Astronauts Made Prank Calls From SpaceX Crew Dragon (cnet.com) 78
PolygamousRanchKid shares a report from CNET: NASA's Doug Hurley and his crewmate Bob Behnken had a satellite phone at their disposal after splashdown on Sunday. At a press conference later that day, Hurley filled us in on what they did with their spare time as they floated around. "Five hours ago we were in a spaceship bobbing around making prank satellite phone calls to whoever we could get ahold of," Hurley said. "Which was kind of fun, by the way." Hurley suggested the satellite phone bill should go to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who was sitting nearby. Hurley and Behnken didn't elaborate on the content of the prank calls, but here's hoping they tried to order a pizza for delivery to GO Navigator, the SpaceX recovery ship that fished them out of the water.
Re: The Good old days (Score:5, Insightful)
When astronauts took their jobs seriously and acted like grown ups.I can't imagine Neil Armstrong doing this.
Human nature doesn't change; military personnel (yes, including pilots) have always done this kind of stuff. The real difference is that back in the day you just wouldn't hear about it.
Re: The Good old days (Score:4, Insightful)
When astronauts took their jobs seriously and acted like grown ups.I can't imagine Neil Armstrong doing this.
Human nature doesn't change; military personnel (yes, including pilots) have always done this kind of stuff. The real difference is that back in the day you just wouldn't hear about it.
Exactly. High stress environments use pranks as a way of coping. As long as they don't get out of hand and no one is hurt, it's all part of coping.
Re: The Good old days (Score:5, Informative)
Human nature doesn't change; military personnel (yes, including pilots) have always done this kind of stuff. The real difference is that back in the day you just wouldn't hear about it.
Back in the day, you could see it . . . live on TV . . . when Alan Shepard duffed some golf balls on the Moon.
Re: The Good old days (Score:2, Insightful)
At least the golf thing had some science/entertainment value for the folks watching back on earth. Not like John Young and his illegal Corned Beef Sandwich ...
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At least the golf thing had some science/entertainment value for the folks watching back on earth. Not like John Young and his illegal Corned Beef Sandwich ...
Except Alan Shepard didn't get permission either, and considering how strict their schedule was while on the moon, NASA wasn't thrilled.
Re: The Good old days (Score:4, Informative)
He got permission. The club was custom made for this purpose with NASA's involvement. [nytimes.com]
Re: The Good old days (Score:4, Funny)
Human nature doesn't change; military personnel (yes, including pilots) have always done this kind of stuff. The real difference is that back in the day you just wouldn't hear about it.
In fact... this stuff even happened in space and we heard about it:
"Oh â" who did it?" commander Tom Stafford suddenly asked, six days into the mission, as the crew discussed preparations for leaving the moon's orbit.
"Who did what?" inquired command module pilot John Young.
"Where did that come from?" interjected lunar module pilot Eugene Cernan.
A moment later, for listeners at ground control, the mystery was resolved.
"Give me a napkin quick," commanded Stafford. "There's a turd floating through the air."
It actually gets better, check out the article so I don't have to transcribe everything:
https://www.vox.com/2015/5/26/... [vox.com]
Tower, this is Ghost Rider requesting a flyby (Score:2)
Tower, this is Ghost Rider requesting a flyby
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I'm about 90% sure this is an elon musk marketing gag. doug hurley went out of his way to say to send the bill to elon musk. that wasn't an accident. that was his way of saying it wasn't his idea.
i can almost guarantee elon told them to use the sat phone to make prank calls, and they were probably like, uhhh ok. so they did it, and had some fun, but ultimately they recognize it is highly unusual behavior that they're probably a bit embarassed of, but didn't feel like they couldn't not do it because elon mus
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Not true. They joked also during the Apollo missions and there is plenty of humour on the old recordings if you cared to watch those.
There are however a few differences.
Back then was it a bit more scary and humour only helps with tension, but not with the fear of death, which was still a very realistic outcome for them and they knew this and they wanted to survive it. This is the main reason why they were more serious back then.
Other factors are that with NASA it is tax payers' money and the Apollo missions
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Re:The Good old days (Score:4, Funny)
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Isn't that the guy who's promotion was held back by the USAF for shooting a cow or something?
Re:The Good old days (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't that the guy who's promotion was held back by the USAF for shooting a cow or something?
Aren't you the guy who shit his pants in kindergarten class when you were 5 years old or something?
Enough of this cancel culture bullshit, and digging up every fucking piece of dirt on people. Clearly whatever the hell you're referring to, did nothing to harm the man's success, even if that is your intent.
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Isn't that the guy who's promotion was held back by the USAF for shooting a cow or something?
Armstrong was Navy.
Re:The Good old days (Score:5, Funny)
I can't imagine Neil Armstrong doing this.
Me neither. There was no way to make a phone call from the Moon.
Re: The Good old days (Score:5, Funny)
Re: The Good old days (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: The Good old days (Score:5, Funny)
Oh please, the studio story is so fake, do you have a faint idea what technological miracles would have been necessary to film that at a sound stage?
It was way cheaper back then to just do it on location.
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Actually the biggest cost saving was on catering, as explained in this leaked footage [youtube.com].
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[Richard Feynman] the great physicist was fond of pranks, quips, and his own stories—qualities that contemporaries found endearing but also, at times, aggravating and inappropriate.
Re:The Good old days (Score:4, Insightful)
When astronauts took their jobs seriously and acted like grown ups.I can't imagine Neil Armstrong doing this.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=golf... [duckduckgo.com]
Now take that stick out of your ass already. This is one of those jobs where death is a very real and justified fear. Humor is often used to offset that, to great success.
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Fuck you. That whole "American Astronaut as growed up Boy Scout" all started with John Glenn giving sermons in response to questions from Life Magazine. The other 6 Mercury astronauts were hot-shot test-pilot/fighter-pilot flyboys who liked to drink and fuck and have a good time and couldn't for the life of them figure out what Glenn was on about. If you want a real example of American astronauts, look at Buzz Aldrin or Mike Massamino. Hell, Even John Young was quite the cut-up, and he was as deadpan and serious as colon cancer when he had the stick.
Glenn was hot shit as well, He famously put a pinup in the capsule for Shepard's flight:
His first action was to chuckle aloud, for Glenn had put a girl pin-up and a placard, which read No Handball Playing in This Area. It was very unlike Glenn, who was normally considered a straight-arrow and not a prankster. He quickly pulled it down. Years later, Shepard’s biographer, Neal Thompson, wrote that Glenn probably had second thoughts and did not want to risk having Freedom 7’s automatic cameras reco
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When astronauts took their jobs seriously and acted like grown ups.
Humor is one of the great inventions of the human mind.
Grown up people taking their jobs seriously, such as Robert and Douglas, know when to exercise humor and when not to.
I can't imagine Neil Armstrong doing this.
Quite, and that lack of imagination is but one of the many reasons you are not an astronaut while Robert and Douglas are, and Neil Armstrong and his colleagues were.
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jesus imagine being related to this guy and having to pretend to love him or hang with him on holidays. oof.
Re: The Good old days (Score:1)
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It's such a shame that the camera self-timer got misplaced. Can you imagine the howls of moon conspiracy theorists today if there had been an inexplicable photo taken that included all of the astronauts at the same time, with no hardware on the manifest listed with the capability to take such a photo? ;)
Re:The Good old days (Score:5, Interesting)
Astronauts have a reputation for being easygoing, and not above a joke or two. You are going to find plenty of examples if you look hard enough.
It is actually a trait that is selected for. Astronauts are expected to spend a lot of time together in close quarters and a hostile environment, where a lot of stressful things can happen. So if they are not the kind of people you want to invite to your party, that's a bad start. They are also expected to be problems solvers and take initiatives, not to be mindless drones. Combine all that and you tend to get people who like a good laugh. It doesn't mean they don't take their mission seriously, but if they is any occasion when they can have fun, they take it.
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The best version of this is this photo:
https://www.cnet.com/news/astr... [cnet.com]
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When astronauts took their jobs seriously and acted like grown ups.I can't imagine Neil Armstrong doing this.
You mean like Buzz Aldrin's reimbursement request for $33.31 in expenses for his TDY trip to the moon?
https://www.theguardian.com/sc... [theguardian.com]
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To be fair, Neil was a famously strict, no-nonsense character. But a large portion of his colleagues (including Buzz) were not. Something which thankfully continues to this day [geekwire.com]. ;)
Astronauts have long, packed, strictly controlled, high-stress schedules. It's important that they can unwind. Otherwise you end up with another Skylab incident [wikipedia.org].
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I can't imagine Neil Armstrong doing this.
That's because Neil didn't have a satellite phone. Duh!
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I remember the good old days when people would not try to view everything through a negative lens.
When exactly was that, anyway? There were pranksters in the original Mercury 7, and I would bet that every single astronaut that NASA has spent the time and energy to put in a rocket knows when it's time to buckle down and get to business, and when it's appropriate to have some light-hearted tension-breaking fun.
They just landed in an ocean after falling through the sky, and had nothing to do after securing th
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When astronauts took their jobs seriously and acted like grown ups...
And also when only the government could conduct space programs, at blistering cost and after long delays.
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The Good Old Days, indeed:
X-rated photos were secretly added to Apollo 12 astronauts' suits | Daily Mail Online [dailymail.co.uk]
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That was a rather childish prank. I do however like the part however where they got a professional geologist to write two pages of complex commentary for Conrad to say, to make him (confusingly) sound like a professional geologist when talking with Mission Control. ;)
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When astronauts took their jobs seriously and acted like grown ups.I can't imagine Neil Armstrong doing this.
So, you don't remember "Good luck, Mr. Gorsky" from Armstrong? If you look at the transcripts from the missions, it's pretty clear that those guys joked around a lot. Remember the Playboy pictures in the wrist-mounted task lists?
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Good luck, Mr. Gorsky
Apocryphal. [snopes.com]
(They did joke around a lot, but that one wasn't real. And really, Neil was one of the least likely astronauts to joke around like that; he was usually rather serious)
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Fair enough on that one. The astronauts, including Armstrong definitely did engage in some humor.
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When astronauts took their jobs seriously and acted like grown ups.I can't imagine Neil Armstrong doing this.
The first American in space, was also the first person to hit a golf ball on the moon.
funny (Score:1)
Musk is a known madlad (Score:5, Funny)
Knowing Musk, he'll might have a pizza delivery company actually have a delivery guy on the receiving ship. And he'll make sure that guy asks for a tip for that arduous delivery process.
Would make for another hilarious Musk internet meme.
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Musk is essentially playing billionaires' KSP.
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Or, thankfully, the rapid unplanned disassembly and lithobraking.
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Musk prefers "rapid unscheduled disassembly."
q.v. 1 minute into How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster [youtube.com]
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So YOU think.
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Knowing Musk, he'll might have a pizza delivery company actually have a delivery guy on the receiving ship. And he'll make sure that guy asks for a tip for that arduous delivery process.
Would make for another hilarious Musk internet meme.
I want the tip back, this pizza is cold...
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That would be a good marketing for whoever does it. According to http://www.hoaxorfact.com/Misc... [hoaxorfact.com], Pizza Hut did this in ISS.
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I love that modern Russian free market pragmatism. "You want pizza delivered on ISS? Sure, let's talk price".
It's such a breath of fresh air after the hyper-ideological soviet communist mindset.
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Knowing Musk, he'll might have a pizza delivery company actually have a delivery guy on the receiving ship. And he'll make sure that guy asks for a tip for that arduous delivery process.
Would make for another hilarious Musk internet meme.
He should have had the people who opened the capsule put on ape suits.
I know it wasn't in the procedure... (Score:5, Funny)
But we thought it was a good idea to make sure the phone was working. Yea, so we ordered doughnuts and coffee for mission control on Eleon's credit card... pizza for 200 for SpaceX headquarters... Yea, that was us too...
Now wait a second, no we did NOT order the dancers or the stack of dollar bills for the CEO's office, I swear..
Hey, but we DID verify the phone worked... So what's the problem, it was in the interest of safety and all.
Mindset (Score:3)
An amusing anecdote to be sure, but this also shows an important delta in the thought processes of traditional and start-up companies.
If this were a Boeing project funded by NASA, the backup communications system would be engineered differently than the primary HF/VHF system, probably using a UHF band, with a separate antenna system that would have to be type approved, FCC approved, tested in environmental and RF test chambers against a variety of electrical and atmospheric phenomena. They might invent some new spread-spectrum system, using rotating frequencies that require multiple front-ends, possibly diversity modulation even. The entire system would cost $40,000,000 to implement.
SpaceX gives their astronauts a satellite phone that does everything the designed-from-scratch Boeing system does for $1000.
This is why SpaceX can go from learning how to launch rockets to sending astronauts in orbit in 18 years, while Boeing, who has been doing this for 50 years, takes 10 years to get an unmanned crew capsule engineering sample together. Heck, Lockheed has been at it for 14 years and still hasn't put one in orbit yet.
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If this were a Boeing project funded by NASA
I think you hit the nail on the head there. This is the same reason why SLS, starting from mostly existing hardware, will cost NASA billions, be years late, and probably (hopefully) only fly once.
Starlink Test (Score:2)
Was this just a PR ploy to test Starlink and get some free advertising ?
If so, it worked.
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Was this just a PR ploy to test Starlink and get some free advertising ?
If so, it worked.
I was wondering that too. Maybe Musk will show off the bill and talk about how much cheaper Starlink will be for phone calls once it's up and running.
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I don't think they used Starlink to make the calls - it needs a pretty large antenna and they'd be so close to the altitude of the starlink sats that it wouldn't get solid coverage
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Was this just a PR ploy to test Starlink and get some free advertising ?
If so, it worked.
No. It's an Iridium phone. Starlink ground antennas are too big for phones, and coverage doesn't reach the Gulf yet anyway. It wouldn't surprise me if they add one of those antennas to the capsule later, but I doubt it has one now. There isn't much to talk to yet. I definitely expect SpaceX operations planetwide to make full use of Starlink as soon as they can. They have a lot of launches to go though.
Hello, Miami Tobacco Shop? (Score:2)
Hello, Miami Tobacco Shop?
Yes.
This is Prince Albert in a can that just splashed down from space.
Hangs up.
Reverse Prank (Score:3)
Go Navigator: Oh, shit! That was TODAY? Ok, uh, we'll be right there.
Not original with me. Apparently the GO Navigator folks joked that they should have done this.
Fun in the Sky (Score:1)
Mission control (Score:1)
Hi. I need to page someone
Ok, what's the name
Mr. Jazz, Hugh Jazz
Hey everyone, I'm looking for a huge ass.
Uh, Mom? (Score:1)
Cheap by Any Measure (Score:2)
It's much better for them to have something to do for the 5 hours after they splash down. Remember that one astronaut panicked and sank the capsule in similar circumstances.