Hi, it's me Tim Dodd the Everyday
Astronaut. This is an Alpha jet. It's a light fighter jet capable of
flying at almost 1,000 kilometers an hour, so just shy of Mach 1. This baby
can pull about eight Gs today. I'm gonna see if I can do that
because I get to ride in this thing. Welcome to Bozeman, Montana. I'm out here with the crew of the Polaris
Dawn Mission for a weekend of fighter jet training. In case you're
unfamiliar with the Polar Dawn mission, this is the second mission funded
by Jared Issacman and this one is extra exciting because they're actually
going to be performing the first EVA or Extra Vehicular Activity
in SpaceX's history. So that means they're actually going to
depressurize the Crew Dragon capsule, they're gonna open up the docking port, and then some of the crew will be able
to go out and just float in space. Which isn't just for fun. They're currently studying if Dragon can
be used to help reboost and service the beloved Hubble Space
Telescope. Yes, that's right. This is being looked at by NASA and
SpaceX as we speak and very well could be the next mission in the Polaris
program after Polaris Dawn, which would be absolutely incredible.
But an EVA like this where you depressurize the entire vehicle hasn't
been done since the Gemini and Apollo program. And doing an EVA is
actually a really big deal. It's actually a really risky thing to do, which is exactly why Jared Isaacman
thinks it's important to train his crew under some stressful and high
risk real world situations. So join me today as we do
something a little bit different. We're gonna be talking to some of
the crew of the Polaris Dawn mission. We're going to be going over the history
of fighter jet training and why they do it. We'll also be talking about the jets and
some of the physics involved and then looking at some of the aerospace
engineering aspects of these planes. And just in case you're here to see
me get thrown around in a fighter jet, I totally understand. I've got timestamps below and the YouTube
time bar is broken up into sections as well. So you can skip right past all
the nerdy stuff and get to the action. Okay, let's get started. 3, 2, 1. Okay, I'm not gonna lie, I wasn't even thinking about or planning
on wearing this Space Shuttle ejection suit hoodie this weekend.
I just happened to... that's the only thing I packed
and it was chilly all weekend. But it's funny because I ended up riding
in a vehicle that has an ejection seat and this hoodie's actually inspired
by the S1030A, a space suit, which is flown on the first four Space
Shuttle missions that had an ejection seat. And this is based off
of the SR-71's flight suit. Because that's a fun fact; the first four Space Shuttle missions
had ejection seats for the pilot and the commander after that they were disarmed
and then totally taken out eventually. Anyway, check out this hoodie and other cool
stuff ar everydayastronaut.com/shop. Okay, now that we've got our
history chops warmed up, let's actually keep going with a little
bit of history. Fighter jet training has been at the heart of human space flight
since the very beginning. In fact, early Mercury astronauts and Soviet
astronauts were all test pilots, so you really couldn't even
have one without the other. But as NASA moved into
the Space Shuttle program, we'd soon see astronauts that
weren't test pilots. Well, we actually saw it in in
the Apollo program too, but the point is the Space Shuttle program
was going to have a lot more civilian astronauts. So even mission specialists who would
never actually be in control of a Space Shuttle were required to fly at
least four hours per month in the T-38. And mission commanders and mission pilots
were actually required to fly about 15 hours per month. And believe it or not, that's actually still true today even
with the commercial program. Now, the number one reason why they still
continue to do fighter jet training today is so that astronauts are used to things
like checklists and communication and situational awareness and just all sorts
of other things in a real world dynamic situation.
But fun fact about the T-38, it was actually specifically helpful
when trying to practice the landing approach with the space shuttle. They actually modified the T-38 to
have a little bit larger air brakes. They'd have the gear out and this all
allowed astronauts to practice that really steep approach angle of the 80 metric
ton flying brick that was the Space Shuttle. But the T-38 was also useful
during actual Space Shuttle missions. You would see them flying along as the
Space Shuttle was coming in for its landing. But the T-38 wasn't actually the best
analog for flying the Space Shuttle for this NASA employed the STA or
the Shuttle Training Aircraft. This was the C-11A, which was a
modified Grumman Gulf Stream II. It was outfitted with Space Shuttle
controls and instrumentation on the commander side so they could practice, but the pilot seat on the right was
actually the normal control sticks. But my favorite thing about the STA is
what it actually took to match the Space Shuttle's landing profile.
At about 11 kilometers, they would deploy the rear landing gear
and only the rear landing gear 'cause the front gear couldn't actually
handle those wind loads, but they would deploy the
rear gear for increased drag. Then the flaps could actually be
deflected upward to decrease lift to match the low lift characteristics of the
Space Shuttle. But that's not all. My favorite thing they did with theta to
match the landing profile was land with the engine thrusters in reverse. Yep. That's what it took to actually match
the landing characteristics of the Space Shuttle. I mean that's pretty ridiculous. You gotta have the flaps inverted the
landing gear out for increased drag and you had to have the engine in reverse.
It's actually a miracle there are no problems with landing the Space Shuttle, but that's enough random history and
facts about fighter jet trainings. Let's get to the point, what is
the point of fighter jet training? With the advent of commercial astronauts
and companies in charge of their own training, some are actually foregoing fighter
jet pilot training altogether and why wouldn't they? Modern
spacecraft are super autonomous. I mean they pretty much
just fly themselves and we
don't have Space Shuttles anymore. There's no like actual
flying of a vehicle altogether. It's pretty much all just a
bunch of falling and parachutes. So why does Mission Commander
Jared Issacman think that
fighter jet training is still important? No, it's a good question. I mean obviously NASA is flying
on Dragon spacecraft same as us. They haven't taken the T-38 away from
their astronauts. In fact, they spend, you know, two years just, you know, familiarizing new astronaut candidates
with you know, T-6, T-38 operations, water survival training. A lot of the same things that we try and
do as part of our missions because it's still an important part of training.
I mean it is a dynamic, you know, G intense environment. You can
work on crew resource management, precision flying, you know, avionic systems that have
a lot of carryover to what
we see in Dragon and it's probably most important, it's high consequence so there's no reset
button like there is in the simulator. You can't just step out of it and
say, "Okay, we got that one wrong. Let's do it again." You know, aircraft, it's totally different environment
and I think that's important. It keeps a good focus. It's why with Inspiration 4 we kept
flying literally right up until the last couple days before launch. It's something we're gonna continue
to do with the Polaris program. So last I just wanted to
talk to you about G forces. And obviously the G force you experience
when pulling a high G maneuver in a jet is a little different than that when
you're accelerating on a rocket. Can you just kind of describe
the differences 'cause
you've experienced both of them now you've experienced the up
to about four Gs on and Dragon and up to eight in you're ,eight or
nine almost in the MiG, right? Yeah. So the Gs you can
pull in a fighter jet, those are the ones that really hurt. So
if you can condition yourself to those, to that kind of a G environment, you
can do really well in space fight. Now that is G Z so
that's along that Z axis. So what it's doing is it's pulling the
blood away from your brain down into your feet and what you have to fight against
there is not losing consciousness. So you are using a G-Suit and you're
tightening every muscle in your body. You're doing everything you can to fight
against the blood that's being pulled down toward, towards your feet. Now in a in a rocket based on
how we're sitting in the vehicle, you're pulling those Gs across
the X axis; so through your chest. And a human body can endorse
so much more. You know, nominal flight in in Falcon and Dragon, you're not really seeing more
than like call it like 4.5, 4.8 Gs depending on whether you're going
uphill or down. You can endure that no problem. You're not worried about blacking out
losing consciousness and it's only for a brief period of time, like the last
call, 30 seconds on the second stage, you know, it's a little bit longer on on reentry
but you're just fighting gets breathing. It just feels like, like an
elephant sitting on your chest. You don't have to worry
about blacking out. It's also why in the launch
escape scenario where there
are certain times on a ballistic re-entry you can get up to
like 20 plus Gs and it's survivable because of the axis you're
pulling it on across your chest. Unlike in a fighter jet, you
pull 20 Gs, I don't know, you're probably not looking the same. Okay. So as Jared mentioned, the forces involved in a jet aren't
quite a perfect analog for flying in a rocket. Now, although you can actually reach higher
G forces on a fighter jet than you would on a nominal space flight mission, the G forces actually aren't along the
same plane. When flying on a rocket, astronauts are pretty much laying on
their back and so the forces are basically just pushing them up along their back as
if you were kinda laying on the ground and gravity just got
stronger and stronger. Now, although fighter jets can pull
some pretty strong longitudinal Gs, they mostly pull Gs thanks
to centripital acceleration. So basically when banking
and pitching really hard, that's when they can pull some real G's. But this is really more
of a compressing G force. So you'll feel like you're getting pressed
down into the bottom of the seat as opposed to getting pushed back
into the back of the seat. These are the same type of G force sthat
you typically experience on a roller coaster and that's because you and
the vehicle you're in have inertia. And even though that vehicle
might change direction, you still wanna keep going in the
direction you were traveling. Okay. That's enough about physics
and the boring history stuff. Let's go take a look at these jets. First off, we have the L-39 Albatross and there's
actually three of these in Jared's fleet. And this is actually one of the most
prolific jet trainers in the world. It's tandem seating. You get two,
which is great of course for training. This thing is extremely rugged. They're known to land on gravel and
things like that. Single engine subsonic, I think it is top speeds 750 kilometers
an hour, something like that. These things, these things out here, these are actually wing tip fuel tanks
to extend the range to the vehicle. It also has... you can pull, like these
things can actually pull about eight Gs. So it makes it great for training
'cause you can, you know, push people pretty hard
in it and, and put, load them up with a
good amount of G forces. Now if you come to the front of the plane,
you actually notice something. These, these jets have very little
dihedral angle about a three degree- That's the angle of
the wings and it's a low slung wing here. So that on this plane
they're a little bit slower. You know, it's the slowest of the three
jet types that that Jared has. And it has a pretty, a
pretty straight wing. They don't have a much of a sweep angle
on 'em compared to the other jets. So you'll notice that the L-39 has
a, like I said, a dihedral angle. But look over here at the Alpha
Jet notice, it has anhedral wings. So the wings are actually
pointed a little bit downward. And what's interesting about that is
it actually makes it more maneuverable. So having a dihedral angle on
your wings makes it more stable. So it makes it so it kind of wants to
auto correct and roll like back to center just naturally. So if you want a vehicle
to be able to roll quickly and do hard maneuvers, you do something like this. So the Alpha Jet here is a
little bit more maneuverable, a little bit more aggressive.
It is dual engine. So even though it looks kind of
similar with the same intakes, it is dual engine and this
thing can fly real quick. This thing's top speed is just
shy of 1,000 kilometers an hour. So it is still subsonic. Another thing you'll notice about these
wings is they're much more aggressive sweep angle compared to the L-39. Now a sweep angle isn't always a direct
correlation with a jet's top speed, but you'll definitely notice any super
sonic jet will have a pretty steep sweep angle, which is exactly what the jet at the
top of this image has come over here. And let's see, Jared's last jet.
All right, and this is the coolest one, at least to me. It's definitely
the fastest. This is the MiG-29. This is the only jet in Jared's
fleet that can fly super sonic. So it can fly like 2,500 kilometers
an hour. So Mach 2, pretty awesome. That's thanks to it's dual RD-33s
.RD, you know, I love that. Uh, and those are, this is of
course an old Soviet jet basically, and it has afterburners in the back that
makes it capable of these Mach numbers. But one of my favorite things about this
thing is if you come here and look at this, you'll notice there's on the top, there's some little slits here and those
are intakes so that when it's taking off on a runway, this
actually closes down. This is like a FOD foreign
object debris guard that closes and allows them to take off
from like any runway, any, like gravel and stuff like that.
You know, normally when you're taking off from
gravel, you have to worry about, you know, gravel getting kicked up
and thrown into the engine. So they would have the ability to close
this down and still get fresh air into the engine via those vents
up there. Come back this way. The engines have an afterburner,
which is really cool. You also notice it does have a slight, slight anhedral angle on it and in
a pretty aggressive sweep of the wings. You'll notice the all
moving control services, the... What would you call that? Those are called stabiliators
when they're all moving like that. So that's really cool. Um, but you'll notice here these are the- you
can see basically the shower heads and it's still warm, I can still feel it, And this thing stopped flying
like an hour ago. Um, but yeah, those are smells like kerosene, like
crazy. Those are the afterburners. And that literally just
sprays kerosene and, you know, the jet fuel into the exhaust.
And it ends up after burning, burning after the main combustion
process of the jet engine. And what this does is basically just
turns the jet engine into a rocket engine. The afterburner just dumps additional
fuel into the exhaust of the engine where we'll burn with unreacted oxygen. Jet engines generally run fuel
lean to keep temperatures low, which leaves a lot of unreacted
oxygen in the exhaust. So the afterburner just dumps a
crap ton of fuel into the exhaust, which will add tons of
additional heat energy. And then the engine actually makes best
use of that heat energy with a variable geometry nozzle that you'll
see on these afterburners. And that'll actually create a converging
diverging nozzle that will literally turn that jet engine into a rocket
engine for a short period of time, which is so, so cool. Now you'll
notice here, this is actually a fun, a fun one here. This is the
parachute. So it actually lands... If it has a long enough runway, it
it can land without a parachute. This runway is short enough that they
actually prefer to land it with a parachute. But yeah, they've been actually pulling
the shoot every time they land, having to repack it every time. And
you also notice this thing here, it kind of looked, might look a little
bit ominous, like a bomb or something, but that's actually just also an external
fuel tank to extend the range to this vehicle as well. And this thing
is a, this thing's a beast. Whoever gets to ride in this, whoever's lucky enough to ride in the
MiG 29 will go for a heck of a ride because it can pull about nine Gs. So definitely the the biggest baddest
jet that Jared owns, in my opinion, one of the coolest looking
jets is it's a kind of a, a Soviet counterpart to the, to the F-15. It looks a lot like an F-15 and I just
think it looks incredible. All right, now we better find out which
jet I'm flying in. All right, so I'm here with Scott "Kidd" Poteet. That's right. And, uh, he's gonna be the one that's
gonna take me up in, in which jet? We're gonna go fly in the Alpha
Jet. So this is a two seater, two engine very agile
fighter aircraft that is used throughout the world as a trainer
and air to ground platform. It's a lot of fun to fly.
It's fast, it's agile, and we like to fly with the MiG,
we like to fly with the L-39. It's just a fun little aircraft to train. So, uh, how, how bad are you
gonna punish me in this thing? Uh, you know, we'll, we'll go as uh,
as hard and as fast as you wanna fly. We could pull up to eight Gs. So... Up to eight you think we'll get there? I think we will. I think, I think we'll,
uh, uh, put some thrust behind it and, and see how, see, see how
she'll, she'll do out there. Okay, that's enough
talking about this stuff. I'm gonna go suit up and then it's time
to get into a fighter jet. All right, so Jared, you are putting
on the G suit. That's right. And so this is all, it's pneumatic obviously since it takes
bleed air and so it almost acts like a blood pressure cuff then? That's exactly what it feels like. Yeah. And it turns on like the, the
air- the airplane is in charge of, uh, activating it, right? Or
how's that actually work? Correct. Basically just as the, the
G comes on for the first couple, like two or three, it's
not gonna do really much. And then beyond that you're gonna have
valve open up and it's gonna start inflating. I'm in the middle of getting a
G suit put on. Check this out. As I mentioned out there, kind of our launch commit criteria here
is gonna be we want VFR conditions, which we do have. So that's
fantastic to put that off the table. We want to comm check
between the two of us. We have to be able to communicate
in the event something goes wrong, we need to instructions
to the emergency... Tim, meet Alpha Jet. This is it, baby! Air speed's alive. Coming up on nose and steering. 100
knots. Rotate. Nose is coming off. 100 meters. Coming up. Flaps coming up. Look at that! Little offset. Heh Heh Heh YES! Woooo! 100 knots of closure. Little bit of
speed break power. I'm gonna hold up 2, 02, 3, 1. We're gonna standby. Little bit of [inaudible] we're
gonna slow that down, get you out of barn door. Here comes the sun. Oh my god. It's not every day you look
out and see a MiG right there. There's incredible. My god! No way! [inaudible]. I'll hang with you, but I request
a trail while you've recover, just give me air speed updates as you go. Yeah, yeah.WOAHHHH. We're gonna go for a
G spike. You good? Yeah, I'm good. Doing alright? Surprisingly. You feel nauseous at all? Uh, no. All right. Here's what a
formation barrel roll feels like. So I don't know if you can see him. He's
gonna be off our left 11 o'clock. Yep. Okay. What you do is you go pull
about one and a half Gs. And that's 2. 25 degrees nose high. And then you start an easy left hand roll. I'm gonna kill some speed, alright?
You see him off right one o',clock? [inaudible]. Whoa. Oh baby, that was incredible. Excellent. You have a good time? Had a hell of time. Oh, that was
awesome. Thank you so much, man. That was amazing. I knew you're ready for it. Yeah, that was just... He had, he had an engine issue. Oh
yeah. So he couldn't pull a lot of Gs, so as soon as he cleared me off,
that's when we started having fun. I'll admit I get it now. I would've
not been able to do anything. I was so concentrating
on just not passing out. That's about all I had
in me was just like, "don't pass out." Now I was kind of
trying to track where the MiG was. That was the only mission
that I kind of had for myself, was trying to keep track of the MiG,
but I couldn't have done anything else. I was completely distracted. Honestly, it'd probably take a while for you to
get used to that kind of environment, to be able to handle those kind of
situations and still stay ahead of your mission and not get behind and not
just let important things go by. But we don't have to hear it from me.
Let's talk to mission specialists, Sarah Gillis and mission
specialist/medical officer
Anna Menon on what fighter jet training has been like for them. First time we went up yesterday
and we're learning, you know, we're following air speed, we're
looking at our altitude, we're changing, heading, and I was able to focus like on very
specific values and then I'd look up and I would have no idea where I was and be
not be paying attention to the horizon. And so today, the second time we did it, you start adding in more pieces to your
crosscheck and you're able to kind of open up your situational awareness. But as soon as you come into the airport
and there's calm that's increasing and there's more parameters
you have to care about, like it's immediately like you
can become aware of less and less. So the more you practice that,
the more you're able to like, keep situational awareness and be able
to make the right decisions in that, that situation where you're coming in, you're having to listen and talk and
take in all the inputs at the same time. Absolutely. You know, I think that all of this type of practice
and training really just increases that threshold so that what you are
doing is you're training your to be so accustomed to this that you expand the
brain space you have available for, for something going off
nominally. And so if, if something were to arise
that would be unexpected, we have the available mental capacity
to respond to that safely and quickly. And we are really well trained to
handle the nominal still parallel, in parallel. So despite my initial
skepticism, I totally get it. I genuinely do see the value
of fighter jet training. Even in a world now today with
commercial and private astronauts. Now maybe if you're just on a quick
little suborbital hop where you're up in space for a couple minutes, this
wouldn't really be necessary. But when you're out there pushing
boundaries and when there's real risks involved, I think this
stuff matters a lot. And the Polaris program will not only
be pushing boundaries of what's possible for the commercial sector, but it's even pushing some boundaries
on human space flight. In fact, Sarah and Anna are going to
be setting altitude records. They're gonna be flying higher and
further away from Earth than any woman has ever flown before. So I hope you guys now all have a
little bit better appreciation and understanding of fighter jet training and
why it still is applicable in a modern space flight world. But I also hope
that you have a little bit better understanding of the entire Polaris
program and I hope you're getting more excited and you start following along. And I also hope that you see a little
bit more of that commitment that Jared Issacman has towards these
missions and towards their safety. So be sure and follow along with the
Polaris crew on their social media handles as they get ready for this mission. You are not going to want to miss this
month and don't forget to support their cause, which is raising
funds and awareness for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. I've got a link below on how you
can help support and like always, I owe a huge thinking to
my Patreon supporters for
helping make things like this possible. If you want to support
the work that I do at on over to patreon.com/everydayastronaut.
And while you're online, don't forget to check out our awesome
web store for things like this, our Space Shuttle, ejection hoodie, and lots of other fun stuff such as
dress wear, our schematics collection, our future margin collection,
norminal things, things for kids, lots of fun stuff at
everydayastronaut.com/shop.
Thanks everybody. That's gonna do it for me. I'm Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut bringing space
down to earth for everyday people.
What Tim brings out here about NASA astronauts flying x hours per month to promote & maintain situational awareness is very interesting. I knew astronauts flew between Houston and KSC, etc, in T-38s to keep up their piloting skills but thought its usefulness was fading. What Tim and Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon say is very convincing, flying T-38s still has real value.
At the same time Eric Berger was flying in the MiG-29, I hope he will write an article about that.
I would have never thought when we first heard of the Inspiration4 that Jarred was going to end up being this important in private human space flight and I'm super excited for the Polaris missions. Also WTG Tim I started watching him when he first started streaming SpaceX launches and I would have never thought that the funny guy in the spacesuit would come this far.
FYI - Jared personally owns the MiG-29, 2 Alpha Jets, and 3 L-39s. These are the ones used in the Inspiration4 mission training and here. They're painted in an arctic camo pattern - as is his large business jet! (The company he founded, Draken, owns many more fighters and trainers. He no longer runs the company.)
The Alpha Jet was developed from the start as a combat jet and trainer. As a combat jet it was used for ground attack with a self-defense fighter capability. The L-39 was developed primarily as a trainer, with some light attack capabilities added later.
I may be going out on a limb here but I think he's becoming less of an everyday man :p
I love tim, he's clearly so well read about everything
Ok, I'm way out of the loop here. Is Jared basically hiring Dragons like an Uber to do his own side research and have a jolly while he's at it?
Jared is the person Tom Cruises wishes he was.
I live in Bozeman and heard/saw this training session. Didn’t realize Tim was up there with them!
Tim Cruise ?