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Florida is weird.

And the Space Coast of Florida is even weirder.

And I can say that because when I wasn't growing up in Bangkok, I was growing up right here.

Yes, it's beaches and turtles and surfers.

But it's also a spaceport.

Most people are familiar with Kennedy Space Center, less so Cape Canaveral Space Force Station-- part wildlife refuge, part spaceport, part military installation.

It's the Space Force installation who oversee all the rocket launches on the Eastern Range, including the one we're here for.

Because we may not get to space in this episode, but it's on our list.

And despite the confusion and the jokes, the Space Force might be the most critical branch of the military yet.

They're also the reason you made it to grandma's for Thanksgiving and avoided that two-hour delay on the interstate.

[music playing] Whether we take time to look up or not, space is an integral part of the modern world.

And nothing goes into space without the Space Force.

So we're traveling to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, the military base that oversees all launches in the Eastern Range.

We want to learn about the role Space Force plays on the ground and in the stars and if we're lucky, maybe see a launch.

The name may be new but the base is not.

The official Space & Missile Museum is on installation in the site of over a half a century of space history.

Museum director Jamie Draper took us to some of his favorite sites.

Complex 26 was our first stop.

This is where America entered the space race with the launch of Explorer 1, our first satellite.

This was essentially command and control for launch activity for this dual pad complex.

It smells like the 1950s.

That's the story-- [laughter] The smell of the '50s.

This is the firing room.

And this is where it all happened.

This is where the launch switches were switched and that rocket went up only 400 feet out that direction.

The walls are 2 feet thick, the ceiling 5 to 8 feet thick.

The windows, you're looking at three segments of 15 panes of glass.

And that's for protection of this crew.

This was state-of-the-art at the time.

This was state-of-the-art.

You've got some vacuum tube technology in here, some transistorized equipment.

These little-- [laughter] All the amenities of the time, you have to have a built-in ashtray.

Yeah, this is actually-- Especially for a military facility.

It feels almost like a movie set.

And imagine this space with 50 to 75 personnel.

Rocketry is a team effort-- always has been.

And when they're doing that countdown, you hear fuel, go, launch, go.

And if there's any issue, they place a hold.

And they do that to this day.

For me, it highlights-- just this proximity, shooting off rockets is not without its risks.

So these were built-- Wow.

--to withstand a direct impact.

They don't have warheads.

But they're a big cylinder of fuel that's very explosive.

If everything's a go, I flip that switch.

And that thing [inaudible].

Can I do it?

Oh, yes.

[laughter] All right.

T minus 3 seconds and counting.

3, 2, 1.

Fire.

Oh.

Oh, man.

Oh.

That happened right here?

Yes, that happened between the pad and here.

But fortunately, that wasn't manned.

That was not manned, no.

Nothing crewed launched here except for a few monkeynauts.

So we had some bio flights launched from this complex.

Bio flights?

They were successful.

Like, we're monkeys!

[laughter] And then in this chamber of the black house, we host a MOD 1 Burroughs computer.

For this computer, the memory bank I think is about 256 bytes.

So imagine that in comparison to your device in your pocket.

This is literally millions of times more powerful in processing and storage and everything else then this computer.

And despite the seemingly antiquated nature of it, this could deliver a warhead to Moscow in a matter of minutes back in 1960.

Wow.

And this facility highlights the history, heritage, and lineage leading up to where we are today.

A short walk from there, Jamie couldn't resist showing us yet another milestone.

This is Launch Complex 5/6.

This is where Alan Shepard, the first American into space, launched-- May 5, 1961.

A few months later, Gus Grissom, one of my astronaut heroes, launched in the same configuration from this spot.

They launched in these little mercury capsules-- one-seater astronaut capsules aboard a modified Redstone ballistic missile.

How terrifying must that have been?

Well, being in that little tiny capsule-- We haven't done this before.

But I think we're cool.

I think we're going to be OK.

It was a big risk, yeah.

You know he's scared.

But that's the definition of bravery.

You're scared.

You do it anyway.

So you're talking Mercury program.

They're test pilots.

They went through all the rigors.

And this is what they lived for.

Mercury program was to get a man in space.

Gemini program came in '65, '66.

And that was to get people working in space.

And then it all led to Apollo.

And Apollo was to get us to the moon.

All of this was geared toward getting us to the moon.

And it was successful.

And being that very first guy, Alan Shepard, he has got to be incorrigible at a cocktail party.

[laughter] For sure.

I've heard some stories.

Yes, yes.

Next up was Hangar C, where you really get a sense of the depth and scope of the programs developed and launched here often through unique partnerships between private, military, and civilian contractors and developers-- After you, brother.

--all working together.

This is our indoor rocket garden, basically housing and displaying the crown jewels of our museum operation.

So with fresh eyes, coming in here, what would you say the most significant pieces are and why?

It's really hard to-- It's choosing your child.

Yes, exactly.

Everything in here is so unique.

And almost all of these were tested here on the Cape.

So what you see is basically test paint schemes like this bright red snark behind us.

Obviously, that's not an operational test scheme because the enemy would see this big red thing barreling toward them.

The bright colors, the checkered patterns, those were intentional for our crews on the Cape to see their trajectory to monitor them, to film them.

A lot of them blew up.

Some of them intentionally so to learn from issues that were arising with the program.

And when the school groups come in here, it's amazing.

These kids-- I bet.

--are just bouncing all over the place.

They're in awe.

We want to inspire people not to just learn more about history but to take this and go into aerospace engineering and become the next paradigm shift or-- One of the things I love about a museum is within a relatively short amount of time, you can learn the history of things and understand things.

Because it's so visual and everything.

You're out of the classroom.

Your nose isn't in a book.

This is visual learning at its core.

That's what drew me and the tangible connections with the past.

And it inspires you.

I mean, yes, there's tour groups that come out here.

But there's not that many people that get access to that, you know?

True.

Since it's an active military spaceport, there will always be that limitation.

So we've got a grand vision for the future.

And that will be a large purpose-built museum facility outside the gate.

Right now, we have all of this material inside that helps extend the life of these pieces by hundreds of years.

We get it in a climate-controlled purpose-built museum environment.

You're talking thousands of years.

And that's the goal.

That's right.

He said thousands of years.

And he's not joking.

He took us to one of his favorite sites on the Cape to talk about the rural conservation and history play in the Cape Canaveral today.

We pulled up to the 1950's era test site for the Navaho cruise missile program.

This structure is so unique.

And there's nothing like it in the world.

Honestly, a miracle is still here.

Why a miracle?

Well, like many of us sites around here, once the program ended, it was abandoned in place.

What you see is what mother nature hasn't taken away yet.

The salt air is relentless.

Your concrete and metal-- everything.

It's honestly one of the most inhospitable preservation environments in the world.

You would never guess looking at it.

But it's a launch stand.

Well, this is a view.

Whoa.

One of the best views on the Cape.

This is where a lot of the older activity occurred before ICBM row and that era of the Atlases and Titans.

Navaho was a very unique program, very short lived, mid '50s.

We test launched about 11.

None of them fully successful.

Very complicated-- Oh, really?

--program.

Really, it wasn't successful as an operational missile system.

But it was highly successful as a research and development program.

We have the only one left in existence in the museum collection.

Oh, right, yeah.

Wow.

Even though it's been around for 50, 60, 70 years or whatever, feels like we're nascent.

This 10 years or 20 years from now-- It will change dramatically.

The range of the future is going to potentially transform all of this into a commercial spaceport.

So imagine an airport.

This would be along those lines but with rockets.

I would like to think that my kids' kids will be here, able to come see this someday.

Museum folks-- we focus on the now but also the distant future.

So I'm not thinking about my kids and my grandkids.

I'm thinking thousands of years into the future.

I'm pondering when we're an intergalactic species, people flying back to Mother Earth and going to the Kittyhawk of the space age here at Cape Canaveral and seeing this is where it all started.

Space hipsters and the pad rats and the Cape apes and all these great nicknames for people that made it all happen.

And some who respectfully-- I mean, they gave their lives for it.

There's inherent risk.

And that's a big part of the story out here.

You need to know where you've been to know where you're going.

And for me, it's all about saving those key representative sites.

I know, yeah.

Preservation is key.

That problem of what to save and how to preserve it is even greater due to the explosive growth in the area.

Not only are there multiple private operators working on the launch pads these days.

Think SpaceX and ULA.

NASA is working on one of its largest projects to date.

And none of these missions could move an inch without the operational command of Space Force.

We caught up with Captain Chiang and First Lieutenant Ruchlin back on Launch Complex 5/6 to learn more about the role of Space Force but not before we got a few stories about the Redstone launches.

These are-- the yellow with the sprays, nozzles.

That's the water suppression system.

And a lot of people think that that's for fire or whatnot.

But it's actually for acoustic reasons.

Basically, if we didn't spray that water and those sound waves didn't have something to hit, it would just completely destroy the pad.

Wow.

So we used to have an unfortunate NCO pick the short straw, go out there, and no joke, they would literally turn that sucker on, hide behind that thing, go into the tunnel, and go back in that building.

Now, we have all remote automated systems.

One of the funniest things to me is that when they fuel this thing, it's literally on a scale.

And I'm talking like an actual analog scale.

Somebody is in there watching like the old-school penny scale turn to the right weight to know that it's fueled.

Well, you guys are both engineers.

I mean, I think that's what a lot of people don't realize in Space Force.

Not everyone's an astronaut or whatever.

Again, as an engineer, I mean, what's interesting about being in Space Force?

Man first flew in 1903.

Just over 60 years later, we put someone on the moon.

And so the progression of aerospace technology is leaps and leaps and bounds ahead of almost anything else in how quickly it progresses.

Space Force isn't some brand new thing, right?

Yeah, our mission set belonged to what used to be US Space Command under the Air Force.

And eventually, they decided that that mission has become too large for just one command under the purview of another branch.

So similar to how the Marines eventually broke away from the Navy, we broke away from the Air Force.

But our job existed before and continues to grow and evolve.

It is its own domain now.

How do you guys view the role of the Space Force overall?

Really, Space Force is integrated with everything.

Because you hear Space Force and you think maybe above the 60 mile on a pipeline.

But actually, it involves entire electromagnetic spectrum.

Communications, right?

We have communication satellites.

Well, every single branch needs communications same with GPS.

Every single branch uses GPS.

So really, our role is probably more integrated than any of the other branches because we have to be.

I can't imagine what it's like.

Can you guys position number one have to overcome the jokes in the beginning and then be really probably one of the most serious efforts that we make as a nation.

Once upon a time in space used to be what we call it a benign domain as in it was this shared handshake agreement.

Like, we're not going to touch our stuff.

We're not going to touch your stuff.

It's not that way anymore.

It's not wrong to say that every single satellite in space experiences some level of attack, whether that be from an adversary or also just from the fact that satellite is facing UV radiation, debris in space.

Like, for instance, we've had recently several ASAT, anti-satellite, events where other countries have launched missiles against their own satellites and then blow them up.

If you've seen movies, right, that debris causes an issue with our satellites.

The most recent one forced the ISS to actually move for the safety of the astronauts.

We're just sitting here.

We're having a casual conversation here on the Eastern seaboard and the Space Coast of Florida.

And there seems to be a lot going on up there.

Up there.

We have no idea.

Yeah, the launches that we do here are the most visible thing that the Space Force does.

But it is by far not the only thing we do.

Our war fighting domain is a digital domain.

We are fighting to keep our code that runs all of our satellites up and running.

We're fighting to make sure that those satellites stay in place, like you said, from physical attacks, from digital or cyber attacks, and from the hostile environment that is space itself.

As we send up new satellites, not just war fighting satellites but scientific satellites, we learn new things all the time.

The James Webb Telescope is going to tell us a whole lot more about space and a whole lot more about what it means to put things into orbit around Earth, put things in orbit around other planets, and eventually travel to other planets and other places in the solar system.

Even your most top secret satellite, it comes overhead.

All you need is a strong Hubble telescope, and you can see that thing.

There's nowhere else in the world that it feels so niche and so vulnerable.

There's nowhere to hide.

There's nowhere to hide.

Exactly.

And that's what we're up against.

We're up against trying to make sure that those things stay safe.

It's one of those things where they say, it's doing a really great job when you never hear about it.

When you hear about it, you have enough terrible day.

So give us a little credit.

If you haven't heard about it, that means we're doing something right.

Before we headed to our forward observation point for the launch, we met with several range operations commanders or ROCs at the Morrell Operation Center or MOC to shed a little light on what their role in a launch is.

Meet Second Lieutenant Schoephoerster, First Lieutenant Conklin, and Second Lieutenant Sawh Our job here is really public safety.

So come day of launch as range operations commanders, we are in charge of the launch from a range perspective.

So the customers will come in.

They are in charge of their rocket.

They worry about their rocket.

Well, we are in charge of here is we worry about the pad itself.

And we worry about the land around it-- boats in the area, aircraft in the area.

But we also worry about the people.

So on game day, when it's a launch, and you guys are doing this, what are you guys seeing up here on the big screens?

Here on the big screen, we have a feed from pad itself with the rocket out there or their graphic user interface, showing the status of everything going on.

We also do monitor the weather as you can see up there in the upper right.

But in the bottom right, we usually have Twitter feeds.

Because as you can imagine, service providers are out there blasting things out super fast.

So sometimes, updates come through that as we're getting them.

I mean, you're pulling information from everywhere.

And then you're assimilating that and making sure that whatever it is, the range is protected or safe.

When we talk about the Eastern Range, I don't think most people understand.

But what is the Eastern Range?

Well, the Eastern RANGE itself is right here at Cape Canaveral.

So it's right here down South.

That's where we do most of our launches from.

And the range, though, extends out.

So how far out does the range extend?

So it goes all the way to-- Yes, out to Ascension all the way up to Wallops Island in Virginia.

So we have a 15-million square mile range That's a lot to cover.

I don't think most people realize that there is a role that Space Force has that really does butt up against not only the public but these commercial relationships that you guys have as well.

Space is ever-growing.

Top leadership decided to put more focus into it.

Everything that we do in the Space Force was already there-- in the Navy and the Air Force and in the army as well.

So really, what we did was we just took it all and put it into one mission.

So we have different jobs.

We have orbital warfare, which is satellites command and control, things like that.

We have space panel management, looking at our radars, space domain awareness, things like that.

And then we also have electronic warfare supporting our other branches as well.

What's the role of Space Force going to be in the future?

You think about GPS and the overarching effect it has on everything we do, whether it's banking systems, just finding directions to get from here to my parents' house.

Support commerce in a really big sense.

Absolutely.

Everything that you have today is just utilizing space.

And no one seems to understand the linkage of that.

And now, to see the US Space Force in action, we were escorted to the observation point by media operations Chief Heather Scott.

She gave us a quick rundown on the impending launch.

In the event of any sort of anomaly or any reason that we need to get out of this area safely and quickly, our cars are backed in so that we can egress quickly.

But in the event of an emergency today, if we need to shelter in place, that's our vehicles.

So we saw a little bit of venting, you said.

Sure, SpaceX's teams are going through all of their final checkouts, making sure the vehicle is healthy and ready for flight.

From the perspective of our team, the Space Force folks that are in the operation center are doing the exact same thing.

So they're running through, making sure that weather is still green, that the range-- that we don't have any aircraft in the keep out zones as well as Mariners so that we don't have a fouled range.

And then when do we start getting excited?

You're not excited already?

[laughter] Well, I love seeing first timers see their first launch.

Just seeing it through your eyes is that much more exciting.

Because it doesn't ever get old.

I'll watch that.

But I'll watch you guys probably too.

So this is a Falcon 9.

You'll have the booster.

On top of it, you'll have whatever the payload is that they're taking.

That will separate hopefully.

[laughter] We won't see stage separation because it's so clear and sunny today.

At night, you can even see where the first and second stage separate.

The booster, that first stage, burns back and lands on the drone ship or on land depending-- and actually, this one's burning back to a drone ship landing out in the Atlantic.

You've had how many this year so far?

This is 18 maybe.

18?

I have to look it up.

But we're tracking 66 potential launches this year.

So 66 to-- Whoa, that's a lot of launches.

[interposing voices] So pardon the pun, but there is an acceleration of launches.

Absolutely.

Yes, the shuttle program ended in 2011.

And people thought that this area just went dormant.

The Space Coast is alive and well.

Here we go.

Oh, there you go.

Oh.

Oh!

Oh, man!

Whoa.

Holy cow, that's amazing!

Yeah!

That's incredible.

You feel it.

[interposing voices] You feel it.

You feel it.

This is-- Since they started-- First launch.

First launch.

It's easy to get distracted by what's right in front of us.

But sometimes, it pays to stop and wonder what's going on up there.

We may not understand what they do and why they do it.

And there may be those that don't agree with the whole mission of any military branch.

But it's clear that Space Force plays a critical role in our daily lives and the lives of those with the future of our species in mind.

We don't know what benefits will come from space exploration.

But we do know that space will ultimately be another place filled with people and their interests.

And where there are people, there are opportunities to make things better.

There's so much more to explore.

And we want you to join us on The Good Road.

For more in-depth content, meet us on the internet at thegoodroad.tv.

Hear more great stories, connect to organizations, and make sure you download our podcast Philanthropology.

Funding for The Good Road has been provided by-- Every road is a good road when you're behind the wheel of a Toyota electrified vehicle.

From the hybrid Sienna and plug-in hybrid RAV4 Prime to the fuel cell Mirai and all-electric bZ4X and with available all-wheel drive on select models, they're designed to go the distance, whether you're driving to work, school, or down the Pacific Coast Highway.

Proud sponsor of The Good Road.

Toyota, let's go places.

Technology changes the world but not on its own.

Hardware needs heart.

Software needs soul.

When we match compute power to instinct and acceleration to imagination, tomorrow comes alive.

For us, it's not what we achieve alone but sharing a vision to solve the world's most important challenges.

Because together, anything is possible.

AMD, together, we advance.

And by Uncommon Giving, the generosity company.

At Plow & Hearth, we believe that the place you are could become the place you want to be.

Philanthropy Journal, stories about bold people changing the world.

[music playing]