Speaker 1: My welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heeart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
Speaker 1: to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1: My normal co host, Robert Lamb is out of town
Speaker 1: this week, so I am bringing you an interview episode.
Speaker 1: It's an interview with Brandon Fibbs, who is the host
Speaker 1: of a new podcast on the I Heeart Radio network
Speaker 1: called Nine Days in July, which is as a profile
Speaker 1: of each of the nine days of the Apollo eleven
Speaker 1: mission in nineteen sixty nine, the mission that landed on
Speaker 1: the Moon. I've started listening to this podcast and a
Speaker 1: few episodes in and I'm hooked. I think Brandon is
Speaker 1: doing an excellent job with this and it goes into
Speaker 1: some really incredible depth. So I had a conversation with
Speaker 1: Brandon about the Apollo eleven mission and about this podcast
Speaker 1: that he's put together. It was a really fun conversation
Speaker 1: and I think you're really going to enjoy it. Before
Speaker 1: we jump into the interview here, let's just play the
Speaker 1: trailer for Nine Days in July to give you a
Speaker 1: taste of things to come. Ignition sequenced. You think you
Speaker 1: know the story of Apollo eleven. But you don't what
Speaker 1: you know is only a small part of the most
Speaker 1: profound human achievement in history. I believe that this nation
Speaker 1: should commit itself to achieving the goal of landing a
Speaker 1: man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.
Speaker 1: Less than three weeks after launching the first American into space,
Speaker 1: a trip that lasted only fifteen minutes, the President went
Speaker 1: before Congress and charged the country with landing on the
Speaker 1: Moon before the end of the decade. And why so
Speaker 1: that we could wallop the Russians, he d look. This
Speaker 1: was one of the most tumultuous eras in American history.
Speaker 1: The profoundly unpopular Vietnam War was raging on without an
Speaker 1: end in sight. Back home, at the Democratic Convention, thousands
Speaker 1: of demonstrators clashed violently with police. They said they were
Speaker 1: there to protest the war, poverty, racism, and other social aliens.
Speaker 1: Some of them were also determined to provoke a confrontation.
Speaker 1: The United States seemed to be coming apart at the
Speaker 1: seems America needed a reason to reach for a greatness
Speaker 1: beyond our misfortunes. We needed Apollo god Spade. Pulling off
Speaker 1: Kennedy's audacious vision required hundreds of thousands of people, tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of companies, and tens of billions of dollars
Speaker 1: to go to the moon and discontay and do the
Speaker 1: other things, not because they are easy, because they are
Speaker 1: on Using never before heard mission audio, I'm going to
Speaker 1: take you through the family lives that fueled the astronauts,
Speaker 1: the political intrigue that cleared the way, and the collective
Speaker 1: drive of the country that pushed us into the future.
Speaker 1: This is Nine Days in July. New episodes arrive every
Speaker 1: Thursday through February six. Listen to Nine Days in July
Speaker 1: on the I Heart Radio app, on Apple podcasts, or
Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts. Well, without any further delay,
Speaker 1: I think we're going to jump right into my conversation
Speaker 1: with Brandon Fibbs. Hey, Brandon, welcome to the show. Thank
Speaker 1: you so very much. So I guess first of all,
Speaker 1: would you like to talk a little bit about your
Speaker 1: own background, maybe introduce yourself and talk about how you
Speaker 1: got so interested in spaceflight. Yeah, my name is Brandon Phibbs.
Speaker 1: I am uh. I've spent the last roughly ten fifteen
Speaker 1: years in film and television. I actually began as a
Speaker 1: film critic writing about other people's films and television shows,
Speaker 1: and then realized, I want people to write about mine.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go get into production myself. So moved to
Speaker 1: l A and stumbled into science documentaries. I went to
Speaker 1: l A like everyone wants to go you want to
Speaker 1: make big movies, and my first production was Cosmos of
Speaker 1: Space Time Odyssey with Neilo grass Tyson. And then I
Speaker 1: realized working on that, I don't want to this is
Speaker 1: the kind of stuff I want to do. I want
Speaker 1: to I want to light people on fire for for
Speaker 1: amazing science. And so I was able to buy and
Speaker 1: large work mostly in science documentaries. Worked with Morgan Freeman
Speaker 1: on Through the Wormhole for a couple of seasons, and
Speaker 1: the Story of God with Morgan Freeman, and a number
Speaker 1: of Science Channel specials and whatnot. And that's that's really
Speaker 1: where um, that's really what you know. I found a
Speaker 1: lot of tremendous satisfaction in that. And then recently I've
Speaker 1: kind of been migrating to podcasts. There's just so many
Speaker 1: ways to tell extraordinary science and history stories. So I'm
Speaker 1: one of these people who if I could go back
Speaker 1: in time and tell my young self Hey, Brandon, here
Speaker 1: are the things. They're gonna light you on fire, and
Speaker 1: you're gonna be passionate about. When you're an adult, you're
Speaker 1: gonna probably want to change your life trajectory right now.
Speaker 1: You're gonna want to change the stuff you studied, and
Speaker 1: rather than study English literature and filmmaking, you're gonna want
Speaker 1: to study science. Um, but I didn't. And so now
Speaker 1: I'm at the place in my life where I'm like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I if I could go back in time to be
Speaker 1: a scientist, I would. But all of my all of
Speaker 1: my work, experience and stuff is in in television documentaries
Speaker 1: and whatnot and now podcasting. And so let's find the
Speaker 1: Vinn diagram of life where science and entertainment overlap. And
Speaker 1: let's drop right down in that little section there, and
Speaker 1: let's make amazing things that popularize science and basically, you know,
Speaker 1: let's find extraordinary stories that are gonna warp people's minds.
Speaker 1: And uh so that's kind of my like life goal
Speaker 1: these days. Wow, I can really identify with you there.
Speaker 1: Actually I also am from a humanity's background, but like
Speaker 1: later in life, got the science bug and in some
Speaker 1: ways kind of wished I've done things different, but also
Speaker 1: I don't know, it helps to be able to bring
Speaker 1: that kind of storytelling sensibility to science as well well.
Speaker 1: And the and the longer I've done it, the more
Speaker 1: I've realized, and the more like actual scientists that I
Speaker 1: speak with an interview or befriend, the more I realized
Speaker 1: that this sort of advocacy is so critical for what
Speaker 1: they do. The there's they're busy being scientists, and so
Speaker 1: you know, it needs people like us to say, look
Speaker 1: world at what the incredible things that they are doing. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: Now I know I've read that you also have experience
Speaker 1: as a pilot though were you were piloting an S
Speaker 1: three Viking? Is that right? Not a pilot? So to
Speaker 1: use to use a film metaphor, um, I was a
Speaker 1: combination of Goose from Top Gun, the guy who sat
Speaker 1: behind the pilot in three, and I was a combination
Speaker 1: with jones Uh with jones E, the guy from the
Speaker 1: Hunt for October who was calling crazy ivans. My job
Speaker 1: was to hunt submarines. So the S three Viking was
Speaker 1: a patrol aircraft, a sub hunting aircraft, and we would
Speaker 1: fly in the ocean and we would drop Sona buoys
Speaker 1: and these SONA buoys would release hydrophones and we could
Speaker 1: deploy them to various depths, and we would listen for submarines,
Speaker 1: and based on the mathematical logarithmic transcripts that would come
Speaker 1: up on my screen, I could tell you, if I
Speaker 1: was very lucky, you know exactly what kind of submarine
Speaker 1: we were flying over, whether it was turning left, turning right, diving, ascending, whatever,
Speaker 1: and sometimes specifically specific submarine we were flying over, so
Speaker 1: that I was I was the backseater. Okay, Now, uh,
Speaker 1: how did you end up doing this? Like a lot
Speaker 1: of these people who ended up in the Apollo program,
Speaker 1: did you long have a passion for for flight? I
Speaker 1: think that, you know, like any red blooded American kid,
Speaker 1: you know, you grow up loving dinosaurs and space and
Speaker 1: and flying and these sorts of things. I actually, when
Speaker 1: I got out of I had started college and then realized,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm gonna need some more money for college
Speaker 1: and blah blah blah, and I had taken an internship.
Speaker 1: I've done an internship in Washington, d C. Congressional internship
Speaker 1: working for my congressman on Capitol Hill. And I was
Speaker 1: just surrounded by military guys and just all kinds of
Speaker 1: different things, and I thought, hey, this, this looks fantastic.
Speaker 1: This would be a way to kind of give back
Speaker 1: to my country but also get what I kind of
Speaker 1: need to further my life and my me for school
Speaker 1: and whatnot. And so it was actually there that I
Speaker 1: kind of came up with the idea joined the military,
Speaker 1: and then spent most of my uh, most of my
Speaker 1: time in the military was actually overseas. It was in Sicily.
Speaker 1: Spent three three years in Sicily and three extraordinary years,
Speaker 1: I should say, and just spent all of that time
Speaker 1: in Europe and traveling all over Europe and even West Africa,
Speaker 1: and it was an extraordinary thing. But yeah, I thought
Speaker 1: at the time actually that I might be pursuing um
Speaker 1: flight and then perhaps even hey, lot, what if I should,
Speaker 1: you know, should I try to become an astronaut? And
Speaker 1: then I just realized, and this kind of goes back
Speaker 1: to what I was saying earlier in terms of like
Speaker 1: I should have been a scientist. There are also certain
Speaker 1: things that I realized I can't do that my mind's
Speaker 1: not exactly made for. And a lot of that is
Speaker 1: complex math and and some really complex you know, physics
Speaker 1: and stuff like that, the kind of things I would
Speaker 1: actually need to become an astronaut. And uh so I
Speaker 1: was like, Okay, let's just stick with the let's stick
Speaker 1: with the story telling, and uh tell the stories of
Speaker 1: these people who can do those complex math and stuff
Speaker 1: like that you can't do, Brandon. That's interesting. Well, so
Speaker 1: to turn to that story, I guess can can you
Speaker 1: start off just by giving us the top line on
Speaker 1: nine days in July? Tell us you know, you know what,
Speaker 1: what do you want people to know if they remember
Speaker 1: one sentence about this podcast? Yeah, my my friend and
Speaker 1: our executive producer, one of our executive producers, Andrew Jacobs,
Speaker 1: came up with the idea and he basically said, we
Speaker 1: are so familiar with the sort of sound bites of
Speaker 1: Apollo eleven. We know like some sound bites from launch,
Speaker 1: we know a lot of sound bites from the landing,
Speaker 1: but that's about it, Like nobody knows the story of
Speaker 1: Apollo eleven. And so our idea was, it's a nine
Speaker 1: day mission. Let's have nine episodes, and each episode is
Speaker 1: going to focus as real time as possible on each
Speaker 1: day of the mission, and let's tell that story. Now.
Speaker 1: Of course, most of what goes on in a spacecraft
Speaker 1: traveling to and from the Moon is incomprehensible techno babble,
Speaker 1: and so once you strip that out, the is a
Speaker 1: lot less story going on, particularly on those transit days.
Speaker 1: And so we knew that we needed to tell more
Speaker 1: than just that story. And so the idea was that
Speaker 1: we came up with, Okay, let's tell the story that
Speaker 1: is going to contextualize everything that we're going to be
Speaker 1: hearing on that spacecraft. Let's tell the biographies of all
Speaker 1: of these astronauts. Let's learn who the people in mission
Speaker 1: control are. Let's talk to scientists about what the moon
Speaker 1: is made of and how it was formed. Let's learn
Speaker 1: about the political dynamics of the space race and and
Speaker 1: and communism and fighting against Russia to to beat everyone
Speaker 1: to the moon. Let's let's take all of these stories
Speaker 1: and tell these stories and bounce back and forth between
Speaker 1: them and the spacecraft, so that when you walk away
Speaker 1: after nine episodes, you not only understand intimately what happened
Speaker 1: on this mission, and you know these guys who worked
Speaker 1: on this in a really profoundly human way, but you
Speaker 1: also come away with a much greater understanding of how
Speaker 1: we got to where where we were when we went
Speaker 1: to the moon, who everyone was and and and what
Speaker 1: the political sort of impetus was to to do it
Speaker 1: in the first place. Yeah, it's a really engrossing approach.
Speaker 1: I'm a couple of episodes in and I've been really
Speaker 1: enjoying the show so far. So maybe we should uh
Speaker 1: turn to these these figures like Neil Armstrong, buzz Aldrin
Speaker 1: and Michael Collins. Can you give a brief sketch of
Speaker 1: of who these three astronauts were? Yeah, So Neil Armstrong
Speaker 1: and a lot of people who didn't kind of know
Speaker 1: more of his story were kind of introduced to him
Speaker 1: recently in the film First Man last year, and that
Speaker 1: was a really good kind of examination. You know. I
Speaker 1: had a lot of friends who who said they they
Speaker 1: found Neil Armstrong really inaccessible because Ryan Gosling's portrayal was
Speaker 1: such that he kind of kept the audience at a distance,
Speaker 1: at an arm's length, and didn't really he didn't feel human.
Speaker 1: And what I told them is that's who Neil Armstrong was.
Speaker 1: Neil Armstrong and buzz Aldren were kind of what we
Speaker 1: what we would have described at the time as squares.
Speaker 1: They were sort of very straight laced and uptie eight
Speaker 1: and and it's one of the things that ruined, frankly,
Speaker 1: both of their marriages in the long run. Um. They
Speaker 1: were just so singularly focused on what they did and
Speaker 1: their jobs, um that they to the exclusion of everything else.
Speaker 1: And then you have Mike Collins, who was jovial and
Speaker 1: and quick witted, and he was the jokester, he was
Speaker 1: the prankster, he was always he was the one that
Speaker 1: you'd want to go have a beer with. And and
Speaker 1: none of these guys actually even really got along. I mean,
Speaker 1: they got along just fine, but they weren't friends. They
Speaker 1: didn't have some sort of like you know, off campus
Speaker 1: sort of relationship in which they hung out. Um. Any
Speaker 1: of the pictures that we have in Life magazine and
Speaker 1: stuff like that showing them all hanging out was completely created,
Speaker 1: fabricated for you know, the magazine. It was just like
Speaker 1: to sell copy. But what we needed were three men
Speaker 1: who are at the top of their intellectual game, who
Speaker 1: worked together, who are professionals, who are the best people
Speaker 1: suited for this particular job. And that's what these three
Speaker 1: guys were. They all came, they were all aviators, they
Speaker 1: all came from flight experience. Neil was in the Navy,
Speaker 1: the other two guys were in the Air Force, and
Speaker 1: they all came out of the Korean War, and some
Speaker 1: of them from test flight experience, and just basically pushing
Speaker 1: the boundaries to do the most extraordinary things possible until
Speaker 1: the most extraordinary thing human beings have ever done was
Speaker 1: presented to them and dropped in their laps. Now we
Speaker 1: know that it wasn't just the three astronauts, of course,
Speaker 1: could you talk a little bit about the cathedral, about
Speaker 1: the flight controllers and the mission planners and all of
Speaker 1: the you know, the thousands of of support figures who
Speaker 1: made the mission possible. You bet you know. And I'll
Speaker 1: just keep doing what I'm about to do just because
Speaker 1: I think it's a really a really accessible way for
Speaker 1: people to identify what's going on. But you know, if
Speaker 1: you've ever seen the movie Apollo thirteen, you know that
Speaker 1: did a wonderful job of kind of setting up. As
Speaker 1: much time as you spent in the spacecraft, you also
Speaker 1: spent in mission control and mission control what had four
Speaker 1: rotating teams of two dozen people at all of these consoles,
Speaker 1: and every console oversaw a different aspect of the flight
Speaker 1: at different aspect of the spacecraft, or you know, you'd
Speaker 1: even have doctors who are monitoring the health of the
Speaker 1: astronauts themselves, and these shifts would just these guys would
Speaker 1: just rotate through the ships. But even within mission control,
Speaker 1: you had whole offices, whole squadrons of people who are
Speaker 1: supporting each one of those consoles so large, you had hundreds,
Speaker 1: if not thousands of people. Technically, especially thousands when you
Speaker 1: consider that all of the companies that built the spacecraft
Speaker 1: and did all these things were we're only a phone
Speaker 1: call away. You have thousands of people supporting the mission
Speaker 1: every single day, UM, and it was an extraordinary Basically,
Speaker 1: in many ways, some of the people in mission control
Speaker 1: will call were referred to as the co pilots of
Speaker 1: Apollo eleven, and that's in many ways very true. They
Speaker 1: were monitoring every aspect of the flight. They were there
Speaker 1: for every aspect of the flight. And yet the only
Speaker 1: voice you ever hear, however, UM on any of these
Speaker 1: tapes is Capcom. Because none of these mission controllers talked
Speaker 1: to the spacecraft. That would just get too confusing, So
Speaker 1: everyone went through CAPCOM, the capsule communicator, who was also
Speaker 1: an astronaut so that he understood everything that was going
Speaker 1: on in mission control, and he intimately understood what it
Speaker 1: was like to be on the inside of that spacecraft.
Speaker 1: And so he was the funnel through which all the
Speaker 1: communications ran. Uh. Yeah, you can imagine how chaotic it
Speaker 1: would have gotten otherwise. Um. Now, among the flight controllers,
Speaker 1: one of the strange facts mentioned in one of your
Speaker 1: early episodes is that, uh in that room, the average
Speaker 1: age was about twenty six. Why so young? What's going
Speaker 1: on there? So you have space flights and new science
Speaker 1: right like we we we've have these visions of like
Speaker 1: the Mercury program and the Gemini program and then the
Speaker 1: Apollo program. There was not a whole lot of years
Speaker 1: between all of those programs. Um, you know, you're talking
Speaker 1: less than ten years of human space fight. By the
Speaker 1: time we landed on the Moon, we'd only been going
Speaker 1: into space for a couple of years. And more than that.
Speaker 1: At the things that got us there, the things that
Speaker 1: enabled us to do it were computers, and computers were
Speaker 1: brand spanking new. And so it's just like today if
Speaker 1: you um, you know, when we were growing up, our
Speaker 1: parents who were always telling us, hey, how do you
Speaker 1: stop the flashing twelve, you know, twelve o'clock on the VCR, kids,
Speaker 1: and need you to fix that for me. And the
Speaker 1: reason they were calling on the kids is because it
Speaker 1: was effortless for young people to integrate with technology. And
Speaker 1: these days, of course, it's you know, how do I
Speaker 1: fix Facebook or Instagram's acting up or you know, TikTok
Speaker 1: or whatever. You ask your kids, or you ask your grandkids,
Speaker 1: because they just get it intuitively. Um. And that's exactly
Speaker 1: what it was like here. Younger people were the ones
Speaker 1: who understood computers. Computers were brand spanking new, and so basically,
Speaker 1: if you want to go to space with new technology,
Speaker 1: you need people who understand that new technology, and so
Speaker 1: mission control had was made up. Like you said, twenty
Speaker 1: six years old was the average age, and for some
Speaker 1: of these guys, for a great many of these guys,
Speaker 1: it was their very first job, read out of college,
Speaker 1: and they're thrust with, like you know, into this being
Speaker 1: responsible for the most extraordinary thing humans have ever done. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of hard to imagine, actually. Um. Now, another
Speaker 1: thing that you talked about in the podcast is the
Speaker 1: fact that, of course uh NASA was a very male
Speaker 1: dominated work culture at the time, but You also mentioned
Speaker 1: the story of these like math experts who would check
Speaker 1: the work of the engineers, many of them female mathematicians,
Speaker 1: sometimes called the time computer rests like Poppy north Cut,
Speaker 1: can can you talk about that experience? Poppy north Cut
Speaker 1: was one of my favorite interviews on this show. And
Speaker 1: unfortunately time constraints and different things have have trimmed what
Speaker 1: you're going to hear from her. But Poppy was Poppy
Speaker 1: needs her own podcast. She was someone who yeah, she
Speaker 1: she got degrees in mathematics, and she was brought in
Speaker 1: to check the men's work. And of course, you can
Speaker 1: imagine in this time frame in the mid sixties and
Speaker 1: in late sixties, there were a lot of guys who
Speaker 1: did exactly think they needed their work checked and if
Speaker 1: it did that, it certainly didn't need to be checked
Speaker 1: by this young twenty seven year old blonde in a
Speaker 1: miniskirt sort of situation. And the amount of sexism that
Speaker 1: she faced. There's a moment that I mentioned the podcast
Speaker 1: of I believe it was in the ABC anchor was
Speaker 1: interviewing her and he specifically said that, like, what's it
Speaker 1: like being a beautiful young woman in a mini skirt
Speaker 1: around here among all these men, and it's she persevered
Speaker 1: like she she had this mindset of I recognize that
Speaker 1: if I'm going to make a difference, I have to
Speaker 1: push through this. I have to be stronger than this.
Speaker 1: I have to tolerate some of this. The stuff I
Speaker 1: don't have to tolerate, I'm gonna call out. But she
Speaker 1: was extraordinarily important, and not only Apollo levin getting them
Speaker 1: to and from the Moon. Her calculations helped them with
Speaker 1: all of their orbits and getting out of orbit and
Speaker 1: returning back to Earth. She also played a key component
Speaker 1: in Apollo thirteen when they had so many problems going
Speaker 1: on their spacecraft. She was there for many of the
Speaker 1: Apollo missions. Now now she is a advocate. She became
Speaker 1: a lawyer. She got out of doing science, then became
Speaker 1: a lawyer, and she advocates for women's rights and feminism.
Speaker 1: And she took on the Houston UH Police and the
Speaker 1: Houston Fire Department and made sure that women could integrate
Speaker 1: into those uh those institutions. And even today she is
Speaker 1: just on the front lines of women's rights issues um
Speaker 1: as a lawyer and advocate. And she has, like I said,
Speaker 1: she needs her own podcast. She's extraordinary, all right, we
Speaker 1: need to take a quick break, but we will be
Speaker 1: right back with more than and we're back all right.
Speaker 1: Maybe we should talk a bit about the hardware and
Speaker 1: the technology that made the mission possible. One of the
Speaker 1: first things I think that would deserve attention here is
Speaker 1: the Saturn five rocket, which I remember I don't recall
Speaker 1: which astronaut it was, but it was somebody who had
Speaker 1: been lifted up on it describing it as a living,
Speaker 1: breathing organism Underneathan, Uh, what what's um? What? What makes
Speaker 1: the Saturn five so special in the history of space exploration?
Speaker 1: The Saturn five is the largest, heaviest, most powerful rocket
Speaker 1: human beings have ever created. NASA is currently building the SLS,
Speaker 1: the Space Launch System. This is the rocket that's going
Speaker 1: to be returning us to the Moon in a couple
Speaker 1: of years and eventually setting us on a path for Mars.
Speaker 1: But until that is built and tested and first run,
Speaker 1: the Saturn five remains, fifty years later, the largest, most powerful,
Speaker 1: heaviest launch vehicle humans have ever built. We we've nothing
Speaker 1: comes close to touching it yet. UM, And it was
Speaker 1: something that was designed and built UM was the brainchild
Speaker 1: UM of Werner von Braun An ex Nazi. He was
Speaker 1: one of the Nazis that, uh, the Americans kind of
Speaker 1: grabbed out of Nazi Germany when when Germany was falling
Speaker 1: after World War Two, we brought our thousands of Nazis
Speaker 1: as part of an Operation paper Clip. So Operation paper
Speaker 1: Clip was this was this government program in which we
Speaker 1: seized thousands of of ex Nazi scientists and engineers, brought
Speaker 1: them back to the United States and basically said, hey,
Speaker 1: you were making some pretty devastating technology like the V
Speaker 1: two rockets and stuff like that that was raining down
Speaker 1: fire all over London and lots of other parts of Europe,
Speaker 1: and hey, we want you to make those for us too.
Speaker 1: And a lot of these guys weren't they weren't died
Speaker 1: in the woold Nazis. They were conscripted. They were you know,
Speaker 1: told to build this or else sort of situations. And
Speaker 1: once they were out of that, they were able to say, hey,
Speaker 1: you know what I what I really want to do
Speaker 1: is build rockets to send people into space. And the
Speaker 1: government US government wasn't interested in that. They wanted to
Speaker 1: be able to, you know, after World War Two, we
Speaker 1: suddenly found ourselves in a Cold War with Russia. We
Speaker 1: just a couple of years later stumbled into a second
Speaker 1: war again with within Korea, and so basically they just
Speaker 1: wanted these guys to design missiles. But it wasn't until
Speaker 1: sput Nick suddenly kind of changed the dynamic. And once
Speaker 1: Russia launched sput Nick and we suddenly realized. And then
Speaker 1: Sputnik two, just four weeks later launched a dog into space.
Speaker 1: The dog's name was like It, which is also the
Speaker 1: name of my dog. Um. That dog into space suddenly
Speaker 1: made people realize, oh wait, that's possible to launch like
Speaker 1: living creatures into space. And then suddenly people started turning
Speaker 1: to people like Verna von Braun and others and saying, okay,
Speaker 1: you have permission now start designing real giant, big rockets,
Speaker 1: not just missiles. And so the Saturn five is is yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the most complex thing that we've ever built. It's
Speaker 1: the reason we got to the Moon. Well, I want
Speaker 1: to come back to some of those political implications and
Speaker 1: just a little bit, but to go on with some
Speaker 1: of the more some of the other technology from the mission.
Speaker 1: So we've got the Saturn five rocket, and that is
Speaker 1: that's sort of the launch delivery program that that NASA
Speaker 1: came up with to get us to the moon was
Speaker 1: only one of several options that were considered, right, well,
Speaker 1: what were what was some of the thinking about how
Speaker 1: to get to the moon and back, and what were
Speaker 1: the other options that we could have tried. Well, so
Speaker 1: they had a number of different options, and the first
Speaker 1: one was the one that's been popularized in every silly
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties sort of sci fi movie you've ever seen,
Speaker 1: and that is you see, you see like sort of
Speaker 1: a prototypical rocket and the rocket is fully formed and
Speaker 1: it lands on some on the moon or some outer
Speaker 1: space planet. People climb out of it and do their thing,
Speaker 1: climb back into it, and it launches back off again.
Speaker 1: But you you can imagine, you've, you know, everyone's seen
Speaker 1: pictures of the Saturn five, something that big, going in
Speaker 1: one piece, going into space in one complete piece, and
Speaker 1: then landing on the Moon again like something like that's
Speaker 1: never gonna happen. The weight would just be prohibitive. The
Speaker 1: size is just so big. And yet people consider that
Speaker 1: that was one of the options, and then then they
Speaker 1: just realized there's no way that Saturn five in that
Speaker 1: size and weight is even going to get out of
Speaker 1: orbit much less land on the Moon and get back
Speaker 1: off of it. Another option was, okay, we launch multiple
Speaker 1: launches with all of the various little spacecraft and once
Speaker 1: they're in Earth orbit, we docked them all together and
Speaker 1: we do all of these things and then we take
Speaker 1: off for the Moon. Um and that was also seen
Speaker 1: as clearly cost prohibitive. We have numerous launches, blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: What they ultimately came down to was lunar orbit rendezvous,
Speaker 1: and that is, let's put everything in a single rocket,
Speaker 1: let's make it build big enough to launch into orbit,
Speaker 1: and then let's do all of our docking that's needed
Speaker 1: around the Moon. And that terrified people at the time
Speaker 1: because at the time we came up with that idea,
Speaker 1: we hadn't we hadn't even docked anyone in orbit around Earth.
Speaker 1: Gemini hadn't even yet achieved that. So everyone was really
Speaker 1: terrified of hundreds of thousands of miles away doing all
Speaker 1: of this docking, so far away from any sort of
Speaker 1: help that could be rendered if they were closer to home.
Speaker 1: So that kind of terrified people. But ultimately they realized
Speaker 1: cost effective, size effective, gas, gas fuel, everything just made
Speaker 1: that that one made the most sense. And so they
Speaker 1: kind of went with it, and that's how we came
Speaker 1: up with lunar orbit rendezvous. Now, do you think that
Speaker 1: the lunar orbit rendezvous was really the only way we
Speaker 1: could have reached the Moon and the time frame we
Speaker 1: did it was very likely the only way we could
Speaker 1: have reached the Moon in the timeframe we did. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not necessarily the only way we could have done it.
Speaker 1: Um And in fact, there were One of the other
Speaker 1: options I didn't mention was that option of basically launching
Speaker 1: certain elements of your mission, landing those remotely without human
Speaker 1: beings on the surface of the Moon, then launching your
Speaker 1: crew and then they land on the Moon and what
Speaker 1: they need is already there waiting for them. That version
Speaker 1: is already what we're pretty much thinking about. In terms
Speaker 1: of going to Mars. The recognition that a long trip
Speaker 1: to Mars, the long you know it's gonna take, I
Speaker 1: believe it's like six months to get to Mars. You'd
Speaker 1: have to be on the Martian surface for more than
Speaker 1: a year before this the planets were to align for
Speaker 1: you to even come back again for another like six
Speaker 1: month trip. So there's like when human beings go to Mars.
Speaker 1: It's going to be a year's long effort, and that
Speaker 1: can't all everything, all that infrastructure, all of that hardware,
Speaker 1: can't be contained in a single space craft, and so
Speaker 1: the idea is that is going to have to be
Speaker 1: requiring multiple launches. You get to Mars, you start generating
Speaker 1: new rocket fuel for the return from the Martian soil.
Speaker 1: This is all being done automatically, uh, with robots and whatnot.
Speaker 1: And then so by the time that the Martian astronauts
Speaker 1: actually land and start doing their exploration, they have habitats
Speaker 1: set up and everything has been going on. That was
Speaker 1: an option that people considered for the Moon as well,
Speaker 1: but people realized Kennedy said, by the end of the decade,
Speaker 1: I want people walking on the Moon by the end
Speaker 1: of the decade, and not just walking on the Moon.
Speaker 1: They have to come home safely, and to do that
Speaker 1: they this mission, uh profile made the most sense. Yeah,
Speaker 1: now thinking about that, that impetus from Kennedy. Of course,
Speaker 1: the moon landing was, you know, this great scientific achievement,
Speaker 1: but your show frequently stresses the political motivations of the
Speaker 1: Apollo program. You know that it was framed in the
Speaker 1: words of Kennedy, I think in the ninete that he
Speaker 1: said it was a contest between freedom, which for him
Speaker 1: obviously meant the United States and tier any, which for
Speaker 1: him in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. How
Speaker 1: do you think this framing of the uh of of
Speaker 1: space exploration as a kind of um, kind of a
Speaker 1: war mobilization almost How did that affect how the Apollo
Speaker 1: program progressed? And do you think the same achievements within
Speaker 1: the same time frame would have been possible if it
Speaker 1: were just treated as a kind of peaceful scientific project.
Speaker 1: More the way we think of space exploration today, I
Speaker 1: don't think we would have gone to the Moon if
Speaker 1: we had done it just for peaceful purposes, uh, in
Speaker 1: the exact same way, for the exact same reason that
Speaker 1: we haven't gone to the moon since, for the exact
Speaker 1: same reason that we are not on the moon now
Speaker 1: that you know, for the exact same reason that we've
Speaker 1: tried to go to the Moon in the past and
Speaker 1: everything fell short that we've tried to you know, do
Speaker 1: moon missions um and those fell apart. We need the
Speaker 1: competition aspect is the thing that drove us. And you know,
Speaker 1: you when you grow up, you have this kind of
Speaker 1: simplistic view of the space program. And you know, when
Speaker 1: you're a kid, you have a simplistic view of lots
Speaker 1: of things. And of course it was just this, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: there's the Russian element of this, but we did this
Speaker 1: for science and exploration and blah blah blah, No we didn't.
Speaker 1: And Kennedy's tapes that were you're gonna hear on episode seven,
Speaker 1: in which we focus specifically on the space race itself.
Speaker 1: There are tapes that didn't come uh to light until
Speaker 1: two thousand and one of Kennedy in the Oval Office
Speaker 1: in the White House talking to various scientific advisors in
Speaker 1: the head of NASA, James Webb, and basically and he says,
Speaker 1: I don't care about space, guys, I don't I just
Speaker 1: want to beat the Russians. Give me something that will
Speaker 1: allow us to embarrass the Russians and and elevate America. Um,
Speaker 1: and let's do that. But I don't care what it is.
Speaker 1: I don't care about space only in so far as
Speaker 1: it's a political gamemanship sort of thing. And of course,
Speaker 1: for most of us growing up, Kennedy is this shining example,
Speaker 1: this this cheerleader for space, and he was that publicly, privately,
Speaker 1: he didn't give a damn about it. He just wanted
Speaker 1: to eat the Russians. Wow. Uh, Now, so you're talking
Speaker 1: about something that would be a sort of symbolic achievement,
Speaker 1: like you that would show the world that we were
Speaker 1: better than the Russians, That would you know, something to
Speaker 1: to efface them. But I wonder also, I mean, what's
Speaker 1: the role of of uh people trying to to imagine
Speaker 1: forward into future military conflicts, because obviously they would have
Speaker 1: had in their recent memory UH air superiority as a
Speaker 1: decisive factor in World War two and and that kind
Speaker 1: of thing. Were they thinking also along those lines? But
Speaker 1: just going to the next level up? Sure? I mean,
Speaker 1: the Cold War was at its essence, space was basically
Speaker 1: just the example that we used to demonstrate to the
Speaker 1: world and to the Soviet Union that we were more
Speaker 1: technologically advanced and more powerful. It was all about technology.
Speaker 1: It was to to you know, do it in a
Speaker 1: kind of a crude sort of way. It was a
Speaker 1: measuring contest, using technology as a yardstick and basically saying,
Speaker 1: you know, hey, our technology is bigger than yours, our
Speaker 1: technology is better than yours, and we just proved it. Um.
Speaker 1: But of course, out of all of that, you know,
Speaker 1: there's so much US military hardware that we used to
Speaker 1: this day that came out of the Apollo program, be
Speaker 1: at the rockets, or the satellites, the spy satellites, the
Speaker 1: you know, there's so much that that it wouldn't be
Speaker 1: here if it wasn't for the Space program. There's also
Speaker 1: a ton of personal stuff. I mean, you wouldn't have
Speaker 1: your cell phones, and you wouldn't have your GPS and
Speaker 1: satellite TV and and half of the medical advances that
Speaker 1: have been made over the last fifty years and stuff
Speaker 1: like that also came out of the space program. And
Speaker 1: you certainly wouldn't have your laptop. So it's not like
Speaker 1: there wasn't it was a purely military effort, But the
Speaker 1: military was more than happy to take the things that
Speaker 1: NASA learned going to the Moon and say, hey, how
Speaker 1: can we use these for for war fighting? We're gonna
Speaker 1: be able to piggyback um a lot of stuff off
Speaker 1: of this and uh and be able to use it
Speaker 1: against our enemies should should have ever become necessary. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know several things you mentioned in the podcast to
Speaker 1: make it clear how in meshed the space program was
Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixties with the Armed forces. I remember
Speaker 1: initially a problem with I don't remember which of the
Speaker 1: three astronauts from eleven it was, but that one of
Speaker 1: them was not eligible to apply to be an astronaut
Speaker 1: because they were not active duty military. Is that correct? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was Neil Armstrong. He got out of the military
Speaker 1: and when he became a test pilot UM and was
Speaker 1: still working with the military and flying all these military aircraft,
Speaker 1: but he was out of the Navy by that point.
Speaker 1: He got out of the Navy when he left Korea
Speaker 1: after his years spent in the Korean War. And Yeah,
Speaker 1: at that time when Mercury, the Project Mercury, and even
Speaker 1: into the early days of Gemini, they were only taking
Speaker 1: military UM personnel because there were so few people they needed,
Speaker 1: you know, pilots who were on the cutting edge of things,
Speaker 1: and you didn't really have civilian pilots flying cutting edge aircraft.
Speaker 1: So it made sense at that time to pull people
Speaker 1: from the military. That's NASA still does it to this day. Um,
Speaker 1: it's not. It's not restricted to the military anymore. Uh.
Speaker 1: And you certainly have various scientists and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: But in terms of your pilots, you know, when you
Speaker 1: were flying the Space Shuttle. I would bet the vast majority,
Speaker 1: if not all, of those pilots for the Space Shuttle
Speaker 1: still came out of the military. Oh yeah, so do
Speaker 1: you do you want to say anything else about this
Speaker 1: was something that that caught my interest in those early episodes,
Speaker 1: the role of um cutting edge aircraft like the X
Speaker 1: fifteen in our sort of escalation towards later space flight. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the X fifteen was one of those aircraft that Neil
Speaker 1: Armstrong flew uh in his test flight experience. The X
Speaker 1: fifteen is basically rocket. It's basically a missile that has
Speaker 1: these tiny, little stubby wings and a cockpit on the
Speaker 1: front um and it is it can't is not capable
Speaker 1: of taking off from the ground. It has to be
Speaker 1: attached to the wing of a bomber and then taken
Speaker 1: up to altitude and then it is dropped and you
Speaker 1: kick on that engine and then you can can head
Speaker 1: up by The X fifteen will fly basically at the
Speaker 1: edge of space. And uh, the control surfaces on the wings,
Speaker 1: those wings are so tiny because it doesn't need them
Speaker 1: to fly it. It needs thrusters and and and uh
Speaker 1: a little like micro jets that are embedded across the
Speaker 1: spacecraft's body of the aircraft's body, because it acts like
Speaker 1: a spacecraft once it gets up there. To control it
Speaker 1: just uses these little puffs of thrusters to to maneuver
Speaker 1: once it's up at high altitude, and then it comes
Speaker 1: in for landings. That glides down in lands in these
Speaker 1: gigantic um salt fields, these in California, flat flat field.
Speaker 1: I think there's a terrifying story you tell about. I
Speaker 1: believe it was Neil Armstrong who's flying in one of
Speaker 1: these and is like trying to descend, but the nose,
Speaker 1: it won't descend because the nose keeps bouncing off of
Speaker 1: the top of the atmosphere. Yes, yeah, it wouldn't. He
Speaker 1: couldn't get it down. He was he was running low
Speaker 1: on fuel. It was time to come back home. He
Speaker 1: tried to angle it the plane down. It wouldn't do it.
Speaker 1: It kept bouncing off the atmosphere and bouncing back up.
Speaker 1: And he was finally able to get it under control,
Speaker 1: but he completely ran out of fuel and he was
Speaker 1: coming back towards Edwards Air Force Space, which is outside
Speaker 1: far outside Los Angeles. But he was coming down so
Speaker 1: fast and so out of his flight zone that he
Speaker 1: was coming like straight down into Pasadena and was able
Speaker 1: finally to get controls and and bring himself back in,
Speaker 1: but he landed. It was one of dozens of times
Speaker 1: that Neil Armstrong practically died um doing that job, because
Speaker 1: he barely eked it back home in time. And that
Speaker 1: was that was something that so many of these guys did.
Speaker 1: You know, if anyone seen the movie The Right Stuff,
Speaker 1: you realize how many people there's that. There's an amazing
Speaker 1: scene in the beginning of The Right Stuff. I think
Speaker 1: it's Dennis Quaid's character comes in to the bar that's
Speaker 1: out there in the middle of the desert, and there's
Speaker 1: the wall is covered with all of these smiling faces
Speaker 1: of guys in uniform and posing in front of planes,
Speaker 1: and he tells the bartender. He's like, he's he's new
Speaker 1: to tow Edwards Air Force Space. He's like, I'm going
Speaker 1: to be up there someday. You're gonna you're gonna know
Speaker 1: who I am. And the bartender says, every single one
Speaker 1: of the people on that wall have died. They were
Speaker 1: all killed in this in this program testing new aircraft,
Speaker 1: and that kind of really humbled both him and the audience.
Speaker 1: You suddenly realized, Man, all of the technological advances we
Speaker 1: have made have come um at the expense of a
Speaker 1: lot of injuries and a lot of death. Yeah. Uh, well, well,
Speaker 1: to discuss another edge of your seat descent, maybe we
Speaker 1: should switch over to the lunar module and his way
Speaker 1: of introduction to that. One of the things I always
Speaker 1: remember thinking when I was younger was when I saw
Speaker 1: pictures of the Apollo eleven lunar module. I thought, that
Speaker 1: doesn't look like a space ship? What what? What? Was?
Speaker 1: What was wrong with my thinking? They're like, why, why?
Speaker 1: Why is it that that doesn't look like a spaceship?
Speaker 1: And that's okay. Yeah. So if you look at the
Speaker 1: command module, that's the module in which the men spent
Speaker 1: most of their time, that looks like a gum drop
Speaker 1: and has a it's a triangular shaped thing, and it's
Speaker 1: triangularly shaped because it's first part of its voyage has
Speaker 1: to get from the ground on Earth up to orbit
Speaker 1: and then onto the Moon, so it needs to be
Speaker 1: as sharp and angled as possible, and then when it
Speaker 1: comes back down, it needs to blend in forward and
Speaker 1: land in the ocean. So everything needs to have sharp edges.
Speaker 1: You know sports cars. Your hummer is not a sports
Speaker 1: car because it doesn't have the angled lines of a Porsche.
Speaker 1: You need something that's going to go through the atmosphere
Speaker 1: needs to be sharp so that it can cut through
Speaker 1: the atmosphere. The lambs not doing that, the lunar module
Speaker 1: can look like an ungainly monstrosity because it's never going
Speaker 1: to fly in earth atmosphere. It's only ever gonna take
Speaker 1: taste the vacuum of space, and so it doesn't need
Speaker 1: to be sharp, it doesn't need to cut through anything,
Speaker 1: and so you could basically make it look however you want.
Speaker 1: And so the joke was they always called it the bug,
Speaker 1: and it really like the two little tiny triangular windows
Speaker 1: on the front and then the hatches and various things
Speaker 1: you can it's got eyes, it's got a mouth, it
Speaker 1: looks like it's got a nose, and yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's so ugly. It's beautiful. It's not certainly something that
Speaker 1: was designed to look pretty. Was designed purely for functionality.
Speaker 1: And they could do that because it was never going
Speaker 1: to ever taste atmosphere. Alright, time to take a quick break,
Speaker 1: but we'll be right back with more than and we're back.
Speaker 1: You tell some excellent stories about the design of the
Speaker 1: lunar module, about what company was doing It was a
Speaker 1: Grumman that was making it, or north of north of Grumman. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it wasn't North of Grumman at the time.
Speaker 1: That was a later fusion of two companies. I believe
Speaker 1: it was just the grum incorporation at that time. But yeah,
Speaker 1: you talk about like the all the design phases and
Speaker 1: all all the problems they encountered as they went through.
Speaker 1: Do you uh, do you want to get into that
Speaker 1: a little bit? Yeah. Mike Lisa was the guy that
Speaker 1: we interviewed at Grumman who was one of the test
Speaker 1: engineers who basically helped build and test this thing before
Speaker 1: it went to space. He was another of my favorite interviews.
Speaker 1: He was just so infectiously excited to talk about this it.
Speaker 1: Even to this day, he worked Grumman for his entire life.
Speaker 1: He still lives in the exact same New York house
Speaker 1: that he lived in when he was working on building
Speaker 1: the lemb Um, And even to this day he's retired
Speaker 1: and he's a docent in a museum, and he still
Speaker 1: just kind of like, is there to answer questions about
Speaker 1: one of the ludder. They have one of the lunar
Speaker 1: modules um at his museum in New York, and I
Speaker 1: believe it's Brookhaven Um because that's where they were they
Speaker 1: were all built. He was so just his his gushing
Speaker 1: enthusiasm for this program was so much fun and when
Speaker 1: you go through his wonderful New York accent, it just
Speaker 1: made him made him so memorable. But yeah, the things
Speaker 1: that they had to do to make sure that this
Speaker 1: thing could survive blast off for one and then lunar
Speaker 1: descent and take off for another. They they built and
Speaker 1: there's some stuff that again, and I'm sure you can
Speaker 1: understand this with your own podcast. There's so many things
Speaker 1: that get cut for time or whatever, and you're just like, oh,
Speaker 1: I wish I could share this with the world and
Speaker 1: some of the stuff, and we do share this to
Speaker 1: some degree. But they built these shakers basically massive, massive
Speaker 1: speakers UM. And just like if you have a speaker
Speaker 1: in your house and you put something fragile on top
Speaker 1: of it and you crank that thing up to eleven,
Speaker 1: it just starts shaking everything off and shaking everything in
Speaker 1: your house. Well, that's basically what they did to the
Speaker 1: lunar module. They tested every little component individually and then
Speaker 1: constructed the lunar module and then put this thing basically
Speaker 1: on top of this giant speaker for what isn't all
Speaker 1: intensive purposes, a giant speaker, and shook it and shook
Speaker 1: it until it fell apart, just to see how long
Speaker 1: it would last. Where were the where were its strengths,
Speaker 1: where were its physical weaknesses. They would turn it upside
Speaker 1: down and shake it to see what fell off. And
Speaker 1: every time something fell off, you know, production stopped and
Speaker 1: they would go and remachine that piece and fix it again,
Speaker 1: because it had to. It had to withstand both the
Speaker 1: stress of a launch and of course getting to and
Speaker 1: from the Moon. And the lunar module, of course, is
Speaker 1: two separate spacecraft, right It's it's got its ascent stage
Speaker 1: and the descent stage, and the bottom, the decent stage,
Speaker 1: stays on the Moon once they blast off and basically
Speaker 1: becomes the launch platform for the ascent stage when it
Speaker 1: when it takes off. And so there's just so many
Speaker 1: the the amount of technical difficulty and complexity in all
Speaker 1: of these machines is breathtaking. It's why the HBO series.
Speaker 1: From the Earth to the Moon is a spectacular series.
Speaker 1: But my favorite episode is the episode called Spider, and
Speaker 1: that's the episode in which you follow the guys along
Speaker 1: as they're building louder or module. It's not even doesn't
Speaker 1: even really take place in space until the very end.
Speaker 1: It's just about a bunch of the guys on the
Speaker 1: ground trying to figure out how to build something no
Speaker 1: one had ever built before. These guys all designed and
Speaker 1: built aircraft. They designed and built the kind of aircraft
Speaker 1: that you know that the guys are flying when they're
Speaker 1: flying over Korea, or that they're flying as test pilots,
Speaker 1: and now all of a sudden, they're building a spacecraft
Speaker 1: that is never gonna taste atmosphere, and no one's ever
Speaker 1: done it before. Like so much of APAOLA was, we're
Speaker 1: building and doing things no one had ever done before.
Speaker 1: We don't even know necessarily what we're doing. We're just
Speaker 1: we're kind of flying blind and giving our best guesses
Speaker 1: and and using really nascent science and technology to kind
Speaker 1: of okay, fingers crossed, hope this works. And we of
Speaker 1: course we pulled it off not once, but you know,
Speaker 1: a dozen times. Yeah. Uh well, speaking of from the
Speaker 1: Earth to the Moon. That reminds me of something I
Speaker 1: wanted to ask you about. So a lot of times
Speaker 1: on the show we end up talking about the interaction
Speaker 1: between science fiction and real cutting edge exploration or experiment.
Speaker 1: Uh there's just one example that's stuck in my memory
Speaker 1: from years ago. I remember reading that. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you came across this, but remembering that during the
Speaker 1: planning phase there was at least at some point someone
Speaker 1: had a concern about the lunar regulth and the idea
Speaker 1: that uh so, like the soil covering the surface of
Speaker 1: the Moon, that it might be so fine grained that
Speaker 1: it would function as a kind of quicksand and that
Speaker 1: the lunar module might sink into the Moon or become
Speaker 1: stuck in the soil after landing. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you get into that later or or if you encountered
Speaker 1: that concern, but that was like a gym in my mind,
Speaker 1: because it of course turned out not to be the case.
Speaker 1: But I'm struck by how much that sounds like a
Speaker 1: scene from a pulp sci fi story, like from you know,
Speaker 1: something that might be published in Amazing stories. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it was something it was so uh speaking one of
Speaker 1: the one of the astronauts, one of the moonwalkers I
Speaker 1: spoke to for this podcast was Harrison Schmidt, who flew
Speaker 1: aboard Apollo seventeen, and I brought those very things up
Speaker 1: with him, and we do address those in episode five,
Speaker 1: which is our the actual moon landing mission, the day
Speaker 1: we landed on the Moon, and he said those things
Speaker 1: were concerns for for several scientists, they were not really
Speaker 1: concerns for NASA. They didn't buy into all of that. Um.
Speaker 1: He said. It was actually one particular scientist who wasn't
Speaker 1: who was an eminent astrophysicist UM whose name eludes me
Speaker 1: at the moment, but who kind of went off on
Speaker 1: some crazy rabbit trails when it came to landing on
Speaker 1: the Moon. But yes, they did think that the lunar
Speaker 1: module might hit the lunar surface and then suddenly just
Speaker 1: sink beneath it like quicksand they were concerned that the
Speaker 1: lunar regular might, when exposed to oxygen um, spontaneously combust.
Speaker 1: And so even though I say that almost everyone at
Speaker 1: NASA didn't think that was going to happen, I should
Speaker 1: also say that Neil's arms Neil Armstrong's mom was convinced
Speaker 1: it was going to happen, and when he climbed off
Speaker 1: the ladder, he tethered himself and when he took his
Speaker 1: first step, he kind of bounced and then stepped back
Speaker 1: and then realized, Okay, nothing's happening. I'm gonna be okay.
Speaker 1: And then later before when they got back into the
Speaker 1: into the lunar module, they took some of that regulars
Speaker 1: with them and put it on top of the ascent
Speaker 1: engine cover and then started slowly bleeding uh an atmosphere
Speaker 1: oxygen back into the into the cabin. But they only
Speaker 1: had a little bit of it exposed because they wanted
Speaker 1: to test is this thing gonna catch fire? Are we
Speaker 1: going to explode? If it is, we want to make
Speaker 1: sure that it's just a tiny bit and then we
Speaker 1: can determine but if this is gonna go wrong. But
Speaker 1: nothing caught fire, and of course they were fine, and
Speaker 1: of course they were covered in lunar regular and it's
Speaker 1: not you know, so all of that stuff we'd already landed.
Speaker 1: The Russians had already landed spacecraft on the Moon, onmanned
Speaker 1: spacecraft on the Moon, and those didn't sink, and of course,
Speaker 1: the lunar module when it sat down didn't sink, so
Speaker 1: I'm sure Neil was pretty convinced it wasn't gonna happen.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that was absolutely a fear with a lot
Speaker 1: of people. They you know, it's one of those like
Speaker 1: I said, we've never done this before. You had no
Speaker 1: idea what was going to happen. Uh. Yeah, And as
Speaker 1: far as combustion goes, I mean, I can't imagine how
Speaker 1: much the specter of what happened with Apollo one would have,
Speaker 1: you know, haunted everything that came after. They're sure, and
Speaker 1: it's not as if regular isn't scary stuff. So regulars,
Speaker 1: like you said, is the is the powdery surface that's
Speaker 1: on the on the top of of the of the
Speaker 1: lunar surface, and it is fine grain. It is like
Speaker 1: talcum powder. It is is ash. It is so incredibly fine,
Speaker 1: but it is also so incredibly sharp. Because on Earth,
Speaker 1: you have erosion, you have wind, you have water, you
Speaker 1: have all these things that take the sort of stuff
Speaker 1: that the sort of fine grain sand and stuff like
Speaker 1: that and wears off all of those edges over time.
Speaker 1: On the Moon, that doesn't happen. There is no wind,
Speaker 1: there is no erosion. There is no water, and so everything,
Speaker 1: if you look at it under microscopes is incredibly sharp
Speaker 1: and incredibly jagged. And while Neil and Buzz were pretty
Speaker 1: conservative when they were walking on the Moon, later cruise
Speaker 1: started to get much more I should say, when they
Speaker 1: were doing their exploring, they were they were bouncing around,
Speaker 1: they were jumping, they were falling, they were rolling, blah
Speaker 1: blah blah. That regular started actually cutting open their space
Speaker 1: suits and releasing oxygen. They later found um and it
Speaker 1: would get into the equipment and start ruining equipment. I mean,
Speaker 1: it was just it was dangerous stuff. It's still something
Speaker 1: that you know, on return missions to the Moon we
Speaker 1: have to be very careful of. You don't want to
Speaker 1: trape this stuff around because just a little of it,
Speaker 1: too much, too much of this, you know, talcum powder
Speaker 1: on your on your flight suit, are on your astronauts
Speaker 1: uh e v A suits, and it's going to start
Speaker 1: cutting cutting holes in it. It's horrifying. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: I've read about that something before, like the idea of
Speaker 1: creating a permanent lunar habitat. You need some kind of
Speaker 1: like clean room or something in between two uh to
Speaker 1: get them out to deal with the regular problem, but
Speaker 1: to bring it back for a second to the idea
Speaker 1: of science fiction. One thing that just crossed my mind
Speaker 1: earlier today was how strange it is that Uh so,
Speaker 1: of course, you know, you had a long tradition of
Speaker 1: stories about spaceflight and going to the moon. You know,
Speaker 1: the astronauts themselves made reference to Jules fern and and uh,
Speaker 1: what's voyage to the moon or or that's how we
Speaker 1: got the name Columbia for the for the commandment. That's right,
Speaker 1: straight from straight from Jules Verne. Yeah. But the other
Speaker 1: one that was crazy for me to be to believe
Speaker 1: was that two thousand one of Space Odyssey came out
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty eight, a year before the Moon landing,
Speaker 1: and I'd always had it the other way around in
Speaker 1: my mind. Um So, do you have a sense of
Speaker 1: how the public's view, or maybe even with some of
Speaker 1: the people involved, how their view of space exploration in
Speaker 1: the late nineteen sixties would have been influenced or colored
Speaker 1: by their engagement with science fiction. Oh, it absolutely drove
Speaker 1: people like VERNR. Von Braun and even his Russian counterpart
Speaker 1: korliev In in Russia. These guys were avid consumers of
Speaker 1: science fiction. And this was back in the time, even
Speaker 1: before like the movies really started getting big. You had
Speaker 1: pulp science fiction. You had all of these um, not
Speaker 1: only books, but you'd have magazines that came out with
Speaker 1: short stories that Isaac Asthmov and Ray Bradbury and all
Speaker 1: of these like science fiction giants were writing at the time. Um,
Speaker 1: those guys were eating those things up, and it absolutely
Speaker 1: drove them to do what they did. I have a
Speaker 1: dear friend who works at NASA, and I once told her,
Speaker 1: you know something about how much I love science fiction,
Speaker 1: how it's my favorite genre, and how Star Trek specifically
Speaker 1: is my my all time favorite piece of art that
Speaker 1: humans have ever made. Um and and I said, And
Speaker 1: she said something like, well, you know what you play
Speaker 1: in You play in fake space. I worked in real
Speaker 1: space and I and I told her, yes, but you
Speaker 1: are surrounded by people the only reason they are working
Speaker 1: in real space is because they were inspired by this
Speaker 1: fake space. That this drove so many people, whether it
Speaker 1: be the people who designed the Saturn five and all
Speaker 1: these rockets, where it inspired them to become astronauts. You know,
Speaker 1: for the last fifty sixty years, people the space program
Speaker 1: is populated by real people who were entirely energized and
Speaker 1: inspired by the thoughts and imaginations and and sort of
Speaker 1: wild fanciful stories that were created by science fiction. So
Speaker 1: in addition to just motivating people to want to explore space,
Speaker 1: do you ever get the sense that the science fiction
Speaker 1: at all colored people's assumptions about what would happen in
Speaker 1: space and space exploration? Oh? Yeah, absolutely. I mean I
Speaker 1: don't know if I have any specific stories, but yeah,
Speaker 1: you certainly, in doing this kind of research come across
Speaker 1: those sorts of things. I mean, even like you brought
Speaker 1: up earlier with the regular thinking people were going to
Speaker 1: sink and stuff like that, you know, going Apollo eleven
Speaker 1: landed on the moon in July of nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 1: we already have two decades of of really heard of
Speaker 1: not hard sci fi, not in the in the technical
Speaker 1: term of that sense, um, but you have you've got
Speaker 1: a lot of science fiction movies by this time. And
Speaker 1: those science fiction movies are you know, go everything back
Speaker 1: from some of the early sort of French filmmaking in
Speaker 1: which you have little you know, jewels verne ships being
Speaker 1: shot out of cannons and landing on the Moon and
Speaker 1: little guys popping out and encountering all of these crazy
Speaker 1: space aliens, and of course they're not wearing space suits.
Speaker 1: But nobody knew. Nobody knew what what was on the Moon.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously, in the late sixties and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: we've been studying it. It did, but back in the
Speaker 1: early days, nobody knew. People thought that there were People
Speaker 1: thought they saw vegetation and rivers and and and animals
Speaker 1: and stuff on the Moon when they started to look
Speaker 1: through like proto nascent telescopes and stuff like that. So yeah,
Speaker 1: absolutely you had science fiction that was coloring the assumptions
Speaker 1: of everybody going forward, and you you know, that kind
Speaker 1: of had to run smack dab into science and people
Speaker 1: going Okay, that's that can't possibly be true. Or you know,
Speaker 1: we know there's no atmosphere. Okay, that's going to remove
Speaker 1: any sort of ideas of life at least as we
Speaker 1: know it existing on the surface of the Moon. So
Speaker 1: you know there's that. But yeah, it absolutely colored colored everything.
Speaker 1: It's one of those things that, like in any enterprise
Speaker 1: in human life, once you do the thing, once you
Speaker 1: make that exploration, so many of those assumptions. Of course,
Speaker 1: fall away in the face of facts and evidence and
Speaker 1: science and whatnot. But before someone is bold enough to
Speaker 1: make that first step and can either confirm or disprove it, um,
Speaker 1: you know, it remains an open possibility. There was one
Speaker 1: quote that I may have been in your first episode
Speaker 1: that I really liked. It was I believe an astronaut
Speaker 1: named Dick Gordon or was he an astronaut or did
Speaker 1: he just work with NASA? Were he anyway? Sorry? The
Speaker 1: quote is uh, he says, what did we discover when
Speaker 1: we went to the Moon. We discovered Earth? Uh. And
Speaker 1: this seems to be a common sentiment among a lot
Speaker 1: of astronauts that they have a different kind of view
Speaker 1: of of life on Earth after being in space. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Dick Gordon was an Apollo astronaut, and his impress Shian
Speaker 1: was almost universal. Um. Even even the Apollo eleven astronauts
Speaker 1: talk about that seeing the Earth from a distance um
Speaker 1: was more life changing than even walking on the Moon. Um.
Speaker 1: And almost to a man, every single one of them
Speaker 1: said that they just their lives were transformed. Harrison Schmidt,
Speaker 1: ironically is one of the only ones who didn't kind
Speaker 1: of have some euphoric experience, and I don't know if
Speaker 1: that's because he was much more of a grounded scientist
Speaker 1: or whatnot. But everyone kind of came back. Their lives changed.
Speaker 1: Some people found God. Some people came back and became artists.
Speaker 1: They just wanted to try to communicate via their art
Speaker 1: and their painting and sculptures and stuff like that, what
Speaker 1: they what they learned from seeing the moon and from
Speaker 1: seeing the Earth. Um A lot of them came back
Speaker 1: very seriously engaged in and promoting uh conservation and and
Speaker 1: and environmentalism and stuff like that. The environmentalism movement pretty
Speaker 1: much kicked off when Apollo eleven took the first picture
Speaker 1: of the Earth rise from the Moon, and all of
Speaker 1: a sudden we realized, Wow, the Earth is this tiny,
Speaker 1: fragile little thing sitting in the middle of this gigantic
Speaker 1: black void, and it just seems so fragile. And another
Speaker 1: asteroat I can't remember who it was, described it as
Speaker 1: a as a Christmas ornament hanging in the binky black
Speaker 1: of space, and you suddenly realize, oh, okay, this is fragile.
Speaker 1: We need to take care of this. And the other
Speaker 1: thing that so many people realized is hey, from orbit,
Speaker 1: there are no borders. This is not like a globe
Speaker 1: where you recognize where one country starts another country ends.
Speaker 1: This is ludicrous, the sort of fights and political infighting
Speaker 1: and stuff that we have. We are human beings and
Speaker 1: we need to be human beings first, before we're even Americans,
Speaker 1: before we Russians, before where anything you get, as Neil
Speaker 1: Degrass Tyson would call it, the cosmic perspective. Interesting how
Speaker 1: that intersects with what we were talking about earlier with
Speaker 1: John F. Kennedy and the you know, the motivations of
Speaker 1: the space program being almost purely geopolitical to begin with.
Speaker 1: You know, there's so much about human life and so
Speaker 1: many of the things that humans do that even if
Speaker 1: it's done pursuing one particular thing, we come out of
Speaker 1: it realizing so much more. It's such a larger experience.
Speaker 1: It informs so much more about what we are and
Speaker 1: who we are, and how we live and how we
Speaker 1: should relate to each other. Um And that's just that's
Speaker 1: a exactly, it's a that's a terrific example of that.
Speaker 1: We may have done something for one reason, but what
Speaker 1: we got out of it was so much deeper and
Speaker 1: so much richer. But it's still a lesson we need
Speaker 1: to take on board today. I mean, it's clearly something
Speaker 1: that we haven't listened to enough. You know, we're we're
Speaker 1: not taking care of our planet like we should. We're
Speaker 1: still having the same sort of petty political squabbles and
Speaker 1: one up and shipped like you know. But at least
Speaker 1: now we have something to refer back to and say, hey,
Speaker 1: knock it off humans. All right, Well, it's been really
Speaker 1: great talking to you, Brandon. I really enjoyed this, and
Speaker 1: again I really do enjoy with the show. Um, I'm
Speaker 1: glad to be glad to be able to recommend it
Speaker 1: to our listeners. So so thanks so much, Thanks so much.
Speaker 1: I I hope I hope they enjoyed two. I think
Speaker 1: they will. All right, Well, that does it huge. Thanks
Speaker 1: again to Brandon Fibbs for joining us today. If you
Speaker 1: haven't checked out nine days in July yet, you should
Speaker 1: give it a listen. I've been really enjoying it and
Speaker 1: I think you will too. In the meantime, if you
Speaker 1: want to check out any other episodes of our podcast,
Speaker 1: you can go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot
Speaker 1: com that will get you there, or you can just
Speaker 1: look up Stuff to Blow your Mind on wherever you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts on iTunes and the I heart Radio
Speaker 1: app or um you know you know all the places.
Speaker 1: Big thank you as always to our excellent audio producer
Speaker 1: Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in
Speaker 1: touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
Speaker 1: to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello,
Speaker 1: you can reach us by email at contact at stuff
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