Ep. 658: Space Exploration Horror Stories (1)
Fraser: Astronomy Cast, Episode 658. Space Exploration Horror Stories. Welcome to Astronomy Cast from weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I'm Fraser Cain, the publisher of Universe Today. I've been a space and astronomy journalist for over 20 years. With me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmo Quest. Hey Pamela, how are you doing?
Dr. Gay: I'm doing well. How are you doing?
Fraser: Good, good. Happy Halloween today.
Dr. Gay: Happy Halloween, and you know what tomorrow is?
Fraser: November 1st?
Dr. Gay: It's New Book Day.
Fraser: For you?
Dr. Gay: Yes. I have a book coming out and my publishers amused me to no end in a very sick, and sad, and twisted way because they're like, “Hey, we're starting to see all the influencer's pictures out there of your book,” and I don't have a copy of my book to show you right now because they only sent copies to influencers, and I'm not enough of an influencer to get a copy of my book.
Fraser: Of your own book.
Dr. Gay: Of my own book.
Fraser: Yeah.
Dr. Gay: Yes. So, it's available for pre-order.
Fraser: Yeah, the publisher will come to you – we did this as well, and they're like, “Where do you want to send these books?” So, I gave them a big list of all the people who I thought could help amplify the message, but in many cases, they're getting copies of the book in their hands before you get a copy of your own book.
Dr. Gay: Yeah.
Fraser: And they're like, “Thanks for sending me the new book, Fraser!” I'm like, “You should tell me what it's like because I don't know.” All I've seen are the pre-pressed. Well, congratulations. What is the book?
Dr. Gay: It's called The Moon, great title. It's a kids book so we kept everything super simple. It looks at how we see the moon, what we see about the moon, the history of exploring the moon, and how today's kids are really gonna be tomorrow's citizens of whatever lunar bases we end up building. So, we're basically giving little kids a heads up on how big, hopefully, they will dream and just tell them to dream as big as they can and here is some scientific information to dream with.
Fraser: Wow, congratulations. Awesome work. Now, we're recording this episode on Halloween, so how could we resist but to take advantage of this opportunity? I mean, space is already terrifying enough with the vast, endless emptiness, the incomprehensible mysteries, and the uncaring coldness, but here are some scary stories to spook it up a notch. All right Pamela, this is a classic Pamela chosen episode. How do you want to tackle this? Give us some scary stories.
Dr. Gay: Well, why don't we start by looking at the weird stuff that astronauts have seen and heard, and try and explain exactly what it was?
Fraser: Okay.
Dr. Gay: Does that work for you?
Fraser: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, tell me one.
Dr. Gay: So, Apollo 10 – Apollo 10 is going to crop up more than once in this episode.
Fraser: Right.
Dr. Gay: Apollo 10 starts out – and I have no idea why this didn't happen to Apollo 8, but Apollo 10 reported that as they flew around the dark side of the moon, the far side of the moon – it's not actually dark, it's just we don't see it. They heard this super weird whistling, spacey music.
Fraser: What?
Dr. Gay: Yeah. Yeah, and they came around the Earth facing side, and they're talking to the ground again, and this was a bit disconcerting.
Fraser: So, they're on the far side of the moon, completely blocked from any radio communications that could be coming from the Earth? There should be no way that they could even be picking up radio waves from planet Earth.
Dr. Gay: Right, and there's this whistling music that sounds like what someone who didn't have a theremin, but was trying really hard, would create if they were trying to create space music. Any guesses as to what it just might have been?
Fraser: I mean, I'm guessing that that was the first time – well, no. They would have been in the shadow of the Earth because they would have orbited around the Earth a couple of times, and then they went out to the moon. So, I'm guessing somehow, they were in the shadow of the moon, but I don't know. Something metal, some part of the spacecraft was creaking and groaning. What was it?
Dr. Gay: So, they actually have these really good recordings of it, and it's coming off the radios, it turns out. They were hearing the absence of signals from Earth. They were hearing some sort of electric noise in the radio components that was what we now have as this classic radio noise from space. This whistling across all the different frequencies of hearing, not of the radio, but they heard it coming out of the radio.
So, hearing this weird, whistling music was apparently extremely creepy. They warned future missions to be prepared for this. Future missions said, “We are so grateful you warned us because that was super creepy.” So, it turns out that outer space itself will make radio sing, and it is creepy, but not spooky. Just creepy.
Fraser: Is it because they were blocked from the Earth that this was happening?
Dr. Gay: Yeah, because normally, you don't hear any of that because the signals from Earth are keeping everything occupied. The gain isn't trying to ramp itself up.
Fraser: I'm sort of imaging a situation where you got somebody who's on a microphone and it's a bad microphone and the software behind it, they're quiet. So, the software is searching, seeking for sound, and it just keeps cranking the gain, and cranking the gain until it just starts making these weird noises coming out of their microphone, and then when they speak again, then the sound comes back to normal, and then they're quiet, and then the gain cranks up again.
That would be really scary, I've gotta say, and I can see why the future Apollo astronauts were like, “Thanks for letting us know because that would have been unnerving.” You can imagine this is like a horror movie. That they're in space, floating around, they go behind the far side of the moon, and then suddenly the radios come on and you hear this weird sound coming out of the radio.
Dr. Gay: Yeah. Yeah.
Fraser: Nicely done. That's a good story.
Dr. Gay: It's quite excellent, and it had a reasonable explanation, but I mean, there are lots of things that have reasonable explanations, but when you're first experiencing them and you don't know those explanations, you kinda wanna go hide under your bed, but if you're on an Apollo capsule, there's no where to go and the noise was coming from inside the capsule, like a phone call coming from inside the house.
Fraser: Yep, yep. That's awesome. What else you got?
Dr. Gay: So, Story Musgrave is – the poor guy. There are stories all over the internet reporting that Story Musgrave saw a couple of meters, several meter long snake or eel that was white and swimming through space. Some of these reporting's go on to say, “Well, you might blame it on being a hose, or something.” Story Musgrave, who is the most educated of all of our astronauts, reported that “No, it was an alien-looking eel or –” No, even he, in an interview with James Oberg, for Omni Magazine said, “Yeah. It really looked like there was an eel,” and then guess what he said next?
Fraser: “But I knew it couldn't be,” right?
Dr. Gay: He didn't quite say that. He went on to say that it was probably a lost seal, a lost hose, something that came off of another spacecraft because when you're in space, you do see other things zipping past. He said that he was actually able to see the mirror when it was 28 miles away at one point.
Fraser: Wow.
Dr. Gay: So, he probably thinks just saw some sort of a seal, or a hose that was in an orbit similar enough to the space shuttle. It seemed to be tracking the space shuttle, swimming along the side, and just the thermos-conditions of space, the left-over energy from whatever it had that sent it into space caused it to just appear to wiggle and swim, which is creepy enough, even when you know what it is.
Fraser: So, he was looking out the window and then some object, probably human-made debris, was on a similar orbit to the space shuttle?
Dr. Gay: Yeah.
Fraser: I mean, that almost feels like it could have been something – it wouldn't be an upper stage because the shuttle doesn't have an upper stage exactly. The shuttle kicks off it's main –
Dr. Gay: It was long and skinny.
Fraser: Yeah. I'm just sort of thinking if it could be something related. I'm sure people have been obsessing about what this could possibly be for decades.
Dr. Gay: He saw it on more than one mission.
Fraser: Oh, okay. Now it's getting weird.
Dr. Gay: Yeah.
Fraser: Have any other astronauts reported this?
Dr. Gay: Not specifically, just story.
Fraser: And he's seen this multiple times?
Dr. Gay: But we also don't know if he's the only one that was peering out that long. So – yeah.
Fraser: Now I wonder if he needed to get his eyes checked. Parasites in his eyes or something.
Dr. Gay: That is definitely something rather grotesque to consider, but I'd rather think that he just had the misfortune of being on similar orbits more than once with the same –
Fraser: Space is big and seeing the same thing multiple times? That seems pretty ludicrous to me.
Dr. Gay: I know.
Fraser: All right. Well, we're gonna talk about some more stuff in a second, but it's time for a break.
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Fraser: And we're back. All right. There you go. Someone in the chat just said that someone got toilet paper under their boot on the way to an EVA. That sounds right. A piece of toilet paper out in space. That sounds exactly what you would be seeing. All right. What else you got?
Dr. Gay: So, we have all the weird things that astronauts saw and heard. There was a Chinese astronaut who perceived what seemed to be knocking on the outside door while he was in space. Yeah.
