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STEVE

Uh, this is quite extraordinary. Of course this is one of the big songs from Armageddon where they had to go to an asteroid. Go to an asteroid and blow it up because it was gonna hit earth and kill us. Well, that didn’t happen in the movie. Just pieces. They saved the world. And now NASA’s working on saving the world, they went to an asteroid actually an asteroid revolving around another asteroid.

MARLO

Yeah, asteroid. So they called, they called this Mission DART – double asteroid redirection. So this is slamming a satellite into an asteroid just to change the direction. I mean, it doesn’t have to be much, right? I mean, 100th of one degree at a million miles is a lot. I mean, if you were to go from Bismark to Fargo and you changed a trajectory by one 10th of one degree, you know, over that 200, you’d probably end up in Mayville or something.

STEVE

I wanna give a little background to this too. So basically the satellite was the size of a refrigerator and they kind of missed, they were trying to shoot for dead center. They were 55 feet off. 

MARLO

Oh my goodness. I was trying to find out how many miles it traveled. You know, 10 months in space traveling at whatever, 40,000 miles an hour or whatever they’re going at. And then to head an asteroid 10 months later and only be 55 feet off, that’s the fact that we know that ths little asteroid rotated around this other big asteroid and we could actually shoot something at it 10 months in advance and hit this thing is just unbelievable to me. Well, and then of course it gets to, well what about aliens? Right. I mean, if you’re, if you’re a believer in that, and now we take out their, or we, we, we’re now shooting rocks as somebody else’s planet . Now we’ve declared war on somebody else. Right. I, I mean, you know, this is, this is where the conversation was going this morning.I’m like, you have got to be kidding me. 

STEVE

Like the movie Battleship. 

MARLO

Yes. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. There you go. There you go.

STEVE

Independence Day. 

MARLO

Oh my goodness. Yeah. I’ve seen this thing. It’s crazy. It’s kind of like who’s invading us? I mean, it just looks that way. Right? Well, you could just position those in a way that they would actually spell something – E.T. ‘s coming from home, but I can, I can see that coming. Our planetary defense system is now activated. 

STEVE

I thought that was Skynet. 

MARLO

It’s planetary defense.

STEVE

Planetary Defense System, Yes. They got that launched back in November. The eventual evolution of Space Force, which kind of was started because there’s a space race going on again. Uh, but eventually that would morph into Star Fleet. Protect the earth. Really? 

MARLO

And I just had a little smile on my face when I’m driving by that, the fact that there’s a sign out there that says Space Force this way. Yeah. 

STEVE

And you don’t think Star Fleet’s coming? 

MARLO

Of course. 

STEVE

Well, yeah. Yeah. It was in the movies. 

MARLO

It was in the movies. 

MARLO

They postponed Artemis because of a leak somewhere. They rescheduled. That was postponed. And it was postponed to the 23rd of September, and then they postponed it to today, So the 27th of September. They actually pulled Artemis One off the launchpad yesterday. Because of the weather. Wow. 

STEVE

They have been bad.

MARLO

But you have to feel bad for NASA. You really do. I mean, I think everybody’s so excited about getting Artemis launched and, and now that it’s ready, and then here comes a hurricane. I mean, my goodness. The timing of it is just impeccable. So they’re gonna have to, I don’t even know when the next launch window is here.

STEVE

We do have to talk about electric cars. Well, so when you’re looking at an electric vehicle, summer performance versus winter performance and climates like ours, greatly degraded. So up to 60% degraded. 

MARLO

How long does it take to charge the car?

STEVE

Well, that’s the question. Depends on what you’ve gotten. Depends on the charger now. 

MARLO

That’s correct. 

STEVE

So when I was mayor, that one of the things we went after, some Volkswagen grant with their settlement. And that’s why we have two high speed, the, the fast charging stations right here in Bismark,  

MARLO

Once you were told what they are, it’s like going up and buying a car that says it’s got 30, that it gets 30 miles per 30 miles per gallon. So there’s a new charger coming. And this charger claims that they can charge a hundred kilometers, whatever. Which would be what? Miles?  Well, right about 67 miles, something like that. Then three minute charge to go 67 miles total charge under 15 minutes. So that’s what they’re claiming. And this is actually being launched right now. 

STEVE

Now is this a universal charger? 

MARLO

Universal charger, yeah. 

STEVE

So it doesn’t matter what vehicle you have. 

MARLO

For now. I mean, who knows what it’ll be? I mean, it’s like USB ports, right? Somebody’s gonna come up with something better and then they’re gonna say, This old port that you have can’t handle this kind of juice. Are we gonna push through it? Kind of like USB-C compared to USB mini and stuff, whatever in the past. So I think it’s interesting that they’re working on that.

STEVE

It’s interesting to me that they’re working on charger technology versus battery technology. 

MARLO

So the battery technology is being worked on as well–

STEVE

–but not as quickly. There’s, there’s some constraints with working on the battery. So their solution is, Okay, well let’s get a faster charger. 

MARLO

You know, my stance on this, I think the electric vehicle, I think it has its place, I do believe that combustion engines will continue to thrive moving forward because I think there’s other alternatives that are coming that people don’t know about yet. And when that happens on a large scale, then it’s not really gonna matter anymore. As far as the fuel that you use, 

STEVE

Where we’re going, we don’t need roads. 

MARLO

That’s correct. Airborne electric vehicles gets kind of exciting to me. You know, it’s not the, it’s not the ground based vehicles that excite me about this. It’s about the fact that we’re going to the air and that we’ll be able to charge those vehicles rather quickly to get us around town or short hopper flights.

STEVE

Over a hundred thousand recalls, Tesla. Apparently there’s something wrong with their window. So when the window rolls up, there’s a little sensor in there. It’s kinda like a garage door. So you can’t get things stuck