get an A S.
S station going. Is that good? We'll call it the
International Space Station and it's gonna be super expensive, so
(34:31):
we need some help. Um, let's partner up with with
fourteen other countries, Canada, Japan, Brazil and then the European
Space Agency, which is the UK, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Netherlands,
did Mark, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden. And he said, as
a good faith measure, let's invite the Soviets. M hm,
(34:53):
I don't know if that was all Russia by then,
Oh yeah, you're right, Yeah, you're right. And the Russian said, sure,
why not, we don't doing anything and not just being friendly,
but you know, they they were probably the second leading
uh uh well, I don't know by that point there
were other players in space science. Yeah, but they were
still pretty highly regarded yeah big time. Yeah, yeah, probably
(35:17):
more than they get credit for again over here. So
they started putting the I S S in orbit, and um,
the first people showed up from it was launched for
They were launched from Russia in two thousand and they
spent about five months. They're like basically getting everything up
and running, taking um all of the uh the little
(35:38):
descant packets out of everything, like they do not eat
things that keep stuff dry silica jel yeah, um, and um,
pulling off all of the cellophane from everything. Well they
left it on the lamp shades, which I thought was tasteless.
It's shiny. Yeah. Um, so they've been living up there.
(35:59):
Like I said, they just launched the one I'm sorry,
but one orbit of Earth and um, we do one
on the I S. But I did look a little
bit into their day to day life. Um. They work
about ten hours a day, uh money through Friday, about
(36:19):
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, face timing. Um.
They have sixteen sunrises and sunsets today, which is decidedly
weird on your body. So they generally just keep those
windows closed so they can get on a reg sketch.
(36:43):
And um, apparently the food isn't great. They don't love
the food. Um, and they have to overspice it. I
didn't know that one of the things space does is
reduce your sense of taste. I've heard that in microgravity
tastes like styrofun. Yeah, so apparently they like really over
everything to try and make it palatable. Um, and they
(37:03):
have to be really careful of crumbs because oh yeah,
remember Homer Simpson, do you remember one of the great
all time scenes when you opened the bag of chips
in space? Great great scene. Um, and then pooping and
pp I gotta go somewhere. They have two toilets, only
(37:27):
two and um oh there's usually only three or four
people up there. There's six right now? Yeah, with two toilets. Yeah,
how many hair dryers? Who knows? They keep their hair
short though, because because there's very few hair dryers in space. Well,
there's no showers. I mean they can wash themselves. They
(37:47):
have like water jets, but not the same. Yeah, not
the same, man. I'll bet that first shower when they
get back down on Earth feels so good. Yeah. But
there's two toilets. They use a fan driven suction system
and you have to latch yourself to the toilet. Oh
yeah for 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
(38:09):
float away. Uh. And then there's a lever that they
hit a suction whole slides open and a big stream
of air carries the 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. Progress is like, yeah,
(38:32):
I wonder what they calls progress. And then the pp
UH is evacuated by a hose that's attached to the
front of the toilet. Uh 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 waters.
(38:53):
UM and the toilets UH for PPR anatomically correct. They
have these funnel adapters. So men and women have different
adapters because you know, they have different parts. Yes they do,
they do have different parts that like a second grader,
I just you don't think about this stuff. Like that's
(39:14):
the first thing I thought. I was like, oh, man,
how they eat, how they poop? But what do they
watch movies? Do they watch movies? Yeah? That the they
just sit back. I think it was the Atlantic had
a great photos spread of photos that this new mission
is taking of uh space and the Earth and you know,
all that stuff. But then pictures on board and um
(39:35):
one of them they were that this huge flat screen
watching The Revenant watching the Revenue. Huh, that's what it
looked like. I could see the two guys on a horse.
It was hard to tell because it was in the background,
but I think it was a Revenant that are cloudy
with the chance of meat pall. Probably not the movie Gravity.
So yeah, no, they were probably like that could never happen.
(39:58):
When Neil Degrass Tyson lost his mo about gravity, hey
he's your pal, he went on a Twitter ran about it. Um,
then then we should talk about the Chinese, because I
think it's been unfair not to. The Chinese launched something
called Tangong one UM back in two thousand three. They
became the third nation on the planet to launch human
(40:20):
into space UM and they launched their space There's space
station in two thousand eleven, and there's been two UM
two missions to to the space station. I think it's
it's it's no longer active, but it's still up there.
But the Chinese admitted this year that they've lost contact
(40:43):
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 um. The two missions included China's first two women astronauts,
Liu Yang and Wang Yaping, and um, they were in
two twelve and two thousand thirteen, and they did I mean,
(41:05):
they lived in space for a while, just like everybody
else had. But the Chinese don't participate in the I
S S. I don't know if they've not been invited
or if they decline an invitation, but they're doing their
own parallel thing, UM, which I would get the impression
that's making people nervous. Interesting. Well, I know it's important
that they've had uh, women astronauts, female astronauts on the
(41:28):
I S S because you know, you you need to
see what space does to them. And I just wonder
if they're gonna like get to the point where like,
well we need to if we really want to call
an ize space, we need to see what happens when
a baby is up there, or give birth in outer space,
or have a ten year old or a seventy five
year old man a ten year old aboard a space
(41:50):
station for like a year. Yeah, oh man, no, thank you. Um.
There's one other thing I wanted to mention, Chuck. There's
the there's talk about out UM saving a lot a
lot of money with the space station by putting it
what's called lagrange point And there's La grange point, L
(42:10):
four and L five and they are these um, these
little the spots between the Earth and 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 is not pulling on it
one way or the other, so you don't have to
(42:30):
use fuel to keep it in that orbit forever. Right,
And this is actually like an early idea that that
I think Arthur C. Clark was the first to put
it out there in nineteen one. And these lagrange points
are like orbits like ninety 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
(42:52):
L five Society that came about UM that is all
about this kind of thing. Crazy. Well, they they plan
to disband on a space station in the L five
band at some point in the future when they all
come together there for the first time. Sound wonderful. Yeah,
(43:15):
one more thing. Valerie Polyakov, record holder right, four hundred
and thirty eight days he did aboard mirror in n
and he had done like two d and thirty eight
days before then. Crazy. I bet he's super fainty, you know,
all the time he's rushing though he can take it.
(43:35):
Do you got anything else? I got nothing else? All right, Well,
let's say for space stations for now. If you want
to learn more about him, you can type those words
in the search part how stuff works. And uh, since
I said search parts, time for listener mail. I'm gonna
call this um oh Chuck's graduation post. So I put
out a post about my nephew graduating high school. Oh yeah,
(43:58):
did he really is? Grad way from high school? And
also the same year, my niece Reagan graduated college Premiorwood College,
moving to New York City like a good girl, and
my other niece Abby moved on matriculated into high school
from middle school. Nothing better than matriculation, nothing better. So
(44:19):
I went to know his 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, like,
and I didn't walk into college one, so I literally
have not been to a ceremony and it just stirred
up all these amazing feelings. No, it was really really
neat just to hear these kids and their speeches, and
(44:43):
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, talked to a seventeen year old
for a little while, who's doing it right and and
we're headed in the right direction like this very empathetic, carrying,
like forward thinking generation. So it was it was really
neat things. So I just congratulations to all the graduates,
(45:04):
especially um, well, if you're listening, then I guess you
are a listener. But all the stuff you should know,
listeners that have been with us, like throughout high school,
we appreciate. Um. A girl named Hannah, I want to say,
rode in and asked for any advice for graduation. That's right,
and she mentioned you in this speech. Yeah yeah, so
pretty to her as well. Pretty great stuff. But you're right,
(45:24):
all stuff you should know listeners who are graduating or matriculating. Congratulation, Yes,
very big accomplishment. So this from Brandy and Kansas. Hey, guys,
want to thank you so much for that Facebook post
about now it's graduation. 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
(45:45):
that thread. Have you considered it doing a show on
Kids Today, Fallacy. That's a well documented phenomenon where each
generation downplays the bad things our own generation didn't believe.
The ones that follow are lazy, spoiled, entitled. Uh. There
are quotes literally dating back two thousands of years ago
of this very thing. Uh. And the music stinks too.
(46:06):
I'm sure that's the other part of that. Yeah, yeah,
oh no, no, no, yeah, the music today stinks our
rights better. I would love to hear you explain this nonsense,
how 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 topped some
(46:28):
lists for the most beautiful sunsets and landscapes and also
have cities on national lists the places to Live. It
takes more than a beautiful sunset to get us to
do a live show. Analystic goals. We make fun of
Kansas because of our good friend to Aaron Cooper and
(46:49):
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 and cool as I
thought he was gonna be. And we met our pal
Tyler Murphy too, and met Tyler and his friends Timothy
(47:11):
and Sarah, and our friend Jane Jenabel was in the audience,
and our old buddy Greg Storkin was in the audience.
It was something else. Yeah, Denver was like these some
of our oldest, oldest fans were in attendance, so that
was wonderful. Anyway, we're not coming to Kansas. Thanks for
a great show, guys, only have a few episodes left
to go from got up and then I will enter
(47:32):
the pit of despair, so at least satisfy one of
my requests who can help pull me out? And as
Brandy in Manhattan, Kansas, thank you Brandy. Good luck in
the pit of despair. Uh, if you want to get
in touch of this. You can hang out with us
on social media. We're on Instagram and Twitter, s y
s K podcast and on Facebook at Facebook dot com
(47:53):
slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an
email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com
and as always, joined us at our him on the web,
Stuff you Should Know dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff Works
dot com
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