Well There‘s Your Problem - Bonus Episode 44 PREVIEW: Stealth (Part 1)

Episode Date: September 17, 2024

you can't even see it full episode on our PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/posts/112264683

What if you used the shuttle to steal a military camera satellite, and used that for your own camera? ALICE That you can't... okay. SEAN I WON'T YOU JUST GIVE US THE PLOT OF MOONRAKER? ALICE It's the plot of Moonraker, it's also a real thing, like, I venture to suggest this is an area that is not widely spoken about, for good reason, but like, I would be amazed if no one had come up with the idea of kidnapping a satellite.

Or indeed if it hadn't been done. RILEY That was part of the mission parameter for the design of the space shuttle, was that it had to be able to rendezvous with a satellite in an orbit that could only have launched from the Cosmodrome and returned to the US. That was literally one of the missions it was designed to do was to capture a Soviet satellite. Yeah, I'm just adding the extra things that then you use the satellite for like street photography. I hate to burst your bubble, but like under 1g of gravity because satellites are built to be as lightweight as possible because lifting a launch pass is expensive.

The structural stability of the camera would be so compromised that you wouldn't have optical alignment under 1G, of course. Sorry. Oh, god damnit. Just me being like, nah, it's fine, I don't need a tripod. Incidentally, I went on a really good podcast called Failure to Launch about the time that the CIA kidnapped a satellite that hadn't even left Earth yet. Jesus. Right?

Actually, it had left Earth, it had come back to Earth, and the Soviets just put it on display, and the CIA kind of kidnapped it. Was an interesting story. Um. They, they, they... The music starts playing. Yeah, literally. I mean, if you're on a shuttle, to my knowledge, it's still in that rotting away in a hangar, we could, you know.

Girlfriend. Yeah. I thought they just moved. I'm pretty sure it's going to a museum now. I'm not sure. Well, a museum is actually easier to get to rather than a locked hangar, honestly. It's on display, you can just walk up and scope the place easily. We'll use MIA for local intelligence, we'll use Victoria for our getaway driver.

I mean, yeah, no, perfect. Next slide, please. The first all trans heist. I put in a slide for us to wantonly speculate about weather satellites and other Earth observing systems and their use as military assets for protection and surveillance. It is surprising how many Earth observing weather satellite jobs require a top secret clearance. Justin, would you be so kind as to click the link in the slide notes?

Ooh, hold on, let me see if I can... I don't know what those coordinates go to, but I can take an educated guess. Allow weathercams.faa.gov to access your location. Well. Hold on a second, I'm having some trouble clicking this from PowerPoint. Justin, it's your house. It's an image of your house. Is it an image of...

I don't believe you. Yes, yes. It literally is. Ross, don't believe you. Yes, yes. It literally is. Ross, don't open that. No, I'm gonna do it. It's like an alarmingly high resolution image of your house. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, look, what a surprise.

Someone's blocking the gate. Okay, so like, when I say that satellites that observe the earth observe the whole heckin earth like if you have a distinctive hat we can track you with weather satellites no military knowledge required I'm putting military and air quotes here you can't see it on the podcast because anything that observes the earth is an intel source and whether we're looking at like the weather patterns or we're looking for contrails or we're looking for patterns, or we're looking for contrails, or we're looking for soil moisture, or we're looking for, like, that's a weird place, it looks like there's tunnels dug underground because there's not enough soil moisture. ALICE Man, this is crispy.

ALICE That is my house. ALICE Yeah, they got this on a big screen in the Department of Energy. JUSTIN Two people are blocking the driveway. ALICE Yeah, they fucking do that. We're getting, bearing in mind that we did Bethnal Green and I nearly doxed Trash Future, the fact that we're getting more and more precise, I'm half expecting to see a slide in the next one that's just in my window, me looking out of the camera just like, uh.

In before Justin starts wondering how I knew where he lived. This is because, you know, he could probably reverse engineer that if you're enough of a psycho just from stuff I posted on Twitter. I, you know, but that seems relatively easy. But you know, I, this is okay. So the grill is in the old location. They haven't put the pallets up. The driveway, driveway is looking a little nicer than it does

right now. Before I got the benches from June. Uh, yeah, okay. I'm not saying you're not a psycho for putting this in. I'm just saying I can see how you did it. I didn't do the screenshot for a reason, don't worry about it, I'm not that crazy. But I just wanted to say hi in my own way. Okay, so right now radar is one of the many tools used to detect aircraft and stealth things. Satellites, which we'll talk about more in the ship part of the episode, are more vulnerable to satellites than they are to radar, because they're pretty close to the ground, and most radar has a radar floor, where the noise of the reflections off of the ground buries any signal that you get from a returning airplane. This is a key feature

of the 2005 movie Stealth, and the Maverick from more recent Blockbuster. They all talk about flying under the radar floor. With satellites you don't really have a floor if you're not actually underground, pretty far. ALICE We have to cover the earth in a big tarp. LIAM Yeah, Sherwin Williams, give us your money. ALICE I'll, I'll pave the earth. Yeah.

So, roughly speaking, we now move to the next arc of the podcast, which is, if these are all your ways of detecting an aircraft or whatever, something that doesn't want to be detected, what can you do about this, right? What sort of countermeasures exist? And one of them is, what if balloon? What if big balloon? If it's stupid and it works it isn't stupid. Arguable if this works, you know?

They're pretty easy to spot, we knew about them on radar for a while, we thought they were one of the balloons at first, to my knowledge. And when you do find them, you don't really need a 67 billion dollar fighter program to pop them, although the US decided to use one, to do the same. Funnily enough- F.2 hadn't had any aerial kills yet, hadn't had any kills of any kind, so they were like, well we spent four years of- Got that sweet high altitude capability, y'know.

This is a weekend I lost a lot of sanity points, cause East Palestine happened the same time. Yeah. Right? And what was the leading news story? We popped the balloon. Well yeah, it's better to talk about using a- so we're gonna rank defense programs in costs of- because Americans don't like using real units, we're not gonna measure it in billions of dollars, we're going to measure it in years of ending homelessness.

So per many new sources, you can check them on yourself, or you can ask me directly for them, it would cost less than ten billion dollars per year to make sure there was not a single homeless person in the US. No one would die of exposure, the social contract would remain intact. This fighter program cost seven years of ending homelessness in the US, and we have popped two balloons with it. I fucking hate this place. I do like, about the balloon, right, the idea that, like, clearly, the US is not the only military bureaucracy in the world that can waste money. Curiously, there is an inversion here, because the CIA tried this on China with surveillance

balloons before, and it was a massive waste of money, like only like three of them even got any useful images back. ZEKE It's very hard to steer a balloon, classically. ALICE Yeah. And I really love the idea that doing this in reverse is, yeah, partially a provocation maybe, but also just as like, this shit doesn't work but we gotta preserve our phony baloney jobs, y'know? Just like, the United States of America is gonna find out why we don't have free healthcare. Y'know? Alright, I see this as the equivalent of throwing spitballs within the UN.

Like, they're just poking you to annoy you, like this is a thing that they did. Like kids helium balloon with a, like, camera dangling. And America's hilarious overreaction of firing an actual missile at a balloon, that balloon was less expensive than the munition used to down it. Like, between the cost of the F-22s fuel, the pilots training the missile, we came out, to use an Yvonne Line term, isc negative on this encounter. ALICE I mean, they kinda threw everything out. I remember seeing photos of a balloon taken

from the cockpit of a U2, and I'm like, man, get another balloon. Like... LILITH Famously balloons are hard to steer. SEAN I just noticed, from the earlier picture, that the building eight doors down has a really nice balcony I've never seen before, cause you can't see it in street light. ALICE Oh shit, that is a really nice balcony, actually. Wow.

Huh. Oh, that's nice, with a nice, like, gable-ing on it? Wow. JUSTIN Oh yeah, it's got a nice gable, you know, we've got a lot of nice houses in this neighborhood. ALICE Mmm. Um. Hmm.

Anyway. ALICE This is the funniest reaction anyone's ever had to being doxed. Next slide please. So, this is- JUSTIN There were two ways it could go, and one of them involved me screaming and shutting down the back end, so. ALICE So, this isn't exactly related, I just wanted to talk about it.

This is the X37B. What the hell is Joe Biden building in there? Like, what the hell are they doing? I know of this- Lazarus Fetters is a solid block of Kerrygold. Putting one into an eccentric orbit. No, I know this is a question that cannot be answered, at least by anyone who doesn't

want to go to federal prison, right? But what the hell are they doing with this fucking thing? Thankfully this is an area I've actually got no direct personal knowledge, so I can speculate wildly with the best of them. It's just up there doing stuff! Personal theory, there are crystalline structures that are difficult to grow under gravity. I also might have read Artemis too recently. ALICE I just, I sometimes wish, right, that I had never gotten mental health, I'd never

started posting, I was fully on the straight and narrow, so that I could be the highly cleared cog in the highly compartmentalized machine, just to satisfy my own personal curiosity about what the hell Joe Biden is putting in space. And now, for work, I get to talk to people who have been highly cleared cogs in the machine, and they won't tell me either! If I told you I wouldn't get to listen to more episodes of the podcast. I can be trusted with classified information, I swear.

You cannot be. And they're like, growing turbine blades in there, and like, y'know, in twenty years, there's just gonna be common knowledge, and they're gonna be on like, the latest, uh, y'know, zombie version, the 737. Honestly, given the orbit, I suspect that it's more of a, it has something with a lens on it, that goes, that they open the bay doors, and that's what's more of a, it has something with a lens on it that goes open, they open the bay doors and that's what we're going to be, that's what they're doing with it.

I see. It's a very highly elliptical Earth orbit. It's I believe sun synchronous, correct me if I'm wrong, actually do and engage with the comments below, like and subscribe. The angle of it suggests to me that this is an observation mission, because there's nothing you would need to do in space for nearly a straight year, completely unmanned, other than observe things. I have...

Mmm. Mmm. It's like Joe Biden has built the Earth with a selfie stick. Yeah, another fucking camera. I mean... Like a really really big one. So I'm gonna be aliens. Space is big and empty and tries to kill humans, I don't know why we're in space. I mean, a really, really big one. So if it'll be aliens and empty and tries to kill humans,

I don't know why we're in space. I like sending cameras into space. I'd love to go to a different planet, but I don't want to spend any time in the in-between. Like, I want to go to France and I want to do it on a boat. That'd be fun, but I don't spend a lot of time on the water. That just seems like a bad idea. Yeah, that's reasonable. I've been to France on a boat.

Yeah, me too. I was with you, actually. Yeah, yeah, we both with the France on it. You got to you got to France on a boat. Yeah, me too. I was with you, actually. Yeah, yeah, we both were with France on a- you gotta take the short way. Next slide, please. Alright, so, ways that you can, like, counter all of these things. Well, the obvious thing, my plane is being seen by people. Don't get seen. Don't get seen.

Yeah. So, back to camouflage again. Yeah, camouflage in the sense of hiding the thing from sight rather than cryptosis. This is the first stealth aircraft in the sense of they painted it slightly differently. I get to talk about Nevo again. RILEY It's a beautiful- it's like a dark British racing green. Y'all have good greens over there. ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If you missed the camouflage episode, this is Night Invisible Varnish Orphaness, named for the place where they developed it. They have really good names for stuff as well, back in the day. Talks about it on camouflage, the deal is that this makes it, like, blend into night better. It doesn't really work, is the thing. As far as these things go, this does kind of prefigure the fact that every military

aircraft now is painted in a kind of, or is just a kind of shitty grey colour and has a low visibility roundel, which also sucks. So yeah, still state of the art in that sense, I suppose. For our viewers, the hex code for this colour is 404735. Nice, I'm just... In case you wanted to type that up and look at it. And this is, to be clear, is like a biplane. Like an inter-war biplane.