transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] TLS is go for main engine, start.

Speaker 2:
[00:06] Go at throttle up. Negative or chart? And we see a nominal MECO, welcome to Space.

Speaker 1:
[00:21] Jake, it's a special Thursday, man.

Speaker 2:
[00:24] It is special. Look how special this is.

Speaker 1:
[00:28] So special that I forgot to ask if you pronounce your name, Deiterich?

Speaker 3:
[00:33] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[00:34] Chuck Deiterich. Deiterich. Deiterich.

Speaker 3:
[00:38] He's like Marlena.

Speaker 1:
[00:41] You are a man that I've been told many times would be an awesome guest for this show, so we are so thankful that you're hanging out with us. Your list of things that you worked on is too long for me to remember them all and list them off in a good order, so I'll let you do it. Tell us the things that you worked on, and we could talk about that, we could talk about Artemis too, we got so much stuff to cover.

Speaker 3:
[01:04] Well, I started out working as a retrofire officer in the Apollo section, and I worked all the Apollo launch missions, I mean, the lunar missions. I was supposed to work Apollo 7 when I was called off to work on Apollo 8 because it was a secret thing. I had never been a lead on a manned mission before, and they made me lead. My section chief was my other guy, my other team, and my branch chief was the other guy. So I had three guys on three teams, and I had to book my bosses working for me. But they were good at it. They followed right along. And so I worked Apollo 11, Apollo 8, Apollo 11, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17. I worked all the Skylab stuff. I worked the Apollo–Soyuz thing with Russia. One of the most fun jobs I had was working Approach and Landing Tests. I got to design the free flight profiles. I got to design the racetrack that we threw around. And I got to then in the control center. I was a flight dynamics officer by that time. And I did the ground control. You know, I told them when to turn and all that sort of stuff. It was really cool. And it was a pretty short program, maybe two or three years long. So I got from the beginning to the very end of it. It was really neat. I really enjoyed it. And one of the things I got to do is I got to run the shuttle training airplane where you come down to Glide Stope at 20 degrees, which is really steep, or 24 degrees, which is really steep. And it was kind of interesting. During the approach, there was a pilot. The astronaut was sitting one on the left side. There was a flight instructor on the right side. And in the middle was a sim engineer. And he had a shoulder harness. Well, he'd been used to flying tail cone on flights, which is not very steep. So he was sitting there without his shoulder straps on. So I was holding the shoulder straps because I was just standing behind the astronaut. And you couldn't see the horizon. All you could see was the ground coming up. And at 2,000 feet, you're going down 200 feet per second, which means in 10 seconds, you're going to hit the ground if they don't do something. Of course, they always do. And so, and then we had two T-38s flying chase out the window. And actually, that Gulf Stream II would actually accelerate those T-38s when they first went around. Well, we came back, went up to 20,000 feet. It was pressurized to sea level, so you couldn't feel any pressure in your eyes at all for years at all. It would only take two and a half minutes to get from 20,000 feet, 25,000 feet down to the ground. But anyway, I went back to the next flight, and some engineer had his shoulder straps on.

Speaker 1:
[04:02] He cracked.

Speaker 3:
[04:04] And so, after that, then I became a manager, and I was the JSC rain safety manager. I would integrate with the people at KSC, the rain safety guys, the Air Force and all that sort of stuff. And then also, after the accident, I was charged with trying to go through the flight design process to see if there was anything what we could do. And I also chaired the rain safety review panel. We had both Air Force, KSC, Huntsville and JSC involved. So that was kind of, that was all right, but it was not much fun to fly in the control center. Oh, I want to show you something.

Speaker 1:
[04:51] Oh, shit, look at this. Hold on, I'm going full screen on this, baby. Yeah, you're doing our segue for us, because we usually talk about what we're drinking, but we got way too down the rabbit hole. What is going on here? Please talk me through this.

Speaker 3:
[05:03] Here's my mug, and here's the other side.

Speaker 1:
[05:09] Wow, that's a killer mug. That thing's awesome.

Speaker 2:
[05:14] Maybe the best drinking vessel that's ever been on the show.

Speaker 3:
[05:16] Oh, 100%.

Speaker 1:
[05:18] What's in it, though? What's in it, Chuck? Water.

Speaker 3:
[05:23] H2O.

Speaker 1:
[05:25] Jake, how's your mug?

Speaker 3:
[05:26] That's the first time I ever drank out of that thing.

Speaker 1:
[05:31] Wow.

Speaker 3:
[05:33] I have a whole bunch of mugs and cups from all the missions, but I never drink out of them. Wow.

Speaker 2:
[05:38] You just left it in the closet for 50 years, and then you finally pulled it out for this?

Speaker 3:
[05:43] Yes, sir. Absolutely. Absolutely. We're honored.

Speaker 1:
[05:46] We're honored.

Speaker 3:
[05:48] Well, I thought you had something to show you. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[05:54] You got some shitty glass, Jake. What did you bring?

Speaker 2:
[05:57] I don't even have a glass. This is how low class I am today. I got a Belgian Blonde ale from Petito. That's all I'm doing today.

Speaker 1:
[06:04] I have a similar, just from my area, I have a Sunshine Pilsner. We are so low-end. We don't make any cool money. Jeez.

Speaker 3:
[06:13] If you notice, the crew signed it.

Speaker 1:
[06:20] That's legitimate. That's a legitimate piece of merchandise.

Speaker 2:
[06:22] I don't know if you should be drinking out of that now that I'm thinking.

Speaker 1:
[06:24] I know. Now I feel bad.

Speaker 3:
[06:27] I actually have one that we made on 25 years after we, you know, 25 years after our manned mission, though, anyway.

Speaker 1:
[06:37] Amazing. Well, where the hell do we start? There's about 16,000 topics. I do want to start with the fact that that was the most resounding endorsement of the shuttle approach and landing test I've ever heard in my entire life. I've never really heard anybody give me such a good review of that program just because I'm young enough that people just don't really tend to talk to me about it.

Speaker 3:
[07:00] It was so much fun. I got to work with the DFRC, or I guess what they call it, Armstrong or something. I don't know. I got to work with the Edwards Air Force Space flight test people. I got to work with the FAA down in Los Angeles. It was really neat. I'll tell you a story about that. We went out there, and Don Putty was my branch chief and Dean Kranz was my division chief. We went out there to Edwards. We stayed in Los Angeles. We went to Edwards and came back. They had to stop and get some beer. They didn't realize you couldn't have an open beer can in California. I did not drink a beer while we were going back. I was driving.

Speaker 2:
[07:44] Anyway, I made a long story short.

Speaker 1:
[07:46] You just had that mug in the car.

Speaker 3:
[07:48] No, I didn't have that mug. But long story short, we didn't get caught.

Speaker 1:
[07:53] We drove really fast for the California side.

Speaker 3:
[07:57] It was a good one. It was neat.

Speaker 1:
[07:59] Jake, you want to start modern or historic?

Speaker 3:
[08:03] Let's do Artemis. I was very disappointed with the press kit that was given out by NASA. It had absolutely nothing in it. Now, as an old trajectory guy, I'm interested in when you're doing maneuvers and when you're not doing maneuvers and that sort of stuff. And I had a hard time figuring it out, finding anything out about it. But I did watch the launch and I did watch the recovery. And I could not believe it took them two hours to get the crew back on the aircraft carrier. For example, on Apollo 8, the crew was on board in 45 minutes. In Apollo 11, where they had to put on biological garments, it took them—I looked this up on the internet, I don't remember these things—63 minutes. And then Apollo 13, they were on a crew on a boat for 30 minutes. Now, why did it take them so long? And the other thing is, I saw the hatch open before they put the flotation collar on. That's crazy. I mean, remember Grissom? He sank his Mercury spacecraft. Well, he didn't, but he did.

Speaker 1:
[09:22] Oh, I'm taking a stance. Was it Gus's fault? Now we know what it really felt like back then, yeah? You're blaming it on Gus?

Speaker 3:
[09:29] So I couldn't believe that. It was just incredible. And, you know, the service module on the Orion is really wimpy. I mean, the Apollo spacecraft had 10,000 feet per second in it. This thing had like 3,500 feet per second. Now, we could do a TLI from Earth orbit with the service module on Apollo. Well, they were in a 100 by 40,000-mile orbit. And so you're more than halfway to the moon by then. It only takes about 10,000 feet per second to get on to the moon. And they actually did that with the service module, which I didn't know at the time was actually made by the European Space Agency. I didn't pay that much attention. But anyway, I could not find out how they did any of the return to Earth aborts if they were going out, unless they got on the way out. Now, in Apollo, I don't know if you can see this or not. No, you can't see that.

Speaker 1:
[10:36] We got it. We got it. We're good.

Speaker 3:
[10:38] That curve up there, this curve here, shows you how much delta-v it takes to get back from different places in the orbit. When you were way out there, almost to the Earth sphere, you could get back at about 5,000 feet per second. Just turn around, straight back, and it would stop going out. After that, it's actually quicker to go around the moon. But I didn't see any of that kind of information anywhere in the thing. But with that Wimpy service module, you're not going to come back very fast.

Speaker 1:
[11:10] The WSM.

Speaker 3:
[11:11] Yeah. Yeah. But anyway. This is great. You know, Wimpy's room. I'm sorry.

Speaker 1:
[11:20] Orion slash WSM. That's good.

Speaker 3:
[11:24] But anyway, of course, the other thing I didn't realize is that they had to stay in the sunlight as much as they could just because they got those solar panels on there, and their thrust can't be too big or they break them off when they try to thrust. So that's why it takes them so long to do maneuvers.

Speaker 1:
[11:43] More of a fuel cell guy? You're more of a fuel cell kind of dude?

Speaker 3:
[11:49] I don't think they have a fuel cell on there.

Speaker 1:
[11:50] No, I'm saying. I know, but you're a fuel cell fan. You don't like dealing with the solar panel situation?

Speaker 3:
[11:57] Oh, they're fine, but you're not going to drag race.

Speaker 1:
[12:08] What did you make of the flight profile itself? I want to dig in more about what you thought they should have put out about the flight profile in advance, but what did you make of doing a free return on this particular mission?

Speaker 3:
[12:20] Oh, I think it was a good idea. Going way out was probably good. They gave more time around the back of the moon, and it probably kept them out in the sunlight. So that was probably cool, that was probably good. Just because they threw it further than the level did, I don't really care about that. But they made a big deal about that, but who cares?

Speaker 1:
[12:42] All right, let's wait. Let's do it, Jake. Let's convince Chuck that we care about this, all right? I'll do it if you're not feeling the vibes, Jake.

Speaker 2:
[12:51] Well, I mean, I can take it from the Canadian angle, right? So, Chuck, I'm Canadian.

Speaker 1:
[12:55] Oh, Jake's Canadian. It's a whole thing. You do Canadian first, and then I'll convince in America.

Speaker 2:
[12:59] There is now a furthest distance from Earth record that is shared by someone from my country. So, it's a big deal to me from that sense, right?

Speaker 1:
[13:07] For me, I'm born in 91. So, my whole life, we were doing things less cool than you were doing. And finally, we've done something a little further. Not that much, but something a little further than the stuff that happened way before I was born. So, it hit me different than I thought it would, for sure.

Speaker 3:
[13:26] But remember, your cell phone has more memory than the Apollo Command Module Guidance System, Guidance Computer.

Speaker 1:
[13:33] By a lot now.

Speaker 3:
[13:34] I mean, it was almost like brute force that we got to the moon and back. I mean, it was kind of like Pathfinder stuff, like going out to the Oregon Trail. I mean, it was pretty primitive compared to what we have today.

Speaker 2:
[13:49] Isn't that room for a wimpy service module on board? Are you saying then that breaking the record is no good because we should have broken it by much, much more, way sooner? Is that what you mean?

Speaker 3:
[14:01] No, not really. Not really. I just didn't think it was a record that was really required to be broken. If you're at 250,000 miles, much 259,000 miles.

Speaker 1:
[14:14] That's true. That's a great point. Especially on a wimpy service monitor, you know?

Speaker 3:
[14:20] Now, let's talk about the... I have some cheat sheets.

Speaker 1:
[14:28] All the paper material. Let's go.

Speaker 3:
[14:31] Let's talk about the reentry. They did a mid-course at five hours out. And then they did another mid-course at three hours out. Why in the world were they doing that? Clearly, they had a better handle on the trajectory than we did. In Apollos 8, we did one maneuver 15 hours after we left the moon and didn't do another one the rest of the way in. So we... the spacecraft was very stable in its orbit and we had good tracking all the way in. They did a maneuver... They did five foot per second at EI minus 21 hours. They did... at five hours, they did 4.2 feet per second. At three hours out, 10 feet per second is a whole degree of flight path angle. Now remember, you only got about two degrees of entry corner. So they must have been doing some of these burns out of plane or something. I have no idea. But you couldn't find that out from other stuff, I tell you. No way. And I have some contacts at NASA. I probably shouldn't say this. And I asked them what was going on, and they haven't been able to tell me.

Speaker 2:
[15:44] We'll foyer it. We'll foyer it.

Speaker 1:
[15:46] That'll work. We're going to need Chuck Deiterich to go to the forum for us. I don't even know what to ask. It's a really good question. We'll submit it and pay. Last time I tried to pay them $200 to find a picture of a tomato in the ISS. So I think this time I'll probably up the budget a little bit.

Speaker 3:
[16:03] You know, there's a shirt I have on.

Speaker 1:
[16:05] Yeah, you got a modern Mission Ops shirt. Here, I'll give you the wide shot so you can...

Speaker 3:
[16:10] There you go. Let me get my hand. The same thing, slow. It says, failure is not an option. Oh, look at that. It was, when Cranes wrote his book, he gave out shirts like this. So it does have the Mission Control patch on it. It says, failure is not an option at the bottom.

Speaker 1:
[16:31] You're wearing that so that your sources will talk to you at Johnson. You're trying to make good on, giving them a little good press so they'll tell you the info.

Speaker 3:
[16:39] You got it. The TV is a little slow. That's why when I look at it, I can't tell what I'm doing.

Speaker 1:
[16:46] And it's mirroring stuff, look at it.

Speaker 3:
[16:49] About a two-second delay. Yeah, that'd be right. So I was a little disturbed, I mean, not disturbed, but just an old trajectory guy trying to figure out exactly what they were doing was not very easy. I went back and looked at the Apollo 8 press kit, and it told you all the maneuvers and all that sort of stuff, what we're going to do. And this one was not that way. Yeah. Anyway.

Speaker 2:
[17:13] Yeah, they don't make them like they used to when it comes to the media kits. Even I used to go back and do research and look at old Apollo ones, or even old shuttle ones, and you could see the details they would give you. And that's been a very recent complaint, especially with Artemis and any SLS launch and stuff, is they give you much more fluffy, pretty pictures but no hard numbers kind of thing in the press kits, which is super frustrating.

Speaker 3:
[17:40] I thought Victor Glover made a good comment. Everybody goes, he's the first black guy to go out to the moon. And his comment was, hey, we're just people going out to the moon, and that's the right answer.

Speaker 1:
[17:51] You don't have to convince this show that Victor Glover is the absolute boss. What did you think about his manual piloting? I want to review, because everybody out here was all, did you watch the piloting demo where they were going up to the ICPS and stuff?

Speaker 3:
[18:03] I didn't see that, no.

Speaker 1:
[18:04] All right, you're going to need to pull that away, because it was awesome to have live video coverage of these kind of operations. Actually, I'll be curious, I got a couple of notes about people saying it was weird that they were doing Proxop demos with a stage that they couldn't be certain was a great anchor point, like it wasn't totally still or not rotating in terms of the reference frame. I'm curious to hear, they're not really telling us much about that, but how they were confident enough that that was a stable enough platform to be a target. Or if they were like, I don't know, I feel like there were a lot of upper-stage targeting things happening back in the day between all the Agenas and then certainly the earlier Apollo missions when we're even trying to see, can we pull off this docking with the lunar module in the inter-stage adapter? So I'm trying to figure out if that was more of a, well, we've done this before, we've used upper stages as good targets in these kind of tests. But was it actually a really good representation of what they would be going up against in the future?

Speaker 3:
[19:05] Well, I think that probably doing those kind of things with some other vehicle that's out there, whether tumbling or not, at least you know how you can control what you're doing. You know, it's like feeling how an airplane flies, you know. You get a sense of what you can and can't do, whether you're over control or under control or what have you. How the digital autopilot works, you know, those kind of things. It's important. And, you know, we've done that before on Apollo 7. They chased the S-4B. Of course, they didn't know much about all of them. We did that in the hospital. But anyway, it was just something out there to shoot for. And that's a good thing to do. And because they had no idea how the vehicle will respond relative to something else with the man in control. So that's probably the smart thing. That's probably one of the smarter things they did. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[20:01] It was really fun to watch. Yeah, you do have to look it up after, Chuck, because it was really fun to watch, like, you know, as much as an astronaut work is, it was very joyful to me because he's got his hand on the stick and he's calling out what he's doing and going left in this degrees and this much thrust and, okay, you know, check this, check this. Okay, it feels good. It's tight, it's slow. You know, he was giving us all the kind of details about how it felt to drive it and it was really fun to watch.

Speaker 3:
[20:26] How bad? How bad? I didn't see it. I didn't see it.

Speaker 2:
[20:33] Yeah. So should we talk about some old stuff? What do you think, Anthony, do you want to move to that? Sure.

Speaker 3:
[20:38] What do you want to talk about?

Speaker 2:
[20:40] Maybe, good for me, can you just describe what retro means? Thank God, dude.

Speaker 1:
[20:45] I was like, can we talk about a retro fire officer?

Speaker 2:
[20:48] I have a loose idea of what that means, but I would love to hear it from the horse's mouth.

Speaker 3:
[20:52] Okay. There's a flight dynamics team. There's a retro fire officer, there's a flight dynamics officer and a guidance officer. The guidance officer is worried about the onboard programs and the onboard computer. The flight dynamics officer is worried about going forward. He will compute some rendezvous maneuvers. He computes the lunar insertion orbit. He computes the descent stuff. The retro fire officer worries about aborts. He worries about aborts from the launch phase till we get into orbit. He worries about emergency de-orbits. Then end of mission, he does all the end of mission design and computes all the data to pass the crew. If on the way out, we would give him block data, which we give them maneuvers every 10 hours or so. If they lost come, they could do that maneuver to get back. When we're going into lunar orbit, if we did some aborts, if during the lunar insertion, or if the engine shut down, we had ways to do maneuvers to get back. It could either do with a lunar module in later missions, or we could do with a service module. And we had a chart, because we're in the backside of the moon, we couldn't compute it for them. So we had a chart that we would update in real time that says if this engine stops here, you do this to get back. And then normal end-of-mission, the retro would compute the TEI, Trans-Earth Injection Maneuver from around the moon, and then compute all the mid-course corrections, and compute the entry trajectory, pick the targets, and all that sort of stuff. So the retro was kind of a end-of-mission kind of guy, and the flight hour was kind of a flag-handed guy, and the guys were worried about the guys' computers for all stuff. And so after Apollo, during Skylab, we didn't have a retrofire officer. I was a FIDO, the Flight Dynamics Officer, and so I did all the orbit maneuvers for Skylab, and I had a buddy, they called me number two, who was kind of do certain kinds of things for us. And then in ASTP, I was a FIDO, but we did have a retro. And so in ALT, we just had a Flight Dynamics Officer that did your constructive control. But so that's kind of where it works. And actually, the retro, a retrofire officer actually started out back in Mercury.

Speaker 1:
[23:37] That's what I was wondering about was, did it come out of that because, I don't know, there's so much talk about the retro pack because that was what we were figuring out at the time. But beyond that, was it that it stayed around in the Apollo days because there was too much work to do that you needed that many people in charge of those different phases of flight?

Speaker 3:
[23:54] Yeah, because one thing the retro did is he kept track of the Ormore clock. Because we got a minute, a second and a half delay when you got out to the moon. But you made sure the clock was right. You don't want to do a maneuver at the wrong time. And he also worried about all the weights and CG. So we compute the weight and CG. On the SPS, the engine, the SPS engine had to point through the CG to the thrust correctly or otherwise to cause it to tumble or spin anyway. So the retro would keep track of all that stuff and put those numbers into the computer and come up with the engine trims that the FIDO would use for. So we had a lot of hassle. We even computed, this is an interesting one. We even computed telescope data for a lot of observatories around the world. And what John Relbank was one of them. And I happen to remember the guy I said was Robert Fritchard. I sent stuff to him back in the 60s, or 60s and 70s. Well, in 2015, I was invited to come over to Sheffield, England, to give a talk. And I happen to mention that I knew this guy from John Relbank. And the people over there got a hold of John Relbank, and the guy was still there, and I actually met him. Some 40 years later, I met Robert Fritchard.

Speaker 1:
[25:15] That's awesome.

Speaker 3:
[25:17] So anyway, that's me and her there. So we did a lot of kinds of things, and the FIDOs did too. It's not about a housekeeping kind of things.

Speaker 2:
[25:28] Yeah, it sounds like a reasonably important job, considering that every step of a lunar mission, like the abort scenario takes on a whole different kind of characteristic, like from launch to Earth orbit, to on the way to the moon, a little bit towards the moon, and a lot towards the moon, and at the moon, and landing, and taking off, all sorts of different stages on there all require dramatically different abort scenarios, right?

Speaker 3:
[25:52] Yeah. We had what we call block data, and we had an abort logistic. We had an abort at 15 hours, 25 hours, 35 hours, 45 hours, and 55 hours, and 65 hours out from the Earth. They were all direct aborts to come back, and they came back sometime, it took two or three days depending on where you were. But then once we get out close to the Moon, we would do what we call flyby maneuver. We would actually have maneuver that would bring us back to a landing point in the Pacific Ocean somewhere. It was at LOI minus five hours. Also at LOI minus five hours, the photos would compute a mid-course correction if they needed one to get into lunar orbit. And then if we just went around the Moon, we did what we call a PC plus two, pericentium plus two. We could do a maneuver there to speed the trajectory up. Because the free returns, Apollo was launched with a free return but it went around the Moon to come back. But who knew where the landing would be? The landing was not targeted. So, we do a PC plus two bird would target the thing back to the Atlantic Ocean or the Pacific Ocean. In fact, we knew about PC plus two, we knew about the flyby maneuver, so we got to 13, it was no big deal to say, hey, we want to do both of those. Now, on 13, if you remember right, we did what we call a hybrid maneuver. Some 20-some hours out, we were on a free return, we had a paracentium of about 270 miles or so, and we brought it down to 60 miles, which made the landing cost less propellant-wise, so they could do more stuff, they could land at different places. Well, when they had the accident, I said, we don't want to be on this non-free return because it had missed the Earth by 2,500 miles or so. So that's what we did, the flyby maneuver, and then I said, well, we want to speed up coming back, too, so we did the PC Plus, too. So there was no big train of thought, engineering thought-wise, hey, we're gonna do these two maneuvers. From my point of view, it wasn't, I don't know, maybe somebody else did, but it wasn't mine. I thought it was my thing to do.

Speaker 2:
[28:06] Yeah, so you did your homework ahead of time, and so the emergency becomes more easy to deal with, right?

Speaker 1:
[28:12] Yeah, you're the abort guy, and you're like, this is an abort mission? Great, I'm in. I'm here, I've got all the paperwork that you need.

Speaker 3:
[28:19] Well, you know, it's interesting. We spend about probably 80% of our time figuring out what ifs, you know, what if that happened, what if this happens. So we do a lot of pre-head thinking.

Speaker 2:
[28:35] Yeah. Yeah, it's one of those weird jobs where most of your work product never gets used, right?

Speaker 3:
[28:41] Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Speaker 1:
[28:44] What was the abort scenario that was the one that kept you up the most? Like, God, I hope we never have to use this one. What's that one for you?

Speaker 3:
[28:54] It's probably an abort from a failed lunar insertion burden. Because some of those are weird. You know, depending on where they were, if they did one thing, they would be in a high lunar apigee, or apicenthion, whatever you call it, a high level movement on the front side of the moon towards us. Well, the Earth would perturbate the orbit. And you had to do a maneuver up there to keep from hitting on the back side of the moon when you went around again to do another bird to come home. So, that was kind of scary because you were out of sight and out of mind. We never did. I don't think we ever sent one of those either. Because it would take two days to send it. You know, talking about sending it, people say, we never lay it on the moon. We couldn't keep computers up long enough to fake it.

Speaker 1:
[29:48] The best defense.

Speaker 2:
[29:50] That's a great defense.

Speaker 1:
[29:52] That's hilarious.

Speaker 2:
[29:53] Oh man, that's really funny.

Speaker 1:
[29:58] We were regrettably discussing the time that Charlie Duke got duped into doing some podcast recently with the guy that Buzz Aldrin punched in the face. And we're like, man, I wish he would just come on these other ones where he doesn't have to deal with that shit.

Speaker 2:
[30:13] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[30:17] But I was on the console when we landed on the moon. I touched down on the moon. In fact, I have a picture I will send you. Usually, they take a picture from the other end of the console. There's four consoles and they take pictures from the other end. But the guy in front of me was on the far right, then the flight out, and then the retrofire officer was next. And then to my left was the booster console. Well, Dorn, he said the booster console was empty. So a lot of astronauts would show up there for descent. Well, I got a picture taken right at touchdown from that end of the console showing all the astronauts and me and the rest of the trench. I'll send it to you.

Speaker 1:
[31:00] So good.

Speaker 3:
[31:01] Love it.

Speaker 1:
[31:01] We know you were there. You have the mug. Can't fake that. Can't fake that mug.

Speaker 3:
[31:08] I was there when we did the touchdown.

Speaker 1:
[31:10] It's crazy.

Speaker 3:
[31:11] In fact, there was a parameter that came down in telemetry from the lunar module that occurred one minute before the engine went throttling. They came in full thrust and they throttled the engine down to land. And my job was to tell them what time that throttle down was going to occur. So if you listen to the transcript about a minute before 640, you'll hear me say, flight, throttle down, 6 plus 25, I think it was. That's me.

Speaker 1:
[31:42] That's so good. Wait, so in your role at that point, are you also the guy in charge of if they decide they're doing a mid-burn abort back up to the command module? Is that your role, too? Is that different?

Speaker 3:
[31:57] That's the Fido's. That's the Fido's. And...

Speaker 1:
[32:03] Why? Sounds like an abort to me. Why'd the Fido get it?

Speaker 3:
[32:06] Well, because he would do the normal ass set, and he would do the rendezvous. And so he did... actually, there wasn't much to do. They had to do the abort, and then they did the rendezvous. It was about an hour or two.

Speaker 1:
[32:18] Yeah, it was a little quick.

Speaker 3:
[32:21] Yeah, he didn't compute anything for that. It was all done. But...

Speaker 1:
[32:26] That one didn't stress you out. It was the high lunar orbit, just because of the non-deterministic nature at the time of the lunar orbits. Like, you were not as stressed about, basically, an Apollo 10 flight path?

Speaker 3:
[32:40] Not really. Back then, we were so young, we didn't know any better.

Speaker 1:
[32:48] Is that the excuse for the Shuttle return to launch site abort mode as well? They were just super young, they didn't know any better?

Speaker 3:
[32:55] That was scary. I'm glad we never had to do one of those. That was really scary.

Speaker 1:
[33:01] Did anyone think it would work?

Speaker 3:
[33:05] I think they seemed it. At that time, I had an Ascent Entry Procedure section when we wrote the checklist for the Shuttle launch and the Ascent and Shuttle reentry. My guys did a lot of the work on those return RTLS things. I was pretty familiar with it. It had been scary. Getting rid of that big tank when you're headed back to the Cape is scary in itself. I guess, I'm not sure what would happen on the Challenger if they were just lost in SRVs when they tried down or not. I guess, they might have. That's probably more scary than even Apollo's abort maneuvers.

Speaker 2:
[33:57] Yeah, everything was shuttle abort maneuver was scary. So, yikes. I wanted to ask about, I read or Anthony told me at least that he read somewhere that you were involved with the, on 13 you had the separation maneuver between the command module and the lunar module on the way in and how tricky of a problem that was. And I wanted to hear a little bit about that because I think, I think there's some of my, my Canadian compatriots that were involved with that too. That's the story they tell up here all the time, at least.

Speaker 3:
[34:35] That's right. Well, it turns out, I was on the launch team for Apollo 10, but I was not on any other shifts. But retros are always worried about going over other vehicles. And so I was in the control center when they were going to jet us in the lunar module. And I shouldn't pick on the crew, but we had what you call flight techniques meetings. And the directory guys and the crew would get together and talk about how they're going to do things. We said, well, we want you to do these things when you jet us in the lunar module. And the commander said, I can handle that. Don't worry about it. So we didn't worry about it. Well, what did he do? He didn't realize that the sun was right behind the lunar module. When he separated the lunar module, it popped right off into the sun. Of course, they didn't pressurize the tunnel between the two. I'm not sure exactly why. I think it was stuck. But so the pressure of the tunnel and the tunnel pressure blew the two vehicles apart. He couldn't see what it was and he didn't know what it was going. Now, I talked to Fred Hayes later on and said, did the simulator show the sun that bright? And he said, no, it did not. But anyway, so I remembered that. And I said, on Apollo 13, we got the service module, but we still had the lunar module on. Now, the way we get the service module was, we thrusted out, we were on a good trajectory, we thrusted out a good trajectory with the lunar module, RCS, and then we jettisoned the service module, and then we back right back into the good trajectory again. It's how we're going to get the lunar module. Well, I said, hey, why don't we use the tunnel pressure that we did on 12, I mean on 10? And so that's what they did. And I never knew until very recently, I got a call from somebody in Canada who was writing a documentary on how, I guess it was the University of Toronto worked with them, and they didn't know that they're the only ones that did it. I didn't know they did it either. But evidently somebody from Grumman or somebody talked to them and said, hey, what happened on 10 was, as soon as they popped it off, the pressure inside the lunar module went to zero, which means the door hatch blew open. So they didn't want that to happen again, and that's why they want to use less tunnel pressure. So that's the story. So the Canadians did good.

Speaker 2:
[37:08] I always hear it as like, I guess for Apollo 13, NASA just tried to ask for help, and they just sort of farmed out a lot of like math to different institutions and things that would help out when they were trying to like do things quickly, and they would have all these kind of people on hand. And that's how it ended up happening. I guess there was someone at U of T that was loosely connected or whatever and had some resources to put people in a room and figure out the hard stuff. So I guess that's what they did. I don't know. It seems like there's a lot of moving parts for all that whole scenario, so.

Speaker 3:
[37:42] I don't know if that documentary is coming out yet or not. I have to look for it. I can't think of the guy's name who did it. His name is Joe something.

Speaker 1:
[37:56] That'll narrow it down.

Speaker 2:
[37:58] Joe from Canada, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[38:02] I talked to him for quite a while and we discussed what went on. I actually did a little video link and I think I'm even in it. It should be coming out pretty soon. I thought it might be coming out about now with Apollo 13 anniversary. But I don't know. I will give you the name of where it, who's writing it and I'll send it to you when I find it.

Speaker 1:
[38:33] We got a lot of show notes to send back and forth. You got to send the Victor Glover one. You got to send us that, the picture view and mission control. A lot of action items out of this one, Jake.

Speaker 2:
[38:44] Productive meeting, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[38:47] Jake, I'm dying to ask about Pete Conrad, who is, we've determined the patron saint of this podcast. I am from the Philadelphia area. He is my hometown moonwalker. He is chaotic and hilarious in the way that we like to channel. You had a couple of run-ins with him, I guess, through the Apollo program and Skylab. Is he, what history says about him?

Speaker 3:
[39:11] Oh, he's good. He was a good guy. I didn't know him as well as I knew some of them. I didn't know him.

Speaker 1:
[39:17] All right, give us your top three. Give us a rundown on who was the best.

Speaker 2:
[39:22] Yeah, pick your favorite as we go around the rank.

Speaker 3:
[39:25] Let me tell you about Pete Conrad. We were in a flight techniques meeting. They were talking about this, they had this plutonium thing that they put in their little solar nuclear generator. He said, that won't keep them from having kids, will it? But anyway, I don't know, Fred Hayes, Jim Lovell, Mike Coates, who's a show guy. John Creighton is a good friend of mine. It turns out that early on, on Apollo 7, the crew got cold, and they had a lot of issues with the ground. And after that, I guess, Deke Slate and the Right Act, and they were very nice after that. And they really do depend, they don't really realize at the time, but they do depend a lot on the whole thousands of people that hold them up on their fingertips. Because they couldn't do it without all those people. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[40:37] I've been thinking about that a lot on the Artemis front, because we had such access to the mission in real time in terms of the livestream that was up. You could hear all the comms to and from, I mean, all except the protected meetings and stuff from the crew to the ground and all that. And there were so many times where they seemed to be in such good sync, both as a crew, but also working with the ground, where they were super deferential to each other, of like, hey, we actually think this up here, all right, yeah, go ahead and do that thing. There didn't seem to be a lot of tension points. And that wasn't necessarily the case back in the day, right? There was a lot more strong opinions and we just also didn't have a lot of experience doing a lot of these operations. Was that something that, through your career, being down at JSC for so long, that you saw that develop and get better over time as we flew more flights, or do you think it's dependent on the kind of mix of crew that you get?

Speaker 3:
[41:29] I think it's kind of the crew, some of the kind of crew. Some of the crews were a little more arrogant than others. But I'll tell you a story about Jim Lovell. Now, he wrote a book, and Jeff Kluger was the co-writer. And I had just retired from NASA in 94, and I was 56. And we moved up here to the Hill Country up by Boston. And I got a copy of the book before when I got up here. And Jim Lovell lived about 20 miles away. And his next door neighbor had a gift shop. And he was going to sign autographs down there. I'll take my book down there and give it to him to sign my autograph. Well, I went down there, stood in line, and I got up here and he said, what are you doing here? I said, you sit down here, sign an autograph with me.

Speaker 2:
[42:25] But why did you have to stand in line? I don't understand.

Speaker 1:
[42:28] Amazing.

Speaker 3:
[42:29] Well, I just because the line was there. But, you know, that's the kind of guy he was. That's the kind of guy he was.

Speaker 1:
[42:38] That's awesome.

Speaker 2:
[42:39] Oh, that's funny.

Speaker 1:
[42:42] Because the line was there.

Speaker 3:
[42:44] Take out the entire story about how it went.

Speaker 1:
[42:47] That's the quote from JFK. Why do we do the other things? Because the line was there, you know?

Speaker 3:
[42:56] I'll tell you another story about Apollo 11. They had a parade downtown Houston. I didn't go to the parade, but my dad did. And while he was down there, he had a flag. And I was thinking he was older than time. Hell, he wasn't. He was only 67. And he took the flag out and gave it to Neil Armstrong. And evidently that made it in the Houston Chronicle newspaper. So I saw Neil a couple of days later, I said, you know, it was my dad that gave you that flag. He said, do you want it? Like a fool, I said no. But, you know, it was just kind of interesting that that would close circuits, just how tight things can be.

Speaker 1:
[43:38] It's a commentary on how populated Houston was at the time.

Speaker 2:
[43:41] Yeah, I was going to say, it wouldn't happen in Houston today, no.

Speaker 1:
[43:46] Your dad would be stuck in traffic. He would be stuck in one of the 19-lane highways in town. That's nuts.

Speaker 3:
[43:55] I hate to go to Houston. I don't go. I got there. It took me about four years since I've been to Houston. I don't even recognize it when I get there.

Speaker 2:
[44:03] Yeah. I'm not an American. The first time I went to Houston, I was in the north side of the town, and I wanted to go visit NASA. I just hopped in my car and said, oh, that'll be no problem. I'm in the same city. That won't be very far at all. Then I had to do the whole drive around the entirety of Houston and all the way down to where JSC is. It was like an hour and a half drive. I was so mad, I was late for everything. It's such a big city now.

Speaker 3:
[44:32] Los Angeles ain't any better.

Speaker 2:
[44:34] No, I don't agree with that.

Speaker 3:
[44:37] I mean, we used to go out to Downey and it was terrible. I liked going up to Edwards. Edwards was cool. Edwards was a neat place to go to. Edwards Air Force Base. It was a neat place to go to. Los Angeles was not too neat. Big cities, man.

Speaker 1:
[44:55] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[45:00] Ah, jeez, I don't know. I feel like we need another whole other thing to, like, we haven't even touched on, like, most of the shuttle stuff, Anthony. We're going to have to figure out.

Speaker 1:
[45:07] I mean, the end all of Apollo–Soyuz, like, the strangest mission that happened in American space industry gets glanced over so much.

Speaker 3:
[45:17] Yeah, yeah. I'm going to tell you a little story about ASDP.

Speaker 2:
[45:22] Perfect.

Speaker 3:
[45:24] I went over to Russia and their control center is bigger than our control center. It has to be because it's Russian. Of course, their equipment was bigger than ours. I mean, their tubes were bigger than ours. Their hardware was bigger than ours. They couldn't miniaturize things very well. And I had to show it through. I said, I'm going to go to the American Embassy, get some penicillin, so I went over to the American Embassy. And you can't read the street signs over there because they're not very serenical. Anyway, so anyway, I get on the subway thinking I'm going to the right place. Nobody spoke English. Nobody spoke English. Nobody talks to anybody on the ship, I must say. So I think you're on the wrong subway. I figured he was my KGB guardian angel.

Speaker 1:
[46:12] Absolutely. He's like, where are you going? You should not be going this way.

Speaker 3:
[46:19] And the place was really clean. It really was really clean. Well, very clean.

Speaker 1:
[46:24] That's why he wanted to stop you before you got to the part where they left all the dirt. They were like, you're exiting the clean part.

Speaker 3:
[46:31] Well, I understand Bob Overmahr was taking some pictures one time and they made him... They let us take pictures, but you had to be careful what you took. And they took his camera away from him.

Speaker 1:
[46:43] We gave it right back to him recently. We had a cosmonaut getting in trouble. What happened to my lights here? I don't know. We're talking crap about Russia. They're turning my lights off. Who was the cosmonaut that just got pulled off the flight?

Speaker 2:
[46:54] Oleg Artemyev?

Speaker 1:
[46:58] It could have been, yeah. And then the reports where he was taking photos in a SpaceX facility where he was not supposed to be.

Speaker 2:
[47:04] Yeah, Falcon 9. Yeah, that's interesting stuff. What's old is new again, right? The same kinds of stories that keep popping up between these kinds of things.

Speaker 3:
[47:16] So, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[47:20] All right. So, the shuttle, you like the approach and landing tests because it was a unique problem to solve after all the time flying around the moon. What was so interesting and exciting about that?

Speaker 3:
[47:33] Well, I always wanted to be a pilot. And my dad actually worked as a mechanic during World War II in a little airport. So, this was one of the airplanes when I was flying. Well, spacecrafts are not airplanes, they're something else. You know, a shuttle is an airplane. And so, you get to learn about lift and drag and all that sort of stuff. And I wrote a little program on a desktop computer that would simulate the approach and landing tests. And I would fly the tests and write them on flight cards. I go over in the simulator and fly them. Then the crew go fly them in a training airplane. Then we go fly them for real. That was a lot of fun. And I learned a lot. And one of the guys, Tom McElroy, worked for Deke Slayton, who was running ALT, said, hey, you ever learn how to fly? I said, you bet. So, back then, he taught me how to fly. Airplane, I could have been assessed to 150 for $14 an hour, and Tom didn't charge me anything, so I got my license for not next to nothing. And when I had 40 hours, he said, go take a check ride. I did not. Somehow, I passed it. So, I've always been interested in airplanes and wings and stuff. So, that's why the approach to landing was so much fun, because I got to design the missions, fly them in the simulator, let the crew fly them, and kind of GCA the crew around the pattern. So, that was kind of a fun job.

Speaker 2:
[49:02] Yeah. It must have been so remarkably unique at the time, right? The first time that we have this merging of spaceship and airplane and at a time, just the point in the history where— X-15 takes great offense to this, Jake. But I mean, it's different though, right? Because that's not the same thing. This is so much closer to what people would imagine like a commercial airliner, right? Compared to X-15, I guess it was a fighter jet.

Speaker 1:
[49:31] All right. You're right.

Speaker 2:
[49:32] A special thing to only special people got to ever get. But shuttle was supposed to be very accessible and it looked like an airplane that you would recognize and just having all that merging must have been so interesting at the time.

Speaker 3:
[49:44] Oh, it was. Because I really thought it was more of an airplane than it is a spacecraft, to be honest with you. It was an airplane that landed a little bit and then came back and landed like an airplane lands. But no, it was a lot. I really enjoyed that whole scenario. And we had the 747 would do touch-and-goes down at Palmdale. And we could watch them, we could track them. We had plot boards in the control center and we could track them, watch them do a touch-and-goes, not with a shuttle on it. It was just the 747. And in real time, we would track the whole thing and we'd give the crew, 747 crew, where to turn and all that sort of stuff. And I had a program. It turned out you couldn't back more than 12 degrees or you lose too much altitude. You just didn't have enough lift. So I wrote a program that would take into consideration the winds. And depending on where the winds were, we'd fly further out, so we'd have to backboard 10 degrees. And so it was kind of fun. I'm sure it was fun.

Speaker 1:
[51:01] How did you, like, looking back, now knowing where the shuttle program ended, what its, you know, kind of results were, then leading into SLS, what is your take on how it felt at the time at the outset of the shuttle program to then what you were kind of left with at the end? Like, what was the delta in your thoughts on shuttle as a spacecraft?

Speaker 3:
[51:24] It was gone when they quit flying the show.

Speaker 1:
[51:26] I know, but you're here. You're still on this earth here. You got opinions on the Space Shuttle. Everyone has opinions on the Space Shuttle. Come on.

Speaker 3:
[51:34] Well, I think it was a very expensive machine. But I think it could have migrated into something more practical. I mean, because it was practical, but it was just kind of tedious to do. We were going to fly 50 missions a year. Well, that never happened. And I think we could have done something more. I mean, obviously, heat shield techniques and stuff like that can be improved. And it certainly carried a lot of stuff up into orbit. I mean, it was really a heavy lifter. And we can't do that anymore. I mean, maybe the SNS can do that now. I don't know. But I don't know. I guess we don't have to do that. We can launch them up on Falcons or whatever, and payloads, what have you. But other than that, I think it's a shame we don't have the shuttle, although it was expensive.

Speaker 2:
[52:42] Yeah, that seems to be like the prevailing shuttle opinion was like, man, it had a lot of flaws, but it was pretty and I miss it.

Speaker 1:
[52:52] Well, Starship is channeling a lot of what shuttle could have been, maybe to a fault almost. I think there's areas where I'm like, is this making the same mistakes that shuttle did? I know a lot of the shuttle heat shield crew was sought out by SpaceX in the early days to come out and work on Starship's heat shield. So I'm curious how much you're following along that and do you have any Starship takes for us, too?

Speaker 3:
[53:20] I just watch them. I haven't done much study on them. I have a second marriage.

Speaker 1:
[53:24] I mean, listen, it's not a wimpy service module.

Speaker 3:
[53:28] No, it's not. No, it's not.

Speaker 1:
[53:33] That's the thing you hate the most.

Speaker 3:
[53:36] I see Blue Origin threw another vehicle. Of course, they put it in the wrong orbit. I can't understand it. I did some consulting for them back when there was only about nine guys working for them back in 2001, 2002.

Speaker 1:
[53:50] Wow.

Speaker 3:
[53:50] And now they've got thousands of people working for them.

Speaker 1:
[53:54] What thing were you consulting on?

Speaker 3:
[53:58] On New Shepard.

Speaker 1:
[54:00] Okay.

Speaker 3:
[54:01] I actually built the first trajectories for New Shepard in Excel.

Speaker 1:
[54:08] That's a sentence I never thought I would hear in my life.

Speaker 2:
[54:10] That's like the most Blue Origin story you could have told.

Speaker 3:
[54:17] What does that even mean?

Speaker 1:
[54:18] Can you explain that more? We can't glance over that. What the hell does that mean?

Speaker 3:
[54:22] Well, I would have Excel, first thing would be on the ground, first line, then it would fly up, and it would use fuel, it would go up to altitude, and then it would come back down and land. And I'd get all that stuff in Visual Basic and Excel. And now I could plot. I have plots showing altitude. In fact, I told them, don't go above 350,000 feet because you'll pull too many Gs coming back. If you go above 350,000 feet, you pull about 6 Gs coming back. If you go much higher, you can pull too many. It doesn't matter what shape your vehicle is, that's what it's going to pull. And so it looks like you're still closer to that, using that same number.

Speaker 1:
[55:05] Not anymore. It got canceled. I don't think it's coming back.

Speaker 2:
[55:09] It's paused.

Speaker 1:
[55:10] Two-year pause.

Speaker 3:
[55:12] Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[55:12] Two-year pause.

Speaker 3:
[55:13] Well, at least Captain Kirk got to fly in it.

Speaker 2:
[55:18] It's true. A very memorable flight, indeed.

Speaker 1:
[55:22] Yeah. A very memorable flight.

Speaker 2:
[55:28] Oh, man.

Speaker 1:
[55:29] All right. What story did we not happen upon that we should have? We've got time for one more story, probably. Maybe an era we didn't dig into enough. Late Apollo.

Speaker 2:
[55:39] Skylab.

Speaker 1:
[55:40] Skylab, obviously.

Speaker 3:
[55:42] All I have is funny stories. I'll tell you a story. When you walk in the control center and from the back door to the front, there was lockers. And you put your headset in, and our combination was 396. Believe it or not, 396 is invisible by a bunch of numbers. But anyway, our numbers are 396.

Speaker 1:
[56:04] I'm going to try it next time we're in Houston. We probably haven't changed the code.

Speaker 3:
[56:09] One of the astronauts took one of these label makers and put Capcom on it and put it on his condom on his locker. Somebody else came on and put one, Capcom on every one of them. He didn't know which one was his because every one of them said, Capcom. Now, do you want me to tell you who it was? It was Bruce McTavis.

Speaker 1:
[56:35] Oh, yes. Bruce, man.

Speaker 3:
[56:41] Poor little Bruce. But he got to fly that thing. That was pretty cool.

Speaker 2:
[56:48] Yeah. Famous.

Speaker 3:
[56:50] I don't know if I want to do that or not.

Speaker 2:
[56:54] Terrifying.

Speaker 1:
[56:56] It's got to be one of the coolest photos of all time.

Speaker 2:
[56:59] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[57:03] Those astronauts are always so interesting to me too. That kind of spanned the eras, right, that were... Because you see, you go back and you watch footage from the Apollo landings, right, and he's right up in there in all the shots and mission control. There's always a Bruce McCandless floating around somewhere. And then you smash cut to him, you know, 300 feet away from the shuttle, totally alone in space. I do wonder right now, like, we're kind of at that inflection point with this current astronaut corps that we have some astronauts that flew on shuttle, did some of these ISS flights, and are going to be in the first couple Artemis missions. We're sort of at another, you know, if things go well with, you know, let's build a moon base, we're kind of in that era again, where we have these astronauts that are like, whoa, they flew on all of the things. But thoughts on moon base. Did you follow these recent announcements of change in plans a little bit to focus more on the surface?

Speaker 3:
[57:59] Yeah, I think it's new. NASA administrators is a little more, I guess, stronger. He's trying to do things. He's not worried about his career, that's for sure.

Speaker 1:
[58:16] Definitely not. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[58:19] I've seen some of his comments about, we need to get back to basics, and we need to get going. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[58:26] He's putting the work in. He's been out there in Congress this week doing it, so.

Speaker 3:
[58:32] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[58:32] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[58:33] Well, the problem is, if you don't get money, you can't do something. That's always a problem. And space kind of things, you can't just whip it out in 10 minutes, 20 minutes. It takes a while to think about it. Well, if it takes too long, you won't get the funding over a long period of time. You get started, and then you don't have the funding to commit and finish it. And that's the problem.

Speaker 2:
[58:56] Yeah. It's tough.

Speaker 1:
[58:58] Or you start it a little bit, and you end up with a wimpy service module, and then here we are, you know?

Speaker 3:
[59:04] It's kind of how we got it. Service modules are made by the European server.

Speaker 1:
[59:11] Chuck, this was awesome. Thank you so much for hanging out with us, for telling stories. For the mug, can you put the mug up one more time? We got to say the mug one more time. I mean, this was like, come on, that is the best mug. So good. The best mug. No one shall ever have a drinking vessel like this on this show, Jake.

Speaker 2:
[59:36] The best one.

Speaker 1:
[59:37] We got to find one on eBay for someone else.

Speaker 3:
[59:41] I don't know. You won't find one that says Retrofire over some of it.

Speaker 1:
[59:46] That one is not it in the market.

Speaker 2:
[59:48] We got to check Laurie Garber's eBay account.

Speaker 1:
[59:50] Yeah, she's in on that. That's right. Thanks again, Chuck. Jake, I have a toy that we can point to. Do you want to know who's coming up on the show soon, Jake?

Speaker 2:
[60:04] I do.

Speaker 1:
[60:04] Would you like to know?

Speaker 2:
[60:06] You could visually communicate that to me.

Speaker 1:
[60:08] Let's see. Will it work? There it goes. I got a split flap to Slai that will now show us the upcoming guests. Boom.

Speaker 2:
[60:20] Look at that. April 30th, we have the new, brand new, shiny CEO of the Planetary Society, Jennifer Vaughn, coming on to talk to us about some cool stuff they're working on. So that's going to be fun.

Speaker 1:
[60:33] We're getting more Planetary Society in our life. That will be a good time. Is there anything we're going to talk about with her or what?

Speaker 3:
[60:41] I think we're going to do very broad.

Speaker 2:
[60:43] We're going to talk about... We got to meet her and we got to know what she wants to get done. So we're going to see some science budget talk.

Speaker 3:
[60:52] High level.

Speaker 2:
[60:52] Yeah, probably. It's top of mind.

Speaker 1:
[60:56] All right. Thanks for hanging out, y'all. Thanks again, Chuck. We'll see you next week.

Speaker 2:
[61:01] Thank you.

Speaker 3:
[61:02] Thank Mike Laux for tying us up together.

Speaker 1:
[61:06] Yes, Mike Laux of the Space Engineering, Vinyl Flowing, butchering their name, Space Exploration Engineering crew. He's a future guest on this show, Jake. You just don't know it yet.

Speaker 3:
[61:19] Well, I ran into him back 2001 or 2002 in a thing called blastoff.com or something like that, but he and I have been friends for a long time. So we've had things together, Blue Origin and what have you.

Speaker 1:
[61:39] He's flown a lot of intermissions.

Speaker 3:
[61:41] Yeah. He knows trajectory stuff a whole lot better than I do.

Speaker 1:
[61:48] It turns out he was also texting me that he was mad NASA wasn't releasing the trajectory numbers. So it's good stuff. All right, y'all. We'll see you next week.

Speaker 3:
[61:57] All right.

Speaker 2:
[61:58] Thanks, Chuck. Thank you, everybody. Bye.

Speaker 3:
[62:00] 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, end of test.