This Week in Space 217 Transcript
Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.
Tariq Malik [00:00:00]:
Coming up on this week in space, NASA's Swift Boost mission launches on a daring rescue flight to save the Swift space telescope. Avi Loeb is now going to lead the UAP panel for the White House and the US government. And what's the deal with 250 years in space and the American space program? Rod and I are going to talk about the greatest hits of America in space for the semi sesquicentennial. I think I got that right. Tune in and check it out.
Rod Pyle [00:00:28]:
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is trit. This is this Week in space, episode number 217, recorded on July 3, 2026. America in Space. Hello and welcome to another episode this week of Space, the America in Space edition to go along with our 250th national anniversary.
Tariq Malik [00:00:54]:
Yay. It's a semi sequenial thing.
Rod Pyle [00:01:00]:
I'm Rod Pyle, editor in chief at Aster magazine. I'm here with my pal, tar, Mr. Red, white and Blue himself. How are you?
Tariq Malik [00:01:06]:
I'm doing well, Rod. Happy, happy.
Rod Pyle [00:01:07]:
Fourth, show us your. Your patriotic shirt.
Tariq Malik [00:01:09]:
This is my shirt. It's a space shuttle. Like with the flags and the stripes and all that stuff. Very good, very good. Very, very excited.
Rod Pyle [00:01:18]:
Hey, before I continue, have you seen pictures of the just about finished shuttle exhibit in la?
Tariq Malik [00:01:25]:
Yes, I've seen pictures. I haven't been there. Chelsea. Chelsea. Goad went for us. How come you didn't go?
Rod Pyle [00:01:30]:
I wasn't asked. I had sent them an email a year ago saying, hey, when it's ready, let me know. We'd like to run it over.
Tariq Malik [00:01:36]:
I could have gotten you in. You know that. If you had, you know, I could have gotten you in for that.
Rod Pyle [00:01:40]:
I didn't know what the date was until after I saw it. Oh, you should have thought of me.
Tariq Malik [00:01:45]:
I. You know what? That is an oversight on myself as a partner in this five. I am ashamed on the eve of the anniversary of our country's birth.
Rod Pyle [00:01:55]:
Tanya, shake a finger at him.
Tariq Malik [00:01:56]:
Another American, A fellow American. Yeah. Appreciation of our national space program.
Rod Pyle [00:02:02]:
All right, well, be that as it may, today we'll be speaking with us, us only, as we take a July 4th inspired look back at America's history of space flight, which is a remarkable one, by far the most remarkable on the planet Earth. The hallmark missions, and of course, our personal favorites. So if you're under 60, put on your Boomer filters, because I was there. I was realizing as I was writing this, I was alive for the whole space age. I was only two when it started, mind you, L1 actually. But I was there for the whole thing. I thought, wow, what a. What a privilege.
Rod Pyle [00:02:38]:
It's not a privilege to be elderly, but it's a privilege to have seen the thing from the beginning.
Tariq Malik [00:02:42]:
That's like me in Star wars, right? I was one month old when Star wars came out.
Rod Pyle [00:02:47]:
Really?
Tariq Malik [00:02:48]:
Yeah.
Rod Pyle [00:02:48]:
Yeah.
Tariq Malik [00:02:49]:
Wow.
Rod Pyle [00:02:52]:
All right. Well, son, sonny boy, first let's have a space joke from friend of the show and retired attorney Bruce McCandless III.
Tariq Malik [00:03:01]:
Bruce.
Rod Pyle [00:03:02]:
We know who Bruce McCandless II was.
Tariq Malik [00:03:04]:
Yeah.
Rod Pyle [00:03:06]:
Hey, Tarek.
Tariq Malik [00:03:07]:
Yes, Rod?
Rod Pyle [00:03:08]:
Why did the astronaut lawyer quit NASA?
Tariq Malik [00:03:11]:
I don't know. Why?
Rod Pyle [00:03:12]:
She was tired of trying spacesuits.
Tariq Malik [00:03:17]:
I love it. I love me a good. That's a good one. That's not a good one.
Rod Pyle [00:03:22]:
Nothing from Anthony on the board.
Tariq Malik [00:03:24]:
I heard.
Rod Pyle [00:03:24]:
Okay, I heard some little grunt.
Tariq Malik [00:03:28]:
There we go.
Rod Pyle [00:03:29]:
Okay. Or how about this? Hey, Tariq.
Tariq Malik [00:03:32]:
Yes, Rod?
Rod Pyle [00:03:32]:
What do astronauts have to constantly tell their gullible offspring?
Tariq Malik [00:03:36]:
I don't know. What?
Rod Pyle [00:03:37]:
There's no such thing as a free launch.
Tariq Malik [00:03:44]:
He was ready with that one. I dig it.
Rod Pyle [00:03:46]:
Keep it coming, keep it coming. We like Bruce. He's a lot of fun. He's working on another book project now that I'm not sure I could talk about, so I won't. But it's going to be very exciting. Now, I've heard that some people want to stuff us into spacesuits without helmets and show us to the nearest airlock when it's joke time in this show. But you can help by sending us your best worst or most indifferent space joke at Twistwit tv. And we'll be happy to blame it on you in the air and give you all due credit.
Rod Pyle [00:04:17]:
But now let's go on to headline news.
Tariq Malik [00:04:23]:
Headline news, My. Am I getting my mojo back? Right?
Rod Pyle [00:04:29]:
I think you got that one.
Tariq Malik [00:04:30]:
Yeah. I was getting close now. Getting close. Yeah. Yeah, they said I nailed it. All right. Yeah, right.
Rod Pyle [00:04:36]:
Right below the box of shame for me. We can tell which way the fan sentiment goes on this show. Mr. Mr. Suck up. You all right? Swift Rescue. Not Swift Water Rescue, but Swift Rescue.
Tariq Malik [00:04:49]:
That's right.
Rod Pyle [00:04:50]:
That's Swift. Reboost mission successfully launched finally. Yeah, on a Pegasus off a plane.
Tariq Malik [00:04:58]:
And there was no live stream either.
Rod Pyle [00:05:00]:
The very last L1011. Well, you know, I kind of get the impression that the. The big new space companies, you know, the ones we know like SpaceX and Blue Origin are becoming less fond of having live streams.
Tariq Malik [00:05:14]:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you, I'll talk about this in a Bit. So this was from. I think that this is from Josh, dinner over@space.com and friend of the show and whatnot. And this has been a long time, if you might recall. I think we talked about this on the show before. I'm going to try to get some of these folks on the channel or on the.
Tariq Malik [00:05:32]:
On the podcast so we can talk about it. Because it's a very fascinating mission, but this is the first of its kind mission, NASA's Swift Boost mission, powered by a catalyst. It's a new company out of, I think, Arizona. They have this spacecraft that they call Link. And in the space of nine months, they have, which means September 2025, NASA gave them a 30 million contract. $30 million contract to go and rescue the Swift Space Telescope, which is for falling out of space. It's. It hunts for gamma ray burst, these most powerful explosions in the universe.
Tariq Malik [00:06:03]:
And it's got very fine pointing, like an ability, like it swiftly pivots itself, spins around like that. And it's been up there since like what, 2014? Rod like that. Yeah. So it's been up there for a while. It had two year mission, it's been extended over time and it works fine. But it has no thrusters like the Hubble Space Telescope. It doesn't have any thrusters, reaction wheels. It's just reaction wheels to spin itself around.
Tariq Malik [00:06:28]:
And because we've had a lot of activity, solar activity, when all of that solar wind hits the Earth, it puffs up our atmosphere, makes it thicker, which means you get more drag. And Instead of being 350km up, now it's slowly falling out of space a lot faster than NASA expected. And they were hoping for a lot more science out of this mission. It's totally fine the way that it is.
Rod Pyle [00:06:48]:
It was launched in 2004.
Tariq Malik [00:06:50]:
2004. Yeah. I was off my whole decade. Yeah, it's been a long time. 22 years old. Dir. Dur. Dur.
Tariq Malik [00:06:55]:
Okay. And so what they've done is they said, hey, if you like, if they do nothing, it falls out of space. Right. And if they do something, it doesn't work. Well, it was already going to fall out of space, so.
Rod Pyle [00:07:06]:
Yeah. But can I just point out that this is the Skylab scenario all over again. We had a more than planned active solar cycle this time we just passed the peak. We think you never quite know, but we're there or close to there. And because of that, the atmosphere swells up and that causes more drag. So that brought down Skylab a couple years earlier than they had planned on, which is why the shuttle couldn't rescue it. And it's affecting the Swift satellite here in this current cycle. So it's not like they didn't plan for it.
Tariq Malik [00:07:37]:
Yeah, well they knew that it would happen like eventually, but they, the fact that it was happening a lot faster, you know, they thought that they would have more time, a few more years at least of science. But the clock has been ticking. So by October they expect that the spacecraft will have fallen so much over half of its distance, about 186 miles above the earth to the point where there's no hope to ever rescue it. So they said, well let's, let's try this. We've got $30 million, we'll give it to this company Catalyst, and we'll see if they can do something about it. And so what they've done is they've built like a small set. It's about the size of a refrigerator or so. You know, it's not, it's not too large.
Tariq Malik [00:08:13]:
It has three robotic arms, it has three hall thrusters and about 26 kind of fine tune thrusters and a bunch of sensors on it. And they're going to send it. They have sent it. That's the success part of this, of this, of this story. They've launched it on the final ever Northrop Grumman's last ever Pegasus XL rocket. It's an air launched rocke from the, the Stargazer L1011. So there's an infographic of, of how it, how it worked when they launched it. And so they've launched it off there.
Tariq Malik [00:08:40]:
It's going to eventually rendezvous over the summer with the spacecraft never designed to be approached by another spacecraft after it was put in space. The Swiss Space Telescope. And it's going to find a place to grab on. And there's lots of risks. So many things can go wrong. But if it goes right, they have demonstrated the first commercial space rescue of a satellite, the first commercial rendezvous and servicing of a satellite and the ability that they could scale this up for something even larger for commercial satellites for a few of these. There have been some other attempts or demonstrations of this because their Intel Sat uses this with, or viasat I think uses this. They've, they've done it twice on a larger satellite.
Tariq Malik [00:09:28]:
But this is the first space telescope kind of commercial servicing mission that we're ever going to see and it might not be the last. They could actually build a bigger one to go to Hubble if it works. So it's going to be Very interesting. So the next few weeks are checkouts and then it's going to raise its orbit over several months to get to, to get to Swift and then boost it up. It should be the whole orbital raising maneuver thing, if it finds a good place to grab on, should be something in like, like two or three months. So.
Rod Pyle [00:09:58]:
And Swift is still stable at this point.
Tariq Malik [00:10:00]:
So grabs. Swift is stable, but it's been in like a, yeah, it's been in a powered down mode. So in February they stopped doing all of the science so that they can serve as much power to keep it like in a good stable position. Because the last thing that you want is your falling satellite to be tumbling in a way where now it's almost impossible to catch it with, with this spacecraft. So it's in a very stable, controlled position. And that's what really makes this, makes this possible. But it's going to be really interesting to see, see, see how this develops because it could be like a game changer. It's the first of its kind ever and in nine months.
Tariq Malik [00:10:34]:
Can you imagine when's the last time the government did anything in nine months? Rod, right.
Rod Pyle [00:10:39]:
Painted the reflecting pool.
Tariq Malik [00:10:41]:
Oh yeah. Oh yeah, there's that, there's that. No, this is really, it's, it's a really interesting demonstration to, seeing how fast we, they can do this. And this comes on the heels of some other fast responsive stuff. I know I'm kind of getting too long. I just, I'm really interested in this mission. I think it's, it's very, it could be a wave of, of the future where this is a really regular thing now and not just a repeated demonstration over and over.
Rod Pyle [00:11:05]:
Does that price tag include the Pegasus or not?
Tariq Malik [00:11:07]:
It includes everything. It includes the Northrop Grumman Pegasus launch, the Stargazer flight.
Rod Pyle [00:11:13]:
Well, they must have gotten a discount on that launch then.
Tariq Malik [00:11:15]:
I suppose so. I mean this is, this is, this is out of Kwajalein Atoll, right? They, they, they, the spacecraft up at Wallops center, that's, we talked about it on the previous episode. That's where I was one of the weeks looking at it, kind of talking to the scientists, all of that. And then now the Swift mission is based out of Penn State and so they've got a control center there and the Catalyst folks are out of Arizona and they've got their own control center. And, and then of course they launched the Northrop government launched it out of quads. So it's, it's going to be distributed around a bit as they, as they get Things sorted. But the whole price tag was the $30 million included, everything. I suspect the reason we didn't get a webcast is because of kind of the rocky nature of the, the air launched rockets that Northrop Grumman inherited from Orbital Sciences when they were the ones that were doing that.
Tariq Malik [00:12:03]:
Remember the, was it the Taurus xl? The ones that failed? There's like a back to back failures with OCO and there's another one after that. So I'm figuring they didn't really want to support that. But I'm sure it's also pretty expensive to support a live stream out of the Southern Pacific like that. And the visuals aren't great.
Rod Pyle [00:12:18]:
You know, if they had done Starlink off the top of the plane, of course, then that means putting a Starlink unit on a plane that you're probably going to retire. Yeah, like right now, but. And you can't call it quad unless you've been there.
Tariq Malik [00:12:31]:
Oh, I'm so sorry, Rod. Okay.
Rod Pyle [00:12:34]:
I haven't been to Kwajalein, but I was in the next ATS all over in the same Republic and they look
Tariq Malik [00:12:39]:
pretty much the same in the Marshall Islands. Right.
Rod Pyle [00:12:41]:
It's like a Walmart parking lot surrounded by water. It's, I mean it's just absolutely pancake flat to the point that if you have so much as a sniffle of a storm, you get washovers from the Pacific side to the lagoon side.
Tariq Malik [00:12:57]:
Well, and that's actually another good point. This, we thought this mission was going to launch over the weekend. The Sunday of the week that we're recording this. It got delayed to Tuesday because of weather and then it got delayed day upon day upon day because they had some really rough weather there and they were finally able to get it up and out the door.
Rod Pyle [00:13:16]:
Well, since we sort of overindulged ourselves on this story, let's indulge ourselves into a quick commercial break and we'll be right back with the rest of our headlines and today's show. So stay there. Next up, welcome to UFO Land. I was going to make a tinfoil hat and I.
Tariq Malik [00:13:33]:
We should have. We should have.
Rod Pyle [00:13:35]:
So our, our not friend of the show because he never came on because he had an exclusive deal with Netflix. But our, our pal Avi Loeb, Dr. Avi Loeb of Harvard, who has long been the promoter of notions theories. I don't know what you'd want to call them. I'm trying to be kind here about
Tariq Malik [00:13:56]:
these alien spaceships outside.
Rod Pyle [00:14:00]:
Interstellar, Interstellar visitors. These rocks, they're pretty clearly rocks. Coming from outside the solar system, slinging past the sun may actually be alien technology. To the point that on the last one he said, you better look out because they're right out where they could plant spies to stare at us and listen in on everything we do and, you know, figure out how they're going to make us into dinner or whatever. But Dr. Loeb, who is a respected member of the astronomical community, although that's been stressed a bit by his various theories, is now a member. He has long been a member of the Saul foundation, which is a kind of pro UAP research group, but is now part of the office or heading the office of the Director of National Intelligence. Not, sorry, the UAP Science Advisory Council is what he's heading under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Rod Pyle [00:14:54]:
How's that?
Tariq Malik [00:14:54]:
What, what's UAP stand for again?
Rod Pyle [00:14:57]:
Unidentified Anomalous pp.
Tariq Malik [00:15:03]:
Phenomena. Phenomena.
Rod Pyle [00:15:04]:
Phenomenon. There we go.
Tariq Malik [00:15:05]:
Phenomena.
Rod Pyle [00:15:06]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. UFOs.
Tariq Malik [00:15:07]:
It used to be aerial and then, and now it's not anymore. It's not.
Rod Pyle [00:15:11]:
Right. Well, because of oceanic involvement. So yeah, so here he is. If you're watching the video stream, this
Tariq Malik [00:15:18]:
is really, it's really, it's really interesting because he's had a bit of a rocky last few years because he keeps making a lot of the, those really wild claims about everything is proof, proof, proof of alien visitors or high tech visitors or alien spaceships, the spherules that they found at the bottom of the ocean, saying that they were conclusively like from, like artificially made rather than being,
Rod Pyle [00:15:38]:
and excuse me for jumping in, but that one I think is the one that really sort of went off the diving board. Because, you know, if, if you're talking about some observations made of a cometary object that's slinging through the solar system or an asteroidal object, that's one thing. This was literally pulling up some little concretions, some little metallic balls off the ocean floor off of Papua New guinea where there might have been an extraterrestrial or, excuse me, an interplanetary, interstellar. Interstellar object broken up in an air burst as it was coming in as a meteorite. But I mean, that same day he had them in his hand. He said, see, these are clear proof of alien technology. They're bbs.
Tariq Malik [00:16:25]:
Yeah.
Rod Pyle [00:16:26]:
And that's the shape things melt into when they're burning up.
Tariq Malik [00:16:29]:
It's very much like the shotgun approach that the administration has had with the UAP phenomenon. Because Trump did announce, you know, when he was campaigning and then after he was elected that he would release the UFO files, if you will. And then they did. The DOD put out a special website. It's a war.gov UFO everybody, you know, and, and you can see basically everything that's unclassified that they put in there. And, and, and it's like. It's like everything. I mean, like, it's balloon sightings and all sorts of stuff, plus those really wild Navy videos where they.
Tariq Malik [00:17:08]:
They have, like, the audio of the pilots talking about things, so you can see all of that stuff there. And, and so they've released, like, three different tranches of these files as they're updating it over time and declassifying things. And so what I understand now is that they want Avi Loeb to run this panel, to look at all these files and then make either some kind of conclusive determination about what is what, or about what needs to be done to further investigate the phenomena themselves. So it's. I'm not sure we're going to get more, though, because NASA had an independent commission about this. Congress had an independent commission about this. I think the only thing that's different now is that all the files are now out there at this website for review.
Rod Pyle [00:17:51]:
Okay, but. But NASA's charge for that commission was to look at ways to study the data, not to actually study the data. So I don't know if that one counts as much.
Tariq Malik [00:18:02]:
Okay, okay.
Rod Pyle [00:18:03]:
But. But I don't know. You know, I haven't read what the exact charter for. For this new group is either. Presumably, it's to try and figure out what's what and who's who and all
Tariq Malik [00:18:12]:
that, according to the reports, you know, from Guardian, from the other folks, it's. They're going to be meeting privately. They're not going to be having public meetings. So that. That's a departure from the hearings that the DoD had, because the DoD had their own thing and, and that. That NASA did, too. But you kind of want to know, like, what's going on. I would advise that they.
Tariq Malik [00:18:30]:
I mean, if they. They're not going to ask me for advice, Rod. Right.
Rod Pyle [00:18:34]:
They never do.
Tariq Malik [00:18:35]:
I know. Right. Who I am. But I would advise that if they're going to have some sort of discussions about the nature of the data that they're looking at, that they do it in a way where people can actually watch and see how that sausage is made, because as they've learned with some other files that maybe we're not going to talk about at all, because it's not really relevant. But the minute that you put something behind a closed door and say, trust us, the public's not going to buy that. And so I think that they, they need to be as open as, as, as, as they can with these discussions. As we, you know, when we had our, our communication specialist on, in, in a recent episode, that was what she said was like the number one thing you have to be as completely transparent as possible when dealing with the, the ins and outs about official documents here and what to do because people will not trust it otherwise.
Rod Pyle [00:19:26]:
So. But if I could just say about both releases on the government website, I refuse to call it Department of War, you know, and I need a minute.
Tariq Malik [00:19:38]:
Take a drink. Take a drink, Rod. Drink some water.
Rod Pyle [00:19:41]:
All I've got is coffee here. You know, we're still waiting for that, that killer image, that killer video, some right in your face. Okay, here it is. And as we've said week after week, you know, everybody's got a smartphone and they're all multi megapixel. They take great pictures and take great videos. They will include metadata that tells you where it was and when it was and all that. And yet we're still seeing smudgy junk, the best of which really is the stuff from the military. And that's mostly FLIR data.
Rod Pyle [00:20:12]:
So that's not so great. And what's frustrating to me is besides the fact that we're just not getting the better stuff is. Oh God, where was I going at that thought?
Tariq Malik [00:20:24]:
Well, there's a really.
Rod Pyle [00:20:25]:
Grandpa had a grain fart.
Tariq Malik [00:20:27]:
There's a really obvious explanation for all of this and it's the fact that the aliens, should they be there, know exactly what kind of equipment that we have. They know what the, the smartphones can see, they know what the FLIR data can see, and they just run a, whatever interference schedule that makes it look like Nessie. Or why do they let people do
Rod Pyle [00:20:46]:
it with photographic film?
Tariq Malik [00:20:47]:
Because then, then. Right then they run whatever light interference to make it look like the smudges again. Because that way.
Rod Pyle [00:20:56]:
The right answer is they can. They can interfere with electronic technology, but not analog technology. I don't know.
Tariq Malik [00:21:04]:
We just keep waiting. We don't know.
Rod Pyle [00:21:06]:
We keep waiting. Well, it's hard to manipulate silver particles and gelatin, but it's a lot easier to, I would think, to manipulate electronic stuff. But we're getting a little off beat path here.
Tariq Malik [00:21:19]:
I don't know, we should have a whole other episode about aliens and what we think they can and can do. Who am I to tell the aliens what the limits of their technology are? You Know not.
Rod Pyle [00:21:30]:
I'm watching the video stream of producer Anthony over on the board wishing he was on Mac Break Weekly right now.
Tariq Malik [00:21:37]:
He's like, we gave them the option to not have a show today and this is what we could.
Rod Pyle [00:21:41]:
This is. That's very good. All right, last up. I don't know why this is America 250, but it is the 30th anniversary of independence Day, Roland Emmerich's last decent movie.
Tariq Malik [00:21:54]:
Yeah, yeah, I.
Rod Pyle [00:21:56]:
The same guy that brought us Moonfall, for God's sake.
Tariq Malik [00:21:58]:
I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna. It's a mea culpa because there were actually like a lot of other science stories that we could have put in here. Like the fact that we've got a new exoplanet that's 25 light years away that just might be habitable. But I skipped it because it's the Independence Day episode and we have the Independence Day movie anniversary. And I just think it's a really fun. It's one of the last like big disaster movies that didn't go that was nice and campy and not so self serious because, you know, it really worked.
Rod Pyle [00:22:29]:
It just worked. I mean, it took every 50s and 60s sci fi trope that ever was, jammed it into one movie brilliantly and was so good. And I can't believe this is the same guy that did Moonfall, which is dreadful.
Tariq Malik [00:22:44]:
Our writer, Jeff Spry. This is a Space.com story. The past story, the Avi Loeb story, by the way, was from the Guardian. But our writer Jeff Spry spoke with Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin about making the film. And so, so this, this, this piece really goes into like what they were thinking about which landmarks to blow up and how do they make, to make it. I actually wrote a term paper about the, about this film because I love disaster movies. I think I've talked to you about that before and, and all through the ages and I have all.
Rod Pyle [00:23:16]:
Brother, you're living a disaster movie.
Tariq Malik [00:23:18]:
Well, there is that too. Right? But, but Independence Day is one of those disaster movies that tries to like purport a way to buck stereotypes and whatnot and by the end of it has in fact gone back to reinforce said stereotypes, you know, about everything. And, and if, you know, if you just watch it for the funsies, you don't see a lot of that stuff like the, the, the single father abandoning his kids or the fact that they have like, like strong women characters who end up just being there for their husbands, you know, and it's really. It's a really mixed message, but it's. There's a lot more going on in that movie than just aliens blowing the world.
Rod Pyle [00:23:56]:
And if I may say, it was the 90s. When this is released. Right. Do you remember drawers full of adapters just to try and figure out which charger worked with which. What unit you had or how you were going to plug your SCSI drive into a. What was. Whatever the other standard was for hard drives. Blah, blah, blah.
Rod Pyle [00:24:18]:
We had multiple drawers of adapters. Yet these guys fly up in their. Their captured flying saucer to the big alien mothership and plug in and boom, they upload a virus, which just happens to work because apparently we knew the alien operating system. So, you know, there's. There's some stretches in there, and the Randy Quaid character was a little over the top. I'm here, Mr. President, you know, but all in all, it was a very fun movie. And I thought the alien was.
Rod Pyle [00:24:46]:
Was the best. I mean, I haven't seen anything that good since just the second. The way his legs were creepy. Second was horrible.
Tariq Malik [00:24:52]:
Yeah. Second one. Not, not, not, not the greatest.
Rod Pyle [00:24:53]:
That school bus chase that went on for, what was it, 40 minutes for a long time, you know, driving around the desert because they didn't have any money. All right, let's. Let's run to another break. Let's get out of the way, and then we'll come back, actually start our episode 20 minutes in standby. All right. 250 years of the United States of America. Look what we've accomplished in that time. And we went from just a few short months after my birthday, my actual, like, zero plus one birthday, went from nothing to becoming the premier space power within less than 10 years.
Rod Pyle [00:25:31]:
Yeah, and we've done some pretty amazing stuff. And you put a little item in here or prompted me to. About U.S. flags in Space.
Tariq Malik [00:25:40]:
U.S. flags.
Rod Pyle [00:25:41]:
The American flag, the one people think of, of course, is Apollo 11. And there's a picture on line 35 of what it might look like. But basically, these were inexpensively produced, commercially procured, small, nylon American flags. And the thought is that they probably bleached out to this little patch of brittle white stuff by now.
Tariq Malik [00:26:04]:
I mean, are they even. I mean, they're. Are they even still standing? Some of them might be. Right.
Rod Pyle [00:26:09]:
Fell over when they took off. Looks like I didn't give Anthony the
Tariq Malik [00:26:14]:
right link because there wasn't a link in there. I put. I put this link in there today, so.
Rod Pyle [00:26:18]:
Well, that doesn't have any of the bleach flags in it, but that's okay. So Apollo 11 fell over, as far as we know. The other one stayed upright because they moved them further away from the lunar module, but they're all still up there, just baking away in that severe ultraviolet.
Tariq Malik [00:26:34]:
Yeah.
Rod Pyle [00:26:34]:
What I kind of was confused by when they said, oh, it's just a flag made out of nylon. It's like, well, then the first lunar day should have cooked it because it's like 250 degrees Fahrenheit out there. So it must have been something other than just nylon because otherwise they put it up, it would have started smoking. It just curled into a little glob.
Tariq Malik [00:26:51]:
Right. Clearly they faked the moon landings. Right. Because why else would the, the flags be waving on the, on the surface of the moon. Right.
Rod Pyle [00:26:59]:
Apollo 16.
Tariq Malik [00:27:00]:
How could, how could it walk unfurled?
Rod Pyle [00:27:03]:
The conspiracy. People often miss that one, which blows my mind because it's probably the most aha moment they could get. However, it's a static rich environment, and when you walk in a synthetic fabric spacesuit within a couple of inches of a nylon flag, which is also charged, it's going to go like it did. But no, it must be the air in the, in the stage.
Tariq Malik [00:27:26]:
Okay. Oh, oh, here's some nice pictures. Yeah, these are nice. These are the ones of that show, both Neil and Buzz walking around. The really rare ones.
Rod Pyle [00:27:34]:
Oh, they're setting up the flag, I think.
Tariq Malik [00:27:35]:
Yeah, yeah, they are. They are.
Rod Pyle [00:27:36]:
Yeah. For those watching the video stream, we're. We're showing the flag set up from Apollo 11. And I was there. Okay. But besides that, we have the flag painted on Viking 1.
Tariq Malik [00:27:51]:
So it's on, on the surface of Mars.
Rod Pyle [00:27:52]:
Right, on the surface of Mars.
Tariq Malik [00:27:53]:
Viking 2 as well. Right? Or no, they didn't get one.
Rod Pyle [00:27:56]:
No, I got one. Just landed in a different spot. I mean, I think every piece of American hardware has an American flag on it somewhere. As do the.
Tariq Malik [00:28:03]:
Yeah, but apparently not all of them say NASA. Right. Like the Pathfinder lander.
Rod Pyle [00:28:08]:
Did they not put NASA on that?
Tariq Malik [00:28:09]:
It just says JPL on the picture. I heard that Dan golden was really mad about.
Rod Pyle [00:28:12]:
Well, he was. And that's why when they tried to put JPL etched out of the wheels for Curiosity, headquarters said, which is why they put it in Morse code instead, which I thought was brilliant. In fact, I remember I called you from JPL while I was up there covering that for Brody. Yeah, Dave Brody. And said, I. I don't know if this has come out yet. And it was. I don't know, it Was my first attempt at a scoop hot dog.
Tariq Malik [00:28:42]:
A scoop.
Rod Pyle [00:28:43]:
Right, sides of space shuttles, sides of every Apollo spacecraft, sides of, I presume the Dragon spacecraft, although I've never actually looked.
Tariq Malik [00:28:51]:
It is. Yeah, it is on the Dragon spacecraft. It's on the other side, says SpaceX on one side and then there it's on, it's on the side. And the, the crude ones have the NASA worm on them, whereas they used to have the, the just the meatball.
Rod Pyle [00:29:04]:
Yeah.
Tariq Malik [00:29:05]:
So the great big giant flag on the vab. Right.
Rod Pyle [00:29:11]:
Which is pretty remarkable if you've never seen it.
Tariq Malik [00:29:13]:
What about interstellar space? Are they on, Are they on Voyager?
Rod Pyle [00:29:18]:
Yeah, they gotta be.
Tariq Malik [00:29:20]:
Not on Titan because that's the Hoijin spacecraft. That was.
Rod Pyle [00:29:23]:
That's true. And, and actually I, I don't know for sure about Voyager Pioneer. However, they do have messages to the, to the aliens on them.
Tariq Malik [00:29:32]:
And, and not on Venus because the Soviets landed there, not us, so.
Rod Pyle [00:29:36]:
Not yet.
Tariq Malik [00:29:37]:
Not yet.
Rod Pyle [00:29:38]:
Actually. We did. We did, yeah. Pioneer.
Tariq Malik [00:29:43]:
How did I not.
Rod Pyle [00:29:44]:
Venus Pioneer. Venus had four atmospheric entry probes. Only one of them survived a hard landing because one had a parachute. The others, I think were just descenders.
Tariq Malik [00:29:58]:
Like spikes.
Rod Pyle [00:29:59]:
Yeah, yeah.
Tariq Malik [00:29:59]:
And they.
Rod Pyle [00:30:00]:
But one of the small ones that did not have parachute went down and actually survived the impact and transmitted back for over an hour, which is longer than the first Soviet Venera probes did. Yeah, that's long, soft landed, but. So we did actually, we did have a landing on Venus. It just wasn't.
Tariq Malik [00:30:17]:
Do you think it has an American flag on it?
Rod Pyle [00:30:20]:
Not anymore.
Tariq Malik [00:30:21]:
There could, there could have been an American. 900 degrees, I imagine I'm going to find out. I'm going to ask NASA.
Rod Pyle [00:30:27]:
You have a project now?
Tariq Malik [00:30:29]:
Yeah, yeah, we, by the way, like, just like last month we had flag day, so that's what got me thinking about a lot of this stuff is like where all the flags are. So very, very cool. Very cool.
Rod Pyle [00:30:40]:
So how did our space age begin? Yes, well, like so many things, we stole it from the Germans. End of World War II. There's a bunch of V2s that are still sitting around in Germany. They had started launching them in 1944. They launched over 3,000 of them. 9,000 casualties were they impacted. But tellingly, 12,000 people died, making them slave labor.
Tariq Malik [00:31:03]:
More people. Right. More people in the making.
Rod Pyle [00:31:06]:
Yeah, so knock on Dr. Von Braun there. But these things pioneered guidance systems, missile guidance systems, regenerative cooling, which I didn't actually know till I looked it up this time. So you use fuel to Actually cool parts of the rocket engine and that preheats the fuel so it helps it burn more efficiently. Ignition systems for the rocket nozzle, high speed flight turbo pumps, which was something that was new and lots more interestingly, the British tried to cover the early attacks on London by citing gas main explosions to the point that the public took to calling V2's Flying Gas Mains. So I guess that didn't work. But after the war, Operation Paperclip, the US and the Soviets had their own version. But in our case, we brought back over 300 rail cars worth of V2s and V2 stuff that we sent out to New Mexico for research flights, the most notable of which crashed within walking distance of a graveyard in Mexico.
Rod Pyle [00:32:11]:
I forget which city it was near. Was it Roswell? No, Mexico. Not New Mexico. In Mexico.
Tariq Malik [00:32:17]:
Oh, in Mexico.
Rod Pyle [00:32:18]:
Our first missile attack on another country.
Tariq Malik [00:32:21]:
Oh man.
Rod Pyle [00:32:22]:
Ended up in Mexico and they sort of forgave us for that. It didn't kill anybody. But anyway, the v. So the V2 was kind of our, our stake in the ground, our beginning. And it led directly to the Redstone. And the Redstone, which is what launched the early Mercury flights, was really just a reskinned V2.
Tariq Malik [00:32:39]:
Yeah, same.
Rod Pyle [00:32:40]:
Same basic engine design, same basic fuel tankage and pumps and all that. So that was our way of making it look less like an evil German rocket, more like a, like a space quasi American rocket. Yeah, so that's, that's my nod to the beginning of the space age. What's yours?
Tariq Malik [00:32:57]:
Well, well obviously it's their first satellite. Right. We have to. The, the, our embarrassing tale of our first satellite. The first discovery of the Van Allen belts with Explorer.
Rod Pyle [00:33:13]:
Explorer 1 did.
Tariq Malik [00:33:13]:
Yeah.
Rod Pyle [00:33:14]:
Our first satellite was Vanguard.
Tariq Malik [00:33:16]:
Well, well, I'm going to.
Rod Pyle [00:33:17]:
Which ended up falling off of an exploding rocket and roll into a stop next to a dumpster.
Tariq Malik [00:33:22]:
I should say, I should say first science satellite.
Rod Pyle [00:33:25]:
First successful satellite.
Tariq Malik [00:33:26]:
First successful satellite. But that one really always struck me because you've got the picture of all of the folks holding the rocket up because they're all excited and holding satellite up, up the satellite up. And, and then, and then of course you make this big discovery about the radiation bells that we all rely on every day to protect us from the getting cooked alive from the cosmic radiation. And we didn't know about that until that satellite went up there. More than just beeps and boops. It's actual science. And it was like a big discovery at that point in time. So I forgot Vanguard 1.
Tariq Malik [00:34:02]:
Yeah, it's popped off. Yeah, and the whole montage in the right stuff where they show all that stuff.
Rod Pyle [00:34:07]:
Who built Explorer 1 Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Tariq Malik [00:34:11]:
That's right, that's right. And it was just they dare mighty things, man. They dare mighty.
Rod Pyle [00:34:16]:
Talking to friend of the show Rob Manning yesterday for about an hour, day before yesterday, telling me about all the new exciting stuff they're doing. So we have to have him back because he's got some good stories to tell. But yeah, so, so. And that's a very cool picture because it's Von Braun Pickering and I forget who the third guy was holding.
Tariq Malik [00:34:33]:
Talk about. Are we gonna talk about Promises? Are we going to talk about that? We should have talked about that. Oh, no.
Rod Pyle [00:34:39]:
Oh, in the headlines, you mean? Yeah, well, I asked him about that and he said, you know, they don't know very much yet.
Tariq Malik [00:34:45]:
Yeah, yeah.
Rod Pyle [00:34:46]:
So, but, but let's. Hey, it's, it's our show. We can freeform for a moment. Yeah, we only have two minutes left before the next break.
Tariq Malik [00:34:53]:
Well, yeah, so, so we were just talking about jpl and one of the bigger news items that I did pass over was a Moon Base update because we found out that NASA is going to be putting them out every month now about an update on what they're doing for the Moon Base program. And Jared Isaacman said regarding JPL that they are going to pull what I believe is. It's not Promise, it's called something else,
Rod Pyle [00:35:16]:
is an engineering twin for.
Tariq Malik [00:35:17]:
There's an engineering twin for the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers and they're going to rename it Promise and send it to the Moon. So they're looking at the possibility of doing it. And Jared Isaacman said that. He says that he is optimistic. That's what optimism. That's what it's called. Yeah, it's called optimism. So anyway, interesting stuff there.
Tariq Malik [00:35:36]:
So if they.
Rod Pyle [00:35:37]:
There's a lot to figure out there because that thing was designed very, very specifically for Mars and Martian conditions. And the Moon's different. You know, it's a hard vacuum. Mars isn't. It doesn't have any weather. Mars does. The dust is different, texture and consistency and of course the temperature extremes are much worse. Mars gets down to I think about -280 Fahrenheit.
Rod Pyle [00:35:59]:
Never gets up much above 70.
Tariq Malik [00:36:02]:
They'll just put more nukes on it, that's all so.
Rod Pyle [00:36:05]:
Well, we don't have any more nukes, at least not plutonium.
Tariq Malik [00:36:09]:
They've got a pipeline going. They've had, they're working on it.
Rod Pyle [00:36:12]:
But I don't Think that they've got
Tariq Malik [00:36:13]:
like the government will find it, Rod. The government doesn't have it until.
Rod Pyle [00:36:18]:
And you can use stuff besides plutonium. They've used other, other nuclear elements.
Tariq Malik [00:36:23]:
They've got. The government has all of that stuff that they just don't want to tell.
Rod Pyle [00:36:26]:
But it's got to, you know, if they're going to put it down to the south pole, it's got to survive Viper like temperatures. So we're talking what, minus 300 or something.
Tariq Malik [00:36:34]:
Oh, and all the time and really big swings and. But the reason that I say all that stuff about how they'll find it, even if it doesn't seem like it's there, is because the minute that they said that they're looking at doing this, then you know that they're going to say, oh well then what if China is going to send their own nuclear giant rover to the moon, you know. Well, we have to. To get there. Oh yeah, yeah. We've got this other cache, you know, it's other. Under Fort Knox or that place in Cascadia or wherever they have the plutonium store.
Rod Pyle [00:37:00]:
So keep guessing. Yeah, it'll be interesting.
Tariq Malik [00:37:03]:
Also let me know when I'm right. Department of War or Department of Energy
Rod Pyle [00:37:06]:
standpoint, I guess it's easier to go from Mars, the moon than from the Moon to Mars because the gravity is significantly less as well. So the machinery should all work very well. All right, let's. Let's fly to another break and we can catch up on our discord chat while Jammer B tries to call us to account for everything we. Everything. Every mistake you make and we'll be right back. Stay with us. All right.
Tariq Malik [00:37:34]:
Is it because Explorer 1 didn't orbit? Is that, is that why they're. I'm getting called out for that?
Rod Pyle [00:37:38]:
Is it did orbit.
Tariq Malik [00:37:39]:
Yeah, that's what I thought.
Rod Pyle [00:37:40]:
Right. Stayed in orbit for I. It. It may still be. I don't think it's still functioning.
Tariq Malik [00:37:45]:
But it was a Vanguard that's still in on too, right.
Rod Pyle [00:37:50]:
Vanguard finally flew after Explorer. Vanguard's a sad story, but it was a noteworthy effort. All right, what do you want to do next?
Tariq Malik [00:37:59]:
Let's talk. Well, We've only got 15 minutes left.
Rod Pyle [00:38:03]:
I know. You know we got to talk about Mariner 4.
Tariq Malik [00:38:05]:
Yeah.
Rod Pyle [00:38:08]:
So Mariner 4, at this point it's 1965. As far as we know, Mars may still have canals and thoats and trees and gimcracks and gerworks and God knows what else living there because we can only see it through our largest Telescopes. It's still kind of a fuzzy, fuzzy flickering blob because the atmosphere. We didn't have space telescopes in 1965.
Tariq Malik [00:38:29]:
You can think Lowell. Right. For all the cats.
Rod Pyle [00:38:32]:
So, yeah, Lowell, Percival Lowell. Turn of the century, late 1900s, early or late 1800s, early 1900s. Had written a series of books, amateur astronomer, but amateur, with a 24 inch refractive telescope in Arizona, about life on Mars and advanced civilizations. You know, there's a little bit of avi lob at Percival Lowell. Every book became a little more fanciful
Tariq Malik [00:38:54]:
and out there, well, you find a planet, I guess you get a lot of street cred. Right?
Rod Pyle [00:38:58]:
Well, no, that was later. And it was. That his observatory, not him. But okay, that was.
Tariq Malik [00:39:03]:
Oh, that was Clay Tombaugh, my boy.
Rod Pyle [00:39:04]:
40 years later.
Tariq Malik [00:39:05]:
Yeah, my apologies, my apologies. But.
Rod Pyle [00:39:08]:
But Lowell, you know, he was a bit of a fanatic and people up through, say 1930 were still kind of into it. And gradually the scientific community turned, turned against him and said, look, this is nuts. You know, we can, we can tell enough from observing the planet that we know it's got a very thin atmosphere, it's very cold, Carbon dioxide rich. No, no, the canal is built by creatures. Look, they double every year and all this stuff. So that was kind of the state of the art. In fact, we were still using maps that dated back 6, 50, 60 years of Mars to plan the flyby and the photo pass when Mariner 4 launched. So 1965, it does its flyby of Mars.
Rod Pyle [00:39:50]:
On July 15th, we got back 21 very low res pictures. I think there were like 100 lines. Yeah, transmitted 21 and a half actually. But it was clear enough to show us that basically it was the moon in red, you know, very thin atmosphere. So after the Flyby, as Mariner 4 cleared the other side, the other limb of the planet, so it goes behind the planet and then it pops back into view of us by radio, if you will. We were able to measure the radio waves through the edge of the atmosphere, which is very clever occultation, and let us know. It has about 1% of Earth's atmosphere. So, yeah, not much going on there.
Rod Pyle [00:40:29]:
Dry, cold, dead as far as we could tell. But that was a remarkable thing. I was alive then. I don't remember it, but I do remember vaguely because I was a science fiction fan. Even at that age. I would have been, I think, seven years old. I was reading Ray Bradbury and other authors like that. This just destroyed that whole Martian empire overnight, you know.
Tariq Malik [00:40:51]:
Yeah, yeah, it's a big moment. But it's really interesting because when I first started in my space career, I went to a talk with Isaac Asimov and he, he gave a talk from
Rod Pyle [00:40:59]:
Sri Lanka, Mr. Cyber. Wait, Clark or Asimov or Arthur C.
Tariq Malik [00:41:03]:
Clark, Pardon me, Arthur C. Clarke. And he gave a talk from, from beamed in from Sri Lanka at the American Museum of Natural History where he talked even then. And this is like early 2000s about the, the, the, the, the wild bushes on Mars that are clearly visible in the orbiter photos that we can see. Really? Yeah, yeah. And, and it was a really weird moment at that point in time that you know, they were still that belief that it was there. But imagine being in that room where you get those little ones and zeros that you got to color in, you know, gray or not gray to see that this is Mars. And, but oh no, there's no canals, you know, there's no.
Rod Pyle [00:41:42]:
So, so what Tareks are from referring to is when the, when the first data came down from Mariner 4, the scientists didn't want to wait for the JPL lab to assemble a photograph out of because it was digital download. And so this, this back then had to be very painstakingly and slowly recreated. So they took the, the paper printout of just the ones and zeros or the numeric values, whatever they were for color, it cut it into strips and then glued them onto a piece of cardboard. Ran down to the local art store and bought some pastel pencils, these kind of oily crayons. Here it is on the video stream. Thanks Anthony. And colored up this first image from Mars. And it, you know, it doesn't tell you much.
Rod Pyle [00:42:27]:
It's basically saying, hey look, a bright albedo here, less albedo over there. But it was a really cool thing and it's still there. So if you go to visit JPL in the comms building where I live,
Tariq Malik [00:42:37]:
you can see it. Yeah, you can see it.
Rod Pyle [00:42:39]:
You just think, wow, that's a whole, truly the end of the analog age right there.
Tariq Malik [00:42:44]:
There's like a whole alcove kind of mini museum to that whole era of planetary exploration there. It's really, really cool.
Rod Pyle [00:42:53]:
If only the tour is easier to get.
Tariq Malik [00:42:55]:
You know they have open days. If you ever are in near JPL during when they're gonna have those open days, go to those open days. They're really good.
Rod Pyle [00:43:03]:
Yeah, but you got to get online when they open up the ticket.
Tariq Malik [00:43:07]:
Yeah.
Rod Pyle [00:43:07]:
Giveaways like within 30 seconds because they're gone in the first five minutes. And that's I think what 15,000 tickets. Yeah, yeah, they go like that.
Tariq Malik [00:43:18]:
All right, like, like Taylor Swift's wedding invite list that's going on right now at Madison Square Garden. Right.
Rod Pyle [00:43:24]:
So what's a Taylor Swift?
Tariq Malik [00:43:28]:
Yeah, she's getting married. Okay, okay, well, then let's. All right, okay, we'll move on. So she hasn't gone to space yet.
Rod Pyle [00:43:36]:
We're not going to get through our list, as always. But I did want to point out, among the Mariner missions, the first one actually was 1962, was Mariner Venus, which is what they called the Squiggly Line mission later, basically just sent back electronic measurements of plasma and magnetism and that kind of stuff. So it's just an oh, look what we get on the, on the magnetometer chart kind of mission. But it was notable that it succeeded because at that point, both we in the Soviet Union were hurling these probes out towards the moon, towards the nearest planets without a lot of success. So this was a big success for us. Then Mariner 5 also went to Venus. Mariner 6 and 7 went to Mars. Mariner 10 went to Venus and Mercury.
Rod Pyle [00:44:21]:
So, so it was a remarkable little program that ended. Voyager 1 and 2 were supposed to be mariners, but they decided that they were sufficiently more ambitious that they were going to call them something else. So they were going to be. There was another name before Voyager, Journeyer or something weird like that.
Tariq Malik [00:44:45]:
Journeyman Journey. Yeah, to the journey.
Rod Pyle [00:44:49]:
But Voyager won out and that was a good name. So anyway, that, that, that's the, the, the quick and dirty on the Mariner program.
Tariq Malik [00:44:55]:
Yeah. Well, let's, let's, let's fast forward because I do want to spend some time. We get to pick and pick our favorite ones, right?
Rod Pyle [00:45:01]:
Yeah.
Tariq Malik [00:45:01]:
And so, so we're gonna, we'll, we'll do a, a quick, a quick whirlwind that. I'm sure I'm gonna miss a few things about the American firsts in space because of course, there was a lot of, of competition in the early days of the space age. You've got the space race and Americans were not first in space. And so to our, you know, really,
Rod Pyle [00:45:24]:
in anything, in anything. 60s sort of lifted us up.
Tariq Malik [00:45:29]:
The Soviets had the first satellite with Sputnik. They had the first animal in space with Laika. They had the first person in space with Yuri Gagarin.
Rod Pyle [00:45:37]:
Well, they had the first animal body in space. Laika didn't even make it to orbit. Well toasted, but.
Tariq Malik [00:45:43]:
Oh, that's so sad. It is sad, but they never plan
Rod Pyle [00:45:46]:
to bring her back.
Tariq Malik [00:45:47]:
I named My space dog, Laika, in Fortnite. Anyway, so a lot of firsts there. A lot of. A lot of firsts. But. But the Americans came in just, just behind for a lot of things. Our first American in space, Alan Shepard, in of May of 61, you had the. The first American spacewalk after the first Soviet spacewalk with.
Tariq Malik [00:46:09]:
With Ed White in on Gemini 4. The first docking. Right. The first docking in space.
Rod Pyle [00:46:17]:
We did that first docking and almost ended the Gemini program. So that was Gemini 8, where Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott went up in a Gemini capsule to dock with the Agena stage, which was an upper stage used before that by the Air Force for satellite launches. And they docked, and suddenly they started to go into slow spin. So I thought, oh, the Agena's fouled up. They tried to turn it off. It didn't work. So they disconnected because they didn't want to get stuck to it with torquing and all that. And then the tumble sped up, and by the time it'd be going on for about eight minutes, they were tumbling at one revolution per second.
Tariq Malik [00:46:57]:
I can't imagine that.
Rod Pyle [00:46:59]:
And that's a point at which you
Tariq Malik [00:47:00]:
start to pass out, right?
Rod Pyle [00:47:02]:
Yeah. And had they died, it would have just kept spinning faster, faster until it depleted all this thruster fuel because there's no. No friction up there. So Armstrong had the wherewithal and the. And the conscious thought to turn off all 16 thruster breakers. I only know these facts because Jerry Griffin and I were just talking about this for his book. Turn off all 16 thruster breakers, then fire the reentry system, which you're not supposed to use until you're ready to reenter. And that stopped the tumble.
Rod Pyle [00:47:31]:
So our first docking was almost our last.
Tariq Malik [00:47:34]:
Yeah, but it was first. It was the first. First there. It was in that. In that space race. So then we. So, you know, we eventually got to, oh, go ahead.
Rod Pyle [00:47:41]:
You know, I want to let you march forward, but we have to do one more break, and then we'll come back, it's all yours because you have a lot of stuff to go through. So. Yeah, yeah, let's run off to a break. We'll be right back, so stay with us.
Tariq Malik [00:47:52]:
Go. All right, all right. Okay. So. So from the first docking in 66, then we're going to just fast forward all the way up to the first moon landing with astronauts. You've got Apollo 11 with Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong. We all know that story, right? Because that's what we hear in all of our history books. If You've watched in the shadow of the moon, you will discover that Buzz Aldrin was the first person to pee on the moon.
Tariq Malik [00:48:14]:
Because as he walked down the ladder, he paused and he went in his suit, which was a nice little fun fact that I never expected to hear from Buzz Aldrin. And there he was. And we talked about it in the roundtable afterward about that. You had the first scientist on the moon, Harrison Smith, on Paul 17, who we just saw.
Rod Pyle [00:48:32]:
Well, you weren't there, but we just had.
Tariq Malik [00:48:34]:
Oh, that's. You saw him at istc, Space Development Conference.
Rod Pyle [00:48:37]:
Well, let's not forget Buzz was also the first to perform any kind of religious ceremony on the moon. He did communion shortly after landing.
Tariq Malik [00:48:43]:
That's right. That's right.
Rod Pyle [00:48:44]:
Very quietly, a little teeny cup and a little teeny bit of liquid that sort of slowly dribbled in and out of it. But, you know, so many people talk about the first man, and as we've discussed in the show before, there was some sensitivity around who was going to go out first, but I maintain they touched down at the same time.
Tariq Malik [00:49:03]:
Yeah, yeah.
Rod Pyle [00:49:05]:
So they were the first two people on the moon. There's what matters.
Tariq Malik [00:49:08]:
There you go. So we had our. Our first space station was Skylab. So that was great. But that wasn't a big first. Right. So we weren't really first for that because the Salutes were already flying at that.
Rod Pyle [00:49:18]:
No, but it was when you look. I was looking at a chart the other day that compares. Compared the Salutes and the Almazas to Skylab, and they're tiny.
Tariq Malik [00:49:26]:
They're so small.
Rod Pyle [00:49:27]:
They look like three garbage cans stacked together. Then you get this 80 foot beast
Tariq Malik [00:49:32]:
called Skylab where you actually get. I mean, and you will never forget, you know, was it. Was it Pete Conrad running around the circle? Right. You know that those are like. Those are like iconic, iconic things that they. They love so much in reality that Kubrick put it in 2001, you know, so. So that's why you see that jogging scene, because.
Rod Pyle [00:49:52]:
And Skylab is still the largest single pressurized space ever put into orbit.
Tariq Malik [00:49:56]:
Well, I guess, until Starship. Right.
Rod Pyle [00:49:58]:
Go, America.
Tariq Malik [00:50:01]:
But. So we had a. I don't know. It's gonna be big. It depends on how they can figure it if they want to do that. So we had a lot of other firsts, you know, the first successful Mars landings with Viking. I don't know if we want to count Mars 2 or not.
Rod Pyle [00:50:13]:
And then talk about the Mars 2 and 3 things. That's. That's Fair game. So the Soviet Union was the first to reach Mars. They did put hardware on the Martian surface. A little crumpled smoking heap with Mars 2. Mars 3 landed successfully and it beeped
Tariq Malik [00:50:30]:
for like 15 minutes.
Rod Pyle [00:50:32]:
In 1973, was it?
Tariq Malik [00:50:35]:
Yeah.
Rod Pyle [00:50:36]:
What year did it land?
Tariq Malik [00:50:37]:
I don't remember.
Rod Pyle [00:50:38]:
Well, you have a computer right in front of you. Look it up. And it worked for exactly 10 seconds. Sent back a piece of an image that was mostly just static and striated lines. And it actually had a little cable attached. Mini rover, this little gimpy thing that would kind of sort of. It was like a turtle.
Tariq Malik [00:51:01]:
1971.
Rod Pyle [00:51:02]:
71. Thank you. So it was an ambitious mission. Didn't work. And then 1976, Viking 1 and Viking 2, massive spacecraft, orbiters and landers. The orbiters were an evolution of Mariner. Yeah, Mariner 9 specifically. And then the landers were completely bespoke hardware.
Rod Pyle [00:51:22]:
And as I've told the story on, on here many times, so I'll keep it short, I managed to get into the auditorium at Caltech to see that first, the landing and the first picture coming back. So we waited out however many minutes it was 10 or 12 minutes until the signal came down from Mars saying landing successful. Then that first picture which came in vertical stripe after vertical stripe from left to right because the camera was a little can shaped affair with an open slit and a mirror that pivoted up and down. That's how they built the images out. Wasn't just a single photograph.
Tariq Malik [00:51:56]:
And that was like it is now.
Rod Pyle [00:51:58]:
That was amazing.
Tariq Malik [00:51:59]:
And you know, the press corps, special moment. That's a special moment to be in like the little audience there as the first, like just, just seeing it from the Curiosity and Perseverance ones is always really exciting. Yeah. So it's a great opportunity.
Rod Pyle [00:52:10]:
Well, it was the first, the first spacecraft successfully land and actually do anything on another planet. We had landed Surveyor on the moon by then. So it wasn't like we didn't know how to land things on other, other bodies. But Mars was a big deal. And it's still, you know, I was reading an essay about this the other day and I've said it many times, I think, you know, Mars has a sense of place that the Moon doesn't, that orbit doesn't. There's a horizon, there's an atmosphere, wind, there's weather, winds, there's dust storms, that kind of stuff. So while I wouldn't want to live there, it certainly does if you're going to send people there for a long period of time. It's got more of a sense of place than just about anywhere else we can actually go and stand.
Rod Pyle [00:52:51]:
Except maybe Titan, but that's another episode. Yeah, I want over to you.
Tariq Malik [00:52:56]:
Well, you know, I, I think we should just accelerate like a bit more. There have been a lot of other first, you know, since then. We had the rovers with Pathfinder and Sojourner. You had the, the first bouncy house rovers on, on, on there. You had Voyager 1 and 2 become the first interplanet inter interstellar objects that we've sent out. You know, someone else is going to see that and be like, is that artificial or is that a natural phenomena? You know?
Rod Pyle [00:53:22]:
Well, talk more about that. I mean, I mean, what is. If you're an alien entity, what do you see when you wrap your, your robotic claws around Voyager?
Tariq Malik [00:53:30]:
Yeah, well, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's a spacecraft. I don't think we have pictures of it, do we? The grand tour, you know.
Rod Pyle [00:53:38]:
Well, there's, yeah, there's a, there's a media file.
Tariq Malik [00:53:41]:
Well, you'll, you'll, you'll see the spacecraft with the big boom and the big dish struggling if you're Hoyzer1 to send little beeps and boops back. And of course, the, the Golden Record where we, we very, very smartly put exactly a nice pulsar diagram of where we live in the, in the, in the universe so that people can come and find us free meat here.
Rod Pyle [00:54:04]:
Well, and we very thoughtfully included a phonograph cartridge with the record. Like that was going to make a difference to a civilization that has tentacles and looks like jellyfish, that they're going to figure out how to play that record.
Tariq Malik [00:54:16]:
But I'm sure they will. Well, I'm sure they're, they'll figure it out. We had the first space tourists. But this was one I wanted to ask you about, right? Because in 2001, when, oh, come on, Tarek. When the million Dennis Tito flew to the space station. So, but he was, he, you know, he, so we, we. That whole thing happened. Does it count as the first, you know, like, American thing if he's like a citizen, but these launches on a Russian Soyuz, does that count? All right.
Tariq Malik [00:54:51]:
Question. I don't.
Rod Pyle [00:54:52]:
That's a good question.
Tariq Malik [00:54:52]:
I'm gonna say no. I'm gonna say no because he flew to Mir, right? Yeah, he flew. No, well, he flew to the iss. It was, there was a, there was a, a British woman who flew as like a, like a passenger. She won a contest. Helen Chapman. I Think, right. She flew, she flew to mirror.
Tariq Malik [00:55:11]:
But. But no, Dennis Ito was the first space. But Space Adventures broke. It brokered that. So that's a US Company anyway, it's a, it's a bit of a weird kind of a place there. But what is unambiguous is that the first private spacewalk was entirely American made and done. And that is much more recent. That is Jared Isaacman, now the administrator of NASA, a American billionaire.
Tariq Malik [00:55:38]:
You know, the, the guy behind all of your Shift 4 payments at the supermarket or wherever the checkout stand? That's him. And he paid SpaceX, another American company, to make all that stuff happen. And now I was gonna say let's
Rod Pyle [00:55:51]:
not discount Elon Musk out of. No, I mean he's transformed.
Tariq Malik [00:55:55]:
Well, that's what I'm saying.
Rod Pyle [00:55:56]:
Love him or hate him, he's transformed. Launch.
Tariq Malik [00:56:00]:
They've revolutionized both space tourism as well as access to space. For all of that. That kind of gets us up to the present. We skip a lot. I mean, a lot, a lot. And so, and it's very, this is very space flight heavy. This entire discussion is. Rod and I are spaceflight people, you know, and you know, like the first reusable rocket.
Tariq Malik [00:56:21]:
We even, we didn't talk about that. That was Blue Origin. And they beat SpaceX by like a month right from, from when they announced their, their launch and landing. And then SpaceX finally was able to get the landing that they needed with the Falcon 9 in that December of 2010.
Rod Pyle [00:56:35]:
So wait, wait, wait, you're saying Blue Origin beat them with the announcement because they didn't.
Tariq Malik [00:56:38]:
No, Blue Origin did a, did a vertical launch, vertical landing test that was successful, but it, it was like a suborbital test. And they, they, they, they, they managed to get it done before Elon was able to do in. SpaceX was able to, which is fair
Rod Pyle [00:56:54]:
because that company's two years older than SpaceX.
Tariq Malik [00:56:56]:
Yeah, so they should have.
Rod Pyle [00:56:58]:
So Jammer B ever sticking his thumb in our eye, says iss. The operative initial there is the. Which is true. However, I would just like to point out that the United States paid for. Depending on whose books you look at and how they're calculated and how the numbers are parsed out, between 70 and 80% of that station was our money. And what the Russians contributed was aging, creaking hardware that is now cracking and leaking. So let's not overdo it.
Tariq Malik [00:57:28]:
It's a good, it's a good point though. That's why like, I was, I was really like on the fence about What. What to include on all of that? You know, the. We didn't even talk about the space Shuttle. The first reusable spacecraft ever. Right. And which is Marvel? Well, no, the orbiter. The orbiters.
Rod Pyle [00:57:45]:
But even the orbiter. I mean, it needed months of repair and refurbishment between you.
Tariq Malik [00:57:50]:
Right. I am not going to knock the Space shuttle. It was the first of its kind so tantalizing that the Russians copied it. You know, bolt for bolt. Exactly, exactly. And just. And I'm not sure if anyone listening has ever had the chance to watch one fly, but for me, I grew up with that from my little baby space reporter days. And I mean, when I was a kid, I had little models that I would make over and over.
Tariq Malik [00:58:20]:
And Rod has heard the story about how I wasn't allowed to use, like, model glue in my models. So I had, like, snap tight space shuttles and I had to use tape to hold some of my models together because I couldn't use glue. And then to.
Rod Pyle [00:58:33]:
Actually, why couldn't you use glue?
Tariq Malik [00:58:34]:
My mom didn't trust me. I think she thought I was going to glue my hands together or something.
Rod Pyle [00:58:38]:
She probably thought you were going to sniff it. No, because you got great, great results when you sniffed airplane glue.
Tariq Malik [00:58:44]:
I was. Especially when I was never. I would never, never.
Rod Pyle [00:58:48]:
Well, you couldn't help it.
Tariq Malik [00:58:50]:
The. The. That's actually pretty. That's a. She probably didn't want me to pass out while I'm making it.
Rod Pyle [00:58:55]:
Your space adventures became much more colorful with a tube of glue. Not that we're recommending it.
Tariq Malik [00:59:01]:
From doing that to then, like, going down to Kennedy for work and like watching as they moved Atlantis or Discovery from the hangar facility to the VAB and then out to the pad. That was like something else. And it is like, you know, a borderline, like, religious experience. If that's something that you've dreamt of forever of, I would love to go to space, but that was like the next best thing to be able to do that.
Rod Pyle [00:59:30]:
So I think the thing about the shuttle is that when you first saw it, it's like, this can't work. Yeah, this should not work. The physics of this and the aerodynamics don't make a lot of sense.
Tariq Malik [00:59:41]:
So much bigger than you. You think it is.
Rod Pyle [00:59:42]:
It is so much bigger. So I saw the approach and landing tests up at Mojave, and then I saw the Endeavor being pulled through Los Angeles over the museum. So that was kind of my bookend of the project. I think I saw three shuttle launches. They were remarkable. I did not get to see SLS Taric, which, you know. But yeah, we didn't. The thing about the shuttle, you know, when you go to one that's on its landing gear somewhere, which la's is not any longer, it's now vertical, which is another story.
Rod Pyle [01:00:15]:
But when you go stand underneath one, you really get a sense of how big it is, right. You look at this vast expanse of these little delicate silica tiles that are just the thinnest crust of black heat rejecting material over this glass foam and you think they actually flew this thing and landed it without any engines coming.
Tariq Malik [01:00:37]:
It's worth, if anyone's ever in New York, it's worth going to see Enterprise because you can walk underneath it at the Enterprise. And it is, it is something else. But you bring up some really good points too. Obviously Artemis 2 was a sight to behold. That first American return to the moon of the 21st century. Watching the SLS go, the Saturn 5 we did not talk about, even though we talked about Skylab.
Rod Pyle [01:00:57]:
Right.
Tariq Malik [01:00:59]:
That moon rocket, the biggest and most powerful of its time. And now we've got starship even bigger, even more powerful. Maybe it will actually fulfill like its purpose of getting into the moon. Or, or not. We'll have to see because they, they just powered it up this week. They powered up the next. The, the starship number 13, you know, so we'll, we'll see how that goes. But we could go on and on about all this.
Rod Pyle [01:01:24]:
Well, let's not forget the irony of the space launch system, which is more powerful at launch than the Saturn 5, but doesn't have nearly the throwaway.
Tariq Malik [01:01:31]:
Yeah, yeah. Because it's trying to get, trying, trying to get bigger. I don't know.
Rod Pyle [01:01:35]:
It's upper stage is wimpy.
Tariq Malik [01:01:37]:
Yeah, we'll have to see, we'll see how that goes. They've got a new plan. They got a new plan. Let's end because we've already gone way beyond. Let's end with like maybe like two or three of your favorite personal missions. We've talked about these big milestones. What if you have to pick three of their, your favorite. It doesn't have to be because of like their historicness or not.
Tariq Malik [01:01:57]:
What is journalist?
Rod Pyle [01:02:00]:
Historical value?
Tariq Malik [01:02:01]:
Historical value. I am notorious. People don't know, but Rod knows I am notorious for like spelling errors like that of all time. And I actually now I talk. Yeah. At work. They know that I will always have all these misspellings and I have to be watched for it. And I've been talking into my phone to send memos and they joke, they joke that the robot that does the auto transcribe is better at spelling than I am.
Rod Pyle [01:02:32]:
Some of your texts to me look like they're coming in. And Klingon, I guess. I mean, you know, no surprise here. Apollo 11 was a huge moment because I was able to see it live. Viking 1 was a huge moment, as I've already discussed for the third one, I think, Pathfinder. Yeah, because that was really when JPL first up their game online so we could follow the mission online, famously crash the servers and blah, blah, blah.
Tariq Malik [01:02:58]:
What date, what day the Pathfinder land on Mars, Rod?
Rod Pyle [01:03:01]:
Was it July 4th?
Tariq Malik [01:03:02]:
July 4th, 1997? Independence Day. Look at this, we're coming full.
Rod Pyle [01:03:07]:
But I think what was so cool for that was they created some good media around it. They hadn't done seven minutes of Terry yet, which is I think NASA's best ever, but they'd created some very good media around it. There was a lot of video of friend of the show Rob Manning with his crew of engineers and scientists designing this thing. And I remember watching. You've seen him, I'm sure his, you know, his beard is still black, his hair is black. We all had black hair back then. He and I are the same age. But they were having so much fun.
Rod Pyle [01:03:39]:
And we talked to him about Pathfinder on the show a couple of times. They were kind of flying under the radar. NASA approved the money. They knew it was going on. But it was an inexpensive mission. I think 80 million, all in which was nothing in those days. And you know, they're kind of being left alone until they're getting to the final strokes. And then it's like headquarters goes, hold on, we got to have a review here.
Rod Pyle [01:04:01]:
So they go in for a technical review and there are a lot of raised eyebrows in that room, primarily about the landing schema, which was the whole beach bouncing beach balls surrounding the, the rover thing. But it all worked. It worked brilliantly. It only worked for a matter of weeks once it was on the surface. But it was remarkable. Inexpensive, small, fairly low tech, demonstration mission. And to me that was remarkable. How about you?
Tariq Malik [01:04:29]:
Yeah, well, yeah, I've got, I've got like a, like a list. I'm not going to do like the traditional ones like Apollo 11. You talked about those ones. I think already, I would say that STS 114, return to flight. That stands out. That's the first mission I ever covered myself and the first space shuttle I ever saw launch. That was really great. Another tie in STS121, the year later in 2006 because it launched on July 4th of that year.
Tariq Malik [01:04:54]:
Right. And no, STS121 was on July 10th. Pardon me, 2010. 2010.
Rod Pyle [01:05:02]:
That was what we're looking at here is. Oh, that's the date of today. Never mind.
Tariq Malik [01:05:06]:
Yeah, so STS121, it was in 2010 and it was one that really struck and I think that might be the one that my mom got to see too because we were able to get her to see one. So. Yep. Watch the video stream and there it is with the American flag right there. They got a lot of pictures with that. Deep Impact crashed into comfort temple one on, on July 4th in, in like the 29, 2000 whatever it was. So, so that was really exciting. It says the date right there to whatever, whatever date that was fourth of July.
Tariq Malik [01:05:42]:
And, and, and Artemis too I think is really great. But the, the one that really knocked my socks off has to be curiosity and the landing because the way that they designed that 2 ton or whatever it is car sized rover to land on, on Mars the first time, you know, yet a third way to land on Mars. You've got powered, powered engines with the Viking landers. Yeah, you had, you had, you had the, the, the inflatable bags with Pathfinder, with the Spirit, with Opportunity. And then it's like you're gonna drop something with a rocket powered sky crane and lower it down and let it, let it do it that way. That was crazy. And it worked flawlessly. And then twice.
Tariq Malik [01:06:22]:
Yeah, and yeah. And so perseverance. I'll lump them in together. But that was the mission where I mean, I'm all alone in the newsroom because it was like overnight that it had happened and you know, Mike Wall and you are probably a JPL doing those things and it lands and you publish everything and it's the crack of whatever dawn and you're like, I can breathe now. And we'll prepare for the next day, what comes next. And then within the first like five minutes, the photos just start rolling in. No waiting for, for printouts, no waiting for colors or whatever. It's just, here's another planet, we're there now.
Tariq Malik [01:06:58]:
And that was absolutely spectacular. It was cathartic from a professional sense to have done that whole thing and seen it go through, but then just watching the achievement that they were able to do and then repeat it with perseverance, it's just crazy. So and so if they can get this promise version onto the moon and we see it from the South Pole, maybe it doesn't you don't have a sky crane because you don't need that, you know.
Rod Pyle [01:07:21]:
Well, you're not gonna be using parachutes, that's for sure.
Tariq Malik [01:07:23]:
Yeah, yeah. So, but. But having that. Because the other. The biggest rover ever sent that didn't. That wasn't driven by astronauts, was what, Lunokhod 2. Right. Still up there.
Rod Pyle [01:07:34]:
The heavier than Curiosity.
Tariq Malik [01:07:36]:
I'm not sure if it was or not, you know, I know that. Doesn't Richard Gary own it? Doesn't have a deed bought. He bought the rights to it.
Rod Pyle [01:07:44]:
Yeah. That's bizarre.
Tariq Malik [01:07:46]:
But a time.
Rod Pyle [01:07:47]:
What he bought was rights to radioactive waste on the moon because that thing had polonium heaters in it.
Tariq Malik [01:07:53]:
A time is coming where people are going to be able to just like on their own, go to the museum and drive rovers on the moon, you know, driver overs on Mars or whatever, as long as you got some time to kill, because you got to wait for the signals to do whatever. And we have a story today on the site by Mike Wall about where we could be in 2020, 2276, something like that. 2176, yeah. In the next 250 years. And I think that we'll be past Mars by that point. It won't be always 30, 30 years off at that point in time. And I think that we might be on other. Like on Venus and Titan and maybe on.
Tariq Malik [01:08:36]:
On our way out of this solar system, Rod, you know.
Rod Pyle [01:08:38]:
So curiosity was 130 pounds heavier than Ludicod 2.
Tariq Malik [01:08:42]:
There you go.
Rod Pyle [01:08:43]:
But I was. I'm amazed they were that close in mass because Lunokhod2 wasn't able to do very much. Well, that's so closing note. That is a testament to American engineering. And as I've mentioned before, back in the 60s when we were. The Russians at that point were just flinging probes throughout the near solar system, it seemed like every month. And they still had to use pressurized vessels because they were using vacuum tubes and very hot electronics. So they needed pressurized vessels to protect and cool them, and we did not.
Rod Pyle [01:09:21]:
So that was one reason. And our probes are able to achieve more. But I will give a tip of the hat to the Soviet Union. Their exploration of Venus was amazing and brilliant. Worked really well. Well, you wasted another hour with us, particularly this week, just sort of expostulating, if that's a word, about our favorite missions. So thanks for bearing with us for episode 217 that we're calling America in Space.
Tariq Malik [01:09:48]:
Space.
Rod Pyle [01:09:49]:
So, my friend, where's the best place to keep up with Your retirement plans as a game master.
Tariq Malik [01:09:55]:
Well, you can find me@space.com, as always, on the socials, @tarikjmalik, on YouTube, @spacetronplace. I just got a space cat in my Fallout 76 game. His name is Mr. Pebbles, and he is amazing.
Rod Pyle [01:10:08]:
Mr. Pebbles?
Tariq Malik [01:10:09]:
Yeah, he's the first.
Rod Pyle [01:10:10]:
You named him Mr. Pebbles?
Tariq Malik [01:10:11]:
No, his name is Mr. Pebbles. He's the first. First cat in space in the Fallout universe, in all the games. Not like Fillicet, the French cat. That was the first.
Rod Pyle [01:10:19]:
Actually, if I had an animal in space and I was going to name it Mr. Pebbles, it'd probably be a goat, for obvious reasons, or maybe a rabbit, but okay.
Tariq Malik [01:10:27]:
But, you know, this weekend you will find me, I think, like a lot of my fellow Americans, out, hopefully watching some fireworks in the sweltering New Jersey heat. It was 104 degrees in my car yesterday, which is crazy for New Jersey. And we're just hoping that there's not going to be rain because there's supposed to be thunderstorms during. During the fireworks. So, you know, fingers crossed.
Rod Pyle [01:10:48]:
Well, so if you saw a lightning storm during fireworks, that would be awesome. At the same time. And of course, you can find me at pilebooks.com or@astermagazine.com and for the 4th of July, you will find me huddled in a corner with my poor old Labrador curled up in my lap, shaking as the idiots nearby drop M80s and other loud fireworks in the very wide concrete drainage channel we have behind our home, which, of course amplifies Nechos. Those sounds horribly. The only worst place is going to my boat with him, which has fireworks off the fantail, the Queen Mary. So I guess we'll just stay home and try and survive it here. And yes, we've tried the thunder wrap and the. The hemp chews and everything else.
Tariq Malik [01:11:35]:
Are there like earplugs? You can put earmuffs?
Rod Pyle [01:11:37]:
Well, they have a thing that wraps tight around their head, holds their ears down. Is supposed to help, but he just. He's not with it. What he needs is to be all 70 pounds of them curled up in your lap, shivering.
Tariq Malik [01:11:49]:
Go out to the desert, okay? Take that dog and give him some peace and quiet.
Rod Pyle [01:11:54]:
That's a good idea. Yeah. Remember, despite that, another good idea is to drop us a line at Twist at 20twit TV. We welcome your comments, suggestions, ideas, and jokes, and we answer each and every email unless they get lost or something. New episodes this podcast publish every Friday in your favorite podcaster, so make sure to subscribe tell your friends and give us reviews. And you can follow the Twittech podcast network at Twit on Twitter and on Facebook and Twitter TV on Instagram. It's been a hoot, my friend. Thank you, Tarek.
Rod Pyle [01:12:23]:
Thank you, Anthony, for pinch hitting today
Tariq Malik [01:12:25]:
and for, like, suffering through. I mean, it is like, almost 3:30
Rod Pyle [01:12:28]:
now, so only in your time zone.
Tariq Malik [01:12:31]:
Yeah.
Rod Pyle [01:12:32]:
And thanks to everybody listening on Discord and YouTube and the other channels that we're on. We love and appreciate you all. Happy fourth of July. We'll see you on the far side.
