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In episode 12 of the Struck Podcast we discussed the SpaceX rocket and its lightning issues, the AC-67 rocket crash from the 1980s, and the Apollo 12 and how lightning protection changed following the two strikes it took upon launch.
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Struck Podcast EP 12 Full Transcript – SpaceX Launch, The AC-67 Rocket Disaster & Apollo 12
[00:00:00] Dan: [00:00:00] You’re listening to the struck podcast. I’m Dan Blewett
[00:00:10] Allen Hall: [00:00:10] I’m Allen hall.
[00:00:11] Dan: [00:00:11] And here on struck, we talk about everything. Aviation, aerospace engineering and lightning protection. All right, Alan, we’re back here for episode 12. What’s going on
[00:00:21] Allen Hall: [00:00:21] the dirty dozen of episodes. Here we go.
[00:00:23] Dan: [00:00:23] Yup. Yup. And the next one’s the Baker’s dozen.
[00:00:25] So we can just keep using this dozens theme for. Lisa another episode. So
[00:00:30] Allen Hall: [00:00:30] Baker Baker’s does this relate it to donuts somehow? So when you say Baker’s does, and it always sticks, you think of food?
[00:00:36] Dan: [00:00:36] Well, I think all of these, like extra things are just stupid because he ended up just getting charged for them.
[00:00:41] Like you think they just it’s always reflected in the price. Like I learned this when I was a kid, my dad’s from Oklahoma and we’d be visiting, you know, my grandparents and we’d be driving around and you’d see this firework stands and it’s like, You drive past one, it says, buy one, get six free. I’m like, Oh my God, what a deal?
[00:00:59] We need to stop. And [00:01:00] then the next one’s like, buy one, get eight free. And I’m like, this is even better. And it’s like, buy one, get 10 free buy one, get 12 free. I’m like mom, like, and the, and my grandma’s like, honey, they just, they just increase the price. So you buy one, but it’s like 12 times more expensive than a normal what it would normally be.
[00:01:17] I’m like, Oh, Well, that seems deceptive. And I was like, I don’t know, 10 or something at the time, but that’s what I feel like. That’s how I feel about the Baker’s dozen. It’s like, you’re not really giving me a 13th, like, come on, you’re building it. You just you’re charging a dollar 25 for a bagel and sub a dollar 20, like just a minute, just a minute.
[00:01:35] But I have no, I also have no evidence to prove this. So maybe, maybe I’m wrong here. I don’t know why
[00:01:39] Allen Hall: [00:01:39] you don’t think the chef’s taken a loss on that one, huh? Or the Baker’s taken a loss on the 13th?
[00:01:45] Dan: [00:01:45] Well, well, I mean the cost of a bagel or, or a donut is probably only a nickel. If that it’s 10 cents probably less.
[00:01:53] Yeah. So maybe they are maybe I’m wrong. But anyway. So in today’s episode, we’re gonna talk a bunch about, uh, [00:02:00] lighting protection as it pertains to spacecraft and rockets, because that’s where a lot of this stuff started. So obviously, uh, space X is a site they’re launched late, was recently struck by lightning.
[00:02:12] Their craft itself was not done in Texas. So we’re going to cover that. And then, uh, obviously the Apollo 12 was one of the big factors that got all lightening protection, a lot of, a lot of steam because. That was a big deal. And so they were like, Disney’s not happening again. And then obviously the, uh, the AC 67 rocket that was hit and then malfunctioned and had a sad ending was another tall tale for today’s episode on space.
[00:02:40] First of all, we should probably just talk for just 30 seconds cause we could probably get on a really big tangent. Space force. How do you feel about the space force?
[00:02:49] Allen Hall: [00:02:49] Oh, I think they have a cool logo. I
[00:02:52] Dan: [00:02:52] feel the exact opposite way. I’m I’m glad you said that because I think their logo is absolutely terrible.
[00:02:58] It’s embarrassing and facts, and I think they [00:03:00] miss a huge opportunity to say, Hey, we need a space for us logo America, graphic designers. And there’s some incredible artists in this country. What do you got? You got 30 days to send in your submissions for this space force logo. I think they really missed the boat doing that.
[00:03:15] Cause it looks like we were made that logo just basically plagiarized the star Trek logo. And they’re like, Oh, Navy blue with one color gray and some times new Roman font. That sounds good. I mean, am I wrong? Am I wrong here?
[00:03:27] Allen Hall: [00:03:27] Uh,
[00:03:28] Dan: [00:03:28] well, I’m not, I’m not wrong. I’m not wrong. I’m definitely not.
[00:03:32] Allen Hall: [00:03:32] I don’t, I don’t know if you’re, I wouldn’t say that you’re wrong.
[00:03:34] All right. But. You know, how many new logos you’re going to come up with that haven’t already been done. We’ve been in the space business since the fifties, early sixties. There’s been a lot of logos
[00:03:46] Dan: [00:03:46] and we can make progress on this one. We can come up with something. Cool. Something cool.
[00:03:50] Allen Hall: [00:03:50] Yeah. Uh, I don’t know.
[00:03:52] I see it. A lot of your aerospace logos in my time. They’re all pretty much the same.
[00:03:57] Dan: [00:03:57] All the more reason to get outside the box.
[00:04:00] [00:04:00] Allen Hall: [00:04:00] I
[00:04:00] Dan: [00:04:00] mean, proving my point here,
[00:04:02] Allen Hall: [00:04:02] I suppose. I mean, how many times has NASA reverted back to an earlier logo?
[00:04:07] Dan: [00:04:07] Doesn’t make it six times. Doesn’t make it the right thing to do. They don’t make a deal.
[00:04:12] Allen Hall: [00:04:12] Well, you know, if NASA, if there’s any, any space or European space organization has got a pretty cool logo, there’s some really cool logos out there, but they, they seem to recycle them every couple of years because it makes a really cool t-shirt. So. That’s the whole point of the logo is for a tee shirt and hat that’s.
[00:04:29] So
[00:04:30] Dan: [00:04:30] I’m not, I’m not buying that space where it’s logo, but if there was like a cool logo, maybe, and then I think this is a lot like the book industry. So if you there’s some of these publishers. Like human kinetics is one of them. And human kinetics is a leader in like strength, training, books, and sports, you know, books.
[00:04:49] They w whoever’s the graphic designer for that company. They’re still like living in the seventies cause their books. I mean, the graph, like so much has changed in graphic design. I think a book cover is super important. [00:05:00] I think logoing and branding is super important in general for any company to be like, you know, like I was talking about wine the other day, like I’m not a fan of wine.
[00:05:08] How many people buy wine because of the company’s name and then, and the label. So many people probably buy a bottle of wine. You have 50 different bottles of wine that are all 11, $11. Which one are you going to pick? They’re all gonna describe it in a similar way of tiny. So you’re not really going to read.
[00:05:24] So it’s coming down to, and I’m saying these truth, wooden baseball, bats, wooden baseball bats. There’s a million, you know, we’ve had this conversation before it all comes down to branding and I think color. Yeah. Yeah. And I think he can get you excited. If there was a cool space force logo, I would buy a space where it’s tee shirt.
[00:05:37] I wear it out. Ironically, it’d be funny.
[00:05:41] Allen Hall: [00:05:41] Are you going to make me buy you a space for his t-shirt you know that
[00:05:44] Dan: [00:05:44] right? I mean, I’ll, I’ll wear it. It’ll be anytime. I just want to be like. I just want to go out and, you know, sometimes I have to beat women off with a stick. I mean, you understand? So that could just like help me, you know, just have a normal night out without just being hounded.
[00:05:59] Allen Hall: [00:05:59] That’d be [00:06:00] in harassed. Huh?
[00:06:01] Dan: [00:06:01] That’s tough. That’s
[00:06:02] Allen Hall: [00:06:02] tough. I’m doing you a favor.
[00:06:04] Dan: [00:06:04] Look at it. That was exactly. Exactly. Let me go out and piece. Yeah, but I digress. So let’s, let’s talk about, uh, let’s talk about space X. So this is obviously nothing got destroyed, but this is still, it seems like a big deal, right?
[00:06:16] Allen Hall: [00:06:16] Oh, yeah. They took a, could have been taking strikes near the facility launch facility down in which essentially Brownsville, Texas. So if you’ve never been down to Brownsville, Texas, it’s right on the border of Mexico, it’s like the Southern most tip of Texas. So it’s right in sorta hurricane territory, also thunderstorm territory,
[00:06:36] Dan: [00:06:36] right in there.
[00:06:37] Mosquito territory,
[00:06:38] Allen Hall: [00:06:38] probably mosquitoes are probably the size of Volkswagens, Tara dactyl. Yeah. Uh, but the, the one thing about, uh, that facility is they bought it because it’s right on. Uh, if you, if you can imagine the United States or ever to get out your globe in your head, You’ve you’ve got Southern Texas and then you kind of got [00:07:00] Florida off to the right.
[00:07:01] And then Cuba is just South of Florida. And there was this alleyway between the two. So they bought that facility because it could launch off the Southern tip of Texas and shoot between Florida and Cuba without. If their spacecraft were to somehow fall from the sky, you wouldn’t land on a, you land in the ocean, which is what you want to do.
[00:07:20] Right. So, uh, so when they bought this land down in Texas, it’s essentially on the beach, it’d be like being buying beach front, front property, except you’re buying it in Texas. And it really isn’t top quality beach front property right there in Texas. It’s kind of swamp fish and Sandy. So you want to build this huge facility on.
[00:07:41] Essentially a sandbar and they’d have trouble, uh, trying to build the facility. Cause you had to bring in a lot of essentially dirt to make something where they’ve got this facility down there. So there, if you ever watch, when you watch, because they’re going to be doing some testing down there relatively soon.
[00:07:58] So when you watch the [00:08:00] video of that, you realize there’s not a lot of tall buildings out there. The rocket tends to be the tallest thing out there or close to it because you can’t really build anything at all. Yeah. Right, right. Which, you know, as we’ve been talking about least to these problems, so they’ve been taking these lightning strikes nearby.
[00:08:17] Now you got rocket fuel, you got this rocket. And it was made out of metal and you got lightning strikes all that does not play well together. Cause you’re in your worst case scenario, you somehow light off this rocket fuel and all things go haywire. So what, so what NASA does and what most launch facilities do is they build these towers around the facilities, really tall towers.
[00:08:45] So they’re the tallest thing around. They build these tall towers and then they hook them together with. Catenary wires, which are essentially just wires. So they hook them up these with these wires, such that you’ve got this kind of grid, electrical wire grid [00:09:00] around the facility to. Capture lightning strikes and to direct them to ground, uh, you know, it’s not the world’s most complicated system, but it takes building these really tall 400, 500 foot towers.
[00:09:14] And in Florida, that’s not easy because again, you’re. You’re talking about sort of a sandbars kind of where Cape Canaveral and NASA launch facilities are. And then you got the same thing down at Texas where space X is. So, you know, if you ever go to the beach, Dan, you try to put an umbrella in the sand and make it stand up there that you’re
[00:09:33] Dan: [00:09:33] in Maryland, right?
[00:09:34] It doesn’t work well. No. Well, you don’t really go to ocean city, Maryland. It’s not like the best place, so not, but I’ve been, wait a minute. Yes. I’ve been to the beach. Yes.
[00:09:43] Allen Hall: [00:09:43] Have you w so where’s the, where’s the good beaches in Maryland. Are there any good beaches in Maryland or you have to go to Delaware?
[00:09:48] Dan: [00:09:48] Uh, yeah, Delaware. My, my family. Wasn’t a big beach family. Um, but Delaware, like the Dewey beach system, that’s probably not the right word, but Dewey beach is like a [00:10:00] beloved beach. Like the Delaware beaches are really nice. So a lot of people do go there. Um, people are close enough here where they’ll go to the outer banks, which is in North Carolina.
[00:10:08] It’s like maybe six hours South.
[00:10:09] Allen Hall: [00:10:09] Really? You don’t go North of Jersey, the Jersey shore. You
[00:10:13] Dan: [00:10:13] don’t know? No. Now if you would just go to Delaware, but ocean city is just like, not, I don’t know. It’s not like a, the highest class place. That’s not the right way to put it. Cause we’re not like my family is not high class people.
[00:10:27] Like we’re not, that’s not the way I want to phrase it, but. And so you just like, kinda got like physically dirty. When I, when I was a kid, just like you go to the beach, it’s just like not super clean. It’s just like, not, not a great experience. So maybe it’s changed. I hope it’s changed, but like, I’m not a huge beach person and we don’t take family vacations, not all the, all the children are grown up.
[00:10:48] So kind of a moot point. So
[00:10:50] Allen Hall: [00:10:50] if you’re, if you ever go to the Jersey shore, And
[00:10:54] Dan: [00:10:54] well, then you’re too busy fist pumping. So to put anything in like your fist to up in the air, who’s going to, who’s going [00:11:00] to put your, your beach beach umbrella in the ground. You know,
[00:11:04] Allen Hall: [00:11:04] it’s, the Jersey shore is a very popular area and.
[00:11:07] Dan: [00:11:07] Not really not really nice. Yeah. And they, they vary widely too.
[00:11:10] Allen Hall: [00:11:10] They, they do. They absolutely do. Uh, so one of the things about trying to build anything on the sand is just impossible, right? So you, when you go out to the shore there and you try to put your umbrella in any kind of stiff breeze and your umbrella’s toppled over, well, think about that same sort of thing.
[00:11:26] Cause now. I’m going to put a 400 or 500 foot tower in this Sandy beach. And they’re going to take hurricane winds that
[00:11:34] Dan: [00:11:34] doesn’t, that doesn’t seem great
[00:11:37] Allen Hall: [00:11:37] and ever it is never going to stay. That’s why, when you go to the beach, there’s nothing very tall around it because it can’t stabilize it in the ground.
[00:11:44] So space six, God has got this problem now in Texas, where they’ve got this facility, you know, great spot location-wise from just the engineering side. Perfect spot. Problem is you can’t really build anything big on it. And they didn’t really realize [00:12:00] that until they got on it. And now you really can’t provide any lightening protection of the standard lightening protection to the facility.
[00:12:05] So as these lightning storms kind of come through their area, I’m not sure what they’re doing, because if I know they’re trying to launch have a launch out of Florida right now with one of the Falcons lined with the Ash, the two astronauts that should be in the next couple of days. That facility is all lightening protected, cause lightning strikes and Florida, or all the time in Texas, not as much.
[00:12:25] And so, but you know, it only takes one.
[00:12:28] Dan: [00:12:28] Yeah,
[00:12:29] Allen Hall: [00:12:29] it’s just like in any sort of lightening event, I’ll only takes one to ruin your day. And just because you can’t move out of the way Anthony’s facilities, you got to really protect facility. So, uh, I’m not sure what space X is going to do down there as they start building, you know, that, that rocket, uh, the star ship, when it’s at its maximum height is bigger than the Saturn five.
[00:12:49] This rocket is huge. Huge. You have your, have you, have you seen those pictures that they’ve been, Elan’s been putting out about the size of that rocket when it’s fully assembled? Holy smokes.
[00:12:58] Dan: [00:12:58] It’s tall. It’s a tall drink of [00:13:00] water, as I’d say in Texas.
[00:13:01] Allen Hall: [00:13:01] Right. It’s going to be the tallest thing in miles, right?
[00:13:03] So it’s the lightening ride, right? There’s your, there’s your, if you want a lightning rod, you can just built the most expensive explosive lightning rod known to man. You’ve gone beyond the, the Saturn five. And we know from the Apollo launches, even like getting the Apollo launch, it’s like an Apollo 12.
[00:13:20] Where, uh, they didn’t know a lot about lightning strikes on rockets, right. And they launched this rocket with astronauts and it going to the moon. And the thing is hit twice by lightning on the way off the ground. And it makes, uh, the, the sort of the capsule guidance system roll over and not know where it’s at and the astronauts like we’ve lost power.
[00:13:39] We’ve lost inertial guidance systems. And we’re in the, rocket’s still burning you’re on that ride, baby. You ain’t stopping that thing. Thank goodness. At the rockets internal navigation system didn’t get affected by that. It’s just the stuff kind of towards the capsule end up to the top got affected by it.
[00:13:55] But you know, they learned a hard lesson in NASA. [00:14:00] Back on the Apollo 12 program. And then they’ll, they had a similar thing happened. Uh, was it back in the eighties with the
[00:14:08] Dan: [00:14:08] let’s talk a little more about the Apollo 12, cause that, that changed a lot of the climate for lightening protection, not just on spacecraft, but, but for aircraft,
[00:14:16] Allen Hall: [00:14:16] right.
[00:14:16] Change everything. It absolutely changed everything. And. It made everybody take a second look because they’ve had
[00:14:24] Dan: [00:14:24] back backend. So fill everyone in for those that don’t know the story. So he apologized, launches. What happens?
[00:14:31] Allen Hall: [00:14:31] Boom, boom, two lady strikes tumbles over every, uh, all the instrumentation tumbles over.
[00:14:36] They actually make it to the astronauts. Uh, you know, S S S nerves of steel. They don’t get too flustered about it. They reset systems and off they go, they move and then they go to the moon when they come back. When they come back, uh, the engineers get, get on the spacecraft and start looking at what, all the damage that had occurred.
[00:14:55] There’s a lot of damage to that spacecraft from the lightning strike. Now. They had [00:15:00] known back in 63, 1963, that there was a crash in Maryland of an airplane taking a strike and exploding. The fuel tank caught fire, essentially airplane crash. So we knew lightning strikes were dangerous. We knew that through world war II, we on the air force, the United States air force do that forever because he had taken a ton of lightning strikes, airplanes, and they’ve lost.
[00:15:21] They lost the aircraft, had severe damage to the aircraft. So we knew all this time running up to Apollo. In, in the Apollo missions that we knew that lightning was an issue. And so they actually had some guidance about, Hey, we can’t launch if there’s thunderstorms in the area. Well, what they didn’t really consider was you’re going to put this giant gas, antic metal object with a rocket plume on the back of it.
[00:15:44] And the rocket plume is conductive stuff. So you’ve got this really tall Metallica and. Conductive object we’re running through the atmosphere. It can actually cause a lightning strike to occur where they otherwise wouldn’t have been. And that’s what happened on Apollo 12 and can actually cause it to happen twice.
[00:15:59] So in [00:16:00] that one event, you know, with the size of NASA, if you think about the era in which has happened, there’s, there’s really two things happen simultaneously in United States history, roughly, um, You have, you know, well, JFK had been assassinated, so that it’ll happen. You know, Martin Luther King, uh, Bobby Kennedy, uh, you’re in the Vietnam war and you have the Apollo program.
[00:16:26] Uh, so all those things are kind of melded together and he just had this continual series of stuff. So there’s the Apollo program was a big deal and have a lightning strike that caused. Any, any of those astronauts to be put at risk or put the program at risk is going to get investigated. So after that happened, there was a huge effort by NASA to go figure out what’s going on.
[00:16:48] And that’s where you start seeing a lot of reports and analysis and studies. And that, that drives not only in the rocket area, but on the aircraft side too. So NASA is involved in [00:17:00] rocketry and it’s also involved in aircraft. So they. It kind of took both out at the same time and had less understanding what’s going on with lightning strikes in the atmosphere.
[00:17:08] So we don’t have problems going forward, or at least we can do something about it. And that’s, that was the impetus to it. All right. Was sort of the Apollo 12 and just having the funds and the wherewithal and the engineering people available to go do this stuff. That’s where it all started.
[00:17:23] Dan: [00:17:23] And so before that, they didn’t really realize that.
[00:17:26] Aircraft were causing the lightning strikes. Is that correct?
[00:17:29] Allen Hall: [00:17:29] I, yeah, I think there was just an assumption. In fact, when I started doing the lightning, getting in the lightning business, this is nineties as long time ago. Uh, the assumption was before, not much soon before that, that. There are a lot of the lightning strikes are just sort of naturally occurring.
[00:17:49] You’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time. And then with some of the NASA testing one, they were flying a fighter airplane, an instrument of fighter airplane through lightning to try to record some data, to see [00:18:00] what was going on. And they realized they could do a lot of triggering of lightning strikes around Florida with the aircraft and fighter aircraft, not very big.
[00:18:08] So they were triggering these strikes. And so you start to see these numbers, like, you know, 90% of strikes were aircraft initiated. I bet you that’s up to 99% today. I think we’re really getting, it used to be like, Oh, it’s like the majority are aircraft triggered and there’s some random, random ones that happen.
[00:18:25] I just, I I’m getting shoved more. I’m up in the 99 percentile case where the aircraft is initiating it.
[00:18:31] Dan: [00:18:31] Hmm that’s that’s an interesting idea. So then what was the main result for aircraft after the policy? 12 stuff that happened? I’m going to try to push that one started going. Yeah, like we got to stop this.
[00:18:43] So what were, what were some of the biggest ones that happened in the immediate five, 10 years after
[00:18:48] Allen Hall: [00:18:48] they started putting out material useful material for engineers to. Understand. So NASA had put out, uh, some publications dealing with, uh, aircraft and lightning strike, and they also did the same [00:19:00] thing for the, the rocketry side.
[00:19:02] So NASA is involved in all this stuff. And the things you see in the aircraft world are just an outgrowth of what NASA was essentially what NASA was doing. Uh, and then on the aircraft side, as the aerospace companies started getting more and more information about what’s happening. The FAA gets involved and NTSB get involved and they start making regulations and you, and you start looking at not just things like aircraft structure, but now you’re looking at aircraft systems as you have more electronics coming in and mrs.
[00:19:29] Back in the seventies. So it was more electronics coming into the play of flight control systems and engine control systems. So it starts to really grow out of that period. So that one really got a couple of big lightning strikes, one in 63 because of the fuels. Systems and all the fuel protection systems that happen.
[00:19:46] And then the Apollo 12 on pretty much everything else. And then driving NASA to, to do a lot of research. It’s amazing. Cause you don’t think about that today. Like in today’s world, we would never do that. Like we just don’t have that sort of [00:20:00] internal government focus program. Like when they, when challenger exploded, we didn’t rally together as a nation to go fix a lot of things like that.
[00:20:11] It, there was emphasis on it, but it wasn’t like. Back on the Apollo program, everything was still new.
[00:20:16] Dan: [00:20:16] So then let’s talk about the AC 67 rocket that, that I guess crash. Isn’t exactly the right term, but. Tell the story about this, this rocker home, the other things from 1986.
[00:20:28] Allen Hall: [00:20:28] Yeah. So isn’t it weird that back on the Apollo 12, which is, you know, and the whole pop Apollo program was sort of late sixties, early seventies, and then all the aircraft work that was done, uh, in the seventies into early eighties.
[00:20:41] And then we get into 1987 or we’re doing a, uh, a rocket launch and it gets struck. Like we, at this point we should know better and it’s a good, it gets back to our little discussions about checklists. Like we know there’s some [00:21:00] activity in the area that we need to be aware of electrical activity in the area you need to be aware of.
[00:21:04] And maybe now’s not the right time to launch this thing with our launch it anyway. Cause I think there’s just some disconnect in the way information is passed up the chain. They get struck. It loses its sort of its nerdy neural guidance system. And the there’s a, there’s a person always sitting there with essentially a red button to detonate the rocket.
[00:21:25] So if it starts going off course, you don’t want that to happen. So they detonate and exploded it and you’re like, man, right? Uh, this is 87. The challenger accident was in 86. What’s going on. Uh, you gotta wonder if it was just the internal workings of NASA at that point have just become so disconnected that they, um, you know, they made another mistake.
[00:21:53] Uh, but boy, you know, you don’t hear about the, the ones that stick in your head. I want you to see on television like this [00:22:00] one, I didn’t remember seeing on television. So you don’t read a lot about it either, which is other weird thing. You don’t read a lot about that. Post-mortem on that rocket launch.
[00:22:10] Cause you tend to read postmortems on rocket launches or aircraft crashes to help us get smarter. As we go along,
[00:22:16] Dan: [00:22:16] I was saying there is, there is suppression of the media. This is covered up. Maybe there was an alien on this
[00:22:22] Allen Hall: [00:22:22] rocket. Well, uh,
[00:22:25] Dan: [00:22:25] maybe, maybe we are sending someone back home to a distant planet, the physical part of the thing.
[00:22:33] Yeah.
[00:22:34] Allen Hall: [00:22:34] But you gotta, you gotta remember what time this is. So 87 is kind of Ronald Reagan, George Bush era, right. Reagan was 80 to 88 or so. So this is in the Reagan administration or were you born during that time? Gosh,
[00:22:49] Dan: [00:22:49] 85 there, this was teenage mutant Ninja turtles territory. Yeah.
[00:22:55] Allen Hall: [00:22:55] So if you remember back at that time, it was a [00:23:00] very turbulent time.
[00:23:01] There was a lot going on government wise, this is the whole Soviet union United States. I’m going back and forth and Reagan’s gonna cause a nuclear war and the Russians and the Soviets are after us. Blah-blah-blah uh, so once bad stuff happened, it just kind of, and cause we didn’t have Twitter and we had Twitter, we would know a lot more about it
[00:23:22] Dan: [00:23:22] and you’re right.
[00:23:22] Twitter would have Twitter would have fixed this whole situation.
[00:23:25] Allen Hall: [00:23:25] You know, you can, you can look down on Twitter, I’ll look down, I’ll tick tock. Now I’m not backing off on tick-tock. But Twitter, one thing about Twitter is when stuff happens pretty much, you know it. So if there was a rocket launch that has gone bad, there’s somebody tweeting about it.
[00:23:38] Dan: [00:23:38] Yeah. I have come to use Twitter as like a news source and a trend trending. And it’s funny, like a lot of these trending terms on Twitter. People like a lot. So you see something trending, like you see Allen Allen hall trending on Twitter and you’re like, Oh God, is he dead? Is he? And that’s what, like the first thing people see, it’s funny, if you click on one of those things, invariably, one of the first [00:24:00] comments is like a meme and it’s like, Oh, when I saw, you know, um, you know, like Emmett Smith was trending.
[00:24:06] I was so worried that my favorite running back was dead. It’s like, something like that, like that’s like the first thing. Cause people would see these like, Oh no, what’s happened. Yeah. It’s like, it’s like a anyway, so, well, it’s
[00:24:16] Allen Hall: [00:24:16] sort of like that, right? Right. If, uh, the, the Twitter feed does change well.
[00:24:23] Okay. So let’s, let’s go back to Apollo time. The big broadcaster at the time was Walter Cronkite. Right. And what Walter Cronkite decided to put in his 20 minute news, uh, Stories
[00:24:39] Dan: [00:24:39] that wasn’t, that wasn’t the news.
[00:24:40] Allen Hall: [00:24:40] That was it. That was it. And what you heard on local news was pretty much it. So if they didn’t cover it, it didn’t exist unless you read it in a newspaper somewhere.
[00:24:47] And even then it got kind of sketchy because the, you know, like pick and choose what they want to throw into this thing. So news outside your area, you kind of have national news and local news. And if it’s not national news, you never going to hear about it. And it obviously [00:25:00] that’s changed a lot as we have, uh, more communication means and.
[00:25:06] I, I do think that, Oh, I’ll give you the, I’ll give you the similar example to this rocket launch thing and not knowing about it is very similar. Like I was sending you some stuff this week on Twitter. About these crazy airplane things that people were doing, right? Like the two guys in the squirrel suits, the flying squirrel suits going down the head of mountain and coming to the side and flying into the side of the airplane as it’s running down this mountain and the same thing, I
[00:25:30] Dan: [00:25:30] didn’t, I didn’t see that they actually hit a airplane or they were
[00:25:33] Allen Hall: [00:25:33] pulling the side of it.
[00:25:34] No, no, no, no, no.
[00:25:35] Dan: [00:25:35] So I’ve seen those before. I’ve seen those. Yeah. The race of the airplane.
[00:25:39] Allen Hall: [00:25:39] Yeah. And they went inside of it. Like they just, they just kind of flew inside the open door. Boom. And yeah. Like, well, that’s unnecessary. That’s that’s crazy. Right?
[00:25:49] Dan: [00:25:49] Well, there’s so many things you can say are unnecessary.
[00:25:51] Like that’s a slippery slope right there. Trying to get into it. They wanted to go somewhere. They had like, they had to get to [00:26:00] taco bell or something. They’re hungry.
[00:26:01] Allen Hall: [00:26:01] Taco bell is always open. I remember that. Talk about it never closes even in Corona, it doesn’t close. So. I thought, okay, that’s crazy right now.
[00:26:10] And I thought to myself, unless I had Twitter, I would not know that people are doing something that’s stupid as that. Now I understand the, the, the adventure part of that. I get it. Okay. But that there’s an airplane there with people in it. And all it take is for something to go minor wrong, and three or four people are dead for what.
[00:26:32] For a tweet for a little video. I’m not sure that makes sense. Like, you know, if you want to go kill yourself, I can’t stop you. But if you’re going to take out an airplane and some other people I’m not showing that, I just don’t think that’s cool. You, same thing happened with that.
[00:26:45] Dan: [00:26:45] Well, there’s an increase in, there’s an increase in deaths because of Instagram as well.
[00:26:49] So I read, I listened to this audio book called a no filter, which is like the story of Instagram, which I like it was interesting enough, but one of the, uh, the chapters towards the end [00:27:00] was about how. People are like trying to do things for the gram. Right. They’re trying to get that glamorous photo and that unique place and be that influencer.
[00:27:07] It gets like this, you know, photo in this waterfall that no one else has photographed. And people are like dying because of that. They’re like trying to get the self and they stumble into like a, they fall down a cliff or stumble down a Geyser, like whatever. And there was a couple who are influencers and they’re there.
[00:27:24] They had this story, they were like hanging out of a moving train. Like he’s holding her and he’s holding on by one arm. And it was just like this really dangerous thing. And it caught the news because they’re just like how dangerous it was, I guess. And it ended up being great for business because they got all these like brand deals out of it, because it was like this beautiful photo and LA, but people are like, they got a lot of flack.
[00:27:46] Cause we were like, are you going to die for a photo? Like, Hey idiot, like that was super dangerous. Like you shouldn’t have done that. That was also why they got so much, you know, the whole like, no publicity is bad publicity thing. That’s kind of how it was, but
[00:27:57] Allen Hall: [00:27:57] yeah, but in today’s world, you got. [00:28:00] Uh, CGI and.
[00:28:03] Photoshop and
[00:28:04] Dan: [00:28:04] yeah, I’m actually not here right now. This is just a CGI avatar of me. I’m asleep in another room.
[00:28:11] Allen Hall: [00:28:11] Yeah. Yeah. Well, don’t you think though, that, uh,
[00:28:15] Dan: [00:28:15] which if we had that technology, we’d all be money right now for coronavirus to stay at home and our little avatar beds and just our avatars are out there just doing their thing, doing our thing, building purpose, everything.
[00:28:25] Yeah. Whatever. That’s what we need. We need, we need force fields and we need. Avatars avatars, then these things don’t matter.
[00:28:34] Allen Hall: [00:28:34] Well, I just think that the lack of communication, it was a big results in some of these things, continuing, it’s not so much that people don’t care is that they just didn’t know.
[00:28:47] And I think that’s a big driver. So I get, I was hustling today to, uh, of all things, a podcast complainant about, uh, how much information there is today and thinking, man, do you remember, he’d go into a library and looking for [00:29:00] stuff. Do you remember having to go ask the library and to go check out a book from California that took two weeks to come in because you’re doing a little research thing.
[00:29:08] That’s those things are gone, man. Thank God they’re gone. Right. But, but that just changed the way we think about. Safety and the way we design things and it doesn’t take long for news to travel and that’s good. That’s good. And so when this, when we were looking at this rocket launch thing, I said, man, Dan Abrams about this rocket launch.
[00:29:27] And like, I have never seen it the same thing. Right? Cause that’s, that’s the era in which it occurred is there has been an as we’ve been going back through the history, that’s one of the things Dan and I, Dan I’ve been doing is going back to like air force history on a lightning strikes, air force airplanes.
[00:29:41] Well, a lot of the publications they had at the time were just sort of air force. Air force specific. So you couldn’t have access to them. Well,
[00:29:47] Dan: [00:29:47] not other than the national stuff like that.
[00:29:49] Allen Hall: [00:29:49] Yeah. Yeah. And now they’re in the national archives, so you can actually go search for that stuff and you go, wow. The air force had a lot of problems and the Navy had a lot of problems with lightening strikes on airplanes a lot, [00:30:00] uh, way more than we in the civilian world would ever allow.
[00:30:04] Uh, even today we would be freaking out about the number of aircraft loss due to lightning strikes and, and what they were recording on a yearly basis, which is nuts. Yeah, right. So I do think we get smarter as we go along and this gets kind of gets back to the space X thing. Right. Because now you’re like, who’s more connected in the world on Twitter or on YouTube than Elon Musk.
[00:30:28] Dan: [00:30:28] Right. He shoots himself in the foot with tweets all the time. It’s
[00:30:32] Allen Hall: [00:30:32] like his thing all the time. Yeah. And I have no problem with it. You know, I understand what’s going on there and I, and I get all that and that’s totally cool. Uh, so it’s, when you see that, like the space X launch facility really doesn’t have any lightening protection at it.
[00:30:48] You’re like, Oh, okay. You know, it’s, we’re now in a world where we could not, we should know better and we should be doing something about it. Maybe they have, you know, and one of the things you and I were talking about was how do [00:31:00] we protect that facility down in Texas? Well, if we’re going to put towers up, where are you going to do?
[00:31:06] That’s fantastic question. Uh, because there’s, you’re talking about doing something that no one else has ever done before, but we do have tools in our little toolbox. We just don’t bring them out very often. The one that I came up first was, well, why wouldn’t you use sort of rocket trigger lightening down in Florida.
[00:31:22] They build these little basically estos model rockets used to get at the hobby store. If there are Harvey stores anymore, and they take a, basically a, a spool of copper wire behind it. Put the wire onto the rocket and they fire the rocket off. Right? So the rocket shoots up into space. It’s got this copper wire behind it again, it’s like launching an Apollo 12 electrically and it flap into the sky when the electric field strong enough in the sky and bam, you get this lightning strike to ground.
[00:31:47] So it takes all the charge in the cloud and it dumps it. To ground. So what you can do is like discharge the cloud before it gets to your facility, it would bind semesters rockets, $5 buying spool of wire. [00:32:00] Me the whole setup may be say, it’s five grand for the whole setup. At least you’d have some level of lighting protection for the facility, uh, cause other other way to do it, which is a more.
[00:32:09] Technology cool air is to use lasers to trigger lightning strikes. So you can actually turn the air into plasma using a laser that’s what lasers do. Um, and so you can put enough energy up in the air and actually makes the air conductive enough and charge in the cloud will follow that. Let laser all the way down to the earth.
[00:32:28] Very simple to do also. Right. And because they’re sort of secluded out in the middle of sort of the beach of Texas, isn’t like a lot of civilization around who’s going to get bothered by the lasers is probably not a lot of flights by there. And obviously you can’t just shoot laters in the air when there’s airplanes coming by.
[00:32:42] But, uh, yeah, maybe I’ll do something like that. Something relatively simple to provide lightening protection that you wouldn’t be able to do, uh, or wouldn’t do because of where you are. You, you know, don’t, don’t you think that Ilan would.
[00:32:56] Dan: [00:32:56] Try to, I mean, that seems yeah. Helen, where, yeah, [00:33:00] man, let’s, let’s do this.
[00:33:01] Let’s get some lasers then
[00:33:03] Allen Hall: [00:33:03] we’re drilling holes under Vegas. Right. We can just finish Joel. And I’ll just see that with the boring company, just. Drove the final, a couple of feet to make the hole
[00:33:13] Dan: [00:33:13] a hundred today. A hundred Vegas.
[00:33:15] Allen Hall: [00:33:15] Yeah, I get it this week where they had a little video of them boring through the last little wall there to connect up whatever that’s going to be ever can drill a tunnel.
[00:33:25] Come on,
[00:33:26] Dan: [00:33:26] man. Maybe we should go to Vegas and we can like do like the ocean’s 11 thing. If there’s a tunnel under Vegas, we can just like break in from underneath and just like clean the place out, drop on his lightening protection stuff. I mean, Empty the vaults then we’re good.
[00:33:41] Allen Hall: [00:33:41] What I saw that video.
[00:33:42] That’s exactly what I thought like, Oh my gosh, this is oceans alive.
[00:33:46] Dan: [00:33:46] Yeah. Who’s who’s in that tunnel, right? Like literally right now, trying to figure out where they drill above to get into MGM grand.
[00:33:53] Allen Hall: [00:33:53] Was it oceans 11 or was it OSHA’s 30? Cause that wasn’t one of the, that’s what I was wondering. Cause it was 11 was the first [00:34:00] Vegas, one 12 there in Europe, right there in Amsterdam.
[00:34:04] And I think it’s 13 where they do the drilling under the earth thing.
[00:34:07] Dan: [00:34:07] I don’t remember. I liked. I think I’d watched some wall wasn’t one. They had to break back in or something to Vegas because the guy caught, he was like his, like, you know, I can’t remember that. It wasn’t Chino. Was another similar. Yeah.
[00:34:25] Allen Hall: [00:34:25] Oh, you’re thinking of the first one you’re thinking of Andy,
[00:34:28] Dan: [00:34:28] Andy something. Yeah,
[00:34:29] Allen Hall: [00:34:29] yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:34:30] Dan: [00:34:30] He was, but he was so they steal from him in the first one, but then the second one, he like knows and he’s like, I want all my money back. That’s the one in Europe and they have to steal the money to give it to him.
[00:34:38] Yeah. Okay. Yup. That’s 12 what’s the 13 one. They just had like break into Chucky cheese or something. And
[00:34:44] Allen Hall: [00:34:44] no, not one of the alpha chinos character as is taken over casino from one of their buddies. And they went to Robin cause he’s a jerk. That’s essentially
[00:34:54] Dan: [00:34:54] what all, once they like stealing those diamonds or something or they’re still
[00:34:58] Allen Hall: [00:34:58] Robin the blind, right?
[00:34:59] This is what [00:35:00] they had to fight where they have the fight, the boxing match and the sh everything starts shaking. Isn’t it? That one. Oh, that’s right.
[00:35:06] Dan: [00:35:06] Yeah, that one. I like those three movies in general. That third one was a little convoluted. I thought. It’s like, well, but anyway. Yeah, no, we should do that.
[00:35:14] Yeah. So yeah, we won’t no, no podcast next week, Alan, we’ll be busy. Yeah. We got an Amazon, some ski masks and whatever.
[00:35:25] Allen Hall: [00:35:25] We’re hitting those strip at our, uh, uh, in our new, uh, space defense. T-shirts right.
[00:35:31] Dan: [00:35:31] Yeah. Yeah. Space force for sure.
[00:35:33] Allen Hall: [00:35:33] Space force. T-shirts yeah.
[00:35:34] Dan: [00:35:34] That’s that’s that’s the caper. Just like, they’ll never suspect.
[00:35:39] Two guys with space for shirts on pull off such a heist, but it won’t even, but here’s the, here’s the kicker. Here’s the big twist. It won’t even be us. We’ll be asleep because it will be our avatars. It’ll be the avatar breaking in. Can you send my avatar to jail? There’s no precedent for that yet. So
[00:35:56] Allen Hall: [00:35:56] you’re always one step ahead of the law.
[00:35:58] Dan,
[00:36:00] [00:36:00] Dan: [00:36:00] I just turned, I just turned them off as a hologram the whole time. How that’s, how that movie ends.
[00:36:06] Allen Hall: [00:36:06] So
[00:36:07] Dan: [00:36:07] they have, they, they have me all like surrounded and like, don’t come near me. I’ve got coronavirus. And they’re like, yeah, just go, just go. It’s fine. It’s fine. Just go the other way.
[00:36:17] Allen Hall: [00:36:17] If you want to get away with something right now, you have the Corona virus.
[00:36:20] That’s for sure.
[00:36:21] Dan: [00:36:21] Yeah. Don’t come. Don’t come near me, but no, but that, that’s a, it’s an interesting thing that we’re still dealing with. Lightning strikes stuff today. We obviously, we talked about the Russian arrow Aeroflot crash. No. And then here with, with SpaceX, you know, fortunately none of their stuff was damaged, but you know, there’s still, it’s still just like isn’t going away.
[00:36:39] I think we need, what we really need to do is zoom Ben Franklin and bring him back somehow. See what he thinks about all this. What would his consulting fee be per hour? What would his hourly rate be if Ben Franklin was here today, 80,000, $80,000 an hour.
[00:36:55] Allen Hall: [00:36:55] Oh,
[00:36:57] Dan: [00:36:57] He’d be a big deal.
[00:36:58] Allen Hall: [00:36:58] He would be,
[00:37:00] [00:37:00] Dan: [00:37:00] he’d be a big deal.
[00:37:02] Allen Hall: [00:37:02] A big deal. Yeah. I just want to worry, think of Twitter. What would Ben Franklin do on Twitter? I have no idea. Like you go, what in the world? Right? You’re going from the making all that, doing the printing press thing for the American revolution. And then you can just. Tell the whole world, anything he wants to at
[00:37:18] Dan: [00:37:18] any moment, I think he’d been calling people out and like sarcastically, trolling people.
[00:37:22] I go, yeah, that’s going to work.
[00:37:25] Allen Hall: [00:37:25] Oh yeah. Ilan. You think you’re cool, but I invented the post office, right?
[00:37:29] Dan: [00:37:29] Yeah. But he’d be like, he’d be like the dorky person that doesn’t know how to use them. You know, like sign his name after every tweet. He’d be like, Oh, you’re a joke. Ben Franklin. It’s like, we know you’re Ben Franklin.
[00:37:38] You’re at Ben Franklin. Like I know like learn how to use Twitter, Ben.
[00:37:42] Allen Hall: [00:37:42] Right. Oh man. Yeah, that was a good one. All
[00:37:48] Dan: [00:37:48] right. Well, that’ll do it for today’s episode of struck. If you’re new to the show. Thank you so much for listening. And please leave a review and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
[00:37:58] Check out the weather guard, lightening [00:38:00] tech YouTube channel for video episodes, full interviews and short clips from the show. And follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Our handle is at WG lightening tune in next Tuesday for another great episode on aviation, aerospace engineering and lightning protection.
