You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM six forty.
Wayne Resniks sitting in until nine. So earlier this morning I texted Handle to let him know I was going to announce my retirement this morning, and he texts me back and he said.
Oh, well you need a new segment. Do you have a job?
All right, some stories we're following for you here at KFI. Funeral services for former President Jimmy Carter will be held in Georgia and Washington, DC. It'll start with a state funeral in Georgia on Saturday, and then he will lie in state at the US Capitol starting Tuesday until a funeral service on Friday. Final Rose Parade preparations are underway and that kicks off tomorrow. If you want to go down there, you can start claiming your spot on the
sidewalk at noon today. You want to be in that scrum now. Twenty twenty four was a year of hits and misses in the world of space exploration, and so here to tell us about them is our our space experts.
If you will, Rod Pile, thank.
You so much for coming on the show to do a cool space news year in review.
Thank you very much, Wayne, And I'm still having PTSD from your mention of staying overnight for the Rose Parade, which.
I will never do again. No I will.
Oh you did it once.
Oh I grew up in Pasttina, So I did it lots of times.
Oh my good. Well, all right, you just burned yourself out on it.
Yeah. I guess like.
Kind of like the last stage of a rocket burns out at the appropriate time.
Good segue.
Yeah, So do you mind? And really it's fine if you do, It's totally fine. Do you mind if I sort of because we have a nice list here of the successes and the things of space expiration that were not a success in twenty twenty four, do you mind if I ask you about the ones that I'm really interested in.
I'm interested in all of them.
But do you mind or do you want to set which ones you're going to talk about in what way?
Yeah? You go for it. You're the expert, all.
Right, So can we start with this?
In twenty twenty four, and it happened on September eleventh, there was a record broken? Tell us about what record was broken in terms of space this year?
Well, actually there were a couple. So I think the one you're talking about is how many people were in orbit?
Right?
Yes, the most number of people in orbit at one time? Tell us how many and who were they from?
It was.
Did this record of how many people were actually in orbit at one time?
Right?
And it was the ISS crew, which was made up of a couple of different flights of astronauts, which unfortunately included and still include the two that flew up on Boeing Starliner which had to come back empty because it was having problems, and the Polaris Dawn flight, which was a private flight by a really fascinating guy named Jared Isaacman who was the putative we think, next leader of NASA. And those were four private astronauts that went up and
broke a couple of records. And then finally the crew in the Tiangong Chinese Space Station, which rotated out a couple of times last year. So yeah, having nineteen people in orbit at one time is kind of a big deal. Fortunately they weren't in all places all in one place, because it would have been very crowded. But just a note on that Polaris Dawn flight. So, Jared Isaacman is a billionaire who made his fortune credit.
Card processing of.
Dropped out of high school, I think, and started that company and then got his ged and he's still only I think in his forties. But the guy is just fascinating. This was his second private flight. Before that, he put together the world's largest private air force, the Airplane, so
he's a flying fanatic for sure. But the player's down flight was four people in a SpaceX Dragon capsule and they first notched the altitude record, flying higher than anybody since nineteen seventy two when Apollo seventeen left for the Moon and the highest Earth orbital flight. And then did a private space walk and it wasn't quite floating free like the astronauts do and they're working on the space station. It was kind of a stand up in the hatch and look around and then go back inside and let
somebody else do it. But still for a private crew, this is a really big deal. So yeah, a little passel of records there.
So I guess we said goodbye to Virgin Galactic Spaceplane.
Yeah.
So this poor company, you know, they've been operating since about two thousand and four, and they finally were getting into a bit of a cadence after those accidents in the early part of the twenty tens where they lost one of them.
But they have not yet really made any profit.
They're charging They were charging two hundred and fifty thousand dollars per flight and I was closed and a half a million. And you know this is this is a horizontal takeoff and landing rocket plane. So it's not quite like what blorgs En doing with the new Shepherds, straight up and straight back. But you know, we thought, okay, they're rounding the corner. They're starting to get some passion of flights going. That's good because they've sold I forget how many tickets.
I think five.
Hundred or six hundred pre sold tickets, either at full price or deposits, and they're trying to catch up because they've got a lot of investment that came in over the years, especially for the Middle East. But this plane, this rocket plane that they use, which is made out of carbon composits, has been not aging well. It's been getting stress cracks and so forth, and they don't want
another accident. It's very complicated the way it re enters once it's dropped from this mother plane that carries it up to altitude and then it zooms up to the edge of space, as to this feathering maneuver where the back half of it kind of folds in for it to slow down and start coming back, and it puts a lot of stress on the airframe.
So it's getting tired.
And they say they're working on a replacement, and I have every confidence they are, but I know the company's been struggling with finances for seven eight years now, and I'm just not sure they're going to get through it.
But we'll see, all right.
Apparently we would like the Russians to plug an air leak in.
They're part of.
The International Space Station. Explain to us how the maintenance responsibilities are supposed to be handled. When you have different countries sharing.
A space, you're supposed to fix your own stuff, right. So the International Space Station is made up of a couple of different sets of compartments, if you will.
Modules.
There's the Russian parts, which are actually the first ones that were up there. Then there's the American segments, which they started building shortly after when they were launching all this stuff in the late nineties, and then eventually the Europeans and the Japanese added their own pieces. But primarily it's Russian and American. So the Russian segment has been leaking a little bit since twenty nineteen, but that leak rate has been picking up, and they think they know
where most of them are. They appear to be cracks in one of the early Russian segments. It's one called the PRK Moons, which connects to the Zevesdja Service Module, which is the power and propulsion part of the space station.
So it's kind of important, but.
It's important to know the space station's only been crewed since two thousand and we were building it the late nineties, but this module was actually built in the mid nineteen eighties for a replacement for the Mirror space station, and at that point Russia was starting to have some financial difficulties, especially on the space side, as just as they are now. So that thing was sitting on the ground kind of riding away until the United States came along and said, Hey, the Soviet Union's fallen.
We don't want your.
Engineers to go work for the bad guys. Come work with us on the space station. We'll all do it together. And they said yes. So this is a really old piece of hardware, and this of course is in addition to a couple of years ago, you remember one of their spacecraft had a hole in it that we think was a manufacturing error. They said, no, no, a suicidal American astronaut drill the.
Hole in our capsule.
So you know, they kind of live a bit of a fantasy world, especially under their previous director of the space program there. But NASA is very concerned about this current leak because they're seeing these stress fractures because the space station does have stresses on it. Every time spacecraft docks or on docks with it, there's a little bit
of a shutter that goes through the whole thing. Then a few years back, a Russian spacecraft came up and docked and suddenly the thrusters started firing, and it did I think a just shore up a three sixty or maybe a three sixty and a half of this thing flipping around until they got under control. So a lot of stuff going on up there, and you don't want those cracks to open up and suddenly give out.
I would think not, And I'm not a space expert, but even I agree, I wouldn't want that. I looked, I wouldn't want a draft in my house. You know what I'm saying, Well.
Is going in the wrong direction, like out.
Yeah, I wouldn't want the air. I wouldn't want the air sucked out of my house. And my house is not in the middle of outer space. Hey, can we talk about this?
Check go ahead?
Yeah, I want to because Okay, how often does NASA build or have built an entire thing, some kind of a thing and then say we're not going to use it at all?
Lord.
Yeah, So there's a rover called VIPER, which is a volatile's prospecting rover that NASA has been building to send the Moon for years with JPL and other companies, and it was finished last year and it's a big, very expensive thing, about half a billion dollars, and everything was looking good.
We're all very excited about this.
Is going to go up on a private launch vehicle, a SpaceX launch vehicle. Then with a company called Intuitive Machines are going to help land it. And if you may recall, a couple of years ago, there were two private attempts at landing on the Moon and neither of them were quite right for reasons that still aren't clear. NASA called this press conference on a Friday afternoon, which is whenever they that's when they hold the press conferences.
I kind of hope you might not watch, is my.
Impression anyway, and said, yeah, we're not going to do this, and we're all looking at each other like what. And they even though the rovers finished and was getting ready to fly this year, for some reason, I was told off the record that it was problems with the company that was building the lander. They decided to cancel the mission, take the rover apart, and either sell or give away pieces of it to private companies that might.
Want to take them up to the Moon.
Now, the whole point of this thing was to go to the South Polar region and drive around looking for water ice, because that's what we want on the Moon because from that you can make the locks and rocket fuel, drinking water, all kinds of stuff. And it's really important that the Chinese are looking for it and we want to find it too. But for some weird reason, this missing mission was canceled, and now it's going to be years before we do that.
Why don't they auction it off for charity because they think somebody else will be able to use some of the components to get it to the Moon and look for this water ice even though NASA can't or won't.
That's the hope, and NASA could.
The alleged reason was that by the time it was finished, because it costs money for it to sit around, because you've got to keep people on payroll and keep it fresh and all that, by the time it was finished it would be more than thirty percent over budget.
But hey, you know webspace telescope.
Hello, lots of things have gone more than thirty percent over budget, and this should have been the next thing that did. So it's still being tossed about in Congress and they're complaining about it, and who knows the Trump administration is going to do. It may get reactivated, but that's where it sits now.
Yeah, all right, let's finish up with this.
Apparently there are there's some number of satellites now in orbit, so one how many? Two is that the do we currently have the most satellites in orbit that we've ever had? And then the big reveal one company is apparently responsible for an outsized share of all these satellites over our heads.
Go man, you do a good build up.
So there at last report, there was just under thirteen thousand active satellites in orbit. There's all kinds of inactive space junk flying around it there, which is kind of dangerous.
But thirteen thousand active satellites.
Half of them are SpaceX's Starlink satellites, and Starlink just this year, in another record, Buster built out its consumer cell connection network on those Starlink satellites. So besides offering global Internet broadband access, they are now offering consumers of some cell phone companies the ability to connect a phone through those satellites for text at this point, but eventually
they get to voice and they all. SpaceX also launched more than half the rockets that flew last year, so there were two hundred and fifty sixty ish and SpaceX launched one hundred and thirty of those.
Oh man, all right, well, they're very busy beavers over there.
They are doing it.
Rod, wonderful to talk to you. We will listen to you on this week in Space the podcast that you co host with Tarik Malik on the Twit network. And your books are wonderful. You could look at them at rodpilebooks dot com.
Happy New Year, sir, Save to you, sir, and congratulations on your re retirement.
Thank you very much.
All Right, Well, now I've never played Dungeons and Dragons, and I have only recently learned enough about it to even begin to understand how it's played. And the reason it's kind of the timing of this because the story here is about the new rules for Dungeons and Dragons that has the Dungeons and Dragons community at each other's throats.
But it's also it's kind of weird happenstance because the only reason that I've learned what I've learned is I happen to be listening to very old episodes of a podcast called Harmontown. Dan Harmon, who made Community, used to do this live show at Nerdmelt rip nerd Melt, which was a comic book store that had a comedy room
in the back. And I happen to be listening this morning to an episode where they played I forget what you call it, a campaign of Dungeons and Dragons live at this show, and they had somebody from the audience who was a dungeon master come up and make characters and everything.
So I've learned a little bit about.
It, and this is not really about Dungeons and dragons per se. It's about these rule changes and what it says about what's going on in society. Because we talked earlier about the diversity, equity and inclusion programs that many corporations were running and are now backing away from because of backlash. So in the world of D and D, they are dealing with the first phase of the DEI the cycle, which is bringing some version of it into the game. So apparently you make a character or the
dungeon master makes a character for you. And it used to be that you could pick your race. They called it race. What race do you want to be? Well, guess what?
Now it's what species do you.
Want to be? And it used to be that if you wanted to be a certain kind of character, that there were inherent attributes that that character would have. So if you were a mountain dwarf, you would be brawny.
Every mountain dwarf in this game is browny. It comes with the territory.
If you chose to be a high elf, it meant you were really intelligent.
Well guess what happened. Racism is everywhere.
You wouldn't think the kinds of people who would play a game like Dungeons and Dragons would have a lot of racists in their midst but apparently there are enough that it was causing a problem because what would happen is the idea that what.
You are.
Memes how you are. That's a racial stereotype.
All black people are this, all Asians are that, all white people are this, And it was happening in the game where people started to mix the fantasy characters and the things that they were with the idea of how humans of different races have inherent attributes all the time, and so certain characters in the game started to be associated with human races in a derogatory way. I'll just
give you one example. It's very it's kind of weird to think somebody's playing Dungeons and Dragons and their attitude is that they're like, they're kind of racist against black people in real life, and now in the game of Dungeons and Dragon Wagons, the orcs are like to them, they're like the black people of Dungeons and Dragons, that's
no good, that's terrible. So they've changed a lot of the rules to try to get away from this idea that what you are it means how you are and yet the old school players they don't like these changes. And another thing is, now do you know, I don't know if you're into BDSM or any of these sexual kink things. Boy, what a left turn. You're thinking, no, no, no. But you know about safe word? If I say, hey, you know what a safe word is? You know what it is, You know what it is in certain contexts
a safe word. You get into some stuff your role playing, and if things get a little out of hand and you don't want it, you have a safe word.
Now there are safe.
Words in Dungeons and Dragons. If a player feels uncomfortable with what's happening in this make believe role playing.
Game, they can stop the action.
And again, half of the players think it's an important way to bring inclusion and safety and accessibility into the game, and the other half say, this is ridiculous. You're trying to make Dungeons and Dragons woke. Now, now New Year's Eve, there will be lots of drinking, there will be lots of DUIs happening, and some of those will be detected by law enforcements, so there will be a lot of
dui arrests. And it so happens that in the United States of America, and certainly in California for the last twenty years, the dui arrests capital is Laguna Beach. So the first thing I want to say about that is they are the leader in arrests for DUI. It doesn't necessarily mean they have the most people driving drunk on any given night. It might mean they have a very aggressive and successful interdiction program. But in any event, they are the dui arrest kings of California have been for
twenty years. Why well, there are a lot of drunk drivers there. I'm not saying they're more than other places of similar size. Except tell me what the population of Laguna Beaches.
Please.
You may say, oh, yeah, it's about twenty two thousand people. Except every year they get six and.
A half million visitors.
It is an intensely popular tourist spot, both for people from southern California and from all over the world.
That's crazy.
That is way too a terrible of a ratio between the number of visitors and the number of people who actually live there.
You couldn't pay.
Me to live in Laguna Beach if you said, we will give you a beautiful house and pay you half a million dollars a year to live in Laguna Beach, but you do have to live there. I wouldn't do it, and I know there's a lot of residents and business owners in Laguna Beach who do not like this. They do not like how many their duells from outside the city show up every weekend. In particular, they go to the bars and they cause trouble and the streets get
crowded and parking is a nightmare. On the other hand, it's a big part of their economy there in Laguna Beach. So in any event, the police have been proactive about trying to catch people driving drunk, and they do a good job, but they felt it wasn't enough because ideally you really would tamp down the number of people driving drunk.
One goal for a law enforcement agency could be to catch as many people driving drunk as possible, and another goal is to reduce the number of people driving drunk in the first place.
So this is what they started doing.
If they get somebody for drunk driving, they will send a letter to the bar where the person had their last drink. They don't say the name of the person, but they write a letter to the bar and they say, hey, on this date, someone was arrested, and I think they tell him his blood. I don't know if they say his that would reveal a gender. Their blood alcohol level was zero point one point eight, and it had and we arrested them at this date, this time and in this location.
And the only way that they could know.
Is if one they followed the person out of the bar and saw them get in their car and saw them drive away and pulled them over and there was a chain of custody, if you will, their eyes on the person they know which was the last bar they left, That would be solid. The only other way they could know is they asked the person and the person says, you know, yeah, my last drink was at whatever bar. But by definition they're schnockered, and by statistics they're probably not.
From around there.
I would hate to think that a bar gets letters from the PD about we arrested this person for drunk driving and you were the last bar and they weren't.
But in any event, the hope is, they say.
It's not putative, it's to maybe give them some information to see if maybe there's a pattern with some of their bartenders over serving people or maybe there's an opportunity to give some extra education to their bartenders and their security staff if they have it, and they just want to educate them about how often this is happening, because you know, bars don't want people to get so drunk that they can't drive. Bars don't want that, do they. Well,
some people like it. They like this idea, and they're glad something's being done. Although to say they're glad something's being done is to imply nothing's being done. They were out there in full force arresting people for duys. It's not like they weren't doing anything. But some people are glad that they're doing everything they can think of to do, and other people they don't like it. For example, an owner of several restaurants down there, some very nice restaurants.
I'm not going to name them because I'm I'm not trying to out anybody about anything, but these are these are some very nice restaurants in Laguna Beach owned by a particular person. And they said it's a bureaucracy and it's a waste of money and time, and and I want to say that this person has a point, and I'll tell you what the point is because Laguna Beach gets so crowded with revelers.
You're in a bar. Let me ask you a question.
Have you ever been in a bar in a group and had one person go up to the bar and order the drinks for the whole table and bring them back.
Probably? So, how can a bartender.
Keep track of how much a specific person is drinking if they're allowed to. I can't even believe. My mind just wet here, and you're gonna hate me for it. But if they're allowed to give one person a bunch of ds, they don't know if I give you four drinks? Are there four people at your table? Are there five people at your table with a designated driver?
Are there two people? Is it just you?
So one thing you could do? I can't believe I'm even pointing this out. And I'm not saying I endorse this because I don't think I do. I'd have to think about it. You could start to have a law that says one drink per human at the bar. You can receive one drink from a bartender at a time. If there are four of you at the table and you all want to drink, all four of you got to haul your keysters up to the bar and each of you orders their individual drink.
Would it help? Maybe? Would we like it?
No?
Are Gary and Shannon next?
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