How Space Stations Work

Steve Rule. We were just talking about Steve Rule and that was very brulesque, brulesque. Not brulesque, right, brulesque brulesque. You're saying you we should do a movie. I'm surprised to I could watch a continuous loop of brules Rules over and over and over, and people thought, you're don't be done. Was an homage to that which omas are rip off depending and it was well, it was it was neither, but it it was reminiscent of it in

good ways. But I don't think that that meant that ripped it off, or that you were paying tribute to It's definitely not intentional. It was just, you know, two two great things that go great together. Can't there be both? Like ESA scuts, Yeah, they go great with kit cats. Oh man, they'd be good. Just take two full kit cats and put two ESA's cups in the middle like a sandwich. I think you just came up with something

the news more the reci cat, Um chuckers. Yes. Have you ever looked to the sky at night, seen some stars flying by and thought, why don't we live up there? Uh? Sure? Have you ever seen the I S S cruising? No? I used to, Um, apparently you can. I used, Yes, I used to get either text or emails. I can't remember that. Would you just put in your your zip code and UM it sends you texts alerts when the I S S is going to be flying overhead. I thought you're gonna say one of the lead astronauts would

just text you be like, h are you doing? We're over your house right now. But I mean, basically it's not from the astronaut, but it's the same thing. It's saying, like, look up in this direction at this time and you you should be able to see the I S S pretty neat. Yeah. I don't think we actually ever went out and looked at it, because it was always at like three in the morning or something like that. Yeah,

this really like thrills me to no end. Once I started looking into this, like I don't I never paid a lot of attention, and it really just dawned on me, like people are living in outer space continuous full time. The International Space Station has been continuously inhabited since it was launched. Yeah. In fact, they just took they're one hundred thousand orbit of Earth. That's really neat in May of this year and Expedition forty seven began in Mark.

That's so cool, man, And like we just it's like you were saying, you you don't really stop and think about it, But we're living in space now. Humanity is extended at least into Earth's or of it, right, that's where we're living, um, And we just kind of seemed

to take that for granted. But that wasn't always the cases actually, And I think the reason why we do kind of take it for granted is because the conception of living in space that we're at right now is remedial compared to where everyone expected it to be in like the mid seventies, when the idea of space colonization was at its peak. I mean NASA Aims Research Center was conducting summer studies is what they were called, where they would just get the public really jazzed about living

in space. Um. And the best you can say, or the least you can say, is that it bore some pretty awesome artists surrenderings and space colonies will look like It seemed like every other issue of Popular Science was just some cool new uh pick of like, you know, one day we're gonna be living out here, right exactly, but the one day seemed a lot closer than than

it does now right. Um. But at the at the most you can say that that space colony fever that was going on in the seventies definitely laid the groundwork paved the way for where we are now, which is living in space. We just don't have like Stanley Kubrick esque space hotels that are big rotating wheels at the moment. It doesn't mean we're not going to. It just didn't happen as fast as everybody thought it was going to. And I was trying to figure out why, and apparently

it's because of the Shuttle program. Like the these the space colony fever was based on the idea that launching the Space Shuttle was going to be way cheaper than launching any of the rockets have been previously. That didn't pan out to be the case, and that there would be something like, um, it's gonna be word like at least sixty launches a year, which is which didn't pan

out to be the case either. But they thought that, yeah, it was just gonna we're gonna be going back and forth to space for like next to nothing all the time, and that we would be colonizing space pretty quickly. That didn't pan out. Um. The Space Shuttle program didn't didn't pan out to be that as cheap or as frequent, um.

And so this dream of space colony or this enthusiasm for space colonization was kind of lost, But luckily it wasn't lost by the actual engineers who were in charge of putting people in space and figuring out how to live in space. And that whole idea is probably still coming, it's just a little further down the road. Yeah, And there were there are many, many, many, hundreds and hundreds of people that helped make this reality over the years.

But a lot of this can be laid at the feet of Mr. Verna von Braun, who was the architect of the US space program, and he was the big champion of space stations early on, like in a real viable way. Well, he was like the Carl Sagan of his day. He realized that he had a quote he said that we can publish scientific papers and treatises till health freezes over. But if we don't get the attention of the taxpayer, we're going We're not going anywhere. And how do you do that? You start putting people in

the moon and start building space stations. Well, even even more basic than that, he started he wrote like popular articles and popular magazines to get the public's imagination prime for that kind of thing. Yeah, and his idea was it was it was not just like, hey, look at a neat thing we can do. It's you know, you have an Antarctic outpost. You have back in the old days, he had an outwest outpost. He was like, we need an outpost. We need a place where people can live

and work and as their base station. Essentially, sure, space is a frontier, but you watch the star trek knows that the final frontier, right, Well, that's what we think, that's what we thought back then. I'm sure there's other frontiers ner dimensions to explore that kind of thing. Right. Uh, well, let's just talk about why what What are some of

the reasons we should do this. Um you mentioned um just capturing the public, and it certainly will would do a lot to rally people around spending funds on you know, space travel, NASA allocating funds towards this kind of thing, right, you mean space tourism. No, no, no, not space tourism. But just initially, you know, they needed the support of the popular American opinion, right, which is why Von Brown said, I'm gonna like reach out to the public directly through

Collier's magazine. He did a three part he hosted a three part show UM on like the Wonderful World of Disney about living in space and we really got people jazzed about this back in the fifties. Then it peaked

again in the seventies. Like I was saying, yeah, but one of the big reasons that you would want to have a working space station is, um, aside from the convenience of you know, having a having it up there and not having to go back and forth every time you want to do something, is to thinks are different up there, and you can do different things without gravity that you can't do here on Earth, like research. Yeah,

like remarkable things. So it turns out gravity has a weird effect on crystals in the way they form, flaws them like inevitably. Um. But if you're out there in micro gravity, there are far fewer flaws, and the crystals tend to form more perfectly. So you can do things like make really good semiconductors right for microchips. Um. You can also crystallize drugs better to make them more potent.

You can really knock your socks off. So research up there that can make things better here, right a point, not just research, but figure out how to do it there, and then build on that by building a manufacturing facility for semiconductors out in space and then bring them back to Earth and be like, watch how fast this baby goes. Another thing that uh, no gravity or microgravity does is it makes flames. Um, you know flames here on Earth with our stupid gravity pulling it in every direction, makes

a flame very unsteady and unpredictable. Makes studying combustion more difficult. Remember when we talked about fire. Yeah, fire and space is very consistent and perfect. It's around. Yeah, it's so cool. So you could you could potentially with uh, with a perfect flame like that, that perfect flame that's got to be a song. Eternal flame is what you're thinking of. No, I'm saying perfect flame. Now you're thinking of eternal flame

such a Josh is m It's one of my favorites. Uh. Micro gravity, though, you can have that eternal flame that is perfect and round and uh, you can study combustion in a more pure fashion, and you could build a better furnace maybe or find out how to reduce air pollution by making things more efficient. That's just like two things that you could do in space. I'm sure there are a thousand things we could list. Um. And as a matter of fact, some of the early ideas for

space stations were these. There were concepts that were that used like moon mined minerals and materials and assembled in space so that you didn't have to launch them from Earth. So this whole idea of like creating things in space was even used to form the basis of these places where we would actually live while we were doing this stuff.

It's pretty cool. Yeah, it also offers a unique perspective on the Earth, if we're talking about landforms and oceans, your atmosphere, uh speaking of which they can take uh much better pictures looking in the other direction into deep space because they don't have that pesky atmosphere in the way, right, So lots of great reasons to be up there, um, not the least of which is something you mentioned earlier, space tourism, which is going to happen at some point, right,

Like people are looking into who is this one company? Um Galactic Suite. Yeah, they're they're still at it. Well, another that I saw there still says they're planning on launching in two thousand twelve. Oh, I thought that they thought they were still kind of I mean obviously not on that timeline. Somebody's still paying for the domain, but it still says like, um, they're gonna be They're gonna head for the star the stars in two thousand twelve.

And then I found another Russian one that was looked pretty promising, but their site apparently was not updated since two thousand ten. But um, a company called Bigelow Industries very recently had SpaceX ferry capsule up to the I S S. It was an inflatable capsule that was a habitat module that was meant to be a prototype for a space hotel and they couldn't get it inflated. It

was in Uh, they just aborted the mission. But um, like people are still working on the concept of of space tourism like today, well, I know, the Galactic Suite said, um, they're like, we we think it will cost a four million dollars for a weekend stay, and our data suggests that there are about forty people in the world that

can and will pay for this. So um, maybe maybe their their site hasn't been updated because they got scared with the end of the world two thousand twelve things and while they were hiding in a cave somewhere, somebody played a prank on them and they're still too scared to come out and update the site. Maybe well Richard Branson, you know, he's trying to fly people into space. Still. Yeah. I looked at that. I was like, wait a minute,

does this Alaskan Airlines merger? Did that kill Virgin Galactic? And apparently not, It was just Virgin America that that Alaskan Airlines took over. Apparently in a hostile takeover Um, but Virgin Galactics still at it. Okay, Well that's good. I guess if you're loaded and want to ride into space. Yeah, if you're Ashton Couture, they were on the list, right, Sure they have disposable income. Sure, send the cooch up there.

All right, either one, I feel like I should take a break and regroup and then we'll start talking about space stations past. I'll take one with you, all right, let's talk about the first one, josh. Uh. We had a great episode on the space Race. It was pretty much a two I love that to nation race between the US and the Soviet Union, and they beat us in a lot of ways as far as first to

the punch Man. They really did. You know, they don't get enough credit around these parts for the stuff that they did as far as space goes, because they definitely did beat us in a lot of ways, like we beat them to the moon basically, Yeah, which we pointed out in our show really got us going, sure and led to our advancements. Yeah. But also what was it? Um, there was another show we did recently, Sputnik led to

Super Bowls. But do you remember we were talking about the Super Bowl In the Super Bowl episode how Sputnik like made America, post war America wake up and be like, hey, stuff being coddled in in lazy. We need to get back to innovation. Yeah, innovating again. And and it was spot Nick that did that. Yeah that's right. Um, nothing like the threat of Communist Russia or Soviet Union to get people going we're being left behind. Um. So back then they were the Soviet Union and they were the first,

as we said with the saliott one station. Uh one? Do they have people living in space? Yeah? The year I was born. It's crazy. And it was actually a combination of a couple of different system one Mas and the soyas The Almas was a military system and the soyas Is was the actual spacecraft that ferried people to and fro. They're still using that thing, so American Astro not to get to the I S s is on Soya's um rockets. Yeah, what what number they had? I wonder? Oh,

who knows? Who knows? A lot? A lot they launched them a lot from the Kazakhstan. I think very nice. Uh uhtt long um had three main compartments. Um, your your standard compartments, which are like dining in recreation, food and water storage. You gotta have your toilet exercise equipment, and then your science e stuff. Yeah, that's sciences stuff.

That's a big deal because not only are they looking at how to make crystals better, they're also studying, um, the effects of micro gravity on the human body, which we're still getting a handle lot. Yeah, we should do an entire episode on how space affects your body. Okay, I think that would be like, I think I got three or four episode ideas of this one article. Well, yeah,

we should do one just on the I S S too. Um. But well, just kind of briefly, one of the things that they found so far about living in space is that your bone mineral density decreases by one percent a month, which you're like one percent there's still left he cares here on Earth. If you're in a senior adult you lose about one percent of bone mass a year. So that's pretty significant. And another thing that they found out

was that the living in microgravity. When you're here on Earth, your fluids and blood and stuff tend to accumulate in your lower extremities, right Uh, in microgravity, it tends to accumulate up in your upper body and your upper chest and in your head and your brains, like, oh, I'm

I'm bathed in this stuff. I need to shut down production on fluids, including blood, so that when astronauts get back on Earth, they tend to be fainty because they don't have enough blood for a while until their bodies like, WHOA, something weird just happened. I need to start making blood. And they say, I'm fainting because of space. Somebody give me some tang My bloodcher is low. Uh. The other thing they found out was in space, no one can

hear you scream. Yeah, they try it fifteen after every hour, all the astronauts scream as loud as they can and nobody can hear him. And that, of course, was the famous tagline from the first Alien movie. Oh really, yeah, I remember seeing the ad with the big egg space No can you scream? I know. I was just though, that's terrifying. I'm gonna watch it. Uh. Oh. One other

thing that they're learning about affects and gravity. So Scott Kelly, the astronaut who famously just spent a year on the I S s um he has a twin who's also an astronaut, leave his name is Mike, and um, Mike has been studied here on Earth. You gotta slit those guys up over the same over the same year that Scott has, and now they're comparing Apparently Scott came down and he was like an inch or too shorter than

his identical twin. That was just one thing, But they're they're examining them on a genetic level to see what differences of have happened, so you can get a better handle on what living in gravity does to the human body. He said, I'm shorter and more fainty for starters. He just felt dead away and they just slapped his face and poured tang down his throat. Well, I think what's lost on a lot of people is that these are real. I mean, human experimentation is going on, and who knows

what the long term effect is going to be. These people are really like sacrificing potentially, you know right, I mean not just being away from family and stuff, but who knows, faint he might turn into something really bad. Well, not only that, they're also exposed to solar radiation and just space radiation that the Earth's atmosphere protects us from. They're exposed to it, and um, apparently there's a huge possibility of their lifetime risk of cancer just goes through

the roof from moving out there. So yeah, there's a lot of questions we have that it's good that we're not all just living out in space because we can. We got a lot of stuff to figure out beforehand. Heroes, sir, That's what I say. So uh, the Sayas ten crew um for that very first uh Saliott space station that Russia had. They were they were supposed to live up there, but they couldn't dock correctly, so they could never enter the space station, so they never could even get in,

big big disappointment. They just hung their heads and put in reverse in the little modulant. So the Saya's eleven crew actually successfully lived there for twenty four days in which is remarkable, but very sadly they all perished upon re entry coming back to Earth. Yeah, there um capsule depressurized and they there capsule at the time wasn't designed for them to wear suits, so they um, they were all asphyxiated just like died instantly, right pretty much. Yeah,

they would have like lost consciousness almost immediately. So after the eleven soy is eleven they launched a different space station altogether, the Sliot two. That one didn't even get up into orbit, so they were like, uh yet uh went through three, four and five h and pretty quick succession, um and each one basically they got better at getting people to and from and they could stay up there

longer and longer. Yeah. I think the last one was launched in two and it was up there until like nine two or ninety four, and they actually used it as like um, they they when they launched the Mirror, which we'll talk about and I think nineteen ninety six, so I guess it was up there then. They were going back and forth between Soliott seven and the Mirror. I guess probably going like, oh we can we can use this vodka over here. You gotta go get it from Salute and take it over to the Mirror. So

it was up there for a while. They got there, they figured it out and one of the big differences between the early Solutes, Chuck in the later ones was that there was a docking a secondary docking module. Yeah. The first one's only had one parking space essentially, right, and so you had the parking space for the crew that was there, and if they needed supplies, well t s. But if you had a second docking port then you can use um. Well, they used an unmanned ship called

Progress two ferry supplies from Earth to the Salute stations. Yeah. I'm surprised that it took them up to the Salute six to realize they needed another parking space. Yeah, because you know you're gonna forget something right, you left the iron on home. We're stuck up here. No one can visit us. Well, like you said that, they figured it out,

which is wonderful. Uh. And that all led to the United States in nineteen seventy three launching their very famous guy Lab one space station, which says the best patch of any NASA related space based anything, Skylab one is the best. Yeah, sky Lab was awesome, but it um it got off on a very bad start, on a bad foot because upon launch, like just getting it out there,

it had these two main solar panels. One of them was completely ripped off, the other one didn't extend out like it should have, and so this thing almost burned up completely initially because it had very little power and they couldn't control the heat, right, it couldn't cool it the interior the capsule went up to like a hundred and twenty six. So they said, hey, guys, we need you to go up there and fix this. And they actually there were three different crews that were that were

sent to Skylab on Apollo capsules and um. The Skylab module itself was actually designed roughly initially by Warner von braun Um out of a Saturn five moon rocket. The third stage of it became sky Lab, and I think at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, not the one at Dullest, but the the one that's in like the like around the mall, and I think it has a replica of Skylab you can walk through. Oh cool, which is so awesome, dude, I would love to do that.

But so the three crews that got sent up there, chuck. They managed to kind of like put Skylight back together with duck tape and bubblegum. Yeah, that first one, Skylab two. They just sent them up a week and a half after the fit, well not fail lunch, but problematic launch. And it's so funny how some of this NASA stuff is so simple. They said, go up there and essentially take this big sunshade like it looks like an umbrella

and pop it open to cool it down. And then see that that solar panel that didn't stretch out far enough, stretch it out, and see that stretch it out. And they did. Uh, Commander Charles Pete, Conrad, Paul Whites, and Joseph Kerwin essentially saved sky Lab. Yeah, right off the bat, and not just then. There were again there were three crews that kind of did one after the other. They didn't overlap, UM, but they finally got the thing working. And I think the last crew spent eighty four days

in orbit. Yeah, the first one spent the next one fifty nine in the final one eighty four days in the seventies and I remember, UM, and this is a big deal, you know, this was the first time they were testing these long duration man missions UM to see, like, you know, can we go to the Moon because it takes a while to get there and back right, That was the thing, Like all the only data we had was on Moon missions, which is about a two week mission, so we didn't have any data on what happened to

people longer than that. Can we can we set up a shop there colonize the moon? Even so they called anything over two weeks a long duration spaceflight. Uh. And I remember in nineteen seventy nine. I remember being an eight year old kid, and I remember hearing about because this is you know in the seventies when families would sit around and watch the news and it's like how

you got all your information? And I remember sitting around and hearing that sky Lab is coming back down to Earth in a unpredictable way, and I remember being sort of scared and thinking like, wow, this is a little weird and kind of a big deal. Yeah, Like even little eight year old Chuck knew like something didn't seem quite right. There are a lot of people who are really anxious about it because NASA very famously said that, um,

everybody calmed down. There's there's a one in one hundred and fifty two chants that somebody will be killed by sky Lab. Well, yeah, they like one in one fifty two. You want to hear numbers from NASA like one in a million or one in a billion, not one in a hundred and fifty two. You're like, I know two

hundred people, I know a hundred and fifty three people. Uh. It also forced NASSA to admit UM, we were so excited about getting this thing up there, we didn't really think a lot about how to control its descent UM, because that was essentially the story. They They were like, we can't, we don't really know how to guide this thing back down. They said it would quote cost too much to have UM designed in a way to bring it down safely. Yeah, and I think they were there

in a hurry. Well. Also, the problem is they thought that it would just it's orbit would decay a little bit and then fall into basically that orbit of space chunk circling the Earth and would just stay there indefinitely. But it's orbit decayed more than expected because there was solar flare activity that NASA hadn't anticipated, and so all of a sudden, sky Labs on a collision course with Earth. NASA saying it'll it'll probably enter somewhere over this thousand

kilometer stretch of Earth that includes Australia. So heads up Australia and UM. There were lots of like sky Lab parties, UM. Because it's America in the seventies, people went like Skylab crazy disco parties UM, and the San Francisco Examiner actually UM offered ten thousand dollars to anybody who could bring in a legitimate piece of sky Lab within seventy two hours of it crashing. And some kid actually collected Yeah in Australian. Yeah, he got on a plane. He had

a little piece of sky Lab. Because where to end up crashing and the esperance Australia when you're perth, Yeah, I mean mostly in the ocean. Yeah, but they did get a pretty good amount of debris in Australia. Yeah, like the sizeable parts. But it's Australia. They're tough, they're like everything tries to kill us. You're silly. Space Station can't do it right. So yeah, this kid flew over

in San Francisco and said here sky Lab. His name was Stanthorpe and he was seventeen, and like, without even thinking twice about it, he grabbed it, hopped on a plane and went to San Francisco, like you said, and they examined or paid him, which I did the West Aig inflation calculator. That's about thirty three thou dollars in today's money. Not bad, No, I'd do that, hop on a plane for that. That's a salary of as your teacher,

right badly. Yeah. Uh, you can also buy pieces of sky Lab today if you've got some dough and an Internet connection. Alleged pieces of sky Lab. Well, sure, just like anything, it should be uh not verified, what do

you call it? Verified? Authenticated? Supposedly NASA's instead of exerting its domain over pieces of sky Lab, the debris that was found in saying you give a back that some people sent their pieces to NASA, NASA authenticated them and send them back mounted saying this is an official piece of sky Lab to the people who mailed it in. Good peeps, Good peeps wearing brown polyester pants up to

their chests. All right, buddy, let's take a break in um, let's go for a little jog around our gravity office, and then we'll talk about mirror and I s all right, all right. We talked about the Soviet which was the Soviet Union's big first success and some failures, but overall, I think they saw it as a success. Right And at the same time, a couple of years later, America had sky LAMB and then the Soviets said, we can do better than than what we're doing. We can do

better than anybody else. We're going to create the mirror. Yeah. And by the way, Skyla was not supposed to be permanent. No, that was never the intention, but mirror was. Was it supposed to be permanent? Yeah, okay, so were the later um soliots Okay, so the mirror definitely was meant to be a permanent one. All right. Well, the first crew cosmonauts Leonid Kasim Vladimir solely off off nice it's a

great name. Um. I think it was just those two dudes. Uh. They shuttled between the sally At seven which is being retired in mirror, and there was some like you said that, there was some cross over there, right and overlap. They had to get the vodka. Yeah, they had to get the vodka. And they spent seventy five days on the mirror and it was continually manned over the next ten years. And you know, manned and built. It's not they they build these things out there or assemble them out there. Um,

I guess we should say. But they don't just launch a space station right like ready to go. They carry pieces of it out there just like I S S. And they put them together. Although I think it was we'll see you later on. I think the Chinese launched a full space station. Of course they did. I think they did, um, but we're talking. Come on. So the Mirror had twelve twelve main parts, which we won't go over all those because we don't like to just read lists.

But you know, it's something you would expect. It was a ge whiz space station, a lot of everything, a lot of a lot of modules, living quarters, transfer compartments, docking places, had more than one parking space. They figured the old mess out. Yeah, you know, I was like, you know, we should have guests, and they did have guests.

They had American guests actually, which was pretty cool. It wasn't until the nineties after the Soviet Union dissolved, and actually there was a cosmonaut aboard Mirror when the Soviet Union dissolved in December. Um. His name was Sergey Kirkov Keev Kirkakv, it started to say, and you would think, yeah, uh, And he was known as the last Soviet citizen because apparently being in space made him immune from the dissolving

in the Soviet Union. Oh really yeah, not really, but that's what everybody said about him, whether he liked it or not. Well, the Mirror, they had some problems kind of later in its life. There was a fire one year uh and then that pro the supply ship was called the Progress I think you mentioned. It actually crashed into the mirror trying to park and it's a little

parking space, which damaged it. And at that point they said, you know what, Uh, we should just make this thing space junk, even though you thought it was going to be permanent. Uh. The US is talking about this I. S. S Station. They want us to come help them with uh. And there was a big campaign to keep the Mirror alive called Keep Mirror Alive uh. And private corporation stepped in and said, no, let us take it over. Let's privatize this thing. And they said, yet, I'm not gonna

do it. Yeah, We're not gonna just hand over space station. Okay, No, we're gonna crash it into the Earth. If I can't have you, no one can't. Pretty much, so um, they had a little bit uh more advanced capabilities in Skylab had as far as directionally um. And in February two thousand one, it uh. They slowed those engines down and it re entered the atmosphere. On March two one burned up broke up and again, uh, tried to kill Australia. I know, Australia is like, what the eight Why is

everyone trying to land their space junk on us? But it was about a thousand miles east of Australia in the ocean. Um has anyone found these things? That's what I was wondering, mire at the bottom of the ocean. I'm sure somebody's found some parts of it. Pretty neat. Yeah, talk about like space records at bottom the ocean. That's a movie. Who was it? Was it Jeff Bezos that went and got like, uh one of the Apollo really stages that had been scuttled in the ocean recently? Probably?

I think it was yep Asos or James Cameron. We talked about him too much though. Uh So that brings us to I S S. Ronald Reagan. I said, you know what, I was about to do a Reagan, but I thought the better. I think everybody wants to hear your Reagan. I don't want to do it. He said, let's let's he said, hey, man, let's get an A S. S station going. Is that good? We'll call it the International Space Station and it's gonna be super expensive, so

we need some help. Um, let's partner up with with fourteen other countries, Canada, Japan, Brazil and then the European Space Agency, which is the UK, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Netherlands, did Mark, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden. And he said, as a good faith measure, let's invite the Soviets. M hm, I don't know if that was all Russia by then,

Oh yeah, you're right, Yeah, you're right. And the Russian said, sure, why not, we don't doing anything and not just being friendly, but you know, they they were probably the second leading uh uh well, I don't know by that point there were other players in space science. Yeah, but they were still pretty highly regarded yeah big time. Yeah, yeah, probably

more than they get credit for again over here. So they started putting the I S S in orbit, and um, the first people showed up from it was launched for They were launched from Russia in two thousand and they spent about five months. They're like basically getting everything up and running, taking um all of the uh the little descant packets out of everything, like they do not eat things that keep stuff dry silica jel yeah, um, and um,

pulling off all of the cellophane from everything. Well they left it on the lamp shades, which I thought was tasteless. It's shiny. Yeah. Um, so they've been living up there. Like I said, they just launched the one I'm sorry, but one orbit of Earth and um, we do one on the I S. But I did look a little

bit into their day to day life. Um. They work about ten hours a day, uh money through Friday, about half that on a Saturday, and then they take Sunday off and then the rest of the time is you know, relaxation, emailing your family, hanging out pool side, face timing. Um. They have sixteen sunrises and sunsets today, which is decidedly weird on your body. So they generally just keep those windows closed so they can get on a reg sketch. And um, apparently the food isn't great. They don't love

the food. Um, and they have to overspice it. I didn't know that one of the things space does is reduce your sense of taste. I've heard that in microgravity tastes like styrofun. Yeah, so apparently they like really over everything to try and make it palatable. Um, and they have to be really careful of crumbs because oh yeah, remember Homer Simpson, do you remember one of the great all time scenes when you opened the bag of chips in space? Great great scene. Um, and then pooping and

pp I gotta go somewhere. They have two toilets, only two and um oh there's usually only three or four people up there. There's six right now? Yeah, with two toilets. Yeah, how many hair dryers? Who knows? They keep their hair short though, because because there's very few hair dryers in space. Well, there's no showers. I mean they can wash themselves. They have like water jets, but not the same. Yeah, not the same, man. I'll bet that first shower when they

get back down on Earth feels so good. Yeah. But there's two toilets. They use a fan driven suction system and you have to latch yourself to the toilet. Oh yeah for that too. And there are restraining bars to ensure there's a good seal, because you know what happens if there's not a good seal and microgravity, things will float away. Uh. And then there's a lever that they hit a suction whole slides open and a big stream

of air carries the waste away. The solids are collected actually into an aluminum container and the they are then transferred to the Progress to take away the little shuttle ship like, here's all our poop. Progress is like, yeah, I wonder what they calls progress. And then the pp UH is evacuated by a hose that's attached to the front of the toilet. Uh they do. I was getting there,

but sure, I'm sorry. Now it's recycled. It's a recovery system and they eventually recycle it back into drinking waters. UM and the toilets UH for PPR anatomically correct. They have these funnel adapters. So men and women have different adapters because you know, they have different parts. Yes they do, they do have different parts that like a second grader, I just you don't think about this stuff. Like that's the first thing I thought. I was like, oh, man,

how they eat, how they poop? But what do they watch movies? Do they watch movies? Yeah? That the they just sit back. I think it was the Atlantic had a great photos spread of photos that this new mission is taking of uh space and the Earth and you know, all that stuff. But then pictures on board and um one of them they were that this huge flat screen watching The Revenant watching the Revenue. Huh, that's what it looked like. I could see the two guys on a horse.

It was hard to tell because it was in the background, but I think it was a Revenant that are cloudy with the chance of meat pall. Probably not the movie Gravity. So yeah, no, they were probably like that could never happen. When Neil Degrass Tyson lost his mo about gravity, hey he's your pal, he went on a Twitter ran about it. Um, then then we should talk about the Chinese, because I think it's been unfair not to. The Chinese launched something

called Tangong one UM back in two thousand three. They became the third nation on the planet to launch human into space UM and they launched their space There's space station in two thousand eleven, and there's been two UM two missions to to the space station. I think it's it's it's no longer active, but it's still up there. But the Chinese admitted this year that they've lost contact with the space station. It's no longer under their control, so it may end up coming back down to Earth

and we'll have a new Skylab party for it. But the um. The two missions included China's first two women astronauts, Liu Yang and Wang Yaping, and um, they were in two twelve and two thousand thirteen, and they did I mean, they lived in space for a while, just like everybody else had. But the Chinese don't participate in the I S S. I don't know if they've not been invited or if they decline an invitation, but they're doing their own parallel thing, UM, which I would get the impression

that's making people nervous. Interesting. Well, I know it's important that they've had uh, women astronauts, female astronauts on the I S S because you know, you you need to see what space does to them. And I just wonder if they're gonna like get to the point where like, well we need to if we really want to call an ize space, we need to see what happens when a baby is up there, or give birth in outer space, or have a ten year old or a seventy five year old man a ten year old aboard a space

station for like a year. Yeah, oh man, no, thank you. Um. There's one other thing I wanted to mention, Chuck. There's the there's talk about out UM saving a lot a lot of money with the space station by putting it what's called lagrange point And there's La grange point, L four and L five and they are these um, these little the spots between the Earth and the Moon to where the gravity between the Earth and the Moon is counterbalanced.

So all it does is just go in orbit around the Earth and the Moon and it will stay in that orbit forever because gravity is not pulling on it one way or the other, so you don't have to use fuel to keep it in that orbit forever. Right, And this is actually like an early idea that that I think Arthur C. Clark was the first to put it out there in nineteen one. And these lagrange points are like orbits like ninety miles across. You can put a bunch of space stations in these things and just

leave them out there. And there's actually something called the L five Society that came about UM that is all about this kind of thing. Crazy. Well, they they plan to disband on a space station in the L five band at some point in the future when they all come together there for the first time. Sound wonderful. Yeah, one more thing. Valerie Polyakov, record holder right, four hundred and thirty eight days he did aboard mirror in n and he had done like two d and thirty eight

days before then. Crazy. I bet he's super fainty, you know, all the time he's rushing though he can take it. Do you got anything else? I got nothing else? All right, Well, let's say for space stations for now. If you want to learn more about him, you can type those words in the search part how stuff works. And uh, since I said search parts, time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this um oh Chuck's graduation post. So I put out a post about my nephew graduating high school. Oh yeah,

did he really is? Grad way from high school? And also the same year, my niece Reagan graduated college Premiorwood College, moving to New York City like a good girl, and my other niece Abby moved on matriculated into high school

from middle school. Nothing better than matriculation, nothing better. So I went to know his graduation and it really like affected me much more than I thought it would, because I haven't been to a graduation since my own, like, and I didn't walk into college one, so I literally have not been to a ceremony and it just stirred up all these amazing feelings. No, it was really really neat just to hear these kids and their speeches, and and I put a Facebook post. I was like, you

know what, we're great, don't people. Millennials get a lot of crap, But like, talked to a seventeen year old for a little while, who's doing it right and and we're headed in the right direction like this very empathetic, carrying, like forward thinking generation. So it was it was really neat things. So I just congratulations to all the graduates, especially um, well, if you're listening, then I guess you

are a listener. But all the stuff you should know, listeners that have been with us, like throughout high school, we appreciate. Um. A girl named Hannah, I want to say, rode in and asked for any advice for graduation. That's right, and she mentioned you in this speech. Yeah yeah, so pretty to her as well. Pretty great stuff. But you're right, all stuff you should know listeners who are graduating or matriculating. Congratulation, Yes,

very big accomplishment. So this from Brandy and Kansas. Hey, guys, want to thank you so much for that Facebook post about now it's graduation. How you have so much hope for the up and coming generation. I'm really excited about the world changers coming up and so rare to hear someone come out and say how awesome they are on that thread. Have you considered it doing a show on

Kids Today, Fallacy. That's a well documented phenomenon where each generation downplays the bad things our own generation didn't believe. The ones that follow are lazy, spoiled, entitled. Uh. There are quotes literally dating back two thousands of years ago of this very thing. Uh. And the music stinks too. I'm sure that's the other part of that. Yeah, yeah, oh no, no, no, yeah, the music today stinks our

rights better. I would love to hear you explain this nonsense, how people stop being so crotchety and instead recognize their role in helping to shape the future generations. Second request, come to Kansas. You guys make fun of us enough and it's time to pace a visit. We topped some lists for the most beautiful sunsets and landscapes and also have cities on national lists the places to Live. It takes more than a beautiful sunset to get us to

do a live show. Analystic goals. We make fun of Kansas because of our good friend to Aaron Cooper and our buddy Isaac McNary is really the two people that we're targeting when we make fun of Kansas and the governor, And it's all out of love because Isaaca and Aaron are great. And we met Aaron at our show in Denver and he's just as nice and cool as I

thought he was gonna be. And we met our pal Tyler Murphy too, and met Tyler and his friends Timothy and Sarah, and our friend Jane Jenabel was in the audience, and our old buddy Greg Storkin was in the audience. It was something else. Yeah, Denver was like these some of our oldest, oldest fans were in attendance, so that

was wonderful. Anyway, we're not coming to Kansas. Thanks for a great show, guys, only have a few episodes left to go from got up and then I will enter the pit of despair, so at least satisfy one of my requests who can help pull me out? And as Brandy in Manhattan, Kansas, thank you Brandy. Good luck in the pit of despair. Uh, if you want to get in touch of this. You can hang out with us on social media. We're on Instagram and Twitter, s y s K podcast and on Facebook at Facebook dot com

slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com and as always, joined us at our him on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff Works dot com