This Week in Space 145 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
 

00:00 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Coming up on this Week in Space. We'll talk with Emily Carney and Bruce McAllister III about their new book, starbound, and whether we're going to the moon, mars or somewhere beyond. It's a big sneak peek at the American space program and also Trump wants to go to Mars and more, so tune in.

00:17 - TWiT.tv (Announcement)
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00:18
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00:39
This is TWiT.

00:39 - Rod Pyle (Host)
This is TORT Chief Badaster Magazine, and I'm joined sadly by Tariq Malik, editor-in-chief at Spacecom. Hello, my friend, hello.

00:48 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Rod. Hello Rod, sadly. He says as he with a big old smile. So you know you love me.

00:54 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I always smile at him. Right, no-transcript. And yes, it's that bruce mccandless. His dad was the other that bruce bruce mccandless. He was bruce mccandless the second. This is bruce mccandless the third, and I can't say that more than twice in a row without without fouling it up.

01:29
But before we start, please don't forget to do us a solid. Make sure to like, subscribe and all the other cool podcast things to show the world how much you love us. And this is your last chance to take the 2025 twit audience survey. This annual survey helps us understand the audience so we can improve your listening and viewing experience. Because we care. It only takes a few minutes, so if you would do so for us, please go to twittv slash survey to take it, but don't wait because we're in the closing minutes here, metaphorically speaking, and it'll help us to make the show and twit even better. Now we are joke bound. Jokes weeks this week. Oh, I see what you did there. This week's joke from adam and adam says I tried to start a hot air balloon. I tried to start a hot air balloon mission on the moon, but it never took off. I tried to start a hot air balloon mission on the moon, but it never took off, adam, I'm sorry, I sort of mangled your joke.

02:33
I didn't write it properly, so I was having to interpret as I read. All right, now I hear, though, that some people want to go beyond starbound and leap into a white dwarf when they hear our jokes. But you can help Send us your best, worst or most indifferent or unique space joke at twist twittv. Uh, these are pg-13 rated, so just bear that in mind, because we've gotten a couple that weren't, and now it's time for headlines, headline news. Headlines, headline news.

03:10 - Tariq Malik (Host)
well, we have a new president. We have a new administration we have a new nasa administrator.

03:15 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yes, or will soon. We have an interim right now well, we, I mean technically, that's new right, yeah, and we have a president that wants to go where?

03:25 - Tariq Malik (Host)
all right, well, we are going to mars, apparently. So this week, uh, this week, that's one of the big stories of president uh donald trump, now the 47th, as well as the 45th president of the united states. In his inaugural address on monday of this week, uh said that, uh, that to see astronauts quote plant the stars in stripes on the planet Mars. He called it our manifest destiny. And, as he said, elon Musk, who was there in attendance at the capital of Rotunda, pumped his fist up and gave two thumbs up in probably the cheesiest smile that I've seen, but very, very appropriate. He's excited that we're going to go to Mars and that's what he wants to do.

04:08 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, and we've been talking about this since 1949, at least formally, with Von Braun's Das Mars Project book, later published in English in 53. And we've been talking about it since before the Mercury program. We were talking about it during Apollo, during the shuttle program. We've had all these design reference missions that have come and gone. We've flown this mission in file cabinets for decades. It would be nice to really go.

04:37 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, it's very interesting because during the actual campaign to become president, trump said a few times that he would like to see astronauts land on on Mars, like by the end of his term, or that. You know he said that he would like to see the you know, the United States land on Mars by the end of his term, which was, you know you can say, okay, launch a mission to Mars, it'll get. You know, you launch on the 20, in the 2026 window, it'll get there in 2027. That could do it. But he didn't say that could do it, but he didn't say that's 18 months away, yeah, yeah, he didn't say if he wanted to have astronauts on that flight, but then he said that he would like to have. He says, and I quote in the inauguration and we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.

05:24
Now he doesn't put a date in that one. So you know, in the earlier two comments it was we'll get to Mars before the end of my term, but it wasn't like astronauts and now we sing astronauts but not a date. Now, that would that would mean that you have until what? January 20, 2029. Yeah, but, astronauts there.

05:40
There's a lot that would have to happen to get astronauts there by 2029, a full shift away from the moon, for one thing, and some sort of big vehicles to get there, but it's interesting and it might be like a hint of what's to come. One thing we didn't talk about in this discussion is that you mentioned the new NASA administrator. Mentioned the new nasa administrator. Uh trump has picked uh kennedy space center director janet petro uh as the interim nasa administrator, skipping over associate administrator jim free uh in uh you know a big proponent of artemis uh in in washington. So that was a like a unexpected twist this week skipping over with a bit of a hiccup.

06:20
They did announce jim free and then they announced petro, that's right within a couple hours yeah, nasa actually changed their website to say that that jim free was the acting administrator and then had to change it again to say that no, he's actually, uh, still associate administrator.

06:35 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Janet petro is the acting administrator, so well, I I want to share something with you for those who are watching the stream. This is the new mug I got from loyal listener an old friend, martin lawler martin, my new space thugs mug, and uh, it's kind of the the other space hipsters, except it's only got two members so far me and martin grand poobah.

06:57 - Tariq Malik (Host)
You have a grand poobah mug yeah, well that.

06:59 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So that's my horrible illustration, but anyway, um, I kind of feel like we're headed that way in some fashion. Do you want to do line two next or go to line four?

07:12 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, I guess the one thing that we would mention, just because we are talking about the administration change, is that there are, in addition to having an interim NASA chief, there are already other echoes being felt or reverberations from the administration. Many listeners may have heard about the, the, the, the trump executive orders to end all dei operations.

07:33 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Uh, diversity, equality and is it or is it equity equality inclusion?

07:38 - Tariq Malik (Host)
and inclusion initiatives across all the agencies. Nasa was not immune to that, and and there was a letter that went out from Petro's desk that basically quoted a form letter that the administration sent to all of the agency directors that would say that everyone has to stop. So they've shut down their whole operation or are in the works of shutting that whole thing down now too, and it's the first of what we expect to be many different changes to come at the agency as the new administration.

08:10 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And eventually their pick for a new administrator take root. Now there was some talk I don't remember it was, I think it was in the atlantic, maybe um, about this also uh, releasing either some individuals or some positions. Now I assume, yeah, if you work inI-related office, that that's going to get closed, but how else does that affect the workforce?

08:28 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, the executive order does say that they have until January 31st to roll out the plan to let the people that are employed by those offices go. So it's very clearly like there will be departures from NASA, from all of the agencies, if they have specific uh office that was geared at that, um, uh, that sort of program. There's also a whole thing about they have to inform on other people if they may have changed the name. Yeah, it's a whole. It's a big mess. You know that's a little more uncomfortable.

08:55 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, but hey, if there's money in it, give me a phone number. Um, I'm just joking. I'm just joking. One of earth's seven weirdo quasi moons was recently named after a competition. This was a head scratcher, because it was named after the goddess of door hinges.

09:15 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That's right. That's right. That's right. This was a story that at spacecom, from Monisha Revasedi, our astronomy editor, uh, but yeah, they named it card, I think. I'm gonna pronounce it right cardia, cardia, the, the goddess of of the door hinge, and um, and it was named by clay chill, I think chill cut man. I'm really bad with names at the the university of georgia, because they they won the naming contest with the IAU, which is, of course, in charge of naming objects. The object is called 2004 GU9. The IAU ran a naming contest with Radiolab, another science radio show, to see exactly what they would call it. This is the name that won. So you know, cardia door hinges.

10:08 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So uh well, next time I won't be named after the goddess of spark plugs or sponges or something well, I mean laugh at you, but it's better than 2004 gu9, you know true but you could just call it jeff and be done it.

10:22 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, or Targ, that's a good name for any object you know in space.

10:27 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I've got a couple of objects right over here in my bathroom that I named Targ.

10:31 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Oh my God, no, no, it's too early, it's too early in the episode.

10:34 - Rod Pyle (Host)
But enough about my plunger, you picked the last one.

10:40 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah.

10:48 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So you know, we, we got a pick. Well, we did. We talked about you know, let's go talk. Wait, you could do both of them. You're the one that always grinds on me about right we're going too long, all right, all right.

10:53 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, a couple, a couple of things in the very, very, very fast we're gonna go sure in order there was. There was a really fun story from from from well, not just from space, space dot-com, but but across about the first meteorite impact caught by a doorbell camera.

11:10 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Isn't that?

11:10 - Tariq Malik (Host)
something and you can hear it, so it's like you're looking at someone's doorstep and then all of a sudden, like poof, like something falls out of the sky. There you go.

11:21 - Rod Pyle (Host)
That's the sound. Yeah, and it ran into something metal, right.

11:24 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, it hit the concrete. I saw a different angle and it hits like the walkway up to the house is what it looks like.

11:32
But it looks like it would hurt. Yeah, it left a big impression, like a big mark. I love it. I love it. And that was inward island, uh, by homeowner joe I think I'm gonna pronounce it right valadium, uh, who noticed this, this like a chalky mark. You know that what we now know is this meteorite impact, and he went back and looked and to see what it was and saw the video of it and it's not something they've ever heard before. They've, they've, they've, it's a brand new thing. And so the university of alberta went and confirmed it that it was a meteorite. And and now we've he's, I wonder if he's going to lucite it over so you can have like the impact on it. You know, like forever preserve, that's what I would do.

12:13 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So you could charge an extra 500 000 for the house and it goes up for sale there you go, there you go, last one.

12:19 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Last one is just a note. Spacex launched in uh three uh uh, falcon nines this this week, uh, culminating, uh in a january 21st launch. Actually, they launched one uh hours before our recording uh, what was their 400th falcon landing? Never 400. So it feels like not too long ago we were doing 300, you know, halfway through last year, and now we're at 400 already, which is absolutely crazy.

12:42 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So I mean it's amazing that a company like that can even launch 400, much less land them and bring them back. Yeah, I keep waiting for the next ula launch and I still haven't heard any news about when they're planning to launch the vulcan again uh, I heard that it's going to be sometime in the spring, uh are they?

12:58 - Tariq Malik (Host)
still for sale. Uh, I haven't heard anything on that. Uh, in a while. So, uh, so we while. So we'd have to see. But I heard, yeah, the Nux Vulcan rocket is going to be sometime in the spring. It's going to be a Space Force national security launch, which is what they wanted to get accredited for. So, yeah, so 400 landings. That was a Starlink mission, 27 Starlinks in space, many more. I think they've launched like 60 in space this week, which is crazy.

13:28 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, and before you know it, we'll have the same number on Starship. Yeah, yeah, hopefully, all right. Well, stand by everybody. We'll be back in just a few moments with Emily Carney and Bruce McCandless to talk about Starbound. All right, welcome back everybody. We are here with Emily Carney. Take a bow, emily. Emily is the co-author of the book we're going to be talking about today and the grand czar, mistress, whatever of Space Hipsters, 60,000 members strong on Facebook, which is a remarkable group and definitely the place to be if you're interested in all things space. And with her is her co-author, bruce mccandless. The the third god, I almost said the second, I'm sorry the third who is famous in his own right and is your primary, uh, purpose in life as a lawyer, other than the author, yeah I was a lawyer for 25 years and retired back in 2019.

14:25
And so since then I've been writing Retired. What's that like? Yes, sir.

14:31 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
Well, I am still working.

14:34 - Rod Pyle (Host)
You retired?

14:34 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
into working harder, probably A little less anxiety. I mean, you know, practicing law is an all-consuming sort of thing. Uh, um, it's, it's. It's hard on the nervous system.

14:47 - Rod Pyle (Host)
uh, I'm enjoying writing a lot better well, after the show, I'm gonna have to talk to you about the switch in revenue from lawyering to law. Yes, because it was certainly a wake-up call for me moving from television to writing books.

14:59 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
That's funny. My wife wants to talk to me about that too really will she be joining us today? She'll be joining the conversation as well.

15:07 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So Emily and Bruce have written a wonderful new book called Starbound, which you should definitely check out if you get a chance, and I guess I haven't told you guys.

15:18 - Tariq Malik (Host)
You're shortchanging it. It's Starbound, A Beginner's Guide to the American Space Program, from Goddard's rocketsets to Goldilocks Planets and everything in between.

15:26 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
Good grief, let's say the whole thing Come on.

15:28 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Because publishers love their subtitles, and we'll be writing a review on it in Ad Astra coming up next quarter and it's very, very favorable, deservedly so. There it is, let's see that cover. Very good.

15:42 - Emily Carney (Guest)
All right.

15:46 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Burn that into your memory, viewers and listeners, because you're going to want to go find that on amazon if you can find it wherever bookstore amazon, we'll take.

15:54 - Emily Carney (Guest)
We'll take the sales anywhere you can uh anywhere you buy it from.

15:58 - Rod Pyle (Host)
It's all the publisher university of nebraska press oh, okay, okay, so is it, but it's not part of the outward odyssey series. It's, it is, it is. It's not part of the Outward Odyssey series.

16:06 - Emily Carney (Guest)
It is. It is indeed part of the Outward Odyssey.

16:09 - Rod Pyle (Host)
My God, you broke the cover convention.

16:11 - Emily Carney (Guest)
We did we did You're the?

16:13 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
first ones. I think there was a pitched battle in that regard and we managed to score this great painting by Chris Cowley. That is not In the painting by chris cowley. Uh, that, uh, that is not in in the. In the painting, actually, the, the background, is more of a purple color and, and, uh, that was going a little too far for for the unp folks. So they wanted it, uh, they they made it black, uh, as you can tell, uh, but we're so excited to have that image. It's such a, um, a beautiful painting and, of course, it is it's a the artist's take on uh on gene cernan's uh.

16:46 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Apollo 17 famous the famous photograph of gene cernan I like that publisher has just done such wonderful things over the years. I mean it's an incredible series working with great authors, great editors um, I don't have a book through them yet. I've negotiated with them a few times, but, uh, everything I've heard has been just glowing reviews in terms of of working with them.

17:08 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
That said, covers are always difficult yeah and uh, I well, yeah, no, this one, this one, uh, we we're hoping folks judge this book by its cover because it it turned out, uh, turned out really well, um, and we're pleased with it.

17:24 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So and, uh, we should mention for viewers who may not know there may be two or three of you out of the tens of thousands that watch and listen every week that, uh, bruce's father was an astronaut and in fact, was bruce mccandless, the second, the first astronaut to fly free and untethered, which, uh, I remember watching that back at the time and feeling this growing pit of terror in my stomach because you know the way I mean, the way it was portrayed, the news it's like oh, this is exciting, it's new, it's different, he's flying free, he's testing out this little one-man spacecraft and all that, and I'm thinking there's no rope. Yeah, exactly yeah.

18:06 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
I imagine you may have been thinking the same thing as a young man you know, I was, uh, I was 22 I guess at the time, uh, 20, maybe almost 23. I was in great britain studying, I was doing a master's degree over there and, uh, I was sitting in a bar basically with some buddies watching it. So I didn't feel a whole lot of terror. I remember being, you know, interested, amazed by the whole process, but I wasn't scared.

18:36
You know, dad had spent 20 years or so working on that thing and we were just glad he was finally getting a chance to test it out. He was confident in it and, you know, as far as we were concerned, if he was okay with it, we were okay. But I will echo your sentiment that while NASA portrayed it as not such a big deal, there were others, like Rick Calculator, who said, you know, nasa was sort of peddling a line there. That wasn't completely right. It was a pretty dangerous thing to be doing and and maybe that's why we're not doing it anymore, you know, yeah, yeah, and what year was that it was 84.

19:13 - Rod Pyle (Host)
yeah, so that was two years before challenger, and I was talking to somebody the other day, uh, at a conference, about the imax film the dream is alive, oh yeah, narrated by walter crronkite, and what a sunny take that was on the shuttle, you know. Oh, this goes up all the time, it's easy. You, just you know, you land it you hose it off, you gas it up and off you go. And then, after Challenger, suddenly I think we all got a serious dose of reality, yeah.

19:45 - Emily Carney (Guest)
I love. I'm sorry. Sorry, I feel like I'm interrupting. I love how you put that, because I never thought of it. It was very optimistic, wasn't it?

19:49 - Rod Pyle (Host)
and that movie was one of my gateway drugs when I was a kid into, like the station I want to get into your book but, that first time, seeing the first launch in that movie where they don't do the countdown, there's no voiceover, it's just the sounds of nature, a couple of shots of alligators swimming past. The next thing, you know, the kaboom, the shuttle igniting and off it goes. And I just I had tears streaming down my face yeah, that's the very beginning of the movie, right, that's.

20:20 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
And then how it starts it actually starts with a.

20:22 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I think it starts with a landing. Oh, okay, I'm coming in on that little tiny runway. But yeah, it's a remarkable film and I still love it, along with Hail Columbia. But good luck catching them at IMAX Theater. Okay, I need to shut up about this and get into your book. We just talked about the episode of what we're talking about. It's a great read. It's a fun read. I won't insult you by calling it breezy, but it but it's easy. You know, it's an easy access piece, which I suspect is exactly what you were going for. So, emily, I know you're a space historian, but this book feels like it was written not just by space historians but by historians in general, I mean your, your context, your take on history overall. So which one of you is the world history historian, or was it both?

21:14 - Emily Carney (Guest)
I think it's a mix of us both. Honestly, god Bruce is going to kill me for saying this. Bruce is a couple years older than I am and he probably has a better perspective on I see. Okay, I love the 1970s in space. That's kind of an era that I focus on a lot. You can definitely see a lot of my imprint on that in that chapter in the book Fun news flash. I wasn't alive for most of the 1970s.

21:44 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Right.

21:46 - Emily Carney (Guest)
And really I feel like this sounds awful. It's not ageism, but as far as Bruce is concerned, you know, it's been really cool picking his brain about certain things that happened during the decade, because I don't have sort of a perspective on the 1970s culturally because I wasn't there, you know, and you know in this, and I wanted that to be a part of the chapter, sort of. You know, ok, this is what was happening in space, but this is what was happening in the background. You know, you had political scandals in the United States, you had, you know, inflation, a lot, a lot of upheaval socially and politically, and also in the background you had the women's rights movement, you had the civil rights movement going on and things like that.

22:35
And it was cool to talk to Bruce because he had a lot of perspective on that. That I really didn't have, frankly, because I didn't really live through that era, so I don't know what it felt like really at the time, if that makes sense. So I think both of us had a lot of input and I can't speak for Bruce, but I think he would agree that we wanted the book to sort of have a cultural, you know, sort of have. You know, okay, this is what was happening in space in the time, but culturally we wanted to talk about what was going on in the world and in the United States, because obviously that does affect what was happening in space policy as well. Like, if you look in, you know and there are certain I won't go too deep into it unpleasant truths that we sort of delved into as well, that you know it happened but you have to sort of discuss it. So I hope that answers the question.

23:32 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, it does. And one of those ugly truths is going to be that Bruce actually mentioned the movie Iron Sky but we'll talk about that later. Sky, but we'll talk about that later which was written by a guy who I hired for his first production job and I called him after I saw the movie and said, michael, what happened anyway? Um, we'll talk about that another time. Bruce, do you want to? You want to jump in there before tarik asks his burning question?

23:55 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
oh, uh, about, uh, history and context. Yeah, that's, that's. You know, emily, and I aren't, uh, engineers or scientists, uh, engineers or scientists. I think we could describe ourselves as cultural historians, and that's how we sort of come out the subject. And I was interested in talking about space as reflected in films and books and, as she says, in politics. So that's you know, I think we do a pretty good job of grounding various space missions and decisions in what was going on in the US and the world during the time.

24:28 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, it's really sorry, tarek, I'm jumping you one more time, but it's kind of a remarkable blend of really fun detail and the general overview, which isn't easy to do isn't easy to do.

24:42 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
Yeah, well, it is not easy to do. We were aiming for, actually for a much shorter book along the lines of Colin Burgess's Soviets in Space, and just didn't. We missed miserably because it ended up being much longer and we ended up foregoing an index and a glossary and various things for the sake of the narrative. And, frankly, we could have written, you know, another 75,000 words easily, things for the sake of the narrative, and and uh, and frankly, we could have written, you know another 75 000 words easily, uh, but, but you know, along the lines of creating a beginner's guide, uh, you want to at least strive for some, uh, some brevity.

25:13 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Um so, yeah, well, I, I, I. I do resonate with that, and the last book I did, I did write another 75 000 words that ended up thrown back in my face. Do we need to go to a break or are we okay to continue? Anthony, you can just give me a nod. Okay, let's go to a break and then we'll be right back. Tarek, you're up at bat, stand by.

25:34 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, I kind of have a twofer, because I usually always start off our interviews with a basic question, emily and Bruce, about when you ever got interested in space. But it seems in this case, emily, you're a return visitor and Bruce, you seem to have a lifelong attachment to the program. But I guess, just to start there, was there one driving force that grabbed you about space exploration, either as a kid or as an adult that got you into it, or is it just something that evolved over time?

26:08 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I think I can guess Bruce's answer.

26:10 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I know right, I feel silly asking the question because it's like so obvious how did you get interested in space, Bruce?

26:16 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
Well, there's actually more to it. I mean I wasn't tremendously interested as a kid. I actually got interested when I started writing the story about my dad. My dad, toward the end of his life, had decided okay, maybe my story's worth telling, I'm going to maybe write an autobiography. But he'd waited a little too late and by the time he really got started he was already ill and wasn't able to do much on the story. So I decided I'd try and do it for him. And you know that necessitated a grounding at least in some space history. And the more I got into it, the more excited I got about it and things that I had heard as a kid started to make sense and resonated with me a little more. And I would really say that that's when I got interested in space, despite, uh, despite the way we, uh, we grew up down there around jsc and that was only, you know, five years ago.

27:10 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So, boy you uh you picked up a lot of knowledge in that time.

27:15 - Emily Carney (Guest)
I feel a bit chagrined, emily um well, I think I've told this story before, but I'll tell it again that my gateway entry into spaceflight was in 1981. I lived not very far from Kennedy Space Center and as a kid, you know, the space shuttle was brand new. And one day my mom was like, hey, the space shuttles going up, you know. And I was like I had a peripheral knowledge of what the space shuttle was. You know, I'd seen pictures of it, I'd seen probably it on tv, stuff like that. And, um, sure enough, we go outside and we look over to the east and there's the space shuttle. I mean, there you could see it from where we were. We were probably about 120 miles out and you could see, you know, these orange flames kind of going up and I was like like, oh my God, and I couldn't get over the fact that there were human beings on top of that. I mean, that just blew my mind. So that for me was the aha moment.

28:11
And later I was like man, what year was that? You know I triangulate it because I was real little when that happened and I sort of did some digging and I was like that was STS too, because we had just moved to Oldsmar, florida at the time. So it was STS to with angle and truly. So that was my gateway and it was real cool because I think it was 35 years to the day of STS to I met Joe angle, general Joe angle rest in peace. He passed away last year and also truly also passed away last year. I never got to meet him but yeah, that was by like oh my God, I'm obsessed moment and I've been into it since I was a little kid, you know, and it's just, I've just loved it since I was a child and it's always been a passion for me. I, yeah.

28:59 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So I hope that answers it it, it does, and I think you were there when you met angle.

29:03 - Emily Carney (Guest)
That was at space fest, right I think I met him actually for the first time. I I did see him at uh space fest, but I've met him at an astronaut scholarship foundation event. It's a funny story. I was at a. I used to drink. I was at a tiki bar, of all things. I was at a tiki bar in coco beach, a tiki bar, of all things. I was at a tiki bar in Cocoa Beach and the ASF event was taking place there.

29:28
Me and a friend of mine were at the bar, you know, drinking as one does, and we look over and there's freaking Joe Engel just sitting there with a genie who's also wonderful, and I'm like, oh my god, it's Joe Angle, it's my lifelong hero. And my friends, like you know, say hi to him. And I was like, no, I don't want to say I do, I'm going to start crying and so, and my friends like, just say hi to him. So I was like OK, so I went over and of course I said something stupid Like the general angle you're one of my heroes, you know, you got me into space, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He, he and genie were as nice as could be. Uh, they were very tolerant of my ridiculous.

30:06 - Rod Pyle (Host)
joe was joe was very engaging and easy and I think genie I would describe as more tolerant yes, she was, nice she was, but she's cool about it because she, she understands. I mean, she thought he was the hottest thing too.

30:19
But yeah, I met them in 2010 and we spent I was working at jsc for a while, so we spent a fair amount of time together and I kept saying you know, we ought to write a book on you and and I, you know, I think, if you ask, not so like this, but particularly joe, with that kind of homespun down home, oh heck, gosh, golly, shucks kind of thing. It's like, oh, nobody wants to know about me what I did. I said, no, they really do. You flew the X-15, for God's sakes, did a barrel roll in it, among other things, but he was just like we never got it together, but it would have been fun because it's a hell of a story.

30:58 - Emily Carney (Guest)
Yeah, it was awesome going I'm sorry.

31:02 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, no, I think that's it helps put kind of the book in perspective. For I think our listeners and our readers, if they kind of know that history and where you come from, plus I I dig it. I just I love everybody's stories uh about, uh about space, when, when they they got bit by the bug. But that does lead me to my, my next question, bruce and Emily, about why now for the book? Obviously, as we're recording this episode, this was NASA's big week of remembrance, you know, for the tragedies, but I know that that's not why the book was coming out. I'm just curious, why choose to release the book? And you know, at this point in our grand space adventure right now?

31:47 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
I'll give that a shot, one. There's a couple different reasons. One reason, uh, is that I I just read colin's book. So soviets in space and I thought you know this is, this is fantastic, this is a great introduction to things like lunacod and vostok and you know all you know these crazy names that you see and are sort of intimidating.

32:04
But you read Collins book and things sort of start to fall into place and I thought you know people are really excited, or getting excited, about the American space program, not only because of Elon Musk and SpaceX and Blue Origin and that sort of thing, but also at the time we were, Emily and I, were very excited about Artemis, which had just sent Artemis 1, had just gone around the moon and we were thinking that fall of 2024 we might be seeing more excitement about Artemis and it might be a great time to release a book. And that didn't work out. We're waiting, obviously, on Artemis 2. But generally speaking, you could say we saw a market opportunity and we saw an educational opportunity. You know, sort of fill a niche that wasn't being filled.

32:55
There are a couple of you know there are some other books that are general histories of American space exploration, but they tend to be longer and they're a little bit out of date, I think. So there was that. But there's also a feeling and this is something that informs Emily's group of space hipsters the feeling that this enthusiasm, this fetishization almost of the American space program is a nice antidote to a lot of the corrosive political bickering we see in the United States. I mean, this is something we can all be proud of, we should all know about. I know lots of people who can recite every statistic possible about the New York Yankees or about the men's professional. You know men's soccer team, our national team, but can't tell you the difference between Mercury and Gemini programs, and I think that's a shame. I think that's something that we all need to learn about and take pride in and, you know, wears a sort of national merit badge. That's sort of sort of a nutshell, I think, why we wrote the book.

33:53 - Rod Pyle (Host)
That's very well put.

33:55 - Emily Carney (Guest)
I don't have anything to add. That's really great how Bruce put it. The only thing I might have to add is that that you know we wanted something to be you said breezy earlier and I actually like that. We wanted something that was kind of easy to read, that was approachable. We didn't want like a textbook. Basically because and that's not a slam against any other writers I've read a probably 1000s of space books in my life and and a lot of them are fantastic. Some of them are more like reference guides. You know they have a lot of statistics, numbers and stuff on them which is they're written by engineers, correct?

34:30
yeah, yeah and in my day job. I work as I'm a technical writer for my day job and one of the biggest challenges is translating stuff written by a software engineer into, like actual English. You know, for a user to understand that's a big, that can be a challenge, you know, and we wanted to do something that sort of translated. You know, this stuff for just anybody, you know.

34:53 - Tariq Malik (Host)
We, we feel, uh, our book is for everyone, you know yeah, it really feels like you're having a conversation, right, not that you're reading like a history or like an encyclopedic entry. I was really struck by that tone and the self-referential nature, a bit just like some bits where you talk about that you're writing the book and we're not going to do that in this book because we're here to talk about this and we're done with this subject, and I thought that that was very engaging in a way that I hadn't seen in a recent space book, I think, as a way to put it.

35:28 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
Well, good, good. And I will say that one other space book I know of that is engaging and not written by an engineer is one of my favorites. It's Rod's book Amazing Stories of space age, which, uh, I, I, I is you gotta plug. It is unbelievably entertaining and interesting about, uh, uh, some of the um, the hijinks that our military services were up to, uh, in the pre-nasa days especially, and uh, rod, so kudos to you, that's a great book.

35:58 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I I appreciate that and and I was having a moment of that feeling when I was reading your favorite space conspiracies and I I loved was neil armstrong, a robot. You guys made that up right just checking okay because that was a really good one. I thought, man, we do our next best conspiracies episode. We're gonna have to include that, but I guess I have some good ones that I've researched in the past.

36:22 - Emily Carney (Guest)
Uh, we did this. I don't think this one didn't make it to starbound. There was the sts1 clones one that they didn't launch uh, young and crippen, but they launched like robot clones of you. Oh, I love it. I love it, or something. I'm dead serious. This was an actual conspiracy theory and it was released on cassette tape. Wow, and so these were supposed to be meatbag clones, not robots, right, she just said robots. I don't know. I don't know if it was a meat bag or a robot. I need to look. It's been a while since I researched this one, but it was that my main memory of it was.

36:58 - Tariq Malik (Host)
It was on cassette it gets better than a track right.

37:02 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
So I have to, I have to say tarik, I also read spacecom's uh 25, uh greatest uh space conspiracies this week and I have to say I'd never heard the black knight conspiracy. Oh yeah, oh, I don't know. That was a new one.

37:18 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That was a new one for me as well. Uh, when our found that one because I was always I had always heard the one about the Air Force has one, but I didn't know that there was a whole Black Knight thing that was separate from that. Oh my God, yeah.

37:34 - Rod Pyle (Host)
It's its own religion.

37:35 - Tariq Malik (Host)
We should do our story on that.

37:38 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Oh, dr Clickbait, you calm down. Okay, we got another break to go, so stand by everybody, we'll be right back. So, uh, we've got a lot of other stuff to cover here, but I just wanted to, uh, to jump back in on the I guess it's a conspiracy theory, I don't know that they actually put an interior lock on the shuttle door yeah tell us that story because I thought that was fascinating. I mean, they're all fascinating, but that one really caught my attention.

38:06 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
Well, yes, from what I can tell, this is a true story that one of the missions, a payload specialist, became very frustrated with his machinery not working the way it was supposed to.

38:19
He'd spent a lot of time and had a lot of people depending on him to get some results from this equipment on the flight and became so despondent he he threatened I'm paraphrasing here to to leave the ship and and and the way you do that is you open a hatch of some sort, and that's not a good thing to do at 160 miles up above zambia and uh. So so it was decided that there should be some sort of way to secure the uh the orbiter, uh and um. It's been a while since I looked at this, but I think there was actually a lot put on for at least some of those missions that uh the commander would have to, would have authority over um and um, and you know I don't think that's apocryphal, I think that actually was the case. I've done gone down a couple of rabbit holes and it seems to seems to be the truth well, it's amazing that somebody would consider leaving the shuttle.

39:14 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And yet those cosmonauts hunched down in in in the the Mir space station for all those many months and years which, from your telling of it, was a little bit of a flying junkyard a little bit of a space slum if you will.

39:32 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
Well, that's right. Yeah, so I think I. Where did I get that? That was Brian Burroughs' book Dragonfly. I think he's talking, is it Gary?

39:45 - Emily Carney (Guest)
who's Gary –ary, uh, is it lininger? Is that who I'm thinking of? He?

39:47 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
had jerry leninger leninger yeah, he had some bad things to say about uh mirror. Now you can. You can read uh you know, shannon lucent sped, shannon lucid spent a bunch of time on the on mirror as well, and she has a pretty benign view of the whole thing. Um, so I don't know, it depends on who you believe, but but there are certainly reports that it was a very unpleasant place to live for any length of time.

40:07 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I heard those stories about smoking. Those are the ones that I've heard. I have to say I was always struck about the story about locking the shuttle doors because when I was a wee 15-year a a wee 15 year old at space camp for the first time and met one of my best friends who is now an aerospace educator at Penn State um, her name is Sarah, hey, sarah, uh, she, you know, you do your simulator at space camp on the shuttle and uh, and she drew the go space crazy card and was trying, was trying desperately to open, uh, open the hatch and we had to, like duct, taper down to the mid-deck seats, uh, to get her, to get her to stop. And uh and uh, and I just remember this, being struck. But why would anyone ever think that they would want to open the door so?

40:57 - Emily Carney (Guest)
uh, anyway, but that was a little bit of a I did not know that was a card you could pull.

41:02 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, you know that, because they can't. I mean, bruce, did you go to space camp, emily? You surely did at one point.

41:08 - Emily Carney (Guest)
I did not. I wish I had. I'd love to do it as an adult. I'm hoping I can sign up for that at some point.

41:15 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, it's great. Plus, when you do the adult one, you can actually have a dinner with a bar and then go into your simulation, which is a great mix.

41:23 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I should say Says you, when I went we had to eat chili, mac and sleep in the kids' bunks, oh wow.

41:32 - Tariq Malik (Host)
But no, I went four times for four weeks as a kid.

41:36
Okay, we're here to talk about the book. Yes, yes, well, we were, we were, but I did want to ask. Well, I have a whole shuttle follow-up to and I think that this is a question that rod put down. But you know, emily, you mentioned earlier about how, you know, you got bit by STS 2 and, like the space shuttle, you and I, I think, are both of an age where we we kind of feel a bit left out. We missed that whole big push to the moon with with Apollo and whatnot, and I actually like was but Bruce and I didn't.

42:04 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I know right Envy us.

42:06 - Tariq Malik (Host)
No, no, but I also like. I have, like multiple space shuttle models made out of wood, made out of paper, made out of plastic, whatever I can get my hands on, and somewhere around here is a Buran poster, I don't know where. Oh, no, so I had many versions.

42:22 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
You had to say, and somewhere around here is a Buran poster I don't know where.

42:25 - Emily Carney (Guest)
Oh no, I had to say the B word Watch it.

42:26 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Okay, and so I guess the question is, you know, a lot of people think oh meh, the space shuttle, it was a big bust of space or whatever. But it has a special place, I think, for the three of us. You know maybe not Rod, I don't know and what really made it special? Because of course now they're in museums and I'm just curious about where that program really stood out for the two of you, because it did seem like it had a bit of a special position to you personally.

43:01 - Emily Carney (Guest)
I'll get started. Well, I think I'm saying this. You know, I'm aware that the shuttle wasn't perfect. Since I became more interested in space history, I've done research. I've talked to people who are bona fide space shuttle experts, People who, like Dennis Jenkins you know he's like the space shuttle guru you know people like Jennifer Lavasseur at Smithsonian, things like that. You know, I've talked to them and I've gotten more of a view of, you know, what the shuttle was viewed when it was being designed versus what it was when it actually went up. You know, and as we know, when it went up, you know we did not get the return on the investment. Probably, as was promised, it was more expensive and more complicated than anybody imagined during the 1970s. In the 70s, it was being billed as. This is the answer to everything 54 flights a year Easy.

43:58
Yeah, exactly 500 flights by 1992. We, you know, from both sides of the coast, and this is, and it's gonna make payloads so cheap that everybody will be able to have a satellite, you know, and you and I can fly on the shuttle. It's gonna be that easy. It'll be like an airplane. Didn't quite happen like that, but I do view, I view the space shuttle as the peopleep. There's this book, I think, by I hope I'm not running her name, amy Kaminsky, I think that's her name the people spaceship. I do view the shuttle as the people spaceship because it did launch, you know, the first astronauts, the US astronauts who really represented the country on it. I view it as the people spaceship. It ushered that era in which was incredibly important, especially to somebody like me growing up. It was like wow, there's women astronauts, you know there's. I was obsessed when I saw the dream is alive. We talked about the movie. I was obsessed with Judy Resnick. I wanted to be her music. I do too.

44:58 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yes, she had awesome hair.

45:00 - Emily Carney (Guest)
She was gorgeous and she was killing it. You know, as an astronaut, and I was just like God. I want to be like that someday. She's so badass Excuse my language so that was tremendously inspiring, not just to me, but to probably thousands and thousands of kids all over the world, not just in the US. And also I know, you know, there were obviously two major accidents for the shuttle and I'm not trying to minimize that by any stretch, but it did do so many amazing things. Look at what, you know, Bruce's dad was able to do. He was able to bring a vehicle that he'd been testing for like 20 years forth and it's still. It may have not been used forever, but it's still an, to me, an amazing accomplishment, because it showed that could be done. That's something we could do in the future.

45:48 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Still, I think it's incredible excuse me, but I think that's really an important point, which is, I mean, they've been trying to do this since the Gemini days, when Gene Cernan was supposed to test something similar. But I mean, obviously, obviously, in our future we're going to have to have one, two, three person propulsion units. So, bruce, your dad really kind of pioneered the way for that with great courage.

46:11 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
I might say, well, yeah, thank you. And there, last time I looked into this, there was a company in Colorado that was, you know, doing some, had actually received some sort of a contract from NASA to start looking at ways to build an improved jetpack, because, I agree with you, something like that's going to be needed. I mean, not every company that goes into space is going to have the resources of a shuttle orbiter that can maneuver as freely as that one did, and they're not going to have the, maybe not have the time or money to have droids that can go out and fix things, and so, and if nothing else, you'll see jet packs used the same way. Maybe Segways or scooters are used now for tourist purposes. We have space hotels and that sort of thing. So I think there's a place in the future for jet packs. You know unclear exactly what it is, but I think we'll see them again yeah, I should point out.

47:06 - Tariq Malik (Host)
by the way, we've been talking about this propulsion unit. We've never called it the man-maneuvering unit, the MMU right For a while. That's what we've been referring to for everyone that's been wondering about it, and there are safer thrusters, I think, on some of the spacesuits that the astronauts use now as an emergency weight.

47:24 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, when you say safer. That's an acronym.

47:26 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That's an acronym. Yeah, Explain that.

47:28 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, so basically, if you get into a tumble or drift away or something, you hit that and, as I understand it, it automatically takes you back, right?

47:36 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
Well, that's a good question. I would say the MMU lives on just that. It's safer these days. Now whether it has some sort of homing capability, I don't know. I've read where Draper was trying to come up with something like that at one point that, would you know it automatically get you back to the space station or wherever. But I'm not sure the safer units they have now have that capability. I know they have propulsion capabilities but I'm not sure they have any sort of automatic return feature.

48:05 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I guess they must have some kind of control over it.

48:07 - Tariq Malik (Host)
One of the things that, bruce, you bring to mind is that there were designs with some of the private stations for that tourist EVA. But the jetpack is like a little bit of a ship, so you're in a bubble Rod.

48:20 - Rod Pyle (Host)
They're like those old Von Braun pods from the Disney special special, that's what they look like no, I'm serious like snow cones, yeah they, they and and and the whole, the whole thought a little robotic arms out the front exactly, and it pops out and it goes around and it comes back, and then you've done your spacewalk.

48:34 - Emily Carney (Guest)
So um all right, all right.

48:36 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That's enough of my interrupting rod.

48:37 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Go ahead, go ahead so no, I mean, uh, actually, now that you're throwing back to me, it's it's time to go to a break, so very opportune, and uh, we'll be back in a moment stand by. So I've got a bunch of other stuff I want to ask, but I do have to direct a question to emily, and this may apply to both of you. There is a very specific, and it's it's not uh overwhelming to demonstrate in the book, but just because I know you, emily, and follow hipsters, there's a very deep interest in Skylab, which is something that a lot of people kind of overlook. So, because of my age, of course, I was fascinated by Gemini and Apollo. By the time Skylab came along, I was well, I was in college, but shortly to head off to wasting a decade in the entertainment industry. So that was a different thing, but it really didn't get the kind of coverage I thought it deserved. And I forget which book it was, but I was writing a chapter on it, the Skylab 2 mission, which is where the astronauts went up to repair it because it was quite imperiled in space and off the books.

49:40
I guess I'd call it courage, or perhaps near insanity, that Pete Conrad showed in getting that solar panel swung out. When I really looked into that I thought holy crap. And years later I was talking to Jerry Griffin and I said who's a? For those who don't know, he's a flight director during the Apollo in years. And I said he said I said I know you weren't on console then because you were in DC, but did you ever hear anything about like the reactions of mission control from when Conrad was like not saying on the radio exactly what he was setting up to do, which is a long story? But basically they tied a cable out the solar panel and got their backpacks underneath it and stood up real fast and it snapped and the panel deployed and they went hurling off into space. Fortunately they were tethered but it must have given the guys on the consoles heart attacks to see that. But you do have a keen interest in skylab yes, uh, it's kind of uh.

50:40 - Emily Carney (Guest)
It's been pointed out to me that my interest in skylab is a borderline, obsessive and strange uh, just because, uh, you know, there were no, obviously there were no women on skylab, and it happened before the crude missions happened, before I was alive. So I don't have the perspective of having been around at the time. But I've done a lot of research. I've talked to pretty much all the remaining Skylab involved people, including the astronauts, the ones who are still alive. I think I've talked to everybody except Conrad, unfortunately. I would have loved to have talked to him about that. Yeah, me too. But I love Skylar.

51:18
I first got into it as a kid because I, of course I was a nerd, I didn't have a lot of boyfriends or a social life when I was little, when I was younger and stuff. But I remember I saw a picture of it in one of my space books and I think I ripped the picture out and just put it on my wall because I just thought it looked cool. It looked like, you know, and I didn't know back then it was sort of spare parts of Apollo. I had no idea. I just thought it looked really cool and and I just always thought it was so interesting. I was like, wow, people lived in space in the 70s, that's so, you know. I mean that's so like wow, you know, that's neat. And as I got older I began to appreciate it, because I really believe this is why, honestly, this is why I have such a passion about the program. I really believe it's the link between Apollo and the shuttle because if you look at you know the, the final mission, skylab, four or three, some of them call it three. You know somebody like Ed Gibson, the science pilot. He was doing things sort of like at the Apollo telescope mount. He was doing things that were kind of analogous to what they were planning to do on the space shuttle, you know, which was very long, kind of observations and shifts, things like that, and that really taught NASA, you know.

52:36
And really spaceflight in general. You know how are we going to work in space for you know extended periods of time and how are we going to work in an online lab or an on orbit, I'm sorry, laboratory, you know, like the space shuttle which by that point, in 1973, 74, they were envisioning the shuttle to do those things and of course we saw later in the shuttle. They had, um, you know, space lab, they had neuro lab, they had uh, space hab, which was also uh, sort of a, a small on board, uh, scientific laboratory. So, um, and obviously later we saw people living on mere and now we have the ISS. The ISS sort of is a direct ancestor, I should say, or a direct descendant, I should say, of the Skylab.

53:23
And I think Skylab David Hitt has a really excellent. He wrote Homesteading Space, the wonderful Skylab book, which is also published on the University of Nebraska. But David Hitt has a great talk about like what Skylab taught me about Mars, and that kind of says it all. I think Skylab is really going to teach people the lessons they learn from. Skylab medically, scientifically and otherwise is going to. It's going to teach people how to live long term on, you know, the moon or Mars, which is where, obviously, places we're looking towards. So I hope that summarizes it. But yeah, I just love it. And plus, there was a ton of drama with Skylab, people Don't. There was so much drama with that program that some of it's a little petty. It's funny, you know, and I just it's's just a wonderful story and we just don't look at it.

54:14 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Wasn't there a mutiny of some kind? Just had to go there, just had to go there. No need to respond.

54:23 - Emily Carney (Guest)
Wow, I screamed kind of. I was like yeah yeah.

54:27 - Tariq Malik (Host)
There was cursing on spacewalks too. Back then Rod so.

54:32 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, it wasn't a mutiny, it was a disagreement.

54:34 - Emily Carney (Guest)
Yeah, it was a disagreement, yeah it was like uh, it was a workflow issue.

54:38 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
I try to yeah it was a work, but yeah, workflow.

54:45 - Emily Carney (Guest)
I call it that at work, when I'm at my day job. That's what? If you have a disagreement with a you know, a project manager on how something should be written, you have a workflow issue. It's a beautiful way of putting without saying disagreement.

54:57 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Better than an airflow issue Fight. So, Bruce, do you have a favorite favorite era?

55:06 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
Well, my the funniest era is Skylab. I like talking to Emily about that because I like talking about the fashions and the. You know, the brown, the bread, the, the the pumpkin colored. At one point there was talk about putting an entertainment console in the sky lab and we'd like to talk about what would have been, you know what would have been included in Herb Albert, and the Tijuana brass would have been playing, I suppose.

55:31
And you know there was a, there was a shower, and you know there's some beefcake photos of Jack Lousma looking out of the shower, and so I like talking about that. I like Gemini as well, just because I like those heroic spacefarers and their you know their chewing gum wrapper pressure suits, and some of the photography from back then is so cool. You know the Edward Spacewalk in particular. Yeah, yeah. So I like that. I think Skylab and Gemini would be my favorites.

56:03 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I think that film of them running around the perimeter.

56:06 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Right.

56:07 - Tariq Malik (Host)
The interior.

56:09 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Barely able to maintain foot contact. I was at KSC recently and I was wandering through the museum and got to I forget which Gemini capsule it was, but it was one of the Gemini capsules and I'm looking in that thing, thinking about those two guys sitting in there for two weeks. And you know, for anybody who hasn't seen the inside of a Gemini capsule, you can imagine the smallest British sports car you've ever seen, like an MG Midget, where your shoulders are almost touching. And add to this, in this case you've got a hatch that's just about touching the top of your helmet. In their case their helmets were soft, but I mean, I can't even begin to imagine. This doesn't include the conversation about elimination of waste materials and eating and moving around and stuff.

56:56 - Emily Carney (Guest)
Wow, I mean bags, you know yeah those guys were true supermen yeah, this is I was talking. I'm not gonna say who it was. I was talking to an apollo astronaut years as one does years ago, and he was discussing one of his crewmates just floating by with a bag on him and and I'm like, why did you tell me this? And the person was at the same event. So every time I see this guy walk by, I'm like I think of him attached to a poop bag.

57:25 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I believe it was called the Top Hat. Yes, yes, for reasons that we don't need to go into. Okay, bruce, before we run out of time here. We should do a whole episode on that, on the top hat with the top hat with the built-in glove. For other reasons we won't discuss. Bruce, I want to ask you about your other books. You've got either one or two novels and, of course, the cool book Wonders All Around. You wrote about your dad.

57:50 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
Yeah, wonders All Around, sure, that's a book about Bruce McAnlis II and his career and, of course, the MMU flight and his work on deploying the Hubble Space Telescope which, as you know, continues to send us some very cool images. There was an image of the Andromeda galaxy released this week which was made up of not new photographs but old photographs together, I guess, or old images stitched together, from Hubble, and it's pretty astounding to see the level of detail if they managed to capture in that that sort of photo montage or however you would describe it. So he talks about that and his career as a fighter pilot and also as a conservationist. He was a big environmentalist, conservationist kind of guy. And then my other foray into space-related matters is a science fiction novel called Sour Lake which I wrote several years ago, and it involves the Tunguska incident back in 1908 and conspiracy theories and that sort of thing. I was going to say talk, uh, conspiracy theories and that sort of thing.

58:54 - Tariq Malik (Host)
so I was gonna say talk about conspiracy. Yeah, I'm gonna look.

59:00 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
I'm gonna look that one up.

59:03 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, so thanks, rod I appreciate you bringing that no sweat and thank you for the shout out about the project orion chapter in your book. I was very pleased to see that because I think that was my favorite to write yeah, how fascinating was that.

59:14 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
That's the, the idea of pulse nuclear blasts, uh, to propel a spaceship, right is that? Am I remembering?

59:20 - Rod Pyle (Host)
yeah, and on the high end, you know this. On the low end this thing was going to be able to be lofted on the upper stage of a saturn 5, but on the high end they were talking about something between a hundred thousand or a million tons, which is basically like launching a neighborhood. I mean. So you can imagine all these guys and their barco loungers, they're, you know, getting drinks from the stewardess and that kind of thing. I mean, this was the 50s and 60s, after all, and you know it could have worked. The only problem was it, you know, would have killed probably 20 or 30 000 people every time you launched it, because nukes.

59:52 - Tariq Malik (Host)
okay, tark, I'm sorry you, I'm sorry, it's your turn. Fun fact Larry Niven and Jerry Purnell built an Orion spaceship to help save the world from elephant creatures in the sci-fi novel Footfall, which was really exciting.

01:00:04 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
Oh, okay, I didn't know that.

01:00:06 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, well, they had their characters build it.

01:00:09 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, the characters built it. Yeah, they also put space shuttles. They welded them into the ship and then they could deploy them like little space fighters. It was really exciting when you get to that part in the book Shades of moonfall.

01:00:23 - Rod Pyle (Host)
By the way, before you ask your wrap up question, I have to say there was a quote that really stuck out to me, and I don't know which one of you came up with this, but it was about Isaac Asimov. Do you know what I'm going to say?

01:00:35 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
Yes, I do know what you're going to say.

01:00:44 - Rod Pyle (Host)
The science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, a prolific fantasist and colorless prose stylist who could make even the most exciting ideas seem like an early dinner with the in-laws, sorry.

01:00:52
No, I am so glad you said it because I read tons of Asimov as a kid and people worshipped it like they did Heinlein. But I thought you know Asimov is to written science fiction. Boy, are we gonna get hate mail for this is to written science fiction as Stanley Kubrick is to science fiction movies. I don't think these guys really like people very much. They just kind of wanted us out of the way. Yeah, so these cold. You know they're good hard science fiction, but they're cold.

01:01:20 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
Oh yeah, and there are lots of Asimov chauvinists out there, so I'm sure you'll get some letters. But you know, and I had to deal with them all through high school and college, you know people would say, well, you just don't understand what he's talking about. And that may have been true.

01:01:34 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I wasn't interested in finding out because it just wasn't compelling, but anyway, Well, and that's a good point, because you will get into conversations, sometimes with engineers, who will look at you and you know what they're thinking is oh you poor little insect. But you know, it's as much a personality thing.

01:01:53 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I apologize, this is not all engineers a handful but I work with a lot of them and it's a little bit more of a personality thing than it is us okay, tark, I'm sorry, I was just saying, I was very I was very, I was very frustrated with isaac asimov because I played that rendezvous with rama video game in which he is a live-action character that when it, whenever you die, like the real life, as like isaac, pops up, as like a, like a guide to say oh, you died because you got the puzzle wrong and I was like you know, I'm gonna blast you with my magic mutton chops isaac, isaac, I'm done, I'm done you can anyway that was like was he gloating?

01:02:29 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
was the character gloating? That he was just?

01:02:30 - Tariq Malik (Host)
kind of saying that that you really should do better, you know and maybe look at this next time, so I was I got frustrated because I got, I got stuck and that was okay, dude, anyway.

01:02:39 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Anyway, it's your question, because we've only done about a third of them, so a lot left to go here I don't know why you're surprised, rod.

01:02:45 - Tariq Malik (Host)
It's like that every episode I prepare.

01:02:48
Yeah well, it dawned on me that starbound comes out at a very interesting time in terms of space exploration. We've been talking about how it's a chronicle of the American space program and all of these great programs. We landed on the moon, we had the space shuttle fabulous machine but now we're kind of at this big crossroads bit. We've got Artemisis one, uh two you mentioned. You were hoping that it was going to go to the moon and there was a question coming, I swear, but. But it just seems like it's very on on on point now and that your goal of kind of getting people up to speed seems like a very appropriate message for this. And I'm curious where you see this area, because you because in two years, 2027, we're going to be at 70 years of the space age, and I'm just wondering where you see the book fitting in, and are we in like a new renaissance of sorts where it can be a foundation for a new generation that has their own progression to go?

01:03:53 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
Yeah, yeah. No, it's a great question and I think you're on to something. I think that you know the newfound prominence of Mr Musk and Mr Isaacman and, frankly, I think President Trump, for whatever reasons maybe personal President Trump, for whatever reasons, maybe personal visions of grandeur would really love to see, as he said, the American flag planted on Mars. I think there's going to be a lot of activity, a lot of talk about space and where we're going and whether we're going to the moon first or going to Mars first, and this is a great book for someone who wants to get sort of caught up and inserted into that conversation.

01:04:37 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yes, it is.

01:04:39 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
I hope anyway, and you know, I think I'm probably like you guys and I'm just fascinated to see what's going to happen in the next six months to a year in terms of where we're going with Artemis, and you know how much influence Elon Musk is going to have on the administration and what the president decides he wants the space program to look like.

01:05:03 - Emily Carney (Guest)
I pretty much agree with what Bruce said. You know, I think our book is kind of. There was this great article years ago I read by David Cloud you know who he is Rod about. It was called Space History. I think at the handoff in a relay race. Years ago I read by a david clout you know who he is rod about a. It was called space history. I think at the handoff in a in a relay race you hand off the yeah yeah, someone else david, david clout, who doesn't realize what a gifted writer he is.

01:05:25 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I keep telling him and he just kind of goes man yeah that, I love that article.

01:05:30 - Emily Carney (Guest)
But I thought the metaphor, the handoff, was great, like the relay, you know, the person with the baton handing it to someone else, and I think we're kind of at the. Our book is sort of at the handoff, if that makes sense, because we're sort of like, okay, this is where we're at right now. You know, we're at the sort of a precipice and we're just leaving it there. I don't know if we'll ever write a follow-up, but we're sort of at a precipice where, you know, we've got a lot of stuff happening. We're not sure if we're going to go to the moon or mars right now, but I think it kind of leaves it at a nice spot, you know, as long as we don't end up destroying ourselves in the process, right, and that's all I'll say I don't know if we're writing a follow-up.

01:06:11 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Did I hear you say that?

01:06:13 - Emily Carney (Guest)
I? I'm saying this because, uh, I have other projects I'm interested in. I just don't know if uh bruce would ever write with me again, or uh, I don't know if he'll ever write with me again or if we'll ever bruce, you can send us an email no, I say that just because you know, whenever you write with people, you know you're always like man will they ever work with me again?

01:06:37
you know afterwards. But no, seriously, it was. It was awesome to write the book with him. But I think if we just leave the book where it is now, you know I it kind of just sums up where we're at at the moment, sort of a precipice in history, which I think is a nice way to leave it.

01:07:02 - Tariq Malik (Host)
You know, I ask myself that same question about rod every week. Uh, so how is that? What did I miss about?

01:07:04 - Emily Carney (Guest)
whether he'll work with me again after every week. You're my hero, I think. I'm like, oh god, they probably are like front they yeah, if they ever want to work with me again. But no, my my thing. More was, I think we left it in a nice yeah, no that's kind of a nice hey you guys.

01:07:16 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
You guys don't need to break up, uh, the partnership, because you're doing a great job. I enjoy it.

01:07:20 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Oh, thank you yeah, we, we like to wear it loose. Um, yeah, you know it's interesting because you wrote about a lot of present day stuff, but you were smart about it because you didn't automatically.

01:07:34
Uh, I'm gonna put this put, put trick date triggers in there yourselves yeah yeah, because I found, about two years after space 2.0 came out, I suddenly realized, oh my god, this thing's horribly out of dates. You know, as of now, spacex has flown 16 times or something, and, um, unfortunately that that happened right before the pandemic. This is a 20 book. And I went back to the publisher and they said if we did a second edition it would be 60 bucks. I went, oh, and I imagine, um, I don't know if you'd face the same thing or not, because you don't have as many color plates, but it's. It's daunting dealing with the publishing industry and I think Nebraska is about as good as it gets.

01:08:14 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
Yeah, they're very good, but they have their own financial restraints, just like any other publisher. And Rod, I mean to be honest. I mean our book was out of date 30 minutes after it was published. I mean, so much is happening these days. We did try to avoid being specific in some respects, but we've got that embarrassing list of predictions at the end that I know are all going to be wrong.

01:08:39 - Emily Carney (Guest)
Well, you know, it's interesting. You mentioned that I'm still alive. In 50 years I'm going to be like oh God.

01:08:44 - Rod Pyle (Host)
As I was reading it, I thought these guys are doing a pretty good job of future-proofing themselves. Right until I got to the point where you were talking about NASA 2025. And I thought, well, who could have guessed? Now that the grenade's been rolled, I guess we'll have to see what's happening. Emily, do you have anything you want to promote while we got a few seconds here?

01:09:06 - Emily Carney (Guest)
No, you did mention space hipsters. Yep, All I'll say is we got I think we got almost 66,000 people in the group now, which is freaking crazy to me.

01:09:19 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Everybody who's a member send a dollar a year to Emily.

01:09:23 - Emily Carney (Guest)
OK, you don't have to know, we have the Hipsters Book Prize, a Facebook live event on Saturday, tomorrow. You can see the banner here for that. Yeah, if you have any interest in spaceflight past, present, future, space for everybody we don't, we do not. We want everybody to be in the group, regardless of your level of knowledge where you're coming from, your background.

01:09:47
We welcome you, so feel free to join us. Look us up. We are on facebook, but uh, yeah, we have our own guidelines. Uh, we allow anybody, uh, race, sex, creed, whatever, as long as you behave. Yeah, come on.

01:10:03 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, love space the good thing is you can drop almost any question in there. Somebody's gonna have an answer, which is really cool, and then the next fun thing is somebody else is going to come behind me and say that's not right. It was like this, because there's a rivet counter in every room, but you know that's part of the fun.

01:10:22 - Emily Carney (Guest)
Exactly and no, but yeah, we welcome you into the group. We're very equality focused. Just be nice to each other, follow the rules. And that's one thing I do love about the group is if I have a question, because obviously I mean, I don't know everything. I know I'm trying to get into astronomy but I'm a total novice at it. And yesterday I asked a question about something and within like 10 minutes somebody had an answer and I was like holy crap, that's amazing. So it is a wonderful resource. So that's really all I've got.

01:10:56 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So if you ask them why you can't see an eclipse of Saturn, they'll be happy to tell you. Bruce, do you have any other things coming up or coming out we should know about?

01:11:06 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
No, I'm working on a couple of things. I'm actually working on a book about the Second World War right now, so I guess that's not really germane to our program today, but that's what I'm up to. But uh, but for the meantime, in the meantime, I'm working on promoting uh um starbound and I'm going to the uh the award ceremony that uh the everyday astronauts putting on here in austin. I'm going to go check out and hear charlie luke uh speak on sunday. So that's about it all right.

01:11:32 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Is your uh world war ii book, pacific theater, european. Speak on Sunday. I use a sweetheart. Is your World War II book Pacific Theater or European, or both?

01:11:37 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
Pacific. Yes, sir.

01:11:39 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Oh, we have to talk.

01:11:40 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
I'd love to talk to you about it.

01:11:41 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I went out in the 90s and shot a documentary of all those god-awful islands, peleliu and Tarawa.

01:11:48 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
Saipan Guam Tinian. All that stuff. I'm right in the middle of all that stuff.

01:11:59 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I'd love to talk to you about it. Yeah, yeah, that'd be fun, all right. Well, I want to thank everybody for joining us today for episode 145 that we'd like to call starbound. Uh, emily, beyond your facebook group, do you have uh somewhere online?

01:12:07 - Emily Carney (Guest)
we should be looking uh, you can find me on pretty much every social media except x. I'm not on x. I'm sorry, that sounds really bad.

01:12:18 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Believe me, it's a trend.

01:12:20 - Emily Carney (Guest)
Yeah, no, I am on blue sky, I'm on Facebook, I'm on LinkedIn. If you want to do businessy conversations, I'm on LinkedIn, pretty much Instagram, wherever you can find me. I'm not, I'm online.

01:12:34 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So, and Bruce, you can find me, I'm online and, bruce, you have a cool website. What's it called?

01:12:38 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
Yeah, thank you. So I'm on various social media sites but I don't do very much on them. But I do have a website and I'm glad you brought it up because you can find source notes, notes on sources for the book on wwwbrucemccanliscom. Uh and uh, hopefully that's. That's helpful if you're interested in reading more about bernard von braun, or or, uh, um, you know, the, the, the mirror space station. We've got some, some sources for you, so go check that out that's great.

01:13:09 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, I was having a conversation with somebody that I work with about von bra Braun the other day and it wasn't an argument, but we did get into a little bit of a shoving match because you know, there's the age-old question of, well, he was bad in Germany and all that. And then I like to remind people yes, but he was NASA's first champion of civil rights in the workplace and squared off against George Wallace. So give the guy a break. Tarek, where can we find you flying and flying untethered these days?

01:13:34 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Oh, I just noticed that, by the way, that if Bruce had a P in his name, you could spell space with your name. That'd be awesome, so I'm sorry.

01:13:42 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I thought I was the one here with ADD. Good Lord.

01:13:45 - Tariq Malik (Host)
No, you can find me at spacecom, as always. I am on the X, also on blue sky and Instagram and LinkedIn too. I always forget about LinkedIn, but no, it's pretty important and I guess, if people are interested, I will be trying desperately to become Godzilla in Fortnite this weekend because of the spawn rate, where you can actually become a towering kaiju monster, so I'm very excited about that.

01:14:09 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Wow, okay, that's so sad, says the guy with the T on his sweater. So people remember his first initial.

01:14:15 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I said so. I remember my name. What are you talking about? All right.

01:14:19 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And, of course, please remember, you can always drop us a line at twisttwittv. That's T-W-I-S. At twittv. We welcome your comments, suggestions, ideas, criticisms, pushback, whatever you want. Just send it along. New episodes of this podcast, published every Friday on your favorite podcatcher. So make sure to subscribe like, give us five stars, thumbs up, spit in your eye, whatever it is you want to send our way, we'll take it. Don't forget. We're counting on you to join Club Twit in 25. This is our big goal. Besides supporting Twit, you'll help keep us on the air and God knows, everybody wants to do that.

01:14:55
Okay, and my sister did you yeah, well, see, bringing you great guests and my horrid space jokes. And, uh, if you do join club twit, you get all the great programming with video streams on the twit network ad free on club twit, as well as some extras that are only available there but it's a secret, so you'll have to join up to see them. Seven dollars a month. What else can you get for seven dollars a month? I ask you, what else can you get?

01:15:20 - Tariq Malik (Host)
for seven dollars. That's a good question. I think you can get like a maybe like half a lane at the bowling alley yeah, or one large latte a couple of blooming onion.

01:15:27 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Hold the cream, bring me the soy. Uh oh, blooming and I'll bloom. And onions are more than seven bucks now. I have had one not too long ago. Anyway, it's a tough time for podcasters, so sign on up and send us your dough. Finally, you can follow the TwitTech Podcast Network at Twit on Twitter and on Facebook and twittv on Instagram. Thank you everybody. Thank you, emily and Bruce. It's been a real treat and if you're not going to do another book in the next year or two, we're going to need to have you back on. So I can ask the other 18 questions.

01:16:02 - Bruce McCandless III (Guest)
I had, I'd be happy to rejoin you guys. Thank you very much. It was a lot of fun Pleasure.

01:16:09 - Rod Pyle (Host)
All right, See you everybody.

01:16:11 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Wait, do we have to get a screenshot? Yeah, but we have to end the show first oh yes, yes, oh sorry, sorry, I thought we were done, bye.