Bonus Episode 44 PREVIEW: Stealth (Part 1)

What if you you used uh the shuttle to steal a military camera satellite and use that for your own

that you can't okay haven't you just given us the plot of Moonraker?

It's the plot of Moonraker.

It's also a real thing.

Like

I venture to suggest this is an area that like is not widely spoken about for good reason, but like

I would be amazed if no one had come up with the idea of like kidnapping a satellite or indeed if it hadn't been done before.

That was part of the mission parameter for the design of the space shuttle was that it had to be able to rendezvous with a satellite in an orbit that could only have launched from the Cosmodrome and returned to the US.

Like that was, that was literally one of the missions it was designed to do was to capture a Soviet satellite.

Yeah, I'm just adding the extra things that then you use the satellite for like street photography.

Yeah.

I hate to burst your bubble, but like under 1 G of gravity, because satellites are built to be as lightweight as possible because lifting a launch mass is expensive, the structural stability of the camera would be so compromised that you wouldn't have optical alignment under 1G, of course.

Sorry.

Just me being like, no, that's fine.

I don't need a tripod.

Incidentally, I went on a really good podcast called Failure to Launch about the time that the CIA kidnapped a satellite that hadn't even left Earth yet.

Jesus.

Oh, Christ.

Right.

Actually, it had left Earth.

It had come back to Earth, and the Soviets just like put it on display, and the CIA kind of kidnapped it.

It was an interesting story.

Heist music starts playing.

Yeah, the camera on shuttle, to my knowledge, is still in that like rotting away in a hangar.

We could, you know, yeah, I thought they just moved.

I'm pretty sure it's going to a museum.

So I'm not sure.

Well, museum is actually easier to get out, get to rather than a locked hangar, honestly.

It's on display.

You can just walk up and scope the place easily.

We'll wrap, we'll use Mia for local intelligence.

We'll use Victoria for our getaway driver.

I mean, yeah, no, perfect.

Next slide, please.

The

Heist.

I put in the slide for us to wantonly speculate about weather satellites and other Earth-observing systems and their use as military assets for protection and surveillance.

It is surprising how many Earth-observing weather satellite jobs require a top-secret clearance.

Justin, would you be so kind as to click the link in the slide notes?

Oh, hold on.

Oh, I don't know what those coordinates go to, but I can take an educated guess.

Allow weathercams.faa.gov to access your location well

hold on a second i'm having i'm having some trouble clicking this from powerpoint justin it's your house it's a it's an image of your house is it an image of i don't believe yes it is it literally is ross don't open that

it's like an alarmingly high resolution image of your house yeah that's yeah oh look look what a surprise someone's blocking the gate

okay so like when i say that like the satellites that observe the earth observe the whole heck an earth like if you have a distinctive hat we can track you with weather satellites no military knowledge required i'm putting military in air quotes here you can't see it on the podcast um because anything that observes the earth is an intel source and whether we're looking at like the weather patterns or we're looking for contrails or we're looking for soil moisture or we're looking for like that's a weird place it looks like there's tunnels dug underground underground because there's not enough soil moisture um man this is crispy

that is my house

yeah they got this on a big screen in the department of energy two people are blocking the driveway yeah they're getting bearing in mind that we did best and all green and i nearly doxed trash future the fact that we we're getting more and more precise i'm half expecting to see a slide in the next one that's just in my window me looking out of the camera.

And before Justin starts wondering how I knew where he lived.

This is, you know, he could probably reverse engineer that if you're enough of a psycho, just from stuff I posted on Twitter.

I, I,

you know, but uh, that that seems relatively easy.

But, you know, I, this is okay, so the grill is in the old location.

They haven't put the pallets up.

The driveway driveway is looking a little nicer than it does right.

This is before I got the benches from June.

Yeah, okay.

I'm not saying you're not a psycho for putting this in.

I'm just saying I can see how you did it.

I did do the screenshot for a reason.

Don't worry about it.

I'm not that crazy.

But I just wanted to say hi in my own way.

Okay, so

right now, radar is one of the many tools used to detect aircraft and stealth things.

Satellites, which we'll talk about more in the ship part of the episode, are more vulnerable to satellites than they are to radar because they're pretty close to the ground and most radar has a radar floor where the noise of the reflections off of the ground buries any signal that you get from a returning airplane.

This is a key feature of the movie 2005 movie Stealth and the radar.

And

the Maverick from more recent Blockbuster.

They all talk about flying under the radar floor.

With satellites, you don't really have a floor if you're not actually underground, pretty far.

We have to cover the earth in a big tarp.

Yes.

Sherwin Williams, give us your money.

I'll paved the earth.

Yeah.

So,

roughly speaking, we now move to the next sort of arc of the podcast, which is, if these are all your ways of detecting an aircraft or whatever, something that doesn't want to be detected, What can you do about this, right?

What sort of countermeasures exist?

And one of them is, what if balloon, what if big balloon, if it's stupid and it works, it isn't stupid.

Yes.

Arguable if this works, you know?

They're pretty easy to spot.

We knew about them on radar for a while.

We thought they were weather balloons at first, to my knowledge.

And when you do find them, you don't really need a $67 billion fighter program to pop them, although the U.S.

decided to use one to do the same.

Funny enough.

You hadn't had any aerial kills yet, hadn't had any kills of any kind.

So they were like, well, we spent four years of what we're doing.

Got that sweet high-altitude capability.

This is a weekend I lost a lot of sanity points because East Palestine happened the same time.

Right.

And what was the leading news story?

We popped the balloon.

Well, yeah, it's better to talk about using a.

So we're going to rank defense programs in costs of, because Americans don't like using real units, we're not going to measure it in billions of dollars.

We're going to measure it in years of ending homelessness.

So, per many news sources, you can check them on yourself or you can ask me directly for them.

It would cost less than $10 billion per year to make sure there was not a single homeless person in the U.S., no one would die of exposure, the social contract would remain intact.

This fighter program cost seven years of ending homelessness in the U.S., and we have popped two balloons with it.

I do like about the balloon, right,

the idea that, like, clearly, the U.S.

is not the like only military bureaucracy in the world that can waste money, right?

And, like, curiously, there is an inversion here because the US, the CIA tried this on China with surveillance balloons before, and it was a massive waste of money.

Like, only like three of them even got any useful like images back.

It's very hard to steer a balloon, classically.

Yeah, and I really love the idea that like doing this in reverse is, yeah, partially a provocation, maybe, but also just as like, this shit doesn't work, but we got to preserve our phony baloney jobs, you know?

This is like the United States of America is going to find out why we don't have free healthcare.

I see this as the equivalent of like throwing spitballs within the UN.

Like,

yeah.

They're just helping you to annoy you.

Like, this is a thing that's going to be

like a kid's helium balloon with a like camera.

And America's hilarious overreaction of firing an actual missile at a balloon, that balloon was less expensive than the munition used to down it.

Like, between the cost of the um f-22's fuel the pilots training the missile we came out to use an eve online term isk negative on this encounter

i mean

they kind of threw everything out i i remember seeing photos of it of the like balloon taken from the cockpit of a u-2 and i'm like man

get a get another balloon like

Famously balloons are hard to steer.

I've just noticed from the earlier picture

that the building eight doors down has a really nice balcony I've never seen before because you can't see the street.

Oh shit, that is a really nice balcony actually.

Yeah, wow.

Huh.

Oh, that's nice with a nice like, you know, like gabling on that.

Wow.

Oh, yeah.

It's got a nice gable.

You know, this, uh, we got a lot of a lot of nice houses in this neighborhood.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Anyway.

This is the funniest reaction anyone's ever had to being doxed.

Next slide, please.

So there were two ways it could go, and one of them involved me screaming and shutting down the podcast.

So

this isn't exactly related.

I just wanted to talk about it.

This is the X-37B.

What the hell is Joe Biden building in there?

What the hell are they doing?

I know

a solid block.

of carry gold

putting one into an eccentric orbit.

No, I know this is a question that cannot be answered, at least by anyone who doesn't want to go to federal prison, right?

But what the hell are they doing with this fucking thing?

Thankfully, this is an area I've actually got no direct personal knowledge, so I can speculate wildly with the best of them.

It's just up there doing stuff.

It's personal theory.

There are crystalline structures that are difficult to grow under gravity.

I also might have read Artemis too recently.

I just, I sometimes wish, right, that I had never, I'd never gotten mental health.

I'd never started posting.

I was like fully, like, on the straight and narrow so that I could be the like highly cleared cog in the like highly compartmentalized machine just to satisfy my own personal curiosity about what the hell Joe Biden is putting in space.

I, like, and now for work, right, I get to talk to people who have been highly cleared cogs in the machine and they won't tell me either.

Fuckers.

I wouldn't get to listen listen to more episodes of the podcast

i can be trusted with classified information

they're like growing turbine blades in there and like you know in 20 years they're it's just going to be common knowledge and they're going to be on like the the latest uh you know zombie version of the 737.

honestly given the orbit i i suspect that it's more of a it has something with a lens on it that goes up that they open the bay doors and that's what we're going to be that's what they're doing with it

I see.

It's a very highly elliptical Earth orbit.

It's, I believe, some synchronious.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Actually, do and engage with the comments below, like and subscribe.

Um,

the angle of it suggests to me that this is an observation mission, um, because there's nothing you would need to do in space for nearly a straight year, completely unmanned, other than observe things.

I, I've

like Joe Biden has built the Earth another camera,

yeah, another fucking camera.

Like a really, really big one.

How could it be alien?

Tries to kill humans.

I don't know why we're in space.

I like sending cameras into space.

I'd love to go to a different planet, but I don't want to spend any time in the in-between.

Like, I want to go to France and I want to do it on a boat.

That'd be fun, but I don't want to spend a lot of time on the water.

That just seems like a bad idea.

Yeah, that's a reasonable.

I've been to France on a boat.

Yeah, me too.

I was with you, actually.

Yeah, yeah, we both went to France on a boat.

You got to take the short way.

Next slide, please.

All right, so ways that you can counter all of these things.

Well, the obvious thing, my plane is being seen by people.

Don't get seen.

Yeah, so back to camouflage again.

Yeah, camouflage in the sense of by hiding the thing from sight rather than cryptsis.

This is the first stealth aircraft in the sense of they painted it slightly differently.

I get to talk about Nevo again.

It's like a dark British racing green.

Y'all have good greens over there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is, if you missed the camouflage episode this is night invisible varnish orphanes um named for the place where they developed it really good names for stuff as well back in the day um talked about it on on camouflage the deal is that this makes it like blend into night better it doesn't really work is the thing um as as far as these things go this does kind of prefigure the fact that every military aircraft now is painted in a kind of or is just a kind of like shitty gray color and has a low visibility roundel which also sucks

So, yeah, still state of the art in that sense, I suppose.

For our viewers,

the hex code for this color is 40, 47, 35.

Nice.

In case you wanted to type that up and look at it.

And this is, to be clear, is like a biplane, like an interwar biplane.

Yeah, next slide, please.