Selects: How Space Stations Work

Hello friends, this is Josh with this week's select Our June twenty sixteen episode on Space Stations. I like to think of it as a far out look at living in space. I hope you enjoy it thoroughly.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry. This is Stuff you should Know.

Okay, you sounded like Steve Rule. We were just talking about Steve Rule, and that was very Brulesque, brew Esque, not burlesque.

All right, brewlesu brew Less. You're saying you should do a movie. I'm surprised you have.

I could watch a continuous loop of brules Rules over and over and over. Yeah, and people thought, you don't be Dune was an homage to that, which.

Or omasure a ripoff, depending on who's well it was.

It was neither, but it it was reminiscent of it in good ways. But I don't think that that meant it ripped it off, or that you were paying tribute to.

It's definitely not intentional. It was just, you know, two great sidental.

Two great things that go great together.

Sure, why can't there be both.

Like Reese's cups.

Yeah, they go great with kit cats.

Oh man, they'd be good. Sure, just take two full kit cats and put two Reese's cups in the middle like a sandwich.

Uh huh. I think you just came up with something the news more the rec cat 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 ISS cruising?

No? I used to. Apparently you can. I used, Yes, I used to get either text or emails. I can't remember that. Would you just put it in your zip code and it sends you texts alerts when the ISS is going to be flying overhead.

I thought you were going to say one of the lead astronauts would just text you be like, Josh, lo up, what 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'll you should be able to see the ISS 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 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 in nineteen ninety eight.

Yeah. In fact, they just took their one hundred thousandth orbit of Earth. That's really neat in May of this year. Expedition forty seven began in March.

That's so cool, man, And like we just it's like you were saying, you don't really stop and think about it, but we're living in space now. Yeah, humanity is extended at least into Earth's orbit, right, that's where we're living. And we just kind of seemed to take that for granted. But that wasn't always the case as 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

Yeah, it seemed like every other issue of Popular Science was just some cool new picture of like, you know, one day we're going to be living out.

Here, right exactly, but the one day seemed a lot closer than it does now, right.

Yeah.

But at the most you can say that that space calony 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. Doesn't mean we're not going to, yeh. It just didn't happen as fast as everybody thought it was going to. And I was trying to figure out why,

Was going to be like a space taxi. I remember those words, sixty.

Like at least sixty launches a year, which didn't pan out to be the case either. But they thought that, yeah, it was just 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. The Space Shuttle program didn't pan out to be that as cheap or as frequent, and so this dream of space colony or this enthusiasm for space

Yeah.

And 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 mister 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 hell freeze is 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 on the moon and start building space stations.

Well, 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 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 out west 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 a 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, new dimensions to explore. Sure, that kind of thing.

Right, Well, let's just talk about why. What are some of the reasons we should do this. You mentioned just capturing the public, and it certainly 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 going to like reach out to the public directly through Colliers magazine. He did a three part he hosted a three part show on like the Wonderful World of Disney about living in space, and we really got people jazzed about this back in the fifties. Yeah, 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, aside from the convenience of you know, having it up there and not having to go back and forth every time you want to do so, right, is things 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 and the way they form flaws them like inevitably. But if you're out there in microgravity, 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. Sure, 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. Yeah, man, and then bring them back to Earth and be like, watch how fast this baby ghess.

Another thing that no gravity or micro gravity does is it makes flames, 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 in space is very consistent and perfect.

It's around. Yeah, it's so cool.

So you could you could potentially with h with a perfect flame like that, then perfect flame that's got to be a song.

Eternal flame is what you're thinking of.

No, I'm saying perfect flaim Now you're thinking of eternal flame. Such a josh ism. That's one of my favorites. Microgravity, though, you can have that eternal flame that is perfect and round, and 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.

Right, And this is just like two things that you could do in space.

I'm sure there are a thousand things we could list, right.

And as a matter of fact, some of the early ideas for space stations were These were concepts that used like moon mined minerals and materials and assembled in space so that you didn't have to launch them from Earth. Yeah, 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, speaking of which they can take 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, not the least of which is something you mentioned earlier, space tourism, which is going to happen at some point, right, Like people are

Well, none that I saw there really still says they're planning on launching in twenty twelve.

Oh I thought that they. I thought they were still kind of I mean obviously not on that timeline, right unless they.

I mean, their site is still up, somebody's still paying for the domain. That doesn't mean but it still says like they're gonna be They're gonna head for the star the stars in twenty twelve. And then I found another Russian one that was looked pretty promising, but their site apparently was not updated since twenty ten. But a company called Bigelow Industries very recently had SpaceX Fairy capsule up

Well, I know, the Galactic Suite said, They're like, we think it'll cost four million dollars for a weekend stay, and our data suggests that there are about forty thousand people in the world that can and will pay for this.

So maybe their site hasn't been updated because they got scared with the end of the World twenty twelve thing. Maybe 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 Alaskan Airlines took over, apparently in a hostile takeover, But Virgin Galactic's still at it.

Okay, Well that's good. I guess if you're loaded and want to ride in the space.

Yeah, if you're Ashton Coucher or Jada Perry.

They were on the list, right, Sure they have disposable income. Sure, and the couch up there, the coach either one. I feel like I should take a break and regroup and then we'll start talking about Space Station's past.

I'll take one with you, all right, let's.

Talk about the first one, Josh. We had a great episode on the space race. It was pretty much a two love that one, a two 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. Sure, like we beat them to the moon basically.

Yeah, which we pointed out, and our show really got us going, sure and led to our advancements.

Yeah. But also what was it There was another show we did recently, Sputnik led to super Balls. 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, stop being coddled and lazy.

Yeah, we need to get back to innovation.

Yeah, innovating again. And it was Sputnik that did that. Yeah, that's right.

Nothing like the threat of Communist Russia or Soviet Union to get people going.

We're being left behind.

So back then they were the Soviet Union, and they were the first, as we said with the Saliot one station nineteen seventy one. Dude, they had people living in space. Yeah, the year I was born. It's crazy, yep. And it was actually a combination of a couple of a different system won the Almas and the Soyas. The Almas was a military system and the Soyas was the actual spacecraft that varied people to and fro.

They're still using that things. How American astronauts to get to the iss is on Soyu's rockets?

Oh really?

Yeah?

What number they had?

I wonder? Oh who knows? Yeah, who knows? A lot? They launched them a lot from the Kazakhstan.

I think, Oh really, h huh, very nice.

So yet one on.

Forty ft long had three main compartments, your standard compartments, which are like dining in recreation, food and water storage. You gotta have your toilet exercise equipment, and then your sciencey stuff.

Yeah, that's science the stuff. That's a big deal, sure, because not only are they looking at how to make crystals better, they're also studying the effects of microgravity 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 out of this one article.

Well, yeah, we should do one just on the ISS too, I think so. But well, just kind of briefly, one of the things that they've found so far about living in space is that your bone mineral density decreases by one percent a month, which are like one percent, there's still ninety nine percent left, who cares. Yeah, right here on Earth, if you were in a senior adult, you lose about one percent of bone mass a year.

Whoa.

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 in microgravity, it tends to accumulate up in your upper body and your upper chest and in your head and your brain's like, ohh,

And they say, I'm fainty because of space.

Somebody give me some tang. My blood sugar is low.

The other thing they found out was that 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 them.

And that, of course, was a famous tagline from the first Alien movie. Oh really, Yeah, I remember seeing the ad with the big egg in space, no one can hear you scream.

I know.

I was just thought, that's terrifying.

I'm gonna watch it. Yep. Oh. One other thing that they're learning about effects and gravity. So Scott Kelly, the astronaut who famously just spent a year on the ISS. Yeah, he has a twin who's also an astronaut.

Oh, wow, I leave.

His name is Mike, and Mike has been studied here on Earth.

Yeah, I was about to say, you got to split those guys.

Up over the same over the same year that Scott has, and now they're comparing him. Apparently Scott came down and he was like an inch or two shorter than his identical twin that way. That was just one thing, but they're they're examining them on a genetic level to see what differences have happened, so you can get a better handle on what living in gravity does to the human body.

So he said, them shorter and more fainty for starters.

He just fell 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 apparently there's a huge possibility 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, is what I say. So the Soya's ten crew for that very first Saliot space station that Russia had, 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 disappointment.

Yea, they just went. They just hung their heads and put in reverse in the little module went.

P yep, that's Earth. So the Soya's eleven crew actually successfully lived there for twenty four days in nineteen seventy one, which is remarkable, but very sadly they all perished upon re entry coming back to Earth.

Yeah. They're capsule depressurized and their capsule at the time was designed for them to wear suits, so they were all asphyxiated.

Yeah, just like died instantly, right pretty much.

Yeah, Yeah, they would have like lost consciousness almost immediately.

So after the eleven, Soy's eleven, they launched a different space station altogether, the Solio two. That one didn't even get up into orbit, so they were like, ah Yit went through three, four, and five in pretty quick succession, 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 nineteen eighty two and it was up there until like nineteen ninety two or nineteen ninety four, and they actually used it as like 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 sali At seven and the Mirror. Yeah, I guess probably going like, oh we can we can use this vodka over here. You got to go get it from Solute and take it over to the Mirror. So

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 ts for them nowhere to park. But if you had a second docking port, then you can use well, they used an unmanned ship called Progress to ferry supplies from Earth to the solute stations.

Yeah, I'm surprised that it took them up to the Salute six to realize they needed another parking space, because you know.

You're gonna forget something, right, you left the iron on back home.

We're stuck up here. No one can visit us exact well, like you said, though, they figured it out, which is wonderful, and that all led to the United States in nineteen seventy three lunching their very famous Skylab one space station.

Which is the best patch of any NASA related, any space based anything. Skylab one is the best.

Yeah, Skylab was awesome, but 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 of the capsule went up to like one hundred and twenty six. Yeah, so they said, hey, guys, that's hot. We needed to go up there and fix this. And they actually there were three different crews that were sent to Skylab on Apollo capsules. Yeah, and the Skylab module itself was actually designed roughly initially by Warner von Braun out of a Saturn five moon rocket.

Yeah.

The third stage of it became Skylab, and I think at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, not the one at Dullest, but the one that's in like the like around the mall.

Yeah.

I think it has a replica of Skylight 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 duct tape and bubble gum.

Yeah, that first one, Skylab two, they just sent them up a week and a half after the fail 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 right to cool it down. And then see that solar panel that didn't stretch out far enough, stretch it out.

See that stretch it out.

And they did. Commander Charles Pete, Conrad Paul White's and Joseph Kerwin essentially saved Skylab.

Yeah, right off the bat. And not just them. There were again, there were three crews that kind of did one after the other. Oh yeah, they didn't overlap, but they finally got the thing working. And I think the last crew spent eighty four days in orbit.

Yeah, the first one spent twenty eight, the next one fifty nine. In the final one eighty four days in the seventies, and I remember, and this is a big deal, you know, this is the first time they were testing these long duration man missions 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, the only data we had was on Moon missions, which is about a two week mission. Yeah, so we didn't have any data on what happened to people longer than.

That, Yeah, can we can we set up shop there, colonize the moon.

Even so, they called anything over two weeks a long duration spaceflight.

And I remember in nineteen seventy nine, I remember being a little 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? Yeah, And I remember sitting around and hearing that Skylab is coming back down to Earth in an unpredictable way, and I remember being sort of scared and thinking like, wow, this is

There are a lot of people who were really anxious about it, because NASA very famously said that everybody calmed down, there's there's a one in one hundred and fifty two chance that somebody will be killed by Skylab.

Well, yeah, they think like one in one fifty two.

You want to hear numbers from NASA like one in a million or one in a billion, one in one hundred and fifty two.

Yeah, you're like, I know, two hundred people. I know one hundred and fifty three people. It also forced NASA to admit, we were so excited about getting this thing up there, we didn't really think a lot about how to control its descent, because that was essentially the story. 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 designed in a way to bring it down safely.

Yeah, and I think they were they were in a hurry.

Well. Also, the problem is is they thought that it would just its 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, Skylab's on a collision course with Earth. NASA saying it'll

Yeah, because it's America. In the seventies, people went like Skylab crazy disco parties.

Oh yeah. The San Francisco Examiner actually offered ten thousand dollars to anybody who could bring in a legitimate piece of sky Lab within seventy two hours of it crashing. Yeah, and some kid actually collected.

Yeah in Australian. Yeah, he got on a plane. He had a little piece of sky Lab because where'd end up crashing.

And the espernce 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. Yeah, your silly space station can't do it.

Right.

So yeah, this kid flew over in San Francisco and said here, pay up, here's a piece of sky Lab.

Yeah. His name was Stan Thornton. 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 the Examiner paid him, Yeah, which I did. The West Egg inflation calculator, Oh that's about thirty three thousand dollars in today's money. Not bad, No, I hop on a plane for that.

That's a salary of a first year teacher, right badly. Yeah, 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 not verified.

What do you call it? Verified? Authenticated?

Yeah, authentic.

Supposedly NASA's instead of exerting its domain over pieces of Skylab, the debris that was found in saying you give a back that some people sent their pieces to NASA, NASA authenticated them and sent them back mounted saying this is an official piece of Skylab. Are the people who mailed it in? Good peeps, not bad? Good peeps wearing brown polyester pants up to their chests.

All right, buddy, let's take a break and let's go for a little jog around our gravity office. Okay, then we'll talk about mirror and iss. All right, all right. We talked about the Soliet, 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 SKYLAMB and then the Soviets said, we can do better than what we're doing. We can do better than anybody else. We're going to create the mirror.

Yeah. And by the way, skylight was not supposed to be permanent. No, that was never the intention, but mirror was.

Was it supposed to be permanent mirror?

Yeah?

Okay, so were the later Soliots. Okay, so the mirror definitely was meant to be a permanent one.

All right. Well, the first crew cosmonauts Leonid Kazimr, solely off Solo y Off nice, it's a great name. I think it was just those two dudes. They shuttled between the Saliot seven, which is being retired, and Mirror, and there was some like you said, there was some crossover there, right, an overlap.

They had to get the vodka.

Yeah, they had to get the vodka right. 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 build these things out there or assemble them out there, I guess we should say. But they don't just launch a space station.

Were right, like the ready to go.

They carry pieces of it out there. Right, just like iss and they put them together.

Although I think, as we'll see later on, I think the Chinese launched a full space station.

Oh really, yeah, of course they did.

I think they did, but we're talking twenty thirteen. 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 g whiz space station. Yeah, a lot of everything.

You need stuff, a lot of modules, living quarters, transfer compartments, docking places. They had more than one parking space. They figured that old mess out. Yeah, you know, it's like, you know, we should have guests.

And they did have guests. They had American guests. Actually, they sure did, which was pretty cool. It wasn't until the nineties after the Soviet Union dissolved, and actually there was a cosmonaut a board Mirror when the Soviet Union dissolved on December twenty sixth, nineteen ninety one. His name was Sergei Kirkvkev kir Ko keV. It's harder to say

Oh really, yeah, not really.

But that's what everybody said about him, whether he liked it or not.

Well, the Mirror had some problems kind of later in its life. There was a fire one year and then 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, we should just make this thing space junk, even though you thought

Yeah, we're not gonna just hand over a space station.

Okay, No, we're going to crash it into the Earth.

Right If I can't have you, no one can't.

Pretty much, so they had a little bit more advanced capabilities in Skylab had as far as directionally and in February two thousand and one. They slowed those endinges down and it re entered the atmosphere on March twenty third, two thousand and one, burned up, broke up, and again tried to kill Australia.

I know Australia is like what the age?

I know, why is everyone trying to land their space junk on us? But it was about on AE, thousand miles east of Australia in the ocean. Has anyone found these things? That's what I was wondering.

Mirror is near at the bottom of the ocean. I'm sure somebody's found some parts of it.

Pretty neat. Yeah, talk about like space wreckage at the bottom of the ocean. That's a movie.

Who was it? Was it Jeff Bezos that went and got like one of the Apollo really stages that had been scull than the ocean recently? Probably? I think I was Jeff Bezos.

Or James Cameron. We talked about him too much though, hm. So that brings us to iss nineteen eighty four, Ronald Reagan said, you know what, I was about to do a Reagan, but I thought the better.

I think everybody wants to hear your Reagan.

No, I don't want to do it, he said, let's he said, hey, man, let's get an.

ISS station going dead on Reagan. Is that good?

Yeah, we'll call it the International Space Station. And it's going to be super expensive, so we need some help. Let's partner up with fourteen other countries, Canada, Japan, Brazil, and then the European Space Agency, which is the UK, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Netherlands and Mark, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden. And he said, as a good faith measure, let's invite the Soviets. I don't know if that was all.

Well, no, it was Russia by then.

Oh yeah, you're right, Yeah, you're right.

And the Russian said, sure, why not. Weren't doing anything.

And not just being friendly, but you know they they were probably the second leading well I don't know by that point there were other players.

Well in space science.

Yeah, but they were still pretty highly regarded.

Sure yeah, big time. Yeah, yeah, probably more than they get credit for again over here, agreed. So they started putting the ISS in orbit in nineteen ninety eight, and the first people showed up from it was launched for They were launched from Russia. Yeah, in two thousand and they spent about five months there like basically getting everything up and running man taking all of the little desecant packets out of everything, like they do not eat things that keep stuff dry.

What is that silica jel?

Yeah, yeah, and pulling off all of the cellophane from everything. Uh huh, Well they left it on the lampshades, which I thought was tasteless.

Oh well, it's shiny.

Yeah.

So they've been living up there. Like I said, they just launched the one hundred thousandth I'm sorry, the forty seventh, but one hundred thousandth orbit of Earth, and we'll do one on the iside.

I really think we should.

But I did look a little bit into their day to day life. They work about ten hours a day Monday 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, facetiming. They have sixteen sunrises and sunsets a day, which is decidedly weird on your body, so they generally just keep those windows closed so they can get on a rag skeedu and apparently the food isn't great.

Do you remember one of the great.

All time scenes when he opened the bag of chips in space? Great great scene and then pooping and peepe.

Gotta go somewhere.

They have two toilets, only two, and oh.

There's usually only three or four people up there.

Well there's six right now?

Oh six? 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.

M hmm.

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 to 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, I've heard 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. And then there's a lever that they hit, a suction hole slides open and a big

Yeah, Progress is like thanks, yeah.

I wonder what they call it progress? And then the peepee is evacuated by a hose that's attached to the front of the toilet.

Do they drink it?

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 water.

Tastes like chicken and.

The toilets for PEP are an comically 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? Do they watch movies?

Do they watch movies?

Yeah? That the they just sit back. I think it was the Atlantic had a great photo spread of photos that this new mission is taking of space and the Earth and you know all that stuff. But then pictures on board, and one of them they were had this huge flat screen watching the.

Revenant, watching the Revenue.

Huh yeah, wow, that's what it looked like.

I could see these.

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 meatball.

Probably not the movie gravity.

So yeah, I know they were probably like it could never happen. Remember when Nils deGrasse Tyson lost his mind about gravity, he went on a Twitter ran about it. Yeah, then then we should talk about the Chinese, because I think it's been unfair not to. The Chinese launched something

Interesting. Well, I know it's important that they've had women astronauts, female astronauts on the ISS, because you know, you need to see what space does to them. And I just wonder if they're going to like get to the point where they're like, well we need to if we really want to call an I 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.

And a ten year old aboard a space station for a year.

Yeah, oh man, no, thank you.

There's one other thing I wanted to mention. There's talk about saving a lot a lot of money with a space station by putting it what's called the lagrange point. And there's lagrange point L four and L five, and they are the little these spots between the Earth and the Moon to where the gravity between the Earth and

I bet their parties are wicked crazy.

Yeah, well they plan to disband on a space station in the L five band at some point in the future. Really, when they all come together there for the first time.

Sounds wonderful.

Yeah. Oh, one more thing, Valerie Polyakov.

Yeah, record holder right.

Yep, four hundred and thirty eight days. He did a board mirror in nineteen ninety four to nineteen ninety five. Man, and he'd done like two hundred and thirty eight days before then.

Crazy. I bet he's super fainty, you know all the time. He's Russian, though, he can take it.

You got anything else?

I got nothing else?

All right, Well, let's it for space stations for now. If you want to learn more about him, you can type those words in the search part house stuff works. And since I said search part's time for listener mail.

I'm going to call this oh Chuck's graduation post. So I put out a post about my nephew graduating high school.

Oh yeah it did he really?

Yeah?

Noah Is graduated from high school. And also Noah the same year, my niece Reagan graduated college from Mayordith College, moving to New York City like a good girl.

Wow.

And my other niece Abby moved on matriculated into high school from middle school.

Nothing better than matriculation.

Nothing better. So I went to Noah's 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. Oh yeah, like and I didn't walk in the college one, so I literally have not been to a ceremony since nineteen eighty nine. And it just stirred up all these amazing feelings.

Oh, I thought you mad.

No, it was really really neat just to hear these kids and their speeches. 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, talk to a seventeen year old for a little while, who's doing it right, and we're headed in the right direction like this very empathetic, carrying, like forward thinking generation.

Nice.

So it was a really neat things. So I just congratulations to all the graduates. Yeah, especially well, if you're listening, then I guess you are a listener. What all your stuff? You should know listeners that have been with us like throughout high school.

We appreciate you. A girl named Hannah, I want to say, wrote in and asked for any advice for graduations.

Oh that's right, and she mentioned you in this speech.

Yeah yeah, so pretty mit relations to her as well.

Pretty great stuff.

But you're right, all stuff you should know. Listeners who are graduating or matriculating, congratulations.

Yes, very big accomplishment. So this is from Brandy and Kansas. Hey, guys, want to thank you so much for that Facebook post about Noah's graduation and 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

Do a live show and listicles.

We make fun of Kansas because of our good friend 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 Mett Tyler and his friends Timothy and Sarah, and our friend Jane Janab 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 inattended, so that it was a great show. It was wonderful. Anyway, we're not coming to Kansas. Thanks for a great show. Guys, only have a few episodes left to go before them got up and then I will enter the pitch of despair, so at least satisfy one of my requests you can help pull me out, and that is Brandy and Manhattan, Kansas.

Thank you, Brandy, good luck in the pit of despair. If you want to get in touch with this and you can send us an email to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.

Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart rate, you visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.