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- [00:00]
A
What's the actual story with how space travel became so shitty and privatized? So, Quinn, welcome to the show.
- [00:07]
B
Hey, thank you for having me.
- [00:09]
C
Our pleasure. Why aren't we in space yet?
- [00:12]
B
People have been asking that question every decade since, like, 1960, and every single decade, there's a new snake oil salesman explaining why. And it's to give them money, it turns out.
- [00:23]
A
Yeah, well, we could all be living in the Jetsons. I guess we just gave Elon Musk the right amount of money. So. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you what I think the common sense story of what happened with space travel in the US is, and then we're going to break down why that common sense story that you, even the listener, may understand to be false, but that's what you understand. Most people believe that might be the only factual story you have.
- [00:48]
C
We're going to teach the controversy here.
- [00:52]
A
Yeah, yeah. We're launching the monkey from the Scopes Monkey trial into space. So the common sense story of what happened with space travel, as far as I understand it, and Quinn, please keep me honest here, is that in the 1960s, the US put loads of money into space. It launched loads of rockets because it had a pissing contest with the ussr. It banked this prestige win, and then everybody stopped caring. And then after a while, the challenger explodes and the US says, oh, this is really risky. And moreover, nobody cares about that because there's no more ussr, so why bother going up there to build a space station? They can see if ants can sort screws or whatever. Besides, why pay attention to up there when all the astrophysicists are doing derivative pricing down here? So anyway, NASA gets smaller and smaller and worse and shittier for years and years and years. Years with its shitty, expensive space shuttle until Elon Musk said, space is cool. I have PayPal money. I'm going to build a company that makes space travel possible again, then hires a bunch of people to essentially fix all the things that made space travel dangerous and expensive and therefore makes it viable again. And we all owe him a debt of gratitude, and we have to give him the right amount of money, which is lots.
- [01:49]
B
Amen.
- [01:50]
C
I can summarize this in a little sort of, like, smaller form, which is to say you're graphing going to space and chudness.
- [01:59]
A
Right?
- [02:00]
C
CHUD versus Woke. And for a long time, NASA was CHUD and was very successful at going to space. That's what the right stuff was about. But then after a while, it got Woker. And that's what like the space shuttle was about. And it got more like the post office. And they started doing pronoun circles in low Earth orbit. And they stopped being good at going to space. But now one brave South African chud has decided to restore the chudedness to space travel. And now we're going back to space.
- [02:27]
A
Yeah, they're going from chuds to Chads. Cannibalistic humanoid extraterrestrial dwellers.
- [02:32]
B
Yeah, I definitely. I think that that is an accurate description of how some people think about space or how like that, how they track the coolness of space. And I've got to imagine that a lot of these people have pretty short memories. They don't remember all the other times people got hyped within their lifespan. Like Chris Hadfield making space cool for a couple of years in like the early 2000s. Just all kinds of, like, things along the way. And now they've latched on to Elon Musk as the capital S savior of space.
- [03:01]
C
It's really selective history as well, because a lot of the like, right stuff guys were not as chatted as it would. You know, their biography might lead you to surmise Chuck Yeager was too much of a chud to go to space. They were like, we can't send him up there. He's going to invent a new slur for aliens.
- [03:19]
B
There's one video, one interview that I always come back to in terms of like, how woke some of the initial astronauts were. And unfortunately I only found it because it's like a key part of moon landing hoax conspiracies. And it is Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon. As soon as he gets back home, he becomes a recluse. He takes no interviews. He's this intensely shy man. And one of the few going out occasions he does. He's talking to a bunch of kids. He's talking to a bunch of girls who want to get into, like, stem. And he's crying as he's talking about all the things they're going to do. And in moon landing conspiracy circles, he's crying out of guilt for lying for so long. We've got him. And it's just this old man being like, so, so inspired by these kids that he's literally crying. But anyway, yeah, like, to your point, a lot of the right stuff guys also, it turns out being right stuff is actually like really, really bad for space exploration. It's good if you want to be. If you want to launch one dude into an incredibly dangerous environment and have him survive. But like, anytime more than two of these guys were on a mission for like five days, plus they almost kill each other. One of the first Soviet space stations, three dudes up there for like a month had what I could only describe as the first zero G line brawl. Because that's just the only way these dudes could sort out problems.
- [04:43]
C
Comrade Comrade Director has, has, has initiated Project Sensitive White Boy.
- [04:52]
B
And to kind of circle back around on. You asked me this question beforehand and I prepped a couple of points of like the history of it, you know, kind of tracks with the decades and whatnot. But one of the main things I wanted to get across is that this is absolutely not new with space. Space exploration, the space industry. It is. I'm sure other people would have other reasons of why, but in my opinion, like, space is a relatively small industry still. It's relatively new. It's only been around like since World War II. And for everything that's going on in it and all, like the cool exploration, it's still pretty small in terms of like percent of GDP or whatever. And that means that it is incredibly prone to great man theory stuff and conspiracy theories. Like if you ask a lot of people what they think the, the moon race was, they'll tell you. The NASA program was Wernher von Braun. You know, like he was the main guy associated with it. He's the great man who led it. And the Soviet program was this dude named Sergei Korolev. And he's the great man on their side. And it's these two titans of space fighting it out. And Korolev had the upper hand. And then von Braun came back near the end. It's basically what I'm getting at is that this happening early, this happening today with Elon Musk is not that uncommon. Like space people like to latch on to one big figure because there's a whole lot going on that isn't that well known about. And that's kind of, you know, that's been consistent across a bunch of different programs. It's been consistent across the decades.
- [06:18]
A
Well, I think that's because places that are thought of as frontiers naturally breed this great man syndrome. If you think about it as somewhere where there isn't anybody, then the people who are sort of. That it's very easy for someone to become very prominent relative to everybody else and seem to have a huge amount of outsize importance. So it's, it's unsurprising, right, that it's, it's almost the same story as like the Famous fucking cowboys and Teddy Roosevelt and so on and so on.
- [06:44]
B
And with those programs, what's interesting is that it almost always, the great man involved almost always winds up being the manager at the top. So like Werner von Braun was kind of more of a scientist, but he gets slotted in as like the leader and chief coordinator of Apollo. Sergei Korolev on the Soviet side is famously like a really mid engineer, but what he's good at is manipulating the Politburo into giving him a shit ton of money. And that's kind of like, you know, I know the, the legends and there are some parts that he did on the actual engineering side. But Elon Musk's main role with SpaceX is to be the hype man, to be the guy coordinating with the government, those contracts and whatnot. But the actual making of the rockets at the end of the day is thousands of people basically just doing engineering jobs, engineer technician jobs, building them, welding, all that kind of stuff.
- [07:33]
A
So what I want to talk about as well, right, is Most people know SpaceX as like a private space program, essentially. You say if you ask a person on the street what SpaceX, they would probably say something along the lines of it's private NASA with a chatbot attached. That's most of its target address, worth
- [07:50]
B
20 times as much as the space part, apparently, which I, I haven't talked to anyone there, but I would imagine has to be the biggest insult if you're just like, you're the, you're working at the only part of Elon Musk's corporate empire that actually makes money now, like launching rockets and satellites, and you're being told that the dipshits at GROK are who's bringing in the real value.
- [08:10]
A
Well, GROK told me that, but it told me in a way that I couldn't repeat on this podcast.
- [08:14]
C
So yeah, weirdly, when it called itself Mecca Hitler, people don't realize it was quoting Van Von Braun.
- [08:20]
B
Yeah, using, using GROK to pick the people who will be paperclipped in Germany.
- [08:28]
A
Let's figure out how NASA, which was this hugely significant public institution in the 1960s, becomes this thing that, that SpaceX is able to essentially eat.
- [08:41]
B
Well, if you, if you watch the
- [08:42]
C
documentary For All Mankind, all sort of like four seasons of it.
- [08:48]
A
So in 1976, NASA's share of federal funding has fallen to like under 1% of US GDP from a height of like four and a half or so. Yes, in the 60s it is falling, falling, falling. And this is partly because Nixon looks around and said, well, we don't, we don't need this anymore. I don't care. We beat the Soviets, bank the prestige, win. How about this? You're not going to do anything you want. You're not going to get more lunar missions, you're not going to get Mars missions. You're going to get a space shuttle which essentially we've designed as a cost saving measure.
- [09:21]
C
Yeah. You're going to get a magic black and white school bus and, and it's
- [09:25]
B
going to fix everything. It's going to be like, yeah. The space shuttle was marketed as being the end all, be all of space. It is going to solve everything. And it, it winds up being a very cool and effective vehicle. It's just, it's a jack of all trades. It, it, it winds up being not as good at anything it is designed to do versus a specialist rocket.
- [09:44]
C
It's also, this is one of my favorite eras of NASA which is all of the having to sort of cohab as NASA has always done, but like in a more overt way. The like military industrial stuff and the we came in peace for all mankind stuff. So you have all of these like shuttle missions where it's like, oh, we put a teacher in space. We taught ants to sort screws. And then they'll be like it's in the Cargo hold. Yeah, STS fucking like, you know, 69B or whatever. And it's like this is four Air Force colonels. The payload classified. What's it doing Classified. They're up there for two weeks. Don't worry about it. And I really love that you just alternate between those to until they cut the budget.