 Coming up, NASA's next Mars mission is delayed, Europe wants to be part of an ambitious mission to Europa, and new plutonium is being manufactured for space missions. Tomorrow begins right now. The live show, seriously, you need to watch live. Welcome to tomorrow, season 9, episode 2 for Saturday, January 9th, 2016. I'd like to thank all of the patrons of tomorrow who've done to make this specific segment of this episode happen. These are the people who have contributed $10 or more to this episode. We are a crowdfunded show. Every single dollar helps. Head on over to patreon.com slash T-M-R-O for more information on how you can help crowdfund the show. My name is Benjamin Higginbotham. I'm joined to my right, your left, by Jared Head, who is getting his Mohawk back. It's coming back. Are you going to color it? Anything? The hero dynamics is returning. It's not quite hero dynamic yet, though. It's becoming a small element of hero dynamics. It's not a major element yet. Directly to my left, I've got space mic over my shoulder, high space mic. And then, of course, my beautiful, lovely, wonderful, and talented wife, Carrie Ann Higginbotham, all the way on the other side of the table. All right. In fact, let's start with you all the way. It's like two feet. Let's start with you. Start with you. Talk to us about what's coming up in San Diego. So, space up. It's that time of year again, where we get to talk about space up. You coordinated it with a shirt and everything. Look at that. Yeah, it's a little big on me because I lost some weight, but we'll ignore that. Anyway. For those of you who do not know what a space up is, it is an unconference and an unconference unlike a traditional conference where you show up and they give you a packet listing all the different topics and all the different people who are going to be in all the different rooms and all the things that they're going to be talking about. Space up is exactly the opposite of that. You show up and whoever's there is encouraged to give a talk or participate in a talk. And then you can decide on the topics. You can decide on basically the schedule, which rooms you want to be in. And then you are deciding the entire structure of the event, which is really amazing. And it's really cool. And this one happens to be about space. And space up San Diego is the original space up and it is San Diego 5 or San Diego V, depending on who you're asking, I guess, which is really cool. That's a Roman numeral. Yeah, no, I know. But I like V as a like a P sign because I think that's really cool. All right. You know what? Psy 5. Psy 5. Yeah. Okay. There you go. So everyone who intends to space up is encouraged to give a talk, moderate a panel or start a discussion of some kind. You can find more information, of course, at spaceup.org. Also they have a Twitter account as you can see here, which is twitter.com slash spaceup.com. C-O-M-C-O-N-F, I can't talk. And there's also the twitter.com slash spaceup San Diego. If you want something more specific about the space up San Diego. Well, well done, Dada. Good save. Yeah, no, that was good. Anyway, we are in the works here at tomorrow and making sure that we're going to be recording the T minus 5 talks, which are a little bit like startup talks. We literally talked to Jared like 10 minutes ago, we're like, hey, would you mind going down to San Diego to capture T minus 5 talks? I will be at space up San Diego. We're also going to talk to our director. He's just now finding this out in real time. We're going to talk to our director and also Mike about going to space up San Diego because I think it's really freaking awesome. So I'd love to send as many people as we can. Also, it's the original space up that was founded in San Diego. And we love to have as many citizens of tomorrow showing up to space up San Diego as humanly possible. I think the more people at an unconference, the better it works, I think. Totally. And it's really kind of funny because the year that it started, there was one, maybe two, I believe that year. Last year, 2015, there were 11 space ups, the majority of which I think all of them were outside of the country. So it started right here in San Diego and then it is spread like wildfire. It's a lot of fun. We love them. We love giving love to space up. So there you go. Space up is coming up. Oh, I don't think I ever told you when. It is January 30th and 31st. It's going to be in San Diego State University in the Aztec Student Union. So very, very cool. Super excited about that. Speaking of almost missing scheduling. Yes. Let's head on over to Nessa's next Mars mission, Jared. Yes, I have some very sad news, which is that NASA's InSight Mars lander, which was set to launch during a 26-day window, which was going to open on March 4th of this year, will not be making that launch window. InSight is a part of NASA's Discovery class of scientific spacecraft. And InSight was supposed to investigate Mars' interior structure with multiple instruments, like a heat flow probe, which was supposed to hammer down about 20 feet into the Martian surface and measure the amount of heat coming out to see how much will be coming from its core. And one of the most important instruments is a seismograph developed by the French Space Agency. And a very sensitive seismograph, too, it was going to be able to go down to subatomic scales of measuring movement. Oh, that's cool. So if you can imagine literally like half an atom's worth of movement, that is what it was going to be able to detect. A lander on the surface of Mars. Yes, was going to detect things moving at half an atom. That is insane. Now, it is ridiculous. And it's so ridiculous that problems arose in the design. It uses a spherical detector about the size of a volleyball. And that interior, that entire interior, has to have the pressure pumped out of it. You have to have a vacuum in there to about 1 billionth the atmospheric pressure of the Earth at sea level. That's how you're able to do that. Unfortunately, they detected a small leak occurring from several of those electrical connections for the sensors. So they were redesigned and installed to solve that. But then another leak began from the pressure vessel itself. And they couldn't resolve the issue in time for the March launch window. And because physics dictates that you have 26 days to launch or you're not going to be launching at all, they had to delay that launch, unfortunately. That's the best truth-ish truth-iness to that. Yes. Well, I mean, it depends on the orbit in which you're going to take the launch of Mars. You can launch at any time. You could. You're just going to have a difference in depth of the energy expected. Difference in energy required will be greater or less. And obviously, we only have the capability at the moment to use the minimum amount of energy to get there. Is it a very heavy payload? Is that why we can only do that? It's actually only about roughly 350 kilograms. But still, you need to be able to get it there in a reasonable amount of time. What's its launch energy, you know? It was an Atlas V and the 401 configuration. So just the common booster core, no solids attached to it. And it was actually going to launch from Vandenberg here in California, which would have made it the first interplanetary launch from Vandenberg. Oh, that would be sweet. Which would have been nice. But it's been delayed now until May of 2018. And in fact, NASA's Associate Administrator for its Science Mission Directorate, former astronaut John Grunsfeld, was asked about the possibility of cancellation of insight. And he said that that is a question that's on the table. Because they've spent $525 million on that. Nearly half a billion dollars. Yeah, half a billion dollars. And it's cost-capped at $625 million. And you would have to store insight for two years at conditions that would not allow it to get contaminated. Because if you send a spacecraft to Mars, you have to keep it extremely clean in order to make sure that you don't cross-contaminate anything on Earth with Mars. For now. Yeah, for now. And that's immensely expensive to do. So you can imagine keeping that in that kind of a clean room for two years. And then also the delay on operations and other things like that. And it may end up, unfortunately, causing that mission to be canceled. And a lot of scientists are irked about it because it was chosen because its technology had a low risk of development for it. Which turns out not so much. Creating a vacuum on an alien's surface is harder to do than we thought? Yeah, it turns out. If you want to have a vacuum that's one billionth the atmospheric pressure of the Earth, then it's a lot more difficult than you expect. Speaking of things that are difficult but kind of awesome, how's that? Planetary resources over at CES, the Consumer Electronic Show, this last week, actually, revealed that they have 3D printed using materials from an asteroid, which I suppose once it enters into Earth's atmosphere becomes a meteorite. But check this out. This is 3D printed from an actual asteroid using something called direct laser metal centering, or DMLS. It's the same general 3D printing process you use to 3D print, say, a rocket engine, or something similar to like that. This is a pulverized, powdered process system using a 3D systems Prox-X DMP 320 metals 3D printer. Easy for me to say. It's the first part ever printed from stuff from outer space. Now, you might be familiar with made in space, where it's just where we 3D print things in space. This is basically the exact opposite. We took material that you would normally find in space and made a 3D object from that material here on Earth. It's from the source from the Campo del Cielo impact near Argentina. And it's composed of iron, nickel, and cobalt. And so that's kind of what you would find in a general asteroid somewhere out there. It's actually very close to like a steel sort of here on Earth. Iron metallic. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, absolutely. And so this design that they printed is kind of similar to what you'd expect them to print for maybe something out in space. And why this is cool is that if we're going to become a space-faring civilization, if we're going to do things out in space, we need to be able to utilize the resources out in space. We can't just be coming back to Earth, grab the things we need from Earth, and loft them all up into space. We need to be able to find water in space. We need to be able to 3D print things in space, be it a new thruster pod or something or a new HAVMOD, whatever. We're going to need to be able to create these things. And 3D printing is a really great way to create a lot of these things. So it's really, really exciting. I'm not sure how well direct metal laser sentering will translate into space, into zero or micro gravity, simply because of the outgassing process. I think we actually had Dave Mastin on once talking about that. And it's fairly, it's a little more complicated than the process of 3D printing like what we're made in space is doing. It's that additive printing. Direct laser metal sentering is more of a, it's also additive, but you have like these beds. Has anyone, you guys know how that works? You have a, basically you have, so what you do is you have a canister basically of powder, right? So you take this, whatever it is, this asteroid and you grind it up to a very fine powder and you put it and you layer it all the way on this base area and then you shoot it with a laser in the shape that you want to build. So you shoot it and then you kind of lower it down to add a new layer of powder and you shoot the next layer and you go back and forth. Well, doing that in space would be hard to do because how do you keep, you know, on earth we just use gravity to let it move down in space. How do you do that? So we need a new form of direct metal. All I can imagine is this sort of like weird box with all of this powder in it, you know, kind of like a sand sort of situation. And then a laser going. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So not magically something comes out of that. I know that's totally not the way that that would work but that's the only like image I get in my head. I guess my point is this is very cool and this is absolutely a first step. We're missing a second step and then the third step is we print in space. Hopefully they've got an idea as to what that second step is but you need to, obviously you need to do these in order, right? You don't just go from nothing to something and so this is that first step on being able to 3D print. It proves that we can take the meter writer, take the asteroid, grind it up and make something out of it. Absolutely and that's a big deal. That's huge. So now we need to fix the next big deal and once we do that, what we'll be able to do in space and creating parts will be incredible. I think it'll open up a whole new area of what we'll be able to do just like in exploration of space. I think that is kind of the thing that will help open up the cosmos. So that's why I'm super excited about this. Something that I think is really interesting about this too is the kind of traditional additive 3D printing is actually something relatively new and the whole laser metal centering is actually something that industry has been doing since I believe the 80s. It might be early 90s. So this type of 3D printing is a little bit more understood than the kind of new type where they're just using simple plastics or something like that. So there might be some kind of insider secrets that we might not be aware of how they would be able to get around some of those problems that you brought up. Maybe, it's a hard, there are hard problems, right? The outgassing problem is a big one. Absolutely. That's a really big problem in space. And then the floating powder, that's also a very big problem. I think these are solvable. There are other technologies that you can use or next generation technologies that maybe don't use the powder in that way. I just, I haven't seen them yet, but I'm sure someone's working on a possibly planetary resources or their very long name 3D systems. I'll just call them 3D systems. Maybe they're working on something. So Mike, why don't you talk to us about other innovative projects going on? So speaking of kind of different type of innovative project, the European Space Agency is actually having second thoughts as to whether they're going to commit to continue operations at the International Space Station all the way to 2024. NASA, the Russian Space Agency, JAXA, the Japanese Space Agency, as well as the Canadian Space Agency have all agreed to continue operations up until 2024. The last kind of ending date of operating at the ISS was 2020. And as of right now, kind of the two leading nations in the European Space Agency, France and Germany, are debating whether or not it's going to be worth it to continue operations at the ISS. Right now, the big focus is on their next generation rocket, the Ariane 6, and a whole bunch of other science missions, ExoMars, which is a partnership they have with Russia being one of them. And so with a lot of these different things on the table, there's a couple of different factors that might increase their normal operating costs. In the past, they did have more money that was going towards their human spaceflight operations, but they also had a barter system with NASA. For sending up astronauts and kind of their share of the costs of operating the ISS, they would send up cargo flights with their automated transfer vehicles, the ATVs. And since after five flights, the ATVs now retired, they kind of renegotiated the deal to use instead the service module of the automated transfer vehicle on the future Orion spacecraft. And even though the Orion is not going to be going to the International Space Station, NASA has agreed to allow that to be part of the European Space Agency's monetary commitment towards the space station. And if they don't have some sort of barter deal like this, then they would have to pay that sort of money. Recently, France did increase the amount of spending towards the human spaceflight program, but it still wouldn't be enough if they didn't have this barter deal in place. So as of right now, there isn't anything that can really be agreed upon until all the different heads of the different space agencies in Europe meet in a big meeting that they'll have in December in Lucerne, Switzerland. And at that meeting is where they're going to have the opportunity to decide whether or not they're going to continue operations at the ISS through to 2024 or to rather increase their focus on the next generation rocket and other projects that they have. So until December of this year, there's not going to be any official word as to what they're going to do, but we're just going to have to wait and see until then as to what sort of motivations and agreements that they come to and hope that they don't bluff with each other enough to kind of shoot themselves in the foot, so to speak. So as of right now, that's all that we have for that. But speaking of some other really cool stuff that Issa definitely does want to be a part of, I'm going to pass it back over to Kerry-Ann who has a really, or excuse me, Jared who has a really cool story about a future science mission they want to be a part of. Yes, and we're very excited because the new NASA budget has increased and there are certain things that are increased in that increase of the budget as well. And one of those is the Europa Clipper mission that is being worked on at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It was originally earmarked for $30 million in that initial NASA budget, but Congress upped that to $175 million. So essentially, Europa Clipper is fully underway development for a launch note earlier than 2022, most likely on the Space Launch System. Now, this mission is going to cruise to Jupiter in less than two years, assuming that the Space Launch System is used and then it will go into orbit and make up to 45 close passes of Europa. Seems like using SLS is a bit of overkill for that, is it not? Space Launch System? It would be a bit of overkill, but using an Atlas V in its most powerful configuration would require a six to seven year cruise on the way to Jupiter. So then the Atlas V is still on the table, if you will, for that, but obviously they want to give some justification for utilizing the Space Launch System with it. And I feel like that's a really good way to do it because just get it there. What's it reduce the transit time to? It reduces it to two years instead of five to six years. That's fair. So yeah, and if you think about the operations costs while you're on your way to your target wherever you're heading, that reduces the costs of your mission too. That makes sense. So there's currently an estimated 250 kilograms of usable excess mass. So that means that you could potentially build a lander to put on there within that mass margin. And in fact, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is looking at that because some congressional representatives have hinted that they may get more funding for that project if they include a lander for that. And if that wasn't enough for you, the European Space Agency- But wait, there's more. Yeah, but wait, there's more. The European Space Agency has contacted NASA declaring official interest in providing the lander for this mission, which they estimate would cost about $550 million. This whole mission just by itself, if we just launched Europa Clipper in its current configuration would be about $2 billion. So this is definitely a flagship project. And the help from the European Space Agency, I would imagine that would be very well accepted and we'd be very happy to collaborate with them on that. Yeah. You know how they might be able to power that lander? Yes, by using plutonium. Plutonium, that's right. So as many people know, United States basically stopped plutonium production in the late 80s. And for the first time in nearly 30 years, we have created a sample of plutonium-238 Hazard. Now this is a big deal because then actually it's a very, very small sample. It's 50 grams or 0.1 pounds of sample inside of there. So it's a very, very small. It is a sample. It's basically proving out that we can do this again and that we have the systems necessary to make it work. Plutonium-238, it's a radioactive isotope that's used for deep space missions on NASA spacecraft and landers and rovers and things like that. For example, the now. Curiosity. Thank you. I'm like, the thing, it moves on Mars. Curiosity, curiosity. We just went to Pluto with New Horizons. Also used it. We also went to... Galileo, one of the Jupiter missions. Cassini has some. Basically if you're out in space, you're probably using a radioactive isotope to make that happen because you can generate lots and lots of power for a very, very long time without a lot of weight. All of these things are very important for space-bound missions and now we can actually do this. And this was all done in the... The US Department of Energy is the department that oversees it, although it was taken over by NASA and it is done in what facility? The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Thank you. I'm like, I lost it in my notes. NASA's actually spent more than $200 million keeping the capability from the Department of Energy online just to be able to generate this plutonium. Eventually they need to be able to generate a lot more. They're hoping to be able to generate 1.5 kilograms or 3.3 pounds every year or so. Eventually they wanna be able to create 35 grams, I'm sorry, 35 kilograms of plutonium which is about 77 pounds. That's actually in their stockpile. Let me try that again. I have failed this story miserably. It's okay. They can produce 400... We're going back up my notes. They can do 400 grams now or nearly a pound. That's, I'm sorry, they can't do that now. They're gonna do that in the near future. 400 grams, about a pound. They want to get to about 3.3 pounds annually. That's where they wanna get to. They have 77 pounds in a stockpile. To put this into perspective, the Mars 2020 Rover, which is basically the sister to Curiosity, will require about four kilograms or 8.8 pounds. So one vehicle requires 8.8 pounds. Man. Do better than I do, please. That story didn't quite go as planned. No, it didn't. I derailed my own show. Don't worry, Ben, we'll get it in post. We will not fix that in post. Carry on safely. So I chose this story because I thought that Lisa would enjoy it slash I thought Lisa would be proud of me. So hopefully I don't screw it up as badly as Ben just did. There are some, there's some moldy plants on the international space station. Gross. I know. Mobile over the international space station. Yeah, so this tweet, as you can see, came out from Commander Kelly not all that long ago. I believe it was December 27th, where he's talking about how his plants are looking a little sick and he's gonna have to mark Watney the snot out of it. And anyway, so for those of you who've seen the Martian, that's or have read the Martian, that's a reference to that obviously. There are four Zinnia plants that are moldy and the veggie experiment aboard the international space station. And the, so Scott Kelly reported it around, I can't talk either apparently around December 22nd. So the veggie project manager is Trent Smith and he's down on the ground and he was trying to manage the water problem from the ground by increasing the fan speed because he noticed through pictures that Scott Kelly had been taking that there was too much water on the outside of the plants and inside of the veggie experiment itself. And it was right around that time that Scott Kelly said, hey guys, by the way, it's kind of moldy. So what's the deal? Gross. So since then Scott Kelly has been labeled a commander or he's been designated commander of the veggie experiment to hopefully cut down on that lag time between hi, I'm seeing something. Yes, we're working on a thing. Okay, we have to give the command to the fan to produce to be at a higher speed. So hopefully it'll help with that. Commander veggie Kelly? Yeah, basically. So that's a commander veggie Kelly can just go in and go more fan speed, please. Thank you. He's also in the process of making sure he's wiping down and sanitizing the experiment and the plants and wiping off any extra water so that to kind of help with all of that. The moldy plants are gonna be bagged up by Kelly and are being stored in a freezer. They're gonna be returned on SpaceX CRS eight later on this year for analysis. Each pillow, you could see that they're doing much better now, which is really nice. Each pillow or each sort of like little segment there has actually two seeds. There was sort of a main seed per pillow and then what they call a quote unquote stealth seed. So, which I thought was hilarious. So it's basically just making sure that if one didn't go, that the other one had a chance kind of thing. And so out of the, I forget what it is, but out of like the six or eight of them, again, each with two stealth seeds in it, four of them were moldy, but three of them are still doing really, really well, which is kind of cool. One of the first veggie experiments was up in 2014 and that was the one that they got the lettuce from that they've harvested two crops of lettuce from that veggie experiment. And for those of you who are asking, okay, well, lettuce and zinnias, like what do those two things have in common? The zinnias are actually sort of a precursor plant for dwarf tomatoes. And then those are going to, yeah, those will be going up in the veggie for 2018. So they should be able to eventually, we're trying to learn how to farm in space. That's what this whole deal is about. We're trying to, we're learning how to build things in space. We're learning how to create food in space. It's all kind of coming together. It is. It's kind of, it's exciting. It's finally upon us. It's finally upon us. Yeah. Space salad. Space salad. Space salad. That sounds delicious. It makes me, it makes me wonder if R2 is dexterous enough to help out with these plants at all, because as far as I know, he's just kind of sitting in a storage locker up there somewhere. Yeah. You guys know what I mean by R2? Yeah, but not R2. Yeah. Not R2-D2. Right, not R2-D2, exactly. Not sure if R2-D2 or R2-KT. Yeah, no, I don't actually know. I think at this point it does still probably take a little bit of a human touch to be able to look at it and analyze and say, okay, there's too much water there. What do we do now? But other than that, it's fairly hands-off. Each little pod kind of has their own little fertilization. And it's pretty much just water and fan air flow at this point. If Johnny Boy brings up an interesting question, is will a tomato be like a perfect sphere in space? Because I know they're kind of squished. I wonder if they'll actually sphere size themselves. A little bit. I mean, the baby. I wonder how they'll actually look. They still have the stem part, right? Then it has to grow out from the stem. So it probably will be perfectly spherical. I wonder what microgravity will do to the growth of a tomato. We already talked about dwarf tomatoes as well. And when you look at cherry tomatoes, they have a much better chance of looking a little bit more spherical. So it depends on the plant. I would imagine the shape of a plant might be genetic as opposed to environmentally influenced, if you will. But I also, I don't know. I'm not like a botanist or anything like that. Yeah, I don't, you know, yeah. I wonder what would happen. This is, I guess we'll have to cover it when it happens to be really cool. A live tomato cam from the International Space Station. That would be kind of amazing. I'll grow really fast, too. It's sort of like those little like baby eagle cams, right? You've got the camera. The Shiba Inu cam. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think it'd be really interesting. Space tomato cam. Exactly, exactly. Space cam. All right, well, let's turn it back on over to Mike to talk about some lunar exploration ideas. So yeah, kind of going back to Europe, the European Space Agency, well, first of all, this all started off with their director, Johann Warner. He made a speech back in October of 2015 in Jerusalem. Pretty much announcing a plan for what he's calling the lunar village or moon village. And with this plan, just recently, the European Space Agency has released a new video, a really nice video actually, kind of detailing their plan. First starting off with robotics and then having human landings until eventually they would build villages or small moon bases near the South Pole and try to harvest water from some of the craters that are permanently shadowed and where we know there's water ice. And with this whole plan, the different nations of the European Space Agency have said nothing about it. They just don't want to comment on it at all. And pretty much those who have talked about it are just like, this is just Johann's plan. Like we're not officially going down this road just yet. However, that being said, there are some officials at the European Space Agency who have drawn up lots of different plans for robotic missions to go to the moon. They want to start cooperating with Russia, China, India, and pretty much anyone who will be willing and wants to be able to participate with them, especially since NASA is mostly gonna be focusing on Mars. And that's their whole fear is that NASA is gonna be too busy focusing on Mars stuff to be a whole part of this lunar plan. But even though they aren't officially going down this road, they will have the opportunity to discuss this again in their big meeting in December. And again, all the same sort of factors kind of weigh in as to kind of waned against this whole plan being adopted, working on the next-gen Ariane 6, the ExoMars, possibly Europa Clipper and a whole bunch of other missions. However, one interesting partner or a possible partner has come forward. And this is actually someone from the United States FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration. And pretty much for this, it's the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee as part of the FAA. And they have expressed interest on how they would be able to allow United States private companies in participating with this whole plan of Europe. So that might be a really interesting partnership that comes about. If NASA or any other worldwide government space agency doesn't wanna participate in this plan, I know of at least a handful of American companies, private companies who definitely wanna go to the moon and go and do the same things that this whole plan is talking about. So that might be a way that we would see this plan become a reality. So that's something that I find really interesting. And again, we're just gonna have to wait and see if this plan continues to develop. However, the director, Johann Warner, is probably gonna continue to push this as hard as he can until some sort of support for it materializes. So that's it for this particular story until we have more information. All right, thank you, Space Mike. Now we're gonna take a quick break, show you a launch calendar about coming to launches this next week. And when we come back, we're gonna be talking about our main topic, which is how to prevent things like hashtag Flat Earth. So, and that's your fault, Ma, we'll describe what all that is. I'm very sorry. All that is all about. So stay with us, we'll be right back. Welcome back to tomorrow. Now before we get started with our main topic, I did go on to give a huge shout out to all of the patrons of tomorrow to help to make this specific segment of this episode happen. These are the people who've contributed $5 or more to this episode. If you'd like more information on how you can help crowdfund the shows of tomorrow, head on over to patreon.com slash T-M-R-O. And speaking of Patreon, we are like 50 some odd dollars away from our next Patreon goal for the Spacepod campaign. That's right. And what that will do when we get that next $50, which brings us up to $500 per month, that will enable us to do two more Spacepods per month, which comes out to about one per week or four per month. So that'd be a really exciting thing. So 50 people contributing $1, five people contributing $10, or any combination in between will help us get to our next Spacepod campaign goal. That's a separate campaign from the main tomorrow live shows that's over at patreon.com slash Spacepod. And I'm really excited because I think that we're gonna hit that. I hope we hit that in January. I hope we would do it too. It would be nice to do that for February and come back. Yeah, it'd be really, really cool. So we'd love to see that happen. And thank you to all of our patrons who will make all of our shows happen. Thank you guys. We couldn't do it without you. I feel like a PBS cell. And viewers like you. All right. Hello neighbor. Let's go ahead and get started with our main topic. How did this come about? What you tweeted something about. This is your fault. Okay, so I'm on Twitter a lot and you can talk to me or everything. You're at Jaredhead. At Jaredhead, just my name. And I really love interacting with people on it and talking with them. And I saw some of my friends were talking about flat earthers, which are these people who think that the earth is not round. That's actually flat. I know. You would think that we abandoned that about 2,000 years ago, but apparently not. Do you know how they, in this flat earth, how do you not fall off the side? I don't know. Wait, wait, how does gravity work? I don't know. Because if you hit the. It just comes down. I can't, like. Like laws of physics stop. There are things that stop working if you assume it's flat. Like not to be insulting, but I can't like lower myself down to that level of physics to think with that, you know? Like it's really. There are no physics with that. There isn't. Yeah. There's no basis. There's no way for it to. The whole thing is that the whole entire universe doesn't even exist. Like all there is is this flat rock that we're on. And actually the rock actually continues on beneath us. And beneath us is hell, where all the demons are. And like the sun is actually like one, one billionth at size. And it's just this kind of light that is orbiting in a circle in a halo orbit above us. Same thing with the moon, just in a tighter one. But wait, wait, wait. And it's ridiculous. This map that is something like 4,000 years old that's from some sort of Kabbalah thing from Jewish history that shows the world in this kind of flat configuration. And the other thing that really fuels the fire to this is that map is the symbol that is used for the United Nations. They're like, United Nations knows it's flat. Why can't you believe it? It's ridiculous. I bet Nicholas Cage is working on it right now. But in that environment, that means that there's a point in time in which there is no sunlight on the Earth, right? Wouldn't there have to be? Apparently. But it would have to happen all at once, right? Yeah, the light turns off. The light would have to turn off at some point before it turns back on. Is that incorrect? Anyone know? I think they say there's like a spotlight and it's only spotlighting on certain parts of the Earth as it works. I'm not gonna be able to see it. Obviously. Is that the thought pro... Cause I'm like, we can just... It's too far. We can super disprove flat Earth real quick with a single video conference to Japan. No. No, no, no, no, no. Because I live here, if this is the disc, right? I live here and the sun is over here because it's obviously like nighttime by me and daytime by Japan. I will be able to see that light. Clearly. Obviously. Obviously. The reason... All right, you're thinking to yourself, self, how in the world is this on tomorrow and how is this a topic for a space show? Bear with me. Let me come full circle. Full disc? Full flat. The idea is the easiest way, in my opinion, to get rid of the conspiracy nuts. Cause ultimately this is a conspiracy, right? Cause they wanna believe there's a conspiracy that everyone's lying to them and something that we hold to be a general truth which is the world is round. Obviously. And that there's a reason you lose the ship over the horizon after about 20 miles or so. No, no, that's not real. No, that's real. And that ultimately there's a conspiracy. We didn't land humans on the moon. It was all faked. Clearly. Conspiracy. It was on the internet. The easiest way. Including all satellites. All satellites. No, no, rockets don't work in space. The easiest way. All space flight is fake. Yeah, the easiest way to get rid of this is to make it so that regular mere mortals, not the super rich and famous, not the people like, selected that go through years of training, you, me, everyone watching the show, anyone who wants to, you solve this by giving them access to space. Let them fly to space. Go up on a blue, now this won't, I know some people are correctly thinking there is nothing you can say to convince certain people that the world is not flat. That is true. We're not talking about those people. There are some people who maybe believe the world is flat because they want to believe in conspiracy. And then if you can actually show them, be like, nope. No. See? They will then no longer believe that. And maybe they will hopefully change your life, Rob. But so, all right. Flat Earth, that's the thing. I feel like that's probably a very small subset Oh, it's huge. It's huge, dude. It is taken over YouTube. In fact, I have been getting personally attacked and trolled by Flat Earthers for over two years now. And I have like had to like report them and get their channels taken down. They got my monetization permanently disabled. They've tried to take my channel down several times. And every time all I do is just write a simple email and they're just like, oh, okay. You're obviously a victim of some fraud here and restore my channel. But this, this is a huge community. It is much bigger than you think. Occasionally we'll bring this up, but it's a lot bigger than you think. That's insane. But the one that is bigger than I always think is the, we never landed on the moon. Yes, that wonderful group of people. That's like 50% of the population. It's a very large group of people who think that maybe there was, not necessarily that we didn't land on the moon, but maybe there is question as to whether there was a conspiracy there. It's a much larger population than you think it should be. And the easiest way to get around this is to send humans into space. Actually, Dada, I got off topic. I know you had something to say. I just, I was on a roll. So go ahead and what was your point? Rather than just sending them into space like a suborbital flight, in order to prove that the Earth is round, you need at least one orbit. So we need to send them to orbit. Well, baby steps. I mean, you're not wrong, but I think, well, no. Because what you're aiming for is the overview effect. Yes. That's what you're aiming for. But it has been talked about a number of times I have a quote from Phil plate. So I apologize. I'm just gonna head down and read this really quickly. It says, there's a state of mind called the overview effect that almost every astronaut experiences. It starts off slowly at first. Each astronaut delights in seeing their own hometown from orbit, then perhaps a day later, their entire region. And then sometime later, so when they see their home country that they start to feel it, eventually it's supplanted by another broader feeling. Borders slip away. The sense of ownership over a particular piece of land fades and they find themselves a citizen, not of a nation, but of an entire world. Which means you can't just go up for 20 seconds and come back down and have the same kind of overview effect. Okay, I accept that. But we also have to do this in baby steps, right? We can't just send people low cost into orbital flights tomorrow. That's not a thing. But I'd be willing to bet we can do high cost suborbital flights within two years. Within two years. Sure, six months. We're only about six months out, it's fine. Yep. But someone will get there, right? Eventually someone will get there. And then you gotta drive that cost down. And then as that cost comes down, you need to start figuring out the orbital side of it and driving that cost down. And I think the easiest way to get rid of these conspiracy theories is to just do it and make it available for everyone to experience. Not just the elite few, but for absolutely everyone. And once everyone can experience it, people don't, I would, does anyone deny gravity exists? Is that a thing? I don't deny it. Is there a hashtag that says gravity? Yeah, we all fight it, but there's no gravity. There are some people. Are there? Is that a real thing? Yeah, there's no such thing as gravity. It's only magnetism. Gravity is not a thing. It's all magnetism. Ha ha ha. It's a small crowd, but there is a crowd. But it's a small crowd. It's a small crowd. It's not a large crowd, right? Really? Definitely not as big as the flatter. I just googled gravity is fake and six million results came up. Six million. I'm now sad for humanity. I feel terrible. That was, my entire point was if we can get people, I actually, it serves as- Gravity is not real, artificial gravity. Fake gravity falls leak. Fake gravity in space. All of those are also suggested for me. Simulated gravity actually is one, I would have hoped that simulated gravity would have come up in that particular list. Anyhow, that was my, so along these same lines, along these same thoughts, I was thinking of adding a hashtag to every show. For example, this show would be hashtagged Flat Earth and I put it like on the, I can't really point to it, but on the bug, like right above or beside the bug, it'd be hashtag Flat Earth. And when you tweet the show, you'd have to reference hashtag Flat Earth, which means that whatever crazy conspiracy theory is out there is now taken over by an actual show with real, some real science behind it. Yes. I also, yeah, go ahead. Ooh, ooh, I Googled is gravity real and I came up with 184 million results. This just makes me sad. We're not gonna, yeah. This is depressing. Be careful. I'm wondering what the title of this video is gonna be, because if it's something like why Flat Earthers are wrong, this video is gonna go viral, I swear. We're gonna get so much hate. And that's what I told them. It's the wrong kind of viral. There you go. Right, you don't wanna have, there are certain people who just want to be right. They just want to be a conspiracy. And okay, we just need to get them off the Flat Earth thing, off the anti-science thing, so that we can actually, as a civilization, kind of move on. And again, the best way to do that is to just prove to them, be like, no, no, look, here. With your own eyes, your own senses. Here is the earth, it is round. We have pictures of it, that doesn't work for them. So they need to actually see it themselves. Some people will say, oh, you're just simulating this with a screen. I don't know how we're simulating the microgravity, but whatever. Yeah. It's all in the pool, man. You shouldn't definitely just- You can see the bubbles and flakes of stuff going everywhere, it's all in the pool, it's all fake. And also- At least that's what I hear. There was some talk in our chat room about the fact that we shouldn't give these people the time of day in order to discuss it. But I think you do, because if you don't address a really like, just like fundamental educational thing that you should understand, that can end up spreading out as like YouTube has sort of shown. If you throw out a misconception and you don't address it, and you don't address it head on and directly, and as best as you can with educating that, then it's just going to continue to spread out and it will sort of indoctrinate an entire group of people, which is maybe not the best way to have that happen. That's what's happened with the moon conspiracy. Yeah, I mean, once it wasn't really addressed until after, I can't remember who, there was some major, one of the major TV channels here in the US decided that they were gonna do an hour long documentary about how the moon landing wasn't real and then era in prime time. And that kind of- You're talking about mythbusters? It started everything. No, this was before mythbusters. This was like in the 90s, just when things started to really roll out with that. But then it's cool because you get things like mythbusters that do directly sort of work against this idea, maybe not necessarily against, but prove that the ideas that were being floated around and said in all these conspiracies have absolutely no holding anywhere, not even scientifically. It's just to quote Phil Plate, who has a great one. The scientific term is wrong. So, which is pretty good. So what do you guys think of the internet community out there? Obviously we don't want to, this isn't supposed, we don't want this to turn into a big, huge eight chat. Or like, oh, you're obviously stupid. That's not the point at all. It's an education point. It's a, this is wrong. So how do we fix it? So it doesn't turn into another, the government is against it. So it's a huge giant conspiracy. No, the earth is round. How do you work that? And I think a lot of valid things are, you can't just say, you can't just show them a picture because we've tried that. So eight has a great picture from the moon. Looking at the earth, it's very clearly round. Earth rise. But I mean CGI. Yeah. Sure. Exactly. So you can't show them a picture. Is bringing them into space the best way to, and someone's gonna say, bring them into space 100%? No, is bringing them into space and letting them see the earth themselves is that going to fix it? Is education here on earth, better education here on earth going to fix it? What are the best ways to go about this that aren't hateful or spiteful, but actually informative and can fix a potential problem as it's cropping up? Or is this an unfixable problem? Is there just a desire to be? Contrarian. Yeah, that's the best way to say it. And no matter what, no matter what we say, no matter what we show them, no matter what proof is put in front of them, they will never ever believe it because they don't want to. Is that the alternate? And it's just impossible to fix. Leave your comments on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, wherever you want to. We will not, I promise we won't use a clickbait title on this because we don't want that, we don't want the wrong kind of community coming here. We want people who don't want it, who are willing to be wrong and say that I'm wrong and want to learn and want to expand their knowledge. So anyhow, that's kind of what we're looking for. All right, interesting topic. Any final thoughts? Can I just say one last thing about this? One last thing about the flatter, there's quite a few of them who do have an open mind and who do do a lot of research, but as soon as they find one point of evidence that the whole space flight is fake, they stick to that and don't continue their research. Some of them, I've seen one particular guy who made the statement about, well, all the satellites would melt up there because it's this particular amount of degrees. And then later learned that without the presence of an atmosphere there to excite the atoms, the temperature wouldn't necessarily matter. And so he was just like, okay, so this is something that I stuck to for a long time as evidence against space flight. And now I've found out that that's actually false. So there are quite a few of them who are reasonable people. I think the biggest thing to this discussion is to not let yourself get down to a label where you resort to name calling. Don't ever name call. Absolutely. Be completely reasonable, be completely calm. And if they're not willing to look at or explore other avenues or other evidence, then you can't really work with that. Those who do have an open mind, just be calm, be gracious. This is still a human being that you're talking to who just unfortunately might have been misled. Absolutely, be civil, because if you're not gonna be civil then who will? And not being civil and resorting to name calling and belittling people is not how you create the next generation of humanity. That is not how you want to be treated. It's not how anyone wants to be treated. I know I've been wrong many times before, probably in this show. Like this exact episode. So, I, you know, so, and I don't want to be belittled, but I do want to learn from that. So, assume that they want to do the same thing. And you hit a dead on. If they don't want to learn and they just want to stick to their point, just stop the conversation. Just walk away. You don't have to be right. Just, I mean, you are right. Just, you don't have to convince them. Just walk away, just walk away. All right, on that note, we're gonna take a quick break. And when we come back, comments from last week's show. Stay tuned, we'll be right back. We've always looked to the stars. They guide us. Give us comfort. Help us find our way. We see ourselves out there. When we look up, it inspires us. We long for something we don't yet know. We yearn to go there. So, we venture forth. We choose to go to the mission of space. Many think we stopped exploring, but we know our journey didn't end. We've only just begun with us and explore tomorrow. Back to tomorrow. Now, before we get started with comments from our last show, I'd like to give a huge shout out to all of the patrons of tomorrow. These are the people who've contributed $2.50 or more to this episode. They're also gonna get a copy of After Dark as soon as that is available online. And of course, their name and the show and access to the hopefully quarterly Google Hangouts that we do with the crew of tomorrow. Just kind of just an exclusive little hangout that we'll do from time to time because there are rewards for crowdfunding the show. But wait, there's more. We've also got our patrons of tomorrow. These are people who contributed one penny. That's right, one penny, up to $2.49 to the tomorrow shows. So even one penny gets your name in every episode. Thank you so much to everyone for contributing. You are the lifeblood of this show. For more information on how you can help crowdfund the shows of tomorrow, head on over to patreon.com slash T-M-R-O. All right, let's go ahead and get started with comments from our last week's show. Comment, Lord! You know when you'll live that down? Never, the 12th of never. All right. This one comes from Ben Hamilton. Good name, Ben. Good name. Strong, solid name, Ben. Well, if I let him be added into the show. Ben is a good character. He's a good person. Good, so the next one is Adam, also off of you two. I'm sorry, no, what was Ben's comment? Yeah, when will the F-9 landing be added into the intro? Yeah, so if you look at the intro, it ends in like 2010. Like all the cool things that we did, like up to 2010 and then like there's nothing from 2010 up through 2015. Cause nothing's happened. Nothing's happened, apparently. I think the show of tomorrow should probably update that. So I'm thinking, actually I love your comments. So the Falcon 9 stage one landing seems like a good thing to add in there. I think the blue origin stuff seems like a good thing to add in there. What else should we add in there? Landing of curiosity. Dragon Cygnus talking to the space station. Cygnus's space station, landing of curiosity. Yeah, that was a good one too. Although that's in our promo video. That is too. Yeah, but it probably should be in the intro. Okay, what else? So leave it in the comments, like between 2010 and 2015, we need some more stuff that was like epic and awesome for humans in space. What should those things be? New horizons as well. Yeah, that's a good one. I will include Dawn with series. Yep, yep. Still got lots. There's lots of stuff, but like pick, I can probably only fit like two or three in there. All right, cause I still have the same amount of time, so. That's true. Filet. Filet. Filet. Filet. Maybe the, like the animation, like the little cartoons they did. Yeah. Yeah, it's so cute. Next up. This one comes from Adam off of YouTube. Hi, Adam. Hey, Adam. I don't trust Adam as much as I trust Ben though. Okay. I don't know why. There's something about Ben that just made him feel super trustworthy. I don't know what it was. Also, the Russian engine versions got the go ahead as an executive decision was probably made, but that SpaceX aren't reliable yet and they need those launches. So the idea being that they were able to sneak in the bill because SpaceX isn't ready and we needed someone else to something, something. I'm not sure that quite makes. I think this was just a single senator working against everyone else to be good for his district. Actually, there are good valid points on either side which is you do need to have the U.S. shouldn't be relying on just one provider and by eliminating these engines, you're kind of eliminating a provider. So that's kind of silly. Also, the whole idea that yes, we're forcing you to use these engines. Oh no, you can't use these anymore. That's a little bit silly. On the other hand, the way they went about doing all of this was totally sketchy and it was kind of douchey on all parties' fronts. Like the reallocating of engines for a military to a non-military, even though there's no restriction on the non-military stuff, they didn't need to do that. That was purely a political move. So it was just, I don't know, everyone involved just did weird bad things and it makes me sad, it just makes me sad. There we go. It's not a good situation. It's not a good situation. Yeah. Next one. Comment, Lord. Yeah. Comment, Lord. Comment, Lord. Ryan Ham off of YouTube. Ben, stop trying to include Jeff Bezos. Don't add him to the list of reusable orbital rocket purveyors. Mastin, McDonnell, Douglas, Grasshopper, Grasshopper 2, Morpheus, even the Lunar Leonard trainer. Heck, in Spaceship 1 and 2 to that list, there's the Space Shuttle and the SRBs. Solid rocket boosters. The X-15 and the true rocket that was recovered. And this is the new stuff. Please shut up about Blue Origin. No, I completely disagree. So first off, you don't have to like Jeff Bezos. That's fine. But there are still hundreds of engineers that are working at Blue Origin that did something that hadn't been really done before, which is a propulsive landing of a stage back at its launch site. The X-15, the DCX didn't, DCX didn't go to the boundary of space. Well, yeah, it didn't. It only went a couple kilometers. Yeah, it didn't go nearly as high, right? And that's ultimately what this is. It went higher than anything else. I don't think we're saying that no one else has ever done this before. What we're saying is that these vehicles that sent something to the border of what we consider the edge of space, barely. Someone brought up in the last show in the comments, like did the first stage make it to that 100 kilometer line, or was it the spacecraft that made it to the 100 kilometer line? I actually don't know. I would actually assume it's the spacecraft that did it and not the stage. Anyone know for certain? Yeah, I don't know. I'm assuming it's spacecraft based on, I would assume it's spacecraft. I would just imagine with the physics it would be the spacecraft. But who cares, right? Because it's not the stage that you need to get to that 100 kilometer line. It's the spacecraft that you need to get there because that's what's gonna carry the people. So it doesn't matter. They did something that no one else had done before and it's really freaking cool. So I don't really care if you like Jeff Bezos or don't like Jeff Bezos. A lot of engineers spent a lot of time and put blood, sweat, and tears into this thing and they did something great. Exactly. And I just wanna add onto that that this whole thing seems to come from the attitude that spaceflight is some kind of zero sum game, which it's not. The total, everybody's success helps everybody out. All ships rise with the tide. Yes, exactly. There you go. Comment, Lord! This one comes from Steven Fiddler off of YouTube. Ben, next launch in landing, you need to take a DB meter with you and add it to the video shoot showing how loud it gets at the SpaceX mission control area. That's a decibel meter to, it'll measure the amount of audio. I'll just tell you it's like louder than a jet engine. It's insane. You can shout to the person next to you and not hear yourself. It's crazy. However, that's not normal, right? Yes. There isn't this, what you saw doesn't happen on every single launch. There is always a crowd, people are always excited and there's always cheering, but that level happens when you do something epic, when a brand new epic thing happens and it happens more than once at SpaceX, but it doesn't happen for every single flight. So, I could bring a meter and capture it, but the next flight, especially if I wasn't running the webcast and I was in California, I would just drive up, I wasn't in California, I wasn't in Galactic headquarters. I would just drive up to the launch site and watch it in person because there's nothing like watching, there's nothing like watching a rocket live, right? Yes. There's no camera. It's amazing. There's no camera that can capture it right. There's no microphone that can capture the audio right. You just have to experience it in person and it is truly an experience. It's the ultimate, to me it's the ultimate raw display of power. It is just, we've literally taken fire to its furthest that it can go and then controlled it to do something and do something unbelievably precise as well. So, it's the best thing ever. It's the best thing ever. So, I would just personally go up and watch it at the launch site and I'm sure that other people at SpaceX have the same thought. So, I think that the energy will be moved potentially to the launch site. All right, next up. This one comes from Fabio Milan, also for YouTube. Also, Fabio comments a lot. So, thank you Fabio. Like good, solid comments. Thank you for being a solid commenter on the show. Absolutely, thank you. You're talking about the curvature of space today and really literally today, I stumbled on videos of people questioning SpaceX saying it's fake and that Earth is flat. At first I thought those were satire, but then I realized that they were serious. We need people in space now. We need to save ourselves from this kind of ignorance. You know what, I just realized, I developed the topic of the show after I put this comment in the show and I should have put this comment up at the main topic because I think we just covered this. To death at the main topic itself. But Fabio, I completely agree. Yep, absolutely, you're dead on. I think putting people in space, like mere mortals, not just at like, but putting you and I in space would go a long way. All right, leave your comments on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, wherever you'd like. Now remember, we are off for the next two weeks. We will not be here for the next two weeks. I believe we return January 30th, 2016. Yep, for our next live show, we look forward to seeing you then. You're gonna have a space pod in between. I will, my space pod is pretty cool too. You're having the next space pod next week, basically essentially in place of this show, right? Well, I think actually Space Mike's having it first, and then I'm doing it after. I'm sorry, so Space Mike, you have yours first. Yep, and what are you gonna be talking about, Space Mike? Yes. What am I gonna talk about? Yeah, yeah. That's a surprise. Ooh, all right, so surprise space pod next week. I actually have two ready and I'm gonna be producing it at the last minute, depending on if a certain rocket launches with a certain payload, so we'll see. Interesting, all right, and you, Jared, what are you gonna be doing? I'm actually gonna be talking about what it's like to go to a rocket launch since we were just talking about this, because I will be at the launch of Jason Three from Vandenberg. How far away from the rocket will you be? I will be 2.4 miles away from the rocket, or just about four kilometers from the pad. Is that the closest you can get to a rocket of that size in the United States? Yes, I will be closer than you can get at Kennedy Space Center by miles. Well, the closer you can get it. It's gonna be amazing. By a mile. Oh, yeah, roughly. Well, actually, that's not true. I was gonna say. By now, you'd have to be on base. Yes. But even then, it's about three miles away. But off base, you're right. It's by miles, if you don't have it taken on base. Yeah, it's gonna be pretty amazing, and I'm looking forward to it because this is gonna be my 12th launch I'll see in person. And I saw the first Falcon 9 1.1 fly in Flight 6, so I get to see the last one now, too. Nice little bookend, and I'm really excited. All right, thank you everyone so much for watching. Stay tuned, After Dark is up next on the other side of that disk, and we'll see you in two weeks, three weeks.