Mars

I saw this on Facebook and had to look it up. It really happened, albeit the details are different. From Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story:

"On the evening of MD-46, I finally played the trick that had been in work for over two month," said Garriott. "It even had the flight controllers puzzled for twenty-five years! My objective was to pretend that my wife, Helen, had come up to Skylab to bring us a hot meal, even though this was an obvious impossibility. Here is how the scheme worked. I recorded her voice on my small hand-held tape recorder before flight, pretending to have a brief conversation with a Capcom, with time gaps for his replies. The Capcom would be my only accomplice, but his role would be carefully disguised.

It was also necessary to have some recent event mentioned to validate the currency of the dialogue, so it would seem it could not have been recorded before fight. The short dialogue is printed below in its entirety. I knew that both Bob Crippen and Karl Henize were going to be Capcoms for Skylab, so they were brought into the planning, given the script and rehearsed on their timing. They kept the short script on a piece of paper in their billfolds, awaiting the right moment.

"For our flight in August-September, there would be many occasions of natural disasters involving forest fires or hurricanes, which would be widely known throughout the United States. So a few comments about one or the other were made on the tape. This led to four different scripts being recorded, one for each of the two Capcoms and one each for the two natural events. I would play the tape on the normal air-to-ground voice link with my wife's recorded voice and the Capcom would respond as if totally surprised by the female interloper."

Near the end of one period of voice contact Garriott said to the ground, "I'll have something for you on the next pass, Bob." Crippen replied, "Roger that, Owen." Then quietly and surreptitiously, he reviewed the brief script that had been in his pocket for all these weeks. Soon after coming into voice range, the ground heard this voice on the standard air-to-ground link:

Skylab (a female voice): "Gad, I don't see how the boys manage to get rid of the feedback berween these speakers.... Hello Houston, how are you reading me down there? (s sec. pause) Hello Houston, are you reading Skylab?"

Capcom: "Skylab, this is Houston. We heard you alright, but had difficulty recognizing your voice. Who do we have on the line up there?"

Skylab: "Hello Houston. Roger. Well I haven't talked with you for a while. Isn't that you down there, Bob? This is Helen, here in Skylab. The boys hadn't had a good home cooked meal in so long, I thought I'd bring one up. Over"

Capcom: "Roger, Skylab. Someone's gotta be pulling my leg, Helen. Where are you?"

Skylab: "Right here in Skylab, Bob. Just a few orbits ago we were looking down on those forest fires in California. The smoke sure covers a lot of territory, and, oh boy, the sunrises are just beautiful! Oh oh..... See you later, Bob. I hear the boys coming up here and I'm not supposed to be on the radio."

"Then quiet returned to the voice link, but we were told later, Bob Crippen had lots of questions coming his way in the Control Center," Garriott said. "What was going on? Where was this voice coming from? Bob must have been a very good actor, because he claimed complete ignorance and innocence of how it happened. Everyone heard it coming down on the air-to-ground loop. The whole two-way conversation sounded like a perfectly normal dialogue. No breaks or gaps, and they all heard Bob respond in real time. Could I have recorded Helen's voice on a 'family conversation' from our home? Yes, but there was no recent one. How would she have known about the fires, or who was to be on Capcom duty and how could she respond to Bob's comments in real time, as everyone could hear?

"No one ever worked out how this was accomplished. Finally, at our twenty-fifth reunion celebration in Houston in 1998, and with many of the flight directors and controllers present and still with no clue as to how it was done, I described it all as above. My prejudiced opinion is that this was the best 'gotcha' ever perpetrated on our friendly flight controllers!"

Crippen recalled: "That was kind of a fun trick. There was head rubbing.

i havent stopped thinking about this tiktok and wanted it on my blog

[VD: A TikTok from @/soupygarbagejuice. It starts with a clip captioned "Biggest Croissant In Malaysia", of a waiter bringing out a large plate with a massive croissant on it out to a woman at a table. Voiceover says "Today I wanted to eat a Croissant–". A man stitches the video, greenscreened over the final frame. Transcript is as follows:

"A few months ago, this was the last TikTok I saw before falling asleep, and I didn't dream about croissants, I didn't dream about her. Every single dream that I had for a while took place in a reality where Billy Joel– one of Billy Joel's greatest hits was called 'The Biggest Croissant in Malaysia'. It just existed, it played on the radio, people would talk about it in the background, 'He played it at The Garden last night'! So at one point I woke up and did my best to recreate exactly what it sounded like in the dreams. [Singing over piano and drums] She ordered the biggest croissant in Malaysia! She ordered the biggest croissant in town, cause Daddy's not around anymore! He's in Singapore, he's in Singapore!"

Like, I’m always just in awe of it because so many players took THREE YEARS on a 1:4000 scale of the earth to just…create.

If your only watching the YouTube videos on his channel, based on a rough estimate, it would take you 9 and half-ish HOURS to see the whole server, and that’s an extremely cut down version.

I can only imagine actually going onto the server and just, wandering. Looking around, seeing the sights of what people build. How many hours could you spend on the New Earth, and still not see everything?

I love the little story lines on the server, like that baguette (?) shop that’s just littered on every continent. That tiny boat that gets cut off at one end of the server and appears at the other end. The koroks hidden everywhere. The amount of personal stories, history, and fun facts you could find just by wandering into random buildings.

I love all the references that you can find, both to RT’s channel and to everything else under the sun.

I love the amount of effort which went into all the large projects. All of the songs which can be found throughout the map. All the towns with hundreds of armor stands to give them life. The mines of moria in South America ( I think?) with the giant cave mountain on top of it and the builds which span across hundreds to thousands of blocks.

I love the amount of effort which went into all the small builds. The cute and cozy houses, the statures of animals, the grocery stores and the roads and the bridges.

I love RT’s community because they were able to achieve all of that.

After orbiting the Earth three times, for 4 hours, 52 minutes, and 31 seconds, the Capsule of Gemini 3 splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean. The spacecraft was greeted by United States Navy swimmers dropped in from two helicopters from Squadron HS-3, which was assigned to USS INTREPID (CV-11).

"Navy swimmers are shown attaching a flotation collar to the Gemini-Titan 3 (GT-3) spacecraft during recovery operations following the successful flight."

"A frogman is lowered to the Gemini 3 spacecraft from a Navy helicopter of squadron HS-3."

Shown here, Navy swimmers are attaching a flotation collar to the spacecraft during recovery operations.

Astronaut John W. Young, the pilot of the Gemini 3 flight, waits in a life raft to be picked up by a helicopter.

Astronauts Virgil I. Grissom (left) and John W. Young are shown aboard a helicopter after being retrieved.

"Astronauts John W. Young and Virgil I. Grissom are shown in bathrobes receiving a warm welcome on the recovery ship, INTREPID."

Later on, INTREPID pulls up alongside the capsule and hoists it out of the water with a large crane on board.

Recovery patch

Date: March 23, 1965

NARA: 6734375, 6734376, 84455

NASA ID: S65-19229, S65-18528, S65-22893, S65-18656, S65-18733, S65-19224

U.S. Navy National Museum of Naval Aviation: 1993.501.073.235, 1993.501.073.240

U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command: 65-H-456, 65-H-565, 1110684,

Intrepid Museum Archive: P2018.81.06

I wanted to make a wiki about it but I don't have time for it.

The point was to try to encompass every "superpower" I could think of into a magic system.