Speaker 1: You know, I was standing in my backyard last night
just looking up. It was one of those nights where
the air is so crisp, the moon looks like a
like a high definition cut out pasted onto the sky.
Speaker 2: Clear.
Speaker 1: It felt so close, like you could just reach out
and grab it. And it struck me the sheer proximity
of it. It's right there. It's our celestial neighbor.
Speaker 2: It's the nightlight of the world exactly.
Speaker 1: And I think collectively we have this this arrogance about it.
We think of it as this conquered dead gray rock.
You know, we went there in the sixties, played some golf,
planted a flag, and came home. Case closed.
Speaker 2: That is the standard textbook narrative, isn't it The Moon?
A known quantity, a done deal. But when you actually
start pulling the files, not just the history books, but
the raw mission logs that you classify, transcripts, the geophysical data,
that dead rock narrative it falls apart pretty quickly.
Speaker 1: And that is exactly why we're here. Welcome to thrilling threads.
Because the more you pull on the loose ends of
the official lunar record, well, the more the whole sweater.
Speaker 2: Starts to unravel it really does.
Speaker 1: We aren't just talking about craters and dust today. We're
talking about physics that don't seem to make sense, sensory
phenomena that shouldn't exist in a vacuum, and geopolitical maneuvers
that sound like they were ripped from a Tom Clancy novel.
Speaker 2: It's a classic situation where proximity creates a false sense
of understanding. We assume because we can see it with
the naked eye, we get it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we've got to figure it out.
Speaker 2: But today we're looking at a stack of sources that
includes declassified NASA transcripts, mission logs highlighted by the Science channels, investigations,
and military archives that were buried for decades.
Speaker 1: And the mission for this deep dive is really to
map the unknown. We're going to explore a moon that
rang like a bell for an hour after we hit it.
Speaker 2: That's a big one.
Speaker 1: We're digging into reports of astronauts hearing space music while
completely cut off from Earth. We've got the actual blueprints
for a secret US Army missile base on the lunar.
Speaker 2: Surface, which is just wild to read, and.
Speaker 1: Perhaps most chillingly, we're going to read the speech the
President was prepared to give to the widows to be
if Apollo eleven failed.
Speaker 2: It's a heavy docket, and I want to set the
lens right up front. We are approaching this with scientific curiosity.
Some of these mysteries, like the ringing Moon, have fascinating
geological explanations that are actually, I think cooler than the
sci fi theories.
Speaker 1: I agree.
Speaker 2: Others, well, there remain open questions. We're going to explore
the what ifs right alongside the hard data.
Speaker 1: So let's pull that first thread. And this one is
a favorite of mine because it challenges our fundamental understanding
of what a planet or a moon should act like physically,
the hollow World's theory.
Speaker 2: This takes us back to November nineteen sixty nine, Apollo twelve. Right.
Everyone remembers Apaoulo eleven for the landing, of course, but
Apollo twelve was where the science really started getting aggressive.
Pete Conrad and Alan Bean weren't just tourists. They were
installing the ALSSE the Apollo Lennard's Surface Experiments package, and
a crucial part of that package was a passive seismometer.
Speaker 1: They wanted to know what was happening inside the moon.
Is it molten? Is it tectonically active? But to test
a seismometer, you need a quake, and you can't just
wait around for a moonquake to happen.
Speaker 2: Exactly, So they decided to create their own. After Conrad
and Bean finished their surface walk, they blasted off in
the lunar module ascent stage, rendezvous with a command module
to get home, and then they jettisoned the ascent stage.
Speaker 1: They just threw it away.
Speaker 2: They turned their used vehicle into a kinetic impactor. They
crashed it on purpose, deliberately, deliberately, They slammed a two
and a half ton spacecraft into the lunar surface at
nearly three eight hundred miles per hour, and they targeted
a spot about forty five miles from where they left
that little seismometer.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's a massive transfer of energy. It carved out
a crater, what thirty feet wide?
Speaker 2: Yeah, But the surprise wasn't the crash itself. It was
the readouts back at mission control.
Speaker 1: Okay, so set the scene on Earth. If you do
something like this.
Speaker 2: If you do this on Earth, say you set up
a large explosion or a heavy impact, the ground vibrates,
of course, But because earth crust is full of water
and the mantle is dense and semi fluid. Those vibrations
are dampened very very quickly. The energy is absorbed, the
signal dies out in minutes.
Speaker 1: It's like hitting a pillow or a.
Speaker 2: Wet sponge exactly. The water just soaks it up. But
when the Apollo twelve module hit the Moon, the seismometers
didn't just register a thud ooh, they registered a continuous vibration.
Murice Ewing, who was the co head of the seismic experiment,
he famously said it was like striking a bell in
a church, bell free, and.
Speaker 1: We are talking about a few minutes of ringing. The
sources say it reverberated for nearly an hour fifty five minutes,
fifty five minutes of continuous oscillation from a single impact.
Speaker 2: It just wouldn't stop. It baffled the geophysicists. How can
a solid rock vibrate for an hour? It immediately fueled
the hollow moon speculation. Of course it did, because in
our experience, the only things that ring like that are
hollow spheres, bell Gong's metal shells.
Speaker 1: Right, the mind just leaps straight to the death star.
Is it an artificial megastructure. Is it some Dyson sphere
disguised as a moon?
Speaker 2: And while that's a fun thought experiment, the reality, I
think tells us something much more fundamental and maybe even
cooler about lunar geology. Okay, it's not that the Moon
is a metal shell. It's that the Moon is incredibly
unfathomably dry.
Speaker 1: So it's a moisture issue. That's the entire explanation.
Speaker 2: Is it really is? On Earth? Water acts as a
damping agent. It fills all the little pores and cracks
in the rock. It dissipates the energy of a wave.
The Moon has been desiccated for billions of years. The
rock is rigid, it's fractured, and it is bone dry,
so when a seismic wave moves through it, there is
almost zero attenuation. The energy just ping pongs back and forth,
scattering through the fractured crust with nothing to stop it.
Speaker 1: So it's not a spaceship. It's just the universe's driest, hardest.
Speaker 2: Sponge, a hi Q environment in physics terms, high quality factor,
low energy loss. It's geologically unique in the Solar System.
But this idea of hollow bodies in space, it doesn't
stop at our moon. We have to talk about Mars. Yes, specifically,
Phobos almost.
Speaker 1: Is the weird cousin of the Solar System.
Speaker 2: It's an anomaly in almost every metric. It's tiny, it's lunthy,
and it orbits Mars at a terrifyingly low altitude only
about what thirty seven hundred miles above the surface.
Speaker 1: Which is nothing for context. Our moon is two hundred
and thirty nine thousand miles away. Phobos is practically skimming
the Martian atmosphere, right.
Speaker 2: And because it's so low, it's fast. It whips around
Mars three times a day. But the thing that really
caught scientists attention wasn't just where it was, but where
it was going.
Speaker 1: This was back in the fifties, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: This was the mystery investigated by the Russian astrophysicist Josef
Schlovsky in nineteen fifty eight. He was analyzing the orbital
data and realized Phobos was accelerating, Its orbit was decaying.
Speaker 1: It was spiraling inward inward.
Speaker 2: Toward Mars faster than standard atmospheric drag calculations could explain.
Speaker 1: It's doomed, right, I mean, eventually it's going.
Speaker 2: To crash in about ten million years. Yes, a cosmic
blink of an eye. But Schklovsky couldn't make the math work.
The only way that drag forces could affect Phobos that
severely is if Phobos had an incredibly low mass for
its size, If it was light, impossibly light. He calculated
that his density had to be so low that it
couldn't be solid rock. So in nineteen fifty nine he
published a paper suggesting that Phobos was a hollow, thin
walled metal shell.
Speaker 1: Wow, which brings us right back to Aliens immediately, a
hollow metal shell in a decaying orbit around Mars. That
just screams derelict space station.
Speaker 2: And people took this seriously. You have to remember the
context of the late fifties. We are just starting to
understand space. The idea that an extinct Martian civilization launched
a satellite station wasn't seen as you know, fringe lunacy.
It was a valid hypothesis to explain the math.
Speaker 1: And the sources mentioned that even the US intelligence community
had a black budget interest in this, the logic being
if there is even a one percent chance that Phobos
is artificial, whoever gets there first inherits the technology of
a superior civilization.
Speaker 2: Whoever gets to Phobos first wins the lottery. That was
a sentiment, A pretty big lottery, a very big one. However,
modern planetary science has given us a much better look.
We've done spectrocoity on Phobos.
Speaker 1: Now spoiler alert, it's not duranium alloy.
Speaker 2: It is not the stromber. JJ Kavlars and others have
confirmed that the surface composition matches carbonaceous chondrites. Basically, it
looks exactly like a C type asteroid.
Speaker 1: But how do you explain the density If it's rock,
why is it so light?
Speaker 2: That brings us to the rubble pile theory. We now
believe Phobos isn't a solid rock, but it's also not
a hollow shell. It's a space bean bag.
Speaker 1: A space beanbag. I like that.
Speaker 2: It's a loose aggregation of boulders, dust, and ice, all
held together by very weak gravity. It's up to thirty
percent porous. It has massive internal voids, so it.
Speaker 1: Is hollow, just like a pile of Swiss cheese.
Speaker 2: Is hollow, precisely massive empty spaces between the rocks and
makes it incredibly light but entirely natural. Though I will
say some futurists argue that even if it isn't a
space station now, it's the perfect candidate to become one.
It's basically a pre made shielded base waiting for us
to hollow it out a bit more.
Speaker 1: That's a great point, which is a nice segue, because
we're moving from the physical structure of these bodies to
the way we experience them. We've established the stage is weird.
Now let's talk about the actors. Thread number two, sensory overload.
Speaker 2: This is where things get subjective, which makes them harder
to debunk. We're talking about TLP transient lunar.
Speaker 1: Phenomena, which is the fancy scientific term for weird lights
on the Moon.
Speaker 2: Correct, and this isn't just amateur astronomers in their backyards.
This goes right to the Apollo command modules. July nineteenth,
nineteen sixty nine. Apollo eleven is an orbit just a
day before the landing. Okay, and astronomers back in Bochum,
Germany spot a strange localized glow in the Aristarkis crater, and.
Speaker 1: Aristarkus is apparently a hot spot for the stuff.
Speaker 2: It is. It's the the rightest formation on the Moon,
very reflective, so mission control radios Armstrong and Collins and says,
hey can take a look out the window. Germany is
reporting a TLP.
Speaker 1: And they saw it. They reported an area that was
considerably more illuminated than the surroundings. They described it as
having a pulsing fluorescent quality.
Speaker 2: Now, the standard NASA explanation is solar glint. The sun
hits a slab of reflective rock at just the right angle,
and bam, you get a flare. Simple.
Speaker 1: But the files reference a counter argument from a doctor
Peter Schultz, a highly respected lunar scientist, and he points
out a pretty big flaw in the glint theory for
this specific event.
Speaker 2: The sun wasn't there at the time Apollo eleven flew
over Aristarchus. That crater was in shadow. It was lunar
night in that region. You cannot have a solar glint
without the sun.
Speaker 1: So if it's not reflected light, it's emitted light. The
Moon is literally glowing.
Speaker 2: That's the implication. Schultz mentioned in an interview that researching
this was considered a career killer back in the day.
I can believe that if you wrote a paper on
glowing lights on the Moon, you were labeled a fringe lunatic.
But now we have better theories. We think it might
be PL's electricity. Piece of what pi's electricity, it's the
electric charge that accumulates in certain solid materials like crystals
or ceramics, in response to applied mechanical stress. Okay, the
Moon has tidal stresses from Earth as the crust flexes,
rocks grind together deep underground, creating high voltage differences that
could discharge as lightning or glowing plasma coming up through cracks.
Speaker 1: We're gas fenting. I've heard that one too.
Speaker 2: That's the other leading theory. Rate and gas burping up
from deep underground getting excited by the solar wind and glowing.
Both explanations suggest the Moon is still geologically active, which
is a huge shift from the dead rock theory.
Speaker 1: But lights are one thing. You can explain lights with
gas and friction. Sound. Sound is harder, especially when you
are in a vacuum. Let's talk about the space music.
Speaker 2: The Apollo ten incident May nineteen sixty nine. This was
the dress rehearsal. Stafford Cernin and Young flew the lunar
module down to just fifty thousand feet off the surface,
but they.
Speaker 1: Didn't land, and during the orbit. They passed behind the Moon, the.
Speaker 2: Far side, and we really need to emphasize the isolation here.
When you are behind the Moon, the lunar mass blocks
all radio signals from Earth. You are in a total
communications blackout. It is the quietest, most isolated place humans
who've ever been. No static, no voices, just dead silence
until it wasn't.
Speaker 1: The transcripts, which were buried in the archives until two
thousand and eight, show the astronauts reacting to a sound
in their headsets.
Speaker 2: They called it woo woo music.
Speaker 1: Woo woo music.
Speaker 2: Yeah, outer space type music. Eh. It wasn't a click
or a beep. It was a tonal, whistling sound. It
had lasted for almost the entire hour they were back there.
Speaker 1: And you can hear the apprehension in their voices on
the tapes. They're debating, you know, should we tell mission control?
Are you going to tell them? I don't know, man.
They weren't genuinely afraid that if they reported hearing weird music,
NASA would think they had cracked.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, these were test pilots the right stuff. Generation. Their
careers depended on being rock solid psychologically. If you say
the moon is singing to me, you get grounded, maybe
for life. So they kept it mostly to themselves.
Speaker 1: So what was it? We know sound can't travel in
a vacuum. It had to be coming through the radio system, right.
Speaker 2: We have a comparison from the Cassini mission to Saturn.
Cassini picked up similar eerie sounds which were caused by
charged particles interacting with Saturn's powerful magnetic field.
Speaker 1: Okay, but the Moon doesn't have a magnetic field or
an atmosphere.
Speaker 2: Exactly, so the Saturn explanation doesn't fit. Nassa's official explanation
for apolloten is technical VHF interference. You had the lunar
module and the command module flying close to each other,
both had radios on the theory is that the two
systems created a feedback loop, a heterodyning effect that manifested
as a whistle in their headsets.
Speaker 1: It sounds plausible, it's just radiostatic.
Speaker 2: It does sound plausible until you hear Warden, the pilot
from Apollo fifteen, talk about it. He's very skeptical of
the interference theory.
Speaker 1: Why is that?
Speaker 2: His point is, we were expert pilots, We lived in
our radios, we knew what static sounded like. We knew
what interference sounded like. This was different.
Speaker 1: It's that astronaut intuition. They know their machines inside and out.
If they say it was distinct, it makes you wonder.
Speaker 2: It leaves the door open, just a crack. But let's
move from what we hear to what we see, because
our eyes can be just as deceptive as our ears.
Thread number three Visual anomalies.
Speaker 1: This is where we get into the evidence that usually
shows up on conspiracy forums, the blory photos. But we're
looking at them through the lens of mission logs. Let's
talk about the UFO that was supposedly tracking Apollo seventeen.
Speaker 2: This is a famous image analyzed by Jim Scotti at
the University of Arizona. You look at the photo, stark
lunar surface, pitch black sky, and there, hovering just above
the horizon is a distinct rectangular object.
Speaker 1: It looks like craft. It's geometric, it's hovering. The immediate
reaction is we are being watched. They were waiting for us.
Speaker 2: It triggers our pattern recognition. But Scotty did the detective
work that most Internet sleuths don't do. He matched the
photo's timestamp to the audio transcript of the mission at
that exact second.
Speaker 1: And this is why context is everything. What were Jeanes
Sernin and Jack Schmidt doing at that moment?
Speaker 2: There were goofing around. Jack Schmidt, the geologist asked Sernan,
can I throw the hammer?
Speaker 1: Said yeah, go for it, and Cernan, being a tourist
at heart, snaps a picture of his buddy throwing the
hammer across the lunar landscape.
Speaker 2: That alien craft is a geology hammer, frozen in midair,
tumbling end over end.
Speaker 1: I love that it's so perfectly human. We're looking for
high tech surveillance from another world, and the reality is
two guys throwing their tools around on the Moon because
they can.
Speaker 2: It's a perfect example of peridolia, our brain's tendency to
find meaning and patterns in random data. We see faces
in clouds, and we see pyramids on the moon.
Speaker 1: Speaking of pyramids, the Apollo seventeen pyramid.
Speaker 2: Photo the classic, a grainy, dark photo that seems to
show a perfect pyramidal structure in the distance. People went wild,
Illuminati moon base, ancient Egyptian connection.
Speaker 1: You name it, but again, you check the logs, you.
Speaker 2: Check the logs and you enhanced the photos contrast, and
it's not a pyramid on the horizon. It's the back
of the seat of the lunar rover, just out of focus.
In the foreground. It's a shadow on a chair, a
shadow on a chair.
Speaker 1: We want so badly for it to be a base.
And I think that desire comes from a real place,
because while the Aliens might not have had a base there,
we certainly plan to build one. This leads us to
thread four real conspiracies.
Speaker 2: This is where the whole thing shifts from is it
real to oh, it was definitely real, Project Horizon.
Speaker 1: This isn't a theory. This is a one hundred and
eighteen page declassified report from the US Army in nineteen
fifty nine.
Speaker 2: And the goal was audacious, a permanent, manned military outpost
on a moon by nineteen sixty six. And let's be
crystal clear, this was not for science. This was General
Arthur Trudeau's vision of the ultimate high ground.
Speaker 1: The logic was pure Cold War paranoia. If you control
the Moon, you look down on the entire Earth.
Speaker 2: Trudeau argued that if the Soviets took the Moon, they
could rain nuclear missiles down on the US with impunity.
We wouldn't see them coming until it was too late,
so the US had to get their first and fortify it.
Speaker 1: The scale of this plan was just insane. They wanted
to launch hundreds of Saturn rockets per year to build it.
They wanted to build a nuclear power plant on the
lunar surface to power the base. They were designing spacesuits
with weapons. This was a literal blueprint for war in space.
Speaker 2: It's terrifying to read. They compared the urgency of it
to the Manhattan Project. The only reason it didn't happen
was the cost and President Eisenhower. He wanted space to
be a civilian domain, which is what led to the
creation of MASA. The military focus shifted to ICBMs on Earth,
which were cheaper and more accurate.
Speaker 1: But the intent was there, the will was there, and
the Soviets were just as desperate. We always talk about
the American success of Apollo eleven, but we rarely mentioned
the Russian robot that was crashing the party at the
exact same time.
Speaker 2: Luna fifteen. This is a great historical footnote. While Armstrong
and Aldren are preparing to walk on the surface, the
Soviets have this unmanned probe Luna fifteen in orbit around
the Moon.
Speaker 1: It was a last ditch effort, like, we can't get
a man there, but maybe we can grab a soil
sample and get it back to Earth before the Americans return.
Speaker 2: Exactly a scoop and run mission to steal the glory.
But the guidance failed. Luna fifteen smashed into the mare Chrisium,
the Sea of Crises at three hundred miles per hour
while the Americans were safely on the ground out.
Speaker 1: But years later the Soviets did succeed with Luna twenty four,
And this brings us to the weirdest conspiracy theory of
the bunch, the Nazi moon.
Speaker 2: Base ah the Iron Sky scenario.
Speaker 1: So Lena twenty four drills into the Sea of Crises
and brings back a core sample. Soviet scientists analyze it
and they're confused. The soil layers are all mixed up.
It looks disturbed.
Speaker 2: Geologically, soil settles over millions of years, you get layer
A than layer B. This sample was churned up. It
looked like someone had been digging.
Speaker 1: There recently, and since the Americans hadn't been to that
specific spot, the fringe theorists leaped to the one group
they could think of, the Nazis.
Speaker 2: It ties into the real history of Werner von Braun.
The rockets that took us to the Moon were direct
descendants of the V two rockets that hit London. The
tech was German, so the theory goes, did a breakaway
Nazi group escape with advanced tech and build a base
in the Sea of Crises.
Speaker 1: But NASA eventually solved the disturbed soil mystery without needing
space fascists.
Speaker 2: They did. In twenty eleven, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter or LRO,
took high res photos of the Luna twenty four landing site,
and it turns out Luna twenty four landed right on
the rim of a relatively fresh impact crater.
Speaker 1: So meteor hit threw up a bunch of dirt from
deep underground and splashed it all over the surface.
Speaker 2: Exactly the digging was done by a rock falling from
the sky. The mixed layers were impact ejecta. Once again
geology mimicking activity.
Speaker 1: It's always geology. But wait, thread five is where geology
fails us, because now we are talking about biology life
on the Moon.
Speaker 2: The Surveyor three incident. This is a genuine scientific puzzle
that still causes arguments at conferences today.
Speaker 1: So Apollo twelve, the same mission with the ringing moonlands
near an old unmanned probe, Surveyor three, which had been
sitting on the Moon for two and a half years.
They cut off the camera assembly and bring it back
to Earth to see how materials degrade in space.
Speaker 2: They expected to find cracked wires, faded paint, that kind
of thing. Instead, when they swabbed the inside of the
camera housing in a clean room, they found a colony
of Streptococcus midas.
Speaker 1: Common throat bacteria living inside the camera.
Speaker 2: Living is the keyword. It was dormant, basically freeze dried.
But when they put it in a nutrient dish and
a lab, it woke up and started reproducing.
Speaker 1: This is mind blowing. This bacteria sat on the Moon
for thirty months. It was exposed to the vacuum of space,
massive radiation belts, and temperature swings from boiling hot to
absolute zero, and it survived.
Speaker 2: It. It implies that life is incredibly resilient. It sparked
the panspermia debate, the idea that life can hop between
planets on meteors. If a germ can survive the Moon,
could it survive a ride from Mars to Earth.
Speaker 1: But there's a catch, right the sneeze theory.
Speaker 2: The skeptics argue that the bacteria didn't survive the Moon
trip at all. They argue that a technician sneezed on
the camera after it got back to the lab, contaminating the.
Speaker 1: Sample, which seems plausible.
Speaker 2: It does, but the source mentions a pretty significant flaw
in the sneeze theory. Yeah, if you sneeze, you expel
thousands of different types of bacteria. The surveyor sample was
a monoculture. It was only strep mitis huh. That suggests
it wasn't a fresh, wet sneeze. It suggests a small
colony that was trapped there before launch, dried out on
the journey, survived, and was then reawakened.
Speaker 1: It makes the universe feel a lot more infectious in
a good way.
Speaker 2: It suggests that the ingredients for life aren't as fragile
as we thought.
Speaker 1: And speaking of ingredients, we have to talk about water
because for decades the dogma was the moon is bone dry,
end of story. Until the orange soil Apollo seventeen. Again,
the geologist Harrison Schmidt is walking near Shorty Crater and
he just yells, it's orange.
Speaker 2: He was ecstatic. You can hear it in the recordings.
That is really orange. At first they thought it was
rust iron oxide, but rust implies water and oxygen, which
shouldn't be there.
Speaker 1: So NASA analyzed it in the seventies and said, nope,
just volcanic glass, zinc and titanium. No water. Case closed again, But.
Speaker 2: In twenty eleven we had much better instruments. Scientists analyzed
those tiny glass beads again and this time they found water,
not liquid water, but water molecules locked inside the crystal
structure of the glass itself.
Speaker 1: This is a radical discovery.
Speaker 2: It completely contradicts the big splash theory, the idea that
the Moon formed from a massive collision that vaporized everything.
If that happened, all volatiles like water should have boiled
off into space. Finding water inside volcanic glass suggests the
Moon has a primordial reservoir water deep.
Speaker 1: Inside, and practically speaking, this changes the future of space
exploration completely.
Speaker 2: If there is water trapped in the geology, we can
mine it. Water gives you drinking water, split the hydrogen
and oxygen, and you have air to breathe. Liquefy the
hydrogen and oxygen, and you have rocket fuel.
Speaker 1: It turns the Moon from a tourist destination into a
gas station, a base of operations.
Speaker 2: It makes colonization feasible. You don't have to bring everything
with you. You can live off the land.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to our final thread. We talk about
colonization and bases and mining, but we often forget the
sheer terror of the human element, the cost of just
going there.
Speaker 2: We look back at Apollo as this great triumph, a
smooth ride, but at the time it was a terrifying gamble.
Speaker 1: I think the most sobering document in the entire archive
is the in Event of Moon Disaster speech.
Speaker 2: This was written by William Safire for President Nixon. It
was prepared specifically for Apollo eleven.
Speaker 1: It's the speech Nixon would have read if the Eagle
lander failed to launch off the surface, if that single
ascent engine didn't light, Armstrong and Aldron were stranded, there
was no backup, no rescue mission possible.
Speaker 2: The speech is hauntingly beautiful. It says Fate has ordained
that the men who went to the Moon to explore
in peace, will stay on the Moon to rest in peace.
Speaker 1: And it outlines the protocol. Nixon would first call the
widows to be then he would read the speech to
the nation, and then he would cut the video feed.
Speaker 2: Think about that. NASA would turn off the cameras. The
astronauts would be left alone on the Moon. They would
either have to wait to suffocate when their oxygen ran out,
or yeah, well the implication they would have to end
it themselves.
Speaker 1: It just highlights how close they came. We assume success now,
but Neil Armstrong himself gave the landing only a fifty
to fifty chance of success, and.
Speaker 2: The landing itself was a disaster waiting to happen. The
navigation computer was overloading with alarms and has taken them
straight into a boulder field. If they had landed where
the autopilot wanted, they would have tipped over and died.
Speaker 1: So Armstrong takes manual control. He's flying this flimsy metal
spider like a helicopter, skimming across the surface looking.
Speaker 2: For a flat spot, and he's burning fuel fast.
Speaker 1: The sixty seconds warning mission.
Speaker 2: Control calls out sixty seconds it's not sixty seconds to landing.
That's sixty seconds until the tank is dry. If he
didn't put it down right then they would have had
to abort, which involves blowing explosive bolts and separating the
stage's mid air, a maneuver that had never been tested
in that gravity. They had seconds left when they finally
touched down.
Speaker 1: It takes a special kind of bravery or maybe madness,
to look at the math, see a fifty percent chance
of death and say let's go anyway.
Speaker 2: The bravery required to go when the math says you
might die. That sums up the entire Apollo program. It
wasn't safe, it was calculated desperation.
Speaker 1: So let's unpack all of this. We've gone from a
moon that rings like a bell to phantom music, from
visual tricks of the light to biological anomalies, and finally
to the stark reality of the moon.
Speaker 2: Isn't just a dead stage. It's dynamic, it's mysterious, and
it's dangerous.
Speaker 1: And what I love is that the transition from is
it aliens to its geology or physics doesn't make it
less cool.
Speaker 2: I'd argue it makes it cooler. The fact that the
moon rings because it's a high q dry rigid sponge
is fascinating science. The fact that water is hidden in
volcanic glass is more exciting than finding a rusty old
alien base because we can actually use that water.
Speaker 1: Because it's real. Reality is often stranger and more useful
than the fiction we invent for ourselves.
Speaker 2: And looking forward, that reality is our future. NASA is
launching lunar flashlight missions to map the ice deposits. We
are talking about the Artemis program, putting boots back on
the ground, potentially for good this time.
Speaker 1: The orange soil discovery is the key. We aren't just
visiting anymore. We're moving in.
Speaker 2: But it brings us back to the risks, back to
the human element. The closer we've talked about, the near disasters,
the sounds that make you question your sanity, the sheer
isolation of being on the far side, completely cut off
from all of humanity.
Speaker 1: It's not for the faint of heart.
Speaker 2: So here's my question for you listening right now, after
hearing about all the risks, the weird noises, the woo
woo music, and the speeches written for your potential funeral,
if you were offered a seat on the next flight
to a lunar base, knowing you might hear things in
your headset that shouldn't be there, would you go?
Speaker 1: That is the ultimate question, isn't it curiosity versus survival?
Speaker 2: I think I know my answer.
Speaker 1: Oh, I think I'd be on that rocket before they
finish the question. So, for everyone listening, let us know
what you think. Would you take the ticket? Leave a
comment and tell us keep looking up. Thanks for unraveling
these thrilling threads with us