Big If True

Today we’re learning about hair that’s larger than life! In the past, rich and powerful folks have used their hair to show off how great they were–but all that hair power comes with a price. We talk to Emma Markiewicz about hair and big wigs on today’s episode.

Before you listen to the episode, scroll down to see some truly amazing wigs.

Guest bio: Emma Markiewicz

Emma originally trained as an archaeologist, and worked on excavations all over the world helping improve our knowledge of the past through investigating the sites and artefacts left behind by ancient civilisations. Through this work she became very interested in the material culture of past societies, and especially in thinking about how parts of the body can be turned into objects. She started researching for her PhD on Hair, Wigs and Wig Wearing in Eighteenth-Century England, which took her to archives all over England. She currently works at The National Archives (UK) in Kew, London, where she is responsible for delivering funded programmes, training and guidance to archives organisations of all shapes and sizes. Emma loves working with organisations which look after records and make them accessible to everyone, and remains fascinated by hair and what it can tell us about ideas of beauty and how people managed their health and appearance. 

Transcript

MAGGIE:
You know how every time I take a shower, my hair gets all tangley. And then you make me brush it and it hurts and it takes forever to get the tangles out.

ABBY:
Yes, I do. My mother made me do exactly the same thing. Both you and I have hair that tends to get really tangley really easily.

MAGGIE:
Wouldn’t be nice if you could just keep your hair from getting tangley or once you’ve made it look nice, it just stayed that way?

ABBY:
Well, the only way I can think of is if you didn’t use your own hair. You could wear a wig.

MAGGIE:
I don’t really think that’s something I’d like.

ABBY:
Yeah, me neither, though I do know some folks who can seriously rock a wig. But did you know that in the past, people who were wealthy or powerful sometimes wore wigs that were way bigger than their real hair? And they did it as a way to show everyone that they were wealthy and powerful.

MAGGIE:
That’s kind of weird. So I think we should talk more about this on today’s episode of

MAGGIE AND ABBY: Big if True.

MAGGIE:
Where I, Maggie,

ABBY:
and I, Abby,

MAGGIE:
explore the truth about big things. Today we’re going to learn about a lot of very strange ways to do your hair. So here’s our quiz question to test your knowledge

ABBY:
In the 16 and 1700s, which of these techniques was not used in the process of making a wig?

MAGGIE:
A. combing, B. sewing, C. baking or D. they’re all used.

ABBY:
We’ll tell you the answer near the end of the show.

MAGGIE::
Our guest today knows a lot about wigs and why people wore them. She especially studies men’s wigs. Before we start though, you should take a look at our show notes to see the pictures of the kinds of wigs we’re talking about. If you’ve never seen them before, they’re kind of hard to imagine. You can find them at bigiftrue.abbymullen.org/wigs.

MARKIEWICZ:
My name is Emma Markiewicz. And I work at the National Archives in England. I also did a PhD in history which focused on hair and wigs and wig wearing in 18th century England.

MAGGIE:
What are wigs?

MARKIEWICZ:
What are wigs, I think that wigs are really a means of replacing a whole head of hair with some false hair. So that you can try and change the shape and the style and the color of what’s on your head. They can be made from real human hair belonging to other people. Or they could actually even be made from your own hair as well. They could be made from animal hair, like horse or goat. And of course, in modern times, they can be made from synthetic materials as well like nylon.

MAGGIE:
What are wigs for?

MARKIEWICZ:
So I think really, they had several different functions; they still do. And that could be if you want to replace your own hair, because perhaps you’ve lost your hair, or it’s not the quality you would like it to be. So there’s a sort of real physical use for them there. But also to transform your appearance. So you can put a wig on and you can become somebody else very, very quickly and very, very easily. I also think from the 18th century perspective, there was another function and that was really often to make everybody feel like they belonged to the same group. So what we see quite commonly, particularly in things like the professions, so if you’re a doctor or a lawyer, or a judge, you might wear a wig to show very clearly that you’re part of that group. Similarly, politicians, so very sort of men have very high status would all wear wigs that looked strikingly similar to each other. And I think that a lot of that is to show that they were they were belonging in that group. And that was their status. And that was their place in society. And if they all look the same, then they’ve got strength in numbers. And it’s very clear what they do and what therefore they have a real purpose.

MAGGIE:
When were wigs fashionable?

MARKIEWICZ:
I mean, wigs, really, they come in and out of fashion, all through history. And even today, we see people still wearing wigs. Often we also see people wearing hair pieces or hair extensions. So for the whole of time, I think people have worn false hair in some way or another. For the period that I studied in particular, that was the 18th century. So that really went from the time when King Charles II came on to the throne in England around about 1660. And it said that he spent a lot of his younger years in France where it was very fashionable in the court in the court of the French King to wear great big wigs to show your power and your status. And he came back to take the throne of England and he brought them with him. And they got picked up quite quickly by the upper echelons of society. And then they became very, very popular, particularly amongst men for the first part of that century, and perhaps started to fall out of fashion in the later part. So around about 1760, perhaps around them, finally sort of really coming to an end at the very end of the century, roundabout 1795.

ABBY:
Charles, the second is the one who had like, like two pronged wigs, right, and then really long.

MARKIEWICZ:
Yeah, that is, that was the height of it really the height of the big wigs, they were called periwigs. And they did, they had these big prongs at the front, and then two pieces down the front and a piece at the back very curly, a lot of hair, a lot of time and money goes into those. And it really does show that you are a very wealthy person, and you have a lot of time to look after your appearance.

MAGGIE:
How heavy are some of the big wigs?

MARKIEWICZ:
I mean, it’s hard to say. I can see from accounts of people who were buying and selling wigs that they would often be sold, the hair itself in its raw form would be sold by the pound. So that’s pretty heavy. I don’t know how much of a pound would go into making one particular wig. It’s very difficult to say, but I think we can say that some of those big ones would have been very heavy.

MAGGIE:
How tall were the tall wigs?

MARKIEWICZ:
So height was important for these in this in this early stage of the fashion. The taller the better, the bigger, the better. The bigger, the more expensive, the more time and effort goes goes into making and preparing the wig. We have to be a bit careful because there’s a lot of caricatures from that period. So a lot of cartoons that were deliberately produced to make fun out of people who put all that time and effort into frivolous fashions like wig wearing. So in some of those, you can see a hairdresser, literally up a ladder to get to the top of somebody’s wig to work on it. And we have to be a little bit careful about that it probably wasn’t quite that crazy. But there were certainly some areas of the fashion that did have very tall wigs. So a group called the macaroni who were young tended to be young men who really pushed the boundaries of fashion. A little bit like maybe punk rockers were, you know, in modern times they did, they wanted to look very different. And they wanted to look very out there. And one of the ways that they did that was through wearing very tall wigs.

MAGGIE:
How do you put a wig on?

MARKIEWICZ:
It’s attached to a piece of netting, or in those days it was attached to a piece of netting. So you would attach it, you would, it would sit on top of your head. In some cases, they would be tied behind the ears and around the back of the neck with a ribbon. And I always love I found one account if somebody have an older gentleman who would be able to tie have his wig tied on with the ribbon so tightly that it almost acted in the same way as giving him a bit of a facelift. He had it so tight it could pull pull back his skin at the temples and make him look younger.

MAGGIE:
How do you make a wig?

MARKIEWICZ:
Well, in those days, it was a very long process. It took a lot of time, it took a lot of expertise, hence why wigs initially anyway were very expensive. So it was there were lots of different processes that went into it. So first of all, they of course they had to find the hair. And I’d like I said that could be human hair. But some wig makers were a bit unscrupulous and would mix it with animal hair, and then sell it as though it was 100% human hair. So they did have to be a little bit careful about where the hair came from and how real it was. But what they would do is they would take packets of the hair and sort it by length and bind it together. And then that would be cleaned and processed. They would use a comb and iron comb attached to a stand to comb through the clumps of hair to make sure that there were no knots and try and get as much of the grease out as possible. Then they would curl the hair into wooden curlers or ceramic curlers. And in order to set that to make the curl stayed and they would bake it in an oven for a few hours. So quite often we can find accounts of wig makers who went into partnerships with local bakers and use their ovens at night. To cook the hair sometimes they would cook the hair in dough as well. And then once that was done, then it would be set up on a silk loom and woven together. And then you have the sort of strands of clean curled hair, which you can then attach to a net, using a mount in the shape of a head with with a needle and scissors, with needle and thread, and literally so each one on individually around the net. So it took a long time. Very painstaking process. And once that was done, and it was attached securely, using a ribbon, then around the edge of the netting, they could style the wig and cut it and shape it as they wanted. throughout that process, they would have to be working with the person that the wick was for. So they’d have to keep going back and checking the measurements and checking the style and having different fittings through the process.

MAGGIE:
What can go on a wig?

MARKIEWICZ:
Certainly I think for women’s fashions, things like fruit and flowers were quite common at that time and embellishing wigs or hairpieces was a big part of it. Less so for men, I think with men’s wigs, what they would tend to do is produce a particular style of wig that might celebrate something so particularly around battles and war. So if a particular campaign had gone well, somewhere, they would produce a wig with the name of that campaign that they people could then wear to be seen to be celebrating great battles and so on. But yes, embellishments definitely part of it for women, at least anyway. Although again, I think we have to be a bit careful though, again, some of the character chores do show some absolutely crazy over the top styles and boats and you know what, and somebody up a ladder trying to fit them all in. Possibly that was exceptional rather than the rule.

MAGGIE:
Why were some wigs powdered? doesn’t that get messy?

MARKIEWICZ:
It does seem a bit a bit revolting doesn’t it to us these days? I think we’re very used to our shampoos and conditioners and, and feeling our hair to be silky and smooth and not free. I think it was unlikely to be like that. In those days, I think they had a bit of a different idea about what clean hair looked like and felt like. So the powder was really to get rid of grease. So you could comb it through to get rid of grease, make the hair just a bit more manageable. That that’s how they would clean their hair really a lot of the time, they would also use powder for scent. So on the market, you can see in different advertisements for hairdressers that they would be selling an amazing range of powders with with all sorts of different citrus and fruit and flower smells. So something about making it smell nice as well. And yeah, I think it would definitely have got a bit messy. But you also see, particularly in the grand houses and in the hairdressing salons, those masks that they would put over their face. So when the powder is squirted on, their face is covered. So they don’t get it all over their, their clothes and in their eyes. And of course, people did use powder in their own hair as well, that became really quite common as a way to shape it and style it and keep it clean. So it was used completely across the board almost I suppose it’s as the equivalent of shampoo would be today. Of course, what happened gradually over the course of the century was that style changed. And so it became less acceptable to have this crazy over the top style and styles just did big generally start to become more simple, and a bit less formal and a bit less heavy. And I think that made it quite difficult then to keep up with wearing as part of that overall look. So it all started to become a lot more about being natural. And that meant, of course part of that is wearing your own natural hair and being a bit more in touch with nature than those very rigid structured styles that had been present earlier in the century.

MAGGIE:
Emma, thank you so much for talking to us today. I learned a lot, including the fact that I really don’t ever want to wear these kinds of wigs.

ABBY:
Totally agree.

MAGGIE:
Also, listeners, did you remember our quiz question choices: combing, sewing, and baking were all used in the construction of wigs.

ABBY:
So even though Emma told us that the most outlandish wigs we see in pictures are probably a little bit exaggerated, you can still design your own completely outlandish wig. The Victoria and Albert Museum in England has a little web app where you can build your own, including decorations like feathers, flowers and ships. Not kidding, you can really put a ship in your hair. There’s a link to this site in our show notes. That’s bigiftrue.abbymullen.org/wigs.

MAGGIE:
And that’s our show for today. Join us next time for another episode of Big If True!

ABBY:
Big if True is produced by me, Abby, and Maggie. Special thanks to our expert guest Emma Markiewicz. Our theme music is by Andrew Cote. Did you know you can buy a Big if True t shirt? The link is on our website. One more time that’s bigiftrue.abbymullen.org. Thanks everybody for listening

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Show notes

• Incidental music in today’s episode was:
  • J.S. Bach, Gavattes, from Orchestral Suite no. 1 in C major, BWV 1066. Music from Musopen.
  • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Piano Trio in G major, K. 564. Music from Musopen.
• Play around with making your own wig at the Victoria and Albert Museum!

This week we’re launching into space! We’re learning all about the rocket that propelled astronauts all the way to the moon: the Saturn V. Our guest, Michael Neufeld of the National Air and Space Museum, tells us all about what these giant rockets are, what they do, and why we stopped using them.

Guest bio: Michael Neufeld

Michael J. Neufeld is a Senior Curator in the Space History Department of the National Air and Space Museum, where he is responsible for the rocket collection and for Mercury and Gemini spacecraft. He has written or edited nine books, notably The Rocket and the Reich (1995), Von Braun (2007) and Spaceflight: A Concise History (2018). In 2017 Secretary David Skorton gave him the Smithsonian Distinguished Scholar Award, the highest research award of the Institution.

Transcript

Speaker from Marshall Space Flight Center: The life of this stage in flight will be 2 and one half minutes. After it boosts the upper stages and the three astronauts in the Apollo spacecraft to 5000 miles an hour, at an altitude of 40 miles, the booster will be separated and discarded. The upper stages then take over the mission of sending the astronauts to the moon and to outer space. The five huge engines are next installed and checked out. During the test firing the outer four engines are gimbaled to test their capability for guiding the Saturn V during an actual flight. The test time has arrived, water is run through the flame deflector to prevent its melting 5.4.3.2.1. Ignition…

MAGGIE:
Whoa, this footage from the Marshall Space Flight Center is pretty amazing. I’m not so sure I’d be able to put myself on top of this huge rocket and launch into space.

ABBY:
Yeah, I think it really takes a special kind of person to be an astronaut in the 1960s and 70s the astronauts in NASA’s Apollo Program did just that on top of this huge rocket.

MAGGIE:
In the clip we just heard, NASA was testing the rocket that would eventually send the Apollo astronauts to space. It’s called the Saturn V and is the topic for today’s episode of

MAGGIE and ABBY:

Big if True,

MAGGIE:
where I, Maggie,

ABBY:
and I, Abby,

MAGGIE:
explore the truth about big things.

ABBY:
If you like Big if True, did you know you can subscribe to our newsletter? Then you can be notified when new episodes come out along with getting some extra fun stuff.

MAGGIE:
You can sign up for our newsletter at our website, bigiftrue.abbymullen.org.

ABBY:
Okay, back to the Saturn V.

MAGGIE:
Here’s our quiz question to test your knowledge.

ABBY:
The last Saturn V rocket was launched in 1973. How many Saturn Vs were launched total into space?

MAGGIE:
A. 4, B. 13, C. 20, or D. 28.

ABBY:
We’ll tell you the answer near the end of the show.

MAGGIE:
Our guest today preserves and studies historical rockets for his job. We asked him lots of questions, including some suggested by you, our listeners.

NEUFELD:
Hi, I’m Michael Neufeld. I’m a senior curator at the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution.

MAGGIE:
Thank you for talking to us. What is a rocket?

NEUFELD:
A rocket is basically something that can expel a mass, usually a gas, and propel itself through space. Mostly, we do that by burning two propellants. And those two propellants produce a hot gas that is expelled of the back of the rocket. But there, there are also other forms of rockets to in addition to that chemical rocket we’re so familiar with.

MAGGIE:
How did you get interested in rockets?

NEUFELD:
I grew up in the space race. So I was born 70 years ago, I was 10 years old when the first humans were launched into space in 1961. And so you know, I’m one of the people, a lot of them who got drawn into the whole idea of astronomy and space through the news of the space race.

MAGGIE:
That’s cool. What is the Saturn V?

NEUFELD:
The Saturn V was the giant rocket that NASA built to send astronauts to land on the moon. So it had one real purpose, which was to launch the astronauts in the Apollo spacecraft so that they could carry out the moon landing. Of course, that was in time for… President Kennedy’s deadline was the end of the 1960s. And so there was a real big rush on in the 1960s to build this huge rocket, get to the moon and beat the Soviets.

MAGGIE:
How big is it?

NEUFELD:
Saturn V is huge. I mean, it, when you stack it on the launch pad, it was 363 feet, about 111 meters tall. So really a significant size, that you can compare it to the Washington Monument, is it’s a significant fraction of the height of the Washington Monument.

MAGGIE:
How heavy is it?

NEUFELD:
It was about six and a half million pounds when it was fully fueled on a launch pad. Almost all of that weight was propellant so it was pumped full of liquid propellant just before launch.

MAGGIE:
Why is it called Saturn V?

NEUFELD:
So the Saturn program started at the end of the 1950s. And it was part of again, the Space Race. You know, the sense of we got to catch up with the Soviets. Of course, they put the first satellite in space, Sputnik, in October 1957. Then they put a dog in orbit in November 1957. They went on so I could go on about this but bottom line, as we had to beat the Soviet, so we started by building a smaller, but still for that time very big rocket called Saturn. And then another version, the Saturn 1B. And Saturn V was essentially the fifth overall design for the Saturn series. Some of those numbers weren’t used, they were designs on paper that were thrown away. So Saturn V was the fifth major design in this Saturn rocket series.

MAGGIE:
One was Saturn V first built?

NEUFELD:
So as a result of Kennedy’s decision in 1961, that we want to send astronauts to land on the moon, they started working on how big a rocket would we need. And so it was designed in the early 60s; the first ones that were actually constructed were in 1966, 1967.

MAGGIE:
How did the builders put Saturn V together so that it would withstand being launched into space?

NEUFELD:
Well, of course, you know, it needs to be very strong, because you’ve got this huge force. In order to get a six and a half million pound rocket off the launch pad, you need more thrust in that to counteract Earth’s gravity. So it has seven and a half million pounds of thrust. And that, you had to construct these metal fuselage to be able to stand the huge forces on it as well as the aerodynamic forces of being, going through the lower atmosphere after it takes off.

NEUFELD:

I have to explain the Saturn V is a three stage rocket. So it has three major sections. And as you, one of the propellant is used up in the first stage is thrown away. And then there’s propellant and then the second stage burns, and then it’s thrown away. And then the third stage burns and it puts the Apollo spacecraft in orbit. And then that third stage burns again to send the Apollo spacecraft to the moon. So it’s, you know, it’s made up of big sections called stages. So the first stage, which is the big one, that had seven and a half million pounds of thrust the one to lift it off the launch pad, that use liquid oxygen and kerosene. The upper stages, however, use liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. So both of those are, have to be extremely cold liquids. And you take hydrogen and you, you cool it down till it’s 423 degrees below zero. And then you can turn hydrogen into a liquid. And oxygen needs to be 297 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. And these two cold liquids are contained in tanks in the upper stages of the rocket. And they’re brought together and burned. Of course hydrogen and oxygen make water so, so you actually, when you light a hydrogen oxygen rocket, a lot of what’s coming out of there is actually steam.

MAGGIE:
How much fuel does it take to launch?

NEUFELD:
So out of that six and a half million pounds at the launch pad, probably about five and a half to 6 million pounds is nothing but propellants. So you know, it’s basically a huge empty shell, that you fill up with these propellants, you know, that they’re pumped into the wall, the rocket on all each stage of the rocket is pumped into it before launch. And then then you light that, light it off and it goes up with stages in turn. So yeah, it’s mostly an empty shell when you’re, when it’s, when it’s sitting on the launch pad before it’s tanked up.

MISSION CONTROL:
T-minus nine. For main engineer start, for engines, [cross-talk, ignition sequence of Saturn V].

MAGGIE:
Where were the astronauts?

NEUFELD:
The astronauts were at the very nose of this thing near or very near the nose of this thing. So if you’ve seen them, I’m sure, you’ve looked at the picture of a Saturn five. On the very top is a little cone. That’s where the three astronauts sat. And above that cone, you see a tower that was actually a rocket to pull the astronauts away if the rocket was going to blow up. Go off course. You had a so called escape tower. It’s actually a solid propellant rocket on top of the thing, but pull that little cone capsule away. So so they sat in the main cabin, the so called command module of the Apollo spacecraft.

MAGGIE:
What does it feel like to be launched into space on a rocket?

NEUFELD:
Well, I mean, it was certainly exciting. And incredibly noisy, especially the first stage of the rocket, and in the atmosphere where you still had a atmosphere to transmit sound. So sound came all the way through the structure of the rocket. And also, you know, through the air as you’ll be bouncing around. So it was extremely loud and noisy and, and jittery, in the first part of the launch, so the astronauts almost have a hard time seeing their instruments during the early part. In the later parts of the launch, they say it was extremely smooth.

Apollo astronauts and mission control:
Magnificent, right, Roger 11, we’ll pass that on. And it certainly looks like you’re well on your way. Now. We have no complaints with any of the three stages. That right here we copy, no transited staging of any significance that we’re at, right.

NEUFELD:
And when they got into space, the noise decreased, and then they, and then it was very sort of more a distant rumble. Of course, another factor in this is you are being accelerated. So if you’re being accelerated, that means you have G forces port pushing down on you. So you know, during the launch, you could have the force of three to five times the Earth’s gravity pressing you into your seat, which was actually a lot better than the earlier astronaut launches, where they used smaller rockets and went faster and the G forces are even bigger. But yeah, you had to, you had to be able to withstand this force on you, it’s like a huge weight on your chest as the acceleration of the rocket pushes you into your seat. Now when the rocket stops, you suddenly go weightless. So just like that, you go from several G’s pressing down on you to weightless instantaneously when the rocket shuts off. Because now you’re in freefall, you’re actually essentially free falling through space. So for the astronauts it was often rather, is a very sudden transition.

MAGGIE:
What happens to the rocket once it separates from the payload?

NEUFELD:
So each stage is thrown away in turn. So the first and second stages, they end up re-entering the atmosphere and then crashing into the ocean. So it’s a throwaway rocket. Only recently have we begun to do more with recovering the stages of rockets and reusing them, the whole thing was a throwaway. So and the third stage, the last stage, the one that propelled the astronauts spacecraft to the moon, that was on the moon trajectory with them. And they usually, especially with the later launches, they directed it to crash into the moon, so they could create an artificial moon quake. So after the first crews had planted seismometers, so like earthquake measuring devices on the moon, they crashed their last rocket stage into the moon to try to create an artificial moon quake.

MAGGIE:
Who picks up the stages in the water?

NEUFELD:
The stages are lost. I mean, they go they crash they are they are maybe destroyed on the way down by aerodynamic forces and they they sink to the bottom of the ocean. And in fact, just a few years ago, Amazon owner Jeff Bezos paid 10s of millions of dollars to recover parts of the engines of the first stage of some of the Saturn Vs so we now own some pieces of Apollo 11’s Saturn V first stage engines and that gives us a better sense of what happened so yeah, there might have been that huge stage of the rocket the first, the first third or so of the rocket probably some pieces broke off when it was falling back in the atmosphere. And then it crashed into the ocean which completely destroyed it and some basically metal pieces sank to the bottom of the ocean. And the parts we could find, the parts he could find were basically the heavy parts of the engines because they were survived the impact more intact than some of the other parts. The tanks are like, I mean, that when that when those rocket is discarded those tanks are like gigantic beer empty beer cans, you just got this huge aluminum cylinder and it’s empty and it doesn’t have a whole lot of strength. So you know pretty much got, you know, smashed to pieces when it hit the water.

MAGGIE:
Did anything bad ever happened during the Saturn V rocket?

NEUFELD:
Saturn V had an incredibly good safety record, nothing ever bad happened to astronauts on a flight. The second test of the Saturn V had a bunch of problems. So this happened in April 1968. And the engine shut down and they had a hard time, they could not restart the third stage engine for a test. So this was an unmanned–uncrewed test. And they had a bunch of technical problems, but nothing ever, you know, went seriously bad. None blew up, which was kind of a very pleasant surprise, because if you look back to the late 50s, and the early 60s, when rocket technology was a little more new, or especially this huge, this new giant rockets were being built during the, for the Cold War for the nuclear arms race and for, for the space race, a lot of them went crazy blew up, crashed, were blown up. They were like it was a guy on the ground. There’s a range safety officer who was responsible for pressing the button to the blow up the rocket if it was going off course. All of this stuff could happen. But Saturn V was virtually perfect.

MAGGIE:
How many Saturn Vs were launched altogether?

NEUFELD:
13 Saturn Vs were launched from November ’67 to May 1973. Of course the first launches were development launches, try to just get understand the rocket. And then with the third launch, they launched the the Apollo 8 astronauts to the moon in December 1968. And then Apollo 11 was the first landing on the moon. And then, then of course, there were several landings. So there were six landings on the moon with Apollo 11, to Apollo 17. And one failure that was Apollo 13. As a movie you may want to watch or have seen maybe. So there were seven times landed in the moon, six of them worked, one of them failed. And then there was one last launch of a Saturn five. In 1973, a special two stage version of the Saturn V launched the Skylab space station, the Skylab space station was actually an outfitted third stage. And so instead of having propellant inside this third stage, it had a living area, you know, for the astronauts and had like solar panels attached to it and things so that last launch of the Saturn V put Skylab into orbit.

MAGGIE:
Why did NASA stop using them?

NEUFELD:
Well, I think two reasons or two related reasons. Number one, it was extremely expensive. So it was, you know, a billion dollars every time you wanted to launch one. And it was built specifically for the moon landings and the United States lost interest in going to the moon, clear and simple. The public didn’t want to support it. The public was no longer interested in spending the money on NASA moon landings and although NASA managed to have enough money to land on the moon six times, there was no more support for Apollo beyond that.

MAGGIE:
Did you catch the answer to our quiz question? There were 13 Saturn Vs, launched from 1967 to 1973.

ABBY:
If you want to see a Saturn V rocket today, Mike told us that you have a few options to see a deconstructed one: the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the Space and Rocket Center in Alabama, or the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. By the way, that’s the Houston in the recording we played earlier from Apollo 11’s launch.

MAGGIE:
Houston, we’ve had a problem

ABBY:
exactly, only that’s from Apollo 13.

MAGGIE:
Today if you want to go to space, you’ll have to hitch a ride on a Russian rocket or fly on SpaceX. But the Saturn V will always be the very first rocket to get a person to the moon. Thank you, Mike for telling us all about these huge rockets. That’s our show for this week.

ABBY:
Have a great semester, everybody, and we’ll see you next time on another episode of

MAGGIE:
Big if True.

ABBY:
Big if True is produced by me, Abby, and MAGGIE: . Special thanks to our expert guest NEUFELD:. To learn more about him, check out our show notes at bigiftrue.abbymullen.org. Our theme music is by Andrew Cote. And special thanks to NASA and the Marshall Space Flight Center, the source of the recordings that you heard of the Saturn V launches. Thanks to everybody who sent in questions for this episode. I hope you got the answers you were looking for. And even if you didn’t, thanks for listening.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Airships are giant balloons with engines! They’ve been used for recreation, espionage, defense, and more. Our guest Brett Holman tells us about these giant airborne vehicles, and what happens when people get a little bit too paranoid about them…

Guest bio: Brett Holman

Dr Brett Holman is a historian from Melbourne, Australia, graduating with a PhD in history from the University of Melbourne in 2009 and then teaching history at the University of New England (Australia). He researches and writes about what people thought and felt about aviation in Britain, Australia and New Zealand in the early 20th century – from fearing a “knock-out blow from the air” to enjoying the spectacle of flight as entertainment. Brett’s first book, The Next War in the Air: Britain’s Fear of the Bomber, 1908-1941, was published in 2014, and he has been blogging at Airminded since 2005: https://airminded.org.

The Tokyo 2020(1) Olympics are starting! So we wanted to find out a little more about what the Olympics are, and why they work the way they do. We talk to Dr. Matt Hodler, a historian of sport, to learn more about this big sporting event.

Guest bio: Matt Hodler

Matt Hodler is an Assistant Professor in Sport Media & Communication at the University of Rhode Island.

In today’s episode, we’re talking about World War II on Memorial Day weekend. We don’t have time to talk about even a fraction of the war, so we’re just touching on a few topics that we’re interested in about how American soldiers got to the front.

Guest bio: Kim Guise

Kimberly Guise is a Curator and Assistant Director for Curatorial Services at The National WWII Museum. She holds a BA in German and Judaic Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She also studied at the Universität Freiburg in Germany and holds a masters in Library and Information Science (MLIS) from Louisiana State University. Kim is fluent in German, reads Yiddish, and specializes in the American prisoner-of-war experience in World War II. After working at the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, she began working at The National WWII Museum in 2008, where she has since facilitated the acquisition of thousands of artifacts, led numerous Museum tours, and curated several exhibits including Guests of the Third Reich: American POWs in Europe. (from the National World War II Museum website)

Did you hear the story about the ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal? Did you find the story super confusing because it seemed so improbable? Today’s episode is about the Ever Given, the ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal at the end of March. Our expert, Sal Mercogliano, talks us through what container ships are, why they’re so important, and what in the world happened to the Ever Given!

Guest Bio

Sal Mercogliano is an Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History, Criminal Justice and Political Science Department at Campbell University.  He is a former merchant mariner and has a BS in Marine Transportation from SUNY Maritime College, an MA in Maritime History and Nautical Archaeology from East Carolina University and a Ph.D. in Military and Naval History from the University of Alabama.