===TRANSCRIPT START===

Welcome back to Scared All The Time, I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And this week, we're shooting for the moon, because even if we fall short, well, that's the scary part. We won't land among the stars. We'll probably float off into space forever and ever. Hopefully, there's something wrong with our suit, and death will come quickly. But imagine it doesn't. Imagine you still have oxygen, so you're fully conscious as you float away from everything that could save you. There's gotta be a way back. But there's nothing to grab, nothing to push against. The vacuum of space is heartless that way. It's the sight of what could save you fading away that would truly crush your spirit. Your ship, your friends, your family, the planet, receding into the distance as panic races over you in waves. Smaller and smaller still, it's the knowing, isn't it? The god-awful knowing that this is all that's left for you. No words, no comfort, no one holding your hand or telling you it will be all right. Everyone dies alone, but not truly alone, not like this. And as you accept your fate, you slowly turn around. No aliens to greet you, no monsters, just terrible, infinite space. And scared all the time, because even though you're fucked, your suit still has headphones.

What are we?

Now it is time for. Time for scared all the time.

All right, so we're back. In terms of housekeeping, I think we should just keep it short. We'll be the only short thing about this episode. It is a very, very long one. So how was your Thanksgiving?

My Thanksgiving was great. I went to my cousin's house. Her and her husband are foodies. They made a smoked turkey, a sous vide turkey, all kinds of dishes and side dishes. And it was really amazing as it is every year. How about yourself?

I had an awesome Thanksgiving. I went with Jackson and Pat and Lex, couple friends that we know from college. I ate a bunch of great food, had some good conversation, smoked some cigars. It was fucking rad.

Awesome. We hope you guys also all had a fantastic Thanksgiving. And just a reminder, share the podcast with your friends, hit us up on socials. As we always say, we want the show to be as interactive as possible.

Speaking of which, one of the things I am thankful for, this audience, this crowd, who shows up every week to hang out with us. It's very, very cool. Thanks so much for reaching out. It's awesome. And let's fucking just get after it because it's a freaking long one.

All right. With that said.

Let's go.

Nine, eight, seven, six.

We have main engine start.

Four, three, two, one. And liftoff.

Engines throttling up. Three engines now at 104%.

Challenger, go with throttle up.

Challenger, go with throttle up.

All right. So today, we're talking about a fear that I've had since I was very young. The fear of being lost in space. And don't worry, the whole episode won't be as depressing as the opening. But I think it's important to set the table for what's so scary about dying in space. Specifically, dying because of space and how menacing and terrible it is. Not dying because you get blasted by lasers from aliens or something, or get smashed by an asteroid. There are quicker, terrible ways to die in space. And we're going to touch on a bunch of those in this episode. We're also going to touch on at least one famous space disaster and discuss a wild conspiracy theory about lost Russian cosmonauts. But first, I want to talk about how I developed a fear of dying in space because it's not something that I think is particularly common fear. But Ed, how do you feel about dying in space? Is it something you ever think about?

I don't think about it often. I love space stuff. I have no interest in going for probably a number of things we're going to bring up in this episode. It's interesting because I have a fear of the ocean and space is just the ocean above us.

That's a little dismissive of space.

No, it's the same fucking thing. And the reason I know it's the same goddamn thing is take any great movie about a shipwreck and make it in space and it's still a great movie. I'm not even kidding. Every single movie where people are lost at sea, it works for space because they're the same thing. They're both massively unexplored. They're both uninhabitable. Fucking sea creatures are aliens right here on this planet. Only people who go to super dangerous places in space and the sea are super rich people. The list goes on and on. They're the same fucking thing. So if you're talking about an implosion in space, how is that any different than an implosion in a submarine?

I think the difference for me is that the ocean isn't infinite.

Yeah, but it's super uncharted.

Yeah, it's uncharted, but it's conceptual. You're able to imagine it and conceive it, whereas space to me is particularly scary because it is, it's the void, it's nothing, and there's so much of it. There's too much of it.

Yeah, but that just means no one's gonna grab your body. Like life support's not gonna take you probably too much further than the ocean's depth.

Who's gonna grab your body in the ocean?

I guess what I'm saying is that the level of void that is space really isn't infinite in terms of how far we can travel into it or how far you'll be alive to experience your oxygen depleting or whatever. So I guess it's really no different again than being lost in the bottom of the ocean with an oxygen tank depleting.

I still think this is offensive towards the grandness of space, but we can move on. For me, the first time I ever really thought about dying in space, and the reason I think it's a core fear is because of the movie 2001.

I've never thought about dying in space from 2001, but I have thought about killing myself watching 2001. Let the fucking emails come. I don't care, that movie is obscenely boring. And I watched it in 70 millimeter as it's supposed to be seen, like in a theater being like, okay, well, maybe just because I hadn't seen it the way it's supposed to be seen. Don't get me wrong, astoundingly gorgeous. And I do not believe even remotely in the faked moon landing conspiracy theory, but holy shit, there's stuff in that movie where I'm like, yeah, give these guys a call and you can probably dupe some people.

Yeah, no, it's beautiful. And every time, even when I was like going back and watching parts to prep for this, it's crazy how every frame of that movie looks like a movie that came out yesterday.

No, it's stunning.

I mean, like pace-wise, it maybe has aged, but like visually, that movie has not aged a day, probably because so many big directors now just rip it off. You know, like.

No, I mean, just everything. It's so stunning. The model work looks better than VFX. The lighting is unbelievable. Like when they're in space, the hard lighting on the actual model of the craft seems so weirdly realistic to, I mean, I guess realistic to what they tell us is realistic. I mean, I've never been up there, but it's just so convincingly, you're like, those people are in space.

Yeah, truly. But anyway, so I was really young and my dad introduced me to 2001. He introduced me to a couple movies that fucked me up as a kid. One was Animal House, which he showed me way too young.

That's another fucking super overrated movie. Bring on the emails, I don't care.

I would agree. I mean, Animal House, I think, is like the best comedy of all time for a certain generation, like my dad's generation. But I think for people our age, it is not the funniest movie of all time at all. But my dad showed it to me because in fifth grade, they sent home permission slips for us to have sex ed at my public school. And my dad felt that he didn't want me doing that. So he showed me Animal House. And then when it was over, he goes, there, now you don't need to go to that class. And so for years.

Next up, Bachelor Party, just weird double feature at your house about how not to compose yourself in any romantic situation. Yeah, here's two movies about that.

Yeah, I mean, I remember like, you know, when your dad tells you something like that when you're in fifth grade, you kind of take it sort of seriously. So I would go back and try to watch the movie and trying to figure out what I didn't understand about girls or sex, but not realizing which parts were jokes because I knew nothing about girls or sex. So it was very confusing.

My favorite movie of all time is Top Gun, the original. And there is a silhouette kiss in that movie, which is not teaching anyone how to kiss. That is the weirdest. Like that was my only exposure to something like that. And thank God I didn't use it as a blueprint for anything.

Yeah. Wait, when you were a kid, did anyone ever try to tell you what sex was, but they were totally wrong about it?

Yes, it's a core memory. It's a core memory of a kid in my class. I want to say, fuck, second grade, like some crazy small grade number where I just remember him saying that you pee inside someone.

Okay. Well, that's cool.

He got inside.

He got inside. I remember my cousin Katie. I don't remember what grade it was. It was young. I remember her telling me that sex was when a man kissed a woman's butt. I was like, okay, all right, I could see that. That was before Animal House because then I was taking the butt kissing knowledge into Animal House and not seeing any butts being kissed.

Everyone in that movie is a virgin, dude. No butt kisses.

No.

Captain PG.

Yeah. So one movie that fucked me up was Animal House and the other was 2001, which in case you haven't seen it, I'm sorry. Spoiler alert for the most famous movie of all time. But there's a computer named Hal that comes to life on board the ship that they're on in the movie 2001 and he feels threatened by the two astronauts on board. I think it's Frank and Dave and sets one of them, Frank, adrift when he goes outside the ship to fix the antenna or something. And Hal controls this little pod bot that leaps forward and cuts the air hose to Frank's suit and he goes spinning off. And it's like two minutes of this epic, beautiful movie that Ed hates. And for years, it was the only part that I remembered because it's so sudden and scary. And I was probably already overwhelmed by how well Kubrick was portraying the vastness and mystery of space. But I just remember losing my shit over this scene and how fucking scary the idea was of just being tossed off into space in your suit, especially because the scene itself is nearly silent. And you're not inside the suit, you don't hear Frank screaming. It's Kubrick doing the like, you know, in space, no one can hear you scream. There's no sound waves, it's silent. So as Frank is like flying off into space, he's frantically pulling at his suit and trying to tie off the air hose. There's no screaming, there's no nothing. And I think it's the futility of that, of falling into that nothing. Like you can't even die like an animal. Like you can't even make noise and scream. You're just falling and dying.

So it's interesting that you say falling. I don't know, I was watching something or listening to some astronaut talk about this and some little kid or somebody asked, when you go out for an EVA, an extravehicular assignment, I don't know what the hell it's called. When you go outside the spaceship, are you afraid that when you step out the door, you're just going to fall down? And I never really thought about that. And I was like, from the mouth of babes, you know, and the astronaut was like, actually, yes. Do you do all this training in your underwater? And, you know, but when you when you're there and you see the earth down there and shit? Yeah, your first step out, you're like, every part of me knows I'm going to move forward. But growing up with gravity for the previous X many years, you anticipate falling. And he's like, yeah, that first step, first step is a little something.

Yeah, there's no up or down in space. So you're not, I use the term falling. You're just drifting one direction or the other. But so that that really fucked me up. And then I wasn't as young, but I remember there's a scene in one of the worst movies of all time, Brian De Palma's Mission to Mars.

Not a strong film.

Not a strong film. But do you remember the part at the beginning where they get attacked by the Vortex?

I don't, I don't. I saw that movie once. I saw that and I saw Red Planet once.

Yeah.

Which was the Carpenter one.

That's Ghost of Mars. No, the Carpenter one is Ghost of Mars. Yeah.

Ghost of Mars. So I've seen all the Mars movies just one time, except for the Martian a few twice.

What the fuck was that all about? Those three Mars movies was within a year of each other.

It was that era. And I guess we kind of still have us a little bit, but that was definitely that era where it was Dante's Inferno and-

Volcano.

And Deep Impact and Armageddon. It was this weird era of there was no counter-programming. When I worked at Sony, I used to think, yeah, if everyone's making a movie about how the world's gonna end soon, why aren't we making a movie about how the world will never fucking end?

Yeah.

Hard cut to Barbenheimer being the biggest weekend of the last decade. So it's like, yeah, counter-programming kind of slaps.

Yeah, well, Mission to Mars doesn't slap, but there is a part near the beginning of the movie where these explorers on the surface of Mars get attacked by this sort of seemingly sentient sand vortex, and a guy gets sucked up into it and spun around so fast that his arms and legs get ripped off.

Oh, wow.

It's not as psychologically frightening as floating away forever, but I still have nightmares about it, so it counts.

But that's just Twister, that's just Twister on Mars.

That's just Twister. But now that I think about it, I think Tim Robbins also dramatically kills himself in space in that movie.

This is not a spoiler-free episode.

No, well, again, sorry to those who haven't seen 2001, and if you haven't seen Mission to Mars, I'm saving you two hours. Tim Robbins, his wife is gonna come after him or something, and so he takes his helmet off in space and his head freezes and he floats away.

I will say, in terms of helmet off in space, and I'm sure we're getting to it, this isn't necessarily full space, but I was affected as a young person when Total Recall, where anyone's helmet cracks in Mars in that movie and your eyeballs get all big and crazy.

Oh, we're gonna get to it. Just real quick, I was like, man, I'm remembering Mission to Mars feels kind of violent. It was rated PG. It was a Disney movie, and I think it was based on a Disney ride. And it's PG, and I would think maybe I'm misremembering this, but I, well, maybe I'm misremembering the Tim Robbins thing, but when I was thinking about this, I went back and watched the scene, and the guy does get ripped to pieces, like graphically on screen by this tornado.

It was a different time.

It was a different time. So to me, dying in space is scary because of the forces at play, both physically and psychologically. And I think to understand the psychological aspects, we have to answer a big question first. Space, what is it? Ed knows a lot about space, so he can probably fact check me on some of this, but the first thing that's a real mind fuck to me, and this isn't like a science fact necessarily, but it's the way that I think about it, is that outer space isn't really a place. It's the lack of a place. It's literally the space between spaces. And it might sound kind of obvious to say that, but when we say someone is going to space, it's kind of misleading. It's not like going to New Jersey. Like you're not going somewhere, you're going nowhere. You're going to the nothing.

I mean, I guess, I mean, it's why we have the International Space Station, because there are certain elements that only space provides, like a zero gravity vacuum of space stuff. That's why we even keep that thing going. So we can do experiments in this hostile environment that we can't replicate here. But yeah, I guess I also never really thought of it as being the highway to some other place we'll never go.

It's the nothingness of it. The fact that it's all around us all the time, and we just don't have the perspective of it being all around us all the time. Like if you, like right now, if you were with us in the studio, you'd say.

Yeah, sure, the studio.

Well, first you'd think, wow, I'm lucky to be here in the studio with Chris and Ed. But second, you'd say, you know where you are. You're between us. You're in the studio. But if you take away the doors and the windows and the walls and everything else, you're eventually, you're just in space. You just don't realize it.

If you take away the doors and the windows and the walls, we're just on the street. Like, it's not, we're not in space.

Well, we're on Earth, but Earth is in space.

Yeah, Earth is cruising around the sun and we're all out here. We're on a pale blue dot in a sea of darkness. But how do you live your life if you're thinking that way every minute? You know, you can't.

No, you can't, you can't. But when you do stop to think about it, that's what I'm saying is one of the psychologically scary elements to me about space and how much nothing there is between spaces. Because I look this up, the average distance between stars in our galaxy is five light years. Five goddamn years traveling at the speed of light to get from one star to the other. Five light years of nothing on average between stars. And that's just in our galaxy. The distance between galaxies and homey buckle up, the average distance between galaxies is 10 to 100 million light years between galaxies.

Yeah, it's not small.

And there's an estimated two trillion galaxies in the universe. So that's too much fucking space.

This is what I mean about it. We're guaranteed not alone, but by that virtue, if you're in space and you're gonna die up there, almost a hundred percent chance it's gonna be from some sort of human error or fucking oxygen issue, then it will be a gray or a little green man slapping you around. Like the idea that you're gonna run into anything up there is pretty fucking slim.

But that's my point. That is what's scary to me about it. What's scary to me about it isn't the running into something, it's the never running into anything. It's the infiniteness of it that is scary to me. Like if you were running into something, at least there'd be something, but there's nothing. And that just, I don't know, it just crushes me to think about it. I find all that uncaring nothing just conceptually very scary.

Speaking of light years, before I move on too far from light years, it is an unbelievable concept. We can't obviously travel at the speed of light. So it's also just giving a unit of measurement that is a fuck you to everyone anyway, where it's just like, you know how far the way it is? You shouldn't even tell me, because you're saying it's a hundred light years and we can't travel to the speed of light. So now I have to do some weird conversion of, okay, we can travel four times the speed of sound, but the number just becomes so ugly. So it's like, well, then I guess, yeah, I guess we're a million years of travel from then. Like, it's just so crazy, even with like the advent of AI and we're gonna need AI for space crap. We're just gonna need something that can run the fucking spaceship.

And time gets all weird.

But yeah, we're gonna need AI because it's really fucking far away. I guess we're gonna need like cryogenics or whatever. We're gonna need to like be frozen or fall asleep for a long time. Basically, we have to jump so many hurdles to get to the next nightmare, it's insane. So like, it's so scary with the technology we have. And it was like, okay, what if we put so much effort into going further and then meet a new host of nightmares? Like Lewis and Clark went across this here country and I can't even imagine what running into like new plants, new animals, things you've never seen before, just here on earth and how scary that must have been. I can't even fucking fathom doing all of this, getting the ability to travel to a new planet. I don't just mean like fucking the moon. I mean an inhabited planet, like you find a planet with other life on it, even if it's just biologically plants and stuff. And then you're like, oh, look at this beautiful plant. Oh, it's not a plant. It shoots bees. It shoots space bees out of it. You know what I mean? It's like the idea that God, we have so many more technological advancements to make before we can meet a new nightmare is insane.

Yeah, I would also say jumping an unbelievable number of hurdles just to get to the next nightmare is also a really apt description of trying to produce and record this show.

It is difficult. It's a difficult undertaking sometimes. And by sometimes, I mean every time.

So all of that is just conceptually very scary, which is why before we even went into space, there was a lot of study and debate over what would happen to the human mind when faced with the vastness of the cosmos. There was this concept of what was called space madness. That developed, especially in 1950s era sci-fi. And it was this idea that space travel would either attract psychopaths or men and women of otherwise sound mind would break once they entered the heavens. And this was such a concern that the American Journal of Psychiatry actually issued a special report on space psychiatry that concluded one might expect strong indications of psychopathology from men who signed up to be fired into the cosmos.

So basically they're saying that you'd have to be a fucking lunatic to even want this job. So that's like, we really should test these people.

Yes. They said, quote, volunteers for dangerous missions occasionally have rather bizarre motivations. The report recommended interviews and psychological testing to weed out those with, quote, gross judgmental defects or other major defects in ego integration, but concluded that man's psychological plasticity is a matter of record. And if workable and habitable spaceships are constructed, effective pilots can be found to use them. Government psychiatrists fear that the volunteers for the first manned space missions would be impulsive, suicidal, sexually aberrant thrill seekers.

Oh, boy. Which is funny, because, you know, I think they went to Chuck Yeager as one of the first people they went to, being like, hey, we're doing this thing, the astronauts. You might have noticed that Chuck Yeager is in the right stuff, but he's not in the Mercury Seven.

Yes.

By all accounts, Chuck Yeager is the craziest person on the planet, like broke the fucking sound barrier, like all the speed records. This guy seems like he had either a death wish or just didn't care, he's super steely eyed. And then they were like, hey, you wanna do this? He's like, no, thank you. I'm real good, thanks on that. So it's just funny that like, yeah, psychologically people are like, you know, you might end up with like a Chuck Yeager type, but even he was like, we're good, I'm good, I'm fine.

I would love to know what kind of sexual aberrations the government was afraid of, like people whose kink was like loneliness, or like, I don't understand what kind of aberrations they'd be concerned would be a problem in space.

I don't know, maybe going fast, flying by the seat of your pants, maybe it gives you a boner. I don't even know what a sexual aberration is, so.

Yeah.

Realistically, it's just, it's a Puritan founded country and they're fucking weird about that shit.

Yeah.

So any reason to shame someone in our society, they'll jump right on that.

Well, as they started recruiting astronauts, they found the opposite. Many of their volunteers were not impulsive, suicidal, sexually aberrant, thrill seekers. They were basically engineering nerds who were drawn to the idea of space flight. They were stable men with, quote, excellent interpersonal skills and slight obsessive compulsive tendencies. And ultimately, while a few candidates were cut for not meeting standards of intellectual aptitude, no one was cut from any program on psychological grounds.

You know what's actually interesting? It's not psychological, but it is interesting. I believe one of the first rounds of candidates they considered, I don't know if they ever did it, but one of the first rounds of candidates they considered were movie stuntmen. Cause they were like, who's crazy enough to fucking throw themselves in harms way? But what they quickly found out was, or what they established even before going out to people is, we don't need someone who's crazy enough to be in this machine. We need someone who can be in the machine and tell us what's wrong and know what's wrong. And so that's why we have so many engineers in there, because they're the only person in the machine. So they have to say, this is happening, that's happening, and potentially have to troubleshoot in some way. So yeah, they kind of needed pretty bright people who were also fearless.

Well, yeah, you need guys like Alex Honnold, who did the free climb up.

Yeah, we need that guy, but with an advanced degree.

Yeah, true. Yes, absolutely. So even once the selection process turned up sharp candidates, psychiatrists were still worried that seemingly normal sound minds would break when dealing with weightlessness, radiation, isolation, fear, and the fact that there's no day and night in space. It's all just one time as far as the human mind is concerned.

Hey, I've survived in LA for over a decade and it's just one stupid season basically. And I don't believe it shattered me mentally, but I have lost complete sense of time. So they'll probably lose sense of time up there.

Yeah, it's a recipe for cracking up. And people have been really worried that there would be outbreaks of space madness on ships or space stations, but it really hasn't seemed to be much of an issue. At least not publicly. Neither NASA nor Roscosmos, the Russian analog to NASA, have ever reported any space madness incidents. There's one incident that kinda comes close, although it's kinda shrouded in conflict and finger pointing between NASA and Roscosmos, to the point that I think it's pretty clear that the Russians are trying to use space madness as a smoke screen, but for the sake of being complete, the issue was over the source of these small little holes that caused concern on the ISS in 2018. Two holes were found in one of the Russian Soyuz capsules that docked to the ISS. They were only about two millimeters in diameter, but that was enough to cause the whole ship to depressurize within a few weeks if they weren't dealt with. And they were dealt with, they were patched and it was fine, but the finger pointing started immediately over where these holes came from, why they were there, who put them there. And at first, the holes were thought to be micrometeorites, like these tiny little rock particles that pierced the craft. But then drill marks were discovered, which meant either this was a production mistake on Earth or someone purposely drilled them in space.

I don't like that. I don't like that space espionage.

Yeah, and since it was the Soyuz capsule, that means the engineering would have been Russian and the Russians really didn't love the idea that this was an engineering problem on their end. So they blamed an American astronaut named Serena Onyon-Chancellor, who had flown to the ISS aboard the Soyuz MS-9 spacecraft in June 2018. Now the reason they blamed her is because she was the first astronaut to have ever been treated for deep vein thrombosis, which is basically like blood clots in your legs.

Oh, she's not the first astronaut to be like, I'm packing my own drill. Is that fine?

Yeah, for some reason, all these astronauts to get their drills confiscated, but she snuck one on board. No, their theory was that she had this deep vein thrombosis and that she had it while she was in space and that she suffered an acute psychological crisis that caused her to drill the holes in hopes that it would get her back to earth faster.

I don't even know how that story makes sense, but sure. I mean, there's so much context you would need of recordings that would have had to have been done to even get to that conclusion.

Yeah.

It seems so specific that it must be based on something.

Yeah, well, she did. I mean, she was treated for deep vein thrombosis when she got back to earth. And she did end up leaving ISS early because of these holes. So it was kind of a story constructed after the fact, I think, of, oh, well, she left early and she was sick. So therefore maybe she went crazy and wanted to come home. So she did it, which is a stretch. And of course, the Americans have said is complete nonsense.

Yeah. If it's in the Russian side, it's gonna be like, yeah, like you said, there's only two options, which is it was a manufacturing error in Russia, or it would have to have been an American trying to sabotage Russia. That's why they're also pointing to the American side of being like a cosmonaut wouldn't drill holes in our shit. Although this does bring us to an interesting thing that we haven't mentioned yet in the fears of space travel is we always need someone in the International Space Station. Isn't it like constantly falling out of the sky? Like besides the scientific experiments that they've been contracted to do, I think there needs to be maintenance at all times to keep it in orbit or else it will just fall out of the sky, which is equally scary. And then the idea of adding some holes to that is you're already in this deteriorating box.

Yeah, yeah. I don't think it's been up there, what, like 20 years? So it's definitely had some wear and tear.

Yeah, it probably runs on like Tamagotchis and shit. It was all like 1990s technology.

Yeah, if you don't feed your cat every six hours, the ISS comes crashing back to Earth.

No, exactly.

So I did find some rumors floating around the internet about a case of Russian space madness. Now again, I stress these are rumors and they're not super well-sourced, but they're very entertaining rumors. So I thought I would share them.

Before we get into entertaining rumors, you know what's not an entertaining, not rumor of land madness? Remember when that astronaut like wore a diaper and drove across the country to like kill someone or whatever?

Yeah, yes, I do remember that.

That's an American hero. I don't remember anything more about it.

She was a spurned lover, I believe.

God, that should be in the next season of For All Mankind. That shows already so soap opera-y that that storyline would fit in perfect. But yeah, the only reason I interrupted is because we're gonna go into more, you know, Russian space madness, but it seems like the only true proven space madness we've had is that lady not in space, just a space adjacent madness.

Space adjacent madness, for sure. So this cosmonaut named Sergey Kruchefsky became the first person to speak openly about paranormal and or bizarre psychological phenomena during space flight in the mid 90s. Now this guy, Sergey Kruchefsky is legit. He was a successful military pilot and then he was a cosmonaut and now he's a researcher at the Russian Academy of Astronautics.

Until this podcast comes out and ruins him.

Yeah, he's the real deal, but the source for these quotes is a little sketchy. I've seen the quotes and articles online, but I can't track down a source for the quotes. So take them with a grain of salt. But Kruchevsky said, in 1994, I was preparing for flight. And my friend, an astronaut who had already worked on the space station warned me, Sergei, there you may meet strange phenomena, all the better if you were prepared for them. This astronaut went on to tell Kruchevsky that he experienced something that was like a dream or a hallucination, but so bright and clear, he felt it had to be real. He said he was reincarnated as a dinosaur and that he walked into a group of reptilian relatives, saw his three-toed claws and felt the horns, the horns standing up on his back. He also saw strange landscapes on earth that he felt were hundreds of millions of years old.

Like he'd look out the window and see Pangea down there.

No, no, no, no, no. He experienced being reincarnated as a dinosaur. Like he witnessed this from his perspective. So he walked into a group of reptilian relatives, saw his three-toed claws and felt the horns standing up on his back.

You know what's interesting is someone asked an astronaut, I was watching something and they were like, oh, sleeping in the ISS sucks because you just stand up in a room and you go to bed. And the astronaut was saying that they never achieve REM sleep because your body biologically is in a mode of like never in comfort. So it never feels safe to fall into REM sleep. There's no physical attribute of it's time for sleep now other than I turn the lights off. So you're just weightless, feeling no pressure on any direction of your body. So it's not like it feels like you're laying in bed and you're supposed to just go to sleep and people will do month long stretches up there and feel as though they've never slept. And so I do wonder how that plays into, because the REM sleep of it all would at least give you a release of like a good vivid dream. But by virtue of them never really achieving REM sleep, then I guess him seeing himself as a fucking horned backed toad or whatever.

Dinosaur, let's be respectful.

Thank you. Him being a horned dinosaur of the Spataceous era, then it's almost like your body unable to create dreams is still demanding he has a dream.

Yeah, the same guy also claimed that the deluge of information that you experience in space during these visions is compressed in time. So in just a few minutes, an astronaut can experience a seemingly long period of another life, also sort of like a dream. Sergey said, another time, this guy told him that he turned into an alien creature, visited the future and felt that it was a familiar environment.

Oh my gosh. Okay, so it's funny because my brain immediately went to, it took me a second because my brain went, I thought turned into as in like he steered the ship into.

No.

It was like, I know what you did last summer, an alien, now they all have to keep a secret. But no, yes, he turned into as in like he animorphed.

Yes, so he animorphed, he was reincarnated in the past as a dinosaur, he was future-carnated as an alien, and all of these things he said he experienced because he left the bounds of Earth.

What do you think dinner in the space station with that guy's like? What is it, day three where you just stop asking him how he slept, how his day's been? Because was he turning to other astronauts and being like, guys, are you, is anyone else turning into dinosaurs?

Yeah, I don't know. I imagine he spent a lot of quiet time alone, probably just like staring off into space and sucking on an applesauce packet or whatever food he had up there, but.

Some sort of rehydrated dinosaur food.

Yeah, he sounds like he really lost it. But imagine that one of these guys did snap and open an airlock or something. That takes us to our next section, which I call getting fucked by the void, because that's exactly what it's going to do to you if you have the unpleasant experience of getting shot out of an airlock or otherwise exposing yourself to space without any protection. Now, like we talked about, movies tend to show all kinds of things happening to people in these situations, usually some version of freezing, and usually it happens pretty quickly. But what would actually happen if this were you is much, much worse.

Where'd you get this information? Did you go to like whatwouldhappen.com or something? And does that website exist?

I didn't go to whatwouldhappen.com. I will put this in the show notes where I got this from. I don't remember, but it was a good website. It seemed very legit. So what would actually happen is much worse. Space is a vacuum, which means there's no air out there. And no air means no atmosphere. No atmosphere means no pressure. And when there's no air pressure, the boiling point of liquid, like the 75% of the human body that's made up of water, the boiling point goes way, way, way down. Without any air pressure, the liquid water in our bodies changes pretty much immediately from a liquid to a gas. Another word for that is it boils. It boils, in this case, inside our body and any tissue that contains water, which is all of the tissue in your body, would start to expand. And the reason that this won't kill you instantly is because our circulatory system has its own internal pressure. So while the water in your tissues will boil, your blood won't, at least not until the boiling water tearing apart your tissues bursts your blood vessels, at which point, bye bye pressurized circulatory system and hello, actually boiling blood.

Which is funny because when you see in the movies and TV, it's like, it's always shown as freezing, you know?

Yeah, you sort of do. So get this. According to a 2013 review in the journal Aerospace Medicine and Human Performance that looked at previous exposures to vacuums in animals and humans, which Jesus Christ, I don't know what those experiments were, but they found that animals and humans lost consciousness within 10 seconds. Some of them lost control of their bladders and bowel systems and the swelling in their muscles constricted blood flow to their hearts and brains as their expanded muscles acted as a vapor lock. So basically what happens to the bad guy in Total Recall when he gets shot out under the surface of Mars is actually pretty accurate. I don't know if your eyes would shoot out on stalks like his do, but the bulging and swelling part is correct. But here's where the freezing comes in. So on top of all of your internal water boiling and your blood eventually boiling, the vacuum of space pulls all the air out of your lungs, assuming that like your pressurized suit is punctured or you get shot out without a suit. It pulls all the air out of your lungs, which begins the process of suffocation. And while that is happening, the vacuum of space continues to pull gas and vapor out of your body through your mouth and nose, which I imagine doesn't feel awesome. And the freezing that you so often see in movies happens because the water boiling in your body is theorized, at least, because again, I don't know that they've ever done this to anyone, but that the water boiling would actually cause a cooling effect because the water molecules would absorb the heat energy from your body. So to recap, if you fell into space without a suit, you would boil, suffocate, freeze and probably crap your pants all at the same time.

It sounds quick.

Well, I mean, I read that it would take minutes for you to actually die.

Oh no, that's not quick at all.

Like everything would start very quickly, but it could take minutes for you to die, which could be a good thing if someone needed to save you, you could possibly be rescued.

Yeah, you get your like Guardians of the Galaxy nonsense where you get a little bit of time to save Peter Quill, whatever his name is.

Yeah, and you'd have, I mean, the funny thing about that scene in Guardians 3, I mean, I think they maybe have like a magic healing machine or something, but if you came back in from space after that long, you would have severe brain damage and muscle damage and probably just be like a weird.

I think it happens in number one. So he went a couple movies without brain damage, I guess.

At the end of the third one, doesn't he end up out in space for like-

Maybe, I think they just went back to that well because he definitely has to, because I remember in the third one, just in my head shouting, like why isn't he just putting his mask?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like where is his fucking mask? Because they do the exact same thing in the first one, if I'm not mistaken, where he just gives the other person his mask and then he's up there, he starts his little freezing bullshit.

Right. So a lot of this is just guesswork based on physics because we don't really ever want to test this shit on anyone, although based on the Aerospace Medicine and Human Performance Journal, it sounds like they've tested it on animals.

I mean, I will say it's kind of amazing. You watch any 1960s inside NASA footage and it's guys with slide rulers and yellow pads.

Yeah.

And it's unbelievable. And the same thing where it's like, you know, they've since, you know, Einstein's theory of relativity has since been essentially proven with like GPS satellites. Like it's not a theory anymore. But somebody had to, especially when it's like, we're going to space, somebody had to just sit down and be like, what do you think's going on up there?

Yeah.

Like what tests can we do? What studies can we do? How can we replicate it? Like, do we send a balloon up there? Do we send a, you know what I mean? Like, cause sending dogs and monkeys and stuff, like they're not gonna send back any good evidence, unless you can recover their bodies. They're not gonna radio down to you and be like, you know what, it's cold up here.

You're right. They won't radio down to you. But I think, I wanna say that for Leica, there was at least some basic like heart monitoring equipment that was like sending back.

Yeah, I mean, the Russians had, for the audience who doesn't know, Leica is the dog that the Russians sent to space.

Also in Guardians of the Galaxy.

Well, that, yeah, weirdly. The Russians, they had rovers on the moon moving with radio frequency and stuff. Like they had pretty incredible stuff they were doing and I knew we could monitor things from super far away. So yeah, it's not surprising to me that you slap a couple diodes on an animal, but you're still not like getting, you're just like, well, what we know is that their heart, it went real fast for a minute and then stopped.

Yeah, well, one experiment that we were running that gives credence to the idea that this math was all correct. In 1966, an aerospace engineer at NASA, a guy named Jim LeBlanc, was helping to test the performance of spacesuit prototypes in a vacuum chamber. So he was placed in this giant metal chamber and they sucked all the air out and they were testing to make sure that these suits would work. And somehow the hose feeding the pressurized air into his suit got disconnected. And there's a recording of all of this that you can see. It's on YouTube. We'll link it in the show notes. And it doesn't look very dramatic because you hear a little bit of him being like, oh, I think it's disconnected. And the people outside are like, oh, hold on a second. And then he like falls over. And then a couple of seconds later, people like run in or whatever. But there's a line that Jim says that really sticks with me. He said, as I stumbled backwards, I could feel the saliva on my tongue starting to bubble just before I went unconscious. Which definitely suggests that that idea that without air pressure, water will instantaneously turn into a gas. Pretty accurate, suggests the math is accurate.

I guess you'd have to make things like those vacuum chambers. Smart, smart to do it before you go up there. It is just interesting, the crap that people figured out. It's just pretty mind boggling. I'm assuming we're still doing incredible stuff all the time, but that was just an insane time. It annoys me when people go to the dentist and they don't like getting their teeth drilled and you'd have someone say like, you know, they put a man on the moon, but they can't make a silent drill. Yeah, well, the amount of money the country spent on the space race is staggering. I mean, it's actually weirdly not that staggering when you look at like four fucking men have as much money now, personally.

30 billion dollars was spent on the space race through the moon landings. 30 billion dollars in 1967 is equivalent in purchasing power to about 276,351,197,604.79 today. An increase of over 246 billion dollars over 56 years, which in 2021, Elon Musk alone was briefly worth more than. So yeah, something to think about.

Like it was an insane amount of every tax dollar went to the space race. So yeah, we're not gonna spend that on a fucking silent drill. NASA has so much less funding to go to the moon now with the Artemis missions than they did in the 60s. So I'm actually worried. I mean, I don't wanna slander anybody, but I'm a little worried about these next couple missions because it's like, you're doing this on a fucking shoestring budget comparatively.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, NASA's spending peaked at 4.5% of the federal budget in 1966.

4.5% of all the money this country spends on things was allotted to the space race.

Yeah, it declined to 1% by 1975 and has gradually fallen to about half a percent in recent years.

Yeah, it was 74 as the last year going to the moon, I think. So also we're out of Vietnam at that point, or Vietnam's wrapping up. Because that's the whole point of the space race, right? It was like, just make sure that we have the high ground. And then as soon as it seemed like no one else is gonna do that, you'd think on the moon by 69, you'd think we'd be living in space by 74. But no, we've completely obliterated the budget for it and just never thought back. It was like, yeah, no one else is going up there, it's fine.

Yeah, well, because it's fucking scary. As the rest of this episode is going to continue to prove. So there are three other people who experienced a depressurization in space. Unfortunately, they did not survive to tell the tale. They were three Soviet cosmonauts on board the Soyuz 11 capsule in 1971, where a faulty valve caused the depressurization as they were reentering the Earth's atmosphere. And the depressurization occurred in an altitude of about 168 kilometers or 100 miles above the Earth. But, since our atmosphere doesn't start until about 60 miles above the Earth, that was a pretty big problem. It took about 11 minutes and 40 seconds from the loss of pressure for the capsule to reenter the atmosphere, which is about 11 minutes longer than the crew survived. An investigation would later determine that the cause of death was hypoxia, which is a lack of oxygen to your blood, but I don't know what's fucking worse, suffocating to death 11 minutes before you'd be safe or burning up on reentry. Cause either way, you probably know how fucked you are.

Yeah, and both are just like, man, if I had 11 more minutes, or a better heat shield. It's just like, you can see Earth, you can see Earth right in front of you, and you're like, get me to that.

Yeah, but that's another way to die in space that I think is worth talking about, which is getting fucked by the atmosphere. And the most famous case of this is Space Shuttle Columbia, the tragedy that took place in 2003.

I watched it live. I watched it live in a hotel room of a casino with one of my best friends, Ray, who's actually an engineer working on NASA stuff now.

Was this his origin story? He was watching this at a casino with you being like, I could have saved them.

No, I don't think so. I don't know. He ended up just becoming an engineer and then by happenstance, I think worked in that field. But yeah, watched it live at a hotel casino, saw Chris Rock the night before. So basically his aunt got us like a hotel room at the casino Chris Rock was performing at so we can go see Chris Rock, then stay at this casino. It was a wacky thing to do. We were in high school, so we couldn't like go to the casino floor or anything. But yeah, woke up the next morning, turned on the TV and like watched that live, like watched that happen live, Columbia's re-entry live.

Well, the re-entry was where everyone died, but the part of what makes this so scary to me is that they were fucked from the jump. When the shuttle launched, a piece of foam broke off of the shuttle and damaged the heat shielding on the wing. And shuttles need this heat shield to protect the shuttle and the people in the shuttle from the super intense heat that results when a ship re-enters the atmosphere. The air compresses around the leading edges of the ship so quickly that the air can heat to almost 3000 degrees Fahrenheit. And the shuttle was in no shape for that. So it launched, got damaged, and after 16 days in space, it returned to earth and disintegrated in midair. It's not the same as dying in space, but it is space-based, and there are some truly horrifying, scary details involved in the story, and not the least of which is that ground control within a few days knew what happened.

Oh no. It's like, do I tell them? Is there something we can do?

Yeah, they knew the heat shield was damaged and that they were pretty sure that everyone was gonna die on reentry, but no one on the shuttle knew. So ground control had to decide whether or not to tell the crew what had happened, because if they stayed in space, they might run out of air and die. And if they reenter the atmosphere, they would also probably die. Now, I don't know why a rescue mission wasn't considered at the time.

Yeah, because it's like they went up there to do something. So they're probably like docked to the International Space Station or something. Is there not enough room in there for people, enough oxygen? Like we had multiple shuttles.

The summer after the accident, there was an investigation board that issued a report and they said that it would have been possible for the Columbia crew to repair the damage to the wing or for the crew to be rescued from the shuttle because the Columbia could have stayed in orbit until February 15th and the already planned launch of Atlantis and other shuttle could have been moved up as early as February 10th, leaving a window of about five days to repair the wing or get the crew off of the Columbia.

We could have had movies today that were like the Valentine's Day rescue instead of another admittedly limited number of black marks on NASA. It's very small, but yeah, if any way to avoid that, you'd think, I mean, look at fucking Apollo 13. Got everybody in a room, figured that out. You know what? The fix is in. I don't want to go to Ed's conspiracy corner, but these people, they didn't want them to come back. They knew too much. They saw an alien, dude.

Like, holy shit. They got one of those venom symbiote. They got a symbiote on board.

Couldn't let it come back.

Yeah. So this is also very scary because once the crew started reentering the atmosphere, again, the crew that knew nothing about the being a problem with the ship, they were reentering the atmosphere at 20 times the speed of sound and they pretty quickly knew something was really wrong. This detail haunts me. Witnesses saw streaks of fire in the sky over Texas and the first pieces of debris hit the ground at 8.58 in the morning. But the last transmission from the crew came about a minute after that. So they were riding a spaceship that was actively ripping the pieces around them as they plummeted towards the ground.

There's so many sensors on anything that goes into space. I'm surprised they didn't have some like, oh, we're getting a light for marker 19 that says that we have damage to our heat shield. Like it's weird that that wasn't an alert they got. I mean, they must have known on the ground, so someone got a fucking alert.

Yeah, NASA's report says that there were five quote unquote events, as they call them, that could have ultimately killed the crew. One, loss of cabin pressure just before or as the cabin broke up. Two, crew members unconscious or already dead crashing into objects in the module. Three, being thrown from their seats and the module itself. Four, exposure to a near vacuum at 100,000 feet. And five, which doesn't take a literal rocket scientist to figure out, hitting the ground would have been the last one that NASA said could have killed them.

So it does sound like, I mean, other than that 11 minutes for those poor Russian cosmonauts, I mean, it sounds, whether it's Challenger, Columbia, what have you, I mean, I guess a little less for like gusts on the ground, but seems like a lot of these are pretty quick. It's pretty quick deaths, hopefully. And nothing's not happening quick at 20 times the speed of sound. So pretty good. But I will say this, these few things we've talked about here, whether it's cosmonauts or NASA astronauts, any not really.

What about a garlic not?

I think it's pretty good that maybe they're not civilians. Do you know what I mean?

No.

Which is what this whole fucking rich guys riding dick-shaped craft into space, that I don't have fucking time for. But I guess what I'm getting at is until recently, dying in space kind of seems like this honorable thing to do. Because you were part of an organization working on something bigger than yourself, it was in the pursuit of science or the final frontier or what have you. And it's always a tragedy. It always feels like a global or at minimum national tragedy when an astronaut dies in space. Because they were part of something bigger than themselves, where it's like, I can't think of anything in recent memory that felt more of like, oh, who gives a shit, unfortunately, than the people who died this year in that submarine implosion. It was like, I've never seen a more uniform reaction of, shouldn't even fucking been there. Like it was crazy the level of no empathy for those people. That was like a little disheartening, but I also, I don't know, weirdly get it, right? Like it's like, climb a fucking mountain if you wanna experience something. So anyway, yeah, you get it. It's always a bummer to die, but it used to be that like dying in space was, you're gonna get a folded flag. And now we're hurdling toward like the, what were you even doing up there status?

Well, we're not gonna have anyone going to space as a tourist probably anytime. Well, I shouldn't say anytime soon. I guess Virgin Galactic's kind of already been up there and Elon should be up there any day now.

Elon doesn't go to space. He probably knows better than that.

Well, I mean, they're all trying to get up there, but I think, yeah.

I mean, they're going. It's just weird that he has it, you know? I have my own issues with SpaceX, but the reusable rocket is very handy.

Yeah, actually, didn't they launch it today?

They launched them all the fucking time. They launched them like every goddamn week. On Last Man, we were shooting on the water on this boat and we had to hold for their barge. Like everyone had to stop so that their barge can go to where it needed to be to catch the rock or whatever, which is pretty wild. And I think they currently hold the safety record in terms of like launch to accident ratio and pretty sure they're the only American craft taking humans to ISS. So it's as safe as it's ever gonna get. So yeah, I don't understand what his holdup is, but I do think it's funny that someone who created a spacefaring organization when they themselves don't go, it's a little bit like, I don't wanna get a tattoo from someone who has no tattoos. Yeah, everyone should go to space. We're not going to, but go ahead.

Yeah, I think as soon as it seems safe, they probably will. But I think you talk about people who have died as heroes going to space. Columbia wasn't the first time something like this had happened to an astronaut. The Russians lost a man during reentry over the course of the space race. The cosmonaut's name was Vladimir Komarov, and he wasn't the first man in space. That was his comrade Yuri Gagarin about six years before this happened.

Alan Shepard was pretty pissed.

Yeah.

We're sending monkeys up to space.

I will say, I saw a picture of Yuri Gagarin next to Alan Shepard, and man, Alan Shepard looks like a real goofball compared to Gagarin, who looks like, he's like a man going to space. And Shepard has this kind of like, he'll look on his face.

Don't get me wrong. I mean, all of the Mercury Seven were steely eyed missile men, but yeah, it's a little bit like Drago in Rocky.

Yeah. But Vladimir Komarov, there is a great deal of evidence that he was a genuine patriot. He was such a patriot that he was willing to take a ride on the Soyuz 1 to help beat the Americans in the space race, even though it was pretty clear that the capsule was not ready.

Bro, there is amazing footage you can find on this great documentary, which is, I don't know if it's still streaming. I know it's no longer in print on Blu-ray called When We Left Earth, which is like thousands of hours that they've sifted through of original NASA footage. And there is footage of the original Mercury 7 astronauts standing on like a tarmac, watching missiles explode in the sky. Like rockets that they're supposed to be on soon. And they're literally standing there for test launches and just watching it explode. And it's like, I'm gonna be on a little thing in the front of that? You, I'm gonna be on that? And that's why I'm like, Alan Shepard might not have looked intimidating, but that's a steely eyed missile man.

For sure. I think First Man actually does a really great job of portraying what it must have been like to ride essentially a Model T into space. Like just a shaky ass space jalopy that feels like it's breaking apart all around you at all times.

Because it probably was.

Yeah.

There's that great line in Armageddon where it's like we're sitting on one million moving pieces or whatever. And it's like all built by the lowest bidder.

And in the early days of the Russian space race, it was all just being built by whatever price the state decided it was gonna be built at. And they wanted to get up there, but the capsule.

I think they spent money. I don't think you get food lines like we saw of the average person hurt by the expenditure. I think they were throwing real rubles at this situation.

True. Some people have compared sending Komarov up on this ship to the Apollo 1 fire that killed three American astronauts because both tragedies occurred as a result of working too fast and making mistakes in an attempt to beat each other. The difference is the Apollo 1 accident happened during a launch test and never got off the ground. Komarov got into space and he was orbiting for about five hours before he was ordered to return to earth after a number of malfunctions started to crop up on the ship. And people agree it was pretty much a miracle that he was able to reenter the atmosphere without burning up, but the ship was so damaged and or poorly constructed that his parachute failed to deploy. So after he entered the atmosphere, he just fell straight to earth and crashed and exploded.

Oh no, that's somebody wants you in heaven at that point.

Yeah, and his remains were publicly displayed as part of a celebration of his heroism. And holy shit, there was nothing left of this guy. We'll put a picture in the show notes if you're curious, but it's basically a charred lump. The photo is black and white. It's not really all that gory. It just sort of looks like a piece of coal. And one of the wildest parts about this though, is that there are conflicting stories about how exactly Komarov felt about all this by the time he was crashing to earth. Some stories say he knew the risks like we were talking about earlier and it was a heroic thing to do and that he knew what he was up against and that he very much died a hero. Other people have suggested that he knew how bad it was and he was pissed that he was asked to put his life on the line like this. And the reason that he had an open casket viewing wasn't so much to celebrate him as a hero, it was a request that he made before he went up so that he could humiliate the government after he died, which I think is kind of a stretch because I feel like...

Yeah, that's a government that seems like everything they do is optics. Especially at that time period, there's no way they're going to humiliate themselves.

Yeah.

Let that happen. So yeah, it probably wasn't that.

But I do think it's possible that I also read that because Yuri Gagarin was one of his good friends and Yuri Gagarin was also his backup pilot for this flight if Komarov had gotten sick or something. So there is also a theory that he knew the ship was fucked up and that he took the bullet for Gagarin, that he was like, I don't want my friend going up in this and I'll do it instead.

There's also very well aversion. That might have been the case regardless, but I'm sure there's also aversion with the open casket, which was just world sympathy. You know, behind the Iron Curtain, they're doing this incredible space stuff. If this is gonna cause a delay, we want the world to see what this delay cost us. And to me, that seems, if you think about propaganda and optics, it wouldn't hurt to get a little sympathy on your side. Like, let's say Americans beat them whatever the next task was like the next week. It's like, what would you expect? We're burying a comrade.

Yeah.

And so it probably just a little bit of world sympathy, but as there should be, I mean, this was an interesting time. I mean, it was nations climbing the tallest mountains. It wasn't just adventure seekers. I mean, it was all ultimately done for the wrong reasons. It was all ultimately done to just put missiles higher than anyone can shoot them out of the sky. That's really seems to have been the case as evidenced by pretty much all this shit stopping in 7374. But it still was like ticker-tape parade worthy shit for like a decade.

And the astronauts and the cosmonauts though were, in a way, I feel like sometimes when you hear them talk about each other or you see like the plaque that the Americans put on the moon that also celebrated the lives of the cosmonauts that were lost. Like I feel like the astronauts and the cosmonauts, they were kind of in it together.

Oh no, they were there for this. They weren't there to put a nuclear bomb on the moon, which by the way is now since declassified project that a young Carl Sagan worked on. He was part of the scientists on the team to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon. And it was a thing the United States government was working on in tandem with the fucking space race. And even at the behest of the scientists working on it being like, do not do this. Like this is really not a good idea. It was this weird project that I don't have the name of at the moment, but it has been since been declassified so you can totally read about it.

Project A119, also known as a study of lunar research flights was a top secret plan developed in 1958 by the United States Air Force. The aim of the project was to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon.

It was just this really interesting thing where it is, whether it's a scientist saying, this isn't in our best interest or an astronaut saying X, Y and Z isn't in our best interest because I think these people, the scientists and the astronauts from all countries involved in this were probably doing this for a pure exploration and final frontier attitude and not like becoming the most powerful military in the world aspect.

Yeah, well, we know some of the things that Komarov said because there are supposedly recordings of his last moments that back up how pissed he was. I'm not sure where they came from or how real they are or if the translation is accurate, but they are interesting. They certainly sound real to my ears, but it's just sort of this crackly radio transmission. And it is also a very Russian thing that when you listen to these recordings, there is some sort of an announcer. I don't know if this was like a publicly accessible radio channel or something. And so they needed to have an announcer saying things like what he says, which is essentially calling Komarov a hero. And then like in between that, you hear Komarov saying things like, Fools, you've put me in a botched craft. And it's a very kind of like Cold War feeling transmission of like one guy panicking and being like, fuck you, you ruined me, I'm gonna die. And then the state being like, what a hero, what a triumph. So some experts doubt every detail of this story. I'd really love to know more about where this recording supposedly came from and if it's real or not. If someone listening speaks Russian, maybe you can try to translate and see if the translation in the YouTube video is accurate, or if it's just some random Russian radio clip that doesn't actually say anything interesting at all. But, and this might be my favorite part of the episode that we're about to get into here, what's really fascinating is that this isn't the only mysterious recording made of a cosmonaut supposedly dying in a space accident. In fact, there is a whole secret history and conspiracy theory that revolves around that very idea called the Lost Cosmonaut Theory. Now, before we dive into this, we actually need to know a little bit about the history of amateur radio operators, because without amateur radio operators, we would have none of this interesting history and debate. So, in the early days of the space race, when the Russians launched Sputnik.

October 4th, 1957, a date burned in my brain, because October 4th is my brother's birthday, but also my top five, top 10 favorite movies of all time is October Sky, and it opens on October 4th, 1957, when he sees Sputnik.

God damn, look at Ed go. I don't even need to research this show. He's got this shit down tight. So when they launched Sputnik, though, some Americans panicked, some people were like, oh my God, the Russians have this thing in space. But the Russians actually publicly published the frequency that Sputnik was broadcasting on so that anyone could listen to it.

They do that in October Sky in their high school. The teacher is tuned to that frequency, and it's like, you hear that? That's traveling at whatever thousand miles above the thing. It's like all the kids are listening to it.

Well, dude, this story is basically October Sky 2 then. I think we have the script for the sequel.

October Sky is a near perfect movie. If I could put the whole movie in the show notes without copyright issue, I would.

We should just try it and see what happens.

We're all going to jail.

Scared All The Time. I'm scared of my prison inmate Brutus.

Yeah, your roommate?

Yeah. So they broadcast this frequency and anyone could listen to it. It basically just made beeps, but a lot of people found it mind blowing and really cool that they could intercept this signal from space. And so many people found it mind blowing that a small subculture of radio operators all around the world sprang up just to listen to this satellite. And obviously they were the coolest guys in the world.

I mean, ham radio stuff is so crazy. Like it is wacky where you could from your basement, like in America, potentially talk to someone in Australia. Like radio waves are nuts. Like I said, the Russians operated a rover on the moon with essentially radio waves. Like radio waves are bananas.

They're crazy.

And I have to wonder too, how many people, I mean, this is 57. We have a whole generation of people who fought in World War II and then I guess potentially the Korean War, who probably like a lot of people had access to radios and like had an understanding of radios through their time in the service too. So now it's like, not only do you have this amateur enthusiast, but you have like a bunch of dads of these enthusiasts who would have been pretty familiar with radio and the technology.

Yeah.

So it's like this perfect combination of things in the world that would lead to a bunch of nerds trying to hear stuff in space.

Yeah, it did. There were a lot of people doing this. And when the US launched their first radio satellite, the Explorer 1, they also published the frequencies so that people could listen.

It just played rock and roll, dude.

Yeah, just 24-7 Elvis. So now you have all these people tuning into space frequencies, probably getting laid constantly because they're so fucking cool. Hell yeah. And wouldn't you know it.

Avalanche of sexual activity.

Wouldn't you know it. Now the Italians get involved. Some Italians start stirring up a little trouble.

Oh no.

These two pussy getting brothers, Achille and Giovanni, Judica, Cordelia, these two pussy hounds set up their own experimental listening station just outside Turin in the late 1950s.

To fucking find babes.

They used just purely scavenged and improvised equipment and they claim to have successfully-

It's made entirely of espresso machines. Like discarded espresso machines they found and like Fiat parts.

Yes. Yes, dude. A little, like a couple of mopeds, a couple of espresso machines.

Yeah.

Like a pasta crank.

It took forever to make too because any experience I've had over there, it's like we could only work from nine to 10 and then take a seven hour break.

Well, these guys worked a lot cause they love this and they claim to have successfully monitored transmissions from Sputnik 1 and 2 and Explorer 1. And then they monitored something else. On November 28th, 1960, the Bolkheim Space Observatory in West Germany said it had intercepted radio signals which it thought might have been a satellite. But the boys knew that no official announcement had been made of any launch. Cause at this point, they were paying attention to all of this. So they found it strange that this space observatory said that a satellite had been launched. So they turned on the receivers to listen. And when they listened, after almost an hour of just static, they started to hear a tapping sound emerge from the hiss and the crackle. And they recognized this sound as Morse code. And the Morse code was saying SOS. Oh my God.

Well, that's terrifying. And it probably doesn't make it any less scary that these guys speak satellite. Like these are guys who know what the sound of this battle. I always think about this and this is an aside and it's a very sad aside. I think about this weirdly regularly. Where like Pearl Harbor, if you're a guy working on an American plane all day, every day, planes are taking off, planes are landing, you're a mechanic, you know the sound of an American plane. So I can't even imagine what goes through your mind when you hear like a zero, like a Japanese plane coming. It must have immediately, immediately, without even looking up, know something's wrong.

And yet not even one.

Even if it was just one, I'm saying there's a sensory thing where it's like you don't cook with your eyes, you cook with your ears, you cook with your nose, you cook with everything that you know if something's burning.

This guy is Italian.

Yeah, well, but what I'm saying is same thing, there's a sensory thing. These two fucking spaghetti twisters hear satellites all fucking day. So they're gonna hear something and know like, that's not a satellite.

Yes, correct. It's saying SOS and even stranger, the signal was moving slowly. Not as if the craft was orbiting Earth, but as if it were a single point slowly moving away from Earth. And they listened until the SOS faded away into distant space.

No. In space, everyone can hear you use Morse code. It's the opposite of scream.

Then a couple months later, in February 1961, they were scanning Russian frequencies again, when Achille picked up a transmission from an orbiting capsule and they recorded the wheezing struggling breathing of what they thought was a suffocating cosmonaut. Now, this would have been, I don't know, two or three months before Yuri Gagarin did launch into space. So this would have been a second cosmonaut, not on the books, who might have died.

If you're Yuri Gagarin, what is your the day before the mission? You're just like, because you must know. If you're Yuri Gagarin, you're doing all the same training with these guys and you're just like, hey, where's Ivan? And it's like, Ivan doesn't work here anymore.

Yeah, Ivan got a new job at the bread factory.

Yeah. And it's just like, so you must feel a little worried about your flight. And this might be a fallacy, but I feel that I heard once where I read or it was just a dream I had that-

False memories.

It's a fucking, yeah, implanted memory. I feel like I heard that, you know how America does like T minus 10 seconds, T minus nine, T minus eight for the launch?

Yeah.

If I'm not mistaken, I want to say Russia doesn't do any countdown and when it's time to go, they just hit the button. And it's like there is no pomp and circumstance to it. It's just like all systems go, all systems go, have a good flight. And they just like hit the button.

See ya.

And so a level of no pomp and circumstance does weirdly track with like, where's Ivan? Ivan's at the bread factory. Next man up.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? Like, and there's also that famous anecdote, which is a little bullshit about how America spent a million dollars to develop a pen that can write in space.

Right.

And Russia's response to that was to use a wooden pencil. And everyone's like, how cool is that resourcefulness? And then American scientists are like, actually not cool at all, because pencils create lead shavings and lead shavings in zero gravity can float into your instrument panels and start a fucking fire. So yeah, actually not that cool.

Great job with that.

Okay, sorry for the aside there. I think you were saying that they heard they heard some fucked up wheezing.

They picked up this transmission and they recorded it. They recorded the wheezing, struggling breathing of what they thought was a suffocating cosmonaut.

Alright.

Then the brothers contacted this guy, Professor Achille Dogliotti.

A separate Achille?

A separate Achille.

Wow, two Achilles.

Italy's leading cardiologist to get his read on it. And Dogliotti, the dog man himself, said he could distinguish the clear sounds of forced panting human breath. What they recorded that day remained a mystery, but not for long.

They somehow got me going up more than two flights of stairs.

No, two days later, the Soviet press agency announced that Russia had sent a seven and a half ton spaceship the size of a single decker bus into space on February 2nd and it had burned up during reentry. What they did not say was that a man was on that spaceship that had burned up during reentry.

Yeah, a single decker bus is pretty small. That's like kind of what you'd send a Sputnik up with, I guess. I mean, I don't know what it seems small for, maybe not because you're only going to low earth orbit or just earth orbit, but yeah, there's no manifest, I guess. They didn't reveal like, it was just, oh, we sent up a bunch of shoes, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

It doesn't matter what we sent up, it's our bus to do with what we please. Also, it's Russia, so it might've been an actual bus with a rocket on it.

Yeah, who knows?

I'm just kidding, they had good stuff, I'm just joking.

So these guys probably recorded someone suffocating to death as that was reentering, maybe because it depressurized, no one's sure.

And this is coming on the heels of the fixed item SOS disappearing into the void of space that presumably they lied about, oh, that launch you saw was a satellite, it wasn't in fact a human being that since, you know, fucking died in space.

Yes.

And then this one, it's like, well, fuck, on reentry, we kind of have to say what it is.

I think yes, the fact that it reentered and crashed was sort of, they had to say something about it. But they didn't know who they'd recorded, they didn't know what had gone wrong, and no one really knew. Because the Soviet space program was shrouded in secrecy to the point that by 1971, this is a whole story in and of itself, but without the visuals, it's kind of hard, so I don't have all the details here for us. But basically by 1971, nine cosmonauts had vanished from the official photographs, which were re-released in honor of the 10th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight.

Vanished back to the future, where they slowly dissipated as they went into space, and then it's like, how do we explain this photo? Or that Russian thing of like, no, we only spent five people, I don't care what you heard.

Yeah, vanished as in, there's a whole story about this American space historian who uncovered airbrushing in the photos, and the histories of some of the men who were definitely airbrushed out. But the bottom line is that no one's really sure how many Russians died during the space race. It was eventually admitted that, quote, six or eight trainees died in the early days, but again, no details on who or how.

Well, they probably signed something, it's like, we don't have to acknowledge trainees, it's like interns. Probably a million interns die a year in offices, and they don't have to declare it.

Well, what do they even consider a trainee? I mean, I don't know that there was an official definition of trainee, it might have just been anyone who didn't make it back, was considered a trainee.

Is now deemed a trainee. Yeah. And now their family will receive the trainee Lost in Space amount of four rubles.

Yeah, and two loaves of bread.

Yeah, it got greasy fast, I'm sure. All right, so these people who were airbrushed out, it was for the 10-year anniversary of being airbrushed out, I guess. So that would have been, what'd you say, 71?

Yeah, so in 71, the Soviet space program released these photos in honor of the 10th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight, and people noticed that there were guys who should have been in those photos who were no longer in those photos.

Like whatever their Mercury 7 astronauts would have been, all of a sudden it's like, oh, there's only three here.

Yes.

So that whole era of that spacecraft seemed to have been erased.

Yeah, basically. And all these other record, like the SOS recording, the guy suffocating. Part of the reason that this is also shocking is this was before the Russians were admitting to people being in space at all. They were saying that they were sending up this spacecraft to orbit, that they were testing things. But I don't think they were announcing that there were people on any of these.

Until Yuri Gagarin.

Until Yuri Gagarin, yeah.

But there still could have been, like there were seven astronauts and only one of them was the first. But yeah, it is weird that, yeah, we got no interviews from these other guys and all of a sudden they're not here. And there's, you know what I mean? And it's like, what was their involvement at all? So if I'm looking at the timeline correctly, we have Sputnik in 57, and then we have these Italian boys hearing the SOS and a potential lie about a satellite getting launched by the Russians before Yuri Gagarin does his famous manned orbit around the earth. So we're talking at this point, we're looking between 57 and 61 is when these Italians were building stuff out of noodles and fiat parts.

Yes. So then the brothers would go on to record Yuri Gagarin's space flight, and they actually supposedly were alerted a few hours before Kennedy that Yuri had gone up, because Kennedy was awoken at like two in the morning to be told that Gagarin was the first man in space, and supposedly the brothers knew a few hours before that because they got tipped off by a journalist. So five weeks after the brothers recorded the first official man in space, Yuri Gagarin, they made what has become their most famous recording. On May 19th, 1961, the brothers picked up the voice of a female cosmonaut whose ship burned up on reentry. And we know that this happened because the recording sounds a little bit like this. The recording is like two minutes long, a minute and a half long, and a lot of her words are repeated. But essentially she's saying, I am hot, I am hot, I can see a flame, I am hot, am I going to crash? I will reenter, I feel hot. So they felt that they had picked up the sounds of a secret female cosmonaut who burned up on reentry.

And God bless Russia for using women for a bunch of shit. Like I believe they also had the first flying aces that were female were Russian. I don't know about ladies' lives in Russia in terms of like the day-to-day society, but there was never any separation when it came to like huge, heroic, rad shit.

Well, yeah, I mean, they were all comrades. So they got to go up and do all the cool stuff too.

They got to die in anonymity like the boys.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And then a few days after that, they picked up a few seconds of another transmission, which we unfortunately couldn't find any clean audio of, but it translated to conditions growing worse. Why don't you answer? We are going slower. The world will never know about us. Now, according to the sources I found, both recordings are accurately translated.

The second one might just be someone dating a married person. We've heard this conversation a million times.

So the Brothers story after this point gets really crazy. Like when I said this could be October Sky 2, I don't know if it would be October Sky 2 or just a really badass movie, but...

I mean, literally anything you're about to say will only illuminate that you have maybe not seen October Sky.

The Brothers were approached by Russian and Italian spies individually, the Russians saying we know what you're doing and the Italians saying they're gonna kill you. And then they eventually came to the attention of NASA and got brought to the States to explain what they've been doing and how they did it because they had recordings that the Americans at NASA had no idea how they were able to get.

It's probably two prong. It's probably these guys are skilled ham radio operators, but also something about when those things go over orbit, where Italy is with the orbit of the earth type of thing, because there's a great movie that's called The Dish, maybe, I don't know. It's pretty fun biopic about during the moon landing, we were only able to talk to those guys and like maybe even show the footage because of a giant satellite operated by like a guy in Australia. And the movie's about how it's like a guy. It's not like some crazy organization. So it might just be that they were in the perfect place to pick that up.

I think you're right. There was something in the reading that I was doing about, and I didn't jot it down.

Pretty sure NASA scientists in the 60s could figure out how to do anything, it seems like.

You would think. But they actually even near the end of their time being NASA consultants, they had secretly recorded a Russian who had some suit accident in space and he had fixed it. And then they brought that recording to NASA and they were like, here, this is what you should use to avoid this suit accident ever even happening. So like they may have. Oh wow. Yeah, they may have been able to use these secret recordings to save Americans lives before anything bad ever even happened. And then that was just their journey through the radio world. After that.

Wait, do you know if they, did they come to America? Like, was it like, hey, Russians are gonna kill you if you stick around here? Did they get some sort of sanctuary visa to work with NASA to like save their lives?

So what happened was they got brought onto some Italian television show. Like the Russians showed up, they were a little bit spooked, but they weren't super concerned. And then the Italian spies came to them and said, hey, these guys might kill you. And then they got brought onto this Italian television show that I think was some sort of this is your life kind of program of like, who are these two crazy Italian boys with this radio? And that is what got them the attention of NASA. And then yes, NASA literally brought them to the United States and they were like, what are you guys doing over there?

Yeah, pretty interesting. That's fucking cool.

We're gonna link to an article from the 14 times about all of this. And I forget if it's the Russian or the Italian spy, but one of them said if it weren't for that TV show, they would have been dead.

Oh my gosh. And how early were Italians moving out of New York to Florida? Because who the fuck is even aware of Italian television in either Cape Canaveral area or Houston, Texas, which I've been to both. And I think Florida has got a better chance of having some like New York Italian moved on there.

Well, I don't know that anyone watched the actual, the show made them, I think, big enough celebrities in certain.

I guess it would have made it, I made it to the AP, you're saying. It would have made it to like Associated Press. Yeah, I don't think they would come across the news ticker.

Yeah. I don't think anyone at NASA was like, oh, I am Italian and I am watching Italian television.

It's true. They're not, Operation Paperclip got us a lot of German scientists. I don't know if it got us a lot of Italian scientists.

Yeah, yeah, I don't think so. But then, I mean, these brothers went on, they launched Europe's first cable network and then one of the brothers, following on the heels of Professor Dogman, one of these brothers became another one of the most respected cardiologists in Italy. So they lived wild lives and at least one of them is still alive because one of them gets interviewed in the Vice podcast that was made this year or last year.

Wow, God, I love a success story.

Yes.

And a near death story.

So according to an unsighted list on Wikipedia, so big flashing red lights, this could be bullshit, but the complete list of the lost cosmonaut transmissions the brothers picked up are as follows. May 1960, an unnamed cosmonaut lost when his orbiting space capsule veered off course. November 1960, the brothers picked up the SOS message and Morse code from that troubled spacecraft. February 61, they recorded the suffocation of a cosmonaut. April 61, just prior to Yuri Gagarin's flight, a capsule circled the earth three times before re-entering the earth's atmosphere.

That's amazing. So you're saying that they were as far ahead potentially as John Glenn's multiple orbits of the earth before we even sent Alan Shepard or that monkey, whose name I have not committed to memory, but they just kept fucking dying. And so they couldn't take credit for any of it because these dudes were just burning up in the atmosphere or blowing out into space and like, that's unbelievable.

Yeah, so May 1961, they recorded weak calls for help from an orbiting capsule. October 61, a Soviet spacecraft veered off course and vanished into deep space. November 62, a space capsule bounced off the earth's atmosphere during reentry and disappeared. May 63, an unnamed female cosmonaut perished on reentry. And April 64, a cosmonaut was lost when a capsule burnt up on reentry. Now in the intervening years, a lot of The Brothers' story has come under pretty intense scrutiny for a whole bunch of mostly technical reasons that I didn't totally understand. But basically, there's speculation that The Brothers at some point may have been under intense pressure to keep producing new recordings and that that might have fueled some of their recording production. There's some people that think that they were just picking up recordings that had nothing to do with space and then kind of cherry picking the ones that sounded like they could have something to do with space. And then they also at one point claim to have intercepted image transmissions, but, and this is one of the technical things I didn't quite understand, people have gone back to look at it and the radio frequencies that they claim to intercept these image transmissions on were not frequencies that could have been used to even transmit images. So that seemed like it might have been bullshit.

But there is shit in the fucking air. I mean, there really is. The stuff that's floating around is unbelievable. And if you know how to capture it, plus you said one of those guys ended up going on to have a fairly successful career in like television or cable or something.

They started Europe's first cable network. The brothers did.

Yeah, so I think these guys had technical know-how probably in audio and visual at a certain point. Like they understood how frequencies and radio waves worked and stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if people didn't question them at least for a while on some of the image stuff because it's like they seem like experts in the field.

The Vice podcast says that when they interviewed the one brother, that he really just sounded like a nerd and had absolutely zero interest in talking about anything except the technical details of stuff. So, who knows? But I will say, what's so haunting about this besides the historical implications is that if that SOS signal was real, that means that somewhere out there in space, probably according to some of the math I read about 9 billion miles from the sun right now, the first human either already has or is about to cross the boundary of our solar system into interstellar space. That body would be perfectly preserved, frozen at negative 270 degrees Celsius, sailing away from earth at 18,000 miles an hour. And it's unlikely, but I like to think that maybe that mystery man or woman could someday crash into another planet. And maybe the microbes on their body could survive the crash. And if that planet could support life, then maybe our planet's forgotten astronaut could become the most important being in another planet's history.

That's really pretty and a beautiful thought. The alternative is it causes the 9-11 of whatever that fucking planet is. And now we have a bunch of aliens being like, who did this come from?

Yeah, the alternative is it's carrying a disease that wipes out an entire civilization.

Or it literally just crashes into buildings. And now we're like a couple thousand years away from this armada eventually reaching us in retaliation for a couple things. Honestly, any of our space trash could start an intergalactic war. Which, by the way, a lot of space trash, especially since SpaceX started doing its thing where you can really, the reusable rockets, the amount of money you spend to get a satellite in space has gone down so astronomically that it used to be you were very like, okay, we're sending up just like one thing, it's going to cost a fucking zillion dollars. Now it's pretty cost effective, so they can just say, fuck it, we'll send up a bunch of crap whenever we need it. And we have, I'm making these numbers up, but let's say 5% of the orbit of the Earth with satellites in like 1999. Fuck it, in like 2005, it's like 30% in 2023.

Yeah. The number of operating satellites around the Earth has more than quintupled since 2006. The number has increased by 20% annually on average in the last six years, and more than 30% in the last two years, with one estimate predicting the launch of an additional 58,000 satellites by 2030. Holy shit.

So it's like, we can't even get into space soon, we'll have so many fucking satellites zipping around. So we're going to have a whole new run of people dying, being like, what happened to fucking Susie? Oh, she crashed into some Dogecoin satellite or whatever and perished.

Can you imagine just like a shiny silvery Dogecoin circling the Earth, sending out like Sputnik signals to people?

If Elon has his way, that might be the case. I mean, that guy should be in jail for that Dogecoin shit, but I don't know, I don't deal with crypto.

So it's pretty impressive that even with all these satellites going up and so much stuff orbiting the Earth, that we still manage to make space travel as relatively safe as it is. And that's thanks to a bunch of really smart people who work on making this stuff safe 24 hours a day. And we're really psyched to be able to say that we have one of those very smart people here with us today. The man Ed watched Chris Rock and then the Columbia shuttle disaster with, Ray.

Yeah, so as Chris said, I was able to track down the guy I watched the Columbia space shuttle disaster with, which wasn't that hard because he's one of my best friends and I was also able to confirm that it is in fact not his origin story. But yeah, he is a mechanical engineer who does work on space suits. So he felt like the perfect person to talk to about kind of the realities of the safety of some of this stuff, to either put our fear at ease or potentially stoke new fears that we don't even know exist yet. So without further ado, let's go to our conversation with the man, the myth, the legend, who we'll call, because it's his name, Ray. So we're here with Ray. Hey Ray, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Sure. My name is Ray. I'm a mechanical engineer. I've been working in aerospace about 10 years. I work for a company that's a NASA contractor and we mostly deal with life support hardware for space suits.

Right on. And those are all part of the safety mechanisms?

Yeah, we're part of the structure of the space suit. So the integrity of our parts are what helps keep pressure inside the suit. And we also make some parts that are part of the life support system. A lot of space suits have a portable life support system with it. That includes water supply, oxygen supply, all the things to keep somebody alive and comfortable in an enclosed environment.

So relevant to some of the things we were discussing earlier in this episode, would that water and air supply, would that be for if you were doing some sort of a spacewalk and you were somehow cut free or flung from the ship and spiraling out into space, those things would give you the ability to survive until someone would rescue you?

Yeah, exactly. Nowadays, when you see videos of people doing spacewalks, they're up on ISS and they're wearing an EMU suit. And I think there's been almost 270 spacewalks that they've done from ISS. And on that suit, there's like a big backpack basically, and that contains the life support system. And that's enough to allow somebody to do like a six to eight hour spacewalk without really needing any resources from the space station. So when they're up there floating around, they're really kind of self-sufficient. And that backpack has water supply, you know, helps cool the suit or heat the suit, depending on what they need. And it has their breathing gas and kind of like backup systems for all that basically. So that backpack is jam packed with gas cylinders and water and CO2 scrubbers and all kinds of cool stuff. But yeah, if you run tethered and just floating around, that would keep you alive for quite a while.

Which actually sounds pretty fucking terrifying. Is there a button where you can turn it all off if you're like, well, I'm just floating to Venus here?

Yeah, I don't know what the astronaut can actually control while they're in there. They probably have some control over like temperature and stuff like that. But for the most part, it does all the work for you. Another part that we work on is the umbilical. So when they're in the airlock, they're reducing the pressure of the suit in order to go out into the vacuum of space. They don't run it at like the pressures that we have here on Earth. It's down in like the single digit. Pressure wise, they have to spend a lot of time in there and they actually hook up to an umbilical that's an oxygen water supply that like charges up the suit basically while they're in there before they leave their national space station.

So they get in the airlock and then the umbilical starts feeding in all of the like gas and things they're going to need for that trip?

Yeah, the backpack kind of stays with the suit basically. You just kind of recharge it. Yeah, that's the job in the umbilical. So while you're in there, they want you hooked up and using the resources of the space station up until the moment you leave and then you're on your own.

Is there one bullet in the helmet of the suit just in case?

That I don't know.

Oh yeah, speaking of bullets and helmets, could you shoot a bullet at a space helmet? Like how dense or how strong is a space helmet?

They're super strong. So the one that they use now on the EMU suit is kind of the classic fishbowl design helmet. And that's very similar to the one they used on Apollo. So initially with the spacesuits they had during the Gemini missions, the first ones where they were floating around in space, that had a multi-piece helmet where the clear part in the front was actually a separate piece. And the whole thing kind of bolted together in a way where it held the pressure in, but it was kind of this multi-piece arrangement. And when they were thinking about planetary exploration, they were kind of worried that if they took a header and hit the lunar surface with this multi-piece helmet, that could let some gas out and it just wasn't sturdy enough. So they wanted to use this one-piece design. And that's what they came up with is that kind of fishbowl thing. It's like this one solid plastic bowl that they're wearing on their head. And the thing's pretty thick and it's definitely impact resistant. Like we do do impact testing on it. So we kind of drop a weight on it with a certain shape tip to make sure that it isn't going to fracture or anything like that. But yeah, they're pretty serious. Every once in a while, we'll like whack one with a sledgehammer just to show people, you know, like these things do not shatter. They are pretty, call it bulletproof. I don't know if we've never shot them with a bullet.

I mean, I don't know.

I'd give it like 50-50.

So a lot of this episode, we talk about the most terrible ways to die in space. Is there anything outside of suit depressurization that keeps you up at night as something that would be a terrible way to die in space?

I mean, I think that's the main one. A lot of what we do is making sure our parts, you know, fit together, seal together to keep the gas in. When that life support system that's on the suit, there's extra gas in there. If there was a leak, there's a certain amount of backup so that you're covered and can kind of overcome that escaping gas. For my job, that's a lot of what I think about is keeping the gas in. But there have been incidents where it wasn't a leak in the astronaut. Their life was in jeopardy for other reasons. A couple years ago, there was a water leak inside the suit. And I forget exactly what the source of the water was. You know, there's cooling water and there's drinking water in there. And one of them started leaking and actually, you know, filling up the suit volume. And the ventilation system in the suit pushed that water up into the helmet. And the guy was like, oh, you know, my head's kind of damp and, you know, I don't know exactly what's going on here. And throughout the EVA, it just kept filling up and filling up where it started to like impede his vision. And it was getting in his mouth and around his nose. And I think he realized pretty quickly it was getting serious, where if he got more water in there, he's going to have trouble breathing and seeing. And don't forget, he's outside of the space station floating around. So you really need to be able to see to make your way back in there. So yeah, it was touch and go.

And basically his options, if you let it keep going, drown in space or take your helmet off and have your eyeballs shoot out in stocks in space. It's a rock and a hard place. That was really interesting. What you're saying is might have even just created an atmosphere in there of humidity, which essentially would blind him to seeing how to get back into the station.

Yeah, exactly. And when they did actually get back in the space station, they took that helmet off and there was a lot of water in there.

Crazy.

Yeah, it was pretty shocking.

Somebody has to be like, listen, I don't know how to tell you this, but it was not the cooling or drinking water. This is your piss bag, dude.

Stop the kidding on your own. I mean, that's one of those like astronauts have nerves of steel situations where like if my windshield starts to fog up on the 405, I'm like, oh, God, I need to pull over. Like, I can't imagine being outside the ISS or on whatever spaceship and being like, yeah, can't see, can't breathe. Gonna just keep my cool here and somehow get back inside. That's not for me.

Yeah, pretty amazing. They're definitely some steely dudes. There's still a little bit of. They're just pretty amazing people.

They're in charge. They know what they're doing. And yeah, that's what it takes to be able to think clearly in those situations. And those guys are really good at like problem solving and troubleshooting and helping them work around all those issues. So here's a question for you. What is the future of spacesuit technology look like?

I mean, I know some of this stuff is probably like classified or whatever, but generally are there like theories about what can be improved? If you were to look up XEMU, the letter X and then EMU, you can find some information on kind of what the future is going to look like. There are really two types of space suits. There's IVA suits and EVA suits. And an IVA suit is kind of just a balloon that keeps you safe inside a spacecraft if it was depressurized. So that's kind of like the suit that they wear on the U-2 spy plane, which is at super high elevation. Those are kind of the simpler suits that are tough to move around in, but they're protected. They give you pressure in case of an emergency. The EVA suits are what you're going to explore a planet with. And there's been a lot of really cool development in that area. Big things are improving mobility. You know, if you're going to go explore the surface of a planet, you want to be able to move around and walk pretty uninhibited and without having to exert a ton of energy. Because don't forget, you're wearing this like big inflated thing. And you can imagine just trying to move your arms, move your legs, your compressing fabric and moving all this air around. It takes a lot of energy. And if you see the video of astronauts on the moon, their legs are kind of stiff and stationary and they just kind of bounce around. Those legs weren't really designed to be able to walk and move around with ease. The next generation suits are going to have all kinds of mobility elements in the legs so that they're free to swing and move and just be a lot less of a load on the human body. So yeah, mobility is a big thing. Part of what my company does is developing those joints that help the space suit flex. You can bend down without having it feel like the thing weighs 2000 pounds.

Yeah, I was about to ask that because it's pretty much all designed with like, make it as heavy as you want, right? Because it's zero fucking gravity. So who cares? But then if you go to somewhere has any amount of gravity, I imagine weight becomes the enemy. When you're outside of a spaceship or outside of the ISS, like, yeah, I can lift a Mack truck, but you go somewhere. It's any percentage of gravity, I guess. Now you're feeling all those 2000 pounds of tubes and pipes and shit you got in there.

Oh, yeah, 100 percent.

Now, since this is a show about the worst things that can happen, like what are some of the things before you ship these out the door you have to take into consideration that by virtue of X, Y and Z, these are pretty good to go. Nobody's deaths on my hands.

Yeah, we definitely go through a lot to make sure these parts are super resistant to any kind of issue that's going to happen. So it kind of starts with just the raw material. All the material comes with full chemical and physical test reports so that we know exactly what this stuff's made out of. So we start with like the best of the best material. And then through manufacturing, pretty much everything's 100% inspected. Like every little dimension that's on the blueprint gets checked and you know, pretty tight tolerances on all this stuff. So there's not a lot of room for little variations in the parts. Once they're made, we test everything before it goes out the door. So a lot of what we do is manufacturing, but we also do a lot of testing too. So we have a clean room. A lot of times the parts have to get clean. They go in there, you know, we gown up, we wear hair nets, clean suit, gloves, booties, all that stuff. And we go and test these things in an ultra clean environment and basically replicate what's going to happen to them up in space. So we give them the same pressures, the same loads, all that stuff, and demonstrate that they're going to be absolutely fine before they leave the building. And a lot of that testing is witnessed by customers and also government inspectors come in. So before this stuff goes out the door, a lot of eyes have seen these things work and feel strongly that there's not going to be any issues. It winds up being a ton of effort just to get a part out the door.

Do the astronauts ever ask if they can watch as you're testing this stuff? Because I feel like I want to be there, too.

You know, they're probably somewhat involved in testing of it before a mission. But, yeah, we do have astronauts visit every once in a while. They're always very interested in kind of seeing where everything's made and meet the people, and they're not afraid to ask questions if they see something weird or if they're curious why we do something a certain way, so.

A lot of astronauts that come in, they're not just necessarily like rocket jockeys. They have high level advanced degrees as well, right? They probably have interesting questions or know a little bit.

Yeah, absolutely. I think most of them have some kind of science background. Plenty of them are engineers, and they have a really good understanding of that kind of stuff. And they go through a ton of training. So when it comes to the spacesuit parts, they know what all that stuff is. And even all the spacesuits that are up on the space station, they have to service and maintain those things. So they're kind of like spacesuit mechanics in a sense.

Oh, yeah. Interesting, Drew. So we've talked about a couple different dangers you can run into with this suit. Too little air, too much water. Anything else you can think of? Have we covered all the elements?

So part of the life support system, the backpack that's on the EMU suit that you see floating around, is an oxygen supply to...

Supply oxygen?

Yeah, provide a beautiful environment inside.

The tactical term for the oxygen supply, yeah.

Yep. So there's high pressure oxygen in there, it kind of moves around through metal tubes and metal passages and everything. And something I never really thought about until I was trained in it is that when you machine parts, you're cutting metal, you're moving metal around, it's easy for like a drill bit or a cutting tool to raise like a little sliver of metal and it doesn't get fully cleared away. And if that's an oxygen wetted passage in a part, all of a sudden you start flowing oxygen, hard and fast through this passage, it can actually break away a tiny sliver of metal that isn't supposed to be there and propel that piece of metal into another piece of metal and that can cause a spark.

In a pure oxygen environment.

Yup, exactly. So there's a lot of steps to make sure that all those oxygen wetted surfaces are in super nice shape. There's no weird defects, no slivers, no sharp corners and our blueprints have guidance about what all that is. Probably just the tiniest candle being blown out.

I mean, you know, me and my mom go watch ISS all the time when I'm home.

Oh, that's true. Yeah. So it's pretty cool that there's enough light reflecting off of it that you can see it at night. But I heard recently an astronaut dropped a toolkit up there. You know, they're working on something and they had a tool bag or a toolbox I would think would normally be tethered. And I guess it came loose and just floated away. And I've heard you can actually see it. Like if you're viewing the station from Earth, I think you can also actually see a tiny bit of light that's the floating tool bag drifting along with the space station.

So that's an interesting point, actually, because I love the show For All Mankind. I don't think you or Chris have watched it. It's basically a soap opera. It's a space opera. But for the announcement of the Artemis mission suits or whatever, they had hired the For All Mankind costume designer to do the outside layer to make it look cool. And then I had sent it to you. And then you were like, A, they just put that over it so that other nations and other people don't see like integral design stuff for the new suit. But more importantly, I think you were telling me that space suits all have to be bright white, right?

I don't know if they have to be bright white. It's like the suits they wore during the space shuttle program or that bright orange. That's just for search and rescue. If a shuttle had a crash land or something like that, it had these highly visible orange suits.

I think this only came up when we talked about it because, and we'll put a picture of this in the show notes, it's like a black suit with these little orange accents on it. And I think because it was dark as fuck, you were like, that's not going to fly.

Yeah, that just didn't seem right to me. I don't know if you're out in space, you wouldn't want to be in a black suit, I don't think. Just blending in everything.

Yeah, like trying to find ink in an ink well, I guess.

Yeah, one interesting thing I just thought of, talking about the outer layer of the spacesuit, part of what those layers do is protect against micrometeoroids. That's like a real...

I'm aware of these things. Chris just told me about them.

Yeah, they're just tiny particles moving around really fast, and even though they're small, they have so much energy that they can damage the surface of the suit, so there's a certain level of protection built into those layers, just to protect against micrometeoroids. I've heard that on the outside surface of the space station, there's a lot of handles and footholds and stuff like that, and they're all super rough, just from however long it's been up there, 20 years or so. Just from all these micrometeoroid impacts, it just abrades the surface over time.

Wow, it's funny, the more we talk about space, the more it's like an absence of things. It's also apparently an all-the-time sandpaper.

Yeah, well it's like if you had sand particles in space, it got flung off of something, and there's no friction, and they're moving it 16,000 miles an hour or whatever.

I'm just saying, it's funny to think of space as the absence of everything, including pressure and air, but really, there's shit up there. There's fucking radiation zipping around, there's whatever the sun's doing. Oh yeah, how do you deal with that for the spacesuit? The sun seems real bright.

Oh yeah, so the visor assembly on the suit has eyeshades and sun visor that are all deployable. So depending on whether you're in direct sunlight or if it's just kind of a nuisance thing where you're getting a weird glare and you're trying to focus on something, you can put these shades down that obscure some of the visible area in front of you. So if the sun's to your left, there's like a left eye shade that you can fold down to kind of block some of that out. There's a center eye shade and then the sun visors like a big pair of sunglasses that just goes over the whole front of the helmet basically. And that's got a very special coating on it that blocks out a lot of the harmful part of those rays that are hitting you.

But unlike a welding mask, where like if I put my dad's welding mask on, I can't see anything until I strike up the weld. I guess those are considerably cheaper than whatever NASA's making. But yeah, I guess it would have something where you can look at the sun and not burn out your eyeballs, but also still see things in darker light.

Yeah, definitely not near like what a welding mask is. I don't know if you can stare directly at the sun with it, you know, on Earth. I've looked through them and they do a good job. You can look at the sun without too much of an issue. But I don't know what the training to the astronauts is as far as, you know.

Don't look directly at the sun.

Yeah, I feel like if you're an astronaut, you probably mastered that early on. Don't look at the sun.

Well, anyway, that's pretty cool. So is there anything that you've worked on personally that you're like that's mine up there? Or is everything you work on definitely go to space?

Yeah, every EMU suit has parts that have come from our company. And some of those parts, yeah, I personally test every one of them.

Did you ever put your name on anything? Did you ever put like weird maker's mark on there?

No, I think the inspectors would probably give me a hard time about that. We are pretty good about identifying the parts. So most of what leaves our building has a bunch of information engraved in it permanently.

Well, now this is interesting. Now your company whose name we won't say, they've been around since at least the Apollo era, right?

Yeah, we've worked on all the programs pretty much.

Wow.

As aircraft developed and the need for anti-G suits, I think that it was how we entered this industry. You know, when fighter planes started really pushing the limits of what a human can withstand in there, and they figured out, oh, if we make these G suits press on the lower extremities and help blood stay up in the upper part of your body, it would help pilots do high G maneuvers. We were involved in the early development of that and some of the connectors that supply pressure to G suits. And that's still something we do to this day.

That's awesome. Yeah, just such a crazy like if these walls could talk. But interestingly enough, you could probably just go to the flat files and pull out something from 1957 and be like some engineer signed this that said, yeah, this was good to go to Buzz Aldrin. This was good to go to fucking Alan Shepard.

Oh, yeah. It's a trip to look at some of like the old engineering drawings and the stuff that people drew by hand. And it took them a week to make this gigantic drawing and they smoked three packs of cigarettes when they were doing it. And it's all tinted with tobacco smoke. But yeah, we still have a lot of records from way back then. And it's pretty cool to look.

You can see just how many things you would look at and you go, holy shit, could you believe that they went out there like without X, Y and Z that we take for granted now. Now we would always have these switches. We would always have these. The evolution of safety in this field so that you don't end up one of the stories we're talking about in the show.

Yeah, absolutely. It's definitely come a long way. And back then, even manufacturing processes, it was such a hands on thing where it was more susceptible to human error. Nowadays, we have CNC machines and everything where you get very repeatable parts and every part is made in a much more similar way. You know, back then it was grimy dudes on manual machines, cutting metal parts, but we got it done and did it in a short amount of time. Like the amount of development that happened just in the sixties to go from where we were in the early sixties to landing on the moon is pretty incredible. You know, I've worked in this industry 10 years and for the stuff that's coming down the road, we're just seeing the deployment of some of that stuff I started working on when I started here. So yeah, it's just such a slow process that amazes me how quickly they're able to get to the moon.

Well, we talk about this a little bit in the episode, but it was just an insane amount of the national budget went towards the space race.

Yeah.

Yeah. It was like all red tape in the 1960s was cut away and all the money influxed into the space program. And it was like, yeah, it's how you get shit done in 10 years.

Yeah. 100%. We still have a lot of machinery that they bought during the ramp up of the Apollo program. And I've looked at the serial numbers on some of those machines and they just like bought them all during, you know, like the ramp up for Apollo. So it was just like, Hey, we got to crank all this stuff out. Let's invest in all this stuff. And yeah, companies were built that way, I think.

And luckily a lot of equipment that, you know, Bridgeport machinery and stuff was not planned obsolescence. So you guys can still use it.

Yeah, absolutely. We still use a lot of old Bridgeports that made spacesuit parts in the sixties. They're pretty awesome machines. Yeah.

What a great return on investment that is.

Yeah.

I can't imagine anything lasting more than 10 years now, but a machine like that, when is that 40, 60, 70 plus years now. So Ed, do you want to explain the fear tier to Ray?

I think Ray is a listener. So he's aware, I think of what the fear tier is. It's basically, we just kind of say from a scale of not scary at all to having hot piss and shit dumped on you by a hobo. Like how scary would dying in space be in your mind, whether it's a leak in your suit, turning into a fucking road flare or whatever from oxygen or just being severed and sent off to Pluto and you got however long to think about how much this sucks.

So you want me to pick what I think the scariest scenario is?

Oh, you can.

Yeah, let's do that. Pick the scariest.

I think, I think like it would be a vehicle crashing like on reentry would be the worst for me actually.

Because you can see home five seconds ahead of you.

Yeah, just like it's such an inferno when a capsule is coming back in, you could see it just as superheated. Plasma around the thing and I hate flying. I can't imagine what compels those guys to get in those crazy machines that are unbelievably complex. I wouldn't be able to get out of my own head thinking about all the things that could go wrong. Yeah, just the flight part of space flight would be the worst for me.

Wow, that hasn't come up. Yeah, just the idea of constantly thinking all the time about the things that can go wrong is a whole other section of space madness.

Yeah, well, on the fear tier for me, when I think about dying in space, I guess I do skip immediately to being in space and dying in space. But yes, as another person who really doesn't like flying, the actual process of getting to and from space is frightening enough.

So, well, luckily we got guys like you, Ray, who are out there making every one of those bits a little safer at the, you know, safety factory at the safety factory, who we won't name. But yeah, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us because, you know, we spend the whole episode talking about how scary it is. But it's nice to talk to somebody who can tell us a little bit about why we've heard of 70 years of space travel and probably less than seven major incidents in those 70 years.

Yeah, for all the flights and missions is pretty amazing how little has gone wrong over the years. But yeah, it's definitely scary to think about all the things that can and just such a crazy and complicated thing is going to space. So, yeah, no problem, guys. Happy to talk to you and yeah, it's been a blast.

All right, cool. Keep listening to the show if you're into that kind of thing.

And share it with the boys at work and girls at work.

With the people at work.

With the people at work.

Unless you weren't supposed to do this interview at all, in which case, we won't use your whole name anyway.

All right. Thanks, Ray. Thanks so much.

No problem.

So, let's dive into the fear tier.

This is high before we even started.

Ranking the fear of getting lost and dying in space on a scale of one, two hot piss and shit being dumped on your head. Just to remind everybody, hot piss and shit.

Hot piss and shit as will be evident on the very soon to be, I guess, tier system, like the graphics we're working on.

We have our top men working on those graphics.

Yeah, it's lower than that. Obviously lower than that because crazy people have access to that more than they have access to me getting on a spacecraft. But yeah, I mean, it's high enough where I have seen the advancements in space tourism in the last two decades and have pretty much said I have no interest in this. Like even if money wasn't an issue. Right now, money is not an option. But if money wasn't an issue, I would still go, I'm good. I'm good. There's this great line in the JJ.

Abrams Star Trek, the first one that Bones says, Due to copyright concerns, just make believe I am Bones from the 2009 Star Trek film. In that film, I said, space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence. And according to Ed, I am correct.

And it's like, yeah, that sums it up. That's accurate. It is exactly what he said. So, yeah, it seems dangerous. And like I said, I equate it to Lost at Sea, one of which has a higher survivability rate, but both are, what the fuck are we even doing out here? Or what are we doing this deep? Or what are we doing? You know what I mean? It's just like, leave it alone. And here's the thing. We got people who are super interested in going to Mars and starting a two planet civilization. Motherfuckers, fix this planet here. Like, I don't like this outward thinking of, you know what, in order to become a trillionaire, we got to ruin this fucking place. But by virtue of being a trillionaire, I can fucking go somewhere else. Like, no, man, we got shit. We haven't seen Sasquatch yet. Like, there's shit to discover here. If you want to see science and exploration and breaking boundaries, you can still do that here on Earth, man. And there's no reason to certainly not put anyone in space who didn't sign up or was deemed qualified through either being a cosmonaut or an astronaut or that Chinese one.

Tyconauts, it is unclear if I am pronouncing this correctly because I am a machine.

Yeah, I mean, I 1000% agree. I think space exploration is a worthy endeavor that should be financed, but this whole like, let's colonize Mars is so, the amount of money and technology and time that would need to be spent to make Mars even slightly livable in any sort of even scientific experiment sort of way is like astronomical compared to just like, yeah, fix this fucking planet. Why are we gonna spend gazillions of dollars to-

And I will say the only thing scarier than being lost at space is maybe living in a world where like one or two human beings have enough money to fund something like that. If it's not gonna be funded by, it would have to be funded by like the world, right? It would have to be a consortium of government space programs to even come close to funding and subsidizing the research to even probably put like a moon colony together. And I don't think you're getting to Mars without like a moon fixed launch pad or some shit anyway. But I am even more afraid of what the world looks like if we got a handful of people who can afford to do that without governments than getting on the ships that they send you up in, because that means something's really broken here on this planet if we have like 10 people with that much money.

So everybody, you heard it here first, Ed has promised that even if you make us billionaires off of the success of this podcast, he will not spend that money on going to space. But I would ask this question, would you spend that money on going to space if let's say you were elderly, you were dying, you have no family, like you have no responsibilities or family.

By the way, I am hurtling to exactly this scenario.

And let's say you had the opportunity to take a one-way trip to Mars and spend the last bit of your life as one of the first or the first person on Mars. Would you do it? Would you take a one-way trip to Mars and die there?

I would question anyone in charge of whatever this mission is to be like, why are you sending frail, brittle, old people to be the first people to Mars? Arguably the least helpful group of people you could possibly send to something that would probably kill a bunch of us before we even got there because we're old.

Okay, well, let's say this.

No, this is a bad scenario.

Let's say you're heading out of your 40s and you feel like life's not getting any better.

Again, hurtling towards this outcome, yeah.

And you get the opportunity to leave all of this behind and not just make history as one of the first people on Mars, but to have an experience that no other human being in the history of human beings has had the opportunity to do. You just can't come back. Would you do it?

It's interesting. I guess I'd have to look at the state of the planet at that point. And if it seems like everything's a vibe here, no, I'm good. Let somebody else fucking become a Martian. But if the planet's like a mess and the options are like live on the axiom from Wall-E or live in like a fucking garbage chute from like Ready Player One, yeah, I mean, why not? That Mars supposed to be beautiful this time of year. Like I'll go. Yeah, but again, it would have to be some sort of like gun to your head or fucking old age or the planet's exploding. Yeah, no urge to go to space. No urge to go on a cruise. No urge to go on a submarine.

You wouldn't do it for the glory of it or for, fuck the glory of it. You wouldn't do it for the sensation and the feeling of no one's ever done this before. I'm the first and maybe only to do this.

I don't do things that people have done. I don't do things that are just apparently great outings that are easy and safe, I don't do. Why the fuck would I do the thing that seems not safe?

I don't know.

And also there's not gonna be a ticker tape parade on your arrival. I think a lot of people leapfrogging each other to be the next person on the moon, the next person. You come home to a goddamn parade. So at least there's that. I'm honestly worried that we're gonna spend a bunch of fucking money sending people to the moon again. And honestly, no one's gonna give a shit. The new generations of people who don't look up from their phone anyway and don't give a shit people die in a fucking submarine. I'm worried that we're gonna do some incredible stuff and no one's gonna give a shit anyway. So why would I feel confident?

The moon's not gonna feel incredible because we've already been there and I feel like-

The moon should feel incredible because now we're gonna see it with fucking GoPros. Are you kidding me? Sure, that sounds awesome versus weird, grainy early video.

Is it gonna look any better than it does at the end of First Man? Probably not.

No, but we could say, I don't know. I used to do this bit on stage that was about the fastest way to get back to the moon is if Russia or China went to the moon and just knocked over our flag. And then like you'd see how quickly fucking money finds its way to the space program. And we would go right back up there to pick that fucking flag up. And then it would just become like a decade long knock each other's flags over competition. But that's honestly the fastest way because what is it? 12 people ever have walked on the moon. So yeah, and like no one's been up there to knock our flag off this little propped up perch. So honestly, someone goes up there and you'd have to just go back and pick it up. And then once you find out that like Artemis is the twin sister of Apollo, which is why the Artemis missions are named Artemis, because female astronauts would be going to the moon now.

Oh, I didn't know that. Interesting.

Yeah, I'll look it up to make sure I'm not wrong. But when I found out the mythology behind Apollo and Artemis and it just seemed like, oh, it's a publicity stunt. Gonna send ladies to the moon. It's like, oh, actually this is incredibly beautiful, like poetic mission of the twin sister of Apollo going to the moon is really fucking cool.

Yeah, that's great.

And I wish nothing but success. And even on this janky whatever we're building that we can afford to send people to the moon on now, I don't want anybody to die or end up going to deep space accidentally. I just don't think it's gonna be me. It just doesn't seem like a worthy endeavor for a private citizen.

Fair enough, fair enough. Well, for me, everything involved in dying in space, whether it's freezing, exploding, your blood boiling, crapping your pants, they're all very high on my personal fear tier. But because it's unlikely I'm ever going to space, I would actually put dying in space or getting lost in space very low on my fear tier because I don't think it will ever happen to me. I wouldn't put it lowest. I would put it above talking to the dead because dying in space is a physical threat and thinking about it genuinely upsets me. So that's where I fall.

By virtue of my, the ocean is space, would you get in a submarine?

Probably not.

Yeah, see?

Would I use a Ouija board on a space shuttle? Absolutely.

I don't even know what you'd pick up up there.

Probably some of these Russians.

Yeah, they're trying to like find their fellow cosmonauts.

So that's our show this week. Hit us up with any theories you have about lost astronauts or any other stories you've heard about space accidents that may have been covered up in some way. As always, we'd love to hear from you guys. We'd love to hear any other ways of dying in space we might not have thought of, whether that being pierced by radiation from a pulsar and developing strange cancers.

Becoming the Fantastic Four.

Becoming the Fantastic Four, becoming a noodle man who's not Italian and just a guy who gets stretchy all the time. Happy to hear about that.

I, Ed, do not want to hear about faked moon landing. Don't go knocking on my door about that shit. You can go fucking knock on Chris' door if you want, but I'm too much of a patriot. I think the country needed that, whether it's fake or not, but I don't believe it's fake.

I don't believe it's fake either. Sparrows, we're not afraid of moon landing conspiracies. We're afraid of dying on the moon conspiracies, so.

God, you do need to watch For All Mankind. I love it. It's a soap opera, but there's some good moon stuff in that, man.

Killer. Well, I'm gonna go do that right now. So with that, we bid you adieu and we will see you next week right back here at Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola. And this has been Scared All The Time. Scared All The Time is co-produced and written by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity, Tess Feifel.

Our theme is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is ****.

No part of this show can be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright Astonishing Legends Productions.

Good night.

We are in this together. Together.

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