Outside Information: Sputnik to Artemis II, NDEs to UAPs, Disclosure & Project Hail Mary | Dr. Helm

Artemis II is on its way around the Moon, and we use that moment to ask a blunt question: are we living through a new era of space exploration, or a new era of space storytelling? Our guest, Dr. Neil Helm, has the kind of career that cuts through the noise. He started on a space tracking team as a teenager with a top secret clearance, worked through ComSat and DARPA, and spent decades around the policy and technology circles that shaped the modern space age.

We talk UAP disclosure without the usual vague posture. Helm describes being part of an IEEE-hosted group tasked with reviewing “all space,” including UFO reports and the possibility of nonhuman intelligence, and how summaries were passed upward through official channels. We dig into what disclosure looks like in practice, who actually filters information, and why public readiness feels different today than it did in the 1990s.

Then we go where most Moon base and Mars mission hype refuses to stay: the human body. Radiation exposure, abrasive lunar dust, long-duration health effects, and the gap between optimistic talking points and medical reality all come up, including comparisons between NASA messaging and Russian cosmonaut reporting. We also connect the outer frontier to the inner one through Helm’s account of a near-death experience, spiritual practice, and his interest in consciousness, dreams, and telepathy.

If you care about Artemis II, space policy, UAPs, UFO disclosure, consciousness research, and what it would really take to live off Earth, this one is for you. Subscribe, share this with a friend who loves space, and leave a review to help more listeners find the show. What’s your line between “possible” and “promised” when it comes to the Moon and Mars?

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Transcript

Artemis II And Disclosure Context

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 0:20

Hey Moose. We are one day we're recording this one day after the Artemis II mission got airborne on its way to the a trip around the moon. We have uh astronauts Reag Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen uh on the capsule now. They're underway to go around the moon. It's been over 50 years since we've done that. Uh, some other context. Um, the movie came out late in 2025 called The Age of Disclosure. Still generating a lot of buzz. You're hearing a lot of folks talk about this. UAPs, unknown phenomena. We're also seeing a lot of conversations about consciousness. One of the uh more popular books on the street right now is A World Appears by Michael Poland. It's talking about the nature of consciousness. There's a movie out called Project Hail Mary that I'm gonna go check out tomorrow. We're very excited about that to go watch that movie. And I'm gonna come back to something here in a moment, but I do want to bring up, you know, how does this connect to what you and I talk about quite a bit on the show? And uh, I think it connects right here. And I'm showing an image of John Boyd's real observory decided knack loop, but over here on the left side, there's this thing called outside information. There's something going on around us that John Boyd, I think, was aware of. And Moose, I got to ask you this, man. Who is John Boyd working with in the early 90s? And I I'm we might go back to this. Uh, can you give me some ideas on who he was talking to?

Mark McGrath 1:41

Well, we know from the transcript that we did of uh conceptual spiral, he was speaking at Spacecast, which had a lot of fascinating figures, science fiction writers, and others that were kind of talking about the the beyond. I guess I guess like not your not your normal topics for the uh Air Force, as far as we know, but but it was yeah, Air Force's Space Cast. I'm trying to think.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 2:07

Who in the military was he working with or not government? This is where I'm asking you this because I want to see where you go with it. Well, I'm talking milit military and government leaders. Who was he working with early in the early 90s directly?

Mark McGrath 2:18

Dick Cheney, because he he is counseling Dick Cheney on uh the Gulf War. He had been working with Senator Gary Hart uh or people from his staff, but yeah, I think Dick Cheney at the time was the Secretary of Defense. Right.

Neil Helm’s Space Inner Circle

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 2:32

So, okay, this may come up later. I'm not really sure if it will, but let me introduce our guest and let me give you some background on how I met him. Here in Virginia Beach, we have the Edgar Casey Center. I didn't know what that was until about two years ago. One of our guests and friends that's been on the show, his house is actually across the street from where Edward Casey's house is, which is really cool. I'm not gonna give away that address, by the way. But I went over there a couple years ago. Uh, I looked around, I'm like, this is fantastic. There's a nice library up there. You can go look at a lot of things, a lot of fascinating things going on in and around the Edgar Casey Center, and I'll get to that. It's I believe it's called the ARE. But a few months ago, uh, I saw them advertise this event for a discussion on the age of disclosure. So I went there with my dad, and we sat there for a couple hours and we listened to these speakers. And one of the speakers was our guest tonight, and that is um Dr. Neil Helm. Dr. Helm, so glad you're here with us. I know you and I had uh lunch a few weeks ago. It was an amazing conversation. Uh I want to engage with you on some of the things that we just brought up the last few minutes Artemis, the moon, maybe space exploration, the UAPs, age of disclosure. I'm gonna just throw it back to you and say, where do you want to start tonight?

Neil Helm, PhD 3:45

Thank you, Brian. It's nice to be with Mark and you tonight. I look forward to talking it, talking about space primarily. Uh I spent pretty much an entire career. I at age 17, I went in the Army Security Agency just out of high school. And uh when I was still 17, from a farm boy right on the Montana North Dakota border, farm and ranch kid. And by the time I was still 17, I had a top secret clearance, and I was assigned to the first space tracking team, went to a course that sort of MIT taught, just this one course, on uh on propagation, the different layers and radio through propagation. And then we we were shipped out to Fort Wachuca in the desert, in the Sonora Desert, uh south and uh a little bit west of Tucson. And there I was just a grunt. I mean, I was 17, 18 years old then, and I came off a farm and ranch where I had tools and build things and do things. So I was just the guy that put up the antennas, and and we were there, and this was classified for 50 years. We were there when Spudnik Guan in October 6, 1957, came over the horizon, and we tracked it on its first orbit, and so in that sense, I feel like I can talk about being in space from the first day. Nice. Even though I was I I made no decisions at that time. But when I uh got out of the army uh and went to school, I I kept my interest in space, uh, took a lot of courses in physics and geometry in addition to courses that I took in international relations. And so I joined ComSat, uh education satellite corporation in '67. I was working at Georgetown University, finishing, trying to finish a graph, a graduate degree. And very quickly at Comsat, first few years I was my job initially was assistant to the technical vice president, who really, in many ways, was number one or number two in the corporation. There was a president. But um, my boss, who is Ryger, Sigmund Riger, and he was at Penamundi German with von Braun.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 6:05

Wow.

Neil Helm, PhD 6:05

He pulled the shots, and he was really good, as von Braun was later. I mean, they really knew how to organize and make decisions. So my first uh three, four, five years was as his technic one of his technical assistants and then international relations assistant. But then I went to ComSat Laboratories in 70, and in a few years, while I didn't have the exact title, I basically was the chief technology officer of ComSat. And I would get farmed out to NASA, and I was on the road lot giving speeches, going back into space now and also tying together this Hail Mary movie. My boss, the director of ComSat Laboratories, and I answered directly to him, uh, was a a person by the name of uh Dr. Edelson and E D E L S O N. And he was the first assigned, and in the in you guys mean military guys when Kennedy, and and that's a story I may tell a little bit later, started the Apollo the the machinery for the Apollo program. They then vice president Linda Johnson was made the head of the White House Space Policy Committee. He brought it into being. And a number of admirals and generals and captains and colonels all wanted this job, and they gave the DOD to a commander by way of Dr. Burton Edelson, B-U-R-T-O-N. He'd long passed, he'd been passed now for 20 years or more. But he then became the policy wonk, if we can use that word, yeah, in the White House. So very quickly, when Von Braun was down at Huntsville and the NASA administrator was getting getting organized, they often went to my boss for policy guidance. You know, how are we gonna get how are we gonna get this much and how are we gonna do that? And so we went down and he he was not a brilliant, wonderful, beautiful person, my mentor and my best friend in many ways. But he didn't travel very well, and he came out of the military even as a commander, where he had an aid to camp. And so he really needed an aid to camp, and he used me that way. So I would get all the reservations and the cars and the meetings and the telephone, I would get everything lined up. And so as soon as I started doing that, we made our meetings and everything was on time and everything seemed to work. So I always got taken along and to the early space days, to the early astronauts, the meetings, and they all considered Dr. Edelson their boss because he was in the White House and making policy. So, you know, he he carried a big stick.

unknown 9:02

Okay.

Neil Helm, PhD 9:03

And I sitting next to him, got, you know, pulled into this very nice influence. So I knew these people. I knew, and later in my life, when when Von Braun retired from NASA, went to Fairchild, we would have lunch, my boss and and von Braun and his aide-de-camp, and I was the aide-de-camp, Dr. Edelson. And we had lunches with von Braun for a year every couple of weeks. Uh, and then he died quite prematurely of cancer. So he died about six months after our last lunch with him. So I got to know these kind of people and decision makers and those programs. And then quickly, or not so quickly, my peers nominated me to the Academy of Astronautics, which has parity committees, the correct word, comity with the Academy of Sciences. So automatically I was a member of the Academy of Sciences of all countries, near every Academy of Science I could walk into as a member of the U.S. Academy and as a member of the Academy of Astronautics, which was a very difficult academy to get into. One in 1,000 uh space executives got invited to the Academy of Astronautics. Really an elite group of people. And everybody knew that. So we were invited a lot to give speeches and universities and that, so I did a lot of that. Uh and then that was I I left ComSat then in the mid-80s, went to uh kicked around a little bit, but then in 86 time frame, I was picked up by DARPA as their space director. Okay. And so I was given the first small satellite to launch, and and it was partially built when I came into the program, and i it and it wasn't not being built well, so I got it built correctly and got it launched and into space and working. The first small satellite. And DARPA doesn't uh and then it that that particular program, uh it was slightly classified, one deep deep black, and I decided not to go deep deep black in those years.

Speaker 3 11:23

Okay.

Neil Helm, PhD 11:24

And so I left, and my boss, who was after he left ComSat Labs, Bert Edelson, became the number two or number three person at NASA. He was the associate administrator for alt science and technology that was also an associate administrator for space for manned space. And so he had that, and then as he was getting ready in 1990, he retired from that, and he, and we were still in close call, he said, Neil, let's start an academic center in space. And we had a number of universities that would welcome us. We ended up choosing George Washington University in Washington, D.C., because we both lived relatively close to it. And he passed in the 10th year or 12th year of that, and I was always a deputy director. He very much more and more became a figure, wonderful figurehead and carried the torch. But I ran the Institute of Applied Space Research. So Dr.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 12:23

Hill basically it's safe to say that you knew the people that knew things from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. You were in the circle. You were in the inner circle of things, right? That's correct. Okay, so what I find is I didn't know them all, but I'm right. So we know that there are no coincidences in this universe, uh, that things happen for a reason. And when you and I connected, we really didn't talk a lot about what we're talking about now, but I do want to go back to that conversation you and I had. I want to go back to your childhood and make the connection to Edgar Casey. And and I think it's just amazing that uh the story I believe you'll tell connects, has an interesting connection to the story you just told about your your, I guess your abbreviated story about how you're in the inner circle of understanding things that are in space. Can you talk a little bit more about that connection?

Neil Helm, PhD 13:10

Well, if I understand you right, Brian, going back to my childhood, if if if you're uh talking about, I had a near-death experience at age five, where I met God. And I talk to God every day like I talk to you. I'm not a particularly religious person in that sense, but I'm a very spiritual person. And if you know the differentiation of that. So, yeah, so having the near-death experience and having this relationship with God, he gave me a number of gifts. So we're starting as a teenager, and he said, you know, I'll give you these gifts, but you do them for our work. And so I don't gamble, I've never gambled. I know who's gonna win the horse race, but I I of course don't gamble or don't say anything about it. But he gave me gifts of telepathy and psychic number of psychic gifts, telekinosis, I can move things around, and then pre- and and a number of gifts, but then I also have pre- and post-cognition. That is to say, I can see somewhat in the future and somewhat into the past. I don't see everything on either side, but I see certain things. And all of these gifts have been responsible for making decisions and meeting the people I did and doing the things that I did.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 15:29

Right. So there are no coincidences, and that's what my point is. Another question to you is I don't think our listeners know Edgar Casey. Can you talk a little bit about his background and the center as well?

Neil Helm, PhD 15:39

He was a a seer, um born in in uh 1887 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. Not educated, went through the eighth grade only, but he also had a near-death experience at roughly the same age, five to six, found as I did, and also was given a set of gifts. Now, I'm not Edgar Casey in any way, shape, or form, or very unique, different people, but we both have a set of gifts. His somewhat different than mine, but we had a number of gifts in common. And so when I probably finished graduate school, had time to read a few extra books, I began to read up on levels of consciousness and dreams and near-death experiences and all of that. And his name certainly popped up right away. And I realized very quickly, as soon as I started reading his works, that he also had a near-death experience. It became very clear to me.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 16:41

And then your Jesuit training at GW, you you were introduced to various readers, and we've had this conversation. Uh I want to I want to bring in Moose here for a second. Moose, I know you're dying to ask the question.

Mark McGrath 16:52

Yeah, do you ever look at the work of Taard de Chardin?

Neil Helm, PhD 16:58

Sure. I'm you know, at Georgetown, I matriculated at Georgetown.

Mark McGrath 17:02

Yeah, that's that that's a that I was interested just because that's a Jesuit school and he was a Jesuit and I went to I went to Jesuit schools.

Neil Helm, PhD 17:09

Okay. Well, of course, you know, we sure I I had to take I had to take a number of courses on on uh metaphysics and uh logic and and certainly had to read desjordan, of course.

Mark McGrath 17:22

Well what's interesting about that, I mean, we we've we um you know we talked more and more about his work and John Boyd had read Terre de Jordan, and and there is something about consciousness that he had talked about that was suppressed by the Catholic Church for many, many years until early in the century. Yeah.

Neil Helm, PhD 17:40

Well, there's there's w I sort of gravitated more and more. Well in my later work work, my later life, I became a psychologist and got a doctorate in psychology. And in that but even before I got there, I was a student of Freud and Jung and the psychoanalytic community, and I think they had more because you say, because so much of Dishardin's work was limited, and I really, you know, I certainly read them when I was back in college now, 70 years ago, but I'm much more on levels of consciousness and all of this. I'm much more attuned to the more, well, to the psychoanalytic leaders, but then they're the people who are talking about levels of consciousness and dreams and near-death experiences. I've got a talk, a podcast again in four days, where I'm doing it on dreams. So I'm still talking about this, and I'll there are a number of dream people that and levels of consciousness people that are more contemporary these days that I also follow to some extent.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 18:52

During the uh panel discussion at the Edgar Casey Center, where you guys were talking about the age of disclosure, Danny Sheehan was sharing the stage with you. He was remote, he was on Zoom, but he kept bringing up uh the phenomenon of man. And uh that's that's when I started to go, wait a minute, there's another connection here when we're talking about space, UAPs, UFOs. And then you and I had a conversation, and Moose is very familiar with this conversation as well, and that is the telepathy tapes. Uh, we've had Dr. Moose Mossbridge on on our show, our friend Sarah, she's had um uh Kai Dickens on her show to talk about the telepathy tapes as well. And what you're talking about dreaming, uh, we're talking about telepathy, we're talking about UAPs, uh the newsphere, Omega Point. Um, to me, and we've actually had a conversation about psychedelics, um, uh Dr. Helm, but all these things seem to me to be very similar. Um are we wrong in thinking like that?

Neil Helm, PhD 19:40

Well, no, I again in my talk uh at the ARE, and I I uh being a scientist, I I always feel that I have to start with with at least briefly with the science. Um I can remember when NASA initially talked about uh billions of suns. And then we finally got to the trillion, some trillion of suns. And then there was a little article, and now this was 15 years, well, 10 to 15 years ago, a little article on page four of the Washington Post says NASA finds an additional trillion suns. And now with the more recent galactic studies are now showing billions and hundreds of billions, thousands of billions, and with throughout the galaxies. And so if and I agree that's true, and if you think that each of these sun stars have some planets orbiting around them, which many of them do. We we've we've seen the exoplanets on our telescopes. We've just seen that just the outer surface of it. But we would be this is my statement, we would be extremely naive if we were to think that we were the only people in the universe.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 21:03

So you don't think we're alone in the universe, right?

Neil Helm, PhD 21:06

No, no, no. Then either read into or researched a lot of UFO sightings and read some good books and followed up and did my research, and no, we're talking to astronomers, you know, I knew uh and and I no, we're certainly not alone.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 21:26

Okay, so I don't know how far we can push you on this, and you can push back, but we're getting a lot of you know the disclosure, you know, conversations from by people in my community, uh, the the the USS Nimitz incident uh on the West Coast. We know Ryan Graves talks about this quite a bit, Lieutenant Graves talking about uh his his interaction or his sightings of UAPs. So there are there's something out there. I mean, we don't know what it is. But what is your experience? How much can you share with us what you know about these things, if anything at all?

Neil Helm, PhD 21:57

Well, what I taught what I talked about at the ARE, and and I can repeat most of it, is that yeah, in 92 then I was at George Washington University, and I was then that was the year, or 91 was the year that I got into the academies, and I was invited to join a uh uh an academic was more of an academic group uh of usually 15 to 18 of us, and we were hosted by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, IEEE, which is very excellent, very well understood, and uh uh uh a very valid organization as an sum group. Um to and our mission of these 15 to 18 people was to look at all space, to look at everything. And so we looked at space technologies, we looked at comets and asteroids, and then we looked at the potential of UFOs and the potential of aliens. Not all 15 of us necessarily participated in that part. I can't break that up, but a group of us did. And we wrote then we met. Monthly, only once a month. And we had a staff though. We had a staff that pulled through the IEEE that pulled material together for us. Like we always had the MUFON, the mutual UFO network, that already had thousands of experts out in the field that would go to every sighting and get research, get material. And we would always include the MUFON Monthly Report and how many sightings there were and that kind of thing. So we'd pull all of this together. And I gave I was the deputy chair of that committee for two years and then the chair of that committee for the last two years from uh from uh 2000 to 2004. I was either deputy chair or chair. And I would handle hand my report off to a handler, and I understood it went to the White House and the Pentagon. And it's my understanding that that every new president would get read into, and we all had, all 15 of us had at least a top secret clearance. So going back and looking at this, what what um Christopher Norton and this legacy and this age of disclosure sort of wanted to say, well, this is the legacy group that wouldn't tell the American people of the world about what was really going on. And I sort of disagreed with that because especially when I'll use this example, some UFOs were really spotted over the Maelstrom air base in Montana, where there are some underground launching facilities. So you had three different, you know, viewings of these craft. And was certainly my recommendation to the White House and the Pentagon, you know, this is one that you probably should tell people about. You know, when you get when you get three validations, and that's the way we that's that's the way I handled the committee. Now, certainly there were some things, yeah, we didn't say, and and you have to go back then when I started in um uh 80, 92, excuse me, um, people would have been more fearful if we had come out right then and said, hey guys, there's all these things happening and all of this. But we certainly, as the years progressed, and I think by 2004, uh, and certainly recently, the figure of people who know about UFOs, or UAPs or aliens, went from say 30% back in the 90s early 90s to 85, 90 percent today. So they're the same information. If we give it and people are giving it today, you know, would I certainly have voted for giving out more information all along? And I think I think now we no longer will scare people.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 26:44

Okay. So there was what I'm hearing from you is you you your pro that program you were part of, whatever it may have been, wasn't the filter you weren't filtering information. You were providing information to people that ultimately filtered that information and said what would be uh uh kept secret and what would be released to the public, right? You is that what I'm hearing from you? You you weren't the one filtering it, right?

Neil Helm, PhD 27:06

We gave them a report that that that from us and we were all top secret. I I didn't go into clearances beyond that. I didn't I didn't, as I said, I just gave it off to a to a handler, and I what what he or she at the time did with it, I you know, we just gave him a report.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 27:23

All right, so uh I'm gonna and you can you can you don't have to answer these questions, but I'm gonna go back to that event that was at the Edgar Casey Center and some of the things that I heard, and not necessarily from you, and this goes back to what you just said about presidents. You said that most of the presidents are briefed up on this, uh, whatever this may be. But at that event, I heard that there may be people in our government that don't brief the president on everything, right? And there may have been some handlers that prevented.

Neil Helm, PhD 27:49

Yeah, no, that wasn't true. But uh I you can maybe talk about what uh Daniel Sheehan said. I mean, he said that I think he worked briefly or had um inputs into the second Bush. Now the first Bush was HW was director of the CIA, so he certainly knew what was going on. The second Bush, I think whether he he didn't want to sit through all the briefings, I can't speak for him or or anybody else. But I gather he was a little bit surprised by some of this. Like he should have known something. I think he also talked about opening up, but he wasn't sure what he was. Oh, and there's a story told that that he had not been read in to any sighting or an alien sighting or something. And he said, you know, why am I not being read into this? I that's somebody else talking. I don't know that story.

Area 51 Relocation Rumors

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 28:48

Okay, no, and I I appreciate that. Um but can we can you talk a little bit about uh your experience uh if you have any experience at Wright Patterson Air Force Base and Area 51 and maybe what these things look like? Uh not not the aliens, because I don't know they exist, but the what what's you know, why why is Area 151, Area 150 Area 51 so important, and why is uh Wright Patterson Air Force Base so important in this conversation?

Neil Helm, PhD 29:12

I can't speak a lot about either one. Okay, Brian. Let me say what what I said, which is uh is interesting because I only can say this because it became unclassified, and I'd read it in the paper, and and uh and and in this, it's generally known, this this part of it. Um Area 51 lies in sort of a valley, and on at least three sides there are hills, two big sides. There's a bluff in one side and hill on sort of the other. I don't want to get into all the training features, but anyway, it's in the valley. So this area where there was a sort of a, but it wasn't too steep for bluff. Um there became a village of um big motor homes. And there would be, you know, 30, 40, 50 motor homes parked right up on the top of the ridge looking down on Area 51. And, you know, that was just sort of they camped there, some would spend weeks, some would may have spent months, but so they, you know, and a lot of the activities I I I guess I I don't know. They tried to tried to do stuff at night, stuff where all of this wasn't viewed, but it was pretty hard. And then the other thing that I that was in the paper, so I can say this, that the security people came along and said, hey guys, you have two like 12-foot fences. One of those motorhomes, or two or three of them, coming down, and it wasn't so steep that they could not come down it and really gain some speed. I mean, they'd be going 60, 70 miles an hour. If those big motorhomes hit those fences at 60, 70 miles an hour, they'd they'd blow right through them. So you cannot, with at least the security that you have at this point is not appropriate for some things you're doing or want to do. So at that point, they chose to move 51 somewhere else. And the way I think I tell this is that there was a lot of, again, those who were in that area and sort of knew about this and I had gone to a lot of these conferences and where a bunch of us got invitees to to work there. And it was in Dayton, Ohio. So we were invited to to work in Dayton, and what's in what and then of course they said you you were at right path, right pathway. And so the whole community sort of sort of knew that's where Area 51 moved to to a big underground. Then it was in the paper, I think, at one point in one of the Dayton or one of the Ohio papers that there was just a lot of construction going on under the runways, and it's just a quite a large underground facility there.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 32:05

All right. So I can't remember if we had this conversation about the importance of Easter 2026. And I can't remember if you if we we were talking about Chris Bledsoe at all, or if if you're familiar with his work, UFO of God, but he he's you know, 2012, and I think this has been out on the internet for a little while, and I I I follow what he he's said, and I read his book, but this weekend is pretty important, this this uh holiday weekend. He what what he's claimed in 2012 from his encounters with UAPs or UFOs or non-human intelligence, is that these missiles that are flying between Israel, Iran, and America, there's gonna be some type of intervention by UAPs. Does this make any sense to you?

Neil Helm, PhD 32:47

So certainly a space launch would would would get their attention. It's my understanding that that we're being mob, we've been being monitored for a long time, perhaps thousands of thousands of years. And that we're being monitored and certain things will will kick off when and and certain things will kick off their monitoring devices, which are pretty much all automatic, and they'll they'll then get a closer look at what's going on. So a space launch uh is something that they monitor because they want to know what's coming out their way and what we're doing and what expertise we have. Um I told a little bit of of this story, but I I I the way I was read into it, it was not absolutely happened. It was not absolutely the truth. I mean, it was not even though it was highly classified, it it was it was not necessarily the truth. However, when Danny Sheen mentioned it in the first broadcast, uh uh and I've heard it one once or twice other than that, uh in open open, so I have to assume, I mean he said it, I mean he said it twice, I believe, uh, that President Eisenhower and I may not have all the facts perfect, but in 1958 was contacted by two groups of aliens and met with them out in the Four Corners area in the desert, in the United States desert. And they first off said, you know, you're just such a beautiful blue-green planet. The most of these billions of planets out there, most of them are gray and tan. But you have a beautiful green blue planet here and water and all that good stuff. Um and we've been monitoring you for quite a long time and references to again thousands of years. And then they said, but why are you such warmongers? For goodness sakes, you go to war and kill people because they look different from you. You go to war because different cousins are on different sides of a philosophy, you go to war over religion, you go to war because they speak different or believe different, you kill each other, you bomb each other's women and children. What's wrong with you people? You're a bunch of warmongers. You know, and that's basically what they said. And they said, you know, we'll it we'll show ourselves to you when you get your act together a little bit. But as long as you keep bombing and killing women and children indiscriminately, then we want nothing to do with you. And then there was a couple of things that they said, you know, as we monitor you, one of the things we don't want you to do is to put nuclear weapons in space. Not only because they'll hurt you, the blue, beautiful, blue-green planet, but s one of our neighbors may come along and very well steal it. So don't put nuclear weapons in space. And that briefing supposedly is given to every president when they come into office. Okay. I can't say for sure it was, but whatever.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 36:21

What's absolutely mind-blowing right now is um if you look at what you just said, or you go back to what you just said, what Chris Bledsoe is pointing out there, and the fact that the Artemis mission, I believe it'll be on the dark side of the moon on Easter. I might be off a day on that.

Speaker 3 36:36

Yes, okay.

Moon Mapping And No Dark Side

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 36:37

That is it's just, I mean, this weekend is pretty important. And I don't know when we'll release this podcast, and we might do it earlier rather than later. But can you talk a little bit about the moon? You know, this desire to put a base on the moon and/or Mars. What are your thoughts on that?

Neil Helm, PhD 36:52

Well, I'm always interested when I find people that that don't know their geometry, for example, and they say, oh, well, you know, the Chinese or the Russians have all of these facilities on the dark side of the moon. And what they don't realize is that we see the moon in one orbit. But if somebody goes up in another orbit in relationship to the sun, and all of our problems that we put up way back in the early Apollo days, they go behind what we call the dark side of the moon when it's light.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 37:28

Right, right.

Neil Helm, PhD 37:29

When the sun shines on it. There's no dark side of the moon. I mean, we we we see a bright side, and we because the moon doesn't rotate, but all the probes and that we've set up, we have mapped the backside of the moon down to the meter, as far as I know.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 37:48

So we know what's on it, we we know what's on the other side of the moon, right?

Neil Helm, PhD 37:52

Absolutely.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 37:53

Okay. A quick question, and I learned this recently, and maybe I learned it when I was a kid, but you just pointed out our our moon isn't rotating. Do other moons in the un uh in the solar system rotate? Most everything rotates in space. Okay, is that weird to you that our moon doesn't rotate?

Neil Helm, PhD 38:08

Because that's how they that's how they make that's how they maintain their their um direction and and their their stability and all of that. A rotating device like a top, the momentum and rotating will give it a stability. Okay.

Mark McGrath 38:26

So that's synchronous rotation, right? Isn't it synchronous with its own?

Neil Helm, PhD 38:31

No, the sync synchronous is not the right word, Mark.

Mark McGrath 38:34

But like I guess I guess when I'm sitting here in Manhattan and I'm looking up at the full moon, I'm always gonna Mark, you can yes, I'm sorry.

Neil Helm, PhD 38:41

You can say synchronous to us in the Earth. That's correct.

Mark McGrath 38:44

Yeah.

Neil Helm, PhD 38:45

But it has the moon has is a little bit oblong and has a, and because of that, has a little bit of an orbit of itself in relation to the sun and us. So that when we say I think what 328,000 or 325,000 is on the low side, 352,000 or something's on the high side. So it goes back and forth a little bit. But no, you're right, Mark. In relation to the Earth, it is uh uh geosynchronous.

Radiation Dust And Human Limits In Space

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 39:14

So back to putting base on the moon and/or Mars. What are your thoughts on that? Your thoughts on us putting uh a base on the moon and/or Mars?

Neil Helm, PhD 39:22

I think you have to ask the question why um have we gone more than 50 years without going back to the moon? And there are a whole uh plethora of reasons. But the one I think that that is perhaps most interesting to your group is that what I've found in continuing space with the shuttle programs, and then I had a pretty good relationship with and through the Academy of Astronautics, a lot the second largest group in the Academy of Astronautics are Russians. And so when we go to these meetings, which we uh go to at least one or sometimes two or three or more years, I would meet with the Russians um and I would get invites to to their meetings, and I had access to their publications in Russian. But what we discovered, and I'm not trying to say that NASA or anybody lies to us, but they just don't tell us everything. And so what we found just in going to the moon in the Apollo program is that the radiation is worse probably than they initially predicted. And the effects of the radiation are worse than they initially predicted. And like the the moon dust, uh, if you pick up dirt and dust on Earth, you know it's soft, it's dust. On the moon, the dust is like clinkers that you would get at the bottom of a stove in the old years when you burn coal. And or the other way of saying it, they're like snowflakes. The dust on the moon have sharp edges. They're like snowflakes, they've got just a bunch of edges. So what NASA hasn't said is that even from six, eight hours of walking on the moon, for example, the bottoms of their flight suits and their flight shoes were really torn quite dramatically. So that the basic of this point is that the moon, and and don't get me into Mars, it's even worse, that these places, and then into the shuttle, and the Russians went there the longest, and so I got debriefed on a number of the Russian cosmonauts. And by the way, I was on the team, so to speak, on the international comm team for Apollo Soyuz in 75. So I got to know a number of the well, both cosmonauts that flew then, but I got to know the training team in then the former Soviet Union, then the Soviet Union. So again, I've got really strong Russian connections. But medical reports coming back from the in Russia, the Russian medical reports were were much more dire than NASA's medical reports. So that the cosmonauts, you had the eyes, the back of the eyes would deteriorate. You had really a serious bone deterioration and other effects. One of the last, and I've again I could be raw, I forget which one it was, but I went one of the last big space conferences I was went to was in Marston, D.C. I don't know, about five, six years ago. And uh, I think it was Cooper, Coop was there, and he was bent over absolutely right from the waist. I mean, he his ears were at the same level as his belt. And, you know, he didn't fly a lot. The retinous was the word I was talking about. The retinous came apart, and then what the Russians, more than NASA, tell us is that, and the doctors tell us that the human body, this body that we have evolved into, is not well suited for space. It really isn't. We need a lot of water, we need a lot of food, we don't like the radiation. It really, and this whole thing about putting people to sleep for a long time and waking them up again, the the Russians have wrote on this, you know, it just won't work. While you're asleep, again, the retinas detach. So you can't see, you wake up your blind. And there's just there's just some there's and uh the example I I give one of this is a briefing again 20, 30 years ago, and then a NASA official was giving it, and he said, the loss from uh from bone loss is is three percent. And he was talking on and talking on, and I couldn't resist myself. And I said, you know, and the question answer said, so you said three percent? They said, Yes. I said, Well, it's really more than that. He said, Well, no, no, it's it's three percent a month, and uh, he forgot to say a month. So a ten-month astronaut lost basically a third of their b of their bone structure. Once you say up there a year. And now the later astronauts and cosmonauts did more exercise and learned a few things. But basically, they were losing initially they were they were losing that much. They were losing a third of their bone mass in a year in in the space station.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 44:57

Mars. Uh, you just said it's not worth going there.

Neil Helm, PhD 44:59

It's it's just this whole community, and I'll you have to tell people I'm in my eighty eighth year, so I won't not gonna be around here that much longer. In any case, there's a lot of people in space for as in other things for just money and greed. And and we're gonna have a well. Well, I won't get into it. But anyway, the talks of space habitats is just it's it's just a lot of people getting investors to spend a lot of money, in my opinion. So totally my opinion, it's something that's just not gonna happen or happen very well. And again, in Mars, the radiation is even worse. The weather is even worse, the dust storms and all of that is really, really harsh. So, and the radiation on Mars is much worse in the on the moon. And so, okay, you spend eight to sixteen hours a day down in some under some lead thing staying away from the radiation. Well, that's not a habitat. That's and then even that, and when you go out, you still get some you still get some level of radiation. So that's really and and one of these people just recently, and I won't name names or give companies or anything, but he says, Well, we'll we'll go to we'll go to Mars, and if we catch everything at the right time of the year, our year, and we catch all the planets right, and everything, we'll we'll we'll we'll catch the the thrust, and instead of being 350 days or something like that, oh we can do it in 250 days. But then so then he says, so the mission is 500 days. Well, going one way is like going with the tide or going down a fast stream. If you're going down the stream, everything's pushing you. If you want to turn around and come back up the stream or go against the tide, you're not gonna do it in the same number of days because now you're fighting the tide, and the planets are not in the right order. And so, you know, saying, oh, well, we'll do it in five other days or something, and you know, it's they've they use this kind of logic that and the NASA community knows this, and uh a lot of the people know this, but again, you're there's they're trying to make a lot of money and get people interested, and to some extent, there's a and NASA uses this in the early days. We as humans are built with a desire to investigate, and so that's a part of our DNA. And therefore, we are just made in our DNA to investigate the world, investigate the cosmos. And again, I just fall back on our bodies, I just haven't evolved with the ability to do that.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 47:50

It may be possible many, many, many, many years in the future. Um, I do want to uh pause there for the evening. This has been a fascinating conversation. There's so many other areas we could talk about from NDEs to uh hypnotherapy to uh psychedelics, but I want to keep it there for now. And I do want to give you the opportunity to share with our listeners what you're writing about, if you don't mind sharing what your book is about. Can you do that for us? Look, I'm really not writing a book on this. I know, but you are writing a book, and it's not on this, but can you tell our listeners? Yeah, yes.

Neil Helm, PhD 48:21

So I write every day, and I have a uh a Zoom group that we get together. I'm writing a book on the great earthquake, the greatest natural disaster in the loss of lives in all of humankind, and it happened in our lifetime. Maybe Mark's too young, but happened in my lifetime in 1976, our bicentennial year.

Mark McGrath 48:46

That's the year I was born. Next month is my my birthday.

Neil Helm, PhD 48:51

Okay. So I and one of my I have I'm a curious individual, so I was into a lot of different science things, and one of them was uh seismology, earthquake, vibrations that go through our planet. And so I I lectured for uh and hung out for a weekend in Uppsala, Sweden, where they have the big, the number one seismology center in the world is in Uppsala, Sweden. And I learned seismology, and then in 76 I had developed the first satellite phone. I built my team at ComSat Labs at that time. I had, I don't know, eight, ten, twelve teams that worked for me, groups of engineers and technicians. And one of my teams that I started, and really was one of my favorite teams, was to build smaller and smaller antennas. And the people downtown in ComSat kept saying, no, you can't do that. You can't do that. You know, many reasons, and you can't, don't, don't, we won't give you any money. Whatever you do, don't build small antennas. And I'd go 30 miles out to ComSat Laboratories, which is outside of Washington. I'm just building small antennas. And I bought them, get them down to basically one meter, even 800 centimeters. And so, but they said, Oh, you build one of those, you know, you terrible person. What are you gonna do with it? And I said, Well, you you certainly don't want you to do anything commercial with it. And going back to my near-death experience, I really talked to God, we really like to do his work. So we sort of agreed, well, let's do disaster mitigation. Let's let's so I the whole 800 centimeter antenna and the first satellite radio was weighed 80, 85 pounds. So we could put it in the back of a station wagon and haul it around or put it on a plane. So I started taking it to disasters, Three Mile Island. I took it to the flood in Johnstown, and I took it to a number of, and then I I was saying I was running a bunch of teams. I couldn't do this all the time, so I gave it to the Miami Search and Rescue Group, and they took it internationally. And every time, and and I and I'd read up on a lot of disasters, I'd read 20 or 30 or 50 different accounts of disaster mitigation, and every time when you get there, nobody's in charge if things are going bad, and there's no communications and nothing is going well, and you had a tsunami in the Cook Islands in the Pacific, and they say, okay, the first shipment is coming to you, and it's 2,000 wool blankets. We don't need wool blankets in the tisami and the Cook Islands in 90 degree weather. We need shovels, we need picks, we need that kind of equipment. So these disasters that we went to were just chaos. And then we introduced a phone that could talk to any working phone in the world. We went through the AT ⁇ T switch in in New York. So we could call any working phone if she had a number. It just turned the face of disaster mitigation around. I mean, it was just unbelievable when people found out that they had not only, we had three channels, we had a voice channel, then we could divert a voice channel to data, faximile, and small data in those cases. And so we could send faxes, we could send data things, and we could talk through two channels. And it it just so I was doing that in disaster mitigation. And I had a group of friends in seismology, so they called me and said, Oh, it was a big earthquake in China, really big earthquake, and in July 28th, coming the summer. So I and I'd go through my seismology group and I had a contact in Beijing, and I called him. I was surprised to get through. And I said, I understand you had a big earthquake. Yes. And I said, Well, I've got a working telephone. I can get it there in 24 plus hours. Okay. And should I bring it? Well, let me talk to my boss. And then he came back and said, No, we're not inviting any outside help. They didn't invite the United Nations, they didn't invite the Red Cross, they didn't invite anybody to this earthquake, which took the the the statistics are way off. They came up with a figure of 244,000 people that were killed pretty much initially. And then a Western journalist went to that cadryman a few years later and said, You know, sir, what did you base that on? Did you have some kind of records of death records or something? And uh, as the quote goes, Noah looked down on his shoes and said, I just made up the figure. So our research shows that it was closer to 300,000 initially, and then another 200,000 died probably in the next four or five weeks, maybe six, seven weeks, and another two hundred thousand died through the first winter. So we're talking 500 to 700,000 deaths. Now, there are a number of reasons why the Chinese government, and I'm not trying to point fingers, but they've had other things on their mind and they were doing other things, and they never opened this, and they have really, in many ways, not told, especially the outside world, much about this great human tragedy. And so I'm writing a book about it, in both Mandarin and English. And it should be out hopefully in July this year. So I write five pages every day just to well try to anyway. And again, I've I've got a team of writers in China that write it in Mandarin, and I write in English, and like this morning we trade pages, we talk about it, we talk about what we're writing about and share information, and we do that a couple times a week, and uh you know, at least once a week. And it's so it's it's a really fun project. I love it.

Mark McGrath 54:55

It's interesting. We were talking about the Jesuits, they're the fathers of seismology.

Neil Helm, PhD 55:02

Yeah. Well, one of the early earliest priests uh that I met there at Georgetown was the astronomer. He'd been there for in the years or 40 years, and and a great and we had a little telescope there for a long time at Georgetown. But then I forget so much ambient light in Washington.

Mark McGrath 55:21

I forget the number, but I know that like there is a considerable amount of craters on the moon that are named after Jesuit astronomers.

Neil Helm, PhD 55:29

Yeah, I didn't, yeah. I'm I'm I'm not sure I heard that last part of that, Mark.

Mark McGrath 55:33

There's a lot of craters on the moon that are named after Jesuits.

Project Hail Mary And Space Storytelling

Neil Helm, PhD 55:38

Okay, good, okay, sure. Okay.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 55:40

I tell you what, Dr. Helm, this is again just absolutely fascinating. Uh a lot to think about what you shared with us. I think people needed to go look and watch or watch the movie Age of Disclosure. Absolutely go check out the uh new movie, uh Project Hail Mary. We're gonna go look at it tomorrow. But any last thoughts from you uh before we sign off, Dr. Helm?

Neil Helm, PhD 56:00

Well, yeah, I hope you enjoy Project Hail Mary. As I had mentioned, my nephew's the co-director, Lord and and Miller, and my nephew's Phil Lorde, Philip Lord, and as I tell that story, the Lord family's big, well, Mayflower on both sides, and big industrial family in New England, big family in New England congressman from Maine, and and um so it's a big 40 of us or more get together a number of times a year, and then he was my nephew, so and he's very, very curious, very bright, very extremely talented individual who's done a number of movies. He's got what two senior moments, the big things that you hold in your hand for movie.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 56:43

I don't know, is Oscar? Is it an Oscar? Yeah.

Neil Helm, PhD 56:45

I think he's got two Oscars already for Spider-Verse and and um and anyway, he's just very bright and very talented. And we talked about Space 2001 Space Odyssey, and he was always sort of interested in my work in space, and you know, and he would he's curious and asked me a lot of questions. Again, my mentor, Bert Edelsut, was a naval attaché in England at the time Space Odyssey was made. Kubrick and Arthur wasn't Sir Arthur yet, Arthur Clark and Kubrick invited my boss to come out and be a technical expert on 2001 Space Odyssey. So then I became through again my mentor, Dr. Edelson, I became really, really good friends with Sir Arthur Clark. And so I was just telling my nephew about some of this, and he said, Yeah, well, maybe there's something on space or something. He's looking around for people wanting to direct movies. I don't claim to be the only reason they did Hail Mary. I certainly don't want to claim that, but I think I put a couple of nuggets in his mind about how interesting it would be to sort of do another space odyssey, and that that's what they did. So you're Oh god.

Mark McGrath 58:02

Now I just kind of had a random human interest question. There was really two people that you had mentioned, one from earlier, but one now. I I guess I was curious to know what they were like as people, but you mentioned Arthur Clark, I mean, being friends with him. What was he like as a person?

Neil Helm, PhD 58:17

Oh my goodness, what a fun guy. And again, extremely curious, extremely bright, extremely motivated. He would come then to ComSat Laboratories. And the first year he met, of course, with Bert Edelson, who we knew well. And Bert called me in. And then for the next, for much all of the 10 years that I was at ComSat Laboratories, Arthur Clark would come for a day of technology. Bert had 30 teams he was running, so he would say, Neil, you take Arthur around and we would go, we would look at batteries and solar cells and orientation systems, telemetry control, just on and on and on. And you know, he had a little book that he carried and he'd write and write and write, and we'd talk about these technologies, and then Bert would and a couple of others would catch up to us. We'd go down to the Cosmos Club in Washington, and we'd a couple of years, I think we stayed there till like midnight. You know, we'd knock back a few glasses of wine, but you know, they're still very cogent and just had these conversations with Arthur and my boss Bert Edelson and a couple of other people, maybe associate NASA administrator or someone of that ilk director of one of the NASA centers, or somebody of that ilk. And we'd we'd meet for four or five hours, four hours at the Cosmos Club having dinner and a few glasses of wine. And then he had a he so Arthur Clark lived in Sri Lanka because he didn't want to pay the taxes that the English government taxed him for his books. So he absolutely moved his bean to Sri Lanka, was a citizen of Sri Lanka, and he had a dive operation there, and I was going to go scuba diver and go scuba diving with him. And then a wind came up and we had to cancel it. So we knew each other on that level.

Mark McGrath 1:00:05

He was big into underwater exploration, too, and I guess I he was very big.

Neil Helm, PhD 1:00:11

One of the books that I have, but I have most of his books. One of them is underwater. He's also again extremely curious on how all this works.

Mark McGrath 1:00:20

Well, I was wondering, you hear about the, you know, Ponch and I both have a naval background, so you think you hear of the oceans and things. I've always thought of the ocean as the undiscovered frontier, and somebody like Arthur Clark that had a deep interest in the ocean and what was beneath.

Neil Helm, PhD 1:00:36

Yes, oh yeah, very much so. Not quite as much as he had in outer space, but he had a real and he lamented, uh uh, as we all still do, that what five percent of the Earth's oceans have been mapped? Yeah, back side of the moon, but we've not mapped it, we've not mapped 95% of our oceans.

Mark McGrath 1:00:55

Last one I guess I had for you was you you'd mentioned Werner von Braun earlier. Did you know him personally?

Neil Helm, PhD 1:01:01

Oh yeah. Well, again, uh after he retired from NASA, he went with Fairchild, and Fairchild had a plat out on 270 or 70 going to uh Frederick's Frederick Comset Laboratories was just a few miles beyond that. So we were out there in the hinterlands, and when he retired, and he knew Bert and he knew me from the old days, and so he I don't know, he's the one I think suggested it. He said, let's get together for lunch every few weeks. Usually we did it on a Friday afternoon. Um now, uh Brian, do you have a story? You have time for a really good five-minute story? Keep going. Let's go.

Mark McGrath 1:01:43

Fire away, yeah.

Neil Helm, PhD 1:01:44

So uh so we met for uh, I don't know, once or twice a month for about a year until his cancer got to the point where and then he died six months later. But sitting with him, he tells this wonderful story, which I've heard other people talk about, and I don't know how many times removed they are, but I sat next to Werner von Braun, and he called me Neil, and I called him Dutch, but anyway, he said, well, and he loved to tell stories, and like most of these people, well, Arthur Clark, same, they love to tell stories, as I Neil Helm does. So he said, Well, you know, you know I wrote a couple of articles in the Collier magazine in 58, 50, 59, or something like that. And so in 60, when Kennedy became president, he called and didn't go through the administrator. Somehow the White House called Von Braun down in Huntsville and said, You know, Dr. Von Braun, this is President Kennedy. I'm really interested in your collier magazine about going to the moon. Do you think we could do that? Very said, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think we can do that. So Kennedy said, Well, come talk to me about it more. And Von Braun said, Well, you know, I'm I'm just a director here at Hudson. You have to go through the administrator of NASA to bring me to the White House. And so, of course, Kennedy did. So Von Braun says, So, flew me up, NASA flew me up. And I had an 11 o'clock meeting with J.F. Kennedy in May of 1960, roughly. Well, I could again be off a month, but roughly it's my under my memory. And so he calls me into his office in at 5, 10 after 11. And he said, Well, Dr. Von Braun, I really didn't like your message. You think we can go to the moon? Von Braun said, Oh yeah, we could do it. And Kennedy says, Well, can we do it in four years? And Von Braun said, No, we can't do it in four years. No, no way to get budgets and everything to do it. And then he said, Von Braun said, he looked at me and he said, and there's a little twinkle in Kennedy's eye, and he said, Well, can we do it in eight years? Of course, thinking Kennedy would be re-elected. He'd get himself re-elected. And Von Braun said, Well, it'd be really tight. We'd have to have everything just go so perfect that needed every deadline to do it in eight years. Then he said, and Kennedy said, Well, damn it, you know, can we do it in this decade, this being May of 60? And Von Braun said, Yeah, we can do it in 10 years, nine and a half years. Kennedy said, Fine, I'm gonna budget. And Von Bon said, Well, yeah, I I go back to headquarters and we get a budget. Then would you like to budget, Mr. President? And he looked at his watch and it was now 20 minutes to 12. And Kennedy said, one o'clock. So Von Bond said, well, I went back to my briefcase, basically on the back of an envelope. I called the administrator, he called his bean counter, and at five minutes to one, we had the Apollo budget laid out at twenty billion dollars. And so at one o'clock, I was ready to go back. And at five after one, he called me and he said, Okay, Von Braun, what the hell will it cost? Von Braun said, Well, Mr. President, if we could do it this decade, it's gotta cost twenty billion dollars. Kennedy said, fine, we'll do it. The next morning, Kennedy, without the NASA administrator being a part of this, Kennedy says, I talked to Von Braun, we're going to go to the moon in this decade for twenty billion dollars. I mean, I understand the NASA administrator wet his pants. You don't make those kinds of decisions in an hour as you know, the government and the DOD in NASA without just a lot of meetings and all this nonsense. Well, Von Bon, aha, you know. So everything he said, and he was an incredibly great planner, and just talking to him the way he talked about they bought this together and that this damn guys didn't work initially, so I did this to him. Damn it, they worked, you know. And we did all that, damn it. We got all and he was very profane, by the way, as these Panamoni Germans. I don't know, again, my boss, first boss Riger, Sigmund Ryger, and these Panamoni Germans, whether they learned English in the US military or whatever, they were all extremely profane. So Von Braun's like, oh, you know, the SOB did that, you know, and he he and and uh by the way, he von Braun was beautifully quaffed and dressed every day, just dressed to the nights. And his hair was just perfect, and and he really knew how to lead people, and he knew how to make decisions. So he laughs and he said, We we had 17 was the last Apollo module. They wanted me to do 18 and 19. 18 was all built, 19 was nearly built, but damn it, I wanted to stay within my budget. And at that point, when 17 came back, the Apollo budget was 19,750 million, said damn it, I wanted to bring it in on time and under budget. I did that, I did that. And then NASA spent another five billion closing it down. But anyway, they now say it cost 24 billion. Something. But Von Braun said he closed the program, Paulo program down at under budget.

Mark McGrath 1:07:23

What was he like? I mean, you had a lot of personal interaction with it. What was he just like as a guy?

Neil Helm, PhD 1:07:29

He trusted I have probably ten pictures of Von Braun in groups with other NASA people. And then nine of them, and and not too too many people do this as it he would take a half a step forward. So he would be just in front of everybody else. Well he was terribly vain. As I said, he dressed impeccably, really expensive clothes, and just quaffed. His hair was always just perfect. And and yeah, he was, but he could, and he loved a glass of wine. We'd we had these Friday afternoons, we'd have a couple glasses of wine. And and again, they would go for a couple of hours. We'd have lunches and talk. And it was just my job to listen as the aide to camp, to listen and ask the right questions. Well, Dr. Von Bon, did this happen? Did this happen? Well, yeah, damn it, yeah, of course it happened. You know, da da. I need to answer that correctly. So yeah, it was very and very, yeah, Neil, damn it, we'll see you in a couple of weeks, you know. Of course. This was some good fun.

Artemis II

Mark McGrath 1:08:29

That's awesome. Thanks for sharing that. It's just uh fantastic story.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:08:33

Again, Dr. Helm, thank you for your time tonight. We'll uh we'll definitely uh have you back on the show to talk about some other things. I think the timing is perfect for where we are. Being in April, Artemis 2 is on its way around the moon. Uh got a movie out there, I think people would see.

Neil Helm, PhD 1:08:48

You know, last 96, 90 seconds. I believe this whole a lot of this push on Artemis was to move the publicity away from a couple of other things that are happening this week that certain people don't want. And they would probably like people to read about the moon and all of this rather than some files or some war or something. So it was the big PR. In 2025, we launched 8,000 satellites, something like that. Nearly all nearly all of them in low orbit, of course. Um we launched in 2025 4,500 satellites in 2025 alone, and 2,800 satellites in 20 in 2024. There are now 12,000 satellites in most in low orbit. But we'd have launches. We have launches, you know, every week. We have launches. So, you know, um, so this one was crude and all that, but there's been launches of people going up the lower lower orbits. So this was a whole to-do, again, about this group that sort of wants to make money now. They they're gonna try to sell this whole habitat situation again to investors who were told the story that it probably is gonna work and they're all gonna make a lot of money, but I just don't see I don't see it happening.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:10:21

Thank you. Oh, thank you again. Uh we'll we'll wrap it up there. We'll keep you on the uh on the recording for a few moments. But uh again, thanks again so much for your time and and Moose. That was just fascinating that that conversation about Von Braun there. So thanks for bringing that out.

Speaker 3 1:10:34

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:10:35

Thanks again, Dr. Albert. We'll keep you on here for a second. Thanks, Doc.

Neil Helm, PhD 1:10:39

Stay safe.