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How Going to the Moon Works · Stuff You Should Know

0:00
Speaker 1: Hey, everybody comes see us, because we're coming to see you. Specifically,
0:03
Speaker 1: if you live in Chicago. On July, we're gonna be
0:07
Speaker 1: at the Harris Theater, and the following night we're going
0:09
Speaker 1: to be at the Dan Fourth Music Hall in Toronto.
0:12
Speaker 1: And that's just the beginning, that's right. We're also going
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Speaker 1: to our beloved Wilbur Theater, which we own in Boston
0:18
Speaker 1: on October twenty nine, and then our first visit to Portland,
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Speaker 1: Maine at the State Theater in August. YEP. That's going
0:24
Speaker 1: to be followed in October. We're gonna take a little
0:26
Speaker 1: break because that's a lot of touring in October. On
0:29
Speaker 1: the ninth we're going to be at the Plaza Live
0:31
Speaker 1: in Orlando, and then on October ten, we're gonna be
0:34
Speaker 1: at the Civic Theater in New Orleans, that's right. And
0:37
Speaker 1: in October we're gonna round it all out at the
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Speaker 1: Bellhouse in Brooklyn for three shows October YEP. So go
0:46
Speaker 1: to s y s K live dot com for tickets
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Speaker 1: and information, and we will see you starting this July
0:52
Speaker 1: in Chicago. Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production
0:56
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radios. How Stuff Works, Hey, and welcome
1:05
Speaker 1: to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck,
1:08
Speaker 1: Brian over there, and there's Jerry over there, and this
1:12
Speaker 1: is coming up on the fiftieth anniversary Chuck of the
1:17
Speaker 1: first time humans ever set foot on the Moon. One
1:24
Speaker 1: small step for podcasts. Oh wow, giant or podcasting. That's
1:30
Speaker 1: a that's a really good nail, Arnce Sean, Oh boy,
1:34
Speaker 1: that was dumb. I liked it though. I think this
1:36
Speaker 1: serves as a companion piece to our June two, thou
1:39
Speaker 1: fourteen episode on the Space Race. Yeah, and was the
1:42
Speaker 1: moon landing of hoax? We did that one too, Cheez,
1:45
Speaker 1: did we do that silliness so long ago? Two? That
1:49
Speaker 1: sounds about right. I think we landed on it not
1:52
Speaker 1: being a hoax if I remember correctly, that's right. Yeah,
1:56
Speaker 1: this is a good companion of the Space Race one.
1:59
Speaker 1: I went back and watch the uh, the full CBS
2:02
Speaker 1: broadcast of this. It's like two minutes long. Huh. It's
2:06
Speaker 1: really cool. Yeah, I mean Cronkite is kind of crying.
2:09
Speaker 1: It's easy. Well, he was a big cry baby. Everyone
2:12
Speaker 1: knows that about cron cut He cried the drop of
2:14
Speaker 1: the hat. Yeah, basically you should have seen him when
2:18
Speaker 1: Princess die got married. Good lord, oh boy. So um,
2:23
Speaker 1: there's nothing wrong with crying, Walter. No, so, Chuck, I
2:27
Speaker 1: was reading about that, that transmission and the the it's
2:32
Speaker 1: pretty amazing that the world got to see Neil Armstrong
2:35
Speaker 1: and Buzz Aldrin bouncing around on the moon in the sixties. Yes,
2:39
Speaker 1: in the sixties, at the end of the sixties. But
2:41
Speaker 1: still this was far and away the first time anybody
2:43
Speaker 1: had ever done anything like this. But what I did
2:46
Speaker 1: not know until this very day is that the guy
2:50
Speaker 1: who invented basically the the the whole setup for this
2:55
Speaker 1: for Westinghouse, that that carried this out. Um, when he
2:59
Speaker 1: saw that that that transmission come through, he was he
3:03
Speaker 1: almost had a heart attack. It was way way worse
3:07
Speaker 1: visually than it was supposed to be. Okay, so he
3:10
Speaker 1: was upset at the picture quality. Yes, he I know,
3:14
Speaker 1: That's what I'm saying to Like, you see this and
3:16
Speaker 1: you're like, wow, that's really good. No, this apparently he
3:19
Speaker 1: had not factored in the compression that had to take
3:24
Speaker 1: place from the signal, Like if you see the raw signal,
3:27
Speaker 1: like it was just crisp and clear um or you
3:30
Speaker 1: imagine it would be. It turns out NASA lost the
3:33
Speaker 1: magnetic tapes that have the original raw signal on it um,
3:37
Speaker 1: but when it was compressed for TV, it kind of
3:40
Speaker 1: messed it up a little bit. But he he apparently
3:44
Speaker 1: went with it and was like, that's still good. We're
3:46
Speaker 1: still broadcasting live from the Moon, yeah, which is beaming
3:50
Speaker 1: it down, then back up, then back down. Like what
3:53
Speaker 1: what does he expect? I guess he was a bit
3:55
Speaker 1: for perfectionist. So he had a heart attack dramatic. Well,
3:58
Speaker 1: I said he had a heartest. Oh, I thought he
4:00
Speaker 1: literally had a hard No, no, no, no, no, It's
4:03
Speaker 1: like sure beats cron Kite. He just fell right over.
4:08
Speaker 1: You know, it's funny as cron Kite missed the second
4:10
Speaker 1: half of the quote he said, he said, that's one
4:14
Speaker 1: small step for man. I didn't catch that second part.
4:17
Speaker 1: And then a couple of minutes later, when Neil Armstrong
4:19
Speaker 1: is talking about the the so he quickly goes in
4:22
Speaker 1: you know, he has a great quote then kidding, No,
4:25
Speaker 1: I'm serious. Uh So when Armstrong he says that great
4:29
Speaker 1: quote and then he quickly kind of goes into work
4:31
Speaker 1: mode and he's just talking about the surface of the Moon,
4:33
Speaker 1: how it looks like charcoal us basically, and uh cron
4:40
Speaker 1: Kite interrupts him basically and talks over him. He's like, okay,
4:43
Speaker 1: we have the second part. Apparently he said one giant
4:46
Speaker 1: leap for man kind. Okay. It's like, all right, well,
4:49
Speaker 1: I have never seen that broadcast. It's kind of cool.
4:52
Speaker 1: They have a simulation going, uh so you can you know,
4:56
Speaker 1: a really kind of corny looking sixties simulation of the
4:59
Speaker 1: lunar odile landing and then it picks up with the
5:02
Speaker 1: live feed. Does it look like that mountain climber on
5:05
Speaker 1: the prices right? It was an unlike that. So, for
5:11
Speaker 1: those of you who haven't called on yet, we're talking
5:13
Speaker 1: about the Apollo eleven moon landing, which happened on July
5:18
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty nine. Um, and there was a lot of
5:23
Speaker 1: work that went up to that. We didn't just happen overnight,
5:26
Speaker 1: you know, and it actually all started. Um. A lot
5:31
Speaker 1: of people trace it back to that speech that John
5:33
Speaker 1: Kennedy gave at Rice University in Houston, Texas in nineteen
5:38
Speaker 1: sixty one I believe, yeah, of ninety one. Yeah, where
5:45
Speaker 1: he said that he basically challenged the United States to
5:48
Speaker 1: go to the Moon to put a man on the
5:50
Speaker 1: moon before the end of the decade, right, he said,
5:55
Speaker 1: he said, we go to the moon not because it's easy,
5:58
Speaker 1: but because it's up there mocking us when we sleep.
6:02
Speaker 1: He was quite insane. And I'm told it's made of cheese.
6:07
Speaker 1: They bring me some of that cheese. He turned into
6:11
Speaker 1: Steinbrenner George Steimerer. So, yeah, this this is what really
6:17
Speaker 1: I mean, the space race had been going on, and
6:19
Speaker 1: like I said, we did a pretty good show on
6:20
Speaker 1: that uh and on June five, two fourteen. But you know,
6:26
Speaker 1: most of the nineteen fifties were consumed with the Russians
6:30
Speaker 1: and the United States or the Soviets rather um just
6:34
Speaker 1: sort of well we were in second place, but just
6:37
Speaker 1: one after the other, like oh, they're doing this, and
6:40
Speaker 1: we gotta do this, and they're doing this, and we
6:41
Speaker 1: gotta do this, um and or or both pursuing the
6:44
Speaker 1: same goal and the Soviets beating us to it almost
6:47
Speaker 1: every time by three months, which is enough for the
6:50
Speaker 1: world to be like, but boy, we got the last laugh.
6:53
Speaker 1: We did. But that's what Kennedy went bankrupts. That's what
6:55
Speaker 1: Kennedy was doing. Well, you can thank Reagan for that. Yeah,
6:58
Speaker 1: that's what Kennedy was doing is he was upping the anties, like,
7:02
Speaker 1: all right, enough of this tip fitat stuff. We're gonna
7:06
Speaker 1: really stick it to him. And he said, we're going
7:10
Speaker 1: to the Moon. We're gonna put a person on the moon,
7:12
Speaker 1: a man on the moon. But you know, if it
7:13
Speaker 1: were today, say human, yeah, and I think you know, well,
7:17
Speaker 1: we'll talk more about what's actually gained by a manned
7:20
Speaker 1: like sending a person to the moon. But beyond that,
7:25
Speaker 1: it was very much a symbolic thing to do this
7:28
Speaker 1: and to beat the Soviets there and to plant that
7:31
Speaker 1: American flag firmly in that lunar soil. But that's one
7:35
Speaker 1: one big reason why it was televised live from the moon.
7:39
Speaker 1: Number one, we were showing we might say the moon world.
7:43
Speaker 1: It was broadcasting around the world, but to it documented
7:46
Speaker 1: it as proof that we were up there. To most people,
7:48
Speaker 1: it was documented as proof. But then also there was
7:51
Speaker 1: a certain amount of bravado in the fact that we
7:54
Speaker 1: were broadcasting from the Moon live. So not only did
7:58
Speaker 1: we accomplish this one feat of somebody people to the Moon,
8:01
Speaker 1: we broadcasted at live, which is another feat as well.
8:04
Speaker 1: So we had the US Ranger program from six to
8:07
Speaker 1: sixty five, and these are things that all you know,
8:10
Speaker 1: Like you said, it was a long process, Yeah, building
8:12
Speaker 1: up to actually putting people there, And it's easy to
8:14
Speaker 1: overlook that that, like every every mission that was carried
8:18
Speaker 1: out was a test or. They were trying to just
8:20
Speaker 1: build it by step by stair, including like full on
8:23
Speaker 1: dress rehearsals. Uh So, the Ranger program for four years
8:26
Speaker 1: sent nine missions. They're collecting data basically two say here's
8:31
Speaker 1: how we can do this. UM In sixty two, Ranger
8:34
Speaker 1: four reached the surface but crashed. But then two years
8:39
Speaker 1: after that, Ranger seven UM sent back more than four
8:43
Speaker 1: thousand photographs. Not bad. Rangers six made it, but the
8:47
Speaker 1: camera failed. But get this, Ranger three and five missed.
8:52
Speaker 1: It was like, oh I can't. I mean, it's amazing
8:55
Speaker 1: that we were able to put people on the Moon
8:58
Speaker 1: and bring them back safely in a very short time.
9:00
Speaker 1: Like when you imagine all of the things that can
9:02
Speaker 1: go wrong and what year it was, it's just it's
9:05
Speaker 1: nuts to think about. Yeah, so you said, Rangers seven
9:08
Speaker 1: landed in nineteen sixty four and sent America back its
9:12
Speaker 1: own first images of the Moon. Five years later, we
9:16
Speaker 1: put humans on the moon that's a very short amount
9:19
Speaker 1: of time. Yeah. Yeah, the Soviets were the first to um,
9:24
Speaker 1: so you know these rangers, they were basically like take pictures,
9:27
Speaker 1: take pictures, take pictures, crash right, right, But the Soviets
9:30
Speaker 1: were the first ones who actually land gently land a
9:34
Speaker 1: spacecraft on the Moon without just crashing into it. They
9:37
Speaker 1: were also the first to the very first step with
9:39
Speaker 1: lunar orbit. The second one was crashing on the Moon,
9:43
Speaker 1: and then the third step was landing softly on the Moon.
9:46
Speaker 1: And the Soviets beat us every step of the way,
9:49
Speaker 1: that's right. Which so it was a kind of um,
9:51
Speaker 1: gutsy for Kennedy to be like, we're going to be
9:55
Speaker 1: the first of the Moon because we've been we've been
9:57
Speaker 1: behind every step of the way. I bet the Moon
10:00
Speaker 1: was like WTF, Like what's going on? I've been up
10:04
Speaker 1: here for a long time and now there's just a
10:06
Speaker 1: lot of activity getting on pock mark. People are crashing
10:10
Speaker 1: stuff on me. Here's a dude, he's coming at me.
10:12
Speaker 1: He's about to jump on me. That was the Moon's quote. Okay,
10:18
Speaker 1: so all this led up to obviously, um, these these
10:23
Speaker 1: tests pre flight test on the ground, which uh some
10:26
Speaker 1: ended in tragedy. Notably in n a fire swept through
10:33
Speaker 1: the Apollo command module and killed Gus grissom Ed White,
10:37
Speaker 1: and Roger Chaffee. And that was um They dined with asphyxiation,
10:43
Speaker 1: And after reading up on it, there was like there
10:44
Speaker 1: were so many things wrong, Like their space suits were flammable,
10:48
Speaker 1: they had a hatch door that opened in and like
10:51
Speaker 1: took a long time to open. Well, the the UM
10:54
Speaker 1: fire itself created a vacuum that made it impossible for
10:57
Speaker 1: the hatch to open, Like there was it was impossible
11:00
Speaker 1: where that hatched. It was a really really sad accident,
11:02
Speaker 1: but it might have been one that was like like
11:05
Speaker 1: I wish there weren't people involved, but it might have
11:06
Speaker 1: been something necessary to you know, get everything right. It
11:10
Speaker 1: definitely changed the mentality of the space program and that
11:14
Speaker 1: safety became even more important. And I think Gus Grisson
11:17
Speaker 1: was the first of the Mercury seven to die. Oh yeah,
11:21
Speaker 1: very sad. Yeah forty one years old? Was he just
11:24
Speaker 1: forty one? He looked way It's crazy, like what forty one?
11:28
Speaker 1: What age that was back then? I think everyone that
11:30
Speaker 1: was like the thirty to sixty look the same pretty much,
11:33
Speaker 1: you know. I can't deliverate pretty much. So we've we've
11:36
Speaker 1: gone to lunar orbit, we've crashed landed on the Moon.
11:39
Speaker 1: There's a there's a bunch of steps that we were
11:42
Speaker 1: taking in that made up the space race. One of
11:44
Speaker 1: the next one was to get somebody outside of Earth's
11:50
Speaker 1: orbit and into lunar orbit. Big deal. The Soviets beat
11:54
Speaker 1: us there too, but just very shortly after that, UM,
11:58
Speaker 1: I think it was Apollo seven. Uh, spent a bunch
12:02
Speaker 1: of time orbiting the Earth. I think they made it too. Oh,
12:06
Speaker 1: I know the big the big thing about Apollo seven.
12:08
Speaker 1: So we've gone We've gone from like Pioneer Ranger and
12:13
Speaker 1: Pioneer Ranger and surveyor into now these are crude missions
12:16
Speaker 1: the Apollo program. UM Apollo one and it in tragedy. Uh.
12:21
Speaker 1: And then Apollo seven is where, um, it really starts
12:24
Speaker 1: to become significant, where things are really picking up by
12:27
Speaker 1: leaps and bounce. This is less than a year before
12:31
Speaker 1: we would land on the Moon, and Apollo sevens big
12:34
Speaker 1: one is that this is the first time that we're
12:36
Speaker 1: testing the command module that we would use to send um,
12:42
Speaker 1: Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins up to the Moon. Yeah,
12:46
Speaker 1: so they ordered or orbited the Earth a hundred and
12:48
Speaker 1: sixty three times, spent almost eleven days in space. So
12:53
Speaker 1: that was a big success. This was Walter Shiara Jr. Uh,
12:57
Speaker 1: Don Eassel and Walter Cunningham from Old him Uh. And
13:02
Speaker 1: then Apollo eight was a big deal. Um. It was
13:05
Speaker 1: happening so fast. That was seven was in October a
13:08
Speaker 1: Polo eight was in December of the same year. UM.
13:11
Speaker 1: And this was the first one to use h the
13:14
Speaker 1: Saturn rocket, which was a big, big deal. Yeah, the
13:17
Speaker 1: Saturn rocket is. Um. You can actually see one on
13:19
Speaker 1: its side and walk right under it at Kennedy Space
13:22
Speaker 1: Center the museum right and UM, it's bigger than I
13:26
Speaker 1: think a thirty six story building. It's just this enormously
13:29
Speaker 1: powerful rocket. And UM. When they started testing the Saturn,
13:34
Speaker 1: this was this was like when the Saturn showed that
13:36
Speaker 1: it would work, we people started to realize like we're
13:39
Speaker 1: actually we might do this because we'd already tested out
13:42
Speaker 1: the command module and UM. Now the Saturn was up
13:46
Speaker 1: and the Saturn came in three stages. There was the
13:50
Speaker 1: the first stage that produced like seven point seven million
13:53
Speaker 1: pounds of thrust, which is a lot more than you
13:56
Speaker 1: know you produce when you jump up in the air.
14:00
Speaker 1: I looked, I looked for an analogy. I couldn't find
14:02
Speaker 1: any good comparison. It's just a lot of thrust. Yeah,
14:05
Speaker 1: So this was the thrust that got that. This is
14:08
Speaker 1: the launch thrust. Yeah, it got you out of Earth's
14:11
Speaker 1: gravity or the bulk of the gravity. And then so
14:13
Speaker 1: that first big old stage would fall away, and then
14:16
Speaker 1: the second stage got you all the way out of
14:19
Speaker 1: Earth's gravity, and then the third stage of that second
14:23
Speaker 1: stage you fall away. Then the third stage would propel
14:26
Speaker 1: you to the moon. So it's a three stage rocket.
14:29
Speaker 1: And by the time that third stage had had fired
14:31
Speaker 1: and got you up to top speed, you were going
14:33
Speaker 1: something like twenty five thousand miles per hour in a
14:37
Speaker 1: little capsule at the top of a rocket. It was.
14:40
Speaker 1: It was a very amazing rocket. UM. And this test,
14:44
Speaker 1: it was I will go to my grave saying that.
14:46
Speaker 1: And this test of the Apollo A mission showed that
14:49
Speaker 1: it would work. Yeah. So Apollo nine follows just two
14:54
Speaker 1: and a half months, three months later, And this one
14:58
Speaker 1: was a big deal because actually UM practice a very
15:02
Speaker 1: important procedure, which was the docking between the command module
15:06
Speaker 1: and the lunar module. So you've got this Saturn rocket
15:09
Speaker 1: that's providing the juice. Then you have the command module,
15:12
Speaker 1: which is where essentially where you're you know, you're you're
15:16
Speaker 1: flying what you would think of as the spaceship. It's
15:19
Speaker 1: like the crew quarters. Yeah, yeah, that's where the crew
15:21
Speaker 1: is, is is where they're flying. It's where they're eating and
15:23
Speaker 1: pooping and sleeping. Uh. And then you actually need to
15:26
Speaker 1: land on the Moon, and you don't do that in
15:28
Speaker 1: the command module. You do that in the lunar module.
15:30
Speaker 1: But those two guys have to connect, right, So the
15:34
Speaker 1: command module and the lunar module for launch are facing
15:38
Speaker 1: the same direction. But once they get out into a
15:42
Speaker 1: lunar trajectory, I and I could not find why they
15:46
Speaker 1: designed it like this. You couldn't either. But the the
15:50
Speaker 1: lunar module, that thing that you've seen laying on the
15:53
Speaker 1: Moon that looked just totally ungangly ungainly um had to
15:57
Speaker 1: blast off and it was tethered m It blasted off,
16:02
Speaker 1: turned around, and then redocked with the command module. Knows
16:07
Speaker 1: to know. I don't think I'm surprised that there had
16:10
Speaker 1: to be something they just couldn't figure out a work around. Four.
16:12
Speaker 1: I would love to know anybody who knows, please write
16:14
Speaker 1: in because I was looking all over for but consider this, Chuck.
16:17
Speaker 1: You had two pieces of equipment that we're facing the
16:21
Speaker 1: same direction and you had to turn one around and
16:24
Speaker 1: face the other one in space at twenty five thousand
16:28
Speaker 1: miles per hour. So that's pretty impressive that they were
16:32
Speaker 1: able to do in the sixties, right, So this was
16:34
Speaker 1: this was Apollo nine was the first to show this
16:37
Speaker 1: is this is working, like this is going to work.
16:39
Speaker 1: So they did that, and then Apollo ten was the one.
16:43
Speaker 1: This was the last one in the dress rehearsal. The
16:46
Speaker 1: Apollo ten astronauts you could call them um understudies, I guess,
16:51
Speaker 1: so just really took it for the team. I mean
16:55
Speaker 1: they did everything but touchdown on the Moon. Yeah, they
16:57
Speaker 1: brought that. So they did this whole docking procedure where
17:00
Speaker 1: the the lunar module was blasted off and turned around
17:03
Speaker 1: and nose the nose connected to the command module, and
17:07
Speaker 1: then they did the lunar landing thing where they blasted
17:10
Speaker 1: off the lunar module, brought it down within fifty feet
17:14
Speaker 1: of the moon surface, and then took it back up
17:17
Speaker 1: and redoct again. I wonder if they were like, it's
17:19
Speaker 1: right there, maybe we should just I wonder too. Surely
17:23
Speaker 1: they joked at least, yeah, probably, but there's probably a
17:26
Speaker 1: lot of humor going on. I would hope so. But
17:28
Speaker 1: the whole mission, though, is you've got this this command
17:31
Speaker 1: module and the lunar module and the command module. When
17:33
Speaker 1: the lunar module goes down to the Moon and then
17:35
Speaker 1: back up, the command modules just flying around in a
17:38
Speaker 1: lunar orbit waiting to rendezvous again. So they did everything
17:43
Speaker 1: but touchdown and then they came back. And when they
17:45
Speaker 1: came back, they said, we're ready. This is it that
17:48
Speaker 1: we're ready? Yeah, hint hint uh. And that was like
17:52
Speaker 1: two months before A followed eleven left it off. Should
17:55
Speaker 1: we take a break? I think so? All right, let's
17:57
Speaker 1: take a break and talk about the stars of the show,
18:00
Speaker 1: Polo eleven. I also want to shout out Apollo ten,
18:33
Speaker 1: by the way. Um, So, with Apollo eleven, the command
18:36
Speaker 1: module was named Colombia and the lunar module was famously
18:40
Speaker 1: named Eagle. In Apollo ten, the command module was Charlie
18:44
Speaker 1: Brown and the lunar module was Snoopy, which I love.
18:47
Speaker 1: That's pretty sweet. Yeah, so everyone knows the three human
18:53
Speaker 1: beings that we sent up in Apollo eleven Commander Neil Armstrong,
18:57
Speaker 1: Lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin, and the other guy, I know,
19:01
Speaker 1: poor Michael Collins. Yeah, Command module pilot, Michael Collins, and
19:04
Speaker 1: you really like we want to sing his praises because
19:09
Speaker 1: it stinks to be known as the other guy. I
19:10
Speaker 1: would imagine everyone remembers those other two names. Ask Roger Daltry.
19:15
Speaker 1: They got what they got to, uh, walk around on
19:20
Speaker 1: the moon while Michael Collins essentially babysat the command module
19:25
Speaker 1: in the command module eating ho hoes, waiting for them
19:27
Speaker 1: to come back. That's that's unselfish, extremely and I'm sure
19:31
Speaker 1: they were assigned these roles because of their you know
19:34
Speaker 1: what they had trained for. But to be the guy
19:37
Speaker 1: that's like, yeah, you know what, that's okay, Yeah, I'll
19:40
Speaker 1: be number three. That's what he did, though. He sat
19:42
Speaker 1: up there with the command module and made sure it's
19:44
Speaker 1: stayed in orbit and that's right, just waited for the
19:47
Speaker 1: dudes to come back. So hats off to you, Michael Collins. Alright,
19:51
Speaker 1: So July in the morning, I'm so excited Apollo eleven
19:57
Speaker 1: lists off from JF Case Base Center at Cape Canaveral.
20:01
Speaker 1: It's no, no coincidence there. He said, our go get
20:07
Speaker 1: him and name it after me. So it was a
20:11
Speaker 1: it was a huge moment um for the sort of
20:15
Speaker 1: the end of the space race, you know, if it
20:17
Speaker 1: all went well, if it all went well. So remember
20:20
Speaker 1: we practiced everything up to the actual landing. We'll get
20:24
Speaker 1: to the landing in a second, but um buzz Aldern
20:27
Speaker 1: later said that he was the most worried about the
20:31
Speaker 1: landing because they were the most unknowns, the most questions remaining,
20:34
Speaker 1: because it was the one thing that hadn't been studied
20:36
Speaker 1: and practiced and done before, and it was up to
20:39
Speaker 1: these guys. This is the last thing, the last part
20:42
Speaker 1: of this whole thing, and no one had done it.
20:45
Speaker 1: And so when they took off at two they went through.
20:48
Speaker 1: Everything just went perfectly. The first stage fired fine, second
20:51
Speaker 1: stage fired fine. The third stage got him into a
20:54
Speaker 1: lunar trajectory. And I think they traveled this two and
20:57
Speaker 1: thirty eight thousand miles uh over about two and a
21:01
Speaker 1: half days before they started to reach lunar orbit. Yeah,
21:04
Speaker 1: so on July nineteenth is when they enter that orbit.
21:07
Speaker 1: They spent about a day there. Um sort of, you know,
21:11
Speaker 1: there's a lot of checking on things you don't just
21:15
Speaker 1: you know, like plow ahead with her your plan. You
21:17
Speaker 1: take a day once you get up there to make
21:19
Speaker 1: sure everything's working there, checking the communication systems, and basically
21:24
Speaker 1: preparing for the big uh, the big show to come,
21:29
Speaker 1: convincing Michael Collins that he couldn't come. Sorry, still drawing
21:33
Speaker 1: straws up there in the orbit. So here was the
21:37
Speaker 1: kind of cool thing that I think, maybe if you
21:40
Speaker 1: don't know this full story that's really pretty remarkable is
21:43
Speaker 1: the lunar module was supposed to basically land on autopilot,
21:47
Speaker 1: but they saw where they were headed. Uh they didn't
21:50
Speaker 1: you know, the Moon doesn't have atmosphere. They had never
21:52
Speaker 1: really done this, so they didn't know exactly how to
21:55
Speaker 1: calculate their altitude and air speed and realize in short
21:59
Speaker 1: order they were ahead toward a crater with very steep,
22:03
Speaker 1: sharp rims, and landing either on those rims or down
22:06
Speaker 1: in that crater was no good. So Neil Armstrong said,
22:11
Speaker 1: screw it, I'm gonna fly this baby down. He did.
22:14
Speaker 1: He wasn't even the lunar module pilot. He just took over,
22:17
Speaker 1: I guess as commander because if they were going to
22:20
Speaker 1: crash it was gonna be on him. I need to
22:22
Speaker 1: see this movie. Have you seen it? No, not yet.
22:24
Speaker 1: And there's another documentary I think just called Apollo eleven
22:27
Speaker 1: that's coming out. Oh, it'll have been out because we're
22:31
Speaker 1: releasing this around the anniversary. So I think it came
22:34
Speaker 1: out in late June, maybe on CNN or something, right, Yeah, So, um,
22:39
Speaker 1: so Armstrong had to take over the controls and again,
22:42
Speaker 1: no one had ever done this before. And this guy
22:44
Speaker 1: is landing a lunar module basically manually, and this was unscheduled.
22:50
Speaker 1: He had to make the thing travel further away from
22:52
Speaker 1: the spot I was going to land. And so when
22:54
Speaker 1: they finally landed, um, they had something like thirty seconds
22:58
Speaker 1: of fuel left nuts and it was a little hairy.
23:01
Speaker 1: And there was a very famous quote that came out
23:05
Speaker 1: of the eagle. Lander said Houston, this is Tranquility Base.
23:09
Speaker 1: The Eagle has landed and Tranquility or Houston said, thank goodness. Yeah,
23:15
Speaker 1: Houston actually said, you got a bunch of guys about
23:18
Speaker 1: to turn blue. We're breathing again. Uh. And funny enough,
23:22
Speaker 1: that was Charlie Duke who wasn't he was the capcom
23:27
Speaker 1: on the ground in Houston, but he would later be
23:30
Speaker 1: up in the air and Apollo sixteen pretty neat, and
23:33
Speaker 1: I'll bet he was wearing a tie with short sleeve
23:35
Speaker 1: dress button shirt, probably so that all those guys bore. Yeah,
23:39
Speaker 1: the problem back then was you could never tell car
23:41
Speaker 1: salesman apart from regular people, right from an engineer, a teacher.
23:46
Speaker 1: I bet your dad rocked that look. Oh well into
23:49
Speaker 1: the nineties with the old pocket protector. So they landed
23:55
Speaker 1: and uh, they were gonna abort their mission right there
23:59
Speaker 1: and go right back up. Well, no, they set it
24:02
Speaker 1: up so that they could abort at the drop of
24:04
Speaker 1: a head if they had to. I think it was
24:06
Speaker 1: part of the Okay, I thought they were going to abort. No, No,
24:10
Speaker 1: I think they they The first thing they did was
24:12
Speaker 1: prepare for an abort the chase something went wrong, they
24:15
Speaker 1: wouldn't have to prepare to abort, ex press the button
24:18
Speaker 1: and take off, all right. I thought. I got down
24:20
Speaker 1: there was like, let's go back up. I'm having second
24:23
Speaker 1: thoughts about being the first person to walk on the moon.
24:26
Speaker 1: Well that that actually doesn't make a lot more sense
24:29
Speaker 1: in because what they were supposed to do was take
24:30
Speaker 1: a four hour rest um for safety. But they were
24:35
Speaker 1: all itching to go, so they were like, no, we're
24:36
Speaker 1: gonna work through this. It still took about four hours
24:39
Speaker 1: just to get out onto the Moon, but they were
24:42
Speaker 1: hard at work the whole time. They weren't taking a snooze. Yeah,
24:44
Speaker 1: which I guess men it would have taken them eight
24:46
Speaker 1: hours had they taken that snooze, but they did take
24:48
Speaker 1: a snooze later on. Yeah, that's that's something that I
24:52
Speaker 1: didn't realize about the moon laning. They spend a total
24:55
Speaker 1: of twenty one hours on the Moon, and only two
24:58
Speaker 1: and a half hours of it out walking round on
25:00
Speaker 1: the Moon. The rest of the time they were in
25:02
Speaker 1: the lunar module, including uh, seven and a half hours
25:06
Speaker 1: of sleep. I guess. I mean they needed it. So
25:08
Speaker 1: I was like, how did they sleep? And I thought,
25:12
Speaker 1: I've got it. Drugs. I'll bet they took drugs. They
25:15
Speaker 1: did not. They had sixteen tablets of seeking all on them.
25:20
Speaker 1: They took zero, although later um later lunar landers would
25:25
Speaker 1: would take a significant amount of seeking all, but Buzz
25:28
Speaker 1: Aldrin and um Neil Armstrong didn't take any seeking, although
25:33
Speaker 1: they did take decks of dream tablets during the mission,
25:36
Speaker 1: so they were pepped up, which is hilarious, which means
25:39
Speaker 1: they probably crashed. I guess so, but they were not
25:41
Speaker 1: in any shape to sleep, but they still slept for
25:44
Speaker 1: seven and a half hours. I bet that's some of
25:46
Speaker 1: the quiet as sleep. I don't know. I just I
25:48
Speaker 1: would be too excited. But yeah, I guess so. Maybe
25:51
Speaker 1: just being there and having already gone and walked out
25:54
Speaker 1: on the moon when you come back in ready for
25:57
Speaker 1: a rest. Yeah. So six undred fifty million people watched this.
26:01
Speaker 1: It's about a fifth of the world's population at the time. Um.
26:05
Speaker 1: Armstrong spent about twenty minutes out there by himself, which
26:07
Speaker 1: I imagine was something else. It's not like Aldrin crashed
26:11
Speaker 1: his party on but twenty minutes out on the moon
26:15
Speaker 1: by himself. Like, it's just it's hard to even fathom
26:18
Speaker 1: what that was was like or it would be like
26:21
Speaker 1: now even Um. Then Aldrin follows him down and his
26:25
Speaker 1: description of the lunar surface was magnificent desolation. I never
26:29
Speaker 1: knew that before, did you. Yeah, i'd heard that. That's
26:32
Speaker 1: pretty cool. And um they started working. They started collecting
26:36
Speaker 1: samples surface material, moon rocks, uh, basically taking note notations
26:43
Speaker 1: on like what the gravity was like, because it wasn't
26:46
Speaker 1: no gravity. It was one six of the Earth's gravity,
26:50
Speaker 1: so you know they they were able to hop around
26:52
Speaker 1: and jump around. Have you have here in a swimming
26:54
Speaker 1: pool kind of Yeah? Have you seen that footage of
26:59
Speaker 1: Jack Schmidt from a Polo seventeen. He keeps falling down.
27:04
Speaker 1: He like had a collection backers putting stuff in and
27:06
Speaker 1: he'd like drop it and he bent over and get
27:08
Speaker 1: it and like kind of come back up and then
27:10
Speaker 1: like based almost summersault like he was having a really
27:12
Speaker 1: hard time. And they figured out, like pretty quickly, you
27:16
Speaker 1: can't just walk on the moon, especially in these space suits.
27:19
Speaker 1: You have to hop, right, you have to hop but
27:22
Speaker 1: I think even hopping is not just like innate. Sure,
27:25
Speaker 1: so you can fall over, but learning curve right. But
27:29
Speaker 1: I did not see that Buzz Aldrin or Neil Armstrong
27:32
Speaker 1: fell down? Me, no fall down? Who was at the
27:36
Speaker 1: fell Jack Schmidt from Apolo seventeen, Cletzy Jack that was
27:40
Speaker 1: his name. Yeah, just like up astronaut falls down on
27:42
Speaker 1: the Moon and it's pretty fun to watch, especially if
27:45
Speaker 1: you listen to Yakety Sacks and another tab. So he
27:48
Speaker 1: mentioned that American flag, that iconic flag drop um or
27:53
Speaker 1: flag stick or flag rays what would you call that, uh,
27:57
Speaker 1: all of the above, I don't know. Me poke. Uh,
28:04
Speaker 1: that's a great drink too. By the way, So the
28:07
Speaker 1: pole went in um the first like six inches or
28:10
Speaker 1: so very easily, and they're like, oh, this is a breeze.
28:13
Speaker 1: And then it hit something super hard and I guess
28:16
Speaker 1: they're like, oh, it's not so easy. So they had
28:19
Speaker 1: to lean the flag back. Uh well yeah, they kind of, Oh,
28:23
Speaker 1: just wriggled it back and forth. Thank you, because I
28:26
Speaker 1: realized people can't see what I was doing. But yeah,
28:28
Speaker 1: and in doing this, this is really important. In doing that,
28:32
Speaker 1: they created ripples in this flag, and that's the that's
28:38
Speaker 1: what moon hookes people point to there's no wind on
28:42
Speaker 1: the moon. Yeah, they're like, how is their wind? You idiots?
28:44
Speaker 1: Obviously this is here on Earth and that is the
28:47
Speaker 1: That is the explanation that when they were wriggling it
28:50
Speaker 1: back and forth created ripples, and that you can see
28:53
Speaker 1: in footage the astronauts moving around the flag and the
28:57
Speaker 1: flags ripples remain static. So no, there's not any wind
29:02
Speaker 1: on the moon. But that's not when that did that
29:04
Speaker 1: to the flag on the moon. Yeah, and I saw
29:07
Speaker 1: about six years ago they I feel pretty good that
29:11
Speaker 1: most of those flags, what are their seven and all
29:14
Speaker 1: six six I believe are still there. They should still
29:19
Speaker 1: be there. I don't know how they would fall off
29:21
Speaker 1: the moon, well, not fall off, but just the temperature
29:24
Speaker 1: swings on the moon. There was a lot of surmising
29:27
Speaker 1: that they wouldn't have survived this stuff. Um but really yeah,
29:32
Speaker 1: and the solar radiation and everything. We'll we'll get to
29:35
Speaker 1: all that stuff. But it did. Um. It did say
29:38
Speaker 1: that they took a lot of pictures of the various
29:41
Speaker 1: times of day and they think they have found I
29:44
Speaker 1: don't think they found Apollo eleven, but you know, it's
29:47
Speaker 1: not like they can get it from the surface. So
29:49
Speaker 1: these are all aerial shots. So they're comparing like shadows
29:52
Speaker 1: basically and saying, oh, well, it looks to me like
29:55
Speaker 1: this is the flags. Really yeah, are they still standing
29:57
Speaker 1: up to They think, well, I don't think you can tell, okay,
30:00
Speaker 1: but if it's casting a shadow, it must be oh yeah,
30:03
Speaker 1: I guess that right. Yeah, very you need a job
30:05
Speaker 1: at NASA, Jack, come in and be like, the shadow
30:09
Speaker 1: proves its standing. But in all for Apollo eleven, they
30:13
Speaker 1: collected about fifty pounds of lunar material, took a bunch
30:17
Speaker 1: of pictures, took two court tube samples, and um, like
30:22
Speaker 1: you said, spent what two and a half hours out
30:24
Speaker 1: there just romping around, having a good time, having a
30:27
Speaker 1: good time in twenty one hours total on the on
30:31
Speaker 1: the lunar surface. And then they after well after about
30:36
Speaker 1: twenty one hours, the lunar module went which no one realizes,
30:42
Speaker 1: but that's the sound that it makes in space. And
30:45
Speaker 1: it went up in rende vood with the the then
30:49
Speaker 1: command module in a very uh passive, aggressively hostile Michael Collins.
30:56
Speaker 1: He was very quiet for the rest of the trip.
30:59
Speaker 1: But they docked a again. They docked like they the
31:01
Speaker 1: docking procedure and after launch it, when it rendezvoused, it
31:05
Speaker 1: docked with it. They got out and then they said,
31:09
Speaker 1: so long Eagle, thanks for everything. Blasted it off again
31:13
Speaker 1: and just send it on a crash course to the
31:15
Speaker 1: Moon's surface. And where it's crash site is no one knows.
31:18
Speaker 1: It's an unknown site. Um, but it's on there somewhere.
31:22
Speaker 1: But that's what they did, they said. They used the
31:24
Speaker 1: Eagle to go down, come back up, and then they
31:27
Speaker 1: sent it back to Mama. So what happens on the
31:30
Speaker 1: way back it's is it. There's two scenarios. It's either
31:34
Speaker 1: those two guys can't stop talking about it and Michael
31:36
Speaker 1: Collins is just like yeah, yeah, or Michael Collins is like,
31:41
Speaker 1: what was it like? Guys, what was it like? And
31:42
Speaker 1: they're like, you wouldn't understand. Yeah, we could, we could,
31:45
Speaker 1: we could describe it, but it wouldn't make sense to
31:47
Speaker 1: your brain. Yeah, those are people like the solar eclipse.
31:51
Speaker 1: Either one of these. That's a bad right. Yeah, you
31:53
Speaker 1: really had to see totally, and you know, if you didn't,
31:56
Speaker 1: then just forget it. That's a that's a bad outcome
31:58
Speaker 1: for Michael Collins either way. Pretty bad um, but it's
32:03
Speaker 1: amazing that they were able to not only read doc,
32:07
Speaker 1: but they were able to splash down in Hawaii alive. Yeah,
32:11
Speaker 1: there was one other part. So the command module technically
32:14
Speaker 1: had another part, the service module, that had like the
32:16
Speaker 1: oxygen in the water and all that stuff, and they
32:20
Speaker 1: they they scuttled that on the way back in and
32:23
Speaker 1: then the just the command module made its entry back
32:26
Speaker 1: into the Earth's atmosphere, going again about twenty five thousand
32:29
Speaker 1: miles per hour UM and heating up to something like
32:34
Speaker 1: five thousand degrees fahrenheit and they had created this heat
32:37
Speaker 1: shield that they knew worked because they tested it on
32:40
Speaker 1: former or other Apollo missions. But I mean still, every
32:44
Speaker 1: time you've got three guys in a little tiny capsule
32:48
Speaker 1: going twenty five thousand miles an hour hurtling towards Earth
32:51
Speaker 1: with the outside temperature of five thousand degrees, it's kind
32:54
Speaker 1: of hairy. So yeah, when they splashed down off the
32:56
Speaker 1: coast of Hawaii, it was a big, big deal. Like
33:00
Speaker 1: it had been. It had been successful and actually the
33:03
Speaker 1: the stated primary objective, the primary mission of Apollo eleven
33:09
Speaker 1: was to send a human into space, land them on
33:11
Speaker 1: the Moon, and bring them back safely, the thing that
33:14
Speaker 1: Kennedy challenged the United States to do. And when they
33:17
Speaker 1: splashed down and they were all safe and sound, Apollo
33:20
Speaker 1: eleven was successful. Yeah. I think that, Uh, for all
33:24
Speaker 1: these Apollo missions, the re entry is always the biggest Well,
33:28
Speaker 1: I mean there's tons of concerns, but re entry is
33:31
Speaker 1: just so tough. And that they made this, uh they
33:34
Speaker 1: made a basically a covering that was meant to be destroyed. Um,
33:39
Speaker 1: it's pretty ingenious sacrificial lamb. Yeah, it's like it's supposed
33:43
Speaker 1: to burn and everything inside should be okay, right, should be?
33:49
Speaker 1: I can't imagine that feeling, man, I can't either. And
33:52
Speaker 1: the fear, like, I'm sure it is fearful, but I
33:56
Speaker 1: wonder also, I feel like once you hit the atmosphere,
33:59
Speaker 1: I'll bet you can starting to feel the speed you're going,
34:02
Speaker 1: just just shaking, you know, out in space. I don't
34:04
Speaker 1: believe you can feel any speed at all, but because
34:07
Speaker 1: of the air pressure from the atmosphere, I mean, that's
34:09
Speaker 1: how you feel that stuff. Right, Yeah, I met they
34:11
Speaker 1: could not have felt anything else, but like we were
34:15
Speaker 1: probably going to die here any second now, right Bob,
34:18
Speaker 1: butther is at least one or two yeehawk, you think, yeah,
34:22
Speaker 1: should we take another break? All right, we'll talk about
34:25
Speaker 1: some some of the other Apollo landings and then what's
34:29
Speaker 1: going on today? Right after this? So Charles, as we
35:02
Speaker 1: were researching this, um, I went and looked. I was like,
35:06
Speaker 1: surely Michael Collins got another shot up in space. No? No,
35:11
Speaker 1: well they made a movie about him. They did as
35:13
Speaker 1: an Irish revolutionary. It was an anachronism. So they went
35:17
Speaker 1: on his name sounded up familiar. They wanted to do
35:20
Speaker 1: Apollo twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen and seventeen, uh, and
35:26
Speaker 1: all of them. You know, after eleven it was like
35:30
Speaker 1: the mission is now too. I mean they got stuff
35:32
Speaker 1: done on eleven, but each mission after that had very
35:35
Speaker 1: specific goals that wasn't just just go up to the
35:38
Speaker 1: moon and come back. Of those six, five of them
35:42
Speaker 1: were successful, very famously. Apollo thirteen was not successful. It
35:46
Speaker 1: was an aboarded mission that didn't land on the Moon,
35:48
Speaker 1: but the other five did. And yeah, they were basically
35:52
Speaker 1: really fun scientific journeys. Yeah, should we hit some of
35:56
Speaker 1: these highlights? Yeah, I think Apollo fourteen is known for
36:00
Speaker 1: and Shepherd hitting golf balls. It's funny all the work
36:04
Speaker 1: they did, and that's like the iconic scene as him
36:07
Speaker 1: hitting golf balls. Yeah, and and some of the stuff
36:09
Speaker 1: that they're doing too. I mean, like that's NASA saying, like,
36:12
Speaker 1: go find out how how easy it is to move
36:15
Speaker 1: around in these suits. Right, So Shepherd's like, we'll hit
36:18
Speaker 1: some golf balls up or like a golf course might
36:20
Speaker 1: be nice up there one day, right, Yeah, he's gonna
36:22
Speaker 1: carry Apolo fifteen was the first one where they used
36:27
Speaker 1: that cool, super cool looking roving vehicle, the Lunar rover.
36:32
Speaker 1: That was really neat tore it up. Yeah, remember that
36:35
Speaker 1: that cartoon doom Buggy. It was like Scooby Doo, but
36:38
Speaker 1: the instead of being a dog, Scooby Doo is a
36:40
Speaker 1: doom Buggy. I don't remember that. You're not something wonder Bug?
36:43
Speaker 1: Are you? Okay? I think it was doom Buggy. Yeah,
36:47
Speaker 1: I remember wonder Bug. Wonder Bug was a doom Buggy.
36:51
Speaker 1: I could see there being more than one of these cartoons,
36:53
Speaker 1: somebody ripping off somebody else. Doom Buggies were big in
36:56
Speaker 1: the seventies, remember seeing those around? Oh yeah, I bet
36:59
Speaker 1: you could buy and buggy today for speed Buggy, Speed Buggy,
37:03
Speaker 1: Speed Buggy. All right, Yeah, it was a It was
37:06
Speaker 1: a cartoon from the sixties. Wonderbug was live action for
37:09
Speaker 1: the seventies. I'm sorry. Was it was? Did the did
37:13
Speaker 1: the doom Buggy talk or something like that? Or wonder Bug?
37:17
Speaker 1: Are you thinking of my mother the car? Maybe? I am? Okay?
37:22
Speaker 1: Let me see Apollo seventeen. I think is noted for
37:25
Speaker 1: more lunar roving um. And then a very famous uh
37:31
Speaker 1: famous quote as the last one? Who was it? Gean Sernin?
37:37
Speaker 1: We leave as we came and God willing as we
37:40
Speaker 1: shall return with peace and hope for all mankind. Yeah,
37:44
Speaker 1: that was something that like, you know, the moon landings
37:48
Speaker 1: were part of this space race that grew out of
37:52
Speaker 1: this adversarial relationship of Cold War USSR and United States.
37:58
Speaker 1: But I do have to say that America did it
38:02
Speaker 1: pretty classy when we got there, Like there were all
38:06
Speaker 1: sorts of like, um, talk about peace for human kind
38:10
Speaker 1: and that you know, this is one small step for
38:12
Speaker 1: a man, one giant leap for mankind. It wasn't like
38:15
Speaker 1: you safe or anything like that from the Moon. Yeah. Um,
38:19
Speaker 1: So I I'm really heartened by the fact that that
38:23
Speaker 1: that's how it was done. It was meant to be
38:25
Speaker 1: a mission to the Moon for human kind. I think
38:30
Speaker 1: there was a lot of camaraderie with cosmonauts and astronauts
38:34
Speaker 1: themselves somewhat. There was a lot of um, there's a
38:37
Speaker 1: lot of commemorative material up there commemorating cosmonauts both alive
38:41
Speaker 1: and dead, that American astronauts took up with them. Yeah.
38:45
Speaker 1: I mean, let's talk about the stuff, uh that we
38:48
Speaker 1: brought back and left um from all these missions and
38:52
Speaker 1: by the way, that last mission that's been back sense
38:55
Speaker 1: no human has left lower Earth orbit. I bel eves.
39:00
Speaker 1: Since then, it's hard to believe. You'd think someone like
39:04
Speaker 1: we would have done it for some reason. No, people,
39:07
Speaker 1: I mean, we'll talk about it, but people just lost interest.
39:10
Speaker 1: It just became like whatever part of it was the
39:15
Speaker 1: Vietnam War for sure, but but I think it was
39:18
Speaker 1: also just kind of like, Okay, we've done that a
39:20
Speaker 1: few times. How many rock samples do you guys gonna
39:23
Speaker 1: go get right? Wound me some other way? Well, and
39:26
Speaker 1: it was expensive, and maybe the public sentimenting like how
39:29
Speaker 1: how much money are we going to pour into getting
39:31
Speaker 1: moon rocks probably a lot to do with it. So
39:34
Speaker 1: all end, they carded back moon rocks now just samples
39:41
Speaker 1: two pounds of moon rocks, core samples, pebbles, dust, sand um.
39:46
Speaker 1: And they you know, it helped them determine how old
39:48
Speaker 1: the moon was. That's not bad. No, They figured something
39:51
Speaker 1: like four point five three billion years or something like that.
39:55
Speaker 1: And they also came up with the current um hypothesis
39:58
Speaker 1: for how the Moon was formed that an object named
40:02
Speaker 1: THEA about the size of Mars, collided with Earth early
40:05
Speaker 1: on in Earth's formation and merged but also calved off
40:11
Speaker 1: the Moon. So the Moon was born from the Earth. Yes,
40:14
Speaker 1: that's pretty neat. Yep. So we left a lot of
40:18
Speaker 1: stuff though. Yeah, it's kind of like they didn't listen
40:21
Speaker 1: to Sierra Club. Yeah, four thousand pounds of stuff that's
40:24
Speaker 1: up there, and a lot of it is just gear equipment.
40:30
Speaker 1: I mean they seventies space vehicles. Yeah, but we just
40:34
Speaker 1: left or junk up there basically. Yeah, there's a lot
40:37
Speaker 1: of junk up there. And they said that they did
40:39
Speaker 1: that on purpose to to see what it would do,
40:42
Speaker 1: see what happened to it. A lot of it. Some
40:44
Speaker 1: of it was also um that they were It just
40:49
Speaker 1: made sense to displace stuff. We didn't need to make
40:53
Speaker 1: room for the weight from these samples in moon rocks.
40:56
Speaker 1: And it was also the sixties when you would just
40:58
Speaker 1: go do a family picnic just like leave. Yeah, exactly,
41:02
Speaker 1: there's a big um. There was a debate and it
41:06
Speaker 1: was finally put to rest. But for a while there
41:07
Speaker 1: somebody came across some some detail that there's nineties six
41:14
Speaker 1: Emesa's bags up there on the moon, and Amesa's bag
41:19
Speaker 1: is what you pee, poop or vomit into if you're
41:22
Speaker 1: an astronaut, and so somebody said, oh my god, there's
41:25
Speaker 1: nineties six bags of poop and urine and vomit sitting
41:29
Speaker 1: up on the moon. That's disgusting. And that was that
41:33
Speaker 1: that's what everybody thought for a very long time. And
41:35
Speaker 1: then uh NASA Lunar archivist said no, absolutely not. Um,
41:42
Speaker 1: nobody's puked on the moon. For one, only three guys
41:45
Speaker 1: have puked in space, and none of them were on
41:47
Speaker 1: the moon. Um. Not only did uh Aldrin and Armstrong
41:54
Speaker 1: not poop, they actually took a drug to keep them
41:57
Speaker 1: from pooping while they were on their lunar mission, emodium.
42:00
Speaker 1: Aldrin did p but there's no evidence that he left
42:03
Speaker 1: his bag behind. So they think that these nineties six
42:05
Speaker 1: and mesas bags are all empty bags. That were like,
42:09
Speaker 1: we didn't need this because we don't vomit. Yeah, exactly, Yeah,
42:14
Speaker 1: that makes sense. But that was a that's a that's
42:16
Speaker 1: an urban legend, right, Ripley's Ripley's believe it or not.
42:20
Speaker 1: Websites steered me wrong at first, and then I got
42:22
Speaker 1: steered right by I think slate somebody look good for them. Uh.
42:28
Speaker 1: There are some commemorative items. Besides just the flags, there
42:32
Speaker 1: are plaques kind of all over the place. Aldrin and
42:35
Speaker 1: Armstrong left one that said we came in peace for
42:37
Speaker 1: all mankind. A little on the nose, but still a
42:40
Speaker 1: nice sentiment. Um a disc with seventy three messages from
42:45
Speaker 1: countries all over the world micro etched. Yeah, just to
42:49
Speaker 1: show off more technology of the sixties. Like you said earlier,
42:53
Speaker 1: they honored their Rushiman Russian cosmonaut Um counterparts I guess
42:58
Speaker 1: with metals uh. And then a symbol of the U. S.
43:01
Speaker 1: Eagle carrying an olive branch yep. And then you know,
43:05
Speaker 1: they all left stuff when they went up there, including
43:08
Speaker 1: Charlie Douke who I talked about from Apollo sixteen. He
43:11
Speaker 1: took a picture of his family and left it behind.
43:14
Speaker 1: So what are you gonna do, NASA administrators? Nothing? Yeah,
43:18
Speaker 1: so he left behind they think, now that's probably blank though.
43:21
Speaker 1: That's sad from the solar radiation. Yeah, and his family
43:23
Speaker 1: subsequently disappeared. Yeah, they come back to the future, right,
43:28
Speaker 1: Their souls are trapped on the Moon forever. Something else
43:30
Speaker 1: was smuggled too, though, right, Um that one of a
43:34
Speaker 1: commemorative plaque was smuggled PAULA fifteen. David Scott smuggled an
43:39
Speaker 1: aluminum plaque. Why would he have to smuggle that? I
43:42
Speaker 1: don't know. They just had it was off the charter
43:45
Speaker 1: or whatever. I guess. I don't know why. I know
43:48
Speaker 1: one guy smuggled the sandwich points really, yeah, one of
43:52
Speaker 1: him did. I can't remember. My brother Rose Beef, my
43:55
Speaker 1: brother at one time smuggled the PBNJ into a Dark
43:58
Speaker 1: Straits concert. Yeah did he really? Yeah, it's kind of
44:02
Speaker 1: We still laugh about it. One of the nerdiest things
44:04
Speaker 1: ever was like three songs in when he's like, you
44:07
Speaker 1: want a sandwich, he just starts unwrapping it. That's hilarious.
44:11
Speaker 1: It's great wrapped in wax paper. I think it was
44:18
Speaker 1: so uh. Neither one of us were boy scouts actually,
44:21
Speaker 1: because my brother would have owned that sure, and his
44:24
Speaker 1: son went all the way through. Of course, way is
44:26
Speaker 1: your brother envious? Is he like Michael Collins? Yeah, I
44:29
Speaker 1: think so. Um. But here's the deal with all that
44:34
Speaker 1: stuff up there is, uh, lunar tourism is going to
44:36
Speaker 1: be a thing at some point, So NASA actually had
44:40
Speaker 1: to establish lunar heritage sites and rules like you can't
44:43
Speaker 1: go within a certain amount with like don't go near
44:47
Speaker 1: any of this stuff. Basically, if you see a rover,
44:50
Speaker 1: just turn around and walk the other way, which is
44:53
Speaker 1: like or hoped the other way. I guess, yeah, I
44:54
Speaker 1: don't fall down. Man. Can you imagine like seeing a
44:58
Speaker 1: lunar rover beyond due can't go over there, but on
45:01
Speaker 1: the moon to like just see oh my gosh, frozen
45:04
Speaker 1: in time. It would be so Creepsville would be awesome. Yeah,
45:08
Speaker 1: So what's going on these days? Well, so you said
45:11
Speaker 1: there there, we haven't been back since to the moon,
45:14
Speaker 1: which is really kind of astounding if you think about it.
45:16
Speaker 1: But understandably, the political interest public interests a lot of
45:20
Speaker 1: it waned. That means funding dried up. Um. And because
45:24
Speaker 1: the Moon kind of got left behind, NASA was like, well,
45:27
Speaker 1: we'll just focus on lower Earth orbit stuff and really
45:30
Speaker 1: went all in on the Shuttle program and then um
45:33
Speaker 1: also on the International Space Station. Both again are in
45:36
Speaker 1: lower Earth orbit, not in what you think of as
45:39
Speaker 1: like outer space, right um. And then oh, the Obama
45:43
Speaker 1: administration came no, I'm sorry. The the space Shuttle accident
45:47
Speaker 1: UM that blew up the Columbia UM in two thousand three,
45:53
Speaker 1: UM caused George Bush to say, George W. Bush to say, hey,
45:57
Speaker 1: we let's bounce back, let's go back to the moon
46:00
Speaker 1: by and UM, that's not happening though, No, So the
46:05
Speaker 1: NASA got directed back to the Moon, and Obama's administration
46:10
Speaker 1: did an audit and found that NASA was so far
46:13
Speaker 1: behind that we wouldn't make it back to the Moon
46:15
Speaker 1: by so Obama said go to Mars instead. This is
46:19
Speaker 1: this is par for the course for NASA. Every few
46:22
Speaker 1: years they get a completely new directive to somewhere else
46:24
Speaker 1: in the Solar System, and they have to scramble to
46:27
Speaker 1: like change plans, try to salvage whatever they were working on.
46:31
Speaker 1: And they've gotten kind of good at applying stuff they're
46:33
Speaker 1: working on to to basically fudge to say, okay, we're
46:37
Speaker 1: working on this this Mars, this Mars launcher right now,
46:41
Speaker 1: the SLS, the Space Launch System, and yeah it can
46:45
Speaker 1: get us to Mars, but we could really also go
46:47
Speaker 1: to the Moon with this thing too. They're cross trained, right. So, um,
46:52
Speaker 1: after the Obama administration came along and said forget the Moon,
46:55
Speaker 1: forget this Shuttle program, go to Mars. That started languaghing,
46:59
Speaker 1: and then um the current administration said, let's go back
47:03
Speaker 1: to the Moon. The current administration said, what did Obama say?
47:06
Speaker 1: We'll do the opposite of that, right, So now the
47:09
Speaker 1: man now The current target date is mind bogglingly tight.
47:15
Speaker 1: The the target is to put humans on the Moon
47:19
Speaker 1: again in five years and four years after that establish
47:24
Speaker 1: a moon base. That is extremely ambitious. Yeah, and I
47:29
Speaker 1: think most people UM kind of acknowledge, like, you know,
47:33
Speaker 1: we're not gonna hit that date, but hopefully NASA doesn't.
47:37
Speaker 1: These are outsiders say they're on target. Well, even the
47:41
Speaker 1: outsiders I think are saying, hopefully we'll be within a
47:43
Speaker 1: few years of that. It's possible. I mean, one reason
47:47
Speaker 1: why it is possible is because NASA today has a
47:50
Speaker 1: thriving commercial space industry to work with, and they they
47:54
Speaker 1: are embracing wholehearted partnering with them. Now, how does that work.
47:58
Speaker 1: They just pay those private firms a lot of money
48:01
Speaker 1: to to tap their resources. Yeah, if you get a
48:04
Speaker 1: contract to build the lunar lander for NASA, you might
48:09
Speaker 1: as well just be printing money. Um. They I think
48:12
Speaker 1: the current administrator for NASA UM estimated recently that it
48:17
Speaker 1: would be about thirty billion dollars to get back to
48:20
Speaker 1: the Moon. And they put out a call the designs
48:23
Speaker 1: UM for designs for their lunar Lunar lander, and so
48:27
Speaker 1: Jeff Bezos, remember I went to New York to see
48:30
Speaker 1: the Blue Origin unveiling. That's what he was doing, was
48:32
Speaker 1: unveiling their thing called Blue Moon. It's a lunar lander.
48:35
Speaker 1: It's got a flat top like kidn play, and um,
48:39
Speaker 1: you can put anything on it, a lunar rover, a
48:41
Speaker 1: bunch of scientists, a lab, whatever you want, or pieces
48:45
Speaker 1: to a space base, a moon base and build it
48:49
Speaker 1: slowly like that. Um, and it looks pretty good. Nice,
48:53
Speaker 1: and it runs on hydrogen, which is big because they're
48:56
Speaker 1: gonna start landing on the South Pole of the Moon,
48:59
Speaker 1: which is where they think permanent ices which can be mined, right, Yeah,
49:04
Speaker 1: they haven't. They haven't been to the South Pole first
49:06
Speaker 1: of all with any of the Apollo missions, So that
49:09
Speaker 1: makes a lot of sense to go there. And yeah,
49:11
Speaker 1: like you said, they got ice there. They can split
49:14
Speaker 1: that hydrogen and oxygen thanks to electrolysis, and then you
49:18
Speaker 1: can make rocket fuel. So used to get back potentially. Yeah,
49:22
Speaker 1: I mean the the command module when it was orbiting
49:24
Speaker 1: the Moon, it was operating on liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.
49:29
Speaker 1: So this is like an old technology, but the new
49:32
Speaker 1: thing is we would be mining it on the Moon. Amazing,
49:35
Speaker 1: and the kind of the logical conclusion of that then
49:38
Speaker 1: is if we can establish a permanent presence on the Moon.
49:41
Speaker 1: That's the new motto. So this program, which I think
49:44
Speaker 1: is kind of awesome, is called the Artemis program. This
49:47
Speaker 1: returned to the Moon sister to uh Apollo, right, which
49:51
Speaker 1: makes sense. But it's also the program that's expected to
49:53
Speaker 1: put the first woman on the Moon, which right, pretty cool. Um,
49:57
Speaker 1: But the the the way that they're saying is now
49:59
Speaker 1: we're going to return to the Moon and stay there.
50:02
Speaker 1: Like that's the point, Like, we're permanently returning to the
50:05
Speaker 1: Moon now. Um. So once we do that, we'll have
50:09
Speaker 1: a new place to launch an outer space I mean,
50:12
Speaker 1: remember how many pounds of thrust and how much fuel
50:15
Speaker 1: that first stage of the Saturn took and then the
50:17
Speaker 1: second stage. This doesn't require any of them. And so
50:20
Speaker 1: the plan is to build a small space station in
50:24
Speaker 1: permanent orbit around the Moon that you fly out to
50:28
Speaker 1: and then just like you keep a boat at your
50:30
Speaker 1: lake house tied up, they're gonna keep a lunar lander
50:33
Speaker 1: tied up to that to that um that that space station,
50:37
Speaker 1: and you just kind of go back and forth to
50:39
Speaker 1: the Moon using that. Amazing, it is pretty amazing. And
50:42
Speaker 1: they're talking about doing this in five years. Can you
50:44
Speaker 1: imagine the equality of video and audio that we're gonna get.
50:49
Speaker 1: It's gonna be great. It's gonna be pretty sweet. And
50:51
Speaker 1: I've seen that there are starting to like you were
50:54
Speaker 1: talking about with commercial tourism, Like I saw something like
50:58
Speaker 1: five million. Can at you to the moon? It's pretty
51:02
Speaker 1: soon the moon or just orbiting the moon. Oh, I'm
51:05
Speaker 1: sorry to the to the space station. The I S
51:07
Speaker 1: S five million, which is not bad because they wanted
51:10
Speaker 1: to charge Lance Bass like thirty million or something crazy
51:13
Speaker 1: like that. It's like HDTVs back in the day. Is
51:15
Speaker 1: that price is gonna just keep coming down everybody. Pretty
51:18
Speaker 1: soon you're gonna be able to go to the moon
51:19
Speaker 1: for cool even Lance Basking afford that you got anything else, no, sir, Well,
51:27
Speaker 1: congratulations to the world for fifty years of having been
51:30
Speaker 1: on the moon the first time. I'm proud of us.
51:34
Speaker 1: Uh And since Chuck said hooray, that means it's time
51:37
Speaker 1: for a listener. May I'm gonna call this one I've
51:42
Speaker 1: been meaning to read for a while. We did a
51:43
Speaker 1: show about Live Aid and do they know it's Christmas?
51:46
Speaker 1: And we're like, we love that song. Who doesn't love
51:48
Speaker 1: that song? It turns out a lot of people don't
51:50
Speaker 1: love that song really because the message is flawed. Oh yeah,
51:53
Speaker 1: yeah when you look at the lyrics. Uh, hey, guys,
51:56
Speaker 1: we'll listen to the show on Live Aid and the
51:58
Speaker 1: song do they know it's Christmas? What? That's such a
52:00
Speaker 1: great song. Call me a fuddy duddy. But what I
52:03
Speaker 1: hear is this, There won't be any snow in Africa
52:07
Speaker 1: this Christmas time. The greatest gift they'll get this year
52:11
Speaker 1: is life. And he went, oh, I think, he said,
52:15
Speaker 1: where nothing ever grows. It's like, that's not possible. Africa's
52:19
Speaker 1: is large cottin it with lots of growing things. Uh,
52:22
Speaker 1: no rains or rivers flow. Ever heard of the Nile?
52:26
Speaker 1: That's North Africa? Um? He said. Basically, it treats Africa
52:32
Speaker 1: as a single, homogeneous region when in fact it's incredibly
52:34
Speaker 1: large and diverse, ignores the fact that most of Africa's
52:37
Speaker 1: in the southern hemisphere, so Christmas is in the summer there,
52:42
Speaker 1: and assumes that lack of knowledge of Christmas is a
52:44
Speaker 1: flaw caused by lack of resources in good weather, rather
52:48
Speaker 1: than a reasonable cultural difference. Considering the large Uh that
52:51
Speaker 1: a large percentage of Africans are not Christian. I think
52:54
Speaker 1: this guy is taking the do they know it's Christmas? Literally? Well,
52:58
Speaker 1: a lot of people wrote in about this. I gotta say,
53:00
Speaker 1: I think the point of the lyrics was they have
53:03
Speaker 1: so much hardship in front of their faces. Are they
53:07
Speaker 1: even aware that Christmas time has come? The holiday spirit
53:10
Speaker 1: in season hasn't even shown up there because there's so
53:13
Speaker 1: much hardship. That's the point of the lyrics. Come on.
53:19
Speaker 1: He finishes by saying this, it's okay if you like
53:21
Speaker 1: the song it's sketchy, but please don't claim that everyone
53:23
Speaker 1: should like it. Everyone should like that song. And that's
53:26
Speaker 1: anonymous from a bunch of people. I bet you're anonymous.
53:31
Speaker 1: Uh well, thank you for writing. And we always love
53:33
Speaker 1: opposing opinions, right, thanks bo Yeah right, He's like, if
53:39
Speaker 1: my lyrics had been accepted, it would have been a
53:41
Speaker 1: much better song. Uh well, if you want to point
53:45
Speaker 1: out that something we like is actually heinous, we love
53:47
Speaker 1: hearing that kind of stuff. You can go on to
53:50
Speaker 1: stuff you should not dot com and there you're gonna
53:52
Speaker 1: find all of our social links Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, that's it,
53:58
Speaker 1: and you can send us an email which makes even
54:00
Speaker 1: more sense, Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom,
54:02
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54:05
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54:11
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54:13
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