I'm sorry, I tried. I just cannot stand this rambling nonsense. Call me a boomer and write me off. I'm going back to Joe Scott. He digresses also, but at least he manages to get back to the topic at hand within about a minute.
Also he managed to be way less impressive than the dude sponsored by Red Bull, Felix Baumgartner. Sure, Richard allegedly went twice as high (cnn claims 50 miles up), but he did so in a vehicle, not a balloon like Felix. Look up skydive from edge of space if you want to find the video.
@@nicolescats2 Baumgartner is another good example of the latin phrase "si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses" (if you had remained silent, you would have remained a philosopher). He was doing alright as long as everybody knew him as the parachute guy, but then he opened his mouth and let his political views spill out, and oh boy...
The Challenger explosion is the number one thing we learn in our engineering ethics classes. They constantly tell us, as they should, that we as engineers do not just have the right to refuse doing something dangerous, we have the duty to refuse. We cannot ethically make the decision to just ‚go along‘ when peoples lifes are at stake even if refusing could endanger our job position.
Yeah funny how that stuff evaporates day one on the job. Then again i'm a computer engineer and the worst my software dying will do is to maybe cause 10-15 seconds of downtime at some corp.
I have been told some jurisdictions (Alberta, strangely enough) have legislated that into worker safety laws. Not just for engineers, but all workers. Duty to refuse, not right to refuse.
Good engineers follow orders. We never questioned where the wagons full of subpar quality concrete went or why the rebar trucks came empty. The smell of the client's cologne on the mornings, congratulating me for keeping the costs down.
"I don't know much about space, I have played Kerbal Space Program though." Ah, another expert in the fine art of reducing little green men to a souplike homogenate.
I once downloaded a mod that added in-game achievements for things like doing an EVA report in orbit around/in the atmosphere of etc all of the different bodies in the Kerbol system. I think they had automated which achievements were available, because one of them was "do an EVA report inside the atmosphere of the sun". I somehow didn't consider that this was clearly added as a joke or something you could get with the help of ridiculous mods or bugs, and I figured that if the achievement screen said it could be done, of course it could be done! I designed a gigantic stock rocket with lots of inflatable heat shields covering one side, and probably like 50-100 giant radiators dissipating heat in the other direction. I had to use ion drives in order to be able to get there, since it's really difficult to actually get close to the sun. That took more than an hour in real time. Of course, once I got close enough to the sun, everything exploded and everyone died. This is my favorite gaming memory, because I honestly wasn't trying to kill them. I just wanted to put them INSIDE THE SUN because I was convinced that was going to work for some reason. I had taken every safety precaution availale. I had built for maximum temperature tolerance and made sure every part of that ship was covered by serious heat shielding. And then the game visually explained to me that there are no proper safety precautions for being inside the sun. In my mind those Kerbals completed the mission. Because of the trajectory of the ship, whatever superheated atoms remained of it DID end up inside of the sun.I may not have earned the achievement in-game, but I feel like I earned it spiritually.
The Tsiolkovskiy rocket equation is wild because it was developed by a mad Russian ascetic in 1903 who'd never seen an airplane, let alone a rocket, just doing thought experiments in his little hermitage in the middle of nowhere Russia. It's just one of the most amazing triumphs of theoretical science. The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles had a great exhibit of his life and work, he was really half a scientist, half proto sci-fi guy, half mystic philosopher.
The most impressive piece of technology on the Canadarm is the ability for it to have the Canadian flag and "Canada" logo visible in every single photo of it.
Ah the space shuttle. A hats of to the engineers and designers that managed to pull that off. To quote SGT Johnson: "It flew pretty good, for a brick."
Back when I joined the NASA, we didn’t have any fancy-schmanzy space planes! We had a some egghead Nazi’s and a big-ass slingshot. - SGT Johnson’s space cowboy ancestor, probably.
The Shuttle was such a waste. The failure rate when you take into account all the flights of all the shuttles comes out to like 60%. We had capsule tech down damned good and should have stuck with it. I think the fact everyone is using capsules proves we didn't need the shuttle.
@@BaronFeydRautha two failures in 135 missions is hardly 60%, lovely Feyd. It’s 1.48%. Neither of the accidents would’ve happened if standard procedures had been followed. The failure was of people and organizations. They knew they had a complex vehicle and they didn’t do everything they needed to ensure safety every time.
@@deBASHmode there's an article I read years ago. I'll see if I can find it. You're right the article says it was a 40% vehicle failure rate and a mission failure rate of like 1.6 or something. I'll look for the article. I can't remember if it was in Science or Forbes.
Other commonalities between Space and Alaska : - Lots of mineral ressources - Difficult to build roads to - Terrible cellphone coverage - Pretty much empty
A note on Columbia and the thermal protection system damage during launch: there had been several launches that very narrowly avoided a similar catastrophe in the past off of sheer luck and nothing else, most notably Atlantis on STS-27 (a whole TWO LAUNCHES AFTER CHALLENGER), which lost an entire tile on the underside and the only reason it wasn’t a total loss was the tile was below a metal plate that mounted an antenna. That plate was almost completely melted through by the time they got to ground. The account of the mission is one hell of a read too the crew pretty much all thought they were going to die but because it was a classified mission the video feed to ground was encrypted and therefore the quality sucked, so Houston saw super terrible images of the damage and was like "yeah it's fine go ahead and reenter". Commander Robert Gibson says he told the crew to relax because "there's no use dying all tensed up" but if it was obvious they were burning up he had planned on "telling mission control what I thought of their analysis" before being vaporized.
Hoot Gibson was a character, all right. Mike Mullane's book has some stories about him, and a lot of perspective and analysis on Challenger from Mullane's perspective as an active astronaut at the time. Very much worth the read.
Also, engineers later ran exact replicative projectile tests--identical size piece of the real foam and an actual spare wing edge--and discovered the Challenger foam very easily punched a Very Large Hole in the carbon-carbon panel on the leading edge of the left wing, something NASA thought was impossible. They failed to observe the wing's leading edge before re-entry.
Makes me wonder how much of the NASA management's intransigence for Challenger/Columbia involved the inability to express concerns over 'National Security' classification.. "Here load up this bomb... Err, I mean Bambi, .. This collection of Bambi VHS tapes."
I would like to point out, that aside from Gen. Kutnya and Richard Feynman, it was astronaut Dr. Sally Ride, America's first LGBTQ astronaut, that was the most critical to this. She was the NASA whistleblower who gave the information to Gen. Kutnya who then hinted Feynman in the right direction. This was not revealed until after Sally Ride's death in 2012 due to the obvious problems this would've caused with her career, so I hope that when the video gets made on the Challenger specifically, that this bit of information gets added to it. Always a fan of the show, though!
How so? The system could launch other things - but if you had something like Shuttle-C, so could the Shuttle stack. Putting the engines on the non-reusable booster simply makes the system more expensive. And if you mean the liquid fuel boosters - there were plans for those on the Shuttle too, NASA just didn't have the money for them.
@@HalNordmann As I recall the main design difference discussed in the book (it only had about one page on Buran) was the heat shield being single-use and thus designed for easy replacement. The Shuttle shield was supposed to be reusable (which it was) and require almost no maintenance (which it did NOT). Reusable was a great feature, but the fact that some tiles fell off on EVERY launch meant that refurbishing an orbiter for launch to a lot longer than it was supposed to, and that wound up making the reusable heat shield more expensive than replacing a disposable one after every launch. The book was called "Space: The Next 100 Years" and was published in the 90s. I'll see if I can find it to better source that quote.
@@spyone4828 AFAIK, Buran also had a reusable heatshield, although made of metallic tiles instead of ceramic ones (that didn't make it any safer, since Columbia crashed due to RCC wing leading edges, not the tiles). X-15 had an single-use ablative coating - and it was an absolute chore to scrape off the old coating and apply a new one. So NASA went with reusable tiles for the Shuttle - there were a few plans for interim ablative coating, but those were quickly thrown out.
@@HalNordmann Whether the Buran/Energia or the Orbiter/Space Shuttle is the better launch system IS debatable, and the relative merits of the design philosophies are only one iteration of old arguments. Quantity vs. Quality. Reusable vs. expendable. Developing new hardware Vs. continuing to use established hardware to leverage economies of scale and the learning curve. Upfront costs vs operating costs. I have my own views on all of these issues but even for the camps that I strongly favor I don't think the relative advantage of any approach is overwhelming. To put it another way, all of them are still open questions. Like reusability. Being able to use a launch vehicle multiple times is a huge advantage. If a vehicle would cost four times as much to be reusable but can do ten missions it's much more efficient than the expendable option. The thing is though, it's never that clear cut. Engineering just _has_ to be difficult about freaking everything; it's all compromise this, and redundancy that. If you want to reuse a rocket you have to run the engines at less than the bleeding edge of their capabilities, you have to make the structure stronger to withstand multiple launches, you have to devote mass to recovery hardware (either parachutes or landing legs w/ fuel for a landing burn). All of this raises the dry mass of the vehicle and/or cuts down on the payload mass. You could deal with this by just making the vehicle bigger, but the rocket equation will get all tyrannical on you for it. Let's compare the Buran and the Orbiter as shuttles. I won't opine on cost effectiveness, but in terms of which is the better vehicle? Easily the Buran. Everything is a compromise and the ones the Space Shuttle made really bite it in the ass. The main engines arn't just dead weight while on orbit, they're also taking up the prime real estate. So the orbital engines have to be located in dorsal pods on either side of the tail. That's not inline with the center of mass, so you have to angle the engines so their thrust lines up with the COM. That incurs losses, the horizontal component of each engine"s thrust vector is not doing useful work. If there were three engine pods in trilateral symmetry there's no inefficiency, but then one pod is on the bottom of the vehicle. Bilateral symmetry would also be fine, left and right sides, but I'm guessing that wasn't possible with the three main engines. The actual rocket of the Orbital Maneuver System also kinda sucks. It's pressure fed, hypergolic bi-propellant, so it's stupid simple and very reliable, which is good. On the other hand though. Hypergolic propellants don't have great specific impulse, so less delta v for the same propellant fraction. Pressure fed engines require pressure rated propellant tanks and those are _heavy_ especially if you want a higher thrust engine. The Buran's orbital engines are kerosene liquid oxygen fueled and driven with a turbopump. The propellant tanks can be light weight and are scalable: the engine produces the same thrust no matter how large or small the tankage. KER/LOX also has better specific impulse than hypergolics, so more delta v for the same propellant fraction. Delta v is everything to a rocket, it is the currency you spend to change your orbit and having more let's you do more things. (Or you can get the same orbit but less of the vehicle mass has to be propellant and more can be payload.) They don't call the rocket equation tyrannical for nothing, and _god damn is it harsh_ The Buran is a smaller vehicle than the Orbiter, I think it's dry weight is like 105 tons and the Space Shuttle is like 115-120. Both carry about 14 tons of propellant. Dry weight includes payload, and for the Space Shuttle it's max is 25 tons. It's really limited in terms of what orbits it can get to with that load and most missions were closer to 20 tons. If a satellite is going farther than low earth orbit then part of the payload mass is a whole separate rocket stage to get it there. That's not necessary a bad thing, one of the envisioned payload rockets was basically a Centaur upper stage, but the Challenger disaster put the kibosh on that. So most payloads got their assist from solid rocket motors. There were studies on carrying additional OMS fuel in the payload bay, but nothing came of it. Frankly, it's grasping at straws. The OMS engines arn't particularly efficient, being pressure fed means that the extra tankage has to be at higher pressure, so your bonus tanks are proportionally more tank than fuel. I don't even want to think about the plumbing required. The Buran had a higher max payload, a whopping 30 tons! On a lighter vehicle too. It's got the same amount of fuel as the Space shuttle, 14 tons, but since the Buran is lighter that's a higher propellant fraction. Combine that with the better specific impulse and the Buran had _much_ more delta V. And in the event that you need more Delta V for a mission, it's simple to add a propellant tanks to the cargo bay. It's kerosene and liquid oxygen at normal pressures since the engines are turbopump fed, and their sensible location immediately aft of the carbo bay means that the plumbing won't be an unholy abomination.
Explosions offer a level of finality and emotional destruction that an anticipated death by re-entry doesn't offer. I'd personally rather go out like a comically stubborn general in a lawnchair on a launchpad than like a chicken thrown into a blast furnace. Scratch that I choose neither.
The talk of using a nuke to launch a rocket reminds me of the “fastest moving manhole cover in history”. During an underground nuke test in the 1950s American scientists wanted to test the effects of a 300 ton yield nuke underground. They dug a pit and tunnel and then filled it in with concrete and dirt, then welded shut the tunnel with a 4” thick 500lb steel cover. As they detonated the nuke, the test produced a lot more pressure, a “teensy tiny” bit more than they expected. On the film of the event only one frame captured the cover “lifting off”, they were recording at one frame per millisecond. The manhole cover lifted off at six times escape velocity, escape velocity for reference is 11km/second, and indeed may actually have been the first object to space.
I suppose it bled a significant amount of speed exiting though, if it didn't just vaporize from the air friction.. there are probably people who know rules of thumb applicable here but I don't
1:12:00 Sally Ride also deserves a lot of credit here; she surreptitiously slipped a report from NASA engineers about the dangers of the effects of cold on the O-rings which prompted General Kutyna to tell Richard Feynman about it. He didn't acknowledge this until after she died because he didn't want to cause her professional problems.
Big Bird's main performer would be in the costume to boot, and it was going to be the one used on the show. So not only would Big Bird have died on live tv, Sesame Street would have faced two practical limitations if they'd ignored it.
The reason that Buran was a copy of the space shuttle was because the soviets looked at the shuttle and what NASA said it was supposed to do and concluded that the design made no sense for that mission. The conclusion was that they had some secret military purpose like dropping bombs on Moscow from orbit.
Something to note about rocket engines: they are most efficient when the exit pressure of the exhaust gases is as close to the ambient air pressure as possible. The smaller the nozzle, the higher the exit pressure, so an engine with a small bell works better at sea level, while a large bell works better in a vacuum. That is why the Falcon 9 has nine small bell engines on the first stage, and one engine with a bell the diameter of the rocket on the second stage; they're actually the same engine on both stages, but the one on the upper stage is vacuum optimised. The Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs) had to operate over a massive pressure range, so they had to be essentially a compromise between a vacuum engine and a sea level engine, which is why the bell shape is so different, and almost kinda cylindrical. And if you watch the launch footage from the engineering cameras in Super Slow Mo™, you can see that there are little streaks kinda creeping their way up the inside the bottom edge of the engine bells, which is flow separation caused by the air being around the same pressure as the exhaust. It's also why the exhaust plumes of the S-IC and S-II stages of the Saturn V are so wide when you see them in stage separation, because the air pressure is so low that it's essentially sucking the exhaust sideways to equalise the pressure.
The first billionaire in space was Charles Simonyi, a Microsoft billionaire who was on one of the Soyuz space tourist launches in 2006 and went back in 2009. Guy Laliberté (Cirque de soleil) also went in 2009. None of the other Space Adventures space tourists were billionaires (Tito has about half a billion, the Ansari family has about three quarters). Branson made it to 86.1km, which is 717,500 jars of Branston Pickle high. That's above the NASA definition but below the Karman Line.
The class clown in my morning HS math class blurted out all of a sudden "The shuttle just blew up!", as he was listening to a radio with headphones while the rest of us were taking a test or something. Everybody told him to STFU and stop making shit up and didn't believe him, even after the teacher confiscated the radio.
Normalization of deviance is the term used to describe the kind of engineering culture that led to the shuttle disasters, and it's the scariest kind of engineering related culture there is when it's in a "lives in someone's hands" kind of situation.
That is basically what safety is about. If it costs more than ~9 million dollar per life safed, it's too expensive. (Average. Varies very wildly of course. So-called anti-terror costs in the range of billions. Affordable health care is 6-figure.)
Cool factoid, one Soviet space dog, Strelka, went on to mother six puppies with another dog adopted by the Soviet space program (though he never actually went up into orbit). One of those puppies was given by Khrushchev to John F. Kennedy. The CIA scanned the pupper with X-Ray equipment fearing that the USSR had put listening devices in it, but found her to be clean. Puskinka ended up mothering several pups by another one of the Kennedy's dogs, and many of those pups were given away to children living in the Midwest. So there is a line of communist space dogs living in the US Midwest to this day.
@@trevorcorey7910 tamtaHbogh pa' 'Iw bIQtIqDaq pum je. Which is really more like "storytelling from a stolen territory", but that's as close as we can get it in Klingon.
I watched the first landing of the Space Shuttle when I was 8 and fell in love. I don't care what you guys are going to say and I am sure all criticisms will be correct and factual I will still love the Shuttle. It's my overpriced wasteful big girl and I will love her forever. Now I will listen and enjoy.
I was in 5th grade when Challenger blew up, and I was so pissed that we weren't watching it live, and then we found out it exploded and I was kinda ok with not having watched 7 people die; but then over the next few days it was on a constant loop on TV, so 🤷♂️
I was in high school, and shuttle launches had become pretty passe. In those pre-internet, pre-cell phone days it was just a rumor being passed by word-of-mouth ... until I got to physics class. Our physics teacher used to work for NASA (I think at radio telescopes in Maryland?), and he ditched his whole lesson plan for the day to instead run the calculations on exactly how much liquid hydrogen was in the tank when it detonated and exactly how much energy was released. Not having access to the video yet, he hadn't accounted for the breakup before detonation, or for the initial explosion actually moving the orbiter away from the tank, which is why he calculated that they wouldn't find a piece big enough to identify.
Yes this is true, however mission control did report that the orbiter had exploded shortly after the chaos,.they did have a SAR(search and rescue) team Jolly-1 searching for any signs after the debris hit the ocean.
Fun fact- because of how far they got into planning Lance's trip when he was kicked off, they had to send boxes with loaded with a mass equivalent to 1 Lance Bass up with the mission.
I need you to know I happened upon this comment at the exact moment it was happening in the video and it was a magical moment for me. That isn’t a particularly meaningful addition or anything but I wanted to say it anyway.
I mistook the sound for like warehouse shelving collapsing or something for some reason. Was genuinely worried until I heard everyone start talking again lol
I mean as a photophobic person who wore transitions for the last 15 years, I can confirm they make you look like an insane person. Imo unless you actually spend a lot of time outdoors glasses that filter blue light go much farther and are a hell of a lot cheaper, since even if you don't work an office job basically everyone is in front of a screen most of the time at this point.
The USSR sent dogs to space because they had a shitload of stray dogs in Moscow. And yeah, the vast majority of the space dogs came back safely and were adopted by various staff. I think one was given to the president of the USA. Another even had puppies.
The Russian spy station did, indeed, fire a shot or two. They had such confidence in it the cosmonauts suited up and hung out on the skin of the station in case, ya know, kaboom.
@@MannoMax I was refering to the MiG-27s that were armed with the GSh-6-30, a rotary cannon. To be fair, my saying "a few rounds" was a bit of an overtatement, but at 4-6k RPM of 30mm, it was known to cause serious damage, from cracked fuel tanks and jammed gear doors to one case of the instrument panel falling off in flight
My grandfather worked on the space shuttle designing and building the door hinges for the pay load bay. We didn't know till after he passed when we found an accommodation from nasa and the president. Keep up the awesome work. Love listening to the WTYP crew while building great things.
Living in Seattle, I was walking out the door to go to kindergarten during the Challenger launch. I saw the launch, and appearing to be successful, started to go out the door and my grandmother gasped. Turned back and saw the thing in pieces. Finding out that the astronauts lived (and might've been conscious) until they hit the ocean still haunts me.
To Follow up on Justin's "Fun Fact": The moon is also currently the sole masonic jurisdiction of the Grand Lodge of Texas, as Buzz Aldrin was a member of a Masonic Lodge in Houston, and requested to be to open a Representation of the Grand Lodge of Texas on the Moon and, thereby, establish Masonic Territorial Jurisdiction there. By all rights, that cannot be rescinded without a vote by the membership at a Texas Grand Lodge Annual Communication... except if a Prince Hall Grand Lodge wishes to send a representative and claim jurisdiction, then both will share the jurisdiction.
WTYP: *At each other's throats over whether a space craft disaster that happened before reaching space is a space disaster* Everyone: THIS is why we haven't dismantled capitalism
Whoa I'm hearing the same thunder only Roz's mic that I was hearing outside my house yesterday afternoon. I mean, from the same storm. It was probably like 8 hours later. Wow, it's almost like we all live on the same small, fragile planet or something.
I was fully expecting her to sample the final take (for the outro) of their Shake Hands With Danger jingle to replace the original, glad she at least mentioned considering doing that.
Same here. The first time I saw one in person (Enterprise, at the Intrepid in NYC) I felt very emotional and got teary eyed. It sucked, but it did it's job, for better or worse. Also, putting Hubble in space and maintaining it is good enough for me to love the shuttle forevermore. INB4 someone points out the Enterprise never actually went to space, that's not the point, it's what the shuttle symbolized. I did eventually see the Endeavour as well when I lived in Los Angeles, so that counts.
“And also, the void calls for them…” Great stuff. All episodes should feature home brew bread beer recipes. Also, does Gorbachev’s perestroika prohibition count as an engineering disaster?
No, it's a political one. Maybe historical one, since he should have known what the result is - Russians saw it during WW1, when the Czar was deleted from office and life for trying alcohol prohibition. Yes, Communism is the result of prohibition! I want to see the exploding heads of some US people when hearing that!
Having one cop sitting alone in a fume-filled mine, presumably smoking and reading an ancient paperback and periodically taking a puff of oxygen so he doesn't pass out is actually VERY Russian.
This may be late to the party but, NASA Railroad locomotive #1 (a SW1500 switcher) was sold to and currently oparates at the port of my home town in Natchitoches, Louisiana.... I've sat at crossings watching it pull chip hoppers past, along with the ports other 2 engines, two old ass Baldwin diesel switchers.
My favourite part about Dyna-Soar is that the plan for dealing with the wings on the top of the rocket causing lots of instability was to just... put a set of big fins on the bottom. The artist's impression for that looks absolutely Kerbal. 1:37:00 Not to say on whether a state agency could have done it at all, but I do not think NASA or any of the other large space agencies would have delevoped Falcon 9, or if they did it would have taken a lot longer - F9 took five years from announcement to first flight, and 12 years from announcement to the first booster reuse. SLS was announced 10 years ago while reusing already-developed hardware, and is supposed to have its first flight late this year, but I am highly doubtful about that. The problem is that these large organisations seem to have a quite conservative/risk-averse internal culture, and of course are interwoven into politics, which means goals change with the administrations, and decisionmaking is generally slow. And while the "move fast and break things" approach to development does have some obvious downsides - mostly disregarding the impact operations and explosions have on the local population, leaving yourself open to be made fun of when rocket go boom - it does appear to be working for SpaceX with regards to Starship. We'll have to see how the first testflight of Superheavy goes though, as they have that scheduled for... Musk said this month, but he is notoriously optimistic with times, so I'd cautiously expect "probably sometime this year". In the end, my stance on specifically SpaceX is: Fuck Elon Musk, but the engineers, designers and technicians working there are doing a good job and I hope they succeed, partially because I know that'll make them happy, and partially because I am a big space nerd who likes shiny rocket that lands like the Tintin moon rocket.
Judy Resnik who also died on Challenger was the niece of my mother’s doctor. When Mom went for her appointment a few days after the explosion, she told her doctor how sorry she was. He said she died doing what she loved. ☹️ Fun fact: The commission on the Challenger only found out about the O-rings because Sally Ride did a whistleblower and secretly passed Don Kutnya a NASA report on the O-rings and temperature.
Oh fuck, oh god, can I watch this episode? I know too much and I might get Angy. But seriously though, I was on a quiz show a couple of years back (WHICH I WON) and they put me next to a dude with space shuttle disasters as a specialist topic. The editors ended up with a lot of material for the cutting room floor.
I thought Lance Bass was found to have a heart defect that made him ineligible, which spooked everyone into canceling funding. He learned and supposedly still speaks fluent Russian, unlike some podcast members :P
"Ah yes, what we were supposed to talk about. 41 minutes into the episode." And THIS is why I listen to Well There's Your Problem: A podcast about engineering disasters. With slides.
9:40 - 11:45 As a professional train guy myself, I'd listen to Justin talking about the Amtrak electro-diesels for an hour and thirty minutes, but on the face of it, I don't see it as _that_ big of a problem. It _is_ a problem because of the price tag, and also in the sense that it can be used as an excuse to put off the electrification of mainlines. However, from the viewpoint of effective traction power, modern power electronics for electric locomotives have become so lightweight and space-saving that nowadays, you can cram in all kinds of other stuff just as ballast weight for maximum tractive effort. Case in point: look at developments on the European locomotive market. Over the past decade, we saw the rise of so-called last-mile diesels: these are power packs with a lighter diesel engine (enough power for a light shunter locomotive) that enable an electric locomotive to travel the last miles to the destination of a freight train, along industrial tracks or light-traffic branchlines which typically aren't electrified. And now in the last few years, the big makers started developing the kind of locos Amtrak wants to buy: a combination of a full-power diesel and full-power electric loco. Meaning, in both electric and diesel mode, such a loco won't be any less powerful than a top-notch non-dual locomotive. Stadler's Eurodual locos are already operating, Siemens is also building Vectrons like that. Of course, for sustainability, it would be best if those diesel engines in dual locomotives were replaced by (non-toxic or disposable) batteries.
@@TheGreatPurpleFerret I think Bob meant the Soviet space station back in the 70s where they were also using it as a spy satellite, that had an aircraft gun on it.
It's 2300. WTYP has recorded its 9 millionth episode. Rocz is campaigning against SEPTA's plan to replace buses with personal teleportation devices. Alice is a brain in a vat who somehow still has IBS.
My dad was a first year teacher in Chicago Public Schools in 1986. wheeled in one of those big TV carts just to let his 8th graders watch the Challenger take off. He is fully 58 now and it still affects him to talk about it
I went to an exhibition on the history of spaceflight, I remember there being 2 cases showing the equipment taken by American Astronauts and Soviet Cosmonauts side by side. All the NASA food was in toothpaste tubes labeled in black lettering like "BEEF STROGNAOFF" "BOLOGNA" "CHEESE OMELETTE", all the Soviet food looked like they forgot to pack lunch and sent Sergei down to the missile base commissary 1 hour before launch; tins of caviar, tins of meat, and bottles of orange juice all still with their company labels on. Also they had Werner von Braun's cowboy hat.
Alice I hope you can read this and know that you truly are the glue keeping it together. Thanks for being great at co-hosting and making this podcast excellent!
So funnily enough my mom’s college roommate went on to become an astronaut, and I actually went to a launch when I was a toddler. And I remember one particularly bad incident from a shuttle disaster was the same day I was supposed to take a middle school entrance exam and my big takeaway was “Don’t Swallow Mouthwash” because I did that too.
I remember being in fourth grade working a "What I want to be when I grow up" paper on being an astronaut when the Columbia disaster happened and then I was like lol just kidding I'll be a teacher and redid the whole project a day before it was due.
Launch Loops, Sky Hooks, Sky Towers (or Atlas Towers) and mass drivers are the proper terms for the concepts of 'elevate the launch pad or fire the space ship from a huge ass cannon' systems, oh and the Launch ramps ofc, which are basically mag lev trains that go to stupid high altitude.
I am deeply disappointed that Alice forgot to mention that in a parallel universe, the challenger didn't kill a bunch of teachers, and instead blow big bird to shit.
wait until you hear about how Big Bird...yes the one from sesame street....was supposed to be on the challenger mission too. However they abandoned the idea due to complications with the costume even fitting in the cockpit, fitting a space suit underneath it without it looking weird, and syncing up the mouth movements of the costume in zero-G without the head bopping everywhere.
Don’t make too much fun with the space tarp, folks. A friend of mine’s mom sewed that thing. it was a pretty good repair for the problem, and repairing things in space was still kind of a new business at that point. There’s a little on the issue here: th-cam.com/video/XSiOwBx6gLQ/w-d-xo.html
tfw wearing transitions lenses because my eyes are light sensitive and I can't afford prescription sunglasses and my normal glasses at the same time makes me insane
I just got transition lenses a few weeks ago! My eyes are very light-sensitive, and I've always refused to have prescription sunglasses on the basis that I would inevitably lose them.
Justin is half right. At common law, the traditional rule was "Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos" (whose is the soil, theirs is everything up to heaven and down to hell). But this principle has been significantly modified in the modern world because of the invention of aircraft. In Lord Bernstein v Skyviews Ltd [1978] QB 479 an English aristocrat tried to sue a company that was taking aerial photographs of his house. He failed, the court holding that a landowner's rights over the airspace go only as high as necessary for the "ordinary use and enjoyment" of the land. This is for obvious reasons - otherwise every time a plane flies over your house (however high) would be an actionable trespass. Nonetheless, the old ad coelum principle continues to be surprisingly relevant. In Bocardo SA v Star Energy Onshore Ltd [2010] UKSC 35 the UK Supreme Court held that laying pipelines under a landowner's land for fracking purposes was an actionable trespass, on the basis of the ad coelum principle. The Tory Government promptly reversed this by legislation.
I remember standing in a K-Mart to every single TV showing the exploding Columbia with that stupid CNN "18 times the speed of light" lower third. I was seventeen years old and it is one of my strongest memories. Something about the combination of tragedy and absurd stupidity etched itself onto my mind.
oh my god THIS is the episode i’ve been hoping for. spent my last two days in a low-grade fever just in a haze after getting my 2nd vaccine dose and now i get to enjoy the hell out of this. you all rule
36:10 / Buzz Aldrin's communion: idk about catholics but a bunch of protestant denominations have a thing where you take some of the sacrament blessed at a regular eucharist and set it aside for later (iirc the CofE calls it "communion by extension"). I think the primary purpose/use is to take communion to parishioners who are ill/otherwise can't make it on sunday morning, but hey why not use it for space as well? Anyway yeah I _believe_ that's what Buzz took to the moon with him.
I went to Space Camp and when they were talking about the ignition sequence they would light the main engines first and only once they'd confirmed they'd all ignited would they ignite the SRBs. Once you'd lit the SRBs you were _leaving_. There are explosive bolts that held the SRBs to the pad and we asked what would happen if they didn't fire. Without pausing the engineer replied "they get torn off and you launch anyway."
He's been mentioned a few times before, I'm thinking the lake Peigneur episode in particular. I think he's also been a guest on Kill James Bond, another fine Alice-related podcast available wherever fine podcasts are sold.
I was one the people picking up the pieces of Columbia in Texas. It was an odd job for sure. If it happened in the summer it would have been a nightmarish recovery in those swamps and woods.
Thank you for working on the recovery. What an intense job that must've been. I was in middle school and not yet much of a space nerd at the time of the disaster, so while I remember hearing about it on the news, I didn't know many details until more recently. I read a book about the recovery efforts last year and was so moved to learn how many people contributed.
I'm sorry, I tried. I just cannot stand this rambling nonsense. Call me a boomer and write me off. I'm going back to Joe Scott. He digresses also, but at least he manages to get back to the topic at hand within about a minute.
OK
ok
He took a month and a half to contemplate the episode and finally decided it wasn't for him
ok
cool
I applaud filthy rich people going to space. The thing I have issues with is them coming back.
Also he managed to be way less impressive than the dude sponsored by Red Bull, Felix Baumgartner. Sure, Richard allegedly went twice as high (cnn claims 50 miles up), but he did so in a vehicle, not a balloon like Felix. Look up skydive from edge of space if you want to find the video.
Quick, while they're in space, seize the means of (rocket) production!
@@nicolescats2 Baumgartner is another good example of the latin phrase "si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses" (if you had remained silent, you would have remained a philosopher). He was doing alright as long as everybody knew him as the parachute guy, but then he opened his mouth and let his political views spill out, and oh boy...
Personally, I hope Bezos does come back. Quickly. Very, very quickly.
@@Tuxfanturnip we should mandate unassisted lithobraking for private space ventures if the passengers have a value above 1 billion dollars
The Challenger explosion is the number one thing we learn in our engineering ethics classes. They constantly tell us, as they should, that we as engineers do not just have the right to refuse doing something dangerous, we have the duty to refuse. We cannot ethically make the decision to just ‚go along‘ when peoples lifes are at stake even if refusing could endanger our job position.
Thanks. We're all counting on you.
...Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.
Yeah funny how that stuff evaporates day one on the job.
Then again i'm a computer engineer and the worst my software dying will do is to maybe cause 10-15 seconds of downtime at some corp.
I have been told some jurisdictions (Alberta, strangely enough) have legislated that into worker safety laws. Not just for engineers, but all workers. Duty to refuse, not right to refuse.
Good engineers follow orders. We never questioned where the wagons full of subpar quality concrete went or why the rebar trucks came empty. The smell of the client's cologne on the mornings, congratulating me for keeping the costs down.
@@excitableboy7031 Good morals and getting blacklisted with a mountain of student loans doesn't put food on your table sadly.
"I don't know much about space, I have played Kerbal Space Program though."
Ah, another expert in the fine art of reducing little green men to a souplike homogenate.
I've subjected kerbals to +20 G acceleration/deceleration and have yet to find a way to reduce them to a souplike homogenate.
@@derpderpson2188 decelerate rapidly via contact with an astronomical body
polytron got nothing on my miscalculated suicide burns
Only Untitled Space Craft reduces a Kerbal to a soup like homogenate in under 30 seconds
@@derpderpson2188 Killing your Kerbals via G-forces is surprisingly difficult in stock, yeah.
I once downloaded a mod that added in-game achievements for things like doing an EVA report in orbit around/in the atmosphere of etc all of the different bodies in the Kerbol system. I think they had automated which achievements were available, because one of them was "do an EVA report inside the atmosphere of the sun". I somehow didn't consider that this was clearly added as a joke or something you could get with the help of ridiculous mods or bugs, and I figured that if the achievement screen said it could be done, of course it could be done! I designed a gigantic stock rocket with lots of inflatable heat shields covering one side, and probably like 50-100 giant radiators dissipating heat in the other direction.
I had to use ion drives in order to be able to get there, since it's really difficult to actually get close to the sun. That took more than an hour in real time. Of course, once I got close enough to the sun, everything exploded and everyone died. This is my favorite gaming memory, because I honestly wasn't trying to kill them. I just wanted to put them INSIDE THE SUN because I was convinced that was going to work for some reason.
I had taken every safety precaution availale. I had built for maximum temperature tolerance and made sure every part of that ship was covered by serious heat shielding. And then the game visually explained to me that there are no proper safety precautions for being inside the sun. In my mind those Kerbals completed the mission. Because of the trajectory of the ship, whatever superheated atoms remained of it DID end up inside of the sun.I may not have earned the achievement in-game, but I feel like I earned it spiritually.
The Tsiolkovskiy rocket equation is wild because it was developed by a mad Russian ascetic in 1903 who'd never seen an airplane, let alone a rocket, just doing thought experiments in his little hermitage in the middle of nowhere Russia. It's just one of the most amazing triumphs of theoretical science. The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles had a great exhibit of his life and work, he was really half a scientist, half proto sci-fi guy, half mystic philosopher.
Such a man could only ever come from Russia.
That's three halves
@@Wafflepudding Exactly, he was so mad, he consisted of three whole halves!
The Museum of Jurassic Technology is one of my favorite places in the world!
Like if l Ron Hubbard wasn't a fraud
The most impressive piece of technology on the Canadarm is the ability for it to have the Canadian flag and "Canada" logo visible in every single photo of it.
We do have branding on point
The maple syrup dispenser doesn't get enough praise.
I remember watching a video on the Canadarm with a song saying ‘we built the canadarm, aren’t you proud’, and a bunch of kids dancing on it
Canada is proud to be earth's #1 orbital arms dealer.
Funnier than every attempted joke in the episode
Ah the space shuttle. A hats of to the engineers and designers that managed to pull that off. To quote SGT Johnson: "It flew pretty good, for a brick."
Space is hard!
Back when I joined the NASA, we didn’t have any fancy-schmanzy space planes! We had a some egghead Nazi’s and a big-ass slingshot. - SGT Johnson’s space cowboy ancestor, probably.
The Shuttle was such a waste. The failure rate when you take into account all the flights of all the shuttles comes out to like 60%. We had capsule tech down damned good and should have stuck with it. I think the fact everyone is using capsules proves we didn't need the shuttle.
@@BaronFeydRautha two failures in 135 missions is hardly 60%, lovely Feyd. It’s 1.48%. Neither of the accidents would’ve happened if standard procedures had been followed. The failure was of people and organizations. They knew they had a complex vehicle and they didn’t do everything they needed to ensure safety every time.
@@deBASHmode there's an article I read years ago. I'll see if I can find it. You're right the article says it was a 40% vehicle failure rate and a mission failure rate of like 1.6 or something.
I'll look for the article. I can't remember if it was in Science or Forbes.
Other commonalities between Space and Alaska :
- Lots of mineral ressources
- Difficult to build roads to
- Terrible cellphone coverage
- Pretty much empty
Hey, moose and bears
similar temperature
@@piccalillipit9211 That's a nice one I did miss ^^'
@@Soken50 :-D
A note on Columbia and the thermal protection system damage during launch: there had been several launches that very narrowly avoided a similar catastrophe in the past off of sheer luck and nothing else, most notably Atlantis on STS-27 (a whole TWO LAUNCHES AFTER CHALLENGER), which lost an entire tile on the underside and the only reason it wasn’t a total loss was the tile was below a metal plate that mounted an antenna. That plate was almost completely melted through by the time they got to ground. The account of the mission is one hell of a read too the crew pretty much all thought they were going to die but because it was a classified mission the video feed to ground was encrypted and therefore the quality sucked, so Houston saw super terrible images of the damage and was like "yeah it's fine go ahead and reenter". Commander Robert Gibson says he told the crew to relax because "there's no use dying all tensed up" but if it was obvious they were burning up he had planned on "telling mission control what I thought of their analysis" before being vaporized.
wow. Also this kinda gets back to Alice's observation of how having to get the military involved kinda inherently messes things up.
Hoot Gibson was a character, all right. Mike Mullane's book has some stories about him, and a lot of perspective and analysis on Challenger from Mullane's perspective as an active astronaut at the time. Very much worth the read.
Also, engineers later ran exact replicative projectile tests--identical size piece of the real foam and an actual spare wing edge--and discovered the Challenger foam very easily punched a Very Large Hole in the carbon-carbon panel on the leading edge of the left wing, something NASA thought was impossible. They failed to observe the wing's leading edge before re-entry.
Makes me wonder how much of the NASA management's intransigence for Challenger/Columbia involved the inability to express concerns over 'National Security' classification..
"Here load up this bomb... Err, I mean Bambi, .. This collection of Bambi VHS tapes."
I would like to point out, that aside from Gen. Kutnya and Richard Feynman, it was astronaut Dr. Sally Ride, America's first LGBTQ astronaut, that was the most critical to this. She was the NASA whistleblower who gave the information to Gen. Kutnya who then hinted Feynman in the right direction. This was not revealed until after Sally Ride's death in 2012 due to the obvious problems this would've caused with her career, so I hope that when the video gets made on the Challenger specifically, that this bit of information gets added to it. Always a fan of the show, though!
I read a book in 1992 that had a quote about Buran: "Anybody who says the Soviets just copied our design isn't paying attention. They improved it."
How so? The system could launch other things - but if you had something like Shuttle-C, so could the Shuttle stack. Putting the engines on the non-reusable booster simply makes the system more expensive. And if you mean the liquid fuel boosters - there were plans for those on the Shuttle too, NASA just didn't have the money for them.
@@HalNordmann As I recall the main design difference discussed in the book (it only had about one page on Buran) was the heat shield being single-use and thus designed for easy replacement.
The Shuttle shield was supposed to be reusable (which it was) and require almost no maintenance (which it did NOT). Reusable was a great feature, but the fact that some tiles fell off on EVERY launch meant that refurbishing an orbiter for launch to a lot longer than it was supposed to, and that wound up making the reusable heat shield more expensive than replacing a disposable one after every launch.
The book was called "Space: The Next 100 Years" and was published in the 90s. I'll see if I can find it to better source that quote.
@@spyone4828 AFAIK, Buran also had a reusable heatshield, although made of metallic tiles instead of ceramic ones (that didn't make it any safer, since Columbia crashed due to RCC wing leading edges, not the tiles). X-15 had an single-use ablative coating - and it was an absolute chore to scrape off the old coating and apply a new one. So NASA went with reusable tiles for the Shuttle - there were a few plans for interim ablative coating, but those were quickly thrown out.
@@HalNordmann Whether the Buran/Energia or the Orbiter/Space Shuttle is the better launch system IS debatable, and the relative merits of the design philosophies are only one iteration of old arguments.
Quantity vs. Quality.
Reusable vs. expendable.
Developing new hardware Vs. continuing to use established hardware to leverage economies of scale and the learning curve.
Upfront costs vs operating costs.
I have my own views on all of these issues but even for the camps that I strongly favor I don't think the relative advantage of any approach is overwhelming. To put it another way, all of them are still open questions.
Like reusability. Being able to use a launch vehicle multiple times is a huge advantage. If a vehicle would cost four times as much to be reusable but can do ten missions it's much more efficient than the expendable option. The thing is though, it's never that clear cut. Engineering just _has_ to be difficult about freaking everything; it's all compromise this, and redundancy that. If you want to reuse a rocket you have to run the engines at less than the bleeding edge of their capabilities, you have to make the structure stronger to withstand multiple launches, you have to devote mass to recovery hardware (either parachutes or landing legs w/ fuel for a landing burn). All of this raises the dry mass of the vehicle and/or cuts down on the payload mass. You could deal with this by just making the vehicle bigger, but the rocket equation will get all tyrannical on you for it.
Let's compare the Buran and the Orbiter as shuttles. I won't opine on cost effectiveness, but in terms of which is the better vehicle? Easily the Buran. Everything is a compromise and the ones the Space Shuttle made really bite it in the ass. The main engines arn't just dead weight while on orbit, they're also taking up the prime real estate. So the orbital engines have to be located in dorsal pods on either side of the tail. That's not inline with the center of mass, so you have to angle the engines so their thrust lines up with the COM. That incurs losses, the horizontal component of each engine"s thrust vector is not doing useful work. If there were three engine pods in trilateral symmetry there's no inefficiency, but then one pod is on the bottom of the vehicle. Bilateral symmetry would also be fine, left and right sides, but I'm guessing that wasn't possible with the three main engines.
The actual rocket of the Orbital Maneuver System also kinda sucks. It's pressure fed, hypergolic bi-propellant, so it's stupid simple and very reliable, which is good. On the other hand though. Hypergolic propellants don't have great specific impulse, so less delta v for the same propellant fraction. Pressure fed engines require pressure rated propellant tanks and those are _heavy_ especially if you want a higher thrust engine.
The Buran's orbital engines are kerosene liquid oxygen fueled and driven with a turbopump. The propellant tanks can be light weight and are scalable: the engine produces the same thrust no matter how large or small the tankage. KER/LOX also has better specific impulse than hypergolics, so more delta v for the same propellant fraction. Delta v is everything to a rocket, it is the currency you spend to change your orbit and having more let's you do more things. (Or you can get the same orbit but less of the vehicle mass has to be propellant and more can be payload.)
They don't call the rocket equation tyrannical for nothing, and _god damn is it harsh_ The Buran is a smaller vehicle than the Orbiter, I think it's dry weight is like 105 tons and the Space Shuttle is like 115-120. Both carry about 14 tons of propellant. Dry weight includes payload, and for the Space Shuttle it's max is 25 tons. It's really limited in terms of what orbits it can get to with that load and most missions were closer to 20 tons. If a satellite is going farther than low earth orbit then part of the payload mass is a whole separate rocket stage to get it there. That's not necessary a bad thing, one of the envisioned payload rockets was basically a Centaur upper stage, but the Challenger disaster put the kibosh on that. So most payloads got their assist from solid rocket motors. There were studies on carrying additional OMS fuel in the payload bay, but nothing came of it. Frankly, it's grasping at straws. The OMS engines arn't particularly efficient, being pressure fed means that the extra tankage has to be at higher pressure, so your bonus tanks are proportionally more tank than fuel. I don't even want to think about the plumbing required.
The Buran had a higher max payload, a whopping 30 tons! On a lighter vehicle too. It's got the same amount of fuel as the Space shuttle, 14 tons, but since the Buran is lighter that's a higher propellant fraction. Combine that with the better specific impulse and the Buran had _much_ more delta V. And in the event that you need more Delta V for a mission, it's simple to add a propellant tanks to the cargo bay. It's kerosene and liquid oxygen at normal pressures since the engines are turbopump fed, and their sensible location immediately aft of the carbo bay means that the plumbing won't be an unholy abomination.
@@StarlightSocialist 0/10 was not shaped like Onion
I enjoy so much Liam's unintentional, yet overwhelming hostility when introducing guests.
The Diocese of Orlando having jurisdiction over the moon is my new favorite fact.
"like a space bus" "like a space SUV" "more like a space truck" rack off me space ute
space Liam's van
You can’t spell “Yay, Alice!” Without “Alice”
If I had a penny for each time the space shuttle exploded on live TV I'd have two, which isn't much, but it's weird that it happens twice right?
Explosions offer a level of finality and emotional destruction that an anticipated death by re-entry doesn't offer. I'd personally rather go out like a comically stubborn general in a lawnchair on a launchpad than like a chicken thrown into a blast furnace. Scratch that I choose neither.
@@Zachthesloth I hate that I understand that lawn chair reference
Oh and one of them had the fault directly on a Mormon cult
@@Comical1984 the very one. Where they only found his medals and watch.
The talk of using a nuke to launch a rocket reminds me of the “fastest moving manhole cover in history”.
During an underground nuke test in the 1950s American scientists wanted to test the effects of a 300 ton yield nuke underground. They dug a pit and tunnel and then filled it in with concrete and dirt, then welded shut the tunnel with a 4” thick 500lb steel cover.
As they detonated the nuke, the test produced a lot more pressure, a “teensy tiny” bit more than they expected.
On the film of the event only one frame captured the cover “lifting off”, they were recording at one frame per millisecond.
The manhole cover lifted off at six times escape velocity, escape velocity for reference is 11km/second, and indeed may actually have been the first object to space.
nah the germans managed to put some things in space (though not in orbit) but quite possibly the first to escape earth SOI
@@kupsna at 6 escapes, it's probably outside the solar system by now. How fast were the Voyagers?
@@steemlenn8797 haha shit, they are less than 1,5 escapes fast
*definitely* first interstellar human object
I suppose it bled a significant amount of speed exiting though, if it didn't just vaporize from the air friction.. there are probably people who know rules of thumb applicable here but I don't
1:12:00 Sally Ride also deserves a lot of credit here; she surreptitiously slipped a report from NASA engineers about the dangers of the effects of cold on the O-rings which prompted General Kutyna to tell Richard Feynman about it. He didn't acknowledge this until after she died because he didn't want to cause her professional problems.
Alaska and space similarity no. 23: both used to belong to the Russians.
“Amtrak’s buying new trains and they’re stupid.”
“HOW STUPID ARE THEY?”
They'll give you gas, but only after taking all of your diesel
One of the cases where the dunning kruger detector beeps loudly in the background...
Big Bird was almost on the challenger instead of Christa McAuliffe, imagine how much more traumatizing that would have been.
Big Bird is fast, but the SRBs are faster
Big Bird's main performer would be in the costume to boot, and it was going to be the one used on the show. So not only would Big Bird have died on live tv, Sesame Street would have faced two practical limitations if they'd ignored it.
Big Bird was meant to die in that accident and that's why we have COVID. I'm sure now that is what skewed us off into an alternate reality.
@@JustJezBeingJez two years late sorry
you know there's someone on Twitter who unironically believes this
All disasters are space disasters when you think about it.
Pfft, okay GLOBEHEAD
...Huh...
The reason that Buran was a copy of the space shuttle was because the soviets looked at the shuttle and what NASA said it was supposed to do and concluded that the design made no sense for that mission. The conclusion was that they had some secret military purpose like dropping bombs on Moscow from orbit.
Yeah, they correctly realized that it was very clearly oversized for its official mission and so started extrapolating what it could be for.
@@danielkorladis7869 And since it was still Cold War, they decided to do the same, just better.
Also, the soviets got into space stations way before the US, so they needed a "space truck" more than the US
Something to note about rocket engines: they are most efficient when the exit pressure of the exhaust gases is as close to the ambient air pressure as possible. The smaller the nozzle, the higher the exit pressure, so an engine with a small bell works better at sea level, while a large bell works better in a vacuum. That is why the Falcon 9 has nine small bell engines on the first stage, and one engine with a bell the diameter of the rocket on the second stage; they're actually the same engine on both stages, but the one on the upper stage is vacuum optimised. The Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs) had to operate over a massive pressure range, so they had to be essentially a compromise between a vacuum engine and a sea level engine, which is why the bell shape is so different, and almost kinda cylindrical. And if you watch the launch footage from the engineering cameras in Super Slow Mo™, you can see that there are little streaks kinda creeping their way up the inside the bottom edge of the engine bells, which is flow separation caused by the air being around the same pressure as the exhaust. It's also why the exhaust plumes of the S-IC and S-II stages of the Saturn V are so wide when you see them in stage separation, because the air pressure is so low that it's essentially sucking the exhaust sideways to equalise the pressure.
The first billionaire in space was Charles Simonyi, a Microsoft billionaire who was on one of the Soyuz space tourist launches in 2006 and went back in 2009. Guy Laliberté (Cirque de soleil) also went in 2009.
None of the other Space Adventures space tourists were billionaires (Tito has about half a billion, the Ansari family has about three quarters).
Branson made it to 86.1km, which is 717,500 jars of Branston Pickle high. That's above the NASA definition but below the Karman Line.
God, I miss Branston Pickle. Wish I could have way more of that and way less Dick Branson.
Soyuz, the old ship making new progress.
@@kingjinga2539 No no, Progress is the unmanned version...
The class clown in my morning HS math class blurted out all of a sudden "The shuttle just blew up!", as he was listening to a radio with headphones while the rest of us were taking a test or something. Everybody told him to STFU and stop making shit up and didn't believe him, even after the teacher confiscated the radio.
18 times the speed of light?
Why did we retire the spaceshuttle again if we could reach alpha centauri in under a year?!
Normalization of deviance is the term used to describe the kind of engineering culture that led to the shuttle disasters, and it's the scariest kind of engineering related culture there is when it's in a "lives in someone's hands" kind of situation.
And then there’s *software* engineering
I thought normalisation of deviance was the gay agenda
Re: safety third: the real danger is the company saying “fuck it, it’s cheaper if people just die instead”
Capitalistic pursuit of greater income kills people everywhere on Earth.
That is basically what safety is about. If it costs more than ~9 million dollar per life safed, it's too expensive. (Average. Varies very wildly of course. So-called anti-terror costs in the range of billions. Affordable health care is 6-figure.)
Cool factoid, one Soviet space dog, Strelka, went on to mother six puppies with another dog adopted by the Soviet space program (though he never actually went up into orbit). One of those puppies was given by Khrushchev to John F. Kennedy. The CIA scanned the pupper with X-Ray equipment fearing that the USSR had put listening devices in it, but found her to be clean. Puskinka ended up mothering several pups by another one of the Kennedy's dogs, and many of those pups were given away to children living in the Midwest.
So there is a line of communist space dogs living in the US Midwest to this day.
The storm in the background really captures the spookiness of the space shuttle program
Oh, fuck yes. FUCK YES. Also, "Yay Alice" in Klingon is HIja' Alice. Because it's a space episode... and I'm a nerd.
Just Sayin ..... th-cam.com/video/MA_v0YMPN9c/w-d-xo.html
Qapla
How do you say “is podcasting from stolen land” in Klingon
Alice would probably like to be beaten up by the Duras sisters
@@trevorcorey7910 tamtaHbogh pa' 'Iw bIQtIqDaq pum je. Which is really more like "storytelling from a stolen territory", but that's as close as we can get it in Klingon.
I mean, yeah it was super inefficient and did less than 25% of what it was supposed to do, but still
I miss u space plane
Why don't we give Jeff Bezos the gift of space flight through taxing him into poverty
The French had the guillotine. The Americans fired you into the sun.
God DAMN imagine being able to look back on something like that in a history book
that would inspire patriotism by god
We should nationalise Amazon. His compensation can be an $5 Walgreens gift card and an "I Helped" sticker.
I guess you got your wish, at least partially, judging from the contracts for the new lunar landers
I watched the first landing of the Space Shuttle when I was 8 and fell in love. I don't care what you guys are going to say and I am sure all criticisms will be correct and factual I will still love the Shuttle. It's my overpriced wasteful big girl and I will love her forever. Now I will listen and enjoy.
Space Is Alaska reason 57: only about 5 people live there and they can see Russia from their house.
Reason 58: there’s a lot of minerals up there but getting them is gonna suck and people will die.
I was in 5th grade when Challenger blew up, and I was so pissed that we weren't watching it live, and then we found out it exploded and I was kinda ok with not having watched 7 people die; but then over the next few days it was on a constant loop on TV, so 🤷♂️
If you watch Scott Manley’s video you would know it didn’t technically explode. It became unstable and was ripped apart.
@@zeitgeistx5239 does that really sound like it's the point of this comment.
@@zeitgeistx5239 It was a “major telemetry malfunction” according to the NASA audio feed.
I was in high school, and shuttle launches had become pretty passe.
In those pre-internet, pre-cell phone days it was just a rumor being passed by word-of-mouth ... until I got to physics class. Our physics teacher used to work for NASA (I think at radio telescopes in Maryland?), and he ditched his whole lesson plan for the day to instead run the calculations on exactly how much liquid hydrogen was in the tank when it detonated and exactly how much energy was released.
Not having access to the video yet, he hadn't accounted for the breakup before detonation, or for the initial explosion actually moving the orbiter away from the tank, which is why he calculated that they wouldn't find a piece big enough to identify.
Yes this is true, however mission control did report that the orbiter had exploded shortly after the chaos,.they did have a SAR(search and rescue) team Jolly-1 searching for any signs after the debris hit the ocean.
7:49 "I mean didn't Lance Bass of N'SYNC go to space or was his mission cancelled?" *ominous thunderclap*
Fun fact- because of how far they got into planning Lance's trip when he was kicked off, they had to send boxes with loaded with a mass equivalent to 1 Lance Bass up with the mission.
*camera zooms in on bloody spacesuit that wasn’t there before*
I need you to know I happened upon this comment at the exact moment it was happening in the video and it was a magical moment for me. That isn’t a particularly meaningful addition or anything but I wanted to say it anyway.
I mistook the sound for like warehouse shelving collapsing or something for some reason. Was genuinely worried until I heard everyone start talking again lol
1:22:27
Justin: "Transitions Lenses are mostly worn by insane people."
Me, wearing Transitions Lenses: "Fair enough."
Accusing Justin of being against disabled people because he opposes photophobic people having transition lenses.
Haruka!
My fellow kevinista!
@@joearnold6881 GLORY TO KEVINIA 🐈🌈🐈🌈
I mean as a photophobic person who wore transitions for the last 15 years, I can confirm they make you look like an insane person.
Imo unless you actually spend a lot of time outdoors glasses that filter blue light go much farther and are a hell of a lot cheaper, since even if you don't work an office job basically everyone is in front of a screen most of the time at this point.
@@Matthy63 I got transitions, mostly because I was under 18 and apparetly if you are photophobic then transition lenses are covered by the NHS
The USSR sent dogs to space because they had a shitload of stray dogs in Moscow. And yeah, the vast majority of the space dogs came back safely and were adopted by various staff. I think one was given to the president of the USA. Another even had puppies.
The Russian spy station did, indeed, fire a shot or two. They had such confidence in it the cosmonauts suited up and hung out on the skin of the station in case, ya know, kaboom.
Given their try at an A-10 had a gun so big it could only fire a few rounds at a time or it would rip the plane apart... I would have suited up too
@@NightRavenGSA01 Are you refering to the flying tanks ? Those had actual cannons/autocannons, very different from a minigun
@@MannoMax I was refering to the MiG-27s that were armed with the GSh-6-30, a rotary cannon. To be fair, my saying "a few rounds" was a bit of an overtatement, but at 4-6k RPM of 30mm, it was known to cause serious damage, from cracked fuel tanks and jammed gear doors to one case of the instrument panel falling off in flight
@@NightRavenGSA01 Oh ok. I was talking about the ground attack planes, like the late ILs and the SU 24
My grandfather worked on the space shuttle designing and building the door hinges for the pay load bay.
We didn't know till after he passed when we found an accommodation from nasa and the president. Keep up the awesome work. Love listening to the WTYP crew while building great things.
Me: "Thank you for being the proudest achievement of our nation's history"
Canadarm: "I'm literally just a robot arm"
One hour for each shuttle that exploded on live TV
Featuring: The One With the Big O-ring that Someone Warned Them About and The One With the Fancy Tiles that Someone Warned Them About
That's a solid space shuttle exploding on live TV per hour ratio there.
@@ayle1312 Morale of the story: If the engineers tell you "yo this is a problem that's gonna kill people", believe them!
@@zuthalsoraniz6764 But that’s expensive!!
@@Kaanfight Probably less expensive than needing another seven astronauts tho
Living in Seattle, I was walking out the door to go to kindergarten during the Challenger launch. I saw the launch, and appearing to be successful, started to go out the door and my grandmother gasped. Turned back and saw the thing in pieces. Finding out that the astronauts lived (and might've been conscious) until they hit the ocean still haunts me.
To Follow up on Justin's "Fun Fact": The moon is also currently the sole masonic jurisdiction of the Grand Lodge of Texas, as Buzz Aldrin was a member of a Masonic Lodge in Houston, and requested to be to open a Representation of the Grand Lodge of Texas on the Moon and, thereby, establish Masonic Territorial Jurisdiction there. By all rights, that cannot be rescinded without a vote by the membership at a Texas Grand Lodge Annual Communication... except if a Prince Hall Grand Lodge wishes to send a representative and claim jurisdiction, then both will share the jurisdiction.
WTYP: *At each other's throats over whether a space craft disaster that happened before reaching space is a space disaster*
Everyone: THIS is why we haven't dismantled capitalism
Whoa I'm hearing the same thunder only Roz's mic that I was hearing outside my house yesterday afternoon.
I mean, from the same storm. It was probably like 8 hours later.
Wow, it's almost like we all live on the same small, fragile planet or something.
The Dyno-Saur is the most nouveau riche name I've ever heard for a spacecraft and I want three of them.
The non-Alice one was funny if only for the fake music drops
I was fully expecting her to sample the final take (for the outro) of their Shake Hands With Danger jingle to replace the original, glad she at least mentioned considering doing that.
No it wasn't.
Alice being back is the greatest part of this episode. Never leave us alone with them again, Alice, please
Oh boy - this one is gonna hurt, I love the space shuttle, absolute clusterfuck of a vehicle it was :(
Well at least its not mostly made of fake wood mock ups and rotting in a hanger in Kazakhstan
@@dcorbin5779 rip ptichka
Same here. The first time I saw one in person (Enterprise, at the Intrepid in NYC) I felt very emotional and got teary eyed. It sucked, but it did it's job, for better or worse. Also, putting Hubble in space and maintaining it is good enough for me to love the shuttle forevermore.
INB4 someone points out the Enterprise never actually went to space, that's not the point, it's what the shuttle symbolized. I did eventually see the Endeavour as well when I lived in Los Angeles, so that counts.
“And also, the void calls for them…” Great stuff. All episodes should feature home brew bread beer recipes. Also, does Gorbachev’s perestroika prohibition count as an engineering disaster?
No, it's a political one. Maybe historical one, since he should have known what the result is - Russians saw it during WW1, when the Czar was deleted from office and life for trying alcohol prohibition.
Yes, Communism is the result of prohibition! I want to see the exploding heads of some US people when hearing that!
Having one cop sitting alone in a fume-filled mine, presumably smoking and reading an ancient paperback and periodically taking a puff of oxygen so he doesn't pass out is actually VERY Russian.
This may be late to the party but, NASA Railroad locomotive #1 (a SW1500 switcher) was sold to and currently oparates at the port of my home town in Natchitoches, Louisiana.... I've sat at crossings watching it pull chip hoppers past, along with the ports other 2 engines, two old ass Baldwin diesel switchers.
My favourite part about Dyna-Soar is that the plan for dealing with the wings on the top of the rocket causing lots of instability was to just... put a set of big fins on the bottom. The artist's impression for that looks absolutely Kerbal.
1:37:00 Not to say on whether a state agency could have done it at all, but I do not think NASA or any of the other large space agencies would have delevoped Falcon 9, or if they did it would have taken a lot longer - F9 took five years from announcement to first flight, and 12 years from announcement to the first booster reuse. SLS was announced 10 years ago while reusing already-developed hardware, and is supposed to have its first flight late this year, but I am highly doubtful about that. The problem is that these large organisations seem to have a quite conservative/risk-averse internal culture, and of course are interwoven into politics, which means goals change with the administrations, and decisionmaking is generally slow.
And while the "move fast and break things" approach to development does have some obvious downsides - mostly disregarding the impact operations and explosions have on the local population, leaving yourself open to be made fun of when rocket go boom - it does appear to be working for SpaceX with regards to Starship. We'll have to see how the first testflight of Superheavy goes though, as they have that scheduled for... Musk said this month, but he is notoriously optimistic with times, so I'd cautiously expect "probably sometime this year".
In the end, my stance on specifically SpaceX is: Fuck Elon Musk, but the engineers, designers and technicians working there are doing a good job and I hope they succeed, partially because I know that'll make them happy, and partially because I am a big space nerd who likes shiny rocket that lands like the Tintin moon rocket.
"Turns out to avoid murdering people with huge g-forces, is not have people" hahaha
People want to risk the g-forces _to go_ to space.
Fuck their wants, I guess.
29:30 hand drawn cutaway diagrams are the BEST and we should have more of them
Judy Resnik who also died on Challenger was the niece of my mother’s doctor. When Mom went for her appointment a few days after the explosion, she told her doctor how sorry she was. He said she died doing what she loved. ☹️
Fun fact: The commission on the Challenger only found out about the O-rings because Sally Ride did a whistleblower and secretly passed Don Kutnya a NASA report on the O-rings and temperature.
Everything I've read about Judith Resnik has made her sound like an incredible person. She packed a lot of life into such a short time.
Oh fuck, oh god, can I watch this episode? I know too much and I might get Angy. But seriously though, I was on a quiz show a couple of years back (WHICH I WON) and they put me next to a dude with space shuttle disasters as a specialist topic. The editors ended up with a lot of material for the cutting room floor.
I thought Lance Bass was found to have a heart defect that made him ineligible, which spooked everyone into canceling funding. He learned and supposedly still speaks fluent Russian, unlike some podcast members :P
I wouldn’t be surprised since it’s part of the requirements for riding on a Russian rocket. US astronauts do the same thing.
"Ah yes, what we were supposed to talk about. 41 minutes into the episode."
And THIS is why I listen to Well There's Your Problem: A podcast about engineering disasters. With slides.
Another way in which space is like Alaska: first it was controlled by Russians and then the Americans took over
And now Russia is taking it ba-
I mean, the US can't really get to space without Russia's approval considering astronauts ride the soyuz
9:40 - 11:45 As a professional train guy myself, I'd listen to Justin talking about the Amtrak electro-diesels for an hour and thirty minutes, but on the face of it, I don't see it as _that_ big of a problem. It _is_ a problem because of the price tag, and also in the sense that it can be used as an excuse to put off the electrification of mainlines. However, from the viewpoint of effective traction power, modern power electronics for electric locomotives have become so lightweight and space-saving that nowadays, you can cram in all kinds of other stuff just as ballast weight for maximum tractive effort.
Case in point: look at developments on the European locomotive market. Over the past decade, we saw the rise of so-called last-mile diesels: these are power packs with a lighter diesel engine (enough power for a light shunter locomotive) that enable an electric locomotive to travel the last miles to the destination of a freight train, along industrial tracks or light-traffic branchlines which typically aren't electrified. And now in the last few years, the big makers started developing the kind of locos Amtrak wants to buy: a combination of a full-power diesel and full-power electric loco. Meaning, in both electric and diesel mode, such a loco won't be any less powerful than a top-notch non-dual locomotive. Stadler's Eurodual locos are already operating, Siemens is also building Vectrons like that.
Of course, for sustainability, it would be best if those diesel engines in dual locomotives were replaced by (non-toxic or disposable) batteries.
2:02:45 yeah we demand at least 5% of the gross national budget take it off the military and give it to nasa
Does the space station with a cannon count as a technical?
Nasa is a railroad so it'd be more like an armed train
To mollify concerns about recoil and space debris, default orbital weapons will be lasers
@@koushiro86 also torpedoes :)
@@TheGreatPurpleFerret I think Bob meant the Soviet space station back in the 70s where they were also using it as a spy satellite, that had an aircraft gun on it.
It was a purpose built military space station, so it's not a technical.
1:50:00 This Safety Third needs a lot more research, needs a full episode of its own
Alice should add a Discord ping to the sound board just for the commenters enjoyment.
"It all comes back to tires"
See, you should land it on rails instead.
It's 2300. WTYP has recorded its 9 millionth episode. Rocz is campaigning against SEPTA's plan to replace buses with personal teleportation devices. Alice is a brain in a vat who somehow still has IBS.
My dad was a first year teacher in Chicago Public Schools in 1986. wheeled in one of those big TV carts just to let his 8th graders watch the Challenger take off. He is fully 58 now and it still affects him to talk about it
Was in grad school in education and watching it in the TAoffice. I could only think of all the children watching and how horrible it was.
I went to an exhibition on the history of spaceflight, I remember there being 2 cases showing the equipment taken by American Astronauts and Soviet Cosmonauts side by side. All the NASA food was in toothpaste tubes labeled in black lettering like "BEEF STROGNAOFF" "BOLOGNA" "CHEESE OMELETTE", all the Soviet food looked like they forgot to pack lunch and sent Sergei down to the missile base commissary 1 hour before launch; tins of caviar, tins of meat, and bottles of orange juice all still with their company labels on.
Also they had Werner von Braun's cowboy hat.
Also 4 minutes in and Alice cements herself as truly the glue that keeps the pod together.
Alice I hope you can read this and know that you truly are the glue keeping it together. Thanks for being great at co-hosting and making this podcast excellent!
So funnily enough my mom’s college roommate went on to become an astronaut, and I actually went to a launch when I was a toddler. And I remember one particularly bad incident from a shuttle disaster was the same day I was supposed to take a middle school entrance exam and my big takeaway was “Don’t Swallow Mouthwash” because I did that too.
Oh Alice you have been dearly missed
Me, a Canadian, when they mention Canadarm: Yes, this releases the serotonin.
I remember being in fourth grade working a "What I want to be when I grow up" paper on being an astronaut when the Columbia disaster happened and then I was like lol just kidding I'll be a teacher and redid the whole project a day before it was due.
Launch Loops, Sky Hooks, Sky Towers (or Atlas Towers) and mass drivers are the proper terms for the concepts of 'elevate the launch pad or fire the space ship from a huge ass cannon' systems, oh and the Launch ramps ofc, which are basically mag lev trains that go to stupid high altitude.
Sky hooks require renderite to work though, and mass drivers seem like they only work for, um, “inorganic” cargoes. But also, totally
More podcasts need to start with pointless bickering lol
All WTYP do. Just binge the series. (Wish all podcasts did too)
Edited, thanks
@@colonelgraff9198 I think they mean podcasts in the general term
@@frank6842 yeah not WTYP podcasts specifically just more podcasts in general. I'm all caught up on wtyp
@@frank6842 edited thanks
This is my absolute favourite topic, as an aerospace engineer. So excited to watch this!
I am deeply disappointed that Alice forgot to mention that in a parallel universe, the challenger didn't kill a bunch of teachers, and instead blow big bird to shit.
wait until you hear about how Big Bird...yes the one from sesame street....was supposed to be on the challenger mission too. However they abandoned the idea due to complications with the costume even fitting in the cockpit, fitting a space suit underneath it without it looking weird, and syncing up the mouth movements of the costume in zero-G without the head bopping everywhere.
Don’t make too much fun with the space tarp, folks. A friend of mine’s mom sewed that thing. it was a pretty good repair for the problem, and repairing things in space was still kind of a new business at that point. There’s a little on the issue here: th-cam.com/video/XSiOwBx6gLQ/w-d-xo.html
Making the ISS with carpentry is SUCH a bad idea. No one's gonna steal the space jobs from me bois the masons >:(
tfw wearing transitions lenses because my eyes are light sensitive and I can't afford prescription sunglasses and my normal glasses at the same time makes me insane
some of us are cursed with extra shitty eyes, guys.
I just got transition lenses a few weeks ago! My eyes are very light-sensitive, and I've always refused to have prescription sunglasses on the basis that I would inevitably lose them.
Alice bullying Spacefolk for being Humble Bumpkins is a great rant :D
"so we need to ask a question here' is the best gag on the podcast lol
Justin is half right. At common law, the traditional rule was "Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos" (whose is the soil, theirs is everything up to heaven and down to hell).
But this principle has been significantly modified in the modern world because of the invention of aircraft. In Lord Bernstein v Skyviews Ltd [1978] QB 479 an English aristocrat tried to sue a company that was taking aerial photographs of his house. He failed, the court holding that a landowner's rights over the airspace go only as high as necessary for the "ordinary use and enjoyment" of the land. This is for obvious reasons - otherwise every time a plane flies over your house (however high) would be an actionable trespass.
Nonetheless, the old ad coelum principle continues to be surprisingly relevant. In Bocardo SA v Star Energy Onshore Ltd [2010] UKSC 35 the UK Supreme Court held that laying pipelines under a landowner's land for fracking purposes was an actionable trespass, on the basis of the ad coelum principle. The Tory Government promptly reversed this by legislation.
Justin is correct about the Bishop of the Moon, however.
I drove one of NASA's locomotives. An SW1500, No. 1 I think.
I remember standing in a K-Mart to every single TV showing the exploding Columbia with that stupid CNN "18 times the speed of light" lower third. I was seventeen years old and it is one of my strongest memories. Something about the combination of tragedy and absurd stupidity etched itself onto my mind.
As I tried to aerobrake around Juul, I get the notification these guys uploaded some dope shit about space.
... :( No Kerbals survived.
They knew what they signed up for.
oh my god THIS is the episode i’ve been hoping for. spent my last two days in a low-grade fever just in a haze after getting my 2nd vaccine dose and now i get to enjoy the hell out of this. you all rule
I needed a pick me up today and you delivered 2 hours of educational chaos. Thanks!
36:10 / Buzz Aldrin's communion: idk about catholics but a bunch of protestant denominations have a thing where you take some of the sacrament blessed at a regular eucharist and set it aside for later (iirc the CofE calls it "communion by extension"). I think the primary purpose/use is to take communion to parishioners who are ill/otherwise can't make it on sunday morning, but hey why not use it for space as well? Anyway yeah I _believe_ that's what Buzz took to the moon with him.
I went to Space Camp and when they were talking about the ignition sequence they would light the main engines first and only once they'd confirmed they'd all ignited would they ignite the SRBs. Once you'd lit the SRBs you were _leaving_. There are explosive bolts that held the SRBs to the pad and we asked what would happen if they didn't fire. Without pausing the engineer replied "they get torn off and you launch anyway."
Wait, Alice is married?! Why has it taken me 75 episodes to learn this?!
He's been mentioned a few times before, I'm thinking the lake Peigneur episode in particular. I think he's also been a guest on Kill James Bond, another fine Alice-related podcast available wherever fine podcasts are sold.
Ah yes, space, the last place not corrupted by capitalism.
I was one the people picking up the pieces of Columbia in Texas. It was an odd job for sure. If it happened in the summer it would have been a nightmarish recovery in those swamps and woods.
Thank you for working on the recovery. What an intense job that must've been. I was in middle school and not yet much of a space nerd at the time of the disaster, so while I remember hearing about it on the news, I didn't know many details until more recently. I read a book about the recovery efforts last year and was so moved to learn how many people contributed.
Uncritical support of the Dyna-soar. I see no issues with this paper airplane looking brick