 Welcome to The Conversation, my name is Kari and I will be your host in this first segment of the show. With me today, I have unborrow again for Athena, one of our hosts from Tomorrow Science. I also have with me Mike, our rocket specialist, and of course behind us is one Dada who will be producing the show. Now today in news, we have interstellar donuts, so exciting! Mike? The first air-breathing electric thruster has been tested. Oh, that's also really cool. And Jared will be back. He's actually going to be doing the interview in our second segment with Dwight Stephen Bomiecki, who has a Kickstarter campaign searching for Skylab. I'm also really excited about that. So of course, in the third segment, we take a look back at your comments from about last week's show, but this is Tomorrow Orbit 11.10. The first things I want to make sure I do is give a huge thank you to all of our citizens of Tomorrow. These are the escape velocity citizens. These people have contributed $10 or more per episode on Patreon, or $30 or more a month on Makersupport.com. They of course get their name in all three segments of the show. They get read-only access to the Tomorrow Host channel, which again is a future reward, but that's going to be so exciting. You can see us talk to each other and then like, you know, hey, you got something in your teeth. They get a lot more. In any case, if you're interested in becoming a citizen of Tomorrow, head on over to Patreon.com or Makersupport.com slash T-M-R-O. And just as another quick reminder for those of you, particularly in the United States who are going to be going through daylight saving time this weekend, we only adhere to UTC, Coordinated Universal Time, which means if you change your clocks this weekend next week, the show is going to be an hour later. Just fantastic because in the summertime, we get to sleep in a little bit and that's really cool. And then in the wintertime, when we have less light, we have to get up earlier. I don't know who decided that, Ben, but it's a really terrible idea in either days. If you do not change your clocks like our hologram here, then there's no change for you. You don't have to worry about it in any way, shape or form. But if you do have to go through the whole, actually, nobody even changes their clocks anymore, right? You just wake up. Your phone tells you what time it is. But if you happen to go through a weird week of sleepiness, just know that next week, the show is going to be a little bit later for you, which is great, actually, when you think about it that way, and we're not all up in your business. Yeah. Right? You can sleep in for a little bit. It's cool. We'll still be here. All right. So now that we've gotten that out of the way, Mr. Mike, I feel like we may have launched something in this last week. Yeah? Why don't you fill me in and let's go on. A couple of things, I think. Yeah. Perfect. I'm not going to say anything scary and stuff, but you know. First off, we had a SpaceX launch, of course, which was launching a Spanish commercial communications satellite. And I think that this launch was actually pretty awesome. 4, 2, 1, zero, ignition. This launch occurred on Tuesday, March 6th, at 533 Coordinated Universal Time from the Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. And it just so happened to be the 50th flight of the Falcon 9 rocket, which I think is a pretty cool milestone. But in any case, the payload was Hispasat 30W-6, which was launching on a 15-year mission to relay video data and broadband signals across the Americas, Europe, and North Africa. It's actually built by Space Systems Lural in Palo Alto, California. And Hispasat 30W-6 is one of the heaviest geostationary communications satellites to launch on a Falcon 9 rocket. It's approximately 6.1 metric tons, which is actually a little bit higher than the Ariane 5. In any case, the Falcon 9 first stage detached and it came down for a controlled descent to the Atlantic Ocean. However, SpaceX's rocket recovery ship was not in position in the down-range recovery zone because of rough seas, preventing the booster from making an intact landing for the company to reuse on a future flight. But the upper-stage engine accomplished a six-minute firing to reach a preliminary parking orbit. And then the rocket coasted across the Atlantic, as you see there, before reigniting its engine over Africa for a planned 55-second burn to raise the orbit's apogee or the high point closer to the altitude that Hispasat would finally be in, around 35,800 kilometers above Earth. And US military tracking data indicated that Hispasat 30W-6 satellite was placed in an orbit, ranging in altitude between 185 kilometers at its low point or perigee and 22,250 kilometers above Earth, at its apogee, its high point. And it was also inclined approximately 27 degrees to the equator. The spacecraft is going to be using its own fuel and thrusters to raise and circularize its orbit to place itself into its eventual geostationary position to join the rest of the Hispasat fleet. So congratulations to SpaceX for this successful launch. Bit of a shame that they weren't able to recover it, but in the long run, SpaceX isn't really planning on reusing a whole lot of these prior to the Block 5 version. So I guess it's okay that they didn't recover this booster, but it still did its job. So that's the important part. Totally. Smasher in our chat room even says, SpaceX are throwing away their old block rockets as if they were expendable. And I like the dot, dot, dot on that one. Which is kind of funny. It's kind of funny that in such a short amount of time, you go back like five years and people were still saying, oh no, no one's ever gonna be able to land a rocket. Like that's just, that's crazy pants. And now it's like, how dare they dump it into the ocean. Didn't land the rocket this time, BS. What's happening? Right? Like, how did you know how expensive that is? Like, yeah, I think I've gotten used to saying, like we'll just think of it as being, you know, new coral reef fodder. Like at some point, maybe that'll just sort of help some of that. That's kind of funny. And then the other thing is, I just talked about daylight saving time and you were like, oh yeah, this launch was on Tuesday and I was like, no, oh yeah, no, that's right. Coordinating universal time. We adhere to that always and every facet of our life. I only can hear the universal time. I love it. Well, and all rockets should really just sort of in general. And then there was at least one more launch. Is that right? A Soyuz launch? Yes, yes, there was a Soyuz launch, a Europeanized Soyuz launch from Ariane Space. And with this, it's launching the O3B satellites, four satellites that'll join O3B's expanding broadband network have successfully been launched. This was on Friday on top of the Soyuz booster from French Guiana. And they're gonna be joining 12 other spacecraft that are gonna be linking developing nations, some far-flung islands, cruise ships, and other hard-to-reach locations. Check out the launch. This launch occurred on Friday, March 9th at 1710 coordinated universal time, as I said, from the Guiana Space Center. And the rocket was the Soyuz ST-B or in other words, the Soyuz 2-1B. They make certain adjustments that can be launched from the Guiana Space Center. And this was actually the first launch of a Soyuz from French Guiana in about 10 months. So it's good to see that return. And the Soyuz booster pitched in a down-range trajectory east from the European Space Center and dropped four kerosene-fueled boosters, which you see there in the Atlantic Ocean, none of which were recovered. The entire thing is expendable. And there were engines. On the core stage, the third stage fired in succession and the Russian Fregat upper stage ignited to place the O-3B satellites into a preliminary parking orbit. Now there were also two more burns of the Fregat upper stage to place the O-3B payloads close to their targeted deployment altitude of 7,830 kilometers above the equator. Now the first pair of O-3B satellites released from the Fregat upper stage were released at 1911 coordinated universal time, followed by a brief rocket firing to move to a slightly different position and released the other two spacecraft at 1932 coordinated universal time. Officials confirmed that all four satellites, which were built by Telsenlinia Space, established contact with ground teams and that the reception of the telemetry indicated that the spacecraft were in the correct orbit and healthy following the launch. You can see the first two satellites and the second two deploying there. This was the 18th time that a Russian Soyuz rocket has launched from Fenskoyana. And overall, this was the 1,885th flight of a Soyuz overall, which is just so impressive. One of my favorite rockets that has been going on for this long. But one interesting thing that I did want to mention about the O-3B satellites, they're actually owned, they were bought out by SES back in 2016. And O-3B stands for the other three billion people because it's a project to bring internet connectivity to developing regions and places where it would be really hard to establish internet connections. So I like that project. So far this mission has been successful and one other thing that I wanted to mention too about the orbit, they're all placed into a medium Earth orbit so that they would hopefully be able to communicate as a fleet and have a much faster connection time and not have any latency there. Well, not as much latency as they would if they were in geostationary orbit. So cool to see that mission and looking forward to more in the future. Nice, MEO, medium Earth orbit, that's like not something we talk about or hear about a whole lot. So that's really interesting. Everything is LEO and geostationary and all that other fun stuff, LEO being low Earth orbit in case that wasn't perfectly clear. I do also appreciate the O-3B, sorry, because sometimes you get these rockets and you get these payloads and they have these sort of, particularly planets and stars before we name them. All of these, right? Really complicated, sounding numbers, letters, things that don't say or mean anything. So I just sort of had written that one off until you explained that and that was actually really, really cool, so. Yeah, I'm a three million. Yeah, that's awesome. So this is gonna be a really strange segue. So interstellar donuts? Yes, I wish I had some donuts right now. It has to do with squashed debris. So the Hubble Space Telescope recently just found some really cool data collected of exoplanetary systems that are starting to form but the actual disk that forms around it. Now I personally used to conduct research on protoplanetary disks found in the Orion Nebula, so this is really a hit home for me. Normally around newly born stars, debris, and dust matter tend to accumulate around it and this is known as an accretion disk, which may later evolve into exoplanetary systems, but recent data recorded with Hubble shows that surrounding a young star known as HR 4796A. That's what I'm seeing. Right? Please name. There was this super oddly shaped massive disk of debris spanning about 241 billion kilometers across. Now HR 4796A is only about eight million years old, so it's like mad young, and it's spinning insanely fast, which attracts nearby dust and gas to accumulate around it. And sometimes the matter in these disks can develop into the beginning stages of planets, which would be really cool. And oftentimes these early formations of planets will collide with each other and leave over a bright ring of dusty debris. And Hubble was actually able to detect this bright ring of debris, which was seen at about 11 billion kilometers from the star. The stars is 23 times brighter than our sun, and this leads the star's pressure to be very strong and cause it to expel the dusty debris surrounding it out into space. Now this young star is found in the constellation Centaurus as leading astronomers to studying stellar debris rings around many more, under many more circumstances. Considering the host star's intense radiation and stellar winds, it's affected interactions with the interstellar medium and forces coming from stellar companions, aka nearby stars. So it's really a lot of radiation happening at once. All these factors affect the formation and potential later evolutions of this debris disk. Astronomers are currently measuring how much of an effect it's actually having, each of these factors are having on the debris disk. So using the Hubble Space Telescope Imaging Spectroscop, which is the STIS, to probe and map the small dust particles in the outer reaches of the star system will show measurements of these types of interactions. The debris disk is showing a funny shape. It's described as a donut shape, hence interstellar donuts, that was actually smashed. It looks like it was smashed by a truck on one side. I like to more so explain these as to your drop shape because while conducting research on propelids, protoplanetary disks, which are very similar to this, which are a bit later in their evolutionary stage as this specific star system, propelids are in a creation disk already beginning to form around the star. And what was part of my research was actually measuring the Bose shock radiation coming from the nearby companion star, which would spew off massive amounts of stellar winds and radiation onto this newly formed disk. And it can actually start to disrupt any type of potential planets that actually can form. So while also measuring the distance to the nearby star and also the size of the star itself. But lastly, I think that understanding stellar formations and stellar debris disk formations and their evolutions will really lead us down the right path for knowing just where to look for potential new planetary systems and hopes for life. I mean, when I was personally really doing this, it was calculating so many different effects of the radiation, the interstellar medium, and the flux of the mass loss, right? So overall, the goal right now, as a lot of us are, is looking for life outside our own planet and looking at exoplanets. So looking at the formation of how exoplanets even begin to form and potential systems is looking at the early disks of these types of systems. So I think it's really cool that Hubble recently found this and I think it can explain a lot with the weird shape that it has going on. So I'm excited for what more research is gonna come out of this. No, totally. So you used a word that I'm unfamiliar with. Yes. Accretion disks, is that? Yeah, it's literally like, so the actual word, it accretes all the nearby dust and materials. A lot of it is like also icy particles. So when you have a newborn star like in propolis, which I used to study, you have the Orion nebula, so you have those dust and gas everywhere. And then you have areas where new stars start to form and their gravity is so strong and they're so young and they're spinning really, really fast. They start to attract any nearby dust and gas in the actual nebula and this forms an accretion disk. And a lot of times this dust and material can start to form like particles or potential, like start colliding with each other, maybe planets can form. And so what this research was was that the potential planets when they actually will collide with each other, rocky bodies will collide with each other, this will cause a glowing type of brightness or illumination of the actual disk. And this is what Hubble was actually able to pick up. Very cool, which a number of people in the chat room, actually across all of the chat rooms said look like the eye of Sauron, which I have to kind of agree with as well. Mikey, we're gonna say something though, I didn't wanna cut you off. Yeah, I have a question about this. So from the way that I understand this, is it more likely that planets would form around single star systems like ours than it would binary or trinary star systems, any star system that has companion stars? I would say single star systems, don't quote me on this because I'm sure there's a lot of research with binary star systems only because the immense amount of interactions that happen from binary star systems, it just causes, I mean, one star alone, a newborn star is causing so much rapid, it's rapidly rotating, causes so much stellar wind and it releases a lot of radiation that if you have two stars and they're orbiting each other, that's gonna be like double the amount of stellar radiation that's being emitted and also double the amount of stellar winds and then that's what it really will be impacting these accretion disks. So hence why my research we were calculating like the mass loss rate of the actual accretion disk. So yeah, a binary star system, I mean, I'm not sure maybe out there there's something but I don't think there's a high chance of it just because it's so intense, one alone, imagine two. So, interesting. Yeah, no, that's, yeah, super, that's cool. So Mike, this is something we also don't speak about a whole lot, mostly because A, it sounds really weird, but B, it doesn't sound like it's possible. This is something I have a very hard time wrapping my head around. I know we've talked about it a couple of times in the past, you know, 10 orbits or so, but you were talking about the world's first air breathing electric thruster and it's being tested. So yeah, let's start at the beginning. Normally when we think of electric thrusters, we think of like ion thrusters that use xenon gas or some other type of noble gas as their main propellant, but they do have a propellant. This is an ESA project to be able to pull the type of molecules from the air and from really, really high up altitudes that there isn't a whole lot of density. And still be able to pull enough molecules from the air to be able to provide a fuel. So in this world first, a ESA led team has built and fired an electric thruster that ingests those really scarce air molecules from the top of the atmosphere for the propellant and is opening up a really cool way for satellites to fly in very low orbits. That's the whole kind of key of this, really low orbits, but for years on end. So as an example, ESA's ghost spacecraft, or a GOCE, which is a gravity mapper, which flew as low as about 250 kilometers for about five years, thanks to an electric thruster that continually compensated for air drag so that it wouldn't re-enter the atmosphere too soon. However, its working life was limited by the 40 kilograms of xenon that it carried onboard its propellant. And once that was exhausted, the mission was over. So replacing onboard propellant with atmospheric molecules would create a whole new class of satellites that could operate in those low orbits for a long period of time. So air-breathing electric thrusters could also be used at the outer fringes of atmospheres of other planets, drawing on, say, carbon dioxide of Mars, for instance. And this project began with a really novel design to scoop up air molecules from the top of Earth's atmosphere around 200 kilometers up, and with a typical speed of about 7.8 kilometers per second. Now a complete thruster was developed for testing the concept, which was performed in a vacuum chamber by Citiel in Italy, the company's called Citiel. And it simulated the environment at a 200 kilometer altitude. So there was still a little bit of an atmosphere in there, but this was done in the vacuum chamber to simulate that. And a particle flow generator provided the oncoming high-speed molecules for a collection from what they call their ram electric propulsion, which is really novel intake and thruster for this. Now there are no valves or complex parts. Everything works on a simple, passive basis. And all that's really needed is to power, power is needed to be sent to all the coils and electrodes so that they can create an extremely robust drag compensation system. The challenge for this was to design a new type of intake that could collect the air molecules so that in simply bouncing away, they're collected and compressed. And then the molecule is collected by the intake, which is designed by a company called Kinte Science in Poland, are given electric charges so that they can be accelerated and ejected at the end to provide thrust. Now this whole two-step design ensures better charging of the incoming air, which is harder to achieve than in traditional electric propulsion designs. And Louis Walpot, a team leader for this project, explained that, quote, the team ran computer simulations on particle behavior to model all of the different intake options, but it all came down to this practical test to know if the combined intake and thruster would work together or not. Instead of simply measuring the resulting density at the collector to check the intake design, we decided to attach an electric thruster. And in this way, we proved that we could indeed collect and compress the air molecules to a level where the thruster ignition could take place and measure the actual thrust. Now at first, they checked whether or not their thruster could be ignited repeatedly with a xenon gathered from the particle beam generator. And as the next step, the xenon was partially replaced by a nitrogen-oxygen air mixture. Now when the xenon-based blue color of the engine plume changed to purple, they knew that they had succeeded. You can see in that one that it's blue there using the xenon and then changing to purple once it was just using the nitrogen-oxygen air mixture. Yeah, that was gorgeous. So this system, they ignited the system repeatedly, solely with the atmospheric propellants without any xenon to prove the whole feasibility of this. And this result means that air-breathing electric propulsion is no longer a theory, but it is a tangible working concept ready to be developed to serve one day as this whole new class of engine that could be used for some really interesting science missions. And by the way, this project is supported through ESA's Technology Research Program, which is kind of like the small business opportunities office that NASA has to help develop new ideas and space technology. So I think that this is really cool and any sort of innovative propulsion is right at my alley and I get really excited about. So I'm excited to see what this project leads to in the future. Yeah, totally. So Rob Jones from our YouTube chat room says, is there a goes to mission launching soon on an Iridium mission? Do you know? I don't know. Or a GOCD, right? Yeah, okay. Yeah, GOCD, I don't know if there's a follow-up mission or not. Right. And not to be confused with like goes S and goes R and goes QB, X, Y, Z, all of the other. Right, not the weather satellite. Gravity Mapper. Goes G-O-C-E versus G-O-S. Okay, and then on top of that, Lerr in the tomorrow chat room says, skimming the top of Jupiter's atmosphere would be cool. That's awesome. That's actually my space pod. Yeah. Awesome. Good. Literally that. Good. Lerr, way to jump ahead. But I also appreciate that we're all sort of on the same page on that. So that's very, very cool. Those pictures are gorgeous. They remind me of Tron a little bit. Yeah, those were so nice. Right? All right. Miss Athena. Yes. I love that your voice is still very much so star-based, but still very distinctly different from Jared's voice on the show, particularly in news specifically, because this is not a title that I ever thought I would have to be saying ever, ever, ever. Schrodinger in space. Yeah. That's like crazy. I'm not talking about like putting the cat in space. No, no, no, no. For sure. We've done that and it was not pretty. Maybe it's alive. Oh, yeah. All right, so tell me what's going on here. Yes, it's about essentially what it sounds like, the connection between quantum physics and then physics in our natural world, which you'd think there would never be a connection between those two, which is pretty crazy. So as you guys know, quantum physics, which explains the behavior of particles on the subatomic levels, has never, ever been relevant on large scales like the world we live on. Live in, let alone astronomical scales. But now, sciences are turning to Schrodinger's equation, which is the most fundamental equation in quantum mechanics to explain long-term evolution of some astronomical structures. Now, theorist Konstantin Batygen at Caltech University, which by the way, he's also the scientist behind the proposal of Planet Nine, has come up with an approximation of disk evolutions in the universe based on a mathematical representation, which this pretty much means he interpreted quantum mechanics in the large scales of our universe. Something funny happens with disks like those that surround supermassive black holes and galaxies. These disks are made up of stars, sometimes planets, and even space debris of icy particles. I know I'm talking about disks again, it's really cool. They tend to form in a very flat disk type of shape, spanning millions of light years across. And many times these disks will become distorted. These warpings and distortions of disks have yet to be explained, and have been even detailed simulations on computers. Computer simulations have not been able to offer any type of answer for this. The approximation that this physicist ended up coming up with is based on mathematical equations developed in the 18th century by mathematicians Joseph Louis Legrange and Pierre Simon Leplace. It looks at the orbital trajectory of many particles and combines them all together. This creates a mathematical model consisting of a combination of many different angular momentums between the particles that are being exchanged, hence creating a more accurate approximation. A good way to explain this is if we were to take a planet that's orbiting like a star and break it into many pieces and allow for it to move along the same orbital path that the planet would have originally moved along anyway. This creates multiple paths, which he refers to actually as wires, that the planet would be encircling the star by with each particle interacting gravitationally because of the gravitational effect of the star. These wires vibrate and they mirror the actual orbital path that the original planet would be moving along, as I mentioned, but along its evolutionary cycle, which tends to change after millions and millions of years. And this makes for much more accurate measurements, but when measuring the materials in a disk of say an orbiting star, which are really tiny, tiny particles, what arises is an increasing number of wires and an increasing size of the disk. This eventually read to the approximation calculations to be infinity, which allows for the numbers and wires to be mathematically like blurred together into a continuum. And what happened next is insane. The Schrodinger equation emerged in the calculations, which I could totally do another video actually explaining how these things happen because yeah, with calculations, equations tend to emerge sometimes. And what happened with this is the Schrodinger equation looks at quantum particles, the way that they behave on a wave particle duality. And so the fact that this popped up in like a larger scale in our universe is like super crazy. Badiogen's work might explain large scale warps found in the evolutionary cycles in disk material because it would be kind of like a direct mathematical comparison to the way a single quantum particle behaves both as a wave and a particle. So this was a very big surprise, especially because the Schrodinger equation is a formula that is extremely unlikely to arise when looking at distances on the order of light years. So the Schrodinger equation explains the evolution of wave-like disturbances. And so because of this, Badiogen, the theorist, he actually says, and this is a quote, I was fascinated to find a situation in which an equation that is typically used only for very small systems also works in describing very large systems. So in a sense, the waves that represent the warps and lopsidedness of astrophysical disks are not too different from the waves on a vibrating string, which are themselves not too different from the motion of a quantum particle in a box. So this is like super crazy. And this image right here, I love this. This is called Schrodinger in space. It's an artist's rendition, or it's an impression of the research that's being presented. So that's pretty cool. You could see like the cat up in the corner. And yeah, it has stuff like of quantum particles and then also like galactic on the left side. That's the whole astronomical scales. So yeah, so that's that, which I think is like pretty crazy. I mean, it's definitely mathematical. So there's a lot of stuff being worked on this. It hasn't, obviously there hasn't been any observations, but it's just crazy because there's these crazy observations of like disks over time getting really warped. And there hasn't been an explanation for it yet. And so when he started looking at it in a different way, the fact that Schrodinger's equation even just kind of came up through his calculations really shows maybe that there actually is a connection between like quantum physics and what happens with wave particle duality and, you know, our real world and everyday life and also astronomical scales. So that's pretty crazy. Loving this chat room, by the way. Look at all these comments. I know, like I can't push all of them. I apologize, but if you're not watching live, you need to be watching live. You need to be in any of the chat rooms for sure. It's really amazing conversations going on. I try to speak slower too, I hope that's good. I know. The other thing about this is the way that I understood how creation disks and even galaxies form is because of the motion of, let's say, a star or a black hole at the center of a galaxy. Creating all those waves is what causes that compression to happen to create these disks. And so that same sort of, that same process is happening, but because of quantum physics is causing these type of distortions. Do I have that about right? Precisely, yeah. Because it really is causing ripples in the space time. Yeah, the fabric of space and then time. So we live in three dimensions of space, one dimension of time. So okay, I just don't want to clarify that. But yes, precisely, exactly. Because you have that gravitational effect of the supermassive black hole or the active galactic nuclei, which is the center of a galaxy. And that, because it has such a strong gravitational pull and it causes gravity of all these other stars and stuff to accrete towards its center than the event horizon, that is causing, like you said, a compression and it's causing these ripples. And then we can get into, like, Hawking radiation, the no boundary proposal, which is a whole other thing of like early universe. That's just crazy quantum mechanics. Yeah, anyway, sorry. I can't get into quantum mechanics. I get too intense. This is awesome. As Mike said, this is very cool. However, we have so much more cool stuff to get to. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna take a little bit of break. And when we come back, Jared is going to be interviewing Stephen, wow, Dwight Stephen Bonjitzki. It was the last name that keeps tripping me up and I know he says I can say it wrong, but I feel bad about it anyway. We're gonna be talking about his latest Kickstarter project, searching for Skylabs. So stay with us more tomorrow, coming right back. Let's do some convicts with a test. One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one. And prepare. Okay, we checked all four systems. There you go, modulation all four and came with a go. And welcome back to tomorrow. Now, before we get into our interview today, of course, we've gotta give a huge shout out to our citizens of tomorrow. The escape velocity citizens here who give us $10 or more per episode on Patreon are $30 or more per month on Maker Support. But of course, it's not just our escape velocity citizens that we're very happy to have, it's our orbital citizens. As well, they give us $5 per episode on Patreon or $15 a month or more on Maker Support. And they get a lot of goods. And if you wanna know the goods that you get becoming a citizen of tomorrow, head on over to patreon.com slash T-M-R-O and makersupport.com slash T-M-R-O. And I am joined today by a tomorrow veteran, Dwight Stephen Monetski. You've been on the show quite a lot before, so. So welcome back, at least now we've got, I mean, talking, I saw the previous episodes that you've been on. I think this is either your third or your fourth episode on the show, somewhere around there, right? Second, okay. I thought you- Sorry, this is the third. Yeah, cause you were on last orbit on orbit 10 and you were also way back when it was space vidcast as well, I believe. Yeah, so just reading up on you, you've got a very interesting background, sort of an interesting history in the space flight business, if you will. Can you tell us a little bit about that just to kind of preprep everyone about who you are and what you do? Well, actually my day job is being a transmission controller to the RTL here in Germany. And I've always been interested in space flight. I was six months old when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. My father was very much enthralled by the American space program. And he recorded the Apollo 11 audio and as a child, I had these tapes that he made for me and I would play them and just listen, you know, imagine myself up there on the moon. And of course, when I was 10 years old in 1979, that gives away my age, Skylab was the big deal because Australians were pretty sure it was going to impact on our country. And that's actually what happened. And the night before it hit, you know, a 10 year old boy just lying in bed going, please not our house, please not our house. We all thought, I mean, and then it was always in the back of my mind. And when I was writing my first book, Live TV from the moon, I extensively interviewed Stan Labar, who was the manager of the Westinghouse Lunar Television Development Team. And we would talk about Apollo and he was very, very proud of what they did on Apollo. And he would always go, yeah, but what we did on Skylab, that's where it started. It interested me. What? Skylab? And I ended up getting sorry, the earpiece fell out. The videotapes of, it was just like a hodgepodge VHS tape of Skylab down links. And thankfully, they all had a time and date of the front. So when I did the second book, Live TV from mobile, which detailed how I had to put these things in the sequential order in order to be able to write about the book, to write about the television. And I was caught by the Skylab bug and it stayed with me ever since. The by-product was I had so much film material that a friend of mine said to me, why don't you make a film about Skylab? You've got so much footage. Why not do something with it? And I thought, that's a good idea. Not realizing the amount of work that was involved behind making a film. So I was lucky enough because of the passion for Skylab, Apogee Books allowed me to do their mission reports, which you see behind me, SL1 and 2, SL3 and SL4. And on top of that, they allowed me to do ASTP. And through doing that, I'd started laying the groundwork of being confident that I could handle doing this project of searching for Skylab. And just to answer a question, which I'm sure a lot of people are asking because I get it all the time, why searching for Skylab? And it came about when I was talking to a journalist, friend of mine who worked here in Brussels and took the mission report. And he said, well, telling me who made the communications cable from the talk box to the microphone is all good and dandy. But what did Skylab bring me? And we started, my wife and I, Alex and I, we're thinking, well, yeah, what did it bring humanity? We're searching for the answer. What did it bring us? So with Skylab, you've got a ton of footage that you're working with. How do you acquire that specifically? Because your documentary is focusing specifically on Skylab. And I know we have, there's a lot of footage of Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Shuttle. But what about Skylab? What's the amount that you have to work with in terms of Skylab compared to the other crude programs that the United States has done? We have the services of a gentleman called Stephen Slater and he is our archive producer for this film. And we acquired through him screeners of the Skylab material. And I have a lot of the TV footage. I didn't have a lot of the 16 millimeter stuff other than what you see in Skylab the first 40 days of the short half hour program together. And when I got the hard disk with all the 16 mil footage on it, I'm looking at it and my George is like, good chunk, all right. Whoa, they've got footage of the prototype layout of Skylab and they're showing how they developed where the experiments were going to be placed. They have beautiful, beautiful footage of the workshop from orbit as they departed. Each of the crews filmed as they departed. And this stuff looks fantastic. You see a little bit of it on the promos, not the one you just played, the other ones that have been shown on the program before. And it was after Stephen Slater showed me his material, the material he got for us, but now we can do this. The kinescope for me is very interesting, but no offense against the people at NASA, but that was not stored nicely. It was never color corrected. It looks terrible. There is so much work. We showed last time I was on the show, the amount of reconstruction I had to do just to get the EVA to look halfway decent. So the 16 mil is where people will go, wow, that looks fantastic. The kinescopes help tell the story, but please, please, please don't expect miracles because it is 40 year old footage shot off a TV screen onto 16 millimeter and it shows. So with Skylab, what was something, what were some of the specifics that you wanted to focus on with Skylab? Because with Apollo, you look at the moonshot, that's where it is, that's where the gold is if you will in the story is getting a crew to the moon. What specifically with Skylab is it that you're trying to convey and what are some of the big points with that? I think the biggest thing, the moment for me where I was like, whoa, that's really interesting was finding out that the data they collected with Skylab is still used today to plan ISS. Show me another industry that relies on information collected in 1973 and 74 to plan things that they're doing today. Of course, somebody's going to write in the forum, like, don't you know this blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but in general, you don't have that sort of detail. They collected information for everything. There's footage of them going to the toilet on Skylab and I mean, everything was covered. Everything, Pete Conrad had to film himself because they wanted to know. They had to store like urine samples and bring them back. There's the story on SL4 when Bill Pogue got sick. They didn't want to tell the ground that he had gotten sick because they were worried that funding would be then canceled for the space shuttle. So they decided, keep it quiet and we'll tell them later that, look, this is what happened. And of course that backfired because they were in the command module blabbing away about how they're going to keep it quiet. And of course, when time came down on the ground to transcribe the tape recordings, the person who was transcribing goes, boss, I think you might want to hear this. And it got to me, an on-air reprimand by Al Sheppard who said, it was not a good idea to do that. Jerry Carr said, yeah, we agree it was a dumb move. There's things like that. The other thing I wanted to show is everyone says Apollo, wow, that's the great adventure. It is. But Skylab had a lot of drama and real drama. It launched within 63 seconds of launching the unmanned space station. The meteoroid shield ripped off, took a solar panel with it and nearly jeopardized the entire program. They had secret spy satellite photography. They figured out that the solar panels had not deployed. We interviewed Phil Meyer from Honeysuckle Creek who was there when the data came through. And he said as well, we saw that there was something wrong. We relayed that information. All the different sources of something's wrong came together and they figured out they had to do something. They were supposed to launch the man mission the day after Skylab space station launched. They had to cancel that. Within 11 days, they figured out a system to save Skylab and to keep the space program from the US on track. We spoke with Sylvia Kinsler, who is the widow of Jack Kinsler, who was the man who came up with the idea to use the scientific airlock and put a parasol through it. And that parasol system was the shielding that would cool the space station down. This sort of stuff, this ingenuity that had to be done in 11 days. I get goosebumps talking about it now. We were sitting there talking to these real people and I'm thinking, why is this stuff not taught in schools? Okay, it's 45 year old history, but it's important stuff. It's important people know this. And I became committed to keeping this memory of Skylab alive because there was so much, so much stuff in it that we can't afford it to be forgotten. Yeah, and I kind of feel the same way about that. Back in orbit 10, episode 35, 10.35, we actually had Jerry Carr on the commander of Skylab 4. So we got to hear straight from him about some of the things that happened on that. And there was definitely a lot of interesting things that I think people didn't know about that are likely gonna be reflected in your documentary as well, simply because Skylab's not particularly well known and it should be well known for as innovative and as important as it was. So just a quick one from Carrie Ann, which is kind of sort of what I was gonna ask next, which is what is your favorite story from interviews for the Skylab project? And I kind of want to add to that too. What's your favorite story from each Skylab mission? So what's your favorite from Skylab 2, 3, and 4? In addition to the favorite thing you've done on the documentary so far? From SL2, I find there is an interview that they did a press conference and Joe Kerwin was asked a question of, it's escaped me at the moment. And they said, why didn't you realize la, la, la, la? And Joe just goes, because I was too stupid to realize that's what was going on. I'm like, what? There's another bit, sorry, there's a headpiece, the earphone. There's another bit where when they're approaching the orbiter workstation and they're evaluating what's going on and they opened the hatch and Paul Weitz was supposed to cut the strands of the meteorite shield that were blocking the solar panel from opening. They didn't bleep out the foul language, I can tell you that much. And it's hardcore. It's like, what? Yeah, no seven second delay there, that's for sure. From SL3, the fact that they had the high school student experiments, the spiders, fantastic stuff. The fact that SL3 was nearly rescued because the RCS thrusters on the command module had malfunctioned, not all of them, but one and then followed by the second one. And we talked to Vance Brand and I said, Vance, thanks to your diligence, you actually worked your way out of getting a flight up there. And he sort of looked at me anyway, yeah. Started to laugh, but his ingenuity cost him a flight. And I'm thinking, wow. Then for SL4, there's two sequences I absolutely love. One is where Bill Polk puts fins on his hands and on his feet and he tries to fly through air. And Ed Gibson was telling us that, well, Bill Polk was a test pilot, but deep down he was also a scientist. And he wanted to know, if you can swim through a medium like water, you should theoretically be able to swim through a medium like air. So he put on the fins and he's laughing about going nowhere. It sounded good in theory. It just backfired severely. And the best is he had his helmet on that they used for the MMU. And he put lightning bolts on the side of it and he wore the scarf like an old World War I fighter pilot. It's just hilarious. There's so many things. Oh, and then the other one, I'm sorry, the Bill Polk again has three spheres, roughly the size of this gaffet. And he puts them in front of himself and he's explaining orbital mechanics. And he says, we're about to move the orbit or the workstation into a slightly altered orbit and watch what happens. And they count down and you see the three spheres just move upwards relative to him. And for me, I always watch that. And I think why was I not taught that when I was in school in physics? I would have gotten out of stuff having footage like that to look at. Yeah, and I mean, I've seen footage like that from the International Space Station. Like I can't believe that we didn't even think about putting that out in public at that time. So that's some incredible stuff. And I kind of want to ask you, what was it like actually seeing this footage that may not have seen the light of day for a very long time? What was that, what was kind of going through your head when you're looking at things like this? It's like, wow, they filmed this. There's another bit as well. It's great. It's on the footage that Steven Slater got for us. And it's showing the Skylab crews evaluating the equipment. And Pete Conrad is looking at something. He looks up at Joe Kerwin and he says, if you read his lips, he says, $4 million, you're kidding me. And then he just goes, and when you look at what he's holding, it's like a spanner or something. It's like, I can understand how he was concerned about the cost of it. So it sounds like they were, the astronauts were having a pretty good time in Skylab. Sounds like they almost like, almost like we're looking in on home movies that they're making to kind of entertain each other. Yeah, there was one thing, for example, when we spoke with Bruce McCandless, everybody asked him, how was it like when you got out of the space shuttle and you were in the MMU and you went there? And we asked him, Bruce, you were crucial. You were there for pretty much every single mission. Well, he was, he was Capcom for every single mission. He developed the MMU. People don't know that about him. And his eyes seriously lit up when it's like finally somebody who knows what I actually did apart from that one space walk. And that's something we've noticed with every single astronaut or ground personnel we have spoken with. They are so proud of what they did on Skylab. For example, and this one, it gets me, we interviewed Joe Kerwin and we met him at his house, which you can imagine a space fan is like, oh my God. And we did the interview and it wasn't until I came back home, I'm looking at the high def resolution footage that we got. And I noticed he was wearing a tie with Skylab written on it. And it was a very subtle little thing. And I thought, it still means so much to me. And they're all so supportive. Bill Pogue's family have gone out of their way to help us with the information and finding things. And every post we put out, they forward for us. We interviewed Janet Gibson, who is Ed Gibson's daughter. She lives here in Germany. And just amazingly humble people that have achieved so much greatness and confidence. Yeah, and to kind of jump into our chat room here, Bogdy Well has a sort of like an overall question about Skylab, which is how many Skylab missions were there, how many different astronauts and how many total astronaut days on orbit did these missions do? Okay, SL2, Pete Conrad, Joe Kerwin and Paul Weitz, SL3, Ellen Bean, Owen Garriott, Jack Lausman, SL4, Jerry Carr, Ed Gibson and Bill Pogue. The first mission, 28 days, the second mission, 59 days and the third mission, 84 days. I haven't worked out how much altogether that would be, but for example, SL4 held the record for longest duration in space for approximately 20 years. No, sorry, sorry, when did it come about? Either in the 80s or the early 90s is when it was broken. And we've actually got a couple of videos, if you kind of want to get into those to show off to the folks while we're interviewing. Why don't we go ahead and have Dada bring up our first video and you can tell us about it here, Dwight, and we'll take a look at what we got. Okay, this is some of the image restoration we're doing. The archival material, the kinescope, which was the television material shot then an archived on 16 millimeter had atrocious color on it. It's basically, you see there, it's just terrible. Yeah. So I spent a lot of time getting that looking good. I happened to have a reference tape from one of the networks in the US that was proper color. And I used that as a guide to get this material looking the way it does. Excellent. And let's go ahead and pull that second video up, Dada, so we can take a look at that. Solar physics, which is a pretty big deal. It had a very sophisticated solar observatory. The Apollo telescope mount, basically had an array of telescopes, 10 or 20 feet in diameter and another 20 feet in length with about eight different telescopes, all using different wavelengths of light to image the sun. And those would be at wavelengths that normally do not penetrate the Earth's atmosphere. There's one exception, there was one telescope operated at a visible wavelength that we could see and the ground could see the same thing. So we could talk about that active region, what's it doing? It looks like it might erupt any time. And so then we knew to focus all of our telescopes or the other appropriate ones on that general area. There was lots of judgment that had to be put in the data, but people gave us good displays so we could see what was happening on the sun and make a lot of judgment and which instruments to use and how to use them to get the best scientific data. Yeah, and I kind of just want to say that it really was a major revolution in heliophysics having that system up there to take a look at it because you could see those wavelengths you couldn't see here on the ground and that was a hugely influential in helping with that. And do you guys get into some of the, in depth in some of the science experiments and in searching for Skylab? I'm trying to the best I can with the 90 plus minutes we're working with. It's, there's the space fan or the Skylab fan in me that would be quite happy to show 45 minutes of solar activity. The general public might have a different opinion. So it's a case of how to keep enough information there that the hardcore fans like myself are still happy and that the average person on the street will go, oh, wow, that's interesting. I didn't know. Thank God they didn't talk about it for any longer because I would have lost concentration. Coming back to the solar physics or the solar observations, we acquired through Space Mission Markets, a kinescope of SL2 observations of the sun. And I spoke with David Hitt who wrote the book Homesteading Space and he said, how the hell did you find that footage? Because I looked, I couldn't find it. And so it's like, oh, and that's the sunspot that you just saw on the footage there. That is very unlikely that's been seen since 1973. That's the sort of stuff we're working with. Real deep dives into the archives to bring out things that have not been seen in decades. And that's just, that's fantastic to bring that. Coming back to what you asked me about, watching the footage for the first time, funnily enough, the footage didn't give me the wow factor as much as when I accessed the audio files through JSC, they specially pulled these tapes out of the archives. They had to bake them in the oven for a couple of hours. I don't know if you know that process with old tapes, you have to bake them to get the response level of the signal to a reasonable state. And I'm listening to the intercom stuff and these files go for three and a half hours. And I'm thinking, no one's heard this stuff since 1973, that's for sure. And then they would pipe music in because the missions were so long, they would pipe the local radio station in. And right in the middle of it, I hear this song, the intergalactic laxative will get you from here to Mars. And I'm like, what's this doing on the internal loop of mission control? And they obviously had a sense of humor. And when you listen to the lyrics from the Donovan song, you go, okay, I wonder if they actually piped that up to the guys. That's where I had a feeling I was looking into a time window back to 1973. Yeah, and to go to Rob Jones on YouTube, they're asking about the one day mutiny on SL4, which we actually point blank, I got to point blank, ask Jerry Carr about that. You guys, I'm pretty sure you guys are covering that in the documentary. To quote Ed Gibson, there was no mutiny. That's what Jerry said, so. It came about, they were feeling the stress of rookies being given a schedule that SL3 had no trouble doing because they were an experienced crew. Well, Alan Bean was. And he drove his guys nicely. Now, Ed Gibson said to us, before they flew, they were given a mandate that said you have to take the motion sickness tablets and that they were actually causing dizziness and lack of concentration with the crew. And they said, you have to take them. You will not get sick on this flight. And that was because they were paranoid that if one of the astronauts got sick, they would cause ripples through the political channels and lose funding or get reduced funding for the space shuttle. So they went up there with this mentality, well, we can't get sick. And that's why they covered up the Bill Pogue getting sick because it was actually not really mission critical. He, and the funny thing was Bill Pogue was the Thunderbirds test pilot. And he was the one that got sick and he's the one they called Iron Gus Pogue. Then there's, and then that had already created bad blood between the ground and the Skylab crew. They got the public rep Ramon from Alan Shepard. And it became us versus them situation and us versus them. They then decided we've got so much work to do, only one person will have the radios live between the ground and the other two turn it off and they can concentrate on their work. And what happened, they inadvertently all turned off their radios thinking the other guy had it turned on. And that was for a specific period of time, there was never, when you look at the transcripts, no one says anything like, guys, what were you doing? And the crew said, well, we're going on strike. They never said that. The one thing that did happen, Jerry Carr said, look, we need to discuss the micro management that you're sending up on a 50 page telex every morning. We can't work like that. And Ed Gibson said to us as well, how can you plan your day? You show me somebody that writes down the day before what they're going to do to the precise second the next day of their life. You can't do it. With the possible exception of this country that I live in here, and most definitely the Swiss, they tend to be able to do it, puke an owl as they say. So, there was no mutiny. There was a conflict and it got resolved and that is actually a positive. That's not a negative. The crew discussed on a very civil level, again, read the transcripts. And they worked out a new system that helped them get better. And there is a news conference where Bill Pogue says, I am a man, not a machine. When you let me work like a machine, I am much, much more productive. And that's what happened. And we do discuss this. I apologize profusely to Ed Gibson before I asked the questions. Thankfully, I had been corresponding with him for quite a while, so he knew I was going to ask. It is something that still bothers them a lot. They don't like the fact that it's been inflated into this. We were the crew, we were wearing our pirate hats and we put up the Jolly Roger outside and we took control of the Skylab. And like Ed Gibson said, what were we gonna do? Tell the ground we're going to the moon and we're not coming back? That was not an option for them. And what we've researched with what the transcripts say, it was something that was taken by the press. And again, Ed Gibson says, the press interviewed everybody except the three guys that were there in the middle of it. Yeah, and that was really cool when we got to talk to Jerry Carr about that and kind of get it straight from the commander. So he said the exact same thing that you did, you expanded a little bit more on the civilness of it, which it really was something that, it was just a pure accident that ended up being overblown into something that didn't actually happen. And I kind of also want to ask a little bit because we do talk about the astronauts up in orbit, but also you hinted at talking about Bruce McCandless, working on the ground as Capcom, does searching for Skylab also talk about people who were working in mission control and kind of here on the ground behind the scenes? From mission control, the only person we spoke to was Bruce McCandless. We spoke to several of the engineers and researchers and designers who discussed how they came about, for example, the shower. We talked with the Honey Suckled Creek tracking station personnel about their view and how Phil Meyer told us when they saw the data coming through, they knew immediately something was wrong. We spoke to the families and that's something else I wanted to get was how was it growing up? And all of the astronaut children said to us, we grew up and for us, we were playing in the backyard with, for example, James Kinsler, the son of Jack Kinsler, said I grew up next to Pete Conrad. For me, it was normal to have an astronaut as a neighbor or everybody in our neighborhood was either a physicist or a mission planner or an astronaut. And Matthew White said to us, he said, it's when I come to places like SpaceFest, that's where I first realized how much of a, the word in English, what am I looking for? How much of a or not normal upbringing, my normal upbringing was. Yeah, sort of like an extraordinary, highly unusual upbringing with that. So what a way to think about it. So ultimately, what was the good that came from Skylab? What did we really learn coming from that? Well, it rewrote the book on solar physics as Emily Carney says in that video, just played, there is just so much data. It came at a time, Skylab fell in the shadow of Apollo. And what they did, which no one expected, and there's discussion now of Apollo 8 taking the Earthrise photo and the most poignant photo of the entire Apollo era, arguably, is the photo of Earth and how fragile that Earth is. And Skylab took that a level further and with their EREP, Earth Resources Experiments Packages, they were observing Earth. Oh, I can't remember, Roy Logstrom, I think, was the one who told us that that's the year before, last or in 2015, thereabouts, they discovered a copper mine, the product of which has, I think it was five-fold paid for the Skylab project. And they found that mine by analyzing Skylab photos. Wow, so, yeah, it was a lot more than just learning how to live in space, there was direct impact for us here on Earth. So, Dwight, just to kind of wrap up the interview, we, I'm sure you know about our questions that we ask at the end of the interview, but we have some new questions for orbit 11, so we're gonna go ahead and toss these at you. So, again, no right or wrong answers, just four questions, just let us know. So, our first one is, what is your favorite space mission past, present, or future? And I think I may already know this, but go ahead and tell us anyhow. Skylab B, how's that one? That's for a friend of mine, Brian Fiori, he'll sit there and go, yeah, I think that was for me, it was. Brian, it was for you, where are you? There you are, it's for you, that answer. He's also the guy that did the painting behind me, which we use in our movie poster. So, okay, I'm very biased towards Skylab. Okay, can I answer that, taking Skylab out of the equation? Sure, go for it. Why don't you do that and then give us also your Skylab one as well. Okay, okay, first of all, Skylab SL4 is my favorite Skylab mission, no offense to SL2 or SL3, I just love it, so much of the TV footage. I just feel a part of it and because I'm directly corresponding with Ed Gibson and Janet, it feels like family to me. Taking Skylab out of the equation, I'll probably be called a sheep or Apollo 11. Yeah, kinda hard to beat the one that does the goal, so I'm not gonna argue with that. So, our second question, is human or robot exploration of the cosmos? Both. Both? Why both? Yeah, I think there has to be a human element. The cosmos, you've probably seen the movie Passengers, I don't know if I'd be willing enough to be put in cryogenic storage for 98 years, leaving everything behind. There are some people that would volunteer to do it. Look, when they offered the one-way missions to Mars, there are enough people that volunteered for that, but I think you have to have the robotic contingencies working together to have that happen. Our third question, where should we go next? Well, you asked me this last time and every time I think of my answer, I go there, I said the moon first followed by Mars. Mars or either the moon? I would like to see the moon. I remember watching Apollo 17, so to see live images come back from the moon would be great. The last one and my favorite one, and one that I'm sure you've answered before, but let's have you answer it again, which is why space? Last time I said that, I said it creates jobs and there was a nice long discussion, so it doesn't create jobs. I agree with the person that told me that. Why space? Because why climb the Tarlis mountain? Because it is there. Yeah, little George Mallory to wrap up the interview with. So Dwight, how can people help out with searching for Skylab? We're running a Kickstarter campaign, searching for Skylab. Every little bit helps. If you only feel like donating, we had to set it up with British Pounds because our company is registered in the UK, so sorry about that. We tried to keep it reasonable to understand. We've got different packages, we've got some pretty cool rewards. You will get, for certain rewards, you will get a download of the movie, a Blu-ray or a DVD. If you decide you want to be extremely jealous, you'll get an invite to the screening, which is going to be at SpaceFest. And if you want to contact us, sorry, the last time I was on the show, the earpiece fell out too, and I've got it taped on the back of my head. The things we do to look good on TV. Yeah. We've got a website, www.searchingforskylab.com. All one word, except for the dots, that's an old meme from 19, what ever, no, 2009, last time I was on, when it was Space Midgast. Kerry-Ann thought it was hilarious, so I thought that's for her. And I'm on Facebook, there are two groups I'm very active with. The first one is Skylab, Apollo Soils and 70s Enthusiasts, which is run by my friend, Brian. And he's always happy to greet new people on there. We discuss anything except Apollo and Space Shuttle after 1980. So anything in between, the 70s basically, Viking, Russian space program, the Soviet and Ornzovita, I wanted to say in German, is welcomed there. Space Hipsters is the other group I'm a member of, where I post day and night. They've been actually very, very supportive, both of them for our film. And of course we've got our own Facebook page, searching for Skylab, if you're on our list. We've also got a mailing list. We've got the song Horizon Riders, written by a very talented group of guys here in Germany called Tencent James. And would love to see you there. As I said, every little bit helps. We've got close to 10% of our funding, and that's just after three days. And I am grateful for the people that have helped out and shown their support. It means so much that actually they are prepared to help preserve history. We're just the messengers. It's people like you helping our project will allow this to become a living testament, basically, to what the guys did in 1973 and 74. All right, thank you so much, Dwight, Steven Boniecki, for coming on today. I can't wait to see this, because I'm like you. I love Skylab, and it's one of those things that we don't talk about enough. And it was hugely influential for a multitude of disciplines. So thanks for coming on today. And we will be right back because we... I'm staying for post-so. Oh, what's up, Dwight? I'm staying for After Dark. Oh, okay, yeah. And you better check out some stuff if you want to in After Dark, because we do have some cool footage that you've brought along that we're gonna show in After Dark. So stick around. Or if you want to become a patron, you can see After Dark. Or just wait four weeks. I think it's four weeks now, right? Something like that. So we're gonna go to comments real quick from last week's show. So stay tuned. There's more tomorrow right after this. Science. It both draws us together and tears us apart. Brings discoveries to cure us and threaten us. It is neither good nor evil. It is what we decide to make of it. There is so much more to learn. And we are curious. Together, let's explore the science of tomorrow. And welcome back to tomorrow. Now, before we get into our comments from last week's show, we first want to give a huge shout out to our citizens of tomorrow. Yes, our escape velocity citizens. These folks, you know, they give us $10 or more per episode on Patreon. $30 or more per month on maker support. Also our orbital citizens, here you go. Here's your second time you're in the show. Today you get $5 or more per episode on Patreon or $50 a month on maker support. But how can we forget our suborbital citizens just six months out? Yes, $2 and 50 cents per episode on Patreon or $5 a month on maker support. You get the goods. And if you want to know what the goods are that you get at the certain levels, you can head on over to patreon.com slash tmro or makersupport.com slash tmro. Okay, let's do some comments while we're at it from last week's show. Totally. So last week we were introducing Launcher on orbit 11.09 from Max Hout. It was awesome to have Max with us. That was very, very cool. And also another really fantastic interview by one Jared head. I'm gonna say this on air and he doesn't know it, but Ben said that you are already becoming a better interviewer than he ever was. Nonsense. So there's a document this. Yeah, and Ben's not on mic. So if he's refuting that, no one of us can hear it. I'm not gonna do $5 a month for that. What? Oh, good, so good. Then in any case, so all of these questions, comments, concerns, complaints are all in reference to that particular episode of you haven't watched it. I said, yes, you go back and do so. Because it really was a good episode. It was fun. It was a fun one. This first comment comes off of YouTube from 2001, lex talionis? Lex talionis. Ah, thank you. Lex talionis. Lex talionis. That's what happened. See, when I was younger, I had to read aloud in front of the class. I also said photographer instead of photographer. So that's where. I mean, I got the idea. Yeah, perfect. No, thank you for helping me out with that. In any case, so I think Jax often has both a countdown and a count up. It's really cute when they invite kids to perform it live. Yeah, we've had at least one section of that in one of the many, many launches that ever happened. And if I remember correctly, they were all like in school uniforms or something too. Is that right, Mike? Do you remember? That was. Yeah, it was all school kids. And it was really cool because they had kind of like a live broadcast among several elementary schools. It wasn't just one. So, and the cool thing was is all of their audio from like seven to 15 different schools were all being played at once. So it just sounded like this massive crowd of kids that was counting down with it and how excited they would get for it. Didn't for one Jax I launched, didn't they have like artwork from kids? I like want to say on the payload fairing or something or am I thinking of something different? I'm not sure about that. Yeah. But for those of you who want to go back and see that this is for Japan's quasi Zenith satellites. It's their version of the GPS satellites. So if you want to check that out, you can check out those launches. I believe it was QZRS, I believe is what they were shortened as, but I've forgotten. But yeah, if you look up there, those launches, you'll see those, the kids doing the countdown, which is super cute. Really, really adorable. But yeah, interesting that there's at least some launches that count up as well as down. Just not something we're used to here in the States. Maybe we should start doing. Yes, maybe. That'd be cool. Especially kids. Yes. Big kids. Let's go. Plus ones. Okay, so next car also comes off of YouTube from Little Cripple saying, the rocket industry, as it is today, reminds me of reading about the early car industry in the United States. There was something like 2,000 companies and no one knew who was going to succeed. But most of the time, whenever someone failed, other car companies would buy up what they had and continue on from there. Yeah. I know one of you knows this a little bit better than I, but what's the big conglomerate that we keep joking about? It's not the Northrop Grumman. Oh, Orbital I.C.K. is a space division of Northrop Grumman. Thank you. That's the one. That's exactly what I'm talking about. Yeah, it's that kind of concept, right? Like. Yeah, sort of, I'll buy you out, kind of in a way with that. Yeah, and I feel like it's, I kind of agree with this, but I also feel like it's a bit more like the dot-com bubble coming up where you've got a lot of stuff that's enabling, but there's definitely gonna be a mass extinction event at some point, if you will, with that. So yeah, and that's why I point blank, asked Max last week about that because that's interesting to me, which is that, who's actually gonna survive the big burst that's eventually gonna happen? Because there's gonna be a point where there's just gonna be so much ability to lift that you're gonna exceed the demand and then you're gonna have to figure out who's, all right, which one of you's going down and which one of you am I buying? You know, kind of attitude about it. And that's gonna be, I mean, that's pretty interesting because I don't recall a time in aerospace where there's been an aerospace bubble where just it bursts and then companies start dying off left and right. I mean, maybe like early aviation, like maybe airlines and stuff like that, but yeah, I don't think that's happened with, certainly not the space industry. Yeah, especially launch services, especially not launch services. And I'm also really excited to see who's gonna be the first small sat company to make a reusable launcher. And then is that going to make a difference for a small sat company, small sat launchers as well? Or is it literally just cheaper to expend your rocket with small sats? So, I don't know, these are really cool questions that are gonna get answered soon. Yeah. Something that I find really interesting is that Orbital ATK, before that, when they were Orbital Sciences, they're kind of the survivors of the New Space 1.0 movement. We're really a New Space 2.0 right now with all these private companies that were seen pop up. But in the late 80s and early 90s, there was a whole slew of companies and a lot of those merged and conglomerated into what became Orbital Sciences, which is now Orbital ATK, which being bought out by Northup Grumman, we're kind of seeing that whole thing. But they're kind of the main survivors and the aggregate of a lot of those different companies at that particular time. So, that's something that I've always found really interesting about them in particular and whether or not we're gonna have something like that with all these companies now. I would like to see a lot of these small, laundry companies, instead of getting bought out by bigger companies or just going to the wayside with bankruptcy or whatever, merging together and trying to consolidate their efforts to have the best technology that they possibly can. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's really important to recognize that New Space is actually not a new concept. Maybe, like, newer New Space, I guess, is what we could call this moment. But, yeah, there were a lot of companies like Space Services Incorporated with their Conestoga Rocket, which was the first privately funded commercial rocket to fly. So, like, you know, that was, you know, gosh, I wanna say that was like in the 80s, I wanna say, when they did their first flight. That was before Wernher von Braun died. Wernher von Braun died in the 60s. Yeah, they just did their first flight in 81 and then they had their first successful flight in 82. So, yeah, I mean, you know, it's not new, but it's just, I guess, more exciting now because we have better access to that through things like social media channels and things. Right. So, yeah. Sure. Cool. Interesting. Cool. Cool. All right, next comment also comes off of YouTube. I apologize in advance. From Frode Stockseth, Frody Stockseth? Yeah, something like that. Frode Stockseth. I like Frode Stockseth. That's pretty cool. Frode Stockseth. Frode Stockseth. Maybe something like that. I don't know. Yes. Again, I apologize in advance. It's my poor American upbringing. It says, some small hope for a Proxima B life. If it got tied locked with the same side, it's always facing the star. So the backside is shielded from direct impact, then the backside might possibly be safe enough for life. If there's also atmosphere or something that can heat it up just enough so it's not frozen solid, assuming eruptions are rare enough to not have stripped the planet of volatiles already, on the near side, life would have to hide in deep rocks to survive gamma rays and X-rays that would presumably are part of the huge star eruptions. Mr. Thiet, this was your answer. Yes, I have so much to say about this. Okay, so we're tidally locked things. So for instance, our moon is tidally locked to Earth. What this has just caused by the gravitational pull both both bodies of mass and the rotation period of the objects of the moon around the Earth is the same as its rotation on its axis. Also, I forgot the camera. Yeah. And so with this, yeah, part of me is like, yeah, you know what? If part of it is facing away from when this big stellar flare occurred, then possibly that other side of this exoplanet, Proxima B, might be okay. The only problem is it's gonna be frozen, ice cold. The other side that'll actually be facing the star is going to be like totally burnt out. It's like all of its oceans would have been evaporated. And the atmosphere would be really interesting. The contrast of this tidally locked planet literally will be split in half. The side facing the star is gonna be similar kind of like an atmosphere on Venus can be really thick, lots of greenhouse effects happening. And then on the opposite side, on the side that's facing away from the star it's gonna be frozen a lot of times potentially also. It could be going back and forth between a gaseous stage to an icy stage. So potential for life. I mean, it's possible that the side that was facing the star when the stellar flare happened that the atmosphere was completely blown off. And the other side, it might be there but it's gonna cause a lot of climate change issues. Like talk about climate change. If you have a tidally locked planet there's actually one that I was researching either earlier called Zarmina. It's an extra solar planet around glass 581. And it's about like 20 and a half light years away from Earth. This is something that they're researching right now the potentiality for it harboring life. So there is some potential there but like I said because of the stellar flare that that had happened that really can cause a big stirring up. I mean, what this person was saying is that there's something hiding in I think like deep volcanic regions or something like that. I mean, yeah, it is possible. But again, the actual effects of climate change because you're gonna be having this intermixing of the winds coming from the side facing the sun or the star and the side not facing the star. And though that's just, just give me, it'll be really crazy. Yeah, and we have to remember that small stars like Proxima B as well are significantly more active than larger stars like our sun. They're also more, Proxima Centauri. Yeah, like that too. Yeah, Proxima B, yeah, with that there. And... Sorry about that. No, Proxima Centauri, no, you're right. I'm sorry. I was talking about the, I said the planet. So yeah, Proxima Centauri, the star. The small stars are very eruptive and they're also the most numerous type of stars in our universe as well from stellar populations that we've studied both in the Milky Way and Andromeda with that amazing Hubble study that they did. And you know, also the planets of Trappist I are likely tidally locked as well with the Trappist star. And it's really interesting to think about life surviving in this literal twilight zone and not being facetious like the actual areas of twilight along there. And that's really where the habitable zone of that planet may actually be. So, which is like... Of course, assuming, assuming of course that there's a strong enough magnetic field and that the chemicals exist there for this type of thing to happen. Yeah, when we talk, when stories especially like this, there are a truckload of assumptions. There's also a Falcon Heavy payloads amount of assumptions happening with something like this. So, yeah. So, but you know, things like James Webb are going to sort of help us remove some of these assumptions that we have. So, and then, you know, something like W-1st as well which I'm gonna cross everything for that to happen, you know, could even potentially help out with things like that if they decide to do like this, the star shade idea with that blocking the light with an object millions of miles away flying precisely with it, so. Yeah. Cool stuff. That'd be so great. Yeah. Next comment comes also off of YouTube from one ADD dude. Says, I love how they disprove the rule that if you wanna make it in tech, you need to move to LA. Talking about launcher. Yeah, no, you don't have to move to LA for any sort of, you know, technology in general or even spaceflight technology or anything along those lines. There happens to be quite a number of companies and people working in those fields down in Southern California, but yeah, that's definitely not a necessity. Just some of the other places, you know, in the world where there's big aerospace hubs, Montreal, Canada, Singapore, or Bengal or India, Zampala, Brazil. So I mean, it's not just, I mean, Los Angeles is one of the largest, if not the largest aerospace hub in the world just because of where we're at and everyone who is here. But yeah, you don't necessarily have to. I mean, you can start up wherever you want to, so. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's so much out of New York too. It's like, it's crazy how there really is a lot. That's just being developed there. So I think it's just a matter of like, you know, where you take your brain. Well, we're being a thrive the best. I feel like that's totally fair, yeah. Palm trees are kind of nice here. As Athena did move from New York to be in Southern California and not just for us, but we, you know, we like her. So we'll keep her for a while. Yeah, it's pretty cool, so. That's funny. Go ahead, Mike. Oh, no, no, no. Go ahead. Gotcha, okay. You guys said everything. I feel like sometimes I take the words out of Mike's mouth but I apologize. The next comment comes off of YouTube from one Caleb Crow. It says, if we send a spacecraft with solar panels to another star, do they become stellar panels? What I have to say about that would be, it would be like, there's two different answers. The technical one, I would call it yes. It would be a stellar panel, but if it's gonna be like the executive decision made by the business for a business standpoint, they'd probably stick with the term solar panel because it's more familiar amongst people, but it also depends on it right now that all of our satellites we've launched has been developed specifically with the solar panels being able to retrieve the photons received from our specific star. So the technology will have to be different technically to be sending it to another star because it's gonna be totally different emissions and that will have to actually be making that transfer of the energy retrieved from that star and putting it into fueling the spacecraft or energy-wise, not like actual fuel. So I think that's my opinion. I think that it should be called stellar panels because it will be different technology. Interesting, Prismara in the chatroom says, photovoltaic panels. Yeah, that's the way to do it. Are they dwarf panels though? Dwarf panels, yeah, for dwarf stars. Are they major panels or dwarf panels? Really? I don't know. Are stellar panel sandwiches? From the Centauri panel. Oh gosh, sandwiches. If you follow Jared on Twitter, you will know all of the sandwich debacle are powered panels. Just recently brought up. The raviolis. Oh wow, raviolis. Rob in our chatroom also says, all panels are star-powered panels. Indeed. It's just we use the term solar. Like what we were saying last week we were talking about, we just come from the term helio, which just means sun and solar. This is why I love the community of tomorrow because they think about things like this. And instead of me having this day up awake at night thinking about things, they do it for me. Yeah, so much creative, like Jesus flowing. So many things. I can't describe the star-powered panels. It's so easy for me to picture too. Just Jared lying in bed and just be like, would they be stellar panels? Yeah, I'd literally be like, solar panels. Oh goodness. Are they solar panels or are they stellar panels? Okay, well we're gonna leave you with that comment. But before we do leave, I wanna make sure that I give another thank you to our ground support citizens. Holy cannoli, these people are giving us one dollar or more per episode on Patreon or one dollar per month or more on makersupport.com. They of course get their thank you and name in the show. They get access to our citizen only hangouts, which we are planning on doing very shortly here. And early access to after dark as soon as it's available on demand. Jared is just about pug-locked. If you're interested in any of these things or more, head on over to Patreon or makersupport.com slash T-M-R-O and become a citizen just like the rest of us here. Now next week, we are gonna be talking about the roles of humanities in space exploration. Easy for me to say. The diary of a Martian beekeeper, which is like, I don't even know where to go on that one, but that, and that's an awesome picture. So this should be a lot of fun. I'm sure you guys are gonna have a ton of fun on that one. I'm very excited about it. So I feel like humanities is an integral thing that I feel like is significantly missing from a lot of the STEM education out there, so. Yeah, and Martian beekeeper, I heard that you can keep bees in your apartment now. You can? Yeah, they have like little, yeah. That's cool. That's what I said. You can have your own honey. Yeah, I was about to say I'm like, yo, save me so much money. Oh, see, I don't like honey. I was just thinking about the bees, but there's that. And in the case. Save the bees, y'all. We're gonna have that conversation next week. This conversation at the moment is gonna come to a little bit of a close and we're going to go into After Dark. Dwight Stephen Boniecki is gonna be joining us again. Yay, I can see him in my little preview that he says I got his name kind of right. Or maybe he's, you know, really shouting. It's really, really bad. It's hard to tell because it's down there. It doesn't really matter. In any case, if you're watching live, please just join us for After Dark. And if not, we will see you next week. Bye. Bye-bye.