I'm TT and I'm Zukiah and this is Dope Labs. Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore science with pop culture and a healthy dose of friendship. The last time we were together in person was in Boston.
Yeah, Boston is always a good time.
Yes, But my friend always wants to get to the airport two minutes before the boarding door closes, and I cannot do that.
I am a two hours before the fly.
No. No is your sense of adventure if we're going by plane, training automobile, I like a side shot of adrenaline. Please, you know I don't need that. I'm trying to relax on my travel. She want to run through the airport. I cannot do it. I can't. But what blew me that day was that my flight, even though we got there at a reasonable time, was delayed to you got there too early, and now you thought you had a two hour delay, now you have four.
I thought I was going to cry.
I hate when that happens, you know, a delay. I feel like you're so close to your destination, and every time it make you feel like Tom Hanks and castaway, like you just abandoned at the airport right right. Being stuck anywhere that is not my house, my home, my abode, Mikasa will have me.
Losing my mind.
You be spiraling at four k. Absolutely, You're not the only person that feels that way though, because you talked about being abandoned in the airport. But a lot of people are upset about astronauts that have been in space that are supposed to have been back a very long time ago.
Oh girl, hold that thought. Let's get into the recitation.
Okay, So what do we know? Tt We know that there are two astronauts up in space and they were supposed to be back already. They've been up there for like, I think it's more than six months at this point. We also know that being in space for any amount of time is hard on the body.
Yeah, and from.
Our last episode on space, we know that commercial spaceflight is becoming a bigger and bigger industry. Yes, President Elon Musk has its own space business.
This varies, yes, Okay, So what do we want to know?
I would know why those astronauts were up there in the first place. So how did they get up there, why are they up there? How did they get stuck? And what are we doing to get them back. These are very important questions and I want to know what happens to your body after being in space for that much time. And a lot has happened in the world since our last episode on commercial space flight, but a
lot has happened in that industry specifically. So have there been any new regulations because it was the wild Wild West or the wild wild Space the last time we talked about it, And where's that's in the equation? And are they even gonna still be around to be in the equation? You know, Oh, the jury's still out. There's also a lot of talk about Mars, and I just want to know, like what's good, what's good with Mars? Like why are we even targeting Mars? I think these
are a good starting one thousand questions. So for this episode, we're bringing back our friend, space historian doctor Jordan Beim. Some things have changed with Jordan since the last time we spoke.
I'm still here at the University of Chicago. Since the last time that we chatted, I've become a professor here now, which is Gratus Creations.
Thank you.
Yeah, do you still miss my home country Canada? But I'm you know, still making a go of it down here.
We all miss Canada right now. We all want to go. We want to go. So first we need a little background on these astronauts. Their names are Sunita Sunny Williams and Barry Butch Wilmore. They are both former US Navy captains. Sunni was selected as a NASA astronaut in nineteen ninety eight and has flown on two other missions to space. She even held the female record for most spacewalk time
until twenty seventeen. Butch was selected as a NASA astronaut in two thousand and served as commander of Expedition forty two. It seems like this is definitely not their first radio right, So what was the mission this time?
So they were test flying a new type of spacecraft called the Boeing Starliner, which had a lot of problems in development, and they were the first humans to try and give it a flight, and they made it to the ISS, but there were problems getting there that gave NASA pause about whether they wanted to risk them coming
back on that craft. So what they opted to do was to just have them join the crew that is on the ISS, called Crew nine, and to come back basically on their regular scheduled return vehicle, which is a SpaceX Dragon capsule.
That was the plan, but it didn't turn out that right. I am really scared for my friends Sunni and but but should I.
Be so for this? I have been putting a riff on the famous line from Apollo thirteen and saying, Houston, we have a fake problem. So those astronauts are not stranded. They are not stuck in space.
Wait wait, wait, wait, wait, say that again.
Those astronauts are not stranded. They are not stuck in space. Since September there has been a SpaceX capsule doted the ISS with two seats on it for them. Now, it was a little weird that they were not able to return on the test vehicle that they were test flying, and that their trip has been extended from eight days to you know, eight months plus, But the situation up there pretty much normal for them.
That's not what we've been hearing.
What you're hearing from the political leadership right now about them being abandoned, about them being needing rescue. You know, all of that is giving a false sense of danger, a false sense of risk, and it's putting a false smear of failure upon NASA, which is not actually the case. So the way I've been thinking about it is, imagine you're at a train station and you've got a ticket for the train. The train is there waiting for you, but it's not leaving just yet. It's leaving in an hour.
Are you stranded at that station? Are you in need of rescue? No, You're just waiting for the next scheduled departure.
Jordan. Now I have some follow up questions because there's a delay and then there's eight months, you know, so I'm curious about how often this happens, and is this par for the course. Are people having these kind of delays up there in space or is it typically a couple days or a couple of weeks.
So it's not that their train has been delayed, it's that they're taking a different train that leaves later, and that is totally normal. That's regular scheduled crew transfers from the ISS. So crews go and come to the ISS in regular increments that last for about six or seven months, and Butch Wilmore and Sonny Williams are just waiting for that next increment to conclude so that they can come back to Earth with those two other astronauts on that normal scheduled return.
Are there risk to be in there for ameleass because if I only pack my bags and I brought snacks for like two days.
I don't have enough underwear for that.
Okay, same there are crude resupply missions that are constantly going to the ISS, so they have tons of supplies up there. They are not running out of food or clothes or anything like that. I listened to an interview with them on the ISS just five days ago, and they sounded totally fine, totally normal, just like any other crew on the ISS. The thing to remember is that Butch Wilmore and Sonny Williams are veteran NASA astronauts. This is not a new or unfamiliar place for them. They
are just an integrated, regular part of the crew. They're doing science experiments, they're performing spacewalks to do maintenance up there. They're in good spirits, they're professionals. Part of astronaut training is how to deal with contingencies, how to deal with the unexpected.
What impacts are there on your body when you go to space and being there for an extended amount of time, Do the effects compound. Does it get worse the longer you're out there? So what can we expect for these two astronauts when they get back physically?
Yeah, this is a question a lot of people have, like is it safe to actually extend their stay for that long from eight days to perhaps eight months or longer. And the answer is it's actually well within the known lengths of stays on the ISS. Humans have stayed on
the ISS for over a year. There are known changes to the body that are caused by the microgravity environment, the zero G weightless environment on the ISS, and that includes things like muscle atrophy and bone loss and sometimes changes to the eyeball that can involve vision problems when returning to Earth. But these are well understood and they are mitigated through things like working out every day on board the ISS. They have a treadmill up there, they
have resistance equipment that they all use regularly to mitigate this. So, while yes, some astronauts do have some trouble coming back when they get back to Earth, they are in the very capable hands of NASA's medical team.
So you're basically saying this is a walk in the park, But why does this still feel so spooky ky.
We are sort of fixated on this story because of the word stranded or stuck in space, and there is this sort of cultural imaginary of the stranded astronaut. Right we all know the movie The Martian Matt Damon Stuck on Mars. There are other movies too that deal with stranded astronauts. In nineteen sixty eight, right before the Apollo eleven moon landing, there was a big blockbuster movie called Marooned about a crew of astronauts stuck in Earth orbit.
And even before that, there was a movie called Robinson Crusoe on Mars, which you can imagine what that's like. And there's even urban legends too, like from the early days of the space program in the early nineteen sixties, there was this myth about the lost cosmonauts, and this was the idea that Yuri Gagarin wasn't actually the first human in space, but the Soviet Union had tried to launch humans before, but they had died in orbit and
their missions had been covered up and kept secret. These, of course were total fabrications, urban legends as part of the Cold War, but they endure in our minds, and together with those pop culture imaginaries, they sort of frame what's happening on the ISS right now in a particular way.
So basically you're saying, we all have way too much imagination. We're watching these sci fi movies, and you know what, as you were saying, especially when you brought up The Martian, I just finished listening to Project Hill Mary, which was written by Andy Were who also did wrote The Martian, and so I was thinking all of these things the
entire time. I'm listening to the audiobook, and I'm like, Oh, this's got to be what's happening to my two astronauts that are stranded, not what's happening at all.
No space propaganda, yes, but there is.
There are historical, like real life examples of times where astronauts have had their stays extended due to remarkable circumstances.
The most famous of these occurred in nineteen ninety one nineteen ninety two, and this was a Soviet cosmonaut called Sergei Kerkhlev, who was on the Mirror Space station when the Soviet Union dissolved, and because of the political instability and the lack of funding, he actually had to stay up there for a couple extra one hundred days, so I think he stayed for three hundred days in total, almost a whole year, and he left a citizen of the Soviet Union and returned a citizen of a new country,
the Russian Federation. Now, the other example that comes to mind is in the aftermath of the tragic loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia in two thousand and three, there were astronauts on board the International Space Station whose plan was to come home on the next Space Shuttle. Of course, NASA grounded the entire Shuttle fleet while they tried to figure out what went wrong to cause the loss of Columbia, and those astronauts had to have their stay on the
IS extended about fifty or sixty days. They ended up coming back on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft which was attached to the ISS as part of normal operations. Now, the funny thing is one of those astronauts, Don Pettitt, is actually on board the ISS right now, so this is sort of the second time he has dealt with a sort of unexpected extension of some crew members on the ISS.
If I saw Don on the ISS, I would say, I'm not going up there. Bad luck. It seems like something's going on whenever Europe there. It seems like things are always changing. You know, you've basically diffused this panic in our minds at least, and I'm excited for you to relieve some of the stress for some of our listeners too. I'm wondering if you have more good news for us. So, the last time you were on the show, we talked about commercial spaceflight and implications surrounding the colonization
of space. Can you tell us about any advances or anything that's changed or happened since we last chatted.
Yeah, there have been some significant changes, and some might call them advancements, and they've been both on the technological side and also clearly on the political side as well. So on the technological side, what we've seen is the continued development of reusable heavy lift rockets by companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin.
SpaceX is Elon Musk's commercial space flight company, and Blue Origin is Jeff Bezos's. A reusable heavy lift rocket is a big, powerful rocket that can carry heavy payloads like satellites and crude spacecrafts into space. What's special about them is that they can be recovered and reused to be more cost efficient and so they recover parts like the boosters instead of throwing them away, making space travel cheaper and more frequent.
The biggest one that's been in the spot like the most has been SpaceX's Starship. They've been launching it a lot, but they still have not completed a single successful orbital journey with that system. We've watched as they have caught the lower booster stage with those chopstick like arms, and we've also watched how the actual spacecraft part of it
disintegrated over the Caribbean. If they are able to get there in the next year or so, that would change the game significantly, both in terms of how frequently we can send stuff to space and how much. And on the political side, of course, Elon Musk's ascension into the upper echelons of American political power, which puts him in charge of many different government leavers, including NASA. No, that's a big question right now.
Who knew you could run a space flight company, an EV company, a social media company, and potentially be managing a presidency all at the same time. I saw with Blue Origin that their rocket, New glen It launched January sixteenth, twenty twenty five, and they were successful. Can you talk a little bit about that mission and what we learned from it.
Yeah, that was a remarkable day where both Blue Origin launched New Glen, which is their sort of equivalent of SpaceX's Falcon heavy rockets, and on the same day there was a Starship test launch, so it was like the two dueling space companies on the same day. And what we saw was Blue Origin's New Glen successfully deliver a payload to orbit on its very first attempt, which is
good news. On the other side of the leisure, they were trying to land the sort of lower stage of their rocket the same way that SpaceX does and they missed the target there, so this was a partial success. Now, if Blue Origin is successful and gets New Glen up and running, you know, that would provide an alternative to folks like NASA that are just sort of stuck using SpaceX as their only contractor. Blue Origin could offer this opportunity to have a second, redundant option always on the table.
Okay, now is getting sticky because we're talking about contracts, which is money for work with these private companies.
Elon Musk owned.
SpaceX and now he kind of controls NASA. This feels illegal mmm, because yeah, he could potentially just funnel all the contracts directly to his company, SpaceX and completely shut out the others. Another part of this that's crazy to me is that NASA needs help from these folks Big.
NASA, NASA in all caps, right, the NASA that we know.
They've existed long before SpaceX and Blue Origin, so you would think they had this whole space thing on lot.
So we all remember those massive lunar landings in the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies. That was when NASA was the best funded it will ever be in its entire existence. That's when going to space was not only something interesting, but it was geopolitically urgent. It was part of the Cold War anxiety over competition with the Soviet Union. You know, we are no longer in that age where space is sort of front and center geopolitical
urgent issue. And as a result, after those Apollo Moon landings in the early nineteen seventies, NASA's budget was scaled back significantly. They have never been funded to the level that they could really do, you know, what people in their minds thought a national space agent should be doing. So the idea was to split things between the public and private sector to get into doing these public private partnerships between NASA and companies like SpaceX.
I wish NASA could just fundraise then mets for space.
I'd buy a couple boxes for sure.
What kind of regulations are in place or do you think would be great to have in place? As we think about some of these advancements, particularly with partnerships between government and private sector and space travel.
Well, given the results of the presidential election and Elon Musk's new status within the government, I think the story will not be one of regulation but de regulation. As part of the starship development process, he has made his displeasure with regulations well known. And these are regulations that come from government agencies like the FAA, the Federal Ava Administration. The FAA protects workers and passengers, and the EPA the
Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA protects, you know, our environment
that we all need to survive. So what I expect, given the way things have gone, is to see those agencies defanged when it comes to oversight in terms of space launch and space developments, and whether or not the trade off is worth it in the end to get these sort of technological capabilities at the expense of our environment, at the expense perhaps of workers' lives or the lives of passengers who may be on early flights of these That's a very real concern that I think, this trend
of deregulation, this trend of weakening government institutions, I think that we proceed at our own peril. Here.
You talked about the expense of our environment in a time where we're seeing across the globe effects of climate change, We're maybe more aware of the effects of globalization and dustrialization and other technological advances. I'm thinking about what it looks like to be launching these programs and in different areas. One thing that comes to mind is a documentary on PBS called Bocachica and what's happening in that community. And also you mentioned the dissolution of the rocket over the
Caribbean and that kind of debris. Are we seeing any pushback or is the sentiment that, like these are some of the costs of advancements.
We're not seeing significant pushback, which is alarming. Some of the things that we're seeing, like the damage from the recent test launches that might seem superficial, but it shows a regard or a disregard I think for just a respect for the environment, the respect for other people, and
a narrow focus on technological success at any expense. And what I see there is, you know, looking into the future, if we continue with this regard, if we allow this to stand and expand in the way that Elon Musk says that he plans to expand Starship launches significantly, so that it's like not just something that happens every few months, but something that possibly happens every day. The multiplying factor
there is where I start to get worried. So the trends that we set in the development phase when it comes to respect for workers' rights, human safety, and the environment, you know, we can see a microcosm of where that will be in the future right now, and that that does worry me.
Yeah, Earth, You and Danger Girl, Earth and space. Right when NASA wants to launch into space, we know it's for us to learn more about the universe. But when Elon is going is kind of just a money grab and he set his I on Mars for a long time. But I think the question for me is like, why, what's the goal? What is the goal?
Is absolutely the right question, because the goal when it comes to Mars has always been changing. It's always been
evolved over time. You can think back to who was the very first celebrity promoting sending humans to Mars, and that was in the nineteen fifties, Verner von Brown, the German rocket scientist who was a member of the Nazi Party, an SS officer in that brutal organization, who got brought to the United States as part of Operation paper Clip, ended up working for the US Army and later for NASA, building the massive Saturn five rocket that took ashnauts to
the Moon. His biggest vision for humanity was to send humans to explore the surface of Mars, and the expedition that he imagined going there was a military led expedition. This began to change once NASA was created in nineteen fifty eight as a civilian scientific organization, still with lots of military aspects to it, but the goal of Mars, you know, really changed. Mars became not a place for military conquest and strategic presence, but a place for scientific
exploration and discovery. Now this is changing again, so Elon Musk is not played to send people to Mars for scientific research. He's planning to send a million people to Mars to establish a commercial human settlement there, and this
directly conflicts with scientific goals. You know, you send a million people to Mars, you bring all kinds of contaminants, all kinds of microbes with us, all kinds of garbage and trash, and that ruins Mars as a pristine's scientific object that can tell us things about the origin of life, the development and structure of our solar system and our planet.
It's giving. I'm not interested in the scientific method, You're right, it's giving.
I'm interested in making more.
Mine, Okay, Jordan. So we thought it would be fun to play a game with you, because you are our really really smart space friend. And this game is called real or sci Fi, where you're gonna give us a space clue and we have to guess if it's real or it's made up sci fi?
All right, Real or sci Fi. NASA is planning to send a quad copter drone to Saturn's moon Titan Real quad.
Okay, I'm gonna say, Sifi, this is real.
This is a planned mission called Dragonfly. We have had a helicopter drone on Mars ingenuity, which operated very well in Mars's ultra thin atmosphere. Titan, though, the moon of Saturn has a very thick atmosphere, which actually makes it easier to fly around him. So they have this quad copter drone concept called Dragonfly, which is planned to launch in twenty twenty eight and would arrive on Titan sometime in the twenty thirties.
You know, it sounded so wild.
Zeki was just like, real, well, the helicopter drone is the possible part that gave me the reaction. The only thing I was like, is that dune? What are those things called on doom? Those? Yeah, that was my only hesitation.
Okay, all right, Next one real or sci fi. NASA is planning to send a robotic eel to Saturn's moon, Enceladus.
Now a robotic eel, I'm gonna say. I'm going to say, oh man, now I'm nervous. Robotic eel, don't be nervous for us. All about learning real, I'm gonna say sci fi.
This one is also real. So this is a concept from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory JPL. EEL here stands for Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor, but it is also shaped like an eel, So imagine a thirteen foot long snakelike robot that weighs two hundred pounds. And the idea here is to get around the limitations of rovers, which have been doing a great job on Mars. But they can't go everywhere, you know, they can't go up really steep slopes, they
can't traverse some really rocky terrain. And the idea is that this robotic snakelike eel would be able to slither all over the place. And with Enceladus, especially, robotic spacecraft like Cassini have actually imaged geysers shooting out from underneath the icy crust of the planet, and the idea is if water can come out, then maybe that eel can slither in that sand crevice and meet some aliens down
in that subsurface ocean there. So, you know, this is one of those things that for me, it's like it's such a cool idea, But to watch video of this thing moving around in the lab, it just is very unsettling and gives me the hebgbs.
Are you gonna send an eel down into an icy old faithful exactly old no moon?
That is wild?
Yeah, imagine you're at home and a ale just slither through your door.
No, it's like, hell, look just looking around.
See this goes back to first impressions. Do we really want the underwater aliens to this to be their first impression of us? We got to take that into consideration too.
I know they should think of something else. That's a little bit creepy. Okay.
Last one, real or sci fi. NASA is planning an experiment to see if ants can sort tiny objects in the microgravity environment of space.
That sounds real to me, real, I want to believe.
Nah. This one's from an episode of The Simpsons called Deep Space. Homer, Well, the Simpsons does have predictive power. We have seen that in other places. You're actually right about that. I should have I should have factored that in the Simpsons quotient.
Oh my gosh, that is so funny. Man. Well, I hope home. Was Homer successful in that episode?
No, he wrecked that experiment and they regretted that they will never know if ants truly can sort small objects in microgravity. I'm Jordan beIN, a space historian and professor of science communication at the University of Chicago, and I'm really excited to be on Dope Labs this week.
You know, Jordan always comes with the facts and the history and the pop culture, and this is just a reminder that nobody is immune to the news bubble and their cycle. Because what I was seeing kept making me think that those astronauts were stranded, but there were other outlets that were accurately reporting that they weren't stranded. So
c net has something, Space dot Com had something. I was just looking in the wrong places and really looking at what my favorite social media commentators were saying about it, and that was wrong. Yes, because they're showing pictures of Sunni and making it seems like she is aging at hyper speed when really it's just she's chilling. Mm hmm.
Yeah.
Imagine somebody taking your You already know what I'm call with that. When I get my feet back on Earth, cease and desist to all of you. Oh, don't make me have to knock your block off of send you straight to space and there you have it. A big thank you to Jordan for all of his expertise today. You can find Jordans on Instagram at Jordan b I M M. You can find us on x and Instagram at Dope Lab podcast TT is on x and Instagram, at dr Underscore, t.
S h O, and you can find Zakiya at Ze said So.
Dope Labs is a production of Lemonada Media. Our senior supervising producer is Kristin Lapour and our associate producer is Issara s A. Dope Labs is sound design, edited and mixed by James Farber. Leimonada Media's Vice President of Partnerships and Production is Jackie Danziger. Executive producer from iHeart Podcast is Katrina Norvil. Marketing lead is Alison Canter. Original music composed and produced by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex sugi Ura,
with additional music by Elijah Harvey. Dope Labs is executive produced by us T T Show Dia and Zakiah Wattley.