The Space Above Us

Hey all!

I don’t know if anyone actually reads any of these, but even if no one does they’re helpful for me to sort of pour out some of the thoughts that have been rattling around in my brain.

Obviously, there’s the usual story, which is that the episode is taking a super long time to make. Honestly at this point I’m kind of flummoxed how I ever used to make episodes in only two weeks. I think part of it is I simply gathered and ingested a lot less information, which has its pros and cons. It was nice to keep the narrative moving along, but there are definitely instances where I missed something that would have been nice to include, or occasionally even somewhat important details. As we move into the modern era I am simply drowning in information, and I should probably be a little more judicious in what I deem necessary. Just as an example, here’s what I’ve been reading through for the Expedition 1 episode:

William Shepherd pre-flight interview
Yuri Gidzenko pre-flight interview
Sergei Krikalev pre-flight interview
Yuri Gidzenko biography
Expedition 1 press kit
Relevant portions of Harland’s “Creating the International Space Station”
Spaceflight magazine (Vol 43, No. 2)
Updates posted by mission controllers to the NASA website
Onboard crew log

Honestly, writing this out, it doesn’t seem like all that much, but that short list is hiding some density, especially the last one. The onboard crew log is 89 full sized pages of text, and that’s what’s been taking up at least half of my time. But oh man, there are so many great tidbits to be had in here. I don’t want to give it all away in an update page, but this is one of the more fascinating spaceflight documents I’ve ever read.. even if it is also sort of one of the most dull. It’s an unvarnished glimpse into day to day life on the nascent International Space Station in all of its occasionally banal detail. Reading it, I also get just the tiniest sense of what it must have been like living on board with this crew, getting glimpses of their senses of humor.

As folks in the TSAU Discord know, however, there is another reason for the delay. I hadn’t mentioned anything out of some sort of sense of “just in case”, waiting for things to settle, but I think it’s settled enough. I’m proud to say that I’m just over a month into a Master’s in Aerospace Engineering program at Purdue. The course is online, but it’s the exact same content the in-person students are getting since it’s literally just a camera in the back of the classroom.

This has been a goal of mine for a while. Obviously, I’ve been working in spaceflight for kind of a while now, but it’s hard to avoid an occasional sense of imposter syndrome since I don’t actually have any aero background. I learned a lot through self study and through the infinite patience of friends, colleagues, and mentors, but I’ve really wanted to go learn the fundamentals for myself. If for no other reason than to see if I can do it.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in school, so I wasn’t at all certain that I could do it. Especially since this particular course has a bit of a reputation for being sort of a meat grinder. So far so good, but there’s no denying it has been a major drain on my time and, realistically, I have to prioritize it over the podcast. Last week I logged a kind of insane 29 hours and 44 minutes on lectures and homework which.. yeah. Tough to do that while also working a full time job and delivering a high quality podcast.

I think that this likely won’t last forever though. My brain is reacclimatizing to this sort of workload, which makes it that much easier to sit down and work on the podcast for a few uninterrupted hours when time allows. Also, I have to hope (please?) that not every class will be this demanding.

So yeah. Sorry as always for the delay, but know that I’m still chugging along over here. This episode just had the misfortune of being really info-dense and coming out just as I was getting into back-to-school mode.

Alright, if you made it this far, you deserve something fun, so below you’ll find a particularly nice plot I made for my homework last week.