Part Two: When Women Were Computers: A Tale of Space and Math

who produces this and literally every other podcast. I think, Sophie, what's your elevator pitch for yourself as a person producer podcasts, puppies, plants, You're welcome cool. There are a lot of plants, and so if he's zoom background. So, in the first half of this two parter, we talked about the women who were computers who studied space, or people into space. Today we're going to talk about space and the people who

got into space. But first we're gonna talk about the gay man who broke the Nazis codes and shortened World War two by years, saving fourteen million lives and kind of invented the modern computer, which is to say, we're going to talk about motherfucking Alan Turing, and I say kind of invented modern computing, because there isn't actually a specific start date for computers. It really depends on how

you're defining computer. At Leasta says, I've always understood I think you know more about computers than me, so I'm like making sure that I'm yeah, yeah, I definitely don't. Okay, good to know. So Alan Turing had the misfortune of being born in n in London. I don't know if the year was misfortunate, but being English and gay worked out really badly for him in the end. And not

that many places were better. But just as a white American of Irish descentive legally acquired to make fun of England every chance I can, because I can pretend like it's punching up even though it clearly isn't. So there's my job at England that turned into a jab at myself. Alan Turner was a rich British smart kid, so he wound up in boarding school, where he fell in love with a fellow student named Christopher, who died of sucking

tuberculosis bovine tuberculosis. I swear to God everyone in every episode that I record that if they're not killed violently by a government, they're killed by tuberculosis. Christopher drank infected milk and died Turing. I wasn't really excited about that.

He turned his grief towards his studies. He went on to study at Cambridge, and while he was there he did a bunch of wild math ship that is completely beyond me, and he wrote out a sort of basic idea of a computer, sort of conceptual but not capable of being made. Idea of a computer called the Turing Machine. And I know what you're thinking, because it's what I was thinking when I was researching this. He did not name it the Turing Machine. He's not that kind of asshole.

He named it the a machine for automatic machine, and his doctoral advisor called it the Turing Machine. It also doesn't exist. It's a hypothetical thing. It's a proof of concept, but it's basic principles wound up the central concept of modern computers, which is cool. I mean, I know computers have done a lot of bad things, but I kind of like them. I'm kind of addicted to them. I like them to like, where would we be without our Like, how would we stay up until four am researching nonsense?

Not for the computer. I know, we have to find a library. It's much less fun to be at the library at four am when you should be asleep researching like a list of animals that got college degrees or whatever random thing you're looking up on Wikipedia. Asleep. Wait, which animals got college degrees? Oh, there's a really interesting Wikipedia page about animals that have earned college degrees. But they're all honorary I mean, come on, but still there's

giving us more googling. Thank you my legacy. Yeah, as an aspiring honorary degree getter, U, I really see myself in these animals, so I'm excited to see them. But Alling Turing was not an honorary degree getter. He was a regular degree getter. He might have gotten honorary ones too, I don't know. So after school he also went to Princeton too, I think, just to show off to go

to both Cambridge and Princeton. He got a job working for the government and the Code and Cipher School, and then a nineteen thirty nine The Nazis are like doing their Nazi thing. I swear to God, it's impossible to do a history podcast that doesn't tie in the Nazis at some point, probably one of those animals in that list sucking Nazi um so. And then he starts working at as working at a super secret, top secret, extra secret Bletchley Park in order to decipher Nazi codes, which

he succeeded at not single handedly. I think this guy's hella cool, but we keep hitting the same point. But it's teams of people who make history. But he still did a fucking lot of it, and probably it certainly would have not happened in the same way without him, might not have happened at all. The work that they did did not single handedly crushed Hitler, but basically having

access to all of their coded information. One historian calculated that it shortened the war by two to four years and saved fourteen million lives, which I mean that ain't bad. We always talked about like, oh, this person killed X million number of people, right, but we don't I haven't seen the Wikipedia list of the people who have saved the most people. Yeah, And it really goes back to sort of like I like, it's kind of sucked up that we talk about, like like numbers of people killed

when we're talking about war. But like, even the conception of this action saved x amount of people's lives, we don't really even have like an understanding of that, Like

we don't that's that's not how we describe things. Yeah, totally, and and even like, like I'm pretty pretty antimilitaristic in my attitude and most of the time, but I don't necessarily apply that to World War two, where stopping the Nazi seems like a really important thing to do, even if all of the people trying to do it, all the government's trying to do it were bad, like the USSR in the US, right, But it's interesting to think that, like, oh,

this person who contributed to the war saved millions of lives. I don't know, because most of the time that's not the way that you savellions of lives. So the Nazis are sending messages using these machines called Enigma machines, which would be a name that would be absolutely trite if I wrote it in fiction. And they are these typewriters that translate between cipher text and plain text. You type in your message, it comes out of code, or you

type in a code. It comes out of message and it's based on a key which can change every day, and by the time the war starts, the Nazis are changing it every day. It was actually Polish mathematicians who first broke Enigma, and right before World War Two they passed that information along to the Allies. So poland sort I guess the last laugh about that whole being crushed by the Nazis thing, or at least they got to

participate in the reverse crushing. But then after the war breaks out, the Nazis change how Enigma works and it needed new breaking. The stuff gets really into the weeds. People really like codes. Turing, in, another codebreaker, develops a purpose built code breaking machine that they called the bomb or the Bombay or something, and it's bomb with an E at the end, but not like bomb e like Wally, which would be a better choice I think they could

have made. During the war, he broke Nazi codes and did other ship like he developed a voice scrambler to encrypt voice calls, which is like something that I even I conceptually struggle to imagine how I would do a hundred years later. You know, I'm not a cryptographer, that this is really coming across to anyone who was a cryptographer is listening. And then after the war, he fucking

invents the modern computer. Sort of same as everyone who invents the modern computer, lots of people do it, but he puts forward the idea that computers can store their programs, and this is a really major step up. And he also stayed gay. Imagine that at one pot in one he actually proposed to a coworker, a woman, and she said yes, and then he was like, oh, but I'm gay, and she was like, that's that's fine, Okay, we can

still get married. Not a deal breaker, I know. And then Turing was like, you know, actually I probably shouldn't marry it. I feel like that would be like dishonest or something. But yeah, I appreciate that it wasn't a deal breaker. For in nineteen fifty two, he's thirty nine years old, he starts dating a younger man. He accidentally snitches himself out to the cops about being gay. His house had been burgled, and he made a classic mistake that rich white people make where he thought that the

cops would um help him. Don't talk to cops exactly, And if he had listened to our sponsor, don't talk to cops. His life would have been very different and probably substantially longer. So he outs himself as gay while he's explaining like why his partner like why there's another man in the house or whatever, like his his partner was like unemployed and probably knew the burglar and I don't know, it's all this complicated it. So he and

his boyfriend get arrested because they're gay and that's not right. Apparently, he pleads guilty. First, he kind of leads like no contests, as lawyers like, plead guilty. So he pleads guilty, and he's given two choices. You can either go to fucking prison for darren sleep with another consenting adult, or you can let us chemically castrate you where the government. He picks chemical castration. Basically, they these are just these are

hormones that feminize his body. They reduces libido, they make him impotent, and they cause breast tissue to form. So the punishment for being gay was being forced to transition. Oh my god, like the govern like the government. I mean, it almost seems silly in when we know that our governments are trying to make it like like criminalized trans youth and like keep them from gender reform, gender reforming care. But like, it is wild to me that we're still

having this conference. That's it seems so like backward and horrible. But then I had to be like, oh wait, it's not really like the government really getting involved in like people's expression of their gender and sexuality. I wish it were a thing of the past and that like what a relic of of a of a different time, but like not really unfortunately. Yeah, yeah, I I even I like try to write a thing out in the script about this. At all I wrote out was what the fuck?

Because like what I just keep looking at it, and I'm like, this is what they're not letting us do on purpose now, but when the government wants to do it to game like oh fucking no mine. Fuck. Yeah. His boyfriend gets I think the same deal. He does some kind of deal that gets them out of prison, and I don't believe it was like cooperation or anything.

I think it was probably the same chemical castration. And of course now he's a terrible monster, so he can't keep his security clearance at the government who he entirely saved, and he loses his job. You can't have your fucking fourteen million lives saying fucking here, like sucking dudes off. That'd be bad, you know. Um, And the US doesn't let him enter because he's like so bad and untouchable again,

like the fucking hero of World War two. You can't have someone as dangerous as that around in the US. So two years later, on June seven fifty four, Turing kills himself with cyanide. And it's possible that this was

an accident. I frankly don't believe it. Apparently he loved Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was one of his favorite films, and one biographer said that he particularly liked the scene where the you know, wicked witch or whatever dips the apple into poison, and a half eaten apple was found next to his corpse and they didn't bother to check it for cyanide before they like hucked it

out or whatever. So there was also this whole electroplating set up in his tiny room for gold plating spoons, and so there's like this accidental death theory that he accidentally killed himself with cyanide that he was using to electroplates spoons, which I don't know. I I buy the

theory that he put that there for plausible deniability. He put that there to be like, I feel like a lot of the time, when people choose to end their own lives, they come up with ways to do it in ways that kind of give everyone around them a way to be like, well, we don't know for sure, even though we all kind of know, you know, I don't know. This just gets into the what the fuck He's another gay man driven to suicide by society they

want to accept him. I don't know. And so like we're recording this episode and the listeners listening to this episode with technology that this man fucking developed, um and

then the UK government killed him. As far as I'm concerned, yeah, I mean it's at what you just said really like puts it in perspective that we're people are listening to this episode on technology that we wouldn't have without him, and yet rather than being treated like the innovator and hero that he was, he was driven to death by suicide.

And I think it, like, I don't know, maybe I'm just in a weird place where I can't help but see these parallels of today of like who out there are we going to be like, Oh, if only we had you know, celebrated them and affirmed them while they were here, Like it's just like a generation. It's it's so so wasteful, Like what a wasteful way to treat

someone who had so much to give to the world. Yeah, No, totally, and it it just keeps up coming up again and again that people people work for these institutions like governments in order to improve the world and take humanity further and advance human knowledge and then get basically murdered by them or you know, thrown away. Not my favorite thing that's happened. So let's talk about the space race. So World War two is over and it's cold wartime, and

which brings it with it, the space race. And I'm going to cut mostly over to the USSR for a while because I'm not trying to be like yeah us with this podcast. I've probably hit this theme enough. But I don't like the U S or the U S SR. It's a cold war between two evil powers. But they still did all this really interesting ship the individual scientists and the USSR, for my money, won the space race. We got to the Moon first, which which everyone pretends

like the biggest prize. But the USSR had the first satellite, the first mammal, the first human, the first woman, the first and the first black men into space. Oh what was the first mammal? Do you know? Oh? Crap, I

looked it up. Oh no, I don't, no, no no. I I had this whole section written about the animals they sent to space, and then I got too sad and I decided not to include them because most of the animals that got sent up into space were just like sent into space and then abandoned, or some of them were sent up into space and then came back and then we're you know, treated badly upon their return. Um. No, So I got really sad about the animal parts, so

then I cut it out. And now I don't remember what the first animal was, but fruit flies were the first like living creature. Okay, interesting, Yeah, I I'm sad that that they didn't treat these animals well when they returned, or if they returned. My god, I know some of them ended like heroes or whatever. And like, you know, some of the dogs, I think in particular, I like, I looked it up. It was a dogo oh I

dog go. So the space race. The USSR starts it by launching a satellite, right, and guess what inspired them to launch a satellite. The obvious answers here would be either like domination of the planet to a hive mind of communism if you're reading in propaganda on one end of the spectrum, or the further into human knowledge from a detached atheistic point of view. After all, the uss are we're full of atheists, right? Wrong? I mean, the USSR was full of atheists, but not just full of

atheists and a lot of their rocket scientists. So the philosophical underpinnions of the U S s R is entry into the space race, the thing that started the chain of events that got a human on the moon. Where the cosmists? Have you ever heard of the Cosmists? I haven't. So they're this weird, ideologically diverse philosophical and scientific movement that is kind of cult like and it marries spirituality and science. And they were aspiring necromancers who wanted to

raise the dead, not necromancy. Necromancy if you think the fucking leftists arguing on Twitter are bad right now. In the nineteen twenties, there were anarchists arguing that death was quote logically absurd, ethically impermissible, and esthetically ugly. Oh my gosh, I just I don't know. I somehow I didn't need necromancy versation, roll left turn exactly so. And this is the This is the group that includes basically all of the early rocket scientists in the USSR and the people

designing practical spacecraft. Their ideological founder was a guy named Nikolai Fyodorov who died penniless three of pneumonia in a rented room full of strangers. And he came at the whole thing from a Christian lens. He was an orthodox Christian and the reason he died so poor is that, in proper Christian form he gave away everything he owned. I think he was also, I think it was I think it was him. It was also very conservative and like like these are. This is not like a communist hero.

But he gets called the Socrates of Moscow and he would hold intellectual salons and he was He befriended Tolstoy until they got into arguments about politics, Tolstoy being far left, and Tolstoy also shows up in every episode. I do, and I don't understand why. Um, I don't even have any particular love for Tolstoy, but he's everywhere. If I talk about Russia, Tolstoy is there there. He is pops up his most important project, oh and his whole thing. So the three things that the cosmis are trying to

do is that they're trying to colonized space. They're trying to resurrect the dead and live forever just like you do. Yeah, they're on some like Peter Teel ship like I know, I know, I mean, these are the like, these are the forefathers of the futurist movement. Um, it really doesn't surprise that tols Soys bring brought up when death is being described as aesthetically ugly like that fills very brand. Yeah,

fair enough. So. So this guy's most important protege was Constantine Sholkovski, who lived in a cabin in the woods by choice and wrote books with riveting titles like Explorations of Outer Space by Means of Rocket Devices, and he

was talked about guiding ships of rocket thrusters. He talked about using airlocks on space stations, and he spent his time developing ideas of closed loop ecosystems that would keep everyone fed on space stations, which basically means he he came up with the basic foundations of where we're currently at a hundred years later in terms of our space travel. A lot of these early cosmists are right wings rists and ship but a lot of them weren't. A lot

of them were leftists. During the Russian Revolution and the resulting Civil War, some chunk of the cosmists became the bio cosmists, and they're an anarchist faction and they're fighting for colonized space, resurrect the dead live forever. Lennin famously not excited about anarchists in general, including ones he started

off as his allies. He actually lets them hang out longer than all the other anarchists, not because they're weird necromancers, but because they kind of shut up and backed the Bolsheviks, and they were mostly a poetry movement. They were so confusing the whole fucking cosmist thing, and people are really into the cosmis. I've never even heard of them until I first read about them in an introduction to a Russian novel that I was reading. Most of the rocket

scientists in USS are our cosmists. So after the Revolution. Things were looking really good for the uss are to get into space right until who comes onto this stage but Stalin. Stalin comes on and sucks everything up. Motherfucket Stalin shows up. He sucks everything up. He disappears all of the major players into the whole thing because he does not like how religious the whole thing is, and he doesn't like the some portions of it are too anarchistic.

Space communism aborted by Stalin. He also shuts down research into computer because he saw them as an evil Western capitalist plot undermine workers rights, even though the first computer able to solve differential equations in the world was a Soviet invention in nineteen thirty six. It was called the Water Integrator, and it stores numbers by different quantities of water, which fucking rules. Yeah, I've never even heard of this.

I had neither. I really want to see one. So anyway, in nineteen fifty three, Stalin did the single best thing he ever did for the world. He fucking died. Not a big Stalin fan here. Nineteen fifty seven, Russian scientists get Sputnik one into orbit, the first artificial satellite in Earth orbit by anyone in the world. It's only after a month of design and construction. Basically, they hit the ground running as soon as they get out of Stalin jail.

Sputnik one hangs out doing its thing for three weeks until it's batteries run out, and then a couple of months later it burns up on re entry. And this not the fact that it burns out on re entry, but the fact that they launched it freaks the US out entirely and triggers this base race which the U. S s R continues to beat the ship out of

the US in. On April twelve one, the first human gets into space, Uriga Garin, who's a Russian cosmonaut because they called there's cosmonauts in the US called There's astronauts. Yuri goes up on Volstock one, and the main designer for both of these things, Buttnick and vol Stock was Sergey Pevlovich or oliv. I really am good at Russian. That's my second. I'm not good at Russian. He's a cosmist. Sergey is, or at least he's heavily influenced by the cosmos.

He writes books about the cosmis and shipped to interact with their theories. I think he's a cosmist. He spent six years in prison thanks to Stalin and his fucked up paranoia before he gets out and wins the space race. And this is he sends the first dog, the first man, the first woman, and the first spacewalker into space. His rockets photographed the dark side of the moon. He never loses anyone on any flight during his direction. And unsurprisingly,

actually this is gonna shock you. He didn't trust his government very much. He had lost all of his teeth while he was in prison for some of his teeth because of scurvy, so he doesn't trust his government very much. Apparently his favorite expression was this is a really catchy expression. We are all going to be shots and there will be no obituary. It's just like catchphrase. You know, yeah, I mean I get it, but grim well, death is aesthetically ugly. If you didn't know, yeah, totally, but you

know it isn't aesthetically ugly. Is a good comb, a solid, reliable comb. You can get a lot done with it. Then, not any particular brand, just that a really good comb. As well as all of the sponsors of today's show besides Combs, here's some ads and we are bad and we're talking about how we're all going to be shot and there will be no obituary if we live in Sofia, Russia.

And I think, I think that this attitude of him really underlines this thing again to keep hitting my same themes over and over again, and that these scientists are scientists first and foremost, and they interact with bureaucracy as best as they can to facilitate the science. And this is a lot of bad effects. But I don't know,

I it makes sense to me. I can kind of understand this guy being like, well, I guess I'm really interested in sending ship to space, so I'm going to work with even the people who just let me out of jail. I don't know, Yeah, it makes sense to me. And it's like, like, if you're interested in space, there really is only one game in town. It's not like you can start your own little like indie space startup. Yeah exactly, I mean I wish, but then you have to be elon Musk and do other evil ship on

a completely different other evil access. So so one of the reasons that the Soviets are ahead of the US, I mean, one day they start first, right, and they've been planning for it for years because they practically religiously obsessed with it the Cosmos. At least that's part of their three part program, and the other is kind of ironically. They had an advantage in that they hadn't gotten as

a head in technology. They weren't miniaturizing their technology. We were using we the US was using transistors, and the USSR was still using vacuum tubes. So they just made everything like fucking giant and brutal. On Soviet NASA's Mercury spacecraft was like a tiny floating coffin. The Soviet voss stock was a cannonball filled with padding, and NASA went

for careful water landings. The USSR was like, I'll just get the funk out of a parachute before it hits the ground, all right, um, get the funk out of their good luck goes O't go, what are you an idiot? Then get the ground like that's all. They gave him a good life? Yeah, and actually it actually they gave Although they were the first to start sending engineers instead of just pilots up into space. At the very first people they were sending up, they were like, you don't

have any control over this thing. You just you're just there. You're just there. You have some basic stuff, whereas the U S Space program, the astronauts had a lot more control, a lot more the ability to understand what was happening and fixed problems. But yeah, so this sets them up for quick victories, but it makes a complex operation like landing on the Moon much harder, and so they they do later keep trying and failing too. They managed to hit the moon a lot, but they don't manage to

soft land on the Moon very well. So, but the Soviets get women into space first. The US was poised to get women into space first. The U S had private screenings for potential women astronauts starting in nine It was financed by a wealthy woman aviator, and in the end they picked thirteen women who passed all the same tests as male astronauts. Decades later, they were dubbed the Mercury thirteen, which wasn't their name at the time, as a reference to the Mercury Seven, which is the seven

man astronauts that were picked. An aviator named Jerry Cobb was lead among these women, and she had already set in her twenties, she had set three aviation records, like not just for like a woman aviator, but for any aviator. But then in nineteen sixty two there was a House committee hearing on gender discrimination in the space race. Jerry Cobb and others testified basically it was discrimination to not let them go up into space just because they were women.

They passed all the same tests as the male astronauts. That seems pretty cut and dry, right, do you think they're gonna win? I don't know. Well, guess who testifies against them. But the first two American men to go up in orbit, including John Glenn, who was painted as this trust women anti racist in the fucking movie Hidden Figures. Are you fucking kidding? I Am not kidding. Okay, wait, how the hell do we let people like this be like rebranded as like heroic and like anti racist feminist?

Like what they they only read the fucking headline. They don't read the whole story. Yeah yeah, his quote to the committee. I think this gets back to the where social order is organized. Really, it is just a fact the men go off and fight wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order, which what

is true but only in a bad way. Yeah, and like to say that and be like and like what the unset thing is like that that that and we need to uphold that norm Yeah, totally he did. Apparently he had it like he had his like maybe I shouldn't be this way moment when um, oh, I don't remember her name, but a woman died in the Challenger explosion and oh he eulogized her and did not say like, well, it shouldn't have been there in the first place, and I rite, you know, um, I think he like twenty

years later or whatever kind of like came around. But but first he argued. Part of their defense about why women shouldn't get to fly in space is that in order to be an astronaut you had to be a test pilot in the Air Force, and women weren't allowed to be test pilots. So so sorry, sorry, ladies, get out of space because it's it's not us, it's this other institution that's preventing you. Post other rule. We would we would change it if it were up to us,

but it's just the social owner, am I right? Um? God? Anyway, this delays women from going to space for decades, so that the Soviets are always looking for propagandic coup over the US, and they really like to prove how more progressive they are, so they send the first woman into space, Valentina Tereshkova on June. Most of the Soviets involved in the space race that I found, we're just scientists who happened to do their work in the USSR. Not Valentina.

She's a patriot in a communist well, she's actually still alive, and she's still a patriot. She's not technically a communist anymore. She's born in seven and shortly thereafter her father was killed. And that dumb thing where the Soviets tried to invade Finland because and this thing that will sound familiar to nobody, the Winter War where the Soviets invaded Finland was because they decided that the Finnish border was too close to one of their cities, so it was a threat, and

so they had to move the border, so they invaded Finland. Anyway, her dad died doing that, and I'm not sorry. Valentina finished the school, she joins the Communist party. She gets to work at a textile factory, and then she becomes a competitive parachutist, which is objectively cool. I didn't even imagine competitive parachuting, and I think of parachuting is a thing you do when you turn forty and you're trying to find meaning in life, or your George w Bush

doing it on your birthday. Right. No, Apparently Sophie is wagging her finger correct to say yes um. And it was this activity that got her noticed, and soon enough she ends up a cosmonaut. She's the first woman in space, and to this day she's the only woman who's been to space on a solo trip. And there was this tradition among cosmonauts on the way to the launch pad where they needed to take one last piss before they got into the shuttle, so they would pee on the

tire of the bus that takes them out. I mean, it's the most boy thing in the world, right It's I say this as someone who loves to camp and like it takes a lot of pleasure and peeing outside gross. Valentina did not break this tradition, and she too peed on the which is kind of like, I kind of like that energy, though, I kind of like the all right bucket. She goes up to space. She orbits forty eight times in a single flight, really just trying to flex on the US. She logs more flight time in

that than all American astronauts prior to that combined. She takes photos of the atmosphere that are used to analyze the atmosphere, and then the way that she was particularly nauseous during her her flight was like used to study the effects of space on on the human And since her flight capsule was basically a cannonball, it comes down

crashing into the Earth. She injects four kilometers above the ground and parachutes down, which is the skill that got her the job, because they're like, look, all you gotta do is get shot into space and parachute at the end. Right. That's like and she's like an expert competitive parachuter. So she's gotten like the job, she's got down, Yeah exactly. I mean I think she also like trained and shipped to be a cosmonaut, but like, but this is why

she got picked. And then she fights strong winds on her descent, she bruises but not breaks her nose on the landing, and then she has some dinner with local villagers, and then she goes home a hero, and she wanted to keep going to space, but she was too valuable as a propaganda hero, and against her wishes, she was put in charge of the Committee for Soviet Women in because of the the USSR was a dictatorship and she didn't get to choose what she did. She dives into feminist

socialist politics. She stays a communist for a while after the collapse of the USSR, and now she's a politician with the United Russia Party, which is basically the let Putin do whatever he wants party. She tried to remove term limits for Putin, um she sort of succeeded. Putin now has a two term limit, but they reset them, so Putin has two more terms or whatever, like a decade left. She's not my hero, That's what I'm trying

to say. Yeah, I mean, it's like a classic story of like jumping out of planes and pissing on wheels is cool, but then it's like, oh, yeah, you did all this other stuff for like a fucked up fascist state. A good job, I guess. One time, she meets Jerry Cobb, the American woman who should have preceded her and been the first woman into space, and she actually said, well, I idolized you before she became a cosmonaut, and she said, quote, we always figured you would be the first. What happened?

And then to the media she said, they the American leaders shout at every turn about their democracy and at the same time they announced they will not let a woman into space. This is open inequality. So she knows what the funk is happening. She knows her role both as a propagandist, but she's also telling the truth. You know,

they're both hypocrites, both not the people but the governments. Incidentally, Jerry Cobb, who should have been the first woman in space and should have gotten to go to space with the US, she gets sucked over out of it more than once because later that asshole John Glenn, he gets sent to spaces seventy seven year old, and he claims that he wants to do it so they could test the effects of space on aging. So they need to

send an old person. But it's like really openly, just like a political favor, and he wants to go to space again. So Jerry Cobb is like, oh, yeah, you probably need to test that on a woman too. Me I never got to go to fucking space. NASA's like, sorry, babe, she never got to go to space. That's so fucked up. I know this is really making me hate John Glenn. I feel is bad, but I don't, you know. I'm like, I'm sure there's more to the story than the these

sides of him, but I don't know. I don't know. I'm glad to hear that he maybe renounced these vibes at some point in his life. Oh my god, this is reminding me so much. Did you ever hear that anecdote that Sally Ride when she went to space, they gave her she was gonna be there for a week, and they gave her like a hundred tampons, and they were like this be enough, like the greatest scientific minds, and also will this be enough? I love that, Yeah,

I think it. The whole thing is like all the different ways that like these these institutions and individuals coalesced to make it be like a women don't belong in space, Like did you go up to space? We have no idea how to keep how to make you feel supported, like you had no business up there in the first place. It is wild, totally and then the like more recently when they're like planning the Mars mission and they're like, well, we should send for women so that they don't have

sex and therefore there's no like weird feelings. Yeah, women never have sex with each other. No, definitely, not not in zero G either. Yeah. I didn't know Sally Ride about the tampon thing. I'd heard that. I think I think it was don't quote me on that, but I think it was. It definitely was a hundred tampons, So that is actually correct. Yeah, there's like songs about it. It's it's ridiculous. I've seen a song on I've seen this song like one h tampon, yes, and will that

be enough? Yeah, these are the people who yeah, I can play Oh my gosh. Cool. Yeah. So Sally Ride actually is next to my script because she doesn't get to go to spacete. She's the third woman in space. And I didn't know this until recently, and I think no one most people didn't. It came out more recently she's the first confirmed gay person in space. After she died, her obituary casually mentioned her partner of twenty seven years.

I did not know she was gay. No, she apparently, according to her sister, who's more publicly out, she hadn't hit in her relationship, but she hadn't made it public either, and just basically been like, that's not what And also I think there was a lot of like, what you funk up your career if you told anyone right now you know? Yeah. So, but if if those four women go to Mars, none of them will be gay. Ye, No lesbian sex happening in space, don't worry. Definitely not.

So this brings us the first black person in space. And the first thing I did was Google first Black person in space because I was not totally sure, and I got the wrong answer at the top of the Google screen, because if you type into google first Black person in space, you get little automatic answer at the top that says Gan S. Blueford, who went to space on the third Challenger mission. And this guy is a

mean he's a talented guy. He's still alive. He has medals after medals from the Air Force, and he's written a ton of papers about fluid dynamics and ship like that. But he wasn't the first black person in space. He was the first Black American in space. And it comes up time and time again, right that you look something up and it's like the first person to do this thing, and it usually means the first Western person or the first white person, or the first in this case like

you know, non Soviet block person or whatever. But the first black person in space was also the first Latin American person in space and the first Cuban in space. And he wasn't an astronaut. He was a cosmonaut. Cuban cosmonaut.

Arnaldo to Myo Mendez went to space in nineteen eighty for a week as part of the USSRS inter Cosmos program, which was a program by which the USSRS allies were given access to space for research and honestly just for cloud like every country wants to get to have gone to space, right, And they even let non allied Western power was used Intracosmos sometimes, which was like an extra flex over the US because the US is like waist

injier about who they'll send to space. And Arnaldo Tamio Mendez was born January two in the Guantanamo Province of Cuba. He never knew his father. His mother was dirt poor and died of tuberculosis when Ronaldo was eight months old. He was raised the age of nine by his grandmother, who also took in the children of another one of her dead children. This is not a very nice time to be poor in Cuba. Before communism, it was pretty

fucking bad. Eventually, when he was nine, his uncle, who was a mechanic, took him in and as a young kid, Arnaldo started taking every job he could, as a shoe shine, a vegetable peddler, a milk delivery boy. By the time he used thirteen, he found himself an apprentice carpenter, but he didn't drop out of school. In the background of all this, when Arnaldo was ten or so, the US installed a dictator in Cuba named Batista. Fidel Castro and se Guvara and a ton of other people had this

whole revolution thing. It took like five years nifty nine they win. Batista did the classic dictator thing where he steals hundreds of millions of dollars and then fus off out of the country, in this case to Portugal, and Arnaldo, seventeen, was one of the thousands who stormed through the streets

and joy to see their military dictatorship overthrown. He joins the military, becomes an aviation technician, and soon he adds off to the Soviet Union learning how to fix and fly fighter jets, and then he flies twenty reconnaissance missions

during the Cuban Missile Crisis of nineteen sixty two. The Cuban Missile crisis was when, oh, crap, Cuba has nukes now, which happened when the USSR gave their buds some nukes, which they did because the US had stationed nukes pointing at the USSR in Italy and Turkey, and the US has also just tried to invade Cuba and failed in the Bay of Pigs invasion. So the U S is like, oh, no, Cuba suddenly has nukes. I mean, there's a reason that

Cuba suddenly had nukes. The crisis ends when the US agrees not to invade Cuba anymore and to withdraw its nukes from Turkey, and the USSR agrees to withdraw its

nukes from Cuba. So anyway, Arnaldo flew a bunch in the Cuban Air Force during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and as well as he started teaching Cuban aviators in nineteen sixty seven, he spent two years fighting in Vietnam, which was, you know, on the opposite side of the conflict as the US, which is interesting because he was on the opposite side of the same war flying missions as the US, as first black astronaut. And I've I've read mixed reports

about exactly what Cuba got up to in Vietnam. They weren't like a major presence in the war, but if nothing else, they provided limited air support for the North Vietnamese. The USSR wanted to send some foreign cosmonauts up into space, started looking for a Cuban came down to Arnaldo, who was black, and Jose R. Mondo Lopez Falcon, who wasn't black, and it's possible after winning it down to two people, Castro picked Arnaldo basically as a fuck you to the US to point out to make fun of the US

for its awful race relations. Right, but Cuba was also full of anti black racism at that time. More than half of its population was black. Harold Germaine Star, writing in the Washington Post in made the case that Moscow and Havana rolled out the red carpet for Lanks and Hues and Sada Shakur, but non exceptional black people are regularly discriminated against, jail disproportionate and non black residents and just generally mistreated. Yeah, I mean the anti black it's

so interesting and I love how you've put this. The anti blackness in Cuba is a documented thing, but yet they do like welcome I guess quote exceptional black folks. And it's so interesting to me that Cuba would be trying to sort of get one over on the US by being like, oh, look how we treat our black folks. We spend send them to space, while while like totally ignoring the reality that is anti blackness in their own country.

It is like so interesting and so layered and so complex and nuance, and then like it's I guess I'm happy to hear you talk about it in this way because so many people talking about it really don't have the range to like really parse the like the seven layer castle role that is anti blackness globally. I guess

I'll say, yeah, yeah, No. I spent a while trying to be like, oh my god, and I just kept going, you're right, that's it's so many layers as it goes down and down, and with anti blackness all the way down, it's really fucking pressing. It's anti blackness the whole way to help. So let's talk about the USSR santi black

racism for a second. In the nineteen sixties, the USSR had its own black rights demonstrations because African students, especially from Ghana, had been moving to the country for studies. And then an African man named Edmund A sorrow Atto was found dead in nineteen sixty three and students say that he was killed for sleeping with a white woman, and they had a demonstration about it that may or

may not have been a riot. One sign read another Alabama, which was, you know, a clear reference to the widespread anti black racism and US basically saying it should have been better here. And the Soviet government, surprise, surprise, claimed it was all a propaganda stunts set up by the Western powers, and we're like, oh, the guy just froze to death or whatever, you know. And there's only a hun fifty seven people at this protest, which makes it

seem sort of like not a big deal. But it's the first demonstration of on Red Square since the nineteen twenties. Because uss are not really big on allowing freedom political speech and assembly, and people fucking did it anyway, Um, because they're fucking mad for whatever reason, they pick Arnaldo, and he's a perfectly good, you know, cosmonaut choice. He's a he's a great pilot, he's a perfect choice to

represent Cuba. On September eighteenth, nineteen eighty, Arnaldo becomes the first black person in space, something that the US didn't succeed at until he spent He spends more than a week on the Soviet Space station conducting agricultural experiments designed by Cuban scientists so that Cuba can advance some of its its science. But he wasn't treated as the first black person in space right away. He definitely was the first black person in space, but no one was making

a big deal out of his blackness. He was the first Cuban in space and the first Latin American in space, and it wasn't until the US sent up their black Vietnam vet Gian Blueford that attention was really drawn to the fact that Cuba did at first. Because everything is a bunch of bullshit propaganda wars that use marginalized people as ammunition. Yeah, I mean, it's so much like the episode that we just did about that, you know, hidden

figures and marginalized people in computing. It's like it is, I can't imagine what it must have been like to be Like, on the one hand, I am happy that I get to to, you know, break this barrier and do this milestone. But on the other hand, they're kind of using me because they're trying to make a political point or like use me at like you know what

I mean. Like, I can only imagine what that must have been like to actually know all of these things and feel all of these things, but still be somebody who was like breaking barriers and making history in these ways. Yeah, totally. I would definitely still be like, no fucking send me to space and in his shoes, you know. Not if given the chance, would you go to some I think I would. I would have to because I refuse to let fear control my life. But oh my god, does

that sound anxious? I would What I would need to do not in addition to like astronauto cosmonaut training, I would need to like really figure out a regiment of anti anxiety drugs. Yeah, I'm sure it gets. I'm sure it gets like anxiety provoking up there like tight spaces. It's like probably weird, like like probably weird sounds. I would go on a heartbeat, no question in my mind, I would totally go cool. Sophie, would you go No, we have the full range of choices. You're not even curious,

what's what's going on up there? Nope, You're like, I don't it doesn't concern me. I'm gonna mind my business down here on Earth's going to stay down here with my hundred tam bonds and all the day. They probably like, send me up and they'd be like trans woman woman, Okay, hundred bonds. No, no, no, you two hundred two hundred. I don't even know as I'm like on drugs, but no one else you can eat on drugs. Potatoes absolutely

sponsored today's podcast. Uh, here's some advertising that supports are complicity in capitalism and we are back and we're all jealous of Soaphy, who's dinner arrived while we were just potatoes. I'm so sorry. Well, there's other wholesome foods, I'm sure so. At the top of this episode, the first part of this episode that you heard on Monday today is Wednesday, because obviously you're listening to this to day came out. It could be any day. I don't know what day

it is when you're listening to this. I promised you a bisexual rocket scientist. And so for the last story that I'm going to talk about today, I'm going to tell you about Jack Parsons and the suicide squad. Jack Parsons, who was actually his birth name is Marvel, but he didn't like his dad very much, so he didn't He didn't keep his dad's name Marvel, although Marvel Parsons would have also been a really good name. Jack Parsons, I

like it. He's one of the people who founded JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that later became part of NASA, the place that started the trend of hiring women as computers in aerospace field. And he designed a ton of rocket engines. He made advancements in solid and liquid fuel. That Nazi guy who led the space race, Verna von Braun. One time he got called the father of rocket science, and he was like, no, no, no, that's Jack Parsons.

And I can't tell you that Jack Parsons was a good person, but I can tell you that he is fucking interesting. Jack Parsons was this rich white kid from Pasadena born in nineteen fourteen. He'd read a on of science fiction and he thought rockets were cool. He got picked on in school for being a rich, effeminate kid, and he spent his afternoons with his like one friend and they would go blow shut up in the go out in the woods and blow shut up, sucking homemade

gun patterns. Probably not woods. I assume it's like desert or something. I don't know, the West coast. He reads a ton of occult of ship Pasadena, Pasadena, Florida. Where is it west? Is it Pasadena, California? Wait, where's Pasadena? Because there's Pasadena, California. Or is it Pasadena somewhere else? Because Pasadena, California. We don't upwoods there. Yeah, Okay, Okay, I was right, Okay, So it's not the woods. He's blowing it up in going outside, blowing shut up whatever.

Pasadena looks like. I don't know where Pasadena is. Clearly a most well traveled person. You can trust me, Okay. So his interests in classic go bisexual boy mo he uh. He blows stuff up with homemade gunpowder. He figuring out how to make his own gunpowder, and then he reads a cult of stuff and he tries to summon the devil in his bedroom, but he chickens out and he doesn't finish the ritual. He goes to college, he starts

working on rocket ship in the weekends. He starts corresponding with rocket scientists all over the world, including von Brown and the Russian cosmists. Like before the warship came up, all of the U. S scientists, German scientists, Russian scientists, they're all buds and comparing notes when he's in college. His crew in school got called the suicide Squad because they're reckless with their bomb experiments, and a bunch of the major players in rocket science in the US and

China are involved in the suicide Squad. Wait, I haven't really possibly silly question, Please give me if this is the stupidest question, is that where the name from? Like the comic book slash movie the Suicide Squad? Is that where the name comes from? I don't know. I was thinking about that because this is the second thing like a suicide squad I've run across in UM In the I did an episode on gay resistance to Fascism, and I found out that gay Nazis were put into a suice.

It wasn't. I don't know if it's called a suicide squad, but they were put into a suicide squad where they were like, instead of going to jail, they got put in with all of like the worst Nazis off to go do like but it was like an S S squad um And so I was like reading that, and I was like, WHOA, is this where suicide squad got their things from? Like gay fucking Nazis? And now I'm reading this and I'm like, maybe this is where suicide

squad got its name from. I don't know. Maybe it's just like a thing that people called idiots who kept trying to blow themselves up. Maybe it shows up all throughout history. This is interesting. No, I get really excited about these weird threads that I don't I haven't figured out how to untangle yet. So he drops out of school because he doesn't have enough money to go to school. I think maybe because his dad had sucked off. I'm not entirely sure why this financial situation changed so much.

But he never gets a degree, and he turns down honorary degrees later, which is even more of a flex

in a way. Although I will also say the fact that it's like the white kid turning down all these degrees as compared to like the black women who are like, like, there's a whole thing that I didn't really get into about HBUs historically black universities and like how much work they did to help uh black folks get ahead, and like, so I'm not trying to like whenever I'm like on this maverick named Marvel who dropped out of Oh my God, the fact his name was Marvel and suicide Squad Marvel

or d C. I think it's Marvel, but don't quote me on that. Um anyway, that was a d h D spin off from what I was trying to talk about. But yeah, I mean I think you're right. Like, I love that you've added that that, Like, it's it's really easy to be a white kid from Pasadena who turned

down an honorary degree. Meanwhile, all of these black women who were like working their ass off from any recognition and getting none of it probably would have like been really honored by a degree considering the role that like HBCUs played and things were that black folks were able to get educated. You know, it makes so much sense. Yeah, I also want everyone to know that we are safe. Suicide Squad is d C comics. Okay, too weird, too weird everyone, all right, So he drops out of college.

He's still blowing ship up. He actually, you know, he starts forming these rocket scientist companies and ship, and then he starts hanging out with the communists and gets really into Marxism. But he won't join the Communist Party because

he's too anti authoritarian, which makes me like him. But then he discovers something that he likes even more than like radical leftist anti authoritarian politics, occultism in the in the nineteen thirties, he becomes a Thelamite, which is this religion started by Alistair Crowley that's all into magic and ship.

And he starts talking to how magic is just quantum mechanics because he's brillianto science and all this this other ship and so yeah, he's advancing the field of rocket scientists by leaps and bounds while smoking weed with his friends and chanting to him to pan during rocket tests. This is like, I'm having trouble like wrapping my brain around this the occult Like it's just yeah, this is like in my and when I was like in high

school listening to Pink Floyd. This is like what my mom would be like, Oh, you better watch out or you're gonna end up trying to go into space and being into the occult. Watch out totally. He talks throughout his life. He's he sort of like has a reputation as a womanizer that was actually part of a polyamorous culture. I'll get into a little bit, but he also talks about his latent homosexuality and in his his FBI file, which we'll get to, he's called bisexual. He liked to

answer the door with a snake around his neck. His mailbox was a mannequin holding a bucket that said residents across the bucket. UM. I kind of like, I know, I kind of like this guy. When the US enters World War Two, he and his leftist rocket scientist friends, they're like, we we need to help out with the war effort, and it was a moral duty from from their point of view. They had to stop the Nazis.

So him and all his friends start very intentionally working on developing a lot of the rocketry that people used to fight the Nazis. He also leaves his wife Helen for her seventeen year old sister Sarah. But then Helen falls in love with Jack's best friend, and then the couples move in together into a communis messy, very messy, but they stay friends and the house is called the parsonage because it's I think it's because it's his fucking money paid for it do because it's like and then Sarah, oh,

Sarah gard leaves them for fucking l Ron Hubbard. Are you oh my fucking god. Honestly, of course of course she does. Of course she's like, what else could she do? Like, okay, so anyway, so in a similar way, we're okay, we can, we can, we can. He's really in all this occultis ship too, before he starts his own religion to fucking milk everyone out of their money. Um, and yeah, the weird fucking group of people. Okay, I'm gonna need a

nap after this. So okay. So in a similar way that Stalin had gotten all paranoid and imprisoned and oppressed all of their best scientists, and the UK fucked over Alan turing Well. The House of on American Activities has some words to say for Jack Parsons, who has advanced like like his ideas of rocket fuel are what gets us to the moon. Like, he absolutely does a fucking ton of important stuff right, And then the House of an American Activities is like, now you're fucking communist, and

he's like, actually, I'm not a communist. I I'm anti authoritarian and I'm Athelamite, and so I believe in the power of the individual. And they're like, we don't care, you're fucking communist. They revoke his security clearance. He's not able to get any work in the field, because how are you going to be a missile designer if you can't work for the government, And his life starts is

just falling apart. In NIF two, he moves to Mexico and he sets up an explosives factory, which I guess is a thing one can choose to do when one's life is falling apart. And then one day he's making some bombs for a film set, a Mexican film, and his trailer blows up and it kills him. And lots of people have lots of ideas about exactly what happened here, but it was probably an accident or suicide. He'd probably

been high on morphine at the time. He died, but then other people are like, no, it was these people. His story is so much more complex than I'm getting across because I only half understand it because it's so twisted and convoluted. But there's so many people who would

have tried to kill him. So I don't know what happened to this guy, and everyone likes to argue about it because he's like, Okay, he probably dropped this container of this chemical, and then people like, no, he was very careful, and other people like, are you freaking kid? And he wasn't careful if you met this guy. But on the other hand, he'd been doing that since he

was a little kid, So I don't know. Jack fucking Parsons, Then okay, don't with people, but one more thing, which actually involves a person, So I guess I lied when I said no more people. So for all the cold attached atheism that scientists supposedly known for, there's always this religious component, and I hadn't even realized that's so I started doing this research. You've got a Unitarian astronomer, You've

got the cosmist who want to resurrect the dead. Katherine Johnson was a Presbyterian who sang in the choir is a member of her church for fifty years. Alan Turing he believed in fortune telling. A fortune teller told him when he was a little kid that he was going to be a genius. And supposedly the last time he had his fortune read, he came out really shook, and he didn't tell anyone what happened. Um never told anyone what he heard. And then of course there's Jack fucking Parsons,

who Yeah, he's Jack fucking Parsons. He's singing to him to pan during rocket tests. But I want to talk about one more religion that's obsessed with space, Earth Seed, which is the fictional religion made up by maybe the most prescient science fiction author whoever lived, Octavia Butler. Yes, yes, this is your speaking of my language. I'm a big Butler fan. Let's do this. She's so freaking amazing. I'm this I'm not unfortunately good God, I actually probably need

to do an episode on Butler's You absolutely should. I would definitely listen to that. Okay. So she wrote a book called The Parable the Sewer, which I think is the most Prussian science fiction book that's ever been written, at least in terms of our current disaster that we're all living through. And this is the book where the

fictitious religion of earth Seed comes from. She describes a slow apocalypse that includes a right wing fanatic of a president who runs under the slogan make America Great Again. Sound familiar, and so the protagonists they make their way up to northern California. They set up a little apocalypse survival homestead, and they develop a religion based on basically two things. One God has changed, that we all have to learn to embrace and shape change and let change

shape us. And too, basically that the stars are our destiny, that theoretically something like space exploration ought to be something that brings humanity together instead of dividing us. And I don't know, And I think that that's important to think about one because I fucking like it a lot, but too because the old way of doing space is dying right now, right like nations are no longer the primary

drivers of space research. You have capitalism instead, which is maybe the only thing more dangerous than these nations states. And I propose that we're sort of crossroads. Either space gets explored and claimed by sucking corporations that I claim I would say it will not be named, but we clearly named them earlier. Or we get our ship together and do it like Butler told us, and do it for humanity. That like, you just blew my mind. I yeah, you just move my mind. I hadn't thought about it

that way. First of all, I have to say, I'm so glad that you're referencing Butler, because in this moment, everybody is like, oh, hand its tale, handmade sale. No, it is sucking Butler, like, like that's the that's the text we should be at least the text that I think we should be like looking too. But honestly, the way that you put that is almost kind of hopeful

that we have this. We're at at a crossroads where we can decide if you want the next generation of space exploration to belong to people like Elon Musk or something different, like is it is it? Like? Who is it for? What's who's going to define it? I think I think it's almost sort of hopeful the way that you put that. Thanks. I yeah, I I you know, it's like I I try for optimism sort of strategically because it's the only chance we have is to to act like we can win, you know, I don't know.

And yeah, and that in that book Parallel Sower and thats sequel parable of the talents. It's the most hopeful apocalypse I've ever like apocalyptic book I've ever read, and that's one of the reason I love it so much. That's my episode on space and the exploration of it and rockets and computers. Do you have any any final

final reflections or yeah? My final reflection is just that like, I can't I'm so surprised to find myself in this optimistic space where you know, it's kind of up to us, like, like, what's it gonna be? What are we going to decide we want? And you know, are we gonna treat We've kind of got a number on the on the world on on Earth. Are we going to let people who we know can't be trusted do the same thing to space or aren't we you know, it's just it's kind of up to us. I don't know, it is it's

a hopeful apocalypse. I guess, as you said, than where did you have any plugbolspre us? Yeah, I love conversations about technology and all things nerdy, and so please come check out my podcast there are no girls on the Internet. You can find me on Instagram at Bridget Marie DC are on Twitter at Bridget Marine Amazing and we'll be back next week, right, Margaret, Yay Soil the Heat, Death

of the Universe. Where can people follow you? Margaret Well, if you want to see pictures of my dog or of a turtle that I saw today that was eating a mushroom, Yes, you can follow me on Instagram at Margaret kill Joy. And if you want to hear me complain about discourse while at participating in discourse, you can follow me on Twitter at Magpie killed Joy. I do I really do? And uh Paul Bridget Margaret back next week, everyone,

Cool People Who Did? Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media, but more podcasts and cool Zone Media. Visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.