Brandon Fibbs talks 9 Days in July

It's an interview with Brandon Fibbs, who is the host of a new podcast on the I Heeart Radio network called Nine Days in July, which is as a profile of each of the nine days of the Apollo eleven mission in nineteen sixty nine, the mission that landed on the Moon. I've started listening to this podcast and a few episodes in and I'm hooked. I think Brandon is doing an excellent job with this and it goes into

some really incredible depth. So I had a conversation with Brandon about the Apollo eleven mission and about this podcast that he's put together. It was a really fun conversation and I think you're really going to enjoy it. Before we jump into the interview here, let's just play the trailer for Nine Days in July to give you a taste of things to come. Ignition sequenced. You think you know the story of Apollo eleven. But you don't what you know is only a small part of the most

profound human achievement in history. I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. Less than three weeks after launching the first American into space, a trip that lasted only fifteen minutes, the President went before Congress and charged the country with landing on the Moon before the end of the decade. And why so

that we could wallop the Russians, he d look. This was one of the most tumultuous eras in American history. The profoundly unpopular Vietnam War was raging on without an end in sight. Back home, at the Democratic Convention, thousands of demonstrators clashed violently with police. They said they were there to protest the war, poverty, racism, and other social aliens. Some of them were also determined to provoke a confrontation.

The United States seemed to be coming apart at the seems America needed a reason to reach for a greatness

beyond our misfortunes. We needed Apollo god Spade. Pulling off Kennedy's audacious vision required hundreds of thousands of people, tens of thousands of companies, and tens of billions of dollars to go to the moon and discontay and do the other things, not because they are easy, because they are on Using never before heard mission audio, I'm going to take you through the family lives that fueled the astronauts, the political intrigue that cleared the way, and the collective

drive of the country that pushed us into the future. This is Nine Days in July. New episodes arrive every Thursday through February six. Listen to Nine Days in July on the I Heart Radio app, on Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, without any further delay, I think we're going to jump right into my conversation with Brandon Fibbs. Hey, Brandon, welcome to the show. Thank

you so very much. So I guess first of all, would you like to talk a little bit about your own background, maybe introduce yourself and talk about how you got so interested in spaceflight. Yeah, my name is Brandon Phibbs. I am uh. I've spent the last roughly ten fifteen years in film and television. I actually began as a film critic writing about other people's films and television shows, and then realized, I want people to write about mine. I'm gonna go get into production myself. So moved to

l A and stumbled into science documentaries. I went to l A like everyone wants to go you want to make big movies, and my first production was Cosmos of Space Time Odyssey with Neilo grass Tyson. And then I realized working on that, I don't want to this is the kind of stuff I want to do. I want to I want to light people on fire for for amazing science. And so I was able to buy and

large work mostly in science documentaries. Worked with Morgan Freeman on Through the Wormhole for a couple of seasons, and the Story of God with Morgan Freeman, and a number of Science Channel specials and whatnot. And that's that's really where um, that's really what you know. I found a lot of tremendous satisfaction in that. And then recently I've kind of been migrating to podcasts. There's just so many

ways to tell extraordinary science and history stories. So I'm one of these people who if I could go back in time and tell my young self Hey, Brandon, here are the things. They're gonna light you on fire, and you're gonna be passionate about. When you're an adult, you're gonna probably want to change your life trajectory right now. You're gonna want to change the stuff you studied, and rather than study English literature and filmmaking, you're gonna want

to study science. Um, but I didn't. And so now I'm at the place in my life where I'm like, Okay, I if I could go back in time to be a scientist, I would. But all of my all of my work, experience and stuff is in in television documentaries and whatnot and now podcasting. And so let's find the

Vinn diagram of life where science and entertainment overlap. And let's drop right down in that little section there, and let's make amazing things that popularize science and basically, you know, let's find extraordinary stories that are gonna warp people's minds. And uh so that's kind of my like life goal these days. Wow, I can really identify with you there.

Actually I also am from a humanity's background, but like later in life, got the science bug and in some ways kind of wished I've done things different, but also I don't know, it helps to be able to bring that kind of storytelling sensibility to science as well well. And the and the longer I've done it, the more I've realized, and the more like actual scientists that I speak with an interview or befriend, the more I realized that this sort of advocacy is so critical for what

they do. The there's they're busy being scientists, and so you know, it needs people like us to say, look world at what the incredible things that they are doing. Yeah. Absolutely, Now I know I've read that you also have experience as a pilot though were you were piloting an S

three Viking? Is that right? Not a pilot? So to use to use a film metaphor, um, I was a combination of Goose from Top Gun, the guy who sat behind the pilot in three, and I was a combination with jones Uh with jones E, the guy from the Hunt for October who was calling crazy ivans. My job

was to hunt submarines. So the S three Viking was a patrol aircraft, a sub hunting aircraft, and we would fly in the ocean and we would drop Sona buoys and these SONA buoys would release hydrophones and we could deploy them to various depths, and we would listen for submarines, and based on the mathematical logarithmic transcripts that would come up on my screen, I could tell you, if I was very lucky, you know exactly what kind of submarine

we were flying over, whether it was turning left, turning right, diving, ascending, whatever, and sometimes specifically specific submarine we were flying over, so that I was I was the backseater. Okay, Now, uh, how did you end up doing this? Like a lot of these people who ended up in the Apollo program, did you long have a passion for for flight? I think that, you know, like any red blooded American kid, you know, you grow up loving dinosaurs and space and

and flying and these sorts of things. I actually, when I got out of I had started college and then realized, you know, I'm gonna need some more money for college and blah blah blah, and I had taken an internship. I've done an internship in Washington, d C. Congressional internship working for my congressman on Capitol Hill. And I was just surrounded by military guys and just all kinds of different things, and I thought, hey, this, this looks fantastic.

This would be a way to kind of give back to my country but also get what I kind of need to further my life and my me for school and whatnot. And so it was actually there that I kind of came up with the idea joined the military, and then spent most of my uh, most of my time in the military was actually overseas. It was in Sicily.

Spent three three years in Sicily and three extraordinary years, I should say, and just spent all of that time in Europe and traveling all over Europe and even West Africa, and it was an extraordinary thing. But yeah, I thought at the time actually that I might be pursuing um flight and then perhaps even hey, lot, what if I should, you know, should I try to become an astronaut? And then I just realized, and this kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier in terms of like

I should have been a scientist. There are also certain things that I realized I can't do that my mind's not exactly made for. And a lot of that is complex math and and some really complex you know, physics and stuff like that, the kind of things I would actually need to become an astronaut. And uh so I was like, Okay, let's just stick with the let's stick with the story telling, and uh tell the stories of these people who can do those complex math and stuff

like that you can't do, Brandon. That's interesting. Well, so to turn to that story, I guess can can you start off just by giving us the top line on nine days in July? Tell us you know, you know what, what do you want people to know if they remember one sentence about this podcast? Yeah, my my friend and our executive producer, one of our executive producers, Andrew Jacobs, came up with the idea and he basically said, we are so familiar with the sort of sound bites of

Apollo eleven. We know like some sound bites from launch, we know a lot of sound bites from the landing, but that's about it, Like nobody knows the story of Apollo eleven. And so our idea was, it's a nine day mission. Let's have nine episodes, and each episode is going to focus as real time as possible on each day of the mission, and let's tell that story. Now.

Of course, most of what goes on in a spacecraft traveling to and from the Moon is incomprehensible techno babble, and so once you strip that out, the is a lot less story going on, particularly on those transit days. And so we knew that we needed to tell more than just that story. And so the idea was that we came up with, Okay, let's tell the story that is going to contextualize everything that we're going to be hearing on that spacecraft. Let's tell the biographies of all

of these astronauts. Let's learn who the people in mission control are. Let's talk to scientists about what the moon is made of and how it was formed. Let's learn about the political dynamics of the space race and and and communism and fighting against Russia to to beat everyone

to the moon. Let's let's take all of these stories and tell these stories and bounce back and forth between them and the spacecraft, so that when you walk away after nine episodes, you not only understand intimately what happened on this mission, and you know these guys who worked on this in a really profoundly human way, but you also come away with a much greater understanding of how we got to where where we were when we went to the moon, who everyone was and and and what

the political sort of impetus was to to do it in the first place. Yeah, it's a really engrossing approach. I'm a couple of episodes in and I've been really enjoying the show so far. So maybe we should uh turn to these these figures like Neil Armstrong, buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins. Can you give a brief sketch of

of who these three astronauts were? Yeah, So Neil Armstrong and a lot of people who didn't kind of know more of his story were kind of introduced to him recently in the film First Man last year, and that was a really good kind of examination. You know. I had a lot of friends who who said they they found Neil Armstrong really inaccessible because Ryan Gosling's portrayal was such that he kind of kept the audience at a distance, at an arm's length, and didn't really he didn't feel human.

And what I told them is that's who Neil Armstrong was. Neil Armstrong and buzz Aldren were kind of what we what we would have described at the time as squares. They were sort of very straight laced and uptie eight and and it's one of the things that ruined, frankly, both of their marriages in the long run. Um. They were just so singularly focused on what they did and their jobs, um that they to the exclusion of everything else.

And then you have Mike Collins, who was jovial and and quick witted, and he was the jokester, he was the prankster, he was always he was the one that you'd want to go have a beer with. And and none of these guys actually even really got along. I mean, they got along just fine, but they weren't friends. They didn't have some sort of like you know, off campus

sort of relationship in which they hung out. Um. Any of the pictures that we have in Life magazine and stuff like that showing them all hanging out was completely created, fabricated for you know, the magazine. It was just like to sell copy. But what we needed were three men who are at the top of their intellectual game, who worked together, who are professionals, who are the best people suited for this particular job. And that's what these three

guys were. They all came, they were all aviators, they all came from flight experience. Neil was in the Navy, the other two guys were in the Air Force, and they all came out of the Korean War, and some of them from test flight experience, and just basically pushing the boundaries to do the most extraordinary things possible until the most extraordinary thing human beings have ever done was

presented to them and dropped in their laps. Now we know that it wasn't just the three astronauts, of course, could you talk a little bit about the cathedral, about the flight controllers and the mission planners and all of the you know, the thousands of of support figures who made the mission possible. You bet you know. And I'll just keep doing what I'm about to do just because I think it's a really a really accessible way for

people to identify what's going on. But you know, if you've ever seen the movie Apollo thirteen, you know that

did a wonderful job of kind of setting up. As much time as you spent in the spacecraft, you also spent in mission control and mission control what had four rotating teams of two dozen people at all of these consoles, and every console oversaw a different aspect of the flight at different aspect of the spacecraft, or you know, you'd even have doctors who are monitoring the health of the astronauts themselves, and these shifts would just these guys would

just rotate through the ships. But even within mission control, you had whole offices, whole squadrons of people who are supporting each one of those consoles so large, you had hundreds, if not thousands of people. Technically, especially thousands when you consider that all of the companies that built the spacecraft and did all these things were we're only a phone

call away. You have thousands of people supporting the mission every single day, UM, and it was an extraordinary Basically, in many ways, some of the people in mission control will call were referred to as the co pilots of Apollo eleven, and that's in many ways very true. They were monitoring every aspect of the flight. They were there for every aspect of the flight. And yet the only voice you ever hear, however, UM on any of these

tapes is Capcom. Because none of these mission controllers talked to the spacecraft. That would just get too confusing, So everyone went through CAPCOM, the capsule communicator, who was also an astronaut so that he understood everything that was going on in mission control, and he intimately understood what it was like to be on the inside of that spacecraft. And so he was the funnel through which all the communications ran. Uh. Yeah, you can imagine how chaotic it

would have gotten otherwise. Um. Now, among the flight controllers, one of the strange facts mentioned in one of your early episodes is that, uh in that room, the average age was about twenty six. Why so young? What's going on there? So you have space flights and new science right like we we we've have these visions of like the Mercury program and the Gemini program and then the Apollo program. There was not a whole lot of years between all of those programs. Um, you know, you're talking

less than ten years of human space fight. By the time we landed on the Moon, we'd only been going into space for a couple of years. And more than that. At the things that got us there, the things that enabled us to do it were computers, and computers were brand spanking new. And so it's just like today if you um, you know, when we were growing up, our parents who were always telling us, hey, how do you stop the flashing twelve, you know, twelve o'clock on the VCR, kids,

and need you to fix that for me. And the reason they were calling on the kids is because it was effortless for young people to integrate with technology. And these days, of course, it's you know, how do I fix Facebook or Instagram's acting up or you know, TikTok or whatever. You ask your kids, or you ask your grandkids, because they just get it intuitively. Um. And that's exactly what it was like here. Younger people were the ones

who understood computers. Computers were brand spanking new, and so basically, if you want to go to space with new technology, you need people who understand that new technology, and so mission control had was made up. Like you said, twenty six years old was the average age, and for some of these guys, for a great many of these guys, it was their very first job, read out of college, and they're thrust with, like you know, into this being

responsible for the most extraordinary thing humans have ever done. Yeah, it's kind of hard to imagine, actually. Um. Now, another thing that you talked about in the podcast is the fact that, of course uh NASA was a very male dominated work culture at the time, but You also mentioned the story of these like math experts who would check the work of the engineers, many of them female mathematicians, sometimes called the time computer rests like Poppy north Cut,

can can you talk about that experience? Poppy north Cut was one of my favorite interviews on this show. And unfortunately time constraints and different things have have trimmed what you're going to hear from her. But Poppy was Poppy needs her own podcast. She was someone who yeah, she she got degrees in mathematics, and she was brought in

to check the men's work. And of course, you can imagine in this time frame in the mid sixties and in late sixties, there were a lot of guys who did exactly think they needed their work checked and if it did that, it certainly didn't need to be checked by this young twenty seven year old blonde in a miniskirt sort of situation. And the amount of sexism that

she faced. There's a moment that I mentioned the podcast of I believe it was in the ABC anchor was interviewing her and he specifically said that, like, what's it like being a beautiful young woman in a mini skirt around here among all these men, and it's she persevered like she she had this mindset of I recognize that if I'm going to make a difference, I have to push through this. I have to be stronger than this. I have to tolerate some of this. The stuff I

don't have to tolerate, I'm gonna call out. But she was extraordinarily important, and not only Apollo levin getting them to and from the Moon. Her calculations helped them with all of their orbits and getting out of orbit and returning back to Earth. She also played a key component in Apollo thirteen when they had so many problems going on their spacecraft. She was there for many of the Apollo missions. Now now she is a advocate. She became

a lawyer. She got out of doing science, then became a lawyer, and she advocates for women's rights and feminism. And she took on the Houston UH Police and the Houston Fire Department and made sure that women could integrate into those uh those institutions. And even today she is just on the front lines of women's rights issues um as a lawyer and advocate. And she has, like I said,

she needs her own podcast. She's extraordinary, all right, we need to take a quick break, but we will be right back with more than and we're back all right. Maybe we should talk a bit about the hardware and the technology that made the mission possible. One of the first things I think that would deserve attention here is the Saturn five rocket, which I remember I don't recall which astronaut it was, but it was somebody who had been lifted up on it describing it as a living,

breathing organism Underneathan, Uh, what what's um? What? What makes the Saturn five so special in the history of space exploration? The Saturn five is the largest, heaviest, most powerful rocket human beings have ever created. NASA is currently building the SLS, the Space Launch System. This is the rocket that's going to be returning us to the Moon in a couple of years and eventually setting us on a path for Mars.

But until that is built and tested and first run, the Saturn five remains, fifty years later, the largest, most powerful, heaviest launch vehicle humans have ever built. We we've nothing comes close to touching it yet. UM, And it was something that was designed and built UM was the brainchild UM of Werner von Braun An ex Nazi. He was one of the Nazis that, uh, the Americans kind of grabbed out of Nazi Germany when when Germany was falling after World War Two, we brought our thousands of Nazis

as part of an Operation paper Clip. So Operation paper Clip was this was this government program in which we seized thousands of of ex Nazi scientists and engineers, brought them back to the United States and basically said, hey, you were making some pretty devastating technology like the V two rockets and stuff like that that was raining down fire all over London and lots of other parts of Europe, and hey, we want you to make those for us too. And a lot of these guys weren't they weren't died

in the woold Nazis. They were conscripted. They were you know, told to build this or else sort of situations. And once they were out of that, they were able to say, hey, you know what I what I really want to do is build rockets to send people into space. And the government US government wasn't interested in that. They wanted to be able to, you know, after World War Two, we

suddenly found ourselves in a Cold War with Russia. We just a couple of years later stumbled into a second war again with within Korea, and so basically they just wanted these guys to design missiles. But it wasn't until sput Nick suddenly kind of changed the dynamic. And once Russia launched sput Nick and we suddenly realized. And then Sputnik two, just four weeks later launched a dog into space. The dog's name was like It, which is also the

name of my dog. Um. That dog into space suddenly made people realize, oh wait, that's possible to launch like living creatures into space. And then suddenly people started turning to people like Verna von Braun and others and saying, okay, you have permission now start designing real giant, big rockets, not just missiles. And so the Saturn five is is yeah, it's the most complex thing that we've ever built. It's

the reason we got to the Moon. Well, I want to come back to some of those political implications and just a little bit, but to go on with some of the more some of the other technology from the mission.

So we've got the Saturn five rocket, and that is that's sort of the launch delivery program that that NASA came up with to get us to the moon was only one of several options that were considered, right, well, what were what was some of the thinking about how to get to the moon and back, and what were

the other options that we could have tried. Well, so they had a number of different options, and the first one was the one that's been popularized in every silly nineteen fifties sort of sci fi movie you've ever seen, and that is you see, you see like sort of a prototypical rocket and the rocket is fully formed and it lands on some on the moon or some outer space planet. People climb out of it and do their thing, climb back into it, and it launches back off again.

But you you can imagine, you've, you know, everyone's seen pictures of the Saturn five, something that big, going in one piece, going into space in one complete piece, and then landing on the Moon again like something like that's never gonna happen. The weight would just be prohibitive. The

size is just so big. And yet people consider that that was one of the options, and then then they just realized there's no way that Saturn five in that size and weight is even going to get out of orbit much less land on the Moon and get back off of it. Another option was, okay, we launch multiple launches with all of the various little spacecraft and once they're in Earth orbit, we docked them all together and we do all of these things and then we take off for the Moon. Um and that was also seen

as clearly cost prohibitive. We have numerous launches, blah blah blah. What they ultimately came down to was lunar orbit rendezvous, and that is, let's put everything in a single rocket, let's make it build big enough to launch into orbit, and then let's do all of our docking that's needed around the Moon. And that terrified people at the time because at the time we came up with that idea, we hadn't we hadn't even docked anyone in orbit around Earth.

Gemini hadn't even yet achieved that. So everyone was really terrified of hundreds of thousands of miles away doing all of this docking, so far away from any sort of help that could be rendered if they were closer to home. So that kind of terrified people. But ultimately they realized cost effective, size effective, gas, gas fuel, everything just made that that one made the most sense. And so they kind of went with it, and that's how we came

up with lunar orbit rendezvous. Now, do you think that the lunar orbit rendezvous was really the only way we could have reached the Moon and the time frame we did it was very likely the only way we could have reached the Moon in the timeframe we did. Yeah, it's not necessarily the only way we could have done it.

Um And in fact, there were One of the other options I didn't mention was that option of basically launching certain elements of your mission, landing those remotely without human beings on the surface of the Moon, then launching your crew and then they land on the Moon and what they need is already there waiting for them. That version is already what we're pretty much thinking about. In terms of going to Mars. The recognition that a long trip to Mars, the long you know it's gonna take, I

believe it's like six months to get to Mars. You'd have to be on the Martian surface for more than a year before this the planets were to align for you to even come back again for another like six month trip. So there's like when human beings go to Mars. It's going to be a year's long effort, and that can't all everything, all that infrastructure, all of that hardware, can't be contained in a single space craft, and so the idea is that is going to have to be

requiring multiple launches. You get to Mars, you start generating new rocket fuel for the return from the Martian soil. This is all being done automatically, uh, with robots and whatnot. And then so by the time that the Martian astronauts actually land and start doing their exploration, they have habitats

set up and everything has been going on. That was an option that people considered for the Moon as well, but people realized Kennedy said, by the end of the decade, I want people walking on the Moon by the end of the decade, and not just walking on the Moon. They have to come home safely, and to do that they this mission, uh profile made the most sense. Yeah,

now thinking about that, that impetus from Kennedy. Of course, the moon landing was, you know, this great scientific achievement, but your show frequently stresses the political motivations of the Apollo program. You know that it was framed in the words of Kennedy, I think in the ninete that he said it was a contest between freedom, which for him obviously meant the United States and tier any, which for

him in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. How do you think this framing of the uh of of space exploration as a kind of um, kind of a war mobilization almost How did that affect how the Apollo program progressed? And do you think the same achievements within the same time frame would have been possible if it were just treated as a kind of peaceful scientific project.

More the way we think of space exploration today, I don't think we would have gone to the Moon if we had done it just for peaceful purposes, uh, in the exact same way, for the exact same reason that we haven't gone to the moon since, for the exact same reason that we are not on the moon now that you know, for the exact same reason that we've tried to go to the Moon in the past and everything fell short that we've tried to you know, do moon missions um and those fell apart. We need the

competition aspect is the thing that drove us. And you know, you when you grow up, you have this kind of simplistic view of the space program. And you know, when you're a kid, you have a simplistic view of lots of things. And of course it was just this, yeah, okay, there's the Russian element of this, but we did this for science and exploration and blah blah blah, No we didn't.

And Kennedy's tapes that were you're gonna hear on episode seven, in which we focus specifically on the space race itself. There are tapes that didn't come uh to light until two thousand and one of Kennedy in the Oval Office in the White House talking to various scientific advisors in the head of NASA, James Webb, and basically and he says, I don't care about space, guys, I don't I just want to beat the Russians. Give me something that will

allow us to embarrass the Russians and and elevate America. Um, and let's do that. But I don't care what it is. I don't care about space only in so far as it's a political gamemanship sort of thing. And of course, for most of us growing up, Kennedy is this shining example, this this cheerleader for space, and he was that publicly, privately, he didn't give a damn about it. He just wanted

to eat the Russians. Wow. Uh, Now, so you're talking about something that would be a sort of symbolic achievement, like you that would show the world that we were better than the Russians, That would you know, something to to efface them. But I wonder also, I mean, what's the role of of uh people trying to to imagine forward into future military conflicts, because obviously they would have had in their recent memory UH air superiority as a decisive factor in World War two and and that kind

of thing. Were they thinking also along those lines? But just going to the next level up? Sure? I mean, the Cold War was at its essence, space was basically just the example that we used to demonstrate to the world and to the Soviet Union that we were more technologically advanced and more powerful. It was all about technology. It was to to you know, do it in a

kind of a crude sort of way. It was a measuring contest, using technology as a yardstick and basically saying, you know, hey, our technology is bigger than yours, our technology is better than yours, and we just proved it. Um. But of course, out of all of that, you know, there's so much US military hardware that we used to this day that came out of the Apollo program, be at the rockets, or the satellites, the spy satellites, the you know, there's so much that that it wouldn't be

here if it wasn't for the Space program. There's also a ton of personal stuff. I mean, you wouldn't have your cell phones, and you wouldn't have your GPS and satellite TV and and half of the medical advances that have been made over the last fifty years and stuff like that also came out of the space program. And

you certainly wouldn't have your laptop. So it's not like there wasn't it was a purely military effort, But the military was more than happy to take the things that NASA learned going to the Moon and say, hey, how can we use these for for war fighting? We're gonna be able to piggyback um a lot of stuff off of this and uh and be able to use it

against our enemies should should have ever become necessary. Yeah, I know several things you mentioned in the podcast to make it clear how in meshed the space program was in the nineteen sixties with the Armed forces. I remember initially a problem with I don't remember which of the three astronauts from eleven it was, but that one of them was not eligible to apply to be an astronaut because they were not active duty military. Is that correct? Yeah,

that was Neil Armstrong. He got out of the military and when he became a test pilot UM and was still working with the military and flying all these military aircraft, but he was out of the Navy by that point. He got out of the Navy when he left Korea

after his years spent in the Korean War. And Yeah, at that time when Mercury, the Project Mercury, and even into the early days of Gemini, they were only taking military UM personnel because there were so few people they needed, you know, pilots who were on the cutting edge of things, and you didn't really have civilian pilots flying cutting edge aircraft. So it made sense at that time to pull people from the military. That's NASA still does it to this day. Um,

it's not. It's not restricted to the military anymore. Uh. And you certainly have various scientists and stuff like that, But in terms of your pilots, you know, when you were flying the Space Shuttle. I would bet the vast majority, if not all, of those pilots for the Space Shuttle still came out of the military. Oh yeah, so do you do you want to say anything else about this was something that that caught my interest in those early episodes, the role of um cutting edge aircraft like the X

fifteen in our sort of escalation towards later space flight. Yeah, the X fifteen was one of those aircraft that Neil Armstrong flew uh in his test flight experience. The X fifteen is basically rocket. It's basically a missile that has these tiny, little stubby wings and a cockpit on the front um and it is it can't is not capable

of taking off from the ground. It has to be attached to the wing of a bomber and then taken up to altitude and then it is dropped and you kick on that engine and then you can can head up by The X fifteen will fly basically at the edge of space. And uh, the control surfaces on the wings, those wings are so tiny because it doesn't need them

to fly it. It needs thrusters and and and uh a little like micro jets that are embedded across the spacecraft's body of the aircraft's body, because it acts like a spacecraft once it gets up there. To control it just uses these little puffs of thrusters to to maneuver once it's up at high altitude, and then it comes in for landings. That glides down in lands in these gigantic um salt fields, these in California, flat flat field.

I think there's a terrifying story you tell about. I believe it was Neil Armstrong who's flying in one of these and is like trying to descend, but the nose, it won't descend because the nose keeps bouncing off of the top of the atmosphere. Yes, yeah, it wouldn't. He couldn't get it down. He was he was running low on fuel. It was time to come back home. He tried to angle it the plane down. It wouldn't do it. It kept bouncing off the atmosphere and bouncing back up.

And he was finally able to get it under control, but he completely ran out of fuel and he was coming back towards Edwards Air Force Space, which is outside far outside Los Angeles. But he was coming down so fast and so out of his flight zone that he was coming like straight down into Pasadena and was able finally to get controls and and bring himself back in, but he landed. It was one of dozens of times that Neil Armstrong practically died um doing that job, because

he barely eked it back home in time. And that was that was something that so many of these guys did. You know, if anyone seen the movie The Right Stuff, you realize how many people there's that. There's an amazing scene in the beginning of The Right Stuff. I think it's Dennis Quaid's character comes in to the bar that's out there in the middle of the desert, and there's the wall is covered with all of these smiling faces of guys in uniform and posing in front of planes,

and he tells the bartender. He's like, he's he's new to tow Edwards Air Force Space. He's like, I'm going to be up there someday. You're gonna you're gonna know who I am. And the bartender says, every single one of the people on that wall have died. They were all killed in this in this program testing new aircraft, and that kind of really humbled both him and the audience. You suddenly realized, Man, all of the technological advances we have made have come um at the expense of a

lot of injuries and a lot of death. Yeah. Uh, well, well, to discuss another edge of your seat descent, maybe we should switch over to the lunar module and his way of introduction to that. One of the things I always remember thinking when I was younger was when I saw pictures of the Apollo eleven lunar module. I thought, that doesn't look like a space ship? What what? What? Was? What was wrong with my thinking? They're like, why, why? Why is it that that doesn't look like a spaceship?

And that's okay. Yeah. So if you look at the command module, that's the module in which the men spent most of their time, that looks like a gum drop and has a it's a triangular shaped thing, and it's triangularly shaped because it's first part of its voyage has to get from the ground on Earth up to orbit and then onto the Moon, so it needs to be as sharp and angled as possible, and then when it comes back down, it needs to blend in forward and

land in the ocean. So everything needs to have sharp edges. You know sports cars. Your hummer is not a sports car because it doesn't have the angled lines of a Porsche. You need something that's going to go through the atmosphere needs to be sharp so that it can cut through the atmosphere. The lambs not doing that, the lunar module can look like an ungainly monstrosity because it's never going

to fly in earth atmosphere. It's only ever gonna take taste the vacuum of space, and so it doesn't need to be sharp, it doesn't need to cut through anything, and so you could basically make it look however you want. And so the joke was they always called it the bug, and it really like the two little tiny triangular windows on the front and then the hatches and various things you can it's got eyes, it's got a mouth, it looks like it's got a nose, and yeah, it's it's

it's so ugly. It's beautiful. It's not certainly something that was designed to look pretty. Was designed purely for functionality. And they could do that because it was never going to ever taste atmosphere. Alright, time to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more than and we're back. You tell some excellent stories about the design of the lunar module, about what company was doing It was a

Grumman that was making it, or north of north of Grumman. Yeah, yeah, I think it wasn't North of Grumman at the time. That was a later fusion of two companies. I believe it was just the grum incorporation at that time. But yeah, you talk about like the all the design phases and all all the problems they encountered as they went through. Do you uh, do you want to get into that

a little bit? Yeah. Mike Lisa was the guy that we interviewed at Grumman who was one of the test engineers who basically helped build and test this thing before it went to space. He was another of my favorite interviews. He was just so infectiously excited to talk about this it. Even to this day, he worked Grumman for his entire life.

He still lives in the exact same New York house that he lived in when he was working on building the lemb Um, And even to this day he's retired and he's a docent in a museum, and he still just kind of like, is there to answer questions about one of the ludder. They have one of the lunar modules um at his museum in New York, and I believe it's Brookhaven Um because that's where they were they

were all built. He was so just his his gushing enthusiasm for this program was so much fun and when you go through his wonderful New York accent, it just made him made him so memorable. But yeah, the things that they had to do to make sure that this thing could survive blast off for one and then lunar descent and take off for another. They they built and there's some stuff that again, and I'm sure you can

understand this with your own podcast. There's so many things that get cut for time or whatever, and you're just like, oh, I wish I could share this with the world and some of the stuff, and we do share this to some degree. But they built these shakers basically massive, massive speakers UM. And just like if you have a speaker in your house and you put something fragile on top of it and you crank that thing up to eleven, it just starts shaking everything off and shaking everything in

your house. Well, that's basically what they did to the lunar module. They tested every little component individually and then constructed the lunar module and then put this thing basically on top of this giant speaker for what isn't all intensive purposes, a giant speaker, and shook it and shook it until it fell apart, just to see how long it would last. Where were the where were its strengths, where were its physical weaknesses. They would turn it upside

down and shake it to see what fell off. And every time something fell off, you know, production stopped and they would go and remachine that piece and fix it again, because it had to. It had to withstand both the stress of a launch and of course getting to and

from the Moon. And the lunar module, of course, is two separate spacecraft, right It's it's got its ascent stage and the descent stage, and the bottom, the decent stage, stays on the Moon once they blast off and basically becomes the launch platform for the ascent stage when it when it takes off. And so there's just so many the the amount of technical difficulty and complexity in all of these machines is breathtaking. It's why the HBO series. From the Earth to the Moon is a spectacular series.

But my favorite episode is the episode called Spider, and that's the episode in which you follow the guys along as they're building louder or module. It's not even doesn't even really take place in space until the very end. It's just about a bunch of the guys on the ground trying to figure out how to build something no one had ever built before. These guys all designed and

built aircraft. They designed and built the kind of aircraft that you know that the guys are flying when they're flying over Korea, or that they're flying as test pilots, and now all of a sudden, they're building a spacecraft that is never gonna taste atmosphere, and no one's ever done it before. Like so much of APAOLA was, we're building and doing things no one had ever done before.

We don't even know necessarily what we're doing. We're just we're kind of flying blind and giving our best guesses and and using really nascent science and technology to kind of okay, fingers crossed, hope this works. And we of course we pulled it off not once, but you know, a dozen times. Yeah. Uh well, speaking of from the Earth to the Moon. That reminds me of something I

wanted to ask you about. So a lot of times on the show we end up talking about the interaction between science fiction and real cutting edge exploration or experiment. Uh there's just one example that's stuck in my memory

from years ago. I remember reading that. I don't know if you came across this, but remembering that during the planning phase there was at least at some point someone had a concern about the lunar regulth and the idea that uh so, like the soil covering the surface of the Moon, that it might be so fine grained that it would function as a kind of quicksand and that the lunar module might sink into the Moon or become

stuck in the soil after landing. I don't know if you get into that later or or if you encountered that concern, but that was like a gym in my mind, because it of course turned out not to be the case. But I'm struck by how much that sounds like a scene from a pulp sci fi story, like from you know,

something that might be published in Amazing stories. Yeah, and it was something it was so uh speaking one of the one of the astronauts, one of the moonwalkers I spoke to for this podcast was Harrison Schmidt, who flew aboard Apollo seventeen, and I brought those very things up with him, and we do address those in episode five, which is our the actual moon landing mission, the day we landed on the Moon, and he said those things were concerns for for several scientists, they were not really

concerns for NASA. They didn't buy into all of that. Um. He said. It was actually one particular scientist who wasn't who was an eminent astrophysicist UM whose name eludes me at the moment, but who kind of went off on some crazy rabbit trails when it came to landing on

the Moon. But yes, they did think that the lunar module might hit the lunar surface and then suddenly just sink beneath it like quicksand they were concerned that the lunar regular might, when exposed to oxygen um, spontaneously combust.

And so even though I say that almost everyone at NASA didn't think that was going to happen, I should also say that Neil's arms Neil Armstrong's mom was convinced it was going to happen, and when he climbed off the ladder, he tethered himself and when he took his first step, he kind of bounced and then stepped back and then realized, Okay, nothing's happening. I'm gonna be okay.

And then later before when they got back into the into the lunar module, they took some of that regulars with them and put it on top of the ascent engine cover and then started slowly bleeding uh an atmosphere oxygen back into the into the cabin. But they only had a little bit of it exposed because they wanted to test is this thing gonna catch fire? Are we going to explode? If it is, we want to make sure that it's just a tiny bit and then we

can determine but if this is gonna go wrong. But nothing caught fire, and of course they were fine, and of course they were covered in lunar regular and it's not you know, so all of that stuff we'd already landed. The Russians had already landed spacecraft on the Moon, onmanned spacecraft on the Moon, and those didn't sink, and of course, the lunar module when it sat down didn't sink, so I'm sure Neil was pretty convinced it wasn't gonna happen. But yeah, that was absolutely a fear with a lot

of people. They you know, it's one of those like I said, we've never done this before. You had no idea what was going to happen. Uh. Yeah, And as far as combustion goes, I mean, I can't imagine how much the specter of what happened with Apollo one would have, you know, haunted everything that came after. They're sure, and it's not as if regular isn't scary stuff. So regulars, like you said, is the is the powdery surface that's on the on the top of of the of the

lunar surface, and it is fine grain. It is like talcum powder. It is is ash. It is so incredibly fine, but it is also so incredibly sharp. Because on Earth, you have erosion, you have wind, you have water, you have all these things that take the sort of stuff that the sort of fine grain sand and stuff like that and wears off all of those edges over time. On the Moon, that doesn't happen. There is no wind,

there is no erosion. There is no water, and so everything, if you look at it under microscopes is incredibly sharp and incredibly jagged. And while Neil and Buzz were pretty conservative when they were walking on the Moon, later cruise started to get much more I should say, when they were doing their exploring, they were they were bouncing around, they were jumping, they were falling, they were rolling, blah blah blah. That regular started actually cutting open their space

suits and releasing oxygen. They later found um and it would get into the equipment and start ruining equipment. I mean, it was just it was dangerous stuff. It's still something that you know, on return missions to the Moon we have to be very careful of. You don't want to trape this stuff around because just a little of it, too much, too much of this, you know, talcum powder on your on your flight suit, are on your astronauts uh e v A suits, and it's going to start

cutting cutting holes in it. It's horrifying. I mean, yeah, I've read about that something before, like the idea of creating a permanent lunar habitat. You need some kind of like clean room or something in between two uh to get them out to deal with the regular problem, but to bring it back for a second to the idea of science fiction. One thing that just crossed my mind earlier today was how strange it is that Uh so, of course, you know, you had a long tradition of

stories about spaceflight and going to the moon. You know, the astronauts themselves made reference to Jules fern and and uh, what's voyage to the moon or or that's how we got the name Columbia for the for the commandment. That's right, straight from straight from Jules Verne. Yeah. But the other one that was crazy for me to be to believe was that two thousand one of Space Odyssey came out in nineteen sixty eight, a year before the Moon landing, and I'd always had it the other way around in

my mind. Um So, do you have a sense of how the public's view, or maybe even with some of the people involved, how their view of space exploration in the late nineteen sixties would have been influenced or colored by their engagement with science fiction. Oh, it absolutely drove people like VERNR. Von Braun and even his Russian counterpart korliev In in Russia. These guys were avid consumers of science fiction. And this was back in the time, even

before like the movies really started getting big. You had pulp science fiction. You had all of these um, not only books, but you'd have magazines that came out with short stories that Isaac Asthmov and Ray Bradbury and all of these like science fiction giants were writing at the time. Um, those guys were eating those things up, and it absolutely

drove them to do what they did. I have a dear friend who works at NASA, and I once told her, you know something about how much I love science fiction, how it's my favorite genre, and how Star Trek specifically is my my all time favorite piece of art that humans have ever made. Um and and I said, And she said something like, well, you know what you play

in You play in fake space. I worked in real space and I and I told her, yes, but you are surrounded by people the only reason they are working in real space is because they were inspired by this fake space. That this drove so many people, whether it be the people who designed the Saturn five and all

these rockets, where it inspired them to become astronauts. You know, for the last fifty sixty years, people the space program is populated by real people who were entirely energized and inspired by the thoughts and imaginations and and sort of wild fanciful stories that were created by science fiction. So in addition to just motivating people to want to explore space, do you ever get the sense that the science fiction at all colored people's assumptions about what would happen in

space and space exploration? Oh? Yeah, absolutely. I mean I don't know if I have any specific stories, but yeah, you certainly, in doing this kind of research come across

those sorts of things. I mean, even like you brought up earlier with the regular thinking people were going to sink and stuff like that, you know, going Apollo eleven landed on the moon in July of nineteen sixty nine, we already have two decades of of really heard of not hard sci fi, not in the in the technical term of that sense, um, but you have you've got

a lot of science fiction movies by this time. And those science fiction movies are you know, go everything back from some of the early sort of French filmmaking in which you have little you know, jewels verne ships being shot out of cannons and landing on the Moon and little guys popping out and encountering all of these crazy space aliens, and of course they're not wearing space suits. But nobody knew. Nobody knew what what was on the Moon.

I mean, obviously, in the late sixties and stuff like that, we've been studying it. It did, but back in the early days, nobody knew. People thought that there were People thought they saw vegetation and rivers and and and animals and stuff on the Moon when they started to look

through like proto nascent telescopes and stuff like that. So yeah, absolutely you had science fiction that was coloring the assumptions of everybody going forward, and you you know, that kind of had to run smack dab into science and people going Okay, that's that can't possibly be true. Or you know, we know there's no atmosphere. Okay, that's going to remove any sort of ideas of life at least as we know it existing on the surface of the Moon. So

you know there's that. But yeah, it absolutely colored colored everything. It's one of those things that, like in any enterprise in human life, once you do the thing, once you make that exploration, so many of those assumptions. Of course, fall away in the face of facts and evidence and science and whatnot. But before someone is bold enough to make that first step and can either confirm or disprove it, um,

you know, it remains an open possibility. There was one quote that I may have been in your first episode that I really liked. It was I believe an astronaut named Dick Gordon or was he an astronaut or did he just work with NASA? Were he anyway? Sorry? The quote is uh, he says, what did we discover when we went to the Moon. We discovered Earth? Uh. And this seems to be a common sentiment among a lot of astronauts that they have a different kind of view

of of life on Earth after being in space. Yeah, Dick Gordon was an Apollo astronaut, and his impress Shian was almost universal. Um. Even even the Apollo eleven astronauts talk about that seeing the Earth from a distance um was more life changing than even walking on the Moon. Um. And almost to a man, every single one of them

said that they just their lives were transformed. Harrison Schmidt, ironically is one of the only ones who didn't kind of have some euphoric experience, and I don't know if that's because he was much more of a grounded scientist or whatnot. But everyone kind of came back. Their lives changed. Some people found God. Some people came back and became artists.

They just wanted to try to communicate via their art and their painting and sculptures and stuff like that, what they what they learned from seeing the moon and from seeing the Earth. Um A lot of them came back very seriously engaged in and promoting uh conservation and and

and environmentalism and stuff like that. The environmentalism movement pretty much kicked off when Apollo eleven took the first picture of the Earth rise from the Moon, and all of a sudden we realized, Wow, the Earth is this tiny, fragile little thing sitting in the middle of this gigantic

black void, and it just seems so fragile. And another asteroat I can't remember who it was, described it as a as a Christmas ornament hanging in the binky black of space, and you suddenly realize, oh, okay, this is fragile. We need to take care of this. And the other thing that so many people realized is hey, from orbit, there are no borders. This is not like a globe where you recognize where one country starts another country ends. This is ludicrous, the sort of fights and political infighting

and stuff that we have. We are human beings and we need to be human beings first, before we're even Americans, before we Russians, before where anything you get, as Neil Degrass Tyson would call it, the cosmic perspective. Interesting how that intersects with what we were talking about earlier with John F. Kennedy and the you know, the motivations of the space program being almost purely geopolitical to begin with.

You know, there's so much about human life and so many of the things that humans do that even if it's done pursuing one particular thing, we come out of it realizing so much more. It's such a larger experience. It informs so much more about what we are and who we are, and how we live and how we should relate to each other. Um And that's just that's a exactly, it's a that's a terrific example of that. We may have done something for one reason, but what we got out of it was so much deeper and

so much richer. But it's still a lesson we need to take on board today. I mean, it's clearly something that we haven't listened to enough. You know, we're we're not taking care of our planet like we should. We're still having the same sort of petty political squabbles and one up and shipped like you know. But at least now we have something to refer back to and say, hey, knock it off humans. All right, Well, it's been really great talking to you, Brandon. I really enjoyed this, and

again I really do enjoy with the show. Um, I'm glad to be glad to be able to recommend it to our listeners. So so thanks so much, Thanks so much. I I hope I hope they enjoyed two. I think they will. All right, Well, that does it huge. Thanks again to Brandon Fibbs for joining us today. If you haven't checked out nine days in July yet, you should give it a listen. I've been really enjoying it and

I think you will too. In the meantime, if you want to check out any other episodes of our podcast, you can go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com that will get you there, or you can just look up Stuff to Blow your Mind on wherever you get your podcasts on iTunes and the I heart Radio app or um you know you know all the places. Big thank you as always to our excellent audio producer

Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello, you can reach us by email at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeart Radios. How stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio is a the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.