How Ejection Seats Work

he hit his head on the canopy. I know I broke his neck. Is because he'd angered God earlier that day, I guess so, so I'll be Goose. Are you planning on dying? I'm just planning on you feeling guilt for the rest of your life. You caused the spin by being a guns blazing maverick. That is true, but I would be like, I didn't design the injection seat. That's the guy who should feel guilty for the rest of his life. I'm gonna go get a taco. Um. Yeah,

I'm gonna go ride my motorcycle around Miramar. It's funny. When I saw top Gun, and I may have talked about this before, I remember thinking at the time, like, people, you don't die in training exercises like that, that's so hollywood. It up as a matter of fact, that happened very well two years ago. It happens all the time. You never hear about it. Yeah, there's the guys that make the papers, my paper. It doesn't. It's sad that it doesn't, but uh, yeah, like it. It happens. Our military died

during training and it's it's awful. My brother in law is a helicopter pilos, you know, and he's lost several friends through the years in training. Yeah. Is it in crashes or from ejection seats crashes? Yeah? Um, there was a guy in two thousand and eleven. You know the Blue Angels, the what there's also the Red Arrows. Yeah,

I know the Blue Angels. Okay, Well the Red Arrows um are another formation flying team, like just basically some really great pilots, and one of them was killed when his ejection seat went off while his plane was motionless. The ejection seat just accidentally went off. That's a zero zero ejection and that what that's called. Yes, but that means you're on the ground and you're not flying at all. Right, Um, but I think the problem is the plane didn't realize

where the ejection. Um, the sequencer didn't realize that it was a zero zero ejection because the paras you never deployed. So he died when he fell back down to earth from a couple hundred feet out. I guess, yeah, well,

well this all makes sense in a second. Um. You know what I think as a primer before, if you're at home listening, you can go to the YouTube site and look up, look up like ejection seat and there's one like slow motion on the ground zero zero ejection from film from different angles that really shows how it all works. It's pretty cool and um, you really get a sense of like what they do, go up a couple hundred feet Yeah, and quick too, very quick. Um. This so this is this is not even my intro.

I've got an intro, Chuck. There's a guy in World War Two who is a tail gunner on a B seventeen flying Fortress. And this man's name was Alan McGhee, who's staff sergeant. And if you were a tail gunner on the B seventeen, you were basically cramped into this little gun turret with your knees up to your chest, your heads poking out in a little clear canopy shell. Yes, and you had no room whatsoever to wear a parachute. You had to keep it in the cockpit with everybody else. Well.

Alan McGee is on this B seventeen called the Snap Crackle Pop, and they're flying on a mission over France. Satan is there, which was also known as Flack City because of the anti aircraft guns down on the ground. And sure enough, the Snap Crackle Pop took some flak lost. A wing had a couple of holes in it, and these holes in turn put holes into McGee's parachute. So

he needs to bail out. He finds a hole that's been blown into the side of the the Snap Crackle Pop and jumps out at twenty thousand feet with a parachute with holes in it, with no parachute whatsoever, because he was like why bother. He just knew he needed to get out of the plane quick and he later said that he thought he had a parachute. Yes, He fall twenty two thousand feet more than four miles to the ground, goes right through the skylight in the satan

Asaire Trades train station and Lands and Lives. He had a um how does that happen? He had I'll tell you a second. He had a broken right leg, broken right ankle, nearly severed right arm, twenty eight shrapnel wounds from the shards of glass because he fell right through plate glass from again twenty two thousand ft four miles above the ground, and he lived to tell about it.

A German doctor apparently took very good care of him, and he later on said, you know, publicly thanked the guy, even though he was a Nazi doctor, um for saving his life. And so I'm reading about this and this is just astounding. I'm looking into it more and more and more, and there's no trick. It's just physics. Um. This physicist Dr Seth Eisenberg, he's not a physicist, he's a trauma specialist. He said on Popular Mechanics that there's

really no magic here. That he was going. McGee was going as fast as he would have been had he jumped off of something like a twelve story building. Once you reach terminal velocity, it's all the same, whether it's four miles or whether it's twenty feet. Um, it's still pretty spectacular that he fell four miles through the roof

of a building and survived. The point of all this is so the point was though, that he could have fallen off a twelve story building through the plate glasses and everyone had been like, Wow, that's pretty awesome, but not miraculous. Yeah, compared to four miles it's not. Okay, I got you. It's still be pretty miraculous that he survived. Used to die, you know, twelve story building. He's pretty

banged up. Yeah, So the point is him just jumping out of the the hole in the side of the snap crackle pop was not that different from how you would get out of a plane in World War Two. You just kind of opened up the canopy and jumped out and then you know, opened your parachute at the appropriate height right or altitude. When that's fine with planes, propeller planes, but once jets were introduced, you can't do that because they're going so much faster than a propeller

plane does. You can't just jump out speed of sound, dude. So around the time the jet age began, a company named Martin Baxter, a British aviation company, started really looking into the idea of the ejection seat, and we have that today thanks in large part to them. Hats off, Yeah, real men of genius. Uh So. An ejection seat, if you don't know, just to put it very simply, is a seat that is ejected from the aircraft ob jet,

can be a helicopter. Um. And it's a very much a last second maybe not last second, but it's the last ditch effort to save yourself when you know that that aircraft is going down, right, Yeah, it's the that's your last resort. You don't do that frivolously because number one, airplanes are expense Yeah, they're also very dangerous when they crash land. Yeah, and you really I think it's probably bad form to scuttle your plane when you still have control of it. Yeah, I think so. Like, hey, I

wonder what this thing does. Um. And the article points out and it's once you really read this thing, it's really true. It's one of the most complex parts of an aircraft. Could be thousands of parts in some of these, and the object is to get the pilot out and then disattached from that seat without hitting any part of the aircraft. So like up and out in a way out of harm's way, at which point, um you become

a parachuter. Yeah, that's that's exactly right. You want to get the pilot into the position to just parachute down into the ground, and it all happens and under four seconds, and about two to three of those seconds is the actual parachute aspect, Like the ejection part is all in about a second and a second and a half. It's pretty pretty amazing, and we're gonna tell you how it works.

So the process of it is fairly simple. The procedure, right, it's like, just get the pilot out of the plane above it, out of the way of the plane crash, yeah, and let the parachute happen to its thing. Right. But when you look at the mechanisms involved in this, it's extremely detailed, especially since when you had the first microprocessor in charge of ejection seats. It's really neat. Yes, So let's talk about ejection seats. Let's talk about the basics.

You've got. First of all, the seat, Yes, the seat is connected. It's in the cockpit obviously, and it's attached to rails um by by way of some rollers. So you might think like the seats just like bolted to the floor. It's not. It's on rollers on these rails because those rails and rollers are going to do the initial guidance of the chair at the proper angle out of the aircraft. Right. You can't just go up, you can't just go forward, you can't just go back right.

And when you go up those rails, you actually have to go at a certain amount of speed, and that speed has to be slightly more than the aircraft is going or else you're not going to clear the cockpit. Yeah, So to do that, you have what's called the catapult, which is usually a charge. Yeah, that's what gets you going up the rails and initially out. Um. Then there will be a secondary rocket that that shoots you up another couple of hundred feet and clear the tail of

the plane and everything. Um. And it does it quick too, It does it really quick. And this is all This whole system is called an A E S and Assisted Egress system egress meaning exit or a way out. Um, little on the nose, but I get it. Yeah, that's the military. Um. And Uh, the canopy is you know, if you've ever seen like a fighter jet, they've got the clear clear canopy above them where they like wave and like give the thumbs upside in the black Power

sign and all that stuff. Yeah, where they shoot a bird at the Russian is in top Gun. Remember they flew right on the upside down right above them. That seemed almost incredible. It's very incredible. Yeah, and probably not real. Well, that's what I mean, Tony Scott r I p um. So you got the canopy, and the problem with the canopy is it shouldn't be there when you're trying to eject. It's right, So part of the assisted egre system is the canopy actually uh blowing and getting the heck out

of the way. If you don't have a canopy, you might have an escape hatch built into the roof. And um. You do all this by pulling a lever either between your legs or by your side or in the case of Top Gun. I looked at the clip today. It's too two loops behind their head that they pulled. Or sometimes you might pull a face curtain down in front of your face, which serves two purposes. It gets the whole system moving and protects your face. And it's not

like a veil, no, it's like it's sturdy. Yeah. Well, and I think of, like, you know what I think of when I think of curtain and planes, I think of like what they used to separate first class from from coach. We don't want this to bereta. So here's this black Lacey. He's like, I don't. I don't want to see having to bail out. So those are some of the ways. You know, there's all different kinds of systems, but that's generally how it works. Okay, so we got

the general part before we go. Any let's do a message break and let's do that. Yeah. They's about to get really good though. Mm hm. Okay, So them's the basics. We're talking about the basics. Yeah, let's get into the nuts and bolts of this as it were. Yeah, and bolts will come into play actually specifics. Um. So let's talk about the seat. You've got your bucket, which is where you sit. Um it. Also the seat comes with survival equipment, which is kind of nice. Yeah, I licked

it up. Some survival packs have like oxygen, so if you are bailing out and you're you're not attest to oxygen at a high altitude, you're gonna need it. Um. They have rifles in them. Which is just cool um blankets. What I don't get is the seat ejects from the person. So is the safety pack this stays attest Okay, so you're still in a sitting position with this thing attached to you or it's a test your back Okay, Yeah, I was confused by that too. I'm glad you took

the time. Um, we cover the canopy. The catapult is obviously what initiates it, and it's operated with, like you said, ballistic cartridge. There's a lot of explosions going. You're riding a bullet right then, yeah, pretty much, then you're going

to catapult the rails. You got your drug parachute, which is a small parachute five two to five ft in diameter that it initially pops out to uh, sort of balance you and make sure you're not just flying all over the place and slow you down a little bit, right because I mean, if you're going in at even a slight angle at the speed of sound, possibly, yes, you need to slow down kind of quick. And the drug parachute is just that little one like uh, then

the drags that's exactly what it is. And sometimes you know how they'll have like a small one, and then a big one. They have that too on injection seats as well. And then the drug parachute also very commonly, um will trip the larger parachute too after a certain speed is reached. That's right. Um, what else, man, You've got your environmental sensor, which will get into how all this works. Um, But that is a device that tracks

airspeed and altitude. Um, it doesn't just shoot you up and say I hope it's hope it's okay up there right exactly? And then it also depending on the readings it gets for your air speed and altitude, it'll it'll trip like a certain type of sequence. So like if you're at a very high altitude, there'll be a certain sequence. If you're at a low altitude but going a very fast speed, there will be a certain sequence, and so on. And there's a car called modes of ejection. Well we

might as well go and cover that. It's Um, there's something called and I had to look this up. It was named for physicists Honree Peito, but um, everyone calls them uh pedd or pidot tubes when it really should be Peto tubes because he was French. But these are when the when the sequence begin, it travels up the rails and exposes these tubes and they measure air pressure and the differences in pressure to determine like how fast you're going and like which of these modes to enact

that we're talking about. So that that's the that's part of the environmental center, and it sends that information of the recovery sequencer, which is basically the chip that controls the process. That's right. Um, So what are the three modes? Well, there's low altitude low speed, which is less than two fifty knots at less than fifteen thousand feet. No need for a drug parachute. You barely even need an injection

seed at that point, you know. Um. There's mode too, which is low altitude high speed for when you're like, you know, Maverick or something like that, just going really fast but low UM. And then there's high altitude any speed, known as the scariest mode. Right. And so the modes are all based on you'll notice two things altitude and

um speed velocity right. Um. And you put these things together and you create a graph and inside the graph, inside the the arc that's formed that's called the envelope, and anything inside the envelope is um safety. Like it's been proven, it's tested that if you follow this certain sense of certain sequence of events for this mode, within this altitude and this air speed, you're gonna most likely be fine. That's right. If you go outside of that,

you are what's known as pushing the envelope. Is that where that came from? That's awesome? It is. I thought that was when you, like, we're super cool during negotiations and you would just write down what you wanted and push the envelope across the table. That's pushing your luck. Okay, wow, I love that. You know me and word origins. Yeah, I thought you'd like that when I saw it, and I was like, Jack's gonna love it. So let's back up a bit and uh start with with the bailout.

Your planes not doing well, you want to eject planes. Not your plane is sick. You want to eject and you pull the ejection handle. That sets off what we've already talked about, that first explosion to catapult you up the rails and into the air. And then there is an under seat rocket motor that actually propels you even further. And when you watch this thing in slow motion. It's

you know, serious rocket propelled action going on under your butt. Yeah, and sometimes it's two stages, like the catapult and then the rocket, but it's all in the same source. But yeah, it's basically shot shooting you. So you go off on a bullet and then a rocket. Yeah, that's what happens when you're ejecting in like you said, within the first

half to one and a half seconds. Yeah, that's what all this happens in the canopy obviously has been jettisoned at this point, and that's a really cool thing to Like, these things are have to functions canopy, so they're bolted in there, and the way they're they're ejected as the bolts are blown by little tiny explosive charges, right, that's

called lifting the canopy. Um, the bolts will blow and the cannon people start to fly off, but then there's another charge and another explosion towards the front that just shoots it off in another direction away from you as you're ejecting. All this is just so cool, man, how

fast it happens, how complicated it all is. Yeah, because think about that, Like the computer sequencers still needs to know what mode to follow, so like when that canopy is starting to blow, it's taking the data readings and deciding all this is going on in like a second, a tenth of a seconded um. So lifting the canopy is one way you can still become injured. You can still run into the canopy, um I, just from blowing the bolts. So there's another mode, um or another means

of getting rid of the canopy. And that's just shattering it. Yeah, that's when it basically explodes. And uh, it's like you've got chicken wire, but the chicken wire is explosive. Yeah, just just evaporate. Yeah, well done, evaporate the slipstream. Just makes it go by by really quickly. Um So for

all intents and purposes. Uh. And then we also mentioned earlier if there is no canopy, there will be an explosive hatch that basically that's the same thing that seems the least safe to me, why because you can't see through it. An explosive hatch makes me think of like some really heavy thick steel that, yes, you can't see through, and that is just really a hole in another bit of heavy thick steel that you might bump into on your way out, like like an escape hatch from a submarine.

That's what I think of when I think of a hatch like that on a plane. You know, give me a shattering canopy. You want it to dissolve above your head. Evaporate, evaporate. Alright, So then once you're out from the rails, uh, that secondary the rocket's gonna take you depends on your weight A hundred to two hundred feet up to safe safely clear you and um, I wish we had more recent stats than this, but we have one from that said that they had a success rate or I saw that

four d and sixty three injections. I saw that that's a kind of standard for study from like I think two thousand six or something like that, and they found about eighty nine point four. And the bad news is the other ten percent means you've probably died. Yeah, you know, so it's either success or you die. Yes, I think that's pretty much the I think saving your life through the correct series is successful. Like if you're injured or whatever,

I think they still generally count that as success. Um. So where are we man? So we're at the drug parachute. The drug gun fires a metal slug and it pulls out this little drug parachute. And then like we said, then there's the secondary shoot that I think the drug nnects that, right, yeah, the second they like the main shoot. UM, so you get the main shoot out before this happens. Though.

Think about this when you are shot out on a bullet and then on a rocket and you're going up to I don't know, mark two, mark three, MAK one is seven. UM. That's speed of sound like supersonic travel. Um. And we have planes that can go a lot faster than that. When you exit the plane like that, UM, it's very easy for your seat to start to tumble and move around and spin or your limbs. Let's say,

well we'll get to that. Just the seat itself. If everything's going encoding, the plant plant can still tumble and and this the wind resistance it meets can just push it around in all sorts of weird angles. So there's something called a Vernier rocket, right, and it's it is a rocket that just kind of fires like um, remember on Apollo thirteen when they were um like shooting off the little booster rockets like need correct the yaw and all that and pitch. That's what this rocket does. UM.

Or these rockets, I should say. It stabilizes the seat and keeps it from spinning and tumbling and makes it stay up and down exactly so it knows what it's doing, just like your smartphone. Oh, yes, that what the compass thing is. Yeah really well, I mean yeah, plus when you tilted, it knows to go sideways. And yeah, I mean I'm sure that or I hope the dejection seats have a little more advanced systems. But yeah, gyroscope. Yeah, okay, I never thought about that. Uh, maybe not a gyroscope,

but something that functions in that way. People are like, that's not a gyroscope. We'll find out, Yeah, we sure, well many times over. Okay, so Chuck, let's talk about the physics of all this. Well, first we got to cover the seat man separator motor. And that's actually once you're in the air, you don't you're you don't want you can't land in the seat. They wanted to get you out of the seat, and that's accomplished by the

seat man motor separator. Yeah. This motor dease basically goes we're and detaches the seat from you and you're you've got your parachute one, You've got your survival pack still, but the seat just kind of falls away to Earth and you just um slowly parachute down and land and if you're keptain scott O Grady, Yeah, then you spend the next five days evading serbs. That's right, successfully successfully.

So physics my favorite topic. I know you love physics. Uh. Newton's second law of emotion comes into play here obviously because um force and acceleration of the crew member. Really, you know, that's how you're gonna live or die. Yeah, because when you exited plane, you get smacked by the wind, that's right. I mean, you're going faster than the speed of sound, and while you're normally operating the plane, the

plane's taking it on the chin for you. You're not feeling this force of gravity nearly as much as you are when you're no longer surrounded by the plane and you're just exposed up there in the atmosphere. That's right. So Newton's second law of emotion states the acceleration of an object depends on the force acting upon it and the mass of the object. Force equals mass times acceleration. In this case, the mass is the mass of the human pilot and the chair, right, and uh, the force Uh,

I don't know. Accelerations measured in gees right, So one G equals the the amount of one the the amount of the Earth's gravity right now, right. And so let's say, um, let's say we're a hundred and eighty pound pilot at sea level, we weigh a hundred and eighty pounds. That's one g um when we're going t gs and so on up to say twenty g s I believe, is what the an ejection seat is like the best are developed for At twenty g's hundred and eighty pounds, it

feels like thirty pounds. That's the force that you encounter when you eject thirty pounds, All of a sudden of force is being exerted on your body. Yeah, and keeping in mind that one g of acceleration is equal to thirty two per scond. Yes, And it all depends on how much we weigh, like, that's how you figure out the mass you in the chair. That's the big one. Also, the the chair needs to know how fast to go because it has to go slightly faster than the plane,

like I said, so it can clear it. That's amazing, Yeah, it is. But when So when you reject and you suddenly encounter twenty g s, which is the upper limits of human Um, what's the word I'm looking for? Tolerance? Um, A lot of really bad things can happen to you. That's right, and we know this thanks for our buddy Colonel step Yeah. Remember he used to have read outs from the rocket sled and man he had some crazy

stuff happened to him. So what's the formula? UM speed equals acceleration times time plus initial speed or v F equals a T plus the I. Yes, So think about this. Okay, what we just said is that, UM, we understand the force, which is when you go up, you are suddenly exposed to that lateral force, hit in the face with that windy um, and you're also being pushed out and upward.

So I think you said that in some cases, within the first second and a half you are up two feet, So I think you said earlier something like you within a second you are you go from sitting in the plane to being up about two feet, So that means you're traveling twot a second upward. So you're being pushed up like that while you're being exposed to speeds of upwards of seven twenty g's of force. UM. And all of this is happening to your poor little body, so

a lot of really bad things can happen to it. Um, first of all, First and foremost, I think the number one injury from ejections is spine compression, oh man, Because you're you're being pushed upward at a two ft a second UM. That's a lot of force exerted on your

spinal column. So modern um ejection seats have things like leg restraints, back restraints, restraints, and then that face curtain restrain your head, and you were forced into a completely up and down sitting position so that your vertebra are stacked perfectly on top of one another, because any kind of slip or any kind of angle leads to a slip disc very easily. UM. And there's a long standing legend.

I couldn't verify that in the US Air Force, after two or three ejections you're grounded for life because the spinal compressions just basically used you up. I don't know, I didn't see that it was true anywhere, but it's an old legend. Well, at the very least, you're not very good pilot, so they're like, yeah, maybe we should around them. Or you're like three quarters your height that you were when you enlisted because the final compressions, you know,

short now. So that's the number one I believe UM injury that comes from ejection. There's also something with the horrific name limb flail. So you're secured in your seat, your arms, your legs, your head, you're supposed to be totally immobile in that first couple of seconds, especially until your parachute opens and you slow down and everything. If your arm gets loose. Have you ever seen a dog with its head sticking out of a car window on a highway and it has real long, floppy ears, Yeah,

which is very dangerous. It's not something you should do to your dog. It's bad for your dog. Developed cauliflowerer. It's a bad thing to do. Get things in their eyes. That's going like thirty to sixty miles an hour. We're talking in arm a human r going more than seven fifty miles. When it gets loose, what you have is called limb flail, and what you have are completely shattered bones,

dislocated shoulders. Um, that's a bad jam. Or just imagine going down the highway at like rolled on your window and then quickly to stick your arms. Yes, yes, and multiply that times you know whatever. Um, so that's another type of injury limb flail. Um. There's wind blast, which so they tested this on chimps of course, and um it turns out that you can get third degree burns, severe third degree burns just from the wind at um

mock one point seven. Being exposed to that peak one point seven mack one point seven for one second can give you severe third degree burns. Uh. And then there's tumbling, which you might overlook, but think about this. Remember when um know, the real math, No, the real life guys. No, uh, the dude, oh man, No, the guy who jumped out of the space capsule recently. You know the guy, yeah,

Felix bomb Gardener. Yeah, I can't believe I forgot that. Um. The the when he jumped out, he started to tumble, remember he started going in over end a first. No. And the reason that that is really really bad is because you can build up centrifugal force of your for your blood and it pushes it outward to your extremities, meaning your heart doesn't have any blood to pump any longer, so you can die very quickly. I've seen between two

hundred and four hundred rotations per minute proves fatal to humans. Man, how did that bomb grown? Your guy pull that off? I don't know. That was pretty awesome. Yeah, and hey, our own Discovery channel covered that live. Remember, Yeah, that was huge. It was very cool. That first shot, Dude, I like, I can't look at that when it just falls out of it at his perspective shot when he was just like all right, I'm jumping out of something

from space. Yeah, that was amazing. I remember, um, you, me and I were coming back from some trip or whatever and we just happened to be in the airport when I remembered it was going on. I'm like, oh, yeah, we should watch this, and ended up standing there watching like one of the most amazing things I've ever seen in my entire life. Yeah, I mean, that was just an amazing thing to see. Yeah, and I bet you he wants to top it. I'm sure he's like high

or still. Yeah. And do you remember the guy who did that in like the like nineteen sixty or the

late fifties. Oh, he did it like in this exposed weather balloon wearing like a high altitude a halo mask and air supply and everything, and you've seen footage of it, yes, but he ended up being like the whole program director for Felix baum Gardner's jump, Like he tapped him because he's the only other guy who's done anything like that, and this guy did it in like the eight fifties, I think, so he was literally the only person he could say, what's it? Like? Manly? He said, it sucks

and it's awesome. Apparently he had like a hole in his glove or something like that that they had he told them back on the ground what was going on, they would have called off the mission. And no, the other guy and he just didn't tell him. So that's how Felix bond Gardner works. Alright, Ejection Seats, you've got anything else? I don't have anything else. Yeah, that one was really cool. I thought, Yeah, very complex thing going on very quickly, and watch that super slow mo and

then it shows it in regular time. It's pretty neat. Okay, So since we don't have anything else, um, we would advise you to go onto the how Stuff Works website and check out ejection Seats. Type that into the search bar, and since I said search bar, it is time for listener mail. Yeah, I'm gonna call this b FF. Hey, guys, I've been listening for about six months and catching up on most of your old shows. In that time. I was introduced to your podcast by my best since sixth

grade friend, who was also a serious fan. I admit that it took me a few episodes to warm to your podcast, and now I feel a bit cheapish for ever doubting my friends recommendation. Not only is she one of the smartest people I've ever met, She's one of my oldest friends. It knows me better than anyone. We have a long history of directing each other to many fabulous and geekye pursuits, but stuff you should know, maybe the best of them all. And I have to say,

stiff competition. You're up against Tolkin, the X Files, Star Trek, epic rat battles of History, Dune. She says, we talk all of those. Wow, I mean I see the rat battles, sure, Dune maybe, but tolkan X Files Star Trek. Although I don't like Star Trek, you don't like Start check the movie, the TV shows, none of it. People are gonna be shocked. I've never seen a single Star Trek episode in my life. I think I did when I was a kid. Now, I'll bet I would like it as an adult now.

And I saw the Wrath of con Yeah, I saw that finally. That was good. And then I saw the the first of the new ones, but not the one that just came out. I saw the one that just came out. It's pretty good. Yeah, I mean, I'll get into it. It's just not my universe. I'm Star Wars guy. Not that you can't be, you know, get over this this obstacle, this arbitrary and totally unnecessary wall between people who like Star Trek and Star Wars. Uh. It's it's

not that I think there should be a wall. I just never got into Star Trek as long as it's you're not hating on Star trekah, No, of course, not ak trick. All right, this has been like kind of a geeky episode, have you noticed? Sure? Back to the email from Catherine. A couple of months ago, my friend came to visit for a weekend and we were discussing the podcast. Both made similar comments about why enjoyed it

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interaction with real friends isn't possible. So thanks for being such wonderful imaginary stand in slash other appropriate adjective friends, and keep up a good work explaining like the universe and everything. Best Catherine with the k R y N, Well, thanks a lot. And she didn't say what her friend's name was with I thought it was quite sounds like a pretty bad friend, So Catherine's friend, hats off to you as well. Thanks for the support. Yeah, thanks for

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