Are the Odds of Successfully Navigating an Asteroid Field Really Approximately 3,720 to 1?

The BrainFood Show

Cloud10

Education, History

4.9 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 27 February 2026

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

⁠⁠In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we begin by discussing the real origin of Tang and what that has to do with Pop Rocks and how they work. We then move on to the interesting story behind the invention of Velcro and how it works. Next up we look at whether NASA really spent many millions of dollars developing the famous “space pen” instead of just using a pencil like the Russians. Moving on from there we discuss the fascinating reason why only one side of the moon faces the Earth and how this happened and is still happening, with the Earth itself slowing down such that in theory at some point only one side of it will face the moon. Moving on, we look at what the actual odds of navigating a typical asteroid field in space would be and whether the depictions in movies here are actually accurate. Finally, we respond to some user feedback, including on initial attempts listeners of the female persuasion have made to pee standing up without peeing all over themselves (which sounds even weirder to write, but is in reference to a previous space episode ;-)), and the interesting phenomenon of people using the show to fall asleep every night and whether we should take that as a good thing or a bad thing… Sponsor: Incogni - Use code BRAINFOOD and get 60% off an annual plan using the link ⁠https://incogni.com/brainfood Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The sports card industry has grown at a wild pace reaching close to $13 billion in 2021,
0:05.4	and experts believe it will reach $49 billion by the year 2032.
0:09.5	My name is Jeremy Lee, and if you'd like to learn more through the experiences of lifelong veterans,
0:14.0	industry titans, and the critical thinkers who bring meaning to these historical artifacts,
0:18.2	tune into my podcast, SportsCards Live, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:25.9	All right, welcome to another episode of the Rain Food Podcast.
0:28.7	This is another one in our ongoing series of which we're calling the Final Frontier.
0:35.2	The working title is the Epic Space series, just to confuse me and you, apparently.
0:40.0	This is part five today.
0:42.5	I think last week we promised a lot of bonus facts, right?
0:45.2	Yeah, I decided to do that next week.
0:49.2	So the next week will be the final of the space series.
0:52.4	This one will be the second final.
0:53.7	And this is kind of like a bonus fact, but more of like a... It's bonus fact-e. I know I was kind of reading through it. It feels a bit. Yeah, we're hitting a lot of different things. Yeah. So we're hitting a lot of different things, but mostly just debunking some myths. There was kind of a theme on some of these to just debunk a lot of myths, so I decided
1:11.4	to put it all together to do with certain things with space that people think. So space myths,
1:16.2	what have we got coming up? Yeah, so we got, primarily concerning, Tang, Velcro, pens, the
1:23.5	moon, and the odds of successfully navigating through an asteroid field. Oh, that's, uh, judging by movies, incredibly difficult.
1:31.3	But I think that's probably just for dramatic effect or something, right?
1:34.3	Yeah, we'll get into that.
1:36.3	Space is big, right?
1:37.3	Yeah, and why they're wrong.
1:40.3	I will spoil no more. I'll just leave that for later in this episode. Yeah, this is, I, I like these ones where we tackle a few topics. As mentioned in last week's episode, we are changing up the format slightly. So now we have the kind of the content at the beginning and then we will do follow up on previous episodes and all sorts of, you know, extra podcasty things once we're done with that. So we're just going to crack on. But before we do, just let me say that head on over to iTunes and leave us a review. You can, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, when we hit 200 reviews on iTunes, we're having a giveaway. We're giving a $200 Amazon gift card because 200 reviews to whoever we select at random. It doesn't have to be a good review. It can be a
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