NASA – Page 2 – Pain In The Bud

For All Mankind May Be TV’s Best Show Right Now

For All Mankind shows us the future we could have had and the future that could still be if we celebrate our humanity instead of our differences.

The first few minutes of For All Mankind play out like a documentary for the Apollo moon landing, interspersing archival footage of tense staff in mission control with shots of engineers in horn-rimmed glasses poring over data, backup astronauts raising their glasses in a pub and nervous families sitting in their 1960s living rooms, crowding around televisions.

A news anchor cuts in to report he’s getting the live feed from the moon. We see the door of a lander open…and a Soviet cosmonaut strides out, planting the flag of the USSR on the lunar surface and becoming the first human to ever set foot on another world.

That’s the premise of For All Mankind. In this alternate history series, the fire that killed astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee on Apollo I’s launchpad — which indeed happened in real life — led to policy changes and a more cautious culture at America’s space agency, resulting in the US losing the first and most momentous achievement of the space race.

That’s the start of the what-ifs.

What if the Soviets beat us to the moon? What if the rest of the space race was even more competitive than it was in our history, with an America struggling to prove its primacy? What if the US and Soviet Russia continued to pour incredible resources into space exploration? How far would we go? What kind of incredible new technologies would we invent? How would all of it impact American politics, culture, identity and standing in the world?

Could it have led to a better future?

fam_missioncontrol — Werner Von Braun (Colm Feore) and Deke Slayton (Chris Bauer) in NASA mission control in For All Mankind. Von Braun and Slayton were real-life leaders at the space agency and formative figures in the space race.

The answer to that question is hinted at in the series’ title, and while the show is filled with tense moments of international, organizational and personal rivalry, it’s infused with rational optimism instead of the cheesy, manufactured aspiration we’re accustomed to. It’s more like asking: What could the human race achieve if we all worked together? Is that retrofuturistic gleaming vision of the future still possible, and how do we get there?

For All Mankind follows Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) and Gordo Stevens (Michael Dorman), astronauts and best friends whose Apollo mission came within a few thousand feet of landing on the moon just weeks before the Russian landing.

They’re miserable as they sit in a dive bar just off NASA’s campus watching grainy footage of cosmonauts claim their glory, and blame themselves for their failure to land even though it wasn’t in NASA’s cautious mission plan.

for-all-mankind-drink — Astronauts watch the Soviet moon landing from The Outpost, a dive bar frequented by NASA employees.

The scenes that follow look like they could have come from the 1995 blockbuster Apollo 13 as we meet the astronauts, their kids and their nervous wives, the eggheads and flight directors at NASA, and the political players who keep the space agency funded and protected from the wrath of President Richard Nixon.

With the agency rocked by the Soviet achievement and intense political pressure, it embarks on a series of bold new endeavors dictated by the White House. Not only will Americans land on the moon, they will build a permanent base there, and — embarrassed and spurred on by the fact that one of the cosmonauts was female — NASA will for the first time train a new, all-female class of astronaut recruits.

The later group includes hotshot pilot Molly Cobb, “token black girl” Danielle Poole, quiet but determined Ellen Waverly — and Tracy Stevens, astronaut Gordo Stevens’ beautiful wife who is an accomplished pilot in her own right. While the women manage the normal pressure that comes with astronaut training and the high stakes nature of the job, they must also contend with pushback coming from directions they don’t expect — including hostility from some of the wives of current astronauts, who feel their husbands’ jobs will be threatened by women in space.

Gordo and Tracy — A proud Gordo gives his wife her astronaut pin.

Women of For All Mankind — Ellen Waverly, Molly Cobb, Tracy Stevens, Danielle Poole and another recruit are part of NASA’s first class of potential female astronauts.

For All Mankind is a science fiction show, but it’s also a drama and a thriller, putting viewers through the wringer of emotions.

There are funny and amusing moments as the show references celebrities, political figures and musicians from the 1960s onward, grounding the narrative in American culture. The fortunes of some celebrities and politicians change in the show’s alternate history while others stay the same.

In one running storyline — which you’ll only catch if you pay close attention to certain scenes and montages — John Lennon survives the attempt on his life, continues on as the grating, post-Beatles John Lennon most people would like to forget, and becomes just another aging musician cashing in on past glory alongside bandmate Paul McCartney and bands like the Rolling Stones.

The extension of the space race and continuation of US-Soviet rivalry impacts society in profound ways, many of them we may not realize from our historical perspective.

For example, DARPA created the internet because the US government and military wanted a decentralized communications network that could withstand nuclear attacks and remain operational even if major nodes are taken out in nuclear blasts.

That’s why the internet works on such a wide variety of hardware and why, even when major servers go down, our routers are able to move data packets via alternate paths. It’s difficult to imagine a time when the web wasn’t a medium for exchanging photos and videos of cute cats, but the early internet was populated by government officials, Pentagon brass and leading scientists in crucial fields.

In real life, restrictions were taken off the internet when the Soviet threat began to fade, allowing widespread civilian adoption of the technology and early dial-up services like AOL and CompuServe.

That doesn’t happen in For All Mankind’s alternate history as the USSR and communism remains a major threat, resulting in pop culture developing along a different cultural arc than the one we’re accustomed to.

Helios spaceship Phoenix orbiting Mars in season 3 of For All Mankind TV series_humanMars.net 01

US astronaut & Soviet cosmonout on Mars in season 3 of For All Mankind TV series_humanMars.net

Helios spaceship Phoenix leaving Earth in season 3 of For All Mankind TV series_humanMars.net

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While the pop culture references, sets, cars and costumes help ground For All Mankind historically, the show is at its best when it puts us in mission control and the command modules of high-risk space missions, constantly reminding us of the danger these men and women face while highlighting the commonality of astronauts, cosmonauts and later space explorers from other countries, all of them just human beings millions of miles from their families and everything they’ve ever known.

At the same time, the US and the USSR are playing a game of nuclear brinkmanship and astronauts are in many ways on the front lines as they figure out how to co-exist in unprecedented circumstances and places famously inhospitable to human life.

If astronauts tap a lunar mine too close to Soviet base camp, could that start a war? Are the Soviets spying on communications between NASA and its astronauts on the moon? What happens if someone gets hurt and their blood can’t clot in low/zero gravity?

Handshake in space — NASA astronaut Danielle Poole shakes the hand of her Soviet counterpart as their modules dock in space.

Kinnaman, Dorman, Sarah Jones (Tracy Stevens), Sonya Walger (Cobb) et al shine in those scenes as they juggle the pressure of surviving in space with being exemplars of — and diplomats for — their country. Rather than be content painting the Soviets as the traditional bad guys, the show also gives us a close-up look at the people in the USSR’s space program and the pressures they face, particularly Polish actor Piotr Aleksander Adamczyk’s Sergei Nikulov in his relationship with his NASA counterpart, flight director Margo Madison.

In one of the show’s quieter moments, Poole (Krys Marshall) takes two cosmonauts to The Outpost when, during joint training exercises, they request real American cheeseburgers and whiskey. After a few drinks one of the cosmonauts grows somber and tells Poole how he held Laika, the Moscow street dog who was famously blasted into low Earth orbit in her own little module, before scientists were sure enough in the technology to risk human lives.

Although Soviet propaganda feted Laika as a hero and the official story said she survived until re-entry, the cosmonaut tells Poole that Laika died shortly after liftoff, terrified, alone and subjected to unimaginable forces as thousands of pounds of fuel carried her capsule heavenward via brute force.

(The west was no less barbaric: The French famously sent a street cat named Felicette into space while NASA used a young chimp named Ham. In all of those cases the animals were named only after their missions, as mission commanders didn’t want to risk humanizing them in the event of disaster. Had Felicette and Ham both died in space they’d be remembered only by their identification numbers as footnotes in early space history.)

Ed Baldwin NASA commander — Kinnaman grounds the show as Ed Baldwin, one of the second generation of astronauts who take the mantle from men like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

For All Mankind recently began its fourth season and because AppleTV’s marketing and promotion is curiously weak, it remains one of TV’s best-kept secrets. If you haven’t seen the show yet, now’s a great time to jump aboard with so many TV shows on hiatus for the holidays and many others pushed back or canceled in the wake of the parallel strikes that halted production for most of 2023.

For All Mankind

Network: Apple TV

Content rating: TV-MA for bad language, occasional drug and alcohol use and mature themes.

Ratings: 8.1 (IMDB), 93% (Rotten Tomatoes), 4/5 (Common Sense Media)

Seasons: 4 (current)

PITB verdict: 4 Paws!

Laika And Felicette: The First Dog And Cat In Space Were Sacrificed For Human Ambition

Mankind’s achievements in space came at the expense of dogs, cats and non-human primates, who were sent into orbit during the early days of the space race.

I’ve been watching Apple TV’s exceptional show, For All Mankind, which dramatizes the space race of the 1960s and beyond in a sort of alternate history where the Soviets, not Americans, first lay boots on the lunar regolith.

That loss lights a fire underneath the behinds of the people at NASA and convinces American politicians that the space race is the ultimate measure of our civilization. In real life, American ingenuity and the creativity fostered by a free society allowed the US to leap ahead and “win” the space race. Space missions were already becoming routine by the time the drama of Apollo 13 briefly rekindled public interest.

Then the Soviet space program faded, the competition turned one-sided, and without an arch-enemy to show up, American politicians pulled back NASA’s funding to a fraction of what it once was, where it remains today. That’s why the rise of the private space industry — Elon Musks’s Space X, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, etc — will almost certainly be our ticket to Mars.

But in For All Mankind, NASA remains the budgetary behemoth and source of prestige it was in the 60s and 70s, leading to the development of a permanent moon base, lunar mining operations and a planned mission to the red planet.

There’s a quiet moment in the second season when a Soviet cosmonaut, visiting the US as part of a peacekeeping mission, shares a drink in a dive bar with an American astronaut.

“Do you like dog?” the cosmonaut asks.

“Dogs?” the astronaut replies. “Of course. Who doesn’t like dogs?”

The Soviet shakes his head.

“No, dog,” he tells her. “Laika.”

Laika was the first dog in space, or more accurately, the first dog the Soviets acknowledged sending into space. (The Soviets didn’t acknowledge their failures, and we can only guess at the number of lost cosmonauts and animals officially denied by the Russians, drifting in space for eternity or disintegrated in atmospheric re-entry.)

The moment turns somber as the cosmonaut recalls the Moscow street dog who was selected because she was docile, fearless and could handle the incredible noise and g-forces of a rocket launch.

“I held her in my arms,” the cosmonaut tells his American counterpart, taking a sip of his Jack Daniel’s. “For only one or two minutes on the launchpad.”

Then he leans in and tells her the truth: Laika didn’t triumphantly orbit the Earth for seven days in 1957 as the Soviet Union told the world. She didn’t endure the mission.

She perished, alone and afraid, just hours after launch when her capsule overheated.

The Soviets never designed the Sputnik 2, Laika’s ship, to return to Earth safely. Her death was predetermined.

We laud astronauts and cosmonauts, the brave men and women who willingly strap themselves into tiny capsules attached to cylinders of rocket fuel the size of skyscrapers and depart this Earth via brute force, knowing something could go wrong and their lives could end before they realize what’s happening. We should admire them. Their accomplishments are all the more impressive when you consider the fact that the combined processing power of every computer at NASA’s disposal in the 1960s was but a fraction of what we each hold in our hands these days when we use our smartphones.

Those first astronauts and cosmonauts were extraordinarily brave — but only up to a point.

Unwilling to risk human lives in the early days of space exploration, space programs used dogs, cats and later monkeys and apes, strapping them into confined spaces, wiring their brains with electrodes for telemetry data, poring over the information they gleaned about their heart rates, blood pressure and breathing as they left our home planet.

The sad eyes of a stray dog, separated from everyone she loved, were the first to behold Earth from space. A few years later the eyes of a French street cat took in the same view before humans did.

Felicette, the tuxedo cat who was launched into space by the French on Oct. 18, 1963, didn’t even have a name until the French recovered her capsule and took her back for examination.

The scientists and engineers in charge of the launch didn’t want to humanize her if she didn’t make it, which was a common practice in space programs. (Ham, the chimpanzee sent into space by NASA in January of 1961, was known as No. 65 until his successful recovery. NASA was worried that a name would make him more sympathetic and lead to bad press if the chimpanzee died during the mission.)

Ham_the_chimp_(cropped) — Ham the chimpanzee was little more than a baby. Credit: NASA archives

Despite Felicette’s endurance and successful return, French scientists repaid her bravery by euthanizing her a month later so they could study her brain and learn more about the effects of spaceflight on mammalian biology.

Felicette, like Laika and Ham, was never given a choice. Those animals, with their child-like mental capacity, endured their missions out of a desire to please their human caretakers as much as any natural stoicism they may have possessed.

Would we do the same thing today? Will we repeat those experiments as we set our eyes on Mars?

Consider that the moon is a three day trip, and it’s close enough to Earth’s magnetic field to protect living beings from radiation. Mars is at least a seven month trip if the orbital conditions are right, and there will be no protection from radiation aside from what can be built into the craft. Take that trip without adequate protection and you’re guaranteed to get cancer.

It’s easy to say we wouldn’t make animals our test subjects for a Mars journey, and NASA now has decades of data on the effects of space and zero gravity thanks to the International Space Station.

And yet Neuralink, another company owned by Elon Musk, currently uses monkeys to test its brain interface technology, which allows the primates to operate computers with their thoughts. Those monkeys are forced to endure radical surgery to implant microchips in their brains. The teams working on the technology say suffering by those animals will be worth it as people with paralysis are able to do things with their thoughts and regain a measure of independence, increasing their quality of life.

Likewise, it will probably be an animal, or animals, who will be the test subjects on board craft that first venture beyond the Earth’s protective magnetosphere. Scientists and engineers will do their best to create a vessel that shields its occupants from harmful radiation, but they won’t know how successful they’ve been until the test subjects are returned to Earth and their dosimeters have been examined.

Will an astronaut volunteer for that kind of mission, knowing the “reward” could be a drastically shortened life?

Felicette pictured on commemorative stamps.

Felicette, left, was just one of several cats considered for the launch by French scientists.

To hear Musk and futurists tell it, pushing toward Mars is not just a matter of exploration or aspiration, but is necessary for the survival of our species. Earth becoming uninhabitable, they say, is an eventuality, not an if.

Others point out it’s much easier and wiser to pour our resources into preserving the paradise we do have, and the creatures who live in it, rather than banking on a miserable future existence on Mars where society will have to live underground and gravity, at 0.375 that of Earth, will change the human form in just a few generations.

To put it bluntly, while Musk and futurists look at life on Mars through the rose-colored glasses of science fiction fans, in reality living there is going to thoroughly suck.

If people do live on Mars they’ll never venture outside without a suit, never feel the sun on their skin, never swim in an ocean. They’ll never have another backyard barbecue, watch fireworks light up the sky on the fourth of July, or fall asleep to the gentle rain and crickets of warm summer nights. They’ll never hear birdsong or have the opportunity to see iconic animals like elephants and lions. Every gulp of air will be recycled, every glass of water will have passed through the kidneys of others. There will never be snow. Circadian rhythms will be untethered from the cycle that governed human biology for the 200,000 years our species has existed.

And while there could be a future — if you want to call it that — for people on Mars, there won’t be a future there for the rest of the living creatures on Earth.

As a lifelong fan of science fiction who devours SF novels, counts films like Alien and Bladerunner among my favorites, and is fascinated by shows like For All Mankind, The Peripheral and Star Trek, I understand the appeal of space and the indomitable human spirit that drives us to new frontiers. I just hope we can balance that with respect for the Earth and the animals we share it with. Let’s hope there is never another Laika, Felicette or Ham.

Correction: For All Mankind is the name of the Apple TV series about an alternate history space race. The first reference to the show’s name was incorrect in an earlier version of this story.

felicette-container — A close-up of Felicette’s face. Credit: French government archives

Ham the Space Chimp reaches for his apple reward after his space mission. — Ham the Space Chimp waits for his apple reward. Credit: NASA archives

Catstronauts: Buddy Leads Exploratory Expedition To Epsilon Eridani

Kittens back home on Earth ask the brave catstronauts about their mission and life in space!

STAR COMMANDER BUDDY’S LOG, STARDATE 12142022, Aboard the USS Fowl Play

Lt. Commander Freddie Ferocious has command of the bridge while I’ve retired to my ready room for the important task of answering video messages from kittens in Mrs. Meowmore’s Kittengarden class.

Myles, a three-month-old tuxedo who wants to be a catstronaut when he grows up, has asked me how catstronauts eat and use the litter box in zero gravity.

“Well, Myles,” I tell him, “as you may have guessed, regular litter is no good without gravity! You can’t bury your business, obviously, and you run the risk of free-floating poops and granules of litter escaping into the ship’s habitable areas, so a litter box is out of the question. That is why we have a sealed Litter Chamber and a special suction device. It takes some getting used to, especially since it tends to pull on your fur while you’re doing your business!”

Sophia, a five-month-old Calico, asks us what we eat in space.

“This morning at 0100 hours I was informed that our food replicators are malfunctioning, which means the entire crew has had to make do with freeze-dried kibble and pate MREs. No wonder we’re all so cranky! I have ordered the engineering department to devote all available resources and catpower toward the repair of the replicators. This simply cannot be allowed to go unresolved, for a cranky crew can easily become a mewtinous one, and I don’t want to have to start spacing kitties out of the airlock. Er, I mean throwing ’em in the brig! Chief Engineer Meowdi LaForge tells me the replicators should be back online by breakfast.”

Simba, three and a half months, asks: “Dear Commander Buddy, how far are you from the place you’re traveling to, and what will you do when you get there? Is it true there might be monsters? That would be scary!”

“Thanks for writing, Simba! It’s 10.47 light years to the Epsilon Eridani star system, which is a long ride! Fortunately the USS Fowl Play is a pretty big, comfortable ship, with lots of stuff to do to keep her running, and some pretty cool options for entertainment and R&R when we’re off duty. We’re less than two light years away from our destination now, which means the Fowl Play has already flipped and is engaged in a prolonged deceleration burn. We have to do that, see, so we don’t sail right on past Epsilon Eridani!

“Where did you hear about the thing with the monsters? It’s not true, okay? I don’t know what anyone told you, probably that jealous jerk Commander Calvin, but I totally did not run screaming from a monster during the expedition to Luyten 726-8, okay? That’s fake news!

“What happened was, I saw the monster and issued a blood-curdling battle cry, but then I hit the wrong button on my Planetary CatRover, which caused it to spin around and run in the other direction. I was trying to inspire my team, not abandon them. I would have turned around and battled the monster too, except by the time I realized my mistake I was already more than half way back to the lander and the others had scared the monster away with their laser pointers.”

That’s my rover on the left, and the Scary Monster on the right. As you can see, I’m very brave for facing the Scary Monster:

Buddy’s Planetary Rover

The Evil Monster, whom Buddy was totally not scared of.

Five-month-old Pepper asks: “Star Commander Buddy, do you think smart aliens are out there? What do they look like? Will they be nice when you meet them?”

“Hi, Pepper! Those are good questions. Well we should remember that we cats are not only a super intelligent species, but we are intimidating too! We have sharp teeth and claws, some of us can roar, and we look really strong and tough! So maybe the aliens will be scared of us!

“I think there will be smart aliens even though we haven’t found other intelligent life on Earth. I mean, there’s humans, but they’re simple-minded creatures, aren’t they? That’s why they’re our servants! LOL! Maybe the aliens will only have fur on their heads like humans. Maybe they’ll look like dogs. Gross, I know! Or maybe they’ll look like a cross between elephants, manta rays and aardvarks.

“We just don’t know, which is why we’re trying to find out. Picture it: Star Commander Buddy, fearlessly leading the first expedition to make contact with smart aliens. It’ll be pretty cool to be in the history books. Tell ya what, Pepper. If we find smart aliens, you and the rest of Mrs. Meowmore’s class will be the first to know. After NASA, of course. We’ll send you pictures. Deal?”

NASA Photo Shows ‘Cats’ Got To Mars Before Humans Did

A rock on Mars resembles a crouching cat ready to pounce.

Cats are sneaky, quiet as a ghost when they want to be and have a habit of seemingly teleporting between spots, but could they somehow use their feline superpowers to beat us to Mars?

As the Perseverance rover continues to chug along and take photos as well as samples of rock and soil, people following the rover’s progress can vote for “image of the week,” and this time around they picked an image that, when seen from a distance, appears to show a crouched cat with its behind raised, in mid butt-wiggle as it prepares to pounce on some unfortunate Martian.

marscatloaf — A Martian Desert Cat spots a rich vein of Temptatiums in a natural deposit and is ready to pounce.

This isn’t the first time Mars enthusiasts have spotted a “cat” in an image from the red planet. In 2015, some people said a group of rocks resembled a “giant cat statue” poking out from the Martian soil in a photo taken by the Curiosity rover.

I don’t really see it. YMMV:

An “enhanced” image of the same formation.

The “cat statue” on Mars as encountered by the Curiosity rover in 2015.

Perseverance is exploring the site of a former crater lake and an adjoining former river delta. The Bad Astronomy blog says it was “very clearly a lake of standing water at some point in the past.”

The blog provides a breakdown of the geography of the crater and what it can tell us about the Mars of the past. Knowing there was water on Mars makes the idea of life elsewhere in the solar system seem possible. Astronomers believe Jupiter’s moon Europa, for example, potentially hosts life. The satellite exists so far from the sun it’s in a permanent deep freeze and would normally be inhospitable to life, but the evidence strongly suggests there are oceans beneath Europa’s icy surface, and those oceans are heated by massive vents on the ocean floor.

Water, warmth, energy. The conditions for life are there. If Mars was covered with lakes at one point, what’s swimming in the oceans of Europa?

mars_jezerocrater_landingsite — Credit: NASA

So Mars had water and the entire planet was pristine litter box. If it had some prey to hunt and an atmosphere, the red planet could have been the perfect homeworld for felis sapiens, who would rival humanity in technology if not for the tragic fact that their species is only awake eight hours a day.

Now that’s a scary thought!

NASA: We’re Pretty Sure Cats Can’t Commandeer Our Spacecraft

With their cats hovering around their keyboards, NASA employees working from home discussed how to prevent cats from commandeering spacecraft.

If you’re a cat servant working from home in the social distancing era, you know cats have given themselves a new job: Supervising their humans’ professional activities.

It comes naturally to curious felines, who normally supervise mundane household chores like cleaning the litter box.

Among those working from home these days are NASA and ESA engineers, physicists and anyone else whose primary work responsibility is dealing with data rather than hands-on technical work. Many of them have cats and, well, cats are naturally helping themselves to the work:

Daniel Lakey was in the middle of an important meeting when an unauthorized participant decided to chime in.

“He appeared at the door, jumped on the table, meowed in my face, walked across the keyboard, put his furry ass in my face, and eventually curled up sweetly on the desk next to the laptop,” Lakey recounted to me recently.

It was Sparkle, Lakey’s fluffy brown-and-white cat. Sparkle stuck around for the rest of the virtual meeting, in fact, mewing every time Lakey stopped petting him.

Like many people in the pandemic era, Lakey is doing his job from home, with a new set of colleagues who might be less cooperative than his usual ones; his new workspace is now wherever his two young kids and two cats aren’t. Lakey is a spacecraft-operations engineer who works on the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter, which means that he spends his days managing a spacecraft flying millions of miles away from Earth. The work is complex and precise, and usually doesn’t involve feline input. Sparkle interrupted a teleconference only that one time, but what else could he do?

That thought recently became a point of public discussion when Amber Straughn, an astrophysicist at NASA, tweeted:

The Atlantic’s Marina Koren reached out to Straughn, who assured her “commanding spacecraft is a labyrinthian process from start to finish, with all kinds of checks and fail-safes along the way.”

“As absurd as the scenario might seem, it would be nearly impossible for a cat to briefly become a spacecraft-operations engineer, whether at NASA or ESA,” Koren wrote, after speaking to several NASA employees who assured her cats aren’t capable of flying the complex vessels.

catsinspace3 — LOL humans think we can’t fly spaceships.

Most operations require physical access to control rooms and can’t be operated remotely, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory spokesman Andrew Good said

“Some of those commands require a mouse clicking on certain options, so it’s not just an issue of commands being written and sent up with typos,” Good told The Atlantic. “A person has to make conscious choices for spacecraft commands to go up.”

While NASA says it would be “nearly impossible” for cats to hijack spacecraft normally used to service orbital telescopes or make supply runs to the International Space Station, cats love a good challenge. And what is the ISS, really, but a big metal box that would be fun to play in?

With at least one alien race recognizing cats as the supreme rulers of Earth — sorry, Felinia — is it really far fetched to imagine cats commandeering spacecraft to explore the final frontier and the Great Big Litter Box in the Sky?