Citation Needed - Spaceships That Weren't

Episode Date: June 26, 2024

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_canceled_launch_vehicle_designs Even before the launch of Sputnik 1, there were various types of launch vehicle designs. The launch vehicle designs described below are either canceled or never left the drawing board.

Hello and welcome to Citation Needed, a podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet and that's how it works now. I'm Heath and I'll be controlling this mission. And I'm joined by four guys causing more of a problem for Houston than a baseball cheating scandal and Enron, Eli, Cecil, Tom, and Noah. Wow, really a space and sports reference this early in the show he turned off my microphone okay he's I've

been to that's the show guys hey we did we did. We did everybody. We peaked. Yeah. We're all hanging up. Eli, you go first. Oh man. I remember we used to do that in high school to me. Hey, I've been to Houston. I can assure you nothing I could do to create more problems for Houston. Right? Yeah.

No fun. In fact, the only time I was ever within within 100 miles of Houston, a big part of it exploded and everybody was just like, yeah, Houston does that. Houston, right? Noogie. All right. No, what person place thing, concept, phenomenon or event are we going to be talking about today? Spaceships that weren't. OK, so you've chosen a like a negative subject,

which means you can pretty much just list anything except Spaceship Stair? I mean, pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. Dog. Bear. No. Yeah. Tony Collette nailing it. Okay. So Noah, what weren't spaceships? Great question, I guess. So yeah, so look, is that we here at Citation Needed occasionally do list based subjects. So we generally do that for one of two reasons. Either we have found one thing that we want to talk about and there's not enough stuff about that thing to like fill a whole episode so we find other stuff like it or we're running late and we don't have time to do a whole big narrative thread. Well pleased to say that this episode is both. Okay for the record podcast listener I do lists because I'm lazy and essays with more

than one paragraph about the same topic make me so bored, I feel like I'm going to die. So. So I'm going to try to go more or less in chronological order for this essay, but that's hard to do when you're talking about things that didn't happen. Right. Because many of these things didn't happen for years and years at a time. And sometimes the lack of events overlaps. So I'm gonna, I might have to shift the time scale here a bit. Oh, I get it. No, I had a whole first marriage that didn't happen for years. Me too. So we're gonna start at the very dawn of the space age, or actually the the pre-dawn hours, because

Project Orion was first proposed in 1946, more than a decade before the Soviets would launch the world's first artificial satellite. America had just started smuggling Nazi war criminals into the country to inaugurate our space program and become complicit in the cover-up of their crimes, and we were still trying to figure out how best to launch ships into space. Most scientists favored variations of what we do now, which is essentially you basically you fire a bullet that has a gun on the end of it and once it's going real fast it fires its gun and its bullet has a little gun on that that fires another bullet

once it's going fast enough and you just keep doing that until you're going fast enough to break orbit. But a physicist named Stanislaw Ulam suggested a different method wherein you could build a spaceship that just shits out nuclear bombs and is... What? Yeah, right. Yeah. And it's nuclear bomb proof on the bottom. So every time it shits out a bottom and it blows up, the bombs push it a little higher up. That's pretty smart. If that actually worked with bombs, the bar we performed in an Edinburgh would be in orbit right now

All right guys so the spaceship with a big pole out the front and a magnet on the end of that hole that didn't work I don't know why that seemed perfect guys. I want to try a fan. What's what's the? Opposite of that I was thinking nuclear bombs out the back Magnet front genius this feels like the joke about building the whole plane out of the black box. What the fuck does nuclear bomb proof even mean? What is that? You and Kim Jong-un ask too many of the same questions, Tom. Now, to be clear, as insane as maybe we just ride a wave of nukes into orbit sounds, it is actually possible.

And when you compare it to the chemical fuel proposals, it had the advantage that you could lift a hell of a lot more weight into orbit than you could ever lift even with the biggest bullet gun bullet guns imaginable, right? It has the disadvantage, of course, of every fucking thing else. But the US government saw Ulam's idea as a means of launching a giant battleship into orbit so they were damned if they were gonna let us do it right? Yeah! Fuck you if you think nuclear fallout's gonna stand in our way at edge shit!

Gentlemen we've done the research and if we launch from Las Vegas we've determined nobody will notice. Oh so close to where they wanted to launch it from Eli. Yeah. Okay, everybody. Good news. Our battleship is now in orbit. Bad news. We are now orbiting a blackened husk where the earth used to be.

Right. So now this concept was officially proposed in 1955 and by 1958, DARPA's predecessor ARPA was already funding research to the tune of a million dollars a year. Yeah they changed the name because the D stands for don't do the nuclear bombs idea now. And no lesser than Freeman fucking Dyson was heading up the research on it. A name that it occurs to me now probably doesn't swing as much dick with most people as it does with me But he's easily one of my 20 favorite historical astrophysicists

Thank you, yeah, I mean fucking Dyson. No, he was nice in the top 10 of it, right? Thank you see so But yeah, he'd be in the top 10 if it wasn't for the climate change stuff. I mostly like this early stuff But yeah, he'd be in the top 10 if it wasn't for the climate change stuff. I mostly like this early stuff Guys I'm good with detouring into Noah's tier list for astrophysicists Only if he includes his astrophysicist burn book for the clicks Podcast listener you can't imagine how I smell the word astrophysics. Not in your darkest sexual nightmare. There is an I S S I S in there somewhere. If that helps folks.

It's from Mississippi. I should. It's an astrophysicist who's really into himself. Yeah. into himself. Now I should be clear here that research on Ulam's nuclear propulsion system never actually reached the point of using nukes, which is actually kind of weird by the standard of the time they set off nukes just to have set off nukes back then, but the research they did involved chemical explosions and proof of concept on much smaller devices. Okay, the whiteboard just says, you know when you let go of a balloon and then it says more balloons?

Like balloons on balloons. Who wrote that? It is. This is serious. It's a pretty good idea. So yeah, right. That's actually what we did kind of. But yeah, so as they're chugging along, the Air Force was hard at work designing the sweet Star Destroyer-esque space station that

they were going to use to launch. And the hypothetical vehicle was called the Orion. So here's what the CIA and the Air Force had in mind. It would be basically the size of a medium sized office building. It would hold a crew of about 150 people, and it would be entirely an unabashedly military purpose, right? They might let some science nerds on once in a while, but the purpose would be to have a platform to fire missiles from floating high above the planet and scaring the shit out of all the people who weren't on board with whatever the fuck we were calling freedom that week.

Every week, Joe McCarthy would throw some communist sympathizing actor out the airlock and film them burning up on reentry. I can see why this was necessary. Uh, bad news guys. Uh, we can presently only fire missiles from silos and submarines, fighter jets and bombers and some tanks. So we are definitely going to need some more options. Yeah, another 10, 10 years away from like the arm fired ones.

Yeah, we made so many missiles. They have to go somewhere. It's crazy. They're in a stack in a barn with this guy who made a bunch of money. Says first in last out right on the missile thing. I've got to take them out. Yeah. All right. So to be clear, throughout this entire development process, they knew all about nuclear fallout and they at least had a sense of how ridiculously dangerous it would be to nuke something into orbit. Dyson estimated that every time they launched this system, it would cost between 0.1 and one premature deaths from cancer. But the danger of fallouts were not listed amongst the reasons for ultimately canceling

the project in 1964. It would live on, at least in a sense, in a nuclear rocket engine called Nerva that NASA would continue to develop into the 70s before ultimately shelving it because Nixon thought that space was gay. That's right, listener in Arizona. Richard Nixon is the reason you don't have a cousin with an extra pinky. You're welcome. You're welcome.

Now, of course, the Americans weren't the only ones thinking immediately of militarizing space. From the beginning of its space program, the USSR maintained separate military and scientific arms. So in the 1960s, when they were first developing the Soyuz spacecraft, they were also building a military version right alongside the civilian one. Several of them actually, the Soyuz P interceptor and the Soyuz R reconnaissance craft would hold a crew of one or two people to observe and or destroy enemy satellites. So it was just two guys like staring out the windshield at the black endless expanse of limitless void and playing the world's most open field game of punch buggy ever invented.

Yeah, there's gotta be one down there somewhere. I don't see anything. Come on, come on man. I still don't see anything. Do you spy a star? Is it a star again, man? All right, So one of the big problems with having a fucking Soyuz with a gun is that whole concept of equal and opposite reaction that Newton kept yammering on about. So any projectile that you fire from your spaceship is also an engine pointing in the opposite direction. And this is not a case where you would just like, it would just push you away from your target unless your gun was perfectly centered and all the mass was perfectly balanced,

a shot would just cause your ship to spin uncontrollably. Whee! Right, yeah, exactly. So to make up for that, the Soviets had to design this sort of like free floating gun platform with the least possible friction against the rest of the ship. Okay, the whiteboard just says ghost bazooka? Who wrote that? Seriously? Because that is awesome.

Yeah, exactly. Ghost bazooka. It makes sense. So ultimately though, the militarist Soyuz wouldn't be. They had quite a ways along in terms of development and even selected and trained a crew of cosmonauts meant to operate it. But the project was shelved in 1967 with a prototype most of the way completed. The idea was revived a couple of times. Once in 1973, they actually even started training cosmonauts for it again.

In 1975, they even launched a few uncrewed test missions, but as far as we know, they never actually launched one with people in it. Though, to be fair, we might not know about it if they did. Cool. Hey, Noah, I would love for you and the other space nerds to know if Russia has a Bowser platform floating in space. It's relevant to my interests. They definitely do now. So now, of course, by the mid-60s, America is all in on the moon landing. Oh, I'm sorry, you mean the unaccredited Stanley Kubrick film, Noah?

Yeah, that's not right. That's I'm going to do a fucking ending essay now at you just for that. So so by the mid 60s, we're well on our way to making that happen. But that doesn't mean we still don't have plenty of dead end projects that went nowhere. One of my favorites was a proposed lunar rover called the Mo Lab. That is a portmanteau of mobile laboratory And it was basically an RV for the moon

It would have weighed about seven thousand pounds a bit over three thousand kilograms and could have traveled the lunar surface at over 20 miles per hour and next week a billionaire is gonna gift one of these to Clarence Thomas guarantee Yeah, right. Along with a trip to the moon. Yeah. Actually, ooh, that's a good idea. Sorry. Yeah, right? Put him in the Ghost Bazooka.

Are you allowed to say that? So the idea behind this one was that it would be launched to the moon before the astronauts that were meant to use it, and it would be able to remain on the surface of the moon for up to six months in sort of like a standby mode. Yeah, but then after that you got to call triple A for a jump and the wait that is forever. Yeah, right. Yeah. So, but then once the astronauts are there, they could pressurize it and then drive it

around and use it for up to two weeks. Okay. If we shoot like a Walmart up there, I feel like the RV can park for a while. We can do that. So ultimately the MoLab was deemed to be too dangerous to be feasible. If it broke down along the way, the astronauts would be too far away to get back to the return capsule with the oxygen they could carry on them. And if they didn't get too far away to do that, then there's no fucking point in having

to think. Now, this wouldn't always stop NASA from going ahead with moon rovers, but it stopped them at least in this instance. And that's probably a good thing because the MoLab was being developed by General Motors using the engine from the Chevy Corvair, which, as we all know, is unsafe at any speed. NASA's just drinking coffee out of a Styrofoam cup while someone at the dealership explains

they don't make the parts for their space rover anymore. I don't understand what that means. I should add here that the MoLab got far enough into development that there was a usable vehicle when it was canceled in 1968. The U.S. Geological Survey even borrowed it from GM a couple of times to do work in the less navigable parts of the southwestern U.S. No word on whether Ralph Nader ever found out about that one though. Okay, now the whiteboard says, road runner, rules of gravity different? We'll see that goes for the science of space travel after a quick break.

Uh, Captain? Yes, Captain Raskonokov. Come in. Wait, Raskonokov? Why don't we have Russian accents? Doesn't really serve the sketch at all? Sure, okay, yeah. Wait, whataskonnikov, why don't we have Russian accents? Doesn't really serve the sketch at all? Sure, okay, yeah. Wait, what's up? I heard you had some concerns about our new space platform? Yes, sir. I was just worried that perhaps this is being considered for a military rather than a scientific purpose.

What? What? No, no, no, no, no. I assure you this is all in the name of science Okay, well So the cannons on either side of the platform the thrusters those are thrusters. Oh that shoot cannonballs No, of course not The the balls are just ballast space Ballast okay. Well, yes. What about this this laser? Merely an extraction tool for like rock samples and like rogue asteroids like

No Man's Sky. Rogue asteroids as opposed to... okay so I guess that might be so but but under this list of experiments half of team, who I should point out I've never met, are just assigned, how fast can I blow up America for science? I mean, aren't you curious? Oh, no, I'm a little curious. There we go. See? Science.

There's a place in the Blue Ridge Mountains where a designated American viticultural area produces wines as unforgettable as the views. To learn more about the crest of the Blue Ridge wine country, click this banner and find your mountain moments in Hendersonville, North Carolina. And we're back. When we left off, JFK was very excited about science, yada, yada, yada, Bush Senior, Grassy Noll, but we're still looking at the moon. What's next? All right.

So one of the things that you have to remind yourself when you're looking at the early history of space travel is that by and large, nobody realized that we were just going to dick around with it for a few years and then leave it in our attic like a teenager deciding to learn to play guitar. Right? Back in the 60s and 70s, they assumed that we would keep advancing this going to space shit. And the next stop would be the after the moon would be going to like a crew mission to Mars followed up by missions to Jupiter and beyond with permanently inhabited space stations popping up along the way. Yeah, I mean those planets already have unlivable climate so our work was done for us.

Skipping to the end of the book. Yeah, I know based on the kinds of people who choose to live in inhospitable wastelands like say Alaska, we would just be populating the solar system with misanthropic alcoholics and deadbeat dads. Okay. All right. Counterpoint. They'd be there though.

Right. So, all right. I'm back in. I'm buying back. They read all the newspapers. Very informed people. So for that reason though, there were a lot of designs for what would essentially serve as like a space semi truck.

Now we'd ultimately get one of those in the form of the shuttle program, but early concepts tend to do it. I thought you were going to say Optimus Prime. Well, yeah, him too. But first we'd get the shuttle program by a couple of years, I think. But early concepts for the space truck tended to assume There's gonna be a lot of passengers If they're like out for us spacecation

I guess to some orbiting pleasure dome and at the very least they assume that we'd need to bring a lot of cargo to Space on a pretty regular basis a side note space truck stop food sounds really fucking bad, doesn't it? Ice cream is good. Astronauts pull up. Chick-fil-A is fucking closed. God damn it. What day is it? It's going to be Sunday. It can't be.

Oh, we come back around in 45 minutes. It'll be a different that makes it a different day. Right. So along those lines, it's all. So along those lines, you have this space proposal like the big G or big Gemini. The Gemini program, of course, ended in 1966 and gave way to Apollo, but there were plenty of engineers at NASA and beyond that wanted to keep the Gemini's basic design alive, just soup the fuck up to carry away more stuff. Now, to be clear, the Gemini space capsule was tiny, right?

Those dudes were, I mean, they weren't quite stuck in space coffins for days at a time, but it was really close to that. But McDonnell Douglas had a design for a much larger version that had very little in common with the original, other than the overall outward aesthetic. And the landing method, which is to just sort of parachute out of the sky and hope not to land on anything important. But unlike the original capsules, the big G was intended to be reusable. Oh, three or four missions.

That thing's going to smell like he emptied your sink catcher into your never cleaned flesh light. Sometimes you use your way with words for evil. See, so this is one of those times in my head now forever. I think about that. I did. So all right. So for what it's worth, the big G's in my head now forever. I got to think about that. Good. All right.

So for what it's worth, the Big G earned the big in its name, at least by the standards of spacecraft. It would have launched with a maximum crew of 12. The space shuttle's theoretical max was eight, though it never carried that many people. Even the International Space Station can barely do more than a dozen. The most people it ever had aboard it was 13. But despite the fact that the Office of Management and Budget determined that the Big G aboard a Titan III rocket would be way more cost effective than any of the proposed shuttle

programs, NASA wanted the shuttle. So when budget constraints demanded that they follow one path of the other in the early 1970s, they went with the cooler looking one. Okay, guys, I think we can all agree this one here, it's going to be like but this one's going to be like, that was why they chose this shuttle. OK, so I'm a NASA scientist. Of course, not all our failed spacecraft proposals would have been crude.

There was a pretty cool proposal that the British Interplanetary Society looked into from 1973 to 1978 that was looking for a feasible means of interstellar travel within a human lifetime. The result, or lack thereof ultimately, I guess, was called Project Daedalus, and it would have used a fusion rocket to travel to Barnard Star, which is just shy of six light years away. And it would have got there in just 50 years. Interestingly enough, it is not the closest star to us. But apparently Alpha Centauri would have been too easy.

So they want to do this one. Yeah, I mean, the Brits are wary of any colonization that's too close to home at this point. They've got prior. Jesus Christ. Oh, look, a new sun that has already sat on the British Empire. Yeah, right, yeah. So the ship would have been too big to launch

from the surface, so the proposal was to build Daedalus in orbit. It would have had an initial mass of 54,000 tons, but a full 50,000 of those would just be the fuel. It would ultimately carry only about 500 tons of scientific equipment. It would have been a two-stage rocket with the first stage operating with a steady acceleration for two full years. This would ultimately accelerate the craft to 7.1% of the speed of light.

And then at that point, right? That's pretty fucking fast. The first stage drops away, it's jettisoned, and the second stage kicks in. It would burn for another 1.8 years, and at that point it would achieve its ultimate speed of 12% of the speed of light. Yeah, that's 80 million miles per hour, if I did the math right. That's like, no, no, no. Yeah, it's like so fast.

So very fast. So, and then of course, once it was going that speed, it would just keep going that speed because it's space, and it would continue to do that like in rest mode for 46 years Your rest mode for 46 years is called a Chuck Grassley I'm sorry, but all I can imagine now is how bad British astronaut Would be oh my god Two weeks into the voyage and the fucking beans for breakfast alone gets another two or three percent closer to the speed of light, right? Got another banger stuck in this straw again fuck

Called a tanger Now obviously a ship moving that fast can't slow down. It would take as much fuel to slow it down as it took it to speed up in the first place. It would have been going way too fast to go into orbit around the star. So the best they could hope for was a flyby, but that didn't matter because the project would have cost something like $174 trillion in today's money. Jesus Christ. Yeah, there was no way anybody was going to spend that much money on

something that didn't kill people. So they said no. Yeah, sadly, lots of science gets shut down by like who versus though. Right. We're like, yeah, NASA guys, like I hear there are some brown children on that star to say very alive brown children on that star. So the next item on my list is actually one that we've talked about on the show before. We talked about the space station Freedom back on our episode about the ISS.

That was the proposed space station that Ronald Reagan first announced back in 1984 during his State of the Union address. By then the space shuttle was already in operation and it seemed weird to have a space semi-truck when there was nowhere to take anything in outer space. So Reagan promised a multinational collaboration between the US, Japan, Canada, and the European Space Agency. It's fine, the foreign exchange student's

gonna do our homework. Right, yeah. So this project was kicked around for a solid 10 years or so, getting ever smaller budget allocations from Congress at the same time it was getting ever greater demands from the NASA bigwigs. And it's easy to lose track of just how much work actually goes into even these failed proposals, mostly because I've completely neglected to mention any of it to this point. But it's easy to think of this as just like, oh, well, they canceled that, so a bunch of blueprints and spreadsheets need to be tucked

away in a drawer somewhere or whatever. But they build parts for these motherfuckers along the way and they test them. And millions and millions of dollars are spent designing, building, testing, and rebuilding, and retesting models. And yes, eventually the project was merged into the International Space Station and much of the stuff that was built for the Space Station Freedom thing was used there, but most of it wasn't. Like 90% of it wasn't. Jesus Christ. Yeah, well, you got to keep in mind the ISS was as much a rebranding of America's Space Station Freedoms as it was a rebranding of Russia's Mir-2, so they

couldn't just like link everything up. So we combine the wall covered in pictures of Jesus and the wall covered in pictures of Stalin into a wall covered in pictures of Hitler. I don't like it either, but he is the compromise between those two guys. He's the compromise. Do it. That's just math. I don't know what. Reagan also said that when we land from the International Space Station, we don't need to use a parachute because now we can just trickle our way down. Exactly as realistic as his other use of that term, yeah. So, but while the Space Station Freedom plans were still in the works, the U.S. Naval Academy was teaming up with NASA

to design our next Dooms spaceship. And this is basically what you'd get if Project Orion fucked Project Daedalus. Okay, cool. The son of Daedalus. We'll fly really close to a star. It's going to be great. Nothing could go wrong there. So it would have been an uncrewed interstellar probe that

would have used nuclear propulsion to get to Alpha Centauri B. It would have been significantly smaller than Daedalus, coming in under 400 tons altogether. It also would have been much slower, and it would have been going to a target that was much closer, and it would have taken twice as long to get there. But because of its slower speed, it would have been able to go into orbit around the star once it did. But even 50,000 tons less than Daedalus is still fucking huge for a spacecraft, and it's way too big to launch using traditional rockets. The largest payload ever launched was 140 tons, and that was during the Apollo missions.

So the plan for this interstellar craft was to build it on space station freedom. It would just be docked to the space station during construction and then launched from orbit and partly because it was intended to travel so far and partly because there was no fucking way it was ever gonna happen this one was called project long shot. Alright team project but maybe got shut down by Congress. I'm thinking we just name it better and have the same proposal again. I'm sorry Noah the construction itself was going to be done in space It's just like a bunch of Union guys leaning on their space shovels like well We'd like to move it along. You know we're on our 15 up here. Yeah

No, of course we don't have to look to the annals of history for spacecraft and art There are plenty of space ships that don't exist as we speak. Infinite ones. One of the coolest, yes, really, one of the coolest is a proposal that's been languishing on NASA's backburner since 2009 called the Titan Mare Explorer, or Time. And it's the only space boat on the entire list. Guys, we're avoiding the word Titan for any and all stuff permanently. Okay, that's just a lot.

Okay, especially space boat. Yeah. Okay, got it. I'm going to make a joke about that later. Thank you for jumping on that though. That's helpful. How dare you. One of the coolest celestial bodies in our entire solar system is Saturn's moon Titan.

It's the second largest moon in the solar system. And unlike every other known moon, it's got a thick atmosphere, thicker than ours. Yeah, they're actually considering a renaming it the Kardashian moon. It's that thick. Also, as it's... Three C's. That's the joke. It's also got a subsurface ocean of liquid water that could harbor life Probably doesn't but it could and I can't remember where I read this and I couldn't confirm it as I was writing this essay

So take this with a grain of salt But if I recall correctly Titans combination of gravity and atmosphere is such that if you could stand on its surface and flap little wings on your arms You would fly Okay, see this is how the space nerds get you, because they're like, oh boy, fellas, we should go check out the planet where everyone can fly. Oh, did we not mention it's negative 290 degrees

Fahrenheit on time? Oh well, better slam another billion dollar rover into it and test some rocks. I said if. You weren't listening is the problem. Working for the nerds. Damn right I am Children with that I look if you're trying to get in Jesus fucking dome you getting good with the nerds

That's true More importantly though at least for the purposes of the Titan Mare Explorer Titan has surface lakes of liquid ethane and methane The Titan Mare Explorer would have settled into one of these lakes and then just puttered around its surface for a three to six month cruise of exploration. Yeah, a cruise on a lake of methane still sounds a lot better than anything that Carnival now offers.

Right? Yeah, well yeah, this fucking thing isn't gonna get a disease, right? Like the Titan Mare Explorer's gonna get a plague. Smells so much better on this ship, so much better. Yeah, yep. There was also a related proposal for a submarine version that could have been even cooler. Come on. Yeah, let's make a submarine called Pike.

It'll be great. I wrote three days before you left. I feel like my joke and your joke worked in compliment to each other. It's a symbol. Could have been a yes and situation. But unfortunately- Is that what you're doing? My real name is Keith. But unfortunately, it was passed over for funding

and the windows for missions to Saturn only open like once every 10 years. I believe the second window to do this since it was proposed just closed, if I recall correctly. But perhaps the most famous perpetually upcoming spacecraft of the modern day is that spaceship that Elon Musk is gonna use to colonize Mars any minute now.

Yeah. You'll recall that he promised to land people on Mars 10 years later, about 12 years ago. We're still waiting on the ship that he's gonna do. You would think they'd need a ship. They'd have a ship by now, but he is an unassailable genius who keeps reinventing more complicated versions of train and I and some idiot who can't even see into the dimension that he's playing chess in.

So I'm sure that's coming any minute. Also, apparently being a grandmaster of 12 dimensional chess involves making your astronauts shit into a diaper because the bathroom doesn't work. It's counterintuitive tricky stuff. Sometimes you gotta move back to move forward Heath, yeah. Yeah, a rocket ship made by the same guy who's perfectly terrestrial cars routinely rank last

for reliability is not attempting proposition. But they'll tell you they drive themselves. Yeah, no, they'll tell you that. They have walls and trains. Yeah, exactly. Until the courts come ask it and then they'll say you're not supposed to use that. Why would you use that? You got to drive the car while it's driving itself.

Yeah, right. Full self-driving doesn't mean what it sounds like it means. It doesn't mean it's full or self or driving. Come on. Those are sound words. That's you. Those are sound words. Stop. You sound like that. All right.

And lastly, I wanted to close on my favorite spaceship that ever wasn't. And that is, of course, the Death Star and not just any Death Star, but specifically got any Sith fans out there, right? No, but specifically, this is the Death Star that the Obama administration didn't develop in 2012, despite a petition that got so damn many signatures that they had to actually consider it. Honestly, he could have done it and zap the Philippines and I still would have hated the next guy.

So so this came from the We the People Initiative, a program that Obama started that would theoretically allow the common people's voice to be heard in the halls of power. It was an online petition system where they said that if any

petition could reach a threshold of twenty five thousand signatures, it would be duly considered by the administration and they would respond to the petition in so many days. And entrusted with the most direct form of democracy

that modern technology had ever been able to offer us, we farted into it. A petition to build a Death Star for $850 quadrillion to quote, spur job creation in the fields of construction, engineering, space exploration, and more, and strengthen our national defense, end quote, ultimately gained well over the requisite 25,000 votes. He should have made it a giant floating dark Brandon head. That would have been amazing.

Yeah. Now, ultimately, the Obama administration did respond to the petition in an official capacity. They elected not to build it, as you may have noticed, arguing that their administration wasn't aware of any planets in need of annihilate. Okay, already lying. They also noted that such an expenditure would work against their efforts at deficit reduction. And they added in one of my favorite official government

communications of all time, quote, Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one man starship? And quote, amazing, amazing. And if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be? The fact that we can't have nice things is probably for the best Yeah We learned that democracy doesn't know yeah ever since Obama. Are you ready for the quiz that I am? Alright Noah. Let's get controversial which sci-fi universe has the dumbest

spaceship ooh Hey TIE fighters those jets? There's solar panels on the sides. What the fuck are they? B, the Dune fucking up and downy ships that appear to not have a forward setting. They just hop along the surface of Arrakis.

That's stupid. See Millennium Falcon supposed to be a freighter also appears to be the size of an airport bathroom. Or D. Ready for a hot take. The Enterprise. The least boat or airplane shaped thing imaginable. All right. Well, I, of course, am a true Star Wars fan, so I only criticize things from the prequel

trilogy and the sequel trilogy and the spin off movies and the TV shows and the books and the comics and the games and the last third of Return of the Jedi. So I can't, it can't be A or C. I'm going to go with D because Trekkies need to be taken down a peg, I think. Thank you. All right, Noah, you jump into a spaceship with Barack Obama and head to the Death Star. He's driving. What song does he play a Carry a liaison

Sorry, that's so bad. That's so bad. I'm sorry. That's so bad. All right B drone thugs in harmony Who's saying in the membrane Born in the USA Well now at the risk of offering sucker to birther's I got a D long form way to go good for you All right, Noah, what is Donald Trump's name in the Star Wars universe a Clandocall What is Donald Trump's name in the Star Wars universe? A. Clando Calrissian.

B. The Millennium Felman. C. Frenomenal. Nice. Darth Trader. Or D. Count Dooku.

Frenomenal. That was so good. So good. Heath, the fact that this isn't a visual medium and you couldn't just do count, do coup, but spell it different is a crime against humanity. So I will go with D on that one as well, actually. Correct. Well done.

All right, Noah, as you noted, democracy is a failed idea as evidenced by the We The People petitions. What are some of the most absurd real petitions we actually asked our government to consider? A, a request to nationalize the American Twinkie production infrastructure to ensure the continued presence of Twinkies forever. God damn it. B, to establish a new legal system of motorcycle riding judges who serve

as police judge, jury, and executioner all in one. That's a great idea. That's an awesome idea. I would vote for it. I'm sure it's real. We're C and the love. Transfer funds from the drug war to fund the research and development of the genetic engineering

of domestic cat girls. Well, that one's a great idea. That's a good idea. I think I like that one. That one's okay. That one's all right. I've been going for D on all of the other ones and I have to get this one wrong for That's a great idea. That's a good idea. I think I feel like that one's okay. That one's all right. All right. Well, I've been going for D on all of the other ones and I have to get this one wrong

for the theme to work. So I'm going to go with secret answer D, none of the above. It's all of the above. Oh damn. Seriously, I would transfer like most of the federal budget to domestic cat girl. I would transfer the funds. Name a federal problem that isn't fixed by everyone having a cat girl at home. You're not driving on bridges

if you have a cat girl at home, you're at home with your cat. So I would transfer the funds from the drug war to literally anything. Anything, yeah. Yeah, right. Yep. Both of these.

Just buy drugs, just do the opposite. That would be great. For your cat girl. There you go. We're combining ideas now. I think we're really. See, oh now you're combining. Now you're yes and cat girl There you go. Thank we're combining ideas now Digging down you thought of it just now first yeah Tom you won you stumped it all right Cecil. I'd like to hear from you. All right sounds good Well for Tom Noah Cecil and copycat I'm Heath

All right. Well, for Tom, Noah, Cecil and Copycat, I'm Heath. Thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week and Cecil will be an expert on something else. Between now and then, you can listen to Cognitive Dissonance, Lawful Assembly, Talk-A-Chip, Your Old Dads, God-awful Movies, Skating Atheists, Skeptocrat and D&D-minus. And you could watch some season liberally if you're interested. And if you'd like to join the ranks of our beloved patrons, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod our sponsorship with box of sharp things that

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Those are the two places you can go for all the different things, please help You wanted to see me Admiral Yes, I'm afraid we're cutting off the project but sir Destroying America. Yeah, you know it turns out all we needed to to do was convince millennials to vote for Jill Stein. Oh, yeah, no, that'll do it. It will. It will. Just yeah, it's just for us.

It was really good. So I like that. I like that little editing note Noah just, I just made there just for us. Just in case you didn't catch what was just being said. I'll be by later to help you with this one. I was just in the neighborhood, drove seven or eight hours. I'm about to see some of this all work, need some little help.