Artemis II, Apollo, and the Physics of Going Back to the Moon (EP. 24)

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode is a full-spectrum moonshot: why Artemis II matters, how the mission actually works (SLS, Orion, translunar injection, free-return trajectories), and a first-principles teardown of the most common Apollo “hoax” claims—Van Allen belts, waving flags, shadows, and “why aren’t there stars?” We also run a quick Rundown of wild science headlines (ancient cave art, elevation-dependent warming, dogs and vocabulary, and peptide bonds in deep space), before coming back to the core question: what it takes to send humans safely around the Moon—again. Summary Artemis II mission profile — what “free return” means, why TLI timing matters, and what Orion is doing in high Earth orbit before the Moon. SLS vs Saturn V — the engineering and risk trade-offs behind modern human-rated heavy lift. Apollo myths, explained — radiation belts, camera exposure physics, and why the “flag,” “shadows,” and “no stars” arguments don’t survive basic mechanics and optics. Proof Apollo happened — retroreflectors, orbital imagery, and the reality that the world was watching. Show Notes NASA Artemis Program NASA Orion Spacecraft NASA Space Launch System (SLS) NASA Apollo 11 Mission Overview

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lester Nare?

  Hello, Internet. This is your captain speaking, Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD, Krishna Choudhary. We are traveling this week, and so we're gonna have a special deep dive episode. If you couldn't already tell, it's about the Artemis II mission that's coming up. This should be coming up right before the launch window, which starts on February 6th. We're gonna talk about the Artemis II program, the Artemis program generally, why it's different from Apollo. We're gonna do some debunking of moon landing myths, and maybe a little potpourri of other stuff in there as well.

• 0:41Lester Nare?

  You are going to learn something today, because this is from First Principles.

• 1:02Lester Nare?

  So, it's been more than half a century, 50 years, since we've gone to the moon. The final Apollo mission was Apollo 17. We had a moon buggy, we had a car on the moon that we were driving around. It was amazing. And now, the United States, through the NASA, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, we have chosen to go back. Right? So, I wanted to take this opportunity, because Artemis II is coming up. The launch window is February 2nd, sorry, February 6th is when it opens up. I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about some of the differences between the Artemis missions and the Apollo missions. And then, you know, towards the end of the episode, maybe we'll go into

• 1:45Lester Nare?

  something that I never wanted to do, but I guess we're doing, is debunking these absurd moon conspiracy myths.

• 1:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Let's get started with 1961. President JFK, John F. Kennedy commits the United States to go to the moon in a congressional address. And in 1962, he actually gives a speech at Rice University, which is arguably more famous because he is the one who say, he's the one who says, you know, but why some say the moon? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why 35 years ago fly the Atlantic? And he's talking about Charles Lindbergh, who flew the Atlantic from the United States all the way to Paris. And then he inserts a joke on his own. He says, why does Rice play Texas? And he's at Rice Stadium and that gives a, that gets a huge uproar.

• 2:38Krishna Choudhary?

  And he uses that uproar to, he was a brilliant orator, you know? And he uses that sort of momentum to be like, we choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. That's my best Boston accent.

• 2:58Lester Nare?

  That was quite good.

• 2:59Krishna Choudhary?

  But in that, yeah, but in that like statement there, I mean, it's incredibly inspirational.

• 3:06Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 3:06Krishna Choudhary?

  But in that statement, he actually gives a clue as to why we're doing that in the first place, which is we want to make it so hard that the Soviets can't catch up. At the time, there was a Cold War sprint, right? The Soviets had already beaten us with Sputnik. Yuri Gagarin was on the cover of Time Magazine with a hammer and sickle. And we wanted to make the finish line so far away that everyone who was playing this race, the space race, had to start over from scratch. And so we're like, we're going to go to the moon. Now Yuri Gagarin and the Mercury astronauts, they just went into Earth orbit.

• 3:45Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 3:45Krishna Choudhary?

  That's about like 100 kilometers to like 200, 300, 500 kilometers. Now we're doing hundreds of thousands of kilometers. The moon is 380 kilometers away. That's requires a whole new set of technology.

• 3:59Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 3:59Krishna Choudhary?

  A whole new paradigm shift in how we even approach the space problem. We got to land someone.

• 4:06Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 4:06Krishna Choudhary?

  We got to bring them back.

• 4:07Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 4:08Krishna Choudhary?

  We got to do all these things, right? And so the idea was we just make the finish line in classic American fashion. If we lost.

• 4:15Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 4:16Krishna Choudhary?

  We're just like, no, it's not over.

• 4:17Lester Nare?

  It's, it's over there.

• 4:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Yeah. What are you talking about?

• 4:20Lester Nare?

  It's over there.

• 4:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, like we're still running, right? And that's sort of the crucible in which Apollo was born.

• 4:29Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 4:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Now Apollo was a unilateral US effort. US astronauts, US technology, US money. Everything was American.

• 4:41Lester Nare?

  And I think an important point, just to punctuate that is in an effort to win the Cold War race, we were willing at the time to do everything.

• 4:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 4:53Lester Nare?

  Put the money, recruit the resources, the talent to execute on it.

• 4:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 4:59Lester Nare?

  We don't live in that world anymore.

• 5:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly, exactly. And so Apollo was this just American, all American model. Artemis is very different. It's an international effort. There's this thing called the Artemis Accord. 60 countries have signed it. It's a peaceful, transparent and sustainable space exploration treaty that's saying, you know, we're not gonna, we're not gonna just expend resources. It's gonna be sustainable. It's gonna be cooperative. But all of these countries are sort of on the Western Bloc. It's NATO plus allies, right? And there is still kind of a space race. There is kind of a multipolar competition.

• 5:38Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 5:38Krishna Choudhary?

  China is talking about landing Taikonauts. That's what they call their astronauts. They're planning to land their Taikonauts by the 2030s. Russia is colluding with China, if that's what you can call it.

• 5:52Lester Nare?

  Collusion?

• 5:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. So just like we're colluding with like 60 other countries, the two of them are, you know,

• 5:58Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 5:58Krishna Choudhary?

  colluding with themselves. And it's a very different ballgame now, right? One of our crew that's going on Artemis 2 is Canadian. That just shows just how different Artemis is from Apollo. Apollo is just all American astronauts that are like Air Force pilots or Navy pilots. Now we've got a literal Canadian.

• 6:18Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 6:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Who's, who's, who's on the mission, you know?

• 6:21Lester Nare?

  What's interesting, the timing, which they could never have expected because Artemis has been planning this for such a long period of time. The geopolitical context in which the launch is happening is interesting.

• 6:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 6:33Lester Nare?

  Because the Prime Minister of Canada just came out at the World Economic Forum and gave a speech effectively, you know, they're calling it the great divorce.

• 6:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 6:43Lester Nare?

  You know, from a political, social context in terms of Canada no longer viewing the United States as a reliable partner.

• 6:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Right.

• 6:52Lester Nare?

  And sort of encouraging the EU as a block to think about what the future looks like with an unreliable partner in the US.

• 7:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 7:03Lester Nare?

  And I just bring this up to sort of differentiate that space has always been this arena historically. There's some things, you know, that are changing that in recent memory, but historically that has been apolitical.

• 7:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 7:20Lester Nare?

  And everyone recognizes the value of all of us working together because the fruits of that are just so beneficial to everybody.

• 7:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 7:29Lester Nare?

  But this is, it is happening in a geopolitical environment that is becoming more contentious, very not similar to the Cold War era, but it's just very, it is not a stable geopolitical context in which this is happening. But it is great that the collaboration in this is still going forth despite.

• 7:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 7:50Lester Nare?

  The geopolitical tensions.

• 7:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. I think, I think you make a very good point. You know, space is off Earth by definition, right? And it, it makes you think, okay, Earth is like this rock. And then, and then there's another rock that very few humans have been on. Fine. It's all been American, but it's, we're just on this rock.

• 8:12Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 8:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And the great thing about the Artemis Accords and the Artemis Program to me is that it's one part of American geopolitical policy that has kept that.

• 8:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Philosophy.

• 8:28Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 8:29Krishna Choudhary?

  You know? I, I, I really like that. So Apollo, it was this flag in the dust model, not like Artemis, right? Flag in the dust, meaning like you just put a, you plant a American flag on the moon. And it's designed to demonstrate the superiority of our liberal democracy.

• 8:46Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 8:46Krishna Choudhary?

  That's embedded in capitalism over Soviet communism. It's an ideological battle that we're trying to win. It's technological at the end of the day, but the reason why we're spending all that money is because of ideology.

• 8:59Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 8:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And that's very important. And Artemis is really a paradigm shift towards permanence and sustainability. Apollo was, we get there, we plant the flag, we come back.

• 9:09Lester Nare?

  No repeatability necessarily, like, like.

• 9:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 9:11Lester Nare?

  It wasn't the core function, it's the destination was the goal, not the journey.

• 9:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes. Yeah. And in an Artemis, we're trying to get there and we're trying to really establish a permanent presence. Right? President Donald Trump issued an executive order that called to begin construction of a base in 2030. And also have a nuclear reactor be ready to launch towards the lunar surface by 2030. And NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman purported that sentiment, right? And this is all to prepare us to go to Mars. Because we want a permanent base on the moon. And that way from moon, we can sort of piggyback and go to Mars. We can establish a permanent base on the moon.

• 9:55Krishna Choudhary?

  We can understand what it is like to live on another celestial body without oxygen, without all of the comforts of the earth's atmosphere and all of the hard things. We can do that, you know, in our local neighborhood. Then we can go to Mars, which is a year away.

• 10:10Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 10:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Best case scenario.

• 10:11Lester Nare?

  It becomes this way station. It's like a training ground and a way station.

• 10:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 10:15Lester Nare?

  Or waypoint, rather.

• 10:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 10:17Lester Nare?

  Or like. You can do a whole, especially, I'm not saying that we're there yet, but there are a bunch of TV shows that talk about how there's all the H3 that's below the surface of the moon and it's very, very fuel efficient. And if we can figure out how to mine that, then again, it becomes basically a refueling point on the journey to Mars.

• 10:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly. And in the Apollo paradigm, it was urgency driven, as you said, right? We gotta, we gotta win. And so 2.3% of the total federal budget was given to NASA to make this happen. That's a lot. That's a lot. That's a lot. Okay. I love science and I love technology, but 2.3% is a lot. Now, if you put that in the context of how much we spend on the military, perhaps it's not a lot. But I would say 2.3% is quite a bit, right? But it's a totally different paradigm. With Artemis, you've got this space economy and the goal is to have a sustained presence, right? So you've got this lunar getaway, you've got in situ resource

• 11:22Krishna Choudhary?

  utilization, that thing that you were talking about where we utilize the resources of the moon and we're partnering with agencies that are commercial. For example, SpaceX, the Starship Human Landing System, the way we're going to land on the moon is currently contracted to SpaceX, right? Now, this is the same as before Grumman, which is the predecessor of Northrop Grumman, was actually involved in creating the lunar lander. So this is not different, but now with Artemis, it's a completely different scale.

• 11:54Lester Nare?

  I will just make a quick note. If you are a fan of Elon Musk and you are not a believer in the moon landing, you should talk to Elon Musk because he's clearly a believer in the moon landing and he got the contract to do it again. And so I'm just trying to put two and two together here. The math, the math needs to.

• 12:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Equal. Yeah. And if we were to, if we were to stay on the topic of SpaceX and Elon Musk, there's a side note. So NASA Administrator Sean Duffy last year actually reopened the human landing system contract because the aerospace safety advisory panel is warning that SpaceX's starship human landing system is going to be years late. Okay. He was then fired and then he was replaced by Jared Isaacman, who's a billionaire, commercial astronaut. Neither the demonstration nor the design certification review, which was supposed to happen in the summer of this past year, has happened. And there's not really any

• 12:55Krishna Choudhary?

  information about what the status of that human landing system is. But it's like, it's quite urgent because China says they're going to get there by 2030.

• 13:05Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 13:06Krishna Choudhary?

  We're cutting it quite close.

• 13:07Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 13:08Krishna Choudhary?

  You know?

• 13:08Lester Nare?

  And we know that they are putting all the resources to bear to accomplish the goal.

• 13:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 13:15Lester Nare?

  Just given their system and how it's structured, it's top, you know, they can, they want something to happen. It happens.

• 13:21Krishna Choudhary?

  It happens. Right. Because they just say what happens.

• 13:24Lester Nare?

  And then.

• 13:25Krishna Choudhary?

  And then it happens. Right. So with all that in mind, now we're here with Artemis 2, right? This is the critical crude validation flight, the Artemis 2 rocket, which we have here that Lester has painstakingly made with Lego blocks.

• 13:42Lester Nare?

  Shout out Lego. Lego, if you want to sponsor the show, you know, we're here.

• 13:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Well, he made this thing and this thing is now currently sitting on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Flight Center in Florida.

• 13:56Lester Nare?

  Which we touched on in our rundown on the last episode.

• 13:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep. Yeah. Yeah. And so now, as of the. Publishing of this episode, it should still be there. February 6th is when the window opens up and fingers crossed.

• 14:12Lester Nare?

  And just, just before we get to the rundown, we're going to break this up into two parts. I want to just zoom in on this launch window concept because you know, some of the reaction would be, oh, this, this, are the studios not ready for the production? Or like, oh, of course that it's going to get delayed. You know, and I think helping understand the idea that when we have a launch window, right? Like we are both, you know, we're spinning and in orbit of the sun. And so is everything else. And so when you talk about launch windows, it's about how your flight trajectory is going to align with the normal movement of the planetary bodies around us such that we, you know, we have a certain amount of fuel, we have, everything is very precise.

• 14:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Everything is very precise.

• 14:54Lester Nare?

  So there's, there's only like a few paths to getting there based on what we've built to get there.

• 14:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. And it depends on what we want to do with the moon, right? We're not landing on the moon with Artemis 2, but if we want certain spaces on the moon to be lit up, we need to time it with the phases of the moon.

• 15:12Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 15:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And so that's why the launch window is like early February and then it's late February and March, because the lunar month is 29 days and we need to, you can't just go at a random time.

• 15:25Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 15:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 15:25Lester Nare?

  Yes. It's not, it's not the subway where it's just like, it's constantly running.

• 15:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:30Lester Nare?

  There are the dynamics that, and I just wanted to make sure we touched on that briefly.

• 15:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good.

• 15:34Lester Nare?

  For folks who might not understand the concept of a launch window, that's kind of where it comes from. Before we get back to continuing the coverage of the main story, many of you have loved the rundown. It's a quick overview of other stories we can't go so much into depth on because there's only so much time in a day. So we just hit some highlights of what's going on that's current, recent, breaking and frontier research. Our first story in the rundown today is rock art from at least 67,000 years ago in Sulawesi, which is, this is now a combination of multiple organizations. We have Griffith University, Southern Cross University and others, published in Nature.

• 16:17Lester Nare?

  And this is about the outline of a hand made with red pigment on a cave in Indonesia. That's at least 67,000 years old and may be the world's oldest.

• 16:29Lester Nare?

  Rock art.

• 16:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 16:30Lester Nare?

  According to recent studies.

• 16:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, this is incredible. It's it's supposed to be on the lost continent of Sulawesi. Okay, so back before the Ice Ages, when or during the Ice Ages, I guess, when all of the water of the world was sequestered into glaciers, the sea level was lower. And so Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and Australia were a continuous landmass called Sulawesi. It's a lost continent, so to speak. And to date, what they've done is they've dated the mineral crusts that form on top of these paintings. Because, you know, you could ask, like, how do you know that this thing is 68,000 years old?

• 17:12Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 17:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Well, you what you can do is you can take the cave paintings. And what ends up happening is there's the stuff called cave popcorn that shows up on top of the on top of the cave paintings that is at least as old as the cave paintings. Right? Because the cave paintings formed and then the and then this mineral deposit formed. So we can date the mineral deposit.

• 17:34Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 17:34Krishna Choudhary?

  And using radiocarbon and other kinds of radioactive dating, we can say that this stuff was at least 60,000, 67,000 years old.

• 17:44Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 17:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And this puts it as older than the cave paintings in, what's it called? Lascaux.

• 17:52Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 17:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Lascaux, France, which we we mentioned in the previous.

• 17:57Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 17:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Episode. Again, I'm pretty sure that's how it's pronounced.

• 18:01Lester Nare?

  In the previous episode, we did an ancient math story from from Mesopotamia.

• 18:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and we were talking about art in the ancient past.

• 18:11Lester Nare?

  In ancient past and.

• 18:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Lascaux came up. That's all I'm saying. Okay, so jokes aside, though, one of the one of the coolest things that I found about this story was that in the same cave, they also had recent paintings from about 3,000 to 4,000 years ago.

• 18:26Lester Nare?

  Ah.

• 18:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Which I find kind of incredible, like, imagine, you know, you're going back to a cave as human beings, you're going back to a cave that has been this repository of art for 60,000 years.

• 18:41Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 18:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Isn't that kind of cool?

• 18:43Lester Nare?

  Yeah, it's.

• 18:43Krishna Choudhary?

  So to be those human beings, to be like, I go back and like, those handprints were 60,000 years ago.

• 18:49Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:49Krishna Choudhary?

  I don't know. I think I think that's that's that's really cool.

• 18:52Lester Nare?

  The human story is so beautiful.

• 18:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it really is. I like that.

• 18:56Lester Nare?

  Our story number two. Is about climate change and this concept of elevation dependent climate change in mountain environments. This is coming out of the University of Portsmouth in the UK, Montana Technological University, Montana State University, and the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate National Research Council in Torino, Italy, published in Nature, Earth and Environment. The summary here is that mountain regions show rapid environmental change under anthropogenic warming. The rates of these changes are often stratified by elevation,

• 19:40Lester Nare?

  leading to elevation dependent climate change or EDCC.

• 19:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and this is something that I've noticed. I go to the Himalayas almost every year, maybe every other year, and you can literally kind of see the snow line decreasing. Okay, they analyzed data from 1980 to 2020, and they found that the mountains are actually warming 0.2 degrees Celsius faster than the lowland plains. And snowfall is increasingly being replaced by rain. I mean, anecdotally, you saw this when you went to Big Bear right outside Los Angeles.

• 20:15Lester Nare?

  I literally just experienced this, which is like it's January. And normally, there's plenty of snow on the ground. And it was, I'd never see, I'd never seen the ground.

• 20:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. And for context, there was a lot of precipitation in Southern California. Now, obviously, this is anecdotal, and we don't want to conflate weather versus climate. But if you look at the gradual trend, this is what they're arguing.

• 20:41Lester Nare?

  Correct.

• 20:42Krishna Choudhary?

  From 1980 to 2020,

• 20:45Krishna Choudhary?

  snowfall is being replaced by rain. Okay, and that means more flooding. Pakistan had some really bad flooding that killed 1,000 people this past summer. It's only going to get worse. And mountain regions are really critical for a lot of human population. Billions of people rely on mountains for their source of water. And if it's just going to rain instead of being sequestered into ice that then gradually

• 21:11Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 21:12Krishna Choudhary?

  becomes water, that's going to be huge for.

• 21:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Climate catastrophe, you know?

• 21:18Lester Nare?

  It does like just into it, it does make this if you have the whole concept, you have like heat rises when you're in a house and your attic is hotter than the basement. It's like, okay, well, like at higher elevations.

• 21:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 21:29Lester Nare?

  It make it.

• 21:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, the difference is gonna be bigger.

• 21:32Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 21:32Krishna Choudhary?

  At those higher elevations.

• 21:33Lester Nare?

  So that that that does make sense.

• 21:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 21:36Lester Nare?

  For a lighter story that is not as existential as elevation dependent climate change.

• 21:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 21:44Lester Nare?

  Is a story that was actually published in the New York Times. We love to see when science makes it to the front pages of mainstream media. In this case, it's about dogs building their vocabulary like toddlers. And so this is something that like makes total sense.

• 22:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Anyone who's at a dog.

• 22:06Lester Nare?

  And so the the summary on this, this was in Science. Children as young as 18 months can acquire novel words by overhearing third party interactions. Don't be nosey. Demonstrating similar learning processes in non-human species would indicate that social cognitive skills supporting this process are not exclusively exclusively human, but may have evolved or can develop in other species, offering valuable insights into the origin of language related cognition. We're not so special after all.

• 22:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And what I really like this about this story is like how they did that experiment. So what they looked at was particular types of dogs. They actually found that herding dogs have a particular knack for this. Border collie, border collies, Australian shepherds. What they did was they said, okay, we're gonna have the human owners toss a toy back and forth. While the dog is just monitoring the situation. Okay, so there's no reward based learning. There's no like, oh, here's a treat when you associate this toy with a certain name. Instead, the humans are going back and forth with this toy and they refer to it multiple times in the conversation. So they're like, this is stingray. Give me the stingray. Oh, do you want the stingray? I'll take the stingray.

• 23:23Krishna Choudhary?

  And the dog is just sort of passively observing. And then later on, they test the the dog. They're like, bring me stingray. 80% of the time, these dogs, they they tested 10 dogs. 80% of the time, it came back with the correct toy, which is way out of

• 23:39Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 23:39Krishna Choudhary?

  statistical noise.

• 23:41Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 23:41Krishna Choudhary?

  You know? And. They had a control with 10 other dogs that I guess didn't show this kind of aptitude. And they were at baseline. And I particularly like this because I had my family dog, she was a corgi. She would be able to do exactly this. And we never taught her with reward based learning because my dad is like philosophically against reward based learning. So, you know, we would just like be talking in Urdu and Hindi and English. And she understood all three languages. And when I, I remember once I was like really surprised, I would tell her like, bring me this toy in Urdu. And she would bring it and exactly that toy.

• 24:26Krishna Choudhary?

  And once she actually brought the wrong toy and I said, no, no, not that one. I said, this one, she went back and then she brought the right one. It was like, I was like, wow, but it's all passive learning.

• 24:35Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 24:36Krishna Choudhary?

  You know?

• 24:36Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 24:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Very cool.

• 24:37Lester Nare?

  Yes. As a someone who has three dogs, uh, my lived experience.

• 24:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 24:43Lester Nare?

  Maps on to this, except for one dog who not, doesn't have all the marbles upstairs, but that's.

• 24:49Krishna Choudhary?

  He's part of the control.

• 24:50Lester Nare?

  He's part of the control group.

• 24:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 24:51Lester Nare?

  Correct. He's part of the control group. I always love a dog story, all the animal stories. You guys seem to love the animal stories and so we will continue to try to touch on them as we can. The last story in the rundown is about life's chemistry. The beginnings of life's chemistry and how it may have began in the cold darkness of space. This is out of Arhus University in Denmark, published in Nature Astronomy. New experiments reveal that protein precursors can form naturally in deep space under extreme, in extreme cold and radiation. Scientists found that simple amino acid bonds and peptides on interstellar dust long before stars and planet exists.

• 25:36Lester Nare?

  The challenge, this challenges the idea that complex life and chemistry only happens on planets.

• 25:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 25:42Lester Nare?

  It also boosts the odds that life friendly ingredients are widespread across the universe. And for those of you who know me, you know, my reaction to that is them aliens and they are out there.

• 25:52Krishna Choudhary?

  They are. are out there and apparently they're out in deep space.

• 25:55Lester Nare?

  In deep space.

• 25:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Right. This is a pretty, pretty cool study. They recreated the conditions of the interstellar medium in the lab. Now that's first of all incredibly hard to do. You have to maintain a very low vacuum. You have to have extremely high energy particles because you know, in the interstellar dust, you've got low density, but you also have like particles that are like whizzing back and forth at near the speed of light. So what they did was they simulated cosmic rays using particles from an accelerator Hunren Atomki in Hungary. And they had a little compartment that was close to the conditions of interstellar media. And we already know that amino acids like glycine can form in the interstellar medium. But what these guys wanted to do was figure out, can we have

• 26:41Krishna Choudhary?

  complex peptide bonds, meaning amino acid with another amino acid with another amino acid together to create a kind of, you know, protein, but a smaller version of a protein. So they could form these peptides and the implications are immense, right? Because this means that this is a process that can happen anywhere.

• 27:02Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 27:02Krishna Choudhary?

  In the interstellar medium.

• 27:03Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 27:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So if you have exoplanets all over the place.

• 27:06Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 27:06Krishna Choudhary?

  When the exoplanet forms, you could have stuff in the interstellar medium that has already created complex molecules that are the precursors for life that then get deposited on the exoplanets. And then perhaps life is even more abundant than we thought. I mean, right now we think it's just on earth, but this kind of research lends credibility to the idea that maybe life, just simple life is not all that rare.

• 27:34Lester Nare?

  The, the ingredients necessary for simple life. Previously, it's like it has to be water rich, oxygen rich, all these variables needed to be true.

• 27:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 27:45Lester Nare?

  In order for us to see the, the ingredient, it's not even life.

• 27:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:49Lester Nare?

  Just the ingredients.

• 27:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Ingredients, yeah.

• 27:51Lester Nare?

  Now it's like, okay, well, actually these ingredients can formulate in a much, much larger, larger surface area than before.

• 28:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 28:00Lester Nare?

  So.

• 28:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Who knows? I thought that was a pretty cool story.

• 28:06Lester Nare?

  Very good, very good.

• 28:08Krishna Choudhary?

  And we're going to space with Artemis 2, which we will go back to our main story to continue. So getting back into the Artemis 2 mission, I want to talk about the mission architecture, some of the orbital mechanics and the flight profile. Okay, so the space launch system, which we have beautifully recreated here in Legos. It uses a lot of spare shuttle parts. And there's a photo of me in Huntsville, Alabama. Actually, when I first moved from India to America, I settled in Huntsville, Alabama, with my family for about a year because my dad was working at Marshall Space Flight Center as a solar physicist. And what you notice immediately

• 28:51Krishna Choudhary?

  is that the space shuttle's architecture is very similar to the Artemis 2 architecture.

• 28:57Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 28:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? It's got this orange central part and then the solid rocket boosters on the two sides.

• 29:03Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 29:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And that is not a mistake. What they really did was use a lot of the spare shuttle parts to make the space launch system, this SLS.

• 29:14Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 29:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? The launch vehicle is something called the SLS Block 1. It's got a liftoff thrust of about 8.8 million LBF pounds per...

• 29:25Krishna Choudhary?

  I don't know what the F is, actually. I should probably know that. But it exceeds the Saturn V.

• 29:30Lester Nare?

  Really?

• 29:30Krishna Choudhary?

  By 15%. The Saturn V's thrust was only 7.5 million pounds.

• 29:36Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 29:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes. This thing is 8.8 million. Okay? So it's exceeding it by 15%. Now, you might be asking like, why is the rocket still so big? That's something that I ask because it's like, it's like, we've had 50 years.

• 29:51Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 29:52Krishna Choudhary?

  And the rocket is still so big.

• 29:54Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 29:55Krishna Choudhary?

  What gives? And why more thrust? It actually has less payload.

• 30:02Lester Nare?

  Hmm.

• 30:03Krishna Choudhary?

  It's got more thrust, but it's got less payload.

• 30:05Lester Nare?

  Meaning it can carry less stuff.

• 30:07Krishna Choudhary?

  It can carry less stuff. So I was, I was quite... Confused.

• 30:12Lester Nare?

  Perplexed, one would say.

• 30:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, by that, by that, um, by that number. So here's the idea. First of all, the reason why the rocket is so big is because of the rocket equation. Okay. At the end of the day, if you want to like leave the earth, you gotta push on something. Newton's third law. Newton's laws are the laws of the universe, right? Inertia is a thing. And so in order to, you can't just like create electricity really efficiently and then leave. You literally have to expend material in one direction to push away in order for your rocket to leave. And the amount of material is kind of a non-negotiable thing.

• 30:59Krishna Choudhary?

  If you want to put a giant electronic spacecraft into higher earth orbit and then go all the way to the moon. Okay. So that's one of the reasons why it's about the same scale as the Saturn V rocket and why the starship, the big starship are about the same size, right? It's because you gotta, you gotta leave enough material to get out there.

• 31:20Lester Nare?

  And the idea is the space is being taken up by primarily fuel. Because that fuel is the thing you're pushing, using to expend to give you the thrust to counteract earth's gravity, to be able to leave.

• 31:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 31:35Lester Nare?

  You know, to be able to have enough momentum.

• 31:38Krishna Choudhary?

  To get out.

• 31:39Lester Nare?

  To get out.

• 31:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly. And so, so that's the reason why it's about the same size. Okay. Now let's get into the why the less payload. The short answer is that the Saturn V was actually a three-stage rocket. There was stage one, stage two, stage three. And with this three-stage rocket, what you can do is you can get out and then you can throw away the heavy things and keep going.

• 32:03Lester Nare?

  Cause you have that second stage.

• 32:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that second stage is not propelling the third stage's mass.

• 32:09Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 32:10Krishna Choudhary?

  You know what I mean?

• 32:10Lester Nare?

  Yep, yep.

• 32:11Krishna Choudhary?

  But the SLS is a two-stage rocket.

• 32:14Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 32:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, there's the first stage, which is from here to here and the solid rocket boosters. And then the second stage is all the way here, right? And what that means is with, with the Saturn V. The first stage only took about 2.5 minutes. Gets out of the Earth's atmosphere and then it leaves. This thing sticks around for 8.5 minutes.

• 32:35Lester Nare?

  Oh, that's significantly longer.

• 32:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 32:37Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 32:37Krishna Choudhary?

  So, the whole time, it's hauling all of the

• 32:42Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 32:43Krishna Choudhary?

  sort of mass that isn't really doing anything.

• 32:46Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 32:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 32:47Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 32:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Now, the Saturn V dropped its dead weight, its empty tanks, early and often. Right? While the SLS carries its massive, empty, orange core stage, which is this guy.

• 32:59Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 32:59Krishna Choudhary?

  All the way to the top.

• 33:01Lester Nare?

  That makes sense.

• 33:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 33:02Lester Nare?

  That makes sense.

• 33:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Now, when it comes to engines, the engines on the bottom here, right? The Saturn V used kerosene, which is our hydrocarbon. So, carbon with a bunch of hydrogen bonds. Those bonds are very energetic, meaning that per gram, kerosene has a lot more chemical energy. The SLS uses hydrogen and oxygen.

• 33:27Lester Nare?

  I see.

• 33:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay?

• 33:28Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 33:28Krishna Choudhary?

  It's just H2 and O2. Now, hydrogen is lighter, which means that it'll have a higher exhaust velocity. When it gets out of the rocket, it's going to be moving faster because it's lighter. But at the same time, it's lighter, so you need more of it. The density is lower, right? So, you need a massive sort of thing to hold all that hydrogen. And when you have a two-stage rocket and you're going all the way up, that's a lot of drag. That's a lot of friction that you have to account for.

• 33:56Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 33:57Krishna Choudhary?

  So, all of that accounts for this lower weight that I can put on Earth orbit and all the way to the moon.

• 34:06Lester Nare?

  The idea is because you need more space for the fuel, which is this hydrogen-oxygen mix, as opposed to kerosene and liquid O2. And because you need more of that fuel and you're not dropping stages, like it's not a three-stage system. So, you're not able to let go of that dead weight earlier.

• 34:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 34:26Lester Nare?

  You fundamentally have more space taken up by fuel, which means less space for payload, even though you're accomplishing the same objective. And it's because of these architectural, structural choices.

• 34:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. Yeah. And then one could ask like, okay, why are we doing this architectural choice?

• 34:43Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 34:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Well, there's something called the Senate Launch System.

• 34:47Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 34:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? And that's basically the idea that like, you gotta get through the US Senate, which is two senators per State. So all the states gotta be happy. So you've got the NASA centers all over the country. There's three in California, the Ames Research Center, the Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards Air Force Base.

• 35:07Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 35:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Up in the high desert. And then you've got JPL in Pasadena.

• 35:11Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 35:12Krishna Choudhary?

  You've also got in Louisiana, the assembly that actually makes that orange part. You've got the Kennedy Space Flight Center. You've got Goddard and all these other things in the eastern seaboard. On top of that, all 50 states are actually partners with Artemis in the sense that there is a component on Artemis that comes from each of the 50 states. The nuts and bolts come from Delaware and there's like tubing that comes from some random company in California and all this other stuff. But they they've done a really good job to sort of like make this like an American.

• 35:47Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 35:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, because, you know, Artemis is, as we said with the Artemis Accords, it's like this international collaboration. But it's we're in America.

• 35:55Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 35:55Krishna Choudhary?

  You got to make everyone happy. And the Senate launch system has made sure that all 50 states have a stake.

• 36:01Lester Nare?

  Hmm.

• 36:02Krishna Choudhary?

  In this mission, which I thought I thought that was that was kind of funny.

• 36:06Lester Nare?

  So this is, this is actually an interesting point, which is that there is this social political dynamic. This is not a purely whatever is technologically most efficient and and X, Y, and Z is how we're going to do it.

• 36:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Hmm.

• 36:19Lester Nare?

  It is necessarily having to negotiate so that everyone gets their their P, their chunk of flesh, their piece of meat to be able to say, oh, like, we're supporting NASA by because, you know, the factory that's in the harbor.

• 36:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 36:34Lester Nare?

  Does X and Y. So that again, it's not operating in a vacuum.

• 36:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 36:38Lester Nare?

  It has to get appropriations from somewhere.

• 36:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Hmm.

• 36:40Lester Nare?

  And those appropriations, meaning money.

• 36:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 36:43Lester Nare?

  And support come with strings attached in some cases. And this is kind of part of like, again, when we're no longer having the specter of Cold War, justifying the spend.

• 36:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 36:55Lester Nare?

  You kind of need to get everybody to sit at the table.

• 36:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 36:58Lester Nare?

  Is that fair?

• 36:58Krishna Choudhary?

  And what I loved about that abbreviation is like the Senate Launch System, SLS,

• 37:03Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 37:03Krishna Choudhary?

  is the same as the Space Launch System, which is the acronym that is used by NASA to get us to orbit, right? Okay, so now that's going to get us to orbit.

• 37:14Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 37:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, now, once we get us to orbit, so that's this first part, which is the solid rocket boosters.

• 37:19Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 37:20Krishna Choudhary?

  And this first part all the way up to here.

• 37:21Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 37:22Krishna Choudhary?

  That's going to get us all the way into Earth orbit.

• 37:24Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 37:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, now, from there, we want to get to high Earth orbit. Now, in Apollo, only after two to three hours, you just straight up go to the moon.

• 37:32Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 37:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, you do like one or two rounds on Earth. Make sure everything is checked out, and then you're like, alright, we're go to the moon, we go.

• 37:39Lester Nare?

  We're not, it's a race, we're not hanging out.

• 37:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. These guys are all about risk mitigation, okay? So in Artemis, what's end, what ends up happening is, we actually go into in high Earth orbit before we go to the moon. The idea here is, we want to go into high Earth orbit because we want to fire the rocket boosters up here and make sure that nothing is wrong. If something is wrong, you get back in about, I think it's 45 hours, and you can get back.

• 38:08Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, you don't have to wait days, all the way to go to the moon and back like in Apollo 13, right? So what they do is something called the Apogee Ray's Burn. Apogee is the idea that you have this elliptical orbit, Kepler's laws comes back here.

• 38:22Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 38:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Whenever you have gravity, the orbits are actually going to be ellipses. So what you do is you have a first orbit that is circular, and then you do a burn, which adds velocity, and then you go into an elliptical orbit where you go far away from the Earth, and then you come back. And that elliptical orbit is anywhere from 68,000 miles, which is about like a fifth of the way to the moon, all the way back to 235 miles over a 42-hour period. So you're doing this really highly elliptical orbit to sort of just gauge the systems.

• 38:58Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 38:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Make sure everything is working. Now, in the Apollo missions, They were gauging these systems with intermediate Apollo missions. You had Apollo eight, you had Apollo six, seven, and so on and so forth. You had all the Gemini missions that were going in to make sure that everything was working. Here, you're doing it all at once because we want to save money.

• 39:17Lester Nare?

  I was, I was actually gonna say, the reason why we don't just get all these incremental missions because we're not, the military industrial complex and that geopolitical sort of nexus is not funding this.

• 39:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 39:29Lester Nare?

  And so we have to scrape every dollar we can for everywhere. I mean, literally, there's funding getting canceled actively right now.

• 39:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 39:37Lester Nare?

  For NASA that literally supports this mission.

• 39:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and we don't have 2.3% of GDP.

• 39:44Lester Nare?

  Going towards this.

• 39:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Going towards this, right?

• 39:47Lester Nare?

  This is very different.

• 39:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:48Lester Nare?

  So the analogy is imagine you're a sports, a sports team, you're an owner of a sports team, and you have to compete with like a program, the program from the past when you had $10 billion, and now you have 500 million.

• 40:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 40:01Lester Nare?

  You can recruit the best players.

• 40:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 40:04Lester Nare?

  For 500 million dollars, and so, anyway.

• 40:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so, so that's, there's a risk mitigation strategy here, right?

• 40:10Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 40:10Krishna Choudhary?

  But during that high Earth orbit, what they're gonna do is they're gonna check out everything that's happening at this very top.

• 40:16Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 40:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, one of the things that they're gonna do is manually fly Orion. Orion is this upper part right here.

• 40:23Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 40:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? What they're gonna do is detach that from the rest of the spaceship, and they're gonna just do maneuvering. They're gonna get out, they're gonna turn it around, they're gonna approach, they're gonna go back, they're gonna have this thing autonomously move, and then they're gonna have it go back and forth. What you want to do is really nitty gritty, get into the details of are all of the controls working? Right, like, when I, when I, when I move this joystick this way, is it responding the way that I wanted to? All of these things Apollo was already doing with Gemini and things like that.

• 40:56Lester Nare?

  They already pre.

• 40:56Krishna Choudhary?

  They had separate missions.

• 40:58Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 40:58Krishna Choudhary?

  This we're all doing in one.

• 41:00Lester Nare?

  That's a really important distinction, and also, the way you described that too, it's kind of crazy, oh yeah, we're just gonna fly up, we're just gonna detach, and then it's just gonna, you know. Move around and then eventually it'll cut like that's pretty.

• 41:14Krishna Choudhary?

  It's pretty insane.

• 41:16Lester Nare?

  That's pretty insane.

• 41:16Krishna Choudhary?

  And it's even more insane that we did it like 50 years ago.

• 41:19Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 41:20Krishna Choudhary?

  I mean, with a lot more money, but still.

• 41:23Lester Nare?

  Also true.

• 41:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Very, very cool. And then finally, if everything works out, right? The crew manually flies Orion relative to the rest of the spacecraft. Then we're going to do the translunar injection, which is this hybrid free return. What we're going to do is when the spacecraft reaches perigee, which is when it's closer to the earth. When it's closest to the earth, that's when it has the least potential energy in terms of gravity, because it's close to the earth. But that means it's moving faster.

• 41:54Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 41:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? That's actually Kepler's second law.

• 41:56Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 41:57Krishna Choudhary?

  That like the closer you get, the faster you move. When it's moving faster, that's when we want to do the burn to go to lunar orbit. This is something called the Oberth effect, which basically says that if you want to, if you want to change your trajectory, the fastest way to change your trajectory is to do it when your velocity is highest. Because then your delta V actually has the most effect. Okay? So that's what they're doing. They're going to do this hybrid free return, which means they're going to go all the way to the moon and back. And they're going to do it in such a way that they're farthest away from the moon. They can see the moon and the earth. They're going to swing around. The moon is going to slingshot them back. And then if everything goes well, then the return, the total mission is going to be about 10 days.

• 42:42Krishna Choudhary?

  There's going to be a direct earth entry. And the Orion is capable of doing a skip entry where it like sort of slows down with the earth's atmosphere once, and then it comes back and it lands somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, right off the coast of California, where we have our navy, our beautiful American navy with the warships and the, and the helicopters. They go and they, you know. Pick them up.

• 43:05Lester Nare?

  That's where the military comes back.

• 43:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, yes.

• 43:08Lester Nare?

  After we've done all the hard stuff.

• 43:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 43:10Lester Nare?

  Then they come and do a little quick Uber ride back home.

• 43:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 43:13Lester Nare?

  This is not a shot like we, the men and women who support, it's great, it's fantastic. It's just, it's an appropriations problem.

• 43:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 43:20Lester Nare?

  It's not a armed services, service members problem.

• 43:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and I mean, we're gonna get into the armed services when we talk about the crew, because the crew, a lot of them are from the armed services. So, let's talk about the crew. We've got four astronauts. They've been selected for the NASA Artemis 2 mission. Commander Reid Weisman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen. And can I just say, quite a good looking.

• 43:51Lester Nare?

  Good looking crew. This is a good looking crew.

• 43:54Krishna Choudhary?

  This is a good looking crew, dude. And I am sure there was someone on NASA that, look, I don't know. I don't know, but like, the photogenicness of the crew. I'm sure there was someone that was like, this is gonna be good on Twitter. This is gonna be good on Instagram.

• 44:11Lester Nare?

  I have seen actually that all of the, almost all the posts about Artemis, it's going very viral.

• 44:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 44:17Lester Nare?

  And with the crew backgrounds and da-da-da. It looks like a Hollywood movie.

• 44:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Dude, they look, they look good.

• 44:23Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 44:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay?

• 44:24Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:25Krishna Choudhary?

  It's not weird, guys, I'm just saying, they look good.

• 44:28Lester Nare?

  You're just using your observational skills.

• 44:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I'm just, yeah, yeah. Symmetric faces, that kind of thing, you know? It's very scientific.

• 44:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Anyways, okay, so, let's start with Commander Reid Weisman. He spent 165 days in space. He's a graduate of the Rennesler Polytechnic Institute in Troy. RPI, we did a paper from them, that was the string theory paper.

• 44:50Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 44:51Krishna Choudhary?

  From two episodes ago. He did a bachelor's in computer engineering, and then he did a master's in engineering at Johns Hopkins. It's engineering, but we'll give him. He's a captain in the US Navy, and he is going to be the commander of this mission. And that photo you saw, he's proudly wearing the US Navy.

• 45:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Sort of insignia on the ISS when he was there.

• 45:15Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 45:15Krishna Choudhary?

  All right. Next, we've got pilot Victor Glover. He spent 167 days in space. He's a high school quarterback from Ontario, California, Southern California boy. This guy's from SoCal. He went to Cal Poly Slow in San Luis Obispo.

• 45:31Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 45:31Krishna Choudhary?

  BS in engineering, masters from Air University, which I didn't know was a thing. So apparently the Air Force just has a university that is, it doesn't have a campus, but you can take courses as part of the Air Force and he took it on campus at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California and he got his masters. Um, and that was a photo of him working on some hydroponics plant experiment in the ISS. Next, we've got Christina Koch. She has spent 328 days in space.

• 45:59Lester Nare?

  Oh gee.

• 46:00Krishna Choudhary?

  She's gonna be the first woman on the moon. The, she's actually the longest.

• 46:05Lester Nare?

  Not on, just to be.

• 46:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and not as, as of yet, but she's also gonna be on Artemis 3 to get on the moon. But she'll be the first woman to.

• 46:13Lester Nare?

  Knock on wood.

• 46:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Knock on wood. Yeah, I don't wanna do commentators, commentators curse or anything. But she's gonna at least be the first woman, if everything goes well, to round the moon.

• 46:23Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 46:23Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, and be the furthest woman in outer space. Uh, she's actually quite cool because she had an electrical engineering and a physics bachelor's.

• 46:32Lester Nare?

  We love to see it.

• 46:33Krishna Choudhary?

  We love to see a physics bachelor's from NC State in Raleigh.

• 46:37Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 46:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Which.

• 46:38Lester Nare?

  It's pronounced Raleigh.

• 46:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, whatever. And, and then an MS in electrical engineering from the same place.

• 46:44Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 46:45Krishna Choudhary?

  She's got the longest single continuous stay in space for a woman. And part of her paradigm was, you know, her extended mission is being used to study the physical, biological and mental effects of long-term space travel on women, because we have a ton of data.

• 47:01Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 47:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Of long-term space travel on men.

• 47:04Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 47:04Krishna Choudhary?

  But, you know, moving forward, we need, we need all the data from everywhere, right? So her 328 days is gonna be crucial for that understanding. She's worked in Antarctica, Goddard Space Flight Center and the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins. The Applied Physics Lab is like. Kind of like the JPL of Maryland. You know how JPL is associated with Caltech. Applied Physics Lab is associated with Johns Hopkins. It's kind of this independent research entity that does crazy good stuff.

• 47:34Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 47:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 47:35Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 47:36Krishna Choudhary?

  The photo actually shows her with the cold atom lab. This is really cool. So what they did on the ISS was create a quantum experiment. They're cooling rubidium atoms down to near absolute zero, billionth of a degree, near absolute zero. And they're creating a Bose Einstein condensate, which is this fifth form of matter on the International Space Station. So they can do like quantum physics experiments on the International Space Station.

• 48:04Lester Nare?

  This is like science fiction stuff.

• 48:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, dude, I mean, the ISS is crazy because you have like a, you have like a university physics lab, but in outer space in zero G. It's one of the craziest things that we've made as human beings. And she was, she was doing that in that photo. That was, that was incredible. And then finally, we've got Jeremy Hansen.

• 48:22Lester Nare?

  The squid.

• 48:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and you know, he's Canadian, so we don't have to talk about it. No, I'm just kidding.

• 48:27Lester Nare?

  I mean, Toronto lost to, you know, the Dodgers.

• 48:30Krishna Choudhary?

  We will never forget.

• 48:31Lester Nare?

  You know, I'm sorry. It's just how it goes. It's okay, everyone. I was, I was born in Montreal, so I am also Canadian by at least birth. We support our maybe current slash former allies.

• 48:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I don't know anymore, right?

• 48:45Lester Nare?

  You don't know how it's going yet.

• 48:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so jokes aside, one thing that struck me about him is he's had zero days in space.

• 48:52Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 48:52Krishna Choudhary?

  This is gonna be his first time in space.

• 48:54Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 48:54Krishna Choudhary?

  He's going around the moon.

• 48:56Lester Nare?

  It's pretty, it's pretty crazy.

• 48:57Krishna Choudhary?

  What a lucky, lucky individual.

• 48:59Lester Nare?

  Yes, yes.

• 49:00Krishna Choudhary?

  He got his bachelor's from the Royal Military College in space science.

• 49:04Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 49:04Krishna Choudhary?

  And then a master's in physics.

• 49:06Lester Nare?

  Another physics.

• 49:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and I checked out his master's thesis, by the way.

• 49:10Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 49:11Krishna Choudhary?

  I scrolled through his master's thesis. The first thing was, the abstract was written in French and I was already ticked off.

• 49:17Lester Nare?

  Yes, yes.

• 49:17Krishna Choudhary?

  By the whole thing. I was like, whoa, what the hell? Yeah, but then actually he wrote in English because of course, science is done in English. The master's thesis was wide field of, wide field view of satellite tracking.

• 49:29Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 49:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Very cool. Because what he ended up doing was basically creating a really cheap CCD camera that could track satellites, very.

• 49:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Accurately. And then from that, figure out what satellites were doing what? It was a really cool master's thesis, to be honest. He's got the rank of Colonel in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and now he's going to be going to the moon. And I have to say, um, the crew has a great sense of humor. They were on the Colbert Report for an interview last year, and it's one of the funniest interviews. Just a little tidbit that I want to share from that interview. Jeremy Hansen was seated at the end because he's the tallest of them, but Colbert made a joke about how you're Canadian, so you're seated at the end. But the funniest thing was, you know, he acknowledged that the US could do this on its own, but it's an incredible testament to what NASA is doing

• 50:26Krishna Choudhary?

  as an international entity to bring together someone from the Canadian Air Force to go into space. The funniest thing that he said was, there was a joke about, Colbert asked, "So who's gonna turn the oxygen tanks?" That's a reference to Apollo 13, because the explosion on Apollo 13 happened because the, the pilot on Apollo 13 was asked to turn on the oxygen tank stirring thing. And that oxygen tank stirring is what created the explosion that became Apollo 13, right? So, so it's sort of this like taboo in NASA of like, because somebody's got to stir the oxygen tanks.

• 51:09Krishna Choudhary?

  So who's it gonna be? And Jeremy, very, very funny. He was like, "Actually, I've been asking to throw one switch, and they've told me that I can do that." It was so funny, dude, because everybody else was just like laughing their ass off.

• 51:22Lester Nare?

  Yeah, well done, well done. Well, he understood the assignment.

• 51:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, dude, I thought it was just so funny. And the chemistry in the crew is just so great. Like, I'm, I'm really looking forward to this being a success, you know?

• 51:34Lester Nare?

  That's so good. Oh, it's so good.

• 51:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 51:37Lester Nare?

  So, I think we've covered.

• 51:41Lester Nare?

  Structure of the mission.

• 51:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 51:43Lester Nare?

  What it's aiming to do. Artemis two is a part of a long term project that will ultimately end with having a semi permanent slash the goal of having a semi permanent slash permanent presence on the moon.

• 51:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 51:58Lester Nare?

  And so for folks who are saying, oh, they're going to the moon, but not landing. Why? I come back to my sports analogy, which was like, imagine you're the GM or the head coach or the manager of an English Premier League soccer team. Right? In the nineties, let's say I'm Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United. I have Beckham, I have Paul Scholes, I have Gary Neville, Roy Keane, I have all these great players. We win five champion, we have five Premier Leagues, most winningest team ever. It's amazing. What made that team work? We had the money, we had the talent, and then all of the je ne sais quoi that makes teams work.

• 52:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 52:41Lester Nare?

  Now, fast forward 25 years, and same Manchester United. We don't have any of those players. The players we now have, meh, not comparable. The money we now have, meh, not as effective because the Qataris have come in with money. The Americans have come in with money.

• 53:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 53:02Lester Nare?

  And so now all the best players, all the talent, all the info you've let Carrington, where we do training, it's run down now. None of the people that were there in the nineties that knew how we built a championship winning team.

• 53:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 53:16Lester Nare?

  None of them are here anymore. It's a bunch of new people who've never done it before. That analogy is exactly why you can't just rinse, repeat, going to the moon.

• 53:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, you can't just go to the moon.

• 53:27Lester Nare?

  All of the different component parts that make a Super Bowl winning team, a Premiership winning team, it's hard to go back to back to do just winning sports.

• 53:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 53:38Lester Nare?

  Right? In back to back years with the same everything. Imagine, right, trying to do the most impossible task in humanity with like almost none of the muscle memory from the first time. I just bring that analogy to try to help people reframe how they think about this because it's it's just not it's it's it's not the same anything.

• 54:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 54:01Lester Nare?

  And so, of course, we're gonna have to, again, we don't have 2% of the GDP to go forward. Like, money is really a big driver of us being able to do stuff.

• 54:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 54:10Lester Nare?

  And we just, there's just not the money there. But we're going to, with that entry point, talk about a couple of the myths that arise as it relates to any conversation about the moon.

• 54:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 54:27Lester Nare?

  And so, the first myth, which is one that always comes up immediately. I was shocked in our video, last video about Artemis, which was in the rundown and it was barely anything.

• 54:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 54:38Lester Nare?

  And everyone was just going crazy.

• 54:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 54:41Lester Nare?

  And I didn't expect it. Myth number one is about Van Allen belt radiation or Van Allen radiation belts being impassable.

• 54:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 54:51Lester Nare?

  This is myth number one.

• 54:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes. So what are the Van Allen radiation belts? Well, the earth has a magnetic field and so it traps radiation from the cosmic background, from the sun, from all over the place, into these sort of donuts around the earth. There's an inner belt, which is mostly high-energy protons, and then there's an outer belt that's mostly high-energy electrons. And the myth is that you can't go through without killing yourself. That is totally false because the transit time, you can actually calculate the transit time, we're going at about 11 kilometers per second. Let's say even slower, 6 kilometers per second, which the escape velocity of the earth is 11 kilometers per second.

• 55:34Krishna Choudhary?

  If you were to calculate how big that belt is, you spend about eight minutes.

• 55:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Through the core and about an hour through the whole thing. Now, the Apollo missions had shielding. They had aluminum blocks that would block alpha radiation, which is helium nuclei going through and beta particles. And it's effective against most particles, but you know, you still have to be concerned about Bremsstrahlung radiation, which is when electrons come through and they slow down. And if the electrons slow down, then because of electromagnetism, they're going to release light and that light is usually in the form of X-rays. Right? So, so there's going to be some X-ray radiation. Well, the result is that the Apollo 11 dose was about 0.18 rads, which is comparable to a CT scan. Right? It's far below the lethal dose of 400 rads.

• 56:22Lester Nare?

  So if you have had a CT scan, you've had as much radiation exposure as going through the

• 56:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yes. And to with Artemis, actually, what I found was really funny was the Artemis 1, which is the mission that preceded Artemis 2, they had mannequins called Helga and Zohar that had active dosimeters, which are, you know, radiation meters that track the amount of radiation that they're getting.

• 56:47Lester Nare?

  If you've watched Chernobyl, it's the things that go

• 56:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, 3.6 ronkin.

• 56:52Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 56:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. So the preliminary, the preliminary data from those dosimeters show that while the environment is harsh, the shielding and the short transit time is enough to keep that dose well within safety limits.

• 57:04Lester Nare?

  And it looks like the lethal dose is 400 rads.

• 57:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 57:08Lester Nare?

  And so we're talking about 0.18 at the Apollo times.

• 57:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 57:11Lester Nare?

  And so we're like, we're not even

• 57:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And I mean, you do it so that the trajectory of the mission actually like avoids the big part of that radiation belt. Right? You, you know where the donut is.

• 57:24Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 57:24Krishna Choudhary?

  And you can figure out how to avoid it.

• 57:26Lester Nare?

  And this is why launch windows are a thing.

• 57:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, exactly. Yeah. So the second one.

• 57:32Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 57:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Flags are waved in a vacuum, right? This was the flag that was waving and it's like, oh, how is it waving if it's in a vacuum? And then there's no air. Actually, I would actually like to suggest that the flag waving is actually a characteristic of the vacuum. And here's why. So in a vacuum, there's no atmosphere. Correct? So with a flag that's waving, if the air is very still, like it is in the studio, then the friction from the air is going to stop the waving so that the flag is going to be still. If there's no air and I give the flag a certain amount of momentum, it's kind of like a pendulum, swinging back and forth. It's going to keep waving.

• 58:16Krishna Choudhary?

  The only friction is coming from the internal friction of the fiber in the flag itself. Right? And so the fact that it kept sort of going in the simple harmonic motion is a feature of the fact that there's nothing there to slow it down.

• 58:32Lester Nare?

  The point being, if you go, like, imagine like Heroes of Iwo Jima putting the flag down on the ground.

• 58:39Krishna Choudhary?

  And then you like, try to adjust it for the camera and whatever. You're going to introduce some momentum.

• 58:43Lester Nare?

  There's no way you can place the flag without introducing momentum.

• 58:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, exactly. And the fact that it kept sort of swinging a little bit is because there's nothing else to slow it down. And the damping effect of the fiber itself is actually too small. Over a few oscillations, it does slow down, which you see, but you know, it's not enough.

• 59:04Lester Nare?

  These are just like layups.

• 59:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:06Lester Nare?

  Next one.

• 59:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Next one is this non-parallel shadows imply multiple light sources. So it happened in a studio because the shadows are not pointing in the same direction. This one's like the most dumb to me because like anyone who's taken a photograph has seen that the lights point towards a common center.

• 59:25Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 59:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Like just go outside when the sun is out and then look at, take a photo with your phone of two light poles.

• 59:34Krishna Choudhary?

  And they'll, they'll be pointing to some source. They're not going to be parallel just because of the nature of photography and the idea that you've got a single source that is capturing this. Guys.

• 59:44Lester Nare?

  That one's so dumb.

• 59:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Guys. Okay. The next one is the no stars in the sky. There's no stars in the sky in any of the photographs. Well, the reason for that is the optical dynamic range, right? If you want, if you want to take photographs, the surface of the moon is 30 times brighter than the stars. So anyone who's done photography knows that if you wanna, if you wanna F stop of like F11 and uh exposure time of one 250th of a second, you're not going to get anything.

• 1:00:15Lester Nare?

  I mean, I, I deal with this trying to set up our cameras and I'm trying to make us look beautiful, but I'm like a slightly darker than you.

• 1:00:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. It's this whole thing, right? And actually, I wanted to show that photograph because we actually installed in Apollo 16, we installed a far ultraviolet camera.

• 1:00:31Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:00:31Krishna Choudhary?

  And on the right, we see that far ultraviolet camera and there you can actually see stars. There's a photo of the earth in far UV and the stars around the earth.

• 1:00:40Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:00:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Jokes aside, that's an incredible photograph. It's the earth with the stars in the background. Look at that.

• 1:00:47Lester Nare?

  And it's, it has a sort of crescent, you know.

• 1:00:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:49Lester Nare?

  Glow. It's.

• 1:00:51Krishna Choudhary?

  It's amazing. It puts our place among the stars in the cosmos. I think that's really cool.

• 1:00:56Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:00:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Debunked.

• 1:00:57Lester Nare?

  Yes. Yes.

• 1:00:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. And now let's look for direct evidence. Okay. So proving the landings, there was this thing called a lunar ra- laser ranging. Apollo 11, 14 and 15, they left retro reflector arrays on the moon. And so you can point lasers to the specific points on the moon where Apollo 11, 14 and 15 were there. I mean, we know the coordinates of where the moon are. And nowadays, the laser can be localized to just that part of the moon. And if you point it at other parts of the moon, you're not going to get the laser to bounce back. But if you point it where Apollo 11, 14 and 15 were, you will get the laser to point back. And you can actually. Measure the round trip time. It's gonna be about 2.5 seconds.

• 1:01:39Krishna Choudhary?

  And nowadays, our clocks are so good that you can measure the distance moving away. Because the moon is moving away at about 3.8 centimeters per year. And so every year, if you were to do this experiment, you would actually see the time delay increasing by a tiny, tiny margin because the moon is moving away.

• 1:01:59Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:01:59Krishna Choudhary?

  This is very dear to me because there was this thing called the Bronze Dickey theory out of Princeton. There was a new theory for gravity. What they said was perhaps the gravitational constant, which is G, is not actually constant, but it's actually a scalar field that varies across the cosmos in space and time.

• 1:02:16Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:02:16Krishna Choudhary?

  And one of the ways to do this was to measure the distance to the moon very, very precisely. And that's actually one of the reasons why the Apollo astronauts left these retro reflective mirrors. Because the Princeton team pitched this idea to NASA. And we're like, hey, this would be a cool way to measure G.

• 1:02:38Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:02:39Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like a fundamental test of general relativity.

• 1:02:41Lester Nare?

  Yes, because we're now on a body, rocky body off planet.

• 1:02:46Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's like really far away. So it's maybe perhaps outside of the sort of friction of the earth. If there's like some scalar field that like the earth is dragging or some kind of thing like that, you know?

• 1:02:57Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:02:57Krishna Choudhary?

  So, so I thought that was really cool.

• 1:03:00Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:03:00Krishna Choudhary?

  The second thing is the lunar reconnaissance orbiter, which is like a satellite that goes around the moon and takes photos of the moon, can actually see tracks of Apollo 17's car rides, right? You literally see the car rides and then, and then you can, you can go and see Apollo 17 and look at their footage and be like, oh, they went here. And then you can check the tracks and be like, oh, they went here. They spent some time there and then they went here and they spent some time there on their moon buggy. And they've been taking photos since 2009. The resolution is about half a meter per pixel. So you can literally see the tracks, right? The verification also comes with other. Nation states, the Japanese with Selene and Kaguya and the Indian Isro,

• 1:03:45Krishna Choudhary?

  they made Chandrayaan one. They've taken photographs of the Apollo 11 and Apollo 2 lunar module that are left on the moon.

• 1:03:53Lester Nare?

  I just don't get it.

• 1:03:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, so you can literally like, so what, you're telling me that the Japanese and the Indians and the European Space Agency, everyone is colluding?

• 1:04:02Lester Nare?

  And then also that the Chinese Russians aren't calling this out and making a big whole stink about it.

• 1:04:08Krishna Choudhary?

  And actually, that that takes me to my final point, which is the Russians, why didn't they say anything? In 1969, when we went to the moon, they could have easily been like, no, they didn't. You know what they did instead? They denied that there was ever a race in the first place. Okay, this is archival photographs of their Saturn V, their version of the Saturn V. It was actually bigger, it failed.

• 1:04:32Lester Nare?

  Of course it did.

• 1:04:33Krishna Choudhary?

  But.

• 1:04:33Lester Nare?

  Look at it.

• 1:04:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Look at it. I mean, it failed. Jokes aside, the fact that they even got this far is insane, given the amount of technology that they were behind on in terms of computing and things like that. But back to the jokes, of course it failed because it's the Russians. But at the end of the day, you know what they did? They were like, no, we weren't even trying to go to the moon. I don't know what you guys are talking about. I mean, yeah, you guys went to, I mean, good for you, I guess. But like, we were never even trying. That was their retort. Their retort was not, they never went to the moon. Their retort was, we didn't even know we were in a race.

• 1:05:08Lester Nare?

  Whether you look at it geopolitically, whether you look at it from what you can reproduce with current instruments, like, again, you can, you can, it's visible. You have a laser pointer, if you have a high powered telescope. Multiple other countries have verified this to be true.

• 1:05:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Guys.

• 1:05:25Lester Nare?

  The flag, it's like the vacuum, it, everything is, it just doesn't. I'm just, I was really surprised at how many people.

• 1:05:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and it's not even a minority of the American public.

• 1:05:36Lester Nare?

  No, no, no, it's actually really significant. It's a really significant number of people. And I was unfamiliar with their game.

• 1:05:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:45Lester Nare?

  But.

• 1:05:45Krishna Choudhary?

  It's not a good game, guys.

• 1:05:46Lester Nare?

  It's, it's, it's, everything is, anyway.

• 1:05:51Lester Nare?

  I it's this it this is so what we do in space is so cool and so incredible and is standing on the shoulders of an unbelievable amount of math, physics, biology, chemistry, work that has been going on now for a very long time. And it's important to me that like all of those people who have sacrificed and done this work to like make this happen. And like ultimately, as a species, we will, I believe, and I have to believe from my own spirit, that we will be traveling the stars one day.

• 1:06:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:32Lester Nare?

  Maybe not in our lifetime. Maybe the aliens can help us a little bit with getting getting a little bit, get that interstellar thing going.

• 1:06:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:39Lester Nare?

  But regardless, like, this is like such an important aspect of, I think, our identity as a species of being explorers and having curiosity and wisdom. And it's like the perfect distillation of all of those aspects.

• 1:06:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:53Lester Nare?

  And to just minimize the work and the efforts and the blood, sweat, and tears that so many people put in, you know, to all efforts related to space. It just it's just a huge disservice to a huge number of people. Also, for all the Elon bros, again, Elon knows we went to the moon.

• 1:07:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:14Lester Nare?

  So you like to believe everything he says. Why don't you believe him about this?

• 1:07:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:19Lester Nare?

  You know, he's your man.

• 1:07:20Krishna Choudhary?

  No, he's part of the, you know, it's part of the dingy.

• 1:07:25Lester Nare?

  Huge shout out to all the countries that are in the Artemis Accords, NASA, Canadian Space Agency, ESA, to the crew that is gonna get ready to go out there. The launch window works, you know, hopefully we do. They're doing a lot on this mission all at the same time.

• 1:07:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:43Lester Nare?

  There are a lot of, there's a lot of moving parts. And so, you know, best of luck and Godspeed to the crew. This is just, going back to the moon is awesome.

• 1:07:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:53Lester Nare?

  Um, it there's not, it's just awesome.

• 1:07:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:55Lester Nare?

  Uh, and I can't wait to see where this goes. Uh, uh, Apple TV, plug. Because for all mankind, season five is coming out in March. If you haven't watched it before, the idea is-

• 1:08:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I love that show.

• 1:08:08Lester Nare?

  It's the revisionist history of what would happen if the US got to basically the moon for like, basically if we were-

• 1:08:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Second.

• 1:08:15Lester Nare?

  Second, and they got to the moon first and we were second. And how that would have changed the entire architecture of history. It's quite good.

• 1:08:24Lester Nare?

  And so, this is, we're not living in that timeline. I guess thankfully.

• 1:08:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Thankfully, yeah. Well, before we end, we should do, uh, what should they comment?

• 1:08:33Lester Nare?

  Ah, yes.

• 1:08:34Krishna Choudhary?

  And I, so I propose, I didn't know what LBF meant when the liftoff thrust, 8.8 million LBF.

• 1:08:41Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:08:41Krishna Choudhary?

  It's pounds something.

• 1:08:42Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:08:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Why don't you guys tell us?

• 1:08:44Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:08:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Or come up with your favorite acronym, LBF.

• 1:08:47Lester Nare?

  LBF. That's a good one. Yeah. That's a good one.

• 1:08:51Krishna Choudhary?

  So, if you've made it this far, type in what you think LBF means-

• 1:08:55Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:08:55Krishna Choudhary?

  -when it comes to thrust. It's gotta be, don't, don't make some random crap up. Make it like a thrust thing.

• 1:09:04Lester Nare?

  As you know, uh, my name is Lester Nare, here is your host, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD and moon landing debunker, Krishna Choudhary. Uh, again, this was our off weeks, we just did the one-story deep dive. We'll be back next week. We may have some teasers of a secret project we're working on, but if not then soon. Uh, as always, we really appreciate you all and our commitment to staying curious. This is from First Principles.