Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are you? You know, if you spend enough time with a young kid, like you know, four or five, then you're likely to get pulled into a conversation at which the kid starts asking about how the world works and then just keeps ongoing and every answer you provide leads to more questions. This can actually be funny, It can end up being confusing, It could be frustrating. Sometimes it can get intimidating once you start to reach the limits of your own knowledge and understanding. You've got this inquisitive child trying to make sense of the world around that they're looking to you as the authority on all things everywhere, and you are perilously close to admitting that you don't actually know how it all works. And we're all just really doing the best we can, and we're making up a lot of this stuff as we go along the way. Maybe I'm projecting here, but my point is that kids have this deep desire to know how stuff works and why things are the way they are, and this same spirit underlies the core of science. You know, we use this process and we use documentation, and we use hypotheses and tests to get a better handle on what's going on and why. But at the heart of it all are these questions. And sometimes the answers we find open up a whole new array of questions, and that gets exciting and sometimes a little exhausting and sometimes scary. Now that is a why old preamble to this very very goofy episode, because we're going to talk about some of the strangest stuff we've sent. Keep in mind, sending stuff into space is wicked expensive. Every pound of payload you add requires a certain amount of fuel, and that fuel is costly, Like it is a non trivial thing to add to a payload that's going to be sent into outer space. Privatized space industry has changed this a little bit, but it's still wicked expensive, which makes it even more interesting when you have some very weird stuff having been sent up there. Now, some of this stuff could sound arbitrary, or it's you know, a goof or it was some form of promotion or maybe a symbolic gesture, and those are often fair assessments. There will be cases, as we talk about in this episode, where undeniably it was not for some noble cause. However, we also have had some weird stuff we've sent up that you know, once you get it out into space, you realize it behaves differently. And that was the point that we sent the stuff up in order to see how it's affected, to understand why it's different, how this could be useful in the future. Now, as I said, not everything we're going to cover today is useful. A lot of it's not. But as Little Red Riding Hood once said, I know things now, many valuable things that I hadn't known before. And some of these things include the links to which companies or rich people will go in order to promote stuff or get a big pr splash sometimes to the moon is being literal, y'all. So in no particular order, I'm not going chronologically or in order of craziness. I guess here are some of the weird things that have made the journey up to space for one reason or another. Some of these things returned to Earth, some of them were left up there. And we're going to start off with one of the strangest critters on the planet the tartar grade. Now tartar grades are tiny. They measure less than a millimeter in length. Typically you're going to be using a microscope to really observe these little critters. Now magnified. They kind of look like puffy, eight legged creatures that you would expect to see on an episode of Doctor Who. They have a mouth that looks kind of like a vacuum cleaner attachment. They're sort of cute. I think it just depends upon what you think of as cute. I think they look kind of cute, but other people might think they look horrifying. And they are resilient creatures, that is putting it lightly. They can survive an in readibly harsh conditions from extreme temperatures, either extreme cold, like colder than any normal organism could survive, or extreme heat. They can survive beyond the temperature of boiling. They can also survive insane amounts of pressure. They also can survive exposure to nuclear radiation. They can survive for long periods without any water, and they do this by entering what's called a ton state. It's kind of like suspended animation. They curl up, they tuck their legs in their head and curl up into a ball, and essentially biological processes halt. In fact, their cells end up creating these matrices that keep all of their DNA intact, because otherwise, if they dried out enough, things like that would deteriorate. But effectively they put scaffolding in place. I mean they don't put it. It happens by natural process, but this sort of scaffolding forms inside their cells that holds everything in place. While this creature goes into suspended animation and it can stay like that for ages. Then when it encounters water again, the water dissolved, these matrix seas from inside the cells and the cells return to their normal state. They come out of the ton state. They go back to being a happy little water bear. Oh that's by the way. Another name for tartar grades is water bears. Now, these critters can be found on every continent here on Earth, including Antarctica. Also, they can be found in oceans, they can be found in fresh water. They could probably be found in your yard. And there are thousands of species of Tartar grades and they're super cool. But then there was a question if these suckers are that resilient, and they have shown an incredible ability to survive even the harshest of conditions. Would they survive if they were exposed to the vacuum of space, Well, that was a question that scientists wanted answers too, and so in two thousand and seven, the European Space Agency sent up a packet of Tarta grades as one of many experiments conducted during a mission. And the Tartar grades were exposed to the vacuum of space, even to cosmic radiation. This is stuff that could really mess up a human. I mean, the vacuum of space. If you're exposed to at for any length of time, you're going to be messed up, to be certain, and probably dead. Cosmic radiation could cause really big problems down the road, which is one of the main concerns we have about designing long term space missions in a way that's safe for the people who are aboard them. But sure enough, upon retrieval, these Tartar grades were found to survive the process with no real ill effects. Some folks even speculated that maybe tartar grades actually are not terrestrial creatures, that they had arrived on Earth by hitching rides on material that ultimately crashed into the planet. There are a lot of theories that perhaps the seeds of life on Earth actually came from outer space. However, scientists have ruled that out for tarte grades. They found that tartar grades did in fact originate here on Earth. So while you might hypothesize that they could have survived a trip through space until landing on a plant that has water, that's not what actually happened. That being said, tartar grades might play a part in experimenting with organisms to see if they could survive on other planets in the future. You know, a planet that might be harsh for most organisms might actually be a suitable place for tartar grades. That's really far off in the future, if it ever happens at all, but it is a possibility now. When it comes to unlikely astronauts, dinosaurs, I would say would be way up there. I mean, for one thing, they've been extinct for millions of years, so it's really hard to get one to commit to the strict training regiment of becoming an astronaut. Now, this has not stopped dinosaurs from getting into space. They've actually done it a couple of times, not on their own as it turns out, had a lot of help from US. So the first time was in nineteen eighty five, a physicist named Lauren Acton had applied for and secured the role of payload specialist for a Space Shuttle mission designated STS fifty one. F Acton's area of interest was in solar activity. He was keenly interested in studying the Sun, particularly to learn if there were ways to predict events like coronal mass ejections that could potentially impact communication systems back here on Earth. He was also from Montana, a state that happens to be rich dinosaur fossils, and that might be why he brought some fossilized bone and eggshell fragments from a Miasaura peeblesaurum. And I have no idea if I'm saying that correctly, but it's a dinosaur that fed their nesting young. So they would build a nest, they would lay eggs, the eggs would hatch, and the dinosaurs would continue to care for their young. This kind of flew in the face of preconceived ideas about dinosaurs, and a lot of folks had just assumed they would lay their eggs, wait until they hatched, and then you know you're out of the home. Kids, go have some good luck and get out of the house. That's not how these dinosaurs operated. It's also, by the way, the official state fossil for Montana, so it kind of was a representation of home and of science. So it was a very symbolic sort of thing. I would love to say that the astronauts did some crazy experiments with those dinosaur fossils, but again it was more symbolic than scientific, but really cool a neat gesture. It's also not the only time that dinosaur fossils have made the journey into orbit. In nineteen ninety eight, the Endeavor space shuttle carried a seal a physicist skull to the Mere Space Station. Again, I could be completely mispronouncing this. At the Carnegie Museum loaned the skull to the to NASA and the astronauts promise they would take very, very good care of it, and sure enough, they returned the skull safe and sound at the conclusion of the mission. As for why they wanted to take the skull up there, I mean, I'm guessing it was to promote science. In twenty fourteen, NASA included a fossil belonging to a t Rex on a test flight for the Orion spacecraft. Now as a test flight, there were no human crew aboard this spacecraft, but it was the first time that the Orion spacecraft would enter orbit. The mission lasted four hours. The spacecraft made two orbits of the Earth before re entering the atmosphere. The fossil was on loan from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and the Orion capsule is now on display at the Kennedy Space Center of Visitor Complex. By the way, I highly recommend visiting the Kennedy Space Center. My partner and I went there on a whim one year. We ended up becoming annual pass holders, even though we knew there was very little chance we would be able to get back within that year. We just were so thrilled with it. It was so inspirational. If you are at all interested in rocketry or space, you have got to go. I got very emotional just looking at the various spacecraft and launch vehicles, because sometimes you have to remind yourself that humans are capable of really incredible things when we dedicate ourselves to it. That's also not the end of dinosaurs in space. More recently, Blue Origin, which is Jeff Bezos's private space company, sent fossilized dinosaur bones to space as part of the Huntsville Science Festival and an initiative called Dream Big Alabama. These fossils were on a suborbital flight, so they didn't get to circle the planet like the previous cases. They were from a family of raptors, and this was all part of an effort to promote science and get people excited about stems subjects, and you know, inspiration is a really important goal. Okay, we got more crazy stuff that we've sent into space to talk about. Before we get to that, let's take a quick break. We're back and we are going to transition away from dinosaurs to bacteria. So let's talk about salmonella. This family of bacteria are perhaps best known as pathogens. You know, you've probably heard about needing to be careful around food, make sure making sure that you don't end up contracting salmonella. Salmonella can invade your cells and make you really, really sick. Typically, humans can become infected with salmonella through food poisoning. It gets more specific than that, but it also gets really icky. Let's just say that if the facility that is processing your food or preparing your food isn't following good cleanliness procedures. You have yourself some potential salmonella outbreaks on your hands, and these can be really serious. They can even be life threatening in severe cases. So salmonella is no joke, right, So why did we send it into space? Well, scientists want to see what affects salmonella might experience in a microgravity environment, because if we are serious about human space exploration, particularly long term human space exploration, including colonization, it would be really beneficial to understand what might happen with infectious diseases, including stuff like salmonella. It's a pretty long way to the nearest minute clinic once you're out in space, after all, So getting an understanding of this is critical to ensuring success for future missions. So in twenty twenty one, scientists did a pair of experiments. One of them took place here on Earth, the other took place aboard the International Space Station. Now the Earth one was essentially the control and in both experiments, scientists took some human cells and they infected these cells with pathogens salmonella. Scientists already knew that organic cells undergo changes when in microgravity. We had already made this observation. We know, you know, when people go up into space and they spend a lot of time there, they biologically change. Those changes can be on the macro level and noticeable things like you know, muscle loss because you're no longer supporting your weight because you're in a microgravity environment, but they could be all the way down to a cellular level. So what would happen with human cells infected with salmonella in microgravity? Well, the conclusions aren't quite as definitive as we would like. This is because the experiment itself had a couple of problems along the way. So not all the samples that were sent to space came back in good enough condition to do a full analysis on them. So that's part of the problem is that we don't have the full collection of cells to look at. There's another issue because the International Space Station version of the experiment had a slightly different but potentially significant different amount of pathogen introduced to the control sample so or to the human cells, as opposed to the Earth one. So in other words, if you haven't used exactly the same amount of pathogen in the cells that an alone could affect the outcome of the experiment, So there's you know, you can't have firm conclusion because you didn't have truly equal experiments on Earth and in the space station. However, with those qualifiers in mind, the scientists found that salmonella appeared to be more virulent in a microgravity environment. That's pretty concerning, right, for bacteria to become more virulent. But in addition, the human cells appeared to upregulate, So in other words, the cells were ramping up their response to infection, primarily by upregulating genes related to inflammation, which is a response to infection. The findings have helped expand our understanding of how the humans would respond to infectious diseases in space. That this could be very, very different. Therefore, we need to learn more about it to be prepared for those eventualities that would be awfully handy once we start sending people on longer missions to distant places in the future. Another question that I think everyone has rattling around in the back of their mind, perhaps not even consciously, but I know that it has to be gnawing at everyone is how does the environment of space affect lego minifigs. Okay, again, probably I'm projecting here, but we have sent lego minifigs to space, specifically three minifigs, two representing the mythological figures of Jupiter and Juno, Roman deities who, if you prefer the Greek versions, are similar to Zeus and Hera. The other minifig represents the not at all mythological figure and actual real world historical figure of Galileo Galilei. So why were these lego figures sent into space? Well, these were actually loaded onto the spacecraft Juno. Juno was sent from Earth to travel to the orbit of Jupiter. So thematically there is a connection because you have the figure of Jupiter and his wife Juno. These are obviously associated with the planet Jupiter, and then Galileo historically made some really important observations about the planet Jupiter. So these minifigs are really symbolic and kind of a fun touch to include with this spacecraft. The spacecraft has been in orbit around Jubiter since July fourth, twenty sixteen. That's not when it launched, that's when it arrived at Jupiter. It actually took oh, I don't know, almost five years to get from Earth to Jupiter. It actually launched on August fifth, twenty eleven. So that is a very long space journey, right, I mean, you think most most human endeavors in space can be measured in weeks or months, A couple in a year or more, but only a few examples of that. But this was five years of traveling through space to get to the destination. The Juno spacecraft continues to make observations around Jupiter to this day. It's in a polar orbit around the planet. It has continued its mission beyond the planned seven years scope. So it's another great example of a NASA mission that manages to continue to provide US scientific data beyond the planned mission. Currently, the long term plan here is to keep Juno in orbit around Jupiter until late twenty twenty five, and at that point the spacecraft will be de orbited on purpose to enter Jupiter's atmosphere. The minifigs will truly enter the realm of myth at that point. I do not expect them to survive that travel. Godspeed you tiny plastic heroes. In fact, a lot of different toys have been sent up to space. Santa probably goes there every Christmas, right, I mean, that's probably how he's able to get to all the different people Christmas. He it's orbit. But other space missions have also brought toys along for the ride. One such toy was a Buzz Lightyear action figure, you know Buzz Lightyear from the Toy Story series. In two thousand and eight, the action figure hitched a ride aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery as part of an initiative to get kids excited about space in particular, but science in general, and Disney and NASA actually partnered together to create some interactive experiences like games and work assignment type of stuff that involved Buzz Lightyear in an effort to trick kids into learning stuff. Buzz's journey brought him to the International Space Station. He stayed on the ISS for fifteen months before returning to Earth, and again he hitched a ride on Space Shuttle Discovery. It's just obviously a very different mission because it was a year and a half, well not quite a year and a half later, but a year and some change later. The toy even got his own parade Walt Disney World. Upon being once more shackled with the surly bonds of Earth. I love that I wish I had been at Disney world when that had happened, Just to watch a parade with an action figure of buzz Lightyear, I'm guessing on some sort of vehicle being celebrated as a returning hero. I wonder if the person who was wearing the buzz Lightyear costume that day felt like they were being overshadowed by a figure a fraction of their height. I guess I should also mention that the child aka Grogu aka his real name Baby Yoda, has also made the trip to space for reels. In twenty twenty, a SpaceX Dragon capsule completed the first operational flight of a Dragon capsule carrying a crew to the International Space Station and a cute plush toy, a Baby Yoda, was tagging along for the ride. It was both a morale booster and a quote unquote microgravity indicator, at least according to the reports I read. I guess that means that when you see Baby Yoda's floating around the capsule, you're in microgravity, and when he plummets to whatever surface is down, then you're out of microgravity again. At least I guess it's what a microgravity indicator is. Okay, I've got a few more weird things that we've sent up into space that we should talk about before we jump onto these final little entries in our Goofy episode today, let's take another quick break. Okay, so you probably know that astronaut food is famous for not being terribly appetizing. I want to say that, for the longest time, the astronaut meal that was considered the best was the spicy shrimp cocktail because it had enough flavor to kind of punch through the perpetual head cold that astronauts develop when they're out in space. Because you know, all of your tissues kind of swell a bit when you're out in space, and this in an intern affects your sense of smell and your sense of taste, and so a lot of food just ends up not tasting like much of anything. So you have to have stuff that has really strong flavors to kind of punch through it. All. Well, a lot of astronauts are not super crazy about the foods necessarily, and you know, you also have to be really careful with it because obviously anything that would escape a container could potentially create problems for the electronics aboard spacecraft and space stations and the like. Well, astronaut John Young got a real talking to you about his own choice of contrabrand food that he smuggled aboard the Gemini three spacecraft way back in nineteen because he got settled into the Gemini three with his commander, Virgil Gus Grissom, while having a secret corned beef sandwich hidden away in one of the pockets of his space suit, and a couple of hours into their mission, he pulled it out and offered some to his commander, and together they took a couple of bites of the sandwich while ignoring the food that NASA had actually included for their space flight. However, very early on they realized that, oh, this does mean that we're creating crumbs, and these crumbs are just free floating around the capsule and in a worst case scenario, they could potentially interfere with the electronic systems we have and then it's crisis by corned beef sandwich. So they tucked the sandwiches away and they continue the rest of their mission. However, ASSA was now aware of the contraband sandwich, so when they did return to Earth safely, they later were required to attend a very serious debriefing with a whole bunch of people who were very very cross with them for introducing corned beef to the capsule of the Gemini three spacecraft. They said that at the time it was very intense, but in retrospect, with enough time having passed since it happened, it's just sort of absurdly funny and I could appreciate that now. Other food that has been outside the norm that has made the trip up to space include a pizza sent to the International Space Station back in two thousand and one. Now, this really was just a big old publicity stunt from Pizza Hunt delivering a pizza to the space station. Reportedly, Pizza Huh paid a million dollars to the Russian Space program in order to have one of their pizzas specially wrapped sent up to Yuri Usachov on the International Space Station. They had to go with Russia because NASA has a strict rule about not engaging with commercial brands. NASA does not allow endorsements. They don't want to do product placement, Like the toy stuff is a little borderline if you're being honest, but like they definitely don't want branded foods up there. NASA wants to maintain objectivity and not be crass in the eyes of the scientific community, not to lower itself to becoming a brand placement for various companies out there. But the Russians were happy to take on the gig once the price was right. Now, of course, we do have to mention that one of the strange things that we sent up to space was a Tesla Roadster, specifically Elon Musk's personal Tesla Roadster. Musk used his car as a payload for a test flight of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy launch vehicle. Now it was like, you know, we're gonna put this in place of what a normal payload would be to show you the capability of this heavy launch vehicle. And the car had a mannequin in a spacesuit strapped down behind the wheel named Starman and the Roadster and Starman and the Falcon Heavy took off in February twenty eighteen, and the car was launched into a heliocentric orbit means an orbit around the Sun. It's larger than the Earth's orbit and a little smaller than Mars' orbit. And also the orbital path crosses Mars's orbital path. A couple of times, although you know, obviously not having the Roadster and Mars at the same place at the same time, just that their paths cross. The mannequin has two songs playing on repeat, one in each year. One is Space Oddity and the other there is life on Mars and David Bowie is far out man. I guess, of course, in space, no one can hear David Bowie. You know, you don't have any molecules to bounce around to carry the vibrations. If it's within an oxygenated helmet, then yes, you've got a medium through which the music can move. If there's anything inside the helmet that allows for that, you could do that. But obviously if you just had it on the car speakers, you wouldn't hear anything. Anyway. We don't even know if that music is still playing. It only plays if the battery is still got some juice left in it. As I record this, the roadster is nearly two hundred million miles away from Earth, but it is getting closer to us at the moment. It's currently moving away from Mars at this point in its orbit, though depending on when you're listening to this episode, those conditions could be very different. There are websites that track the roadster's location, so you can actually check up on it and see where it is. Reportedly, the car has a copy of Douglas Adams's science fiction comedy novel The Hitchicker's Guide to the Galaxy inside the glove box, and there's also a towel there, which is important. You always need to know where your towel is. That's one of the jokes from Hitchecker's Guide to the Galaxy. There's a sign with don't panic written on it on the dashboard, another Hitchicker's Guide reference. Really cute, honestly, and again kind of a publicity stunt, but also just kind of neat, Like I can't be mad about it. For one thing. I mean, it's the car from a billionaire, a guy who, at certain points in history has been the richest man in the world. If he wants to shoot his cars off into space whatever, I guess that's fine. It's not like I expect him to use that money to really directly benefit humans in meaningful ways. So if he wants to shoot his fleet of cards into space, go on. Now we get into the grim part of the episode, So let's talk about human remains in space. One of the fringe theories that has made the round since the early days of the space race is that there could be corpses in orbit around Earth, specifically lost cosmonauts Soviet era astronauts who died in midmission. Now, it is true that the Soviet Union spent a lot of time and effort concealing various accidents and disasters during their space program, and some of those disasters included the death of cosmonauts, but there's no evidence that any of them were stuck in orbit. There was one case where there was a depressurization catastrophe aboard a Soyo's capsule as it decoupled from an orbiting platform, but that Saya's capsule did return to Earth the terrible, terrible tragedy that happened. And there was another case where a parachute failed to deploy and the cosmonaut aboard that capsule passed away as well. But there's only ever been one recorded accident that occurred above the Carmen line. This is a boundary that's recognized by some but not all, scientific organizations, as the boundary between space and the Earth's atmosphere. Only one accident has ever happened above that. All the other space related accidents have happened below that line. However, this doesn't mean that there have not been human remains sent to space. We have put some there on purpose as a sort of space burial. The first recorded example of a space burial kind of really or remains being brought to space, would have happened in nineteen ninety two. This was part of Space Shuttle mission STS fifty two, and it was aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia. The crew brought along with them a small sample of the remains of Gene Roddenberry. Ron Berry is the guy who created star Trek, and a lot of people who have pursued careers in the space industry credit star Trek as being one of the reasons they got interested in the subject of space in the first place. Interestingly, ron Berry would be buried in space a second time, as another sample of his remains was aboard a privately funded space burial in nineteen ninety seven. Now the ninety two example, the remains went up into space and returned to Earth at the conclusion of the Space Little mission. The ninety seven example, the remains were sent up to space to board a rocket and eventually returned to Earth when the spacecraft carrying them ultimately re entered the air's atmosphere in two thousand and two. There are a few companies that offer space burials that will transport remains into space. Some of them will go for suborbital flights, so it doesn't go all the way up into orbit and it does come back down. But depending upon your view of where space begins, you can say the remains went to space, and very few people have been to space in the grand scheme of things, so you can kind of see where the appeal is there. But others offer services that would put remains on the Moon or into deep space. Some of the people who have had their remains sent to space include people like Timothy Leary, James Dewan who played Scottie from Star Trek, Clyde Tombaugh, who's an astronomer who discovered Pluto way back in nineteen thirty. His remains, or sample a small sample of his remains are aboard the New Horizon spacecraft that ultimately will leave our Solar system, so he would become the first person to have part of their remains go outside of our Solar system and there are others as well. This is just a tiny group of them. And of course this is not a definitive list of all the weird stuff we've sent into space. There is so much. You know, We've sent a lightsaber prop that Mark Hambell used when he was playing Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars films. The Voyager has a golden record that, among other things, as a recording of Johnny be Good on it, which is pretty awesome. A piece of the Right Brothers original airplane has gone up into space. Amelia Earhart's wristwatch has gone into space. There's so much more, including pictures from Playboy magazine which were sent to the Moon. I didn't learn about that when I was taught about the lunar landing. But apparently this was kind of a kind of a prank pulled on the astronauts, like they weren't aware that it was in specific mission books that they were using once they were on the surface of the Moon. So can you just imagine you're on the Moon. You can see the planet Earth in the sky above you. You are further away than anyone else has ever been really, apart from the astronauts who had actually circled behind the Moon and come back, and you're trying to complete an historic mission on the lunar surface, and you turn your mission book page and there's the centerfold from like nineteen sixty eight or something. I would have imagined that I had gone crazy. If that had happened to me, I would have sat there and thought, this is what losing your mind feels like. But no, it's a prank, ah, those wacky NASA folks. All right, Well, that's just again a small sample of some of the weird stuff we've sent into space, and obviously there's a lot more. Maybe I'll do a follow up at some point and talk about some other examples. But I hope you enjoyed this. I hope you are well. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover and tech stuff, reach out to me. You can let me know on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff HSW or you can download the iHeartRadio app navigate over to the tech Stuff Heart. By putting that into the little search field, you'll see a little microphone icon. If you use that, you can record a voice message up to thirty seconds in link. Let me know what you would like to hear in a future episode, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are you? You know, if you spend enough time with a young kid, like you know, four or five, then you're likely to get pulled into a conversation at which the kid starts asking about how the world works and then just keeps ongoing and every answer you provide leads to more questions. This can actually be funny, It can end up being confusing, It could be frustrating. Sometimes it can get intimidating once you start to reach the limits of your own knowledge and understanding. You've got this inquisitive child trying to make sense of the world around that they're looking to you as the authority on all things everywhere, and you are perilously close to admitting that you don't actually know how it all works. And we're all just really doing the best we can, and we're making up a lot of this stuff as we go along the way. Maybe I'm projecting here, but my point is that kids have this deep desire to know how stuff works and why things are the way they are, and this same spirit underlies the core of science. You know, we use this process and we use documentation, and we use hypotheses and tests to get a better handle on what's going on and why. But at the heart of it all are these questions. And sometimes the answers we find open up a whole new array of questions, and that gets exciting and sometimes a little exhausting and sometimes scary. Now that is a why old preamble to this very very goofy episode, because we're going to talk about some of the strangest stuff we've sent. Keep in mind, sending stuff into space is wicked expensive. Every pound of payload you add requires a certain amount of fuel, and that fuel is costly, Like it is a non trivial thing to add to a payload that's going to be sent into outer space. Privatized space industry has changed this a little bit, but it's still wicked expensive, which makes it even more interesting when you have some very weird stuff having been sent up there. Now, some of this stuff could sound arbitrary, or it's you know, a goof or it was some form of promotion or maybe a symbolic gesture, and those are often fair assessments. There will be cases, as we talk about in this episode, where undeniably it was not for some noble cause. However, we also have had some weird stuff we've sent up that you know, once you get it out into space, you realize it behaves differently. And that was the point that we sent the stuff up in order to see how it's affected, to understand why it's different, how this could be useful in the future. Now, as I said, not everything we're going to cover today is useful. A lot of it's not. But as Little Red Riding Hood once said, I know things now, many valuable things that I hadn't known before. And some of these things include the links to which companies or rich people will go in order to promote stuff or get a big pr splash sometimes to the moon is being literal, y'all. So in no particular order, I'm not going chronologically or in order of craziness. I guess here are some of the weird things that have made the journey up to space for one reason or another. Some of these things returned to Earth, some of them were left up there. And we're going to start off with one of the strangest critters on the planet the tartar grade. Now tartar grades are tiny. They measure less than a millimeter in length. Typically you're going to be using a microscope to really observe these little critters. Now magnified. They kind of look like puffy, eight legged creatures that you would expect to see on an episode of Doctor Who. They have a mouth that looks kind of like a vacuum cleaner attachment. They're sort of cute. I think it just depends upon what you think of as cute. I think they look kind of cute, but other people might think they look horrifying. And they are resilient creatures, that is putting it lightly. They can survive an in readibly harsh conditions from extreme temperatures, either extreme cold, like colder than any normal organism could survive, or extreme heat. They can survive beyond the temperature of boiling. They can also survive insane amounts of pressure. They also can survive exposure to nuclear radiation. They can survive for long periods without any water, and they do this by entering what's called a ton state. It's kind of like suspended animation. They curl up, they tuck their legs in their head and curl up into a ball, and essentially biological processes halt. In fact, their cells end up creating these matrices that keep all of their DNA intact, because otherwise, if they dried out enough, things like that would deteriorate. But effectively they put scaffolding in place. I mean they don't put it. It happens by natural process, but this sort of scaffolding forms inside their cells that holds everything in place. While this creature goes into suspended animation and it can stay like that for ages. Then when it encounters water again, the water dissolved, these matrix seas from inside the cells and the cells return to their normal state. They come out of the ton state. They go back to being a happy little water bear. Oh that's by the way. Another name for tartar grades is water bears. Now, these critters can be found on every continent here on Earth, including Antarctica. Also, they can be found in oceans, they can be found in fresh water. They could probably be found in your yard. And there are thousands of species of Tartar grades and they're super cool. But then there was a question if these suckers are that resilient, and they have shown an incredible ability to survive even the harshest of conditions. Would they survive if they were exposed to the vacuum of space, Well, that was a question that scientists wanted answers too, and so in two thousand and seven, the European Space Agency sent up a packet of Tarta grades as one of many experiments conducted during a mission. And the Tartar grades were exposed to the vacuum of space, even to cosmic radiation. This is stuff that could really mess up a human. I mean, the vacuum of space. If you're exposed to at for any length of time, you're going to be messed up, to be certain, and probably dead. Cosmic radiation could cause really big problems down the road, which is one of the main concerns we have about designing long term space missions in a way that's safe for the people who are aboard them. But sure enough, upon retrieval, these Tartar grades were found to survive the process with no real ill effects. Some folks even speculated that maybe tartar grades actually are not terrestrial creatures, that they had arrived on Earth by hitching rides on material that ultimately crashed into the planet. There are a lot of theories that perhaps the seeds of life on Earth actually came from outer space. However, scientists have ruled that out for tarte grades. They found that tartar grades did in fact originate here on Earth. So while you might hypothesize that they could have survived a trip through space until landing on a plant that has water, that's not what actually happened. That being said, tartar grades might play a part in experimenting with organisms to see if they could survive on other planets in the future. You know, a planet that might be harsh for most organisms might actually be a suitable place for tartar grades. That's really far off in the future, if it ever happens at all, but it is a possibility now. When it comes to unlikely astronauts, dinosaurs, I would say would be way up there. I mean, for one thing, they've been extinct for millions of years, so it's really hard to get one to commit to the strict training regiment of becoming an astronaut. Now, this has not stopped dinosaurs from getting into space. They've actually done it a couple of times, not on their own as it turns out, had a lot of help from US. So the first time was in nineteen eighty five, a physicist named Lauren Acton had applied for and secured the role of payload specialist for a Space Shuttle mission designated STS fifty one. F Acton's area of interest was in solar activity. He was keenly interested in studying the Sun, particularly to learn if there were ways to predict events like coronal mass ejections that could potentially impact communication systems back here on Earth. He was also from Montana, a state that happens to be rich dinosaur fossils, and that might be why he brought some fossilized bone and eggshell fragments from a Miasaura peeblesaurum. And I have no idea if I'm saying that correctly, but it's a dinosaur that fed their nesting young. So they would build a nest, they would lay eggs, the eggs would hatch, and the dinosaurs would continue to care for their young. This kind of flew in the face of preconceived ideas about dinosaurs, and a lot of folks had just assumed they would lay their eggs, wait until they hatched, and then you know you're out of the home. Kids, go have some good luck and get out of the house. That's not how these dinosaurs operated. It's also, by the way, the official state fossil for Montana, so it kind of was a representation of home and of science. So it was a very symbolic sort of thing. I would love to say that the astronauts did some crazy experiments with those dinosaur fossils, but again it was more symbolic than scientific, but really cool a neat gesture. It's also not the only time that dinosaur fossils have made the journey into orbit. In nineteen ninety eight, the Endeavor space shuttle carried a seal a physicist skull to the Mere Space Station. Again, I could be completely mispronouncing this. At the Carnegie Museum loaned the skull to the to NASA and the astronauts promise they would take very, very good care of it, and sure enough, they returned the skull safe and sound at the conclusion of the mission. As for why they wanted to take the skull up there, I mean, I'm guessing it was to promote science. In twenty fourteen, NASA included a fossil belonging to a t Rex on a test flight for the Orion spacecraft. Now as a test flight, there were no human crew aboard this spacecraft, but it was the first time that the Orion spacecraft would enter orbit. The mission lasted four hours. The spacecraft made two orbits of the Earth before re entering the atmosphere. The fossil was on loan from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and the Orion capsule is now on display at the Kennedy Space Center of Visitor Complex. By the way, I highly recommend visiting the Kennedy Space Center. My partner and I went there on a whim one year. We ended up becoming annual pass holders, even though we knew there was very little chance we would be able to get back within that year. We just were so thrilled with it. It was so inspirational. If you are at all interested in rocketry or space, you have got to go. I got very emotional just looking at the various spacecraft and launch vehicles, because sometimes you have to remind yourself that humans are capable of really incredible things when we dedicate ourselves to it. That's also not the end of dinosaurs in space. More recently, Blue Origin, which is Jeff Bezos's private space company, sent fossilized dinosaur bones to space as part of the Huntsville Science Festival and an initiative called Dream Big Alabama. These fossils were on a suborbital flight, so they didn't get to circle the planet like the previous cases. They were from a family of raptors, and this was all part of an effort to promote science and get people excited about stems subjects, and you know, inspiration is a really important goal. Okay, we got more crazy stuff that we've sent into space to talk about. Before we get to that, let's take a quick break. We're back and we are going to transition away from dinosaurs to bacteria. So let's talk about salmonella. This family of bacteria are perhaps best known as pathogens. You know, you've probably heard about needing to be careful around food, make sure making sure that you don't end up contracting salmonella. Salmonella can invade your cells and make you really, really sick. Typically, humans can become infected with salmonella through food poisoning. It gets more specific than that, but it also gets really icky. Let's just say that if the facility that is processing your food or preparing your food isn't following good cleanliness procedures. You have yourself some potential salmonella outbreaks on your hands, and these can be really serious. They can even be life threatening in severe cases. So salmonella is no joke, right, So why did we send it into space? Well, scientists want to see what affects salmonella might experience in a microgravity environment, because if we are serious about human space exploration, particularly long term human space exploration, including colonization, it would be really beneficial to understand what might happen with infectious diseases, including stuff like salmonella. It's a pretty long way to the nearest minute clinic once you're out in space, after all, So getting an understanding of this is critical to ensuring success for future missions. So in twenty twenty one, scientists did a pair of experiments. One of them took place here on Earth, the other took place aboard the International Space Station. Now the Earth one was essentially the control and in both experiments, scientists took some human cells and they infected these cells with pathogens salmonella. Scientists already knew that organic cells undergo changes when in microgravity. We had already made this observation. We know, you know, when people go up into space and they spend a lot of time there, they biologically change. Those changes can be on the macro level and noticeable things like you know, muscle loss because you're no longer supporting your weight because you're in a microgravity environment, but they could be all the way down to a cellular level. So what would happen with human cells infected with salmonella in microgravity? Well, the conclusions aren't quite as definitive as we would like. This is because the experiment itself had a couple of problems along the way. So not all the samples that were sent to space came back in good enough condition to do a full analysis on them. So that's part of the problem is that we don't have the full collection of cells to look at. There's another issue because the International Space Station version of the experiment had a slightly different but potentially significant different amount of pathogen introduced to the control sample so or to the human cells, as opposed to the Earth one. So in other words, if you haven't used exactly the same amount of pathogen in the cells that an alone could affect the outcome of the experiment, So there's you know, you can't have firm conclusion because you didn't have truly equal experiments on Earth and in the space station. However, with those qualifiers in mind, the scientists found that salmonella appeared to be more virulent in a microgravity environment. That's pretty concerning, right, for bacteria to become more virulent. But in addition, the human cells appeared to upregulate, So in other words, the cells were ramping up their response to infection, primarily by upregulating genes related to inflammation, which is a response to infection. The findings have helped expand our understanding of how the humans would respond to infectious diseases in space. That this could be very, very different. Therefore, we need to learn more about it to be prepared for those eventualities that would be awfully handy once we start sending people on longer missions to distant places in the future. Another question that I think everyone has rattling around in the back of their mind, perhaps not even consciously, but I know that it has to be gnawing at everyone is how does the environment of space affect lego minifigs. Okay, again, probably I'm projecting here, but we have sent lego minifigs to space, specifically three minifigs, two representing the mythological figures of Jupiter and Juno, Roman deities who, if you prefer the Greek versions, are similar to Zeus and Hera. The other minifig represents the not at all mythological figure and actual real world historical figure of Galileo Galilei. So why were these lego figures sent into space? Well, these were actually loaded onto the spacecraft Juno. Juno was sent from Earth to travel to the orbit of Jupiter. So thematically there is a connection because you have the figure of Jupiter and his wife Juno. These are obviously associated with the planet Jupiter, and then Galileo historically made some really important observations about the planet Jupiter. So these minifigs are really symbolic and kind of a fun touch to include with this spacecraft. The spacecraft has been in orbit around Jubiter since July fourth, twenty sixteen. That's not when it launched, that's when it arrived at Jupiter. It actually took oh, I don't know, almost five years to get from Earth to Jupiter. It actually launched on August fifth, twenty eleven. So that is a very long space journey, right, I mean, you think most most human endeavors in space can be measured in weeks or months, A couple in a year or more, but only a few examples of that. But this was five years of traveling through space to get to the destination. The Juno spacecraft continues to make observations around Jupiter to this day. It's in a polar orbit around the planet. It has continued its mission beyond the planned seven years scope. So it's another great example of a NASA mission that manages to continue to provide US scientific data beyond the planned mission. Currently, the long term plan here is to keep Juno in orbit around Jupiter until late twenty twenty five, and at that point the spacecraft will be de orbited on purpose to enter Jupiter's atmosphere. The minifigs will truly enter the realm of myth at that point. I do not expect them to survive that travel. Godspeed you tiny plastic heroes. In fact, a lot of different toys have been sent up to space. Santa probably goes there every Christmas, right, I mean, that's probably how he's able to get to all the different people Christmas. He it's orbit. But other space missions have also brought toys along for the ride. One such toy was a Buzz Lightyear action figure, you know Buzz Lightyear from the Toy Story series. In two thousand and eight, the action figure hitched a ride aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery as part of an initiative to get kids excited about space in particular, but science in general, and Disney and NASA actually partnered together to create some interactive experiences like games and work assignment type of stuff that involved Buzz Lightyear in an effort to trick kids into learning stuff. Buzz's journey brought him to the International Space Station. He stayed on the ISS for fifteen months before returning to Earth, and again he hitched a ride on Space Shuttle Discovery. It's just obviously a very different mission because it was a year and a half, well not quite a year and a half later, but a year and some change later. The toy even got his own parade Walt Disney World. Upon being once more shackled with the surly bonds of Earth. I love that I wish I had been at Disney world when that had happened, Just to watch a parade with an action figure of buzz Lightyear, I'm guessing on some sort of vehicle being celebrated as a returning hero. I wonder if the person who was wearing the buzz Lightyear costume that day felt like they were being overshadowed by a figure a fraction of their height. I guess I should also mention that the child aka Grogu aka his real name Baby Yoda, has also made the trip to space for reels. In twenty twenty, a SpaceX Dragon capsule completed the first operational flight of a Dragon capsule carrying a crew to the International Space Station and a cute plush toy, a Baby Yoda, was tagging along for the ride. It was both a morale booster and a quote unquote microgravity indicator, at least according to the reports I read. I guess that means that when you see Baby Yoda's floating around the capsule, you're in microgravity, and when he plummets to whatever surface is down, then you're out of microgravity again. At least I guess it's what a microgravity indicator is. Okay, I've got a few more weird things that we've sent up into space that we should talk about before we jump onto these final little entries in our Goofy episode today, let's take another quick break. Okay, so you probably know that astronaut food is famous for not being terribly appetizing. I want to say that, for the longest time, the astronaut meal that was considered the best was the spicy shrimp cocktail because it had enough flavor to kind of punch through the perpetual head cold that astronauts develop when they're out in space. Because you know, all of your tissues kind of swell a bit when you're out in space, and this in an intern affects your sense of smell and your sense of taste, and so a lot of food just ends up not tasting like much of anything. So you have to have stuff that has really strong flavors to kind of punch through it. All. Well, a lot of astronauts are not super crazy about the foods necessarily, and you know, you also have to be really careful with it because obviously anything that would escape a container could potentially create problems for the electronics aboard spacecraft and space stations and the like. Well, astronaut John Young got a real talking to you about his own choice of contrabrand food that he smuggled aboard the Gemini three spacecraft way back in nineteen because he got settled into the Gemini three with his commander, Virgil Gus Grissom, while having a secret corned beef sandwich hidden away in one of the pockets of his space suit, and a couple of hours into their mission, he pulled it out and offered some to his commander, and together they took a couple of bites of the sandwich while ignoring the food that NASA had actually included for their space flight. However, very early on they realized that, oh, this does mean that we're creating crumbs, and these crumbs are just free floating around the capsule and in a worst case scenario, they could potentially interfere with the electronic systems we have and then it's crisis by corned beef sandwich. So they tucked the sandwiches away and they continue the rest of their mission. However, ASSA was now aware of the contraband sandwich, so when they did return to Earth safely, they later were required to attend a very serious debriefing with a whole bunch of people who were very very cross with them for introducing corned beef to the capsule of the Gemini three spacecraft. They said that at the time it was very intense, but in retrospect, with enough time having passed since it happened, it's just sort of absurdly funny and I could appreciate that now. Other food that has been outside the norm that has made the trip up to space include a pizza sent to the International Space Station back in two thousand and one. Now, this really was just a big old publicity stunt from Pizza Hunt delivering a pizza to the space station. Reportedly, Pizza Huh paid a million dollars to the Russian Space program in order to have one of their pizzas specially wrapped sent up to Yuri Usachov on the International Space Station. They had to go with Russia because NASA has a strict rule about not engaging with commercial brands. NASA does not allow endorsements. They don't want to do product placement, Like the toy stuff is a little borderline if you're being honest, but like they definitely don't want branded foods up there. NASA wants to maintain objectivity and not be crass in the eyes of the scientific community, not to lower itself to becoming a brand placement for various companies out there. But the Russians were happy to take on the gig once the price was right. Now, of course, we do have to mention that one of the strange things that we sent up to space was a Tesla Roadster, specifically Elon Musk's personal Tesla Roadster. Musk used his car as a payload for a test flight of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy launch vehicle. Now it was like, you know, we're gonna put this in place of what a normal payload would be to show you the capability of this heavy launch vehicle. And the car had a mannequin in a spacesuit strapped down behind the wheel named Starman and the Roadster and Starman and the Falcon Heavy took off in February twenty eighteen, and the car was launched into a heliocentric orbit means an orbit around the Sun. It's larger than the Earth's orbit and a little smaller than Mars' orbit. And also the orbital path crosses Mars's orbital path. A couple of times, although you know, obviously not having the Roadster and Mars at the same place at the same time, just that their paths cross. The mannequin has two songs playing on repeat, one in each year. One is Space Oddity and the other there is life on Mars and David Bowie is far out man. I guess, of course, in space, no one can hear David Bowie. You know, you don't have any molecules to bounce around to carry the vibrations. If it's within an oxygenated helmet, then yes, you've got a medium through which the music can move. If there's anything inside the helmet that allows for that, you could do that. But obviously if you just had it on the car speakers, you wouldn't hear anything. Anyway. We don't even know if that music is still playing. It only plays if the battery is still got some juice left in it. As I record this, the roadster is nearly two hundred million miles away from Earth, but it is getting closer to us at the moment. It's currently moving away from Mars at this point in its orbit, though depending on when you're listening to this episode, those conditions could be very different. There are websites that track the roadster's location, so you can actually check up on it and see where it is. Reportedly, the car has a copy of Douglas Adams's science fiction comedy novel The Hitchicker's Guide to the Galaxy inside the glove box, and there's also a towel there, which is important. You always need to know where your towel is. That's one of the jokes from Hitchecker's Guide to the Galaxy. There's a sign with don't panic written on it on the dashboard, another Hitchicker's Guide reference. Really cute, honestly, and again kind of a publicity stunt, but also just kind of neat, Like I can't be mad about it. For one thing. I mean, it's the car from a billionaire, a guy who, at certain points in history has been the richest man in the world. If he wants to shoot his cars off into space whatever, I guess that's fine. It's not like I expect him to use that money to really directly benefit humans in meaningful ways. So if he wants to shoot his fleet of cards into space, go on. Now we get into the grim part of the episode, So let's talk about human remains in space. One of the fringe theories that has made the round since the early days of the space race is that there could be corpses in orbit around Earth, specifically lost cosmonauts Soviet era astronauts who died in midmission. Now, it is true that the Soviet Union spent a lot of time and effort concealing various accidents and disasters during their space program, and some of those disasters included the death of cosmonauts, but there's no evidence that any of them were stuck in orbit. There was one case where there was a depressurization catastrophe aboard a Soyo's capsule as it decoupled from an orbiting platform, but that Saya's capsule did return to Earth the terrible, terrible tragedy that happened. And there was another case where a parachute failed to deploy and the cosmonaut aboard that capsule passed away as well. But there's only ever been one recorded accident that occurred above the Carmen line. This is a boundary that's recognized by some but not all, scientific organizations, as the boundary between space and the Earth's atmosphere. Only one accident has ever happened above that. All the other space related accidents have happened below that line. However, this doesn't mean that there have not been human remains sent to space. We have put some there on purpose as a sort of space burial. The first recorded example of a space burial kind of really or remains being brought to space, would have happened in nineteen ninety two. This was part of Space Shuttle mission STS fifty two, and it was aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia. The crew brought along with them a small sample of the remains of Gene Roddenberry. Ron Berry is the guy who created star Trek, and a lot of people who have pursued careers in the space industry credit star Trek as being one of the reasons they got interested in the subject of space in the first place. Interestingly, ron Berry would be buried in space a second time, as another sample of his remains was aboard a privately funded space burial in nineteen ninety seven. Now the ninety two example, the remains went up into space and returned to Earth at the conclusion of the Space Little mission. The ninety seven example, the remains were sent up to space to board a rocket and eventually returned to Earth when the spacecraft carrying them ultimately re entered the air's atmosphere in two thousand and two. There are a few companies that offer space burials that will transport remains into space. Some of them will go for suborbital flights, so it doesn't go all the way up into orbit and it does come back down. But depending upon your view of where space begins, you can say the remains went to space, and very few people have been to space in the grand scheme of things, so you can kind of see where the appeal is there. But others offer services that would put remains on the Moon or into deep space. Some of the people who have had their remains sent to space include people like Timothy Leary, James Dewan who played Scottie from Star Trek, Clyde Tombaugh, who's an astronomer who discovered Pluto way back in nineteen thirty. His remains, or sample a small sample of his remains are aboard the New Horizon spacecraft that ultimately will leave our Solar system, so he would become the first person to have part of their remains go outside of our Solar system and there are others as well. This is just a tiny group of them. And of course this is not a definitive list of all the weird stuff we've sent into space. There is so much. You know, We've sent a lightsaber prop that Mark Hambell used when he was playing Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars films. The Voyager has a golden record that, among other things, as a recording of Johnny be Good on it, which is pretty awesome. A piece of the Right Brothers original airplane has gone up into space. Amelia Earhart's wristwatch has gone into space. There's so much more, including pictures from Playboy magazine which were sent to the Moon. I didn't learn about that when I was taught about the lunar landing. But apparently this was kind of a kind of a prank pulled on the astronauts, like they weren't aware that it was in specific mission books that they were using once they were on the surface of the Moon. So can you just imagine you're on the Moon. You can see the planet Earth in the sky above you. You are further away than anyone else has ever been really, apart from the astronauts who had actually circled behind the Moon and come back, and you're trying to complete an historic mission on the lunar surface, and you turn your mission book page and there's the centerfold from like nineteen sixty eight or something. I would have imagined that I had gone crazy. If that had happened to me, I would have sat there and thought, this is what losing your mind feels like. But no, it's a prank, ah, those wacky NASA folks. All right, Well, that's just again a small sample of some of the weird stuff we've sent into space, and obviously there's a lot more. Maybe I'll do a follow up at some point and talk about some other examples. But I hope you enjoyed this. I hope you are well. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover and tech stuff, reach out to me. You can let me know on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff HSW or you can download the iHeartRadio app navigate over to the tech Stuff Heart. By putting that into the little search field, you'll see a little microphone icon. If you use that, you can record a voice message up to thirty seconds in link. Let me know what you would like to hear in a future episode, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.