Mike Benz

you know, the NASA version of the, you know, dragon type thing, which never went anywhere after 15 years in development.

So the biggest dud in human development history.

But basically this is led towards trying to develop types of mold that would sort of Tim's point.

The idea is to...

so that every time you add weight to the hull to protect the astronauts from radiation, you have to add more combustion power to the rockets to overcome the weight of the hull.

But the more combustion you add to the rockets, the more destabilizing it is to the hull, so you need more weight added to stabilize the hull.

And the idea is, well, if you can solve that by having effectively a radiation-eating mold that coats the interior of the craft,

you would not need to deal with these huge high combustion engines that require an insane amount of coolant and shielding and all this.

They're easier to control.

They have less malfunction.

But

you know, that's something that the Department of Energy has been working on for like 15 years now.

And this actually flared up in 1968 when the Russians did the Zond 5 mission, which is what spurred us to pursue Apollo 8, which was the first traverse around the, you know, this was basically Christmas 1968 before the 1969 Apollo 11 missions where they orbited the moon, but didn't land on it.

And they read passages of Genesis and the Bible.

And it was a big American healing moment after the assassinations that were destabilizing the country in 1968.

But at that time, the Soviets previously circumnavigated the moon with turtles on board.

And so I think the thought process was, well,

it's kind of safe to do it because turtles can, but turtles are what are known as extremophiles, radiation extremophiles.

They have a very unique tolerance off the charts, like a thousand orders of magnitude more than humans in terms of radiation tolerance.

And in fact, there are some weird healing properties actually that radiation gives to turtles.