Angry Planet - Space: Final Frontier or Billionaire's Playground?

Episode Date: September 3, 2021

Space… Is it still the final frontier? And does anyone really care about it anymore, aside from a few billionaires and maybe a millionaire or two?Does NASA have any mojo left? And are any of us alive now going to see a landing on Mars?These are all questions dear to my heart, so we have Christian Davenport who covers space for the Washington Post and is the author of the Space Barons on the show today. Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world and their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. And welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. space? Is it still the final frontier? And does anyone really care about it anymore, aside from a few billionaires and maybe a millionaire or two? Does NASA have any mojo left? And are any of us alive now going to see a landing on Mars? These are all questions dear to my heart. So we have Christian Davenport, who covers space for the Washington Post, and is the author of the Space Barons. And he's on the show today. Thank you for joining us. Sure. Thanks for having me. All right. Just a very basic question, but does America know why it's in space anymore? That's a good question. I don't know that the average citizen, taxpayer, voter, really pays that much attention, especially with everything that's going on. I mean, as we're recording this, you're looking at Hurricane Idaho. We've got the withdrawal from

Afghanistan. We've got things that are just happening in people's lives, like back to school and just getting by, frankly. So I think space is outside of most people's consciousness, frankly, where it has been for a long time. I mean, particularly since the end of the Apollo era, but I think it's starting to creep back in. I mean, getting back more into mainstream media and getting more attention because of the rise of these billionaire entrepreneurs and people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson and what they're doing. And I think people are starting to pay attention at least a little bit, but it's in my little community of the space tribe. It's the center of our world, but we forget that for most people, it's just not.

So does that mean that the billionaires are actually a good thing for space? And do you think that they're going to have a positive impact on human space exploration going forward? Well, yes and maybe no. If you take SpaceX, for example, what SpaceX has been able to do in its partnership with NASA has allowed NASA to move a lot faster and do things that NASA hasn't been able to do. I mean, people forget that the space shuttle retired in 2011. And for nearly a decade, the United States government could not fly anybody into space. We had no way to get to space. We had to rely on Russia to do it. Russia ended up charging NASA about $85 million per seat to fly American astronauts to the International Space Station. And along came SpaceX, which won the contract, along with Boeing, to build and design vehicles, to fly astronauts from American soil to the International Space Station. And SpaceX invested a lot of their own money into that rocket and capsule. NASA invested a lot of money as well. And now you've got that

capability. And so far, it's been really reliable. And before that, SpaceX was flying cargo and supplies to the International Space Station. And now we're under contract to build the lunar lander that would land astronauts on the moon. So we're seeing so many of these capabilities move to the private sector, which is becoming increasingly ambitious and increasingly capable, that they're able to do things that previously were in the domain of the government. But then at the same time, this raises real questions when, you know, this sort of power is in the hands of private companies and a few private companies as opposed to the government, which we're all invested in, that raises some issues. Can you expand on the issues, actually? Yeah, sure. So, I mean, when it comes to space tourism,

for example, a lot of these companies talk about opening up space to the masses, but right now that's frankly not true. It's opening up space to people who are either incredibly rich or lucky that they win some sort of a sweepstakes. I think over time, if they're successful and they can continue to fly, the cost will come down. But when you get into, say, we're able to build this enterprise out and go to the moon, for example, and you have private companies on the moon, what are the rules and regulations that govern their behavior? There really aren't any. And we're seeing, I think, a moment where the technology is outpacing the regulation. And there are attempts to create rules of the road and norms of behavior that would apply to both governments and private companies,

but that's fitful. And there's sort of a patchwork of that at the moment. To me, it's also very interesting. The people we've really talked about so far, Jeff, Jeff, Bezos, we haven't really spoken about, but his personal worth, I believe, is more than the entire stock market value of Boeing, probably by a bit. And my question is, what happened to Boeing? What's going on with them? Is there any other real private competition for, I mean, our corporate competition, what old school competition against SpaceX and the others? Yeah. And Boeing has had all sorts of. problems. I mean, not only the 737 Max scandal, those two plane crashes, but they were under contract,

as I mentioned earlier, along with SpaceX to fly astronauts to the International Space Station. Before they do a test flight with astronauts on board, they were to do a test flight without any astronauts on board because the spacecraft is autonomous. I mean, it's supposed to be able to fly and dock and do all of that. It has the manual override. If the astronauts run into trouble, they can take control of the spacecraft and park at themselves or fly at themselves. But first, NASA wanted to see, could you fly it autonomously? And that first flight was December of 2019. And immediately upon reaching orbit, their spacecraft called the Starliner had problems. And they had trouble communicating with it. They ultimately had to bring it back down. It was supposed to dock with the

space station, spend about a week there and then come home. They ultimately had to bring it home after two days and realized that there was a massive problem with the software, which is one of the issues that we saw with the 737 Max. And so the computer on board actually thought the spacecraft was 11 hours ahead in the mission. So that was an enormous problem. And then they finally come back of fixing that they were going to go through and look at every single line of code. And after a year and a half, they're back on the launch pad. And they're doing some pre-flight inspection checks just in August. and realized they had some valves in the propulsion system of the service module that were stuck closed when they were supposed to be open.

And they tried to open those back up. They opened up several of them, but couldn't get them all open. And ultimately had to de-stack it. They had to take the starliner off the rocket and put it back into the barn. And they still haven't flown, they still haven't flown the mission without astronauts. Meanwhile, SpaceX has flown three missions with astronauts. That's really remarkable, but it leads me to my next question, which is, how about NASA itself? I mean, it's been working on the SLS now for, actually, I don't know how long they've been working on it.

And do you think they're ever going to get off the ground? So SLS, we're looking at more than a decade at this point. It's obviously a huge trouble program. This is NASA's next big massive rockets called the space launch system. Boeing is the prime contractor on the core stage. And the thing about SLS is it uses a lot of the space shuttle technology. Like the engines that it uses on that core stage are left over from the space shuttle. And they're recycling that hardware.

And that was mandated by Congress, as where much of the design issues were mandated by Congress. Instead of letting the engineers at NASA build it, Congress was literally dictating requirements for this. rocket. And it's known as, you know, the Senate launch system because it's seen, you know, as a sort of jobs program for certain influential members of Congress on the Appropriations Committee who want jobs in Alabama and places like that in Mississippi. And meanwhile, you've seen, you know, SLS was born at a time where there wasn't SpaceX. There wasn't a thriving commercial space industry. And now you're seeing SpaceX build bigger, heavy, lift rockets. So is Blue Origin that ultimately, if they're successful, could be flying and could be

flying at a much, much lower cost. And that leaves NASA, which a huge dilemma. Are they going to pay the $1 to $2 billion a cost to launch SLS for every launch? Or are there going to be cheaper alternatives? And we're saying that, yes, there are cheaper alternatives out there. So SLS is supposed to actually go into deep space or launch capsule into deep space. right, meaning that it could get something, a capsule to the moon. Is that right? Yeah, yeah, and that's what it's built for. It's built to fly the Orion crew capsule to the moon. And what's going on now is the Orion crew capsule can go into orbit around the moon, but it's not a lander. It can't land astronauts on the moon. So NASA just awarded earlier this spring a contract to SpaceX, again, for its starship,

deep space rocket that would then meet up with Orion. in orbit around the moon, and the astronauts would move from Orion into Starship, the Lunar Lander, land on the surface of the moon. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's company, is challenging that contract. They thought that they were sort of in the lead and were going to win that contract, and SpaceX came and sort of in an upset victory, won the contract. So, yeah, that's what SLS is for. But you're seeing now NASA, by awarding this contract, to SpaceX is giving them $3 billion, that was a contract amount, to a direct competitor to its own rocket SLS. It sounds like the advantage there might simply be that we could get to the moon. I mean,

is it that stark? Yeah. I mean, and I think that's what NASA, they want to do it. They see this as the best path forward and they want to get to the moon. I mean, under the Trump administration, there was this timeline to try to get there by 2024, which is unrealistic. It's not going to happen. But it's possible if everything falls into place, maybe it's 2026, somewhere in there, 27. And we do see a sense of urgency for this program. They call it the Artemis program to get astronauts back to the moon that we hadn't seen in a long time. And that's in part because the Trump administration made it a priority. And when President Biden came in, he obviously laid waste to so much. of the scaffolding of the policies and the proposals that the Trump administration put up,

but they left the Artemis program intact and said, no, we want to continue this. And that's been one of the major problems for NASA in the space program, because one administration comes in and says, we're going to the moon. Then another one comes in and says, no, we've already been to the moon. We're going to Mars. Then the next one comes in and says, no, we're going to the moon. And NASA is like this ping pong ball that gets bounced back and forth with no clear directive. but now for the first time in a long time, you have continuity of purpose and goal to get back to the moon and to do it as quickly as possible.

Switching gears just a little bit. Blue Origin, to me, seems the more enigmatic of, I mean, compared to SpaceX. And right now, I think what most people have seen is any sort of real commercial purpose or any, it looks like the only reason it exists is to get Jeff Bezos a ride. what is what is it for right so they are very enigmatic and that's done by design they're just secretive they're very clandestine have always been that way they're trying to start to open up but they're just frankly having a hard time doing that and so i think they're misunderstood and one of the more public things they did was come out for jeff's ride so i think a lot of people look at it and say oh that's why they exist to get jeff to space there is a bigger goal there and they just haven't, you know, communicated it as much or as well.

And it's the ironic thing is very similar to what Elon and SpaceX want to do. I mean, they're aligned there. And Elon has said, and he's told me that he wishes Jeff were more focused on Blue Origin because they both want this goal of lowering the cost of access to space and to get more people out into space. And if Elon would root them on for that goal, and that is their goal. But they've just had a harder time getting there. They've moved slower. They've taken a more traditional sort of big contractor approach where SpaceX has been nimble and iterative,

much more like a software company, and trying out testing rockets that fail. And they blow up. And then they go back and they fix what was wrong. And they try again. And their Elon is driving very hard. And Blue Origin's moving more slowly. So they have their new Shepard rocket, which is that suborbital rocket that goes up and down. And you get a few minutes of weightlessness.

for space tourism and pretty wealthy people. They are working on a rocket called New Glenn that would be capable of getting to orbit. And like SpaceX's Falcon 9, it would be reusable. Traditionally, the first stages of rockets were tossed away in the ocean. And that's what made space so prohibitively expensive. I mean, imagine taking a commercial flight from New York to L.A.

And then you throw out the airplane after every flight. That's what we've done in spaceflight. I mean, it's so expensive. And Jeff, like Elon, it thinks that's crazy. So he wants to land and reuse the new Glenn the way they do, New Shepherd. But they've had problems. The engines that would power that rocket are delayed. And they meant to fly for the first time last year.

I don't even know that New Glenn's going to fly this year. So they've just moving slower. They lost out on the moon contract. But ultimately, now that Jeff has retired from Amazon, people expect him to a lot more focused on Blue Origin, which has been a little bit of drift, frankly, and get it moving so that he can achieve those goals and enter the marketplace and really compete with SpaceX in a way they haven't done yet. And just to touch very briefly on Richard Branson, he's, does he have any broader goal? He's, again, going back to the idea of, is it just

a matter of space tourism? I know he's been selling tickets forever. I mean, it's got to be a decade that he's been selling tickets. Yeah, the spaceplane technology seems like somewhat of a dead end. I mean, would you agree with that? Yeah, I mean, it's not going to go to the moon, for sure. I mean, their goals and aspirations are pretty much these tourism flights to the edge of space and back down. And let me just sort of, for the sake of the intellectual argument, sort of throughout the idea of like why they posit this is a positive thing. Yeah, because now you look at it. It's like a joyride for the rich, but there have only been 570 people who have ever been to space. And if you talk to an astronaut about what it's like to be in space, not just,

they don't say the weightlessness is the best part. They say looking at the window is and seeing the earth from a distance and seeing the curvature of the earth and seeing land masses without borders in the thin, fragile line of the atmosphere. And if you think about that picture, I think was the Apollo 8 astronauts took of the earth from the moon, the pale blue dot, which is like the most replicated picture in the history of photography and help touch off Earth Day. And that their goal is that if more people can have that experience to seeing Earth from a distance, that could have a profound effect if they're successful and they can do it safely and they don't have any accidents. And instead of 570 people, it's 5,000, it's 10,000, it's 15,000 people. And they can, you know, talk about

it, that I think arguably could have a profound effect, especially if the cost comes down and they remain dedicated to that and flying not just rich white men, but a wide array of people from different backgrounds. And I guess the advantage of sending rich white men into space is that they often have, I mean, very rich white men is they have the power to change things in a way that the rest of us really don't, right? And I think what these companies want to do is have these rich people subsidize the early part of the development of the technology. I mean, this is still very early stages. And if the companies are selling these really expensive tickets, then that's helping them ultimately make it safer, make it better, build a bigger fleet and drive the cost down.

I mean, commercial aviation in the early days was also really expensive. And now you know, buy a Southwest flight for $59 or $1. over that. I don't think we're ever going to get there in space, but I think the companies are like, yeah, we'll let you invest in our technology if the goal is to bring it down. And hopefully that's what will happen. All right, Angry Planet listeners, we're going to pause there for a break. We'll be right back after this. All right. Thanks for sticking around Angry Planet listeners. Let's get back to that conversation. Here's a really philosophical question, but I think it's directly related to what we're talking about. Why send people into space at all?

I mean, that actually has been a NASA question at points, right? I mean, I can't remember which administrator was who was focusing on faster, cheaper, better, and unmanned probes to explore the universe. So can you tell me why? Sure. I mean, I can try and give you some sense of why NASA does it and why people like Elon and Jeff want to do it. So, for example, if you send people to Mars, we've got these great rovers there and now we've even got a helicopter. And just a quick note. people like to lament about the demise of NASA, but NASA just landed a car-sized rover on Mars and flew a helicopter on Mars. So that's pretty impressive. But as advanced as that technology is, humans could just be much more efficient and do the science a lot better. And there is a lot of interesting science and vital science to be done on Mars, which we think possibly had life. And that would be a huge discovery. staying with a philosophical theme. I mean, why Elon wants to go and why founded SpaceX was because, I mean, there could be at some point, not tomorrow, not in 50 years, but at some point, an extinction of it, an asteroid

hitting the earth and that humanity goes the way of the dinosaur. And here all our eggs are on Earth. And there's no backup plan. Like you back up your hard drive. There's no plan B. And he wants to, as he says, continue and maintain the light of consciousness. and Mars is possibly a viable option. Jeff Bezos looks at it. Again, the philosophical standpoint, that's the, I think, absolute correct way to think about it and says, we don't want a plan B.

Earth is great. Earth is fantastic. We have, you know, palm trees and waterfalls and bacon and red wine, all these wonderful things on Earth that you don't have on Mars. Mars is horrible. Mars, you want to, like, Mars wants to kill you. You know, Mars is very difficult, but the resources on Earth are limited and we're using them up at a fast rate. And our population is growing and our demand for energy is going for to power these Zoom calls and Hulu and our iPhones. And the resources on Earth, they're going to run out. And so we have to go to space because the resources in space are virtually unlimited.

You know, those meteorites and asteroids have precious metals that can be used that. We could mine and take. And so his idea is preserve Earth, stop, you know, zone Earth residential. All heavy industry goes off into space. And we preserve Earth as like a national park and build these sort of colonies in Earth orbit. Now, this is like some science fiction dream and it's hundreds of years away. But his goal now is to build the infrastructure to get there, the drive down the cost of access to space. In a way, you know, you saw this economic dynamism with the internet.

and Jeff would say when he started Amazon and Mark Zuckerberg started in his dorm room Facebook, they were building upon an existing infrastructure. The phone companies had laid down the cables for the internet. There was this magical device called the credit card where Jeff could take people's money to buy books. There was a service called the post office that would deliver the books. That was all there. But in space, that infrastructure is not there. It's too difficult to get to space.

And so what they want to do is at least lay the beginnings of the foundation to get there. So that brings up the importance of science fiction, actually, to me. And science fiction has gone along with space exploration, led space exploration all along. These billionaires inspired by science fiction, and does science fiction still have the ability to inspire? Yeah, I mean, absolutely. They both, Jeff and Elon particularly, huge science fiction fans. Jeff was a hardcore Trekkie. And Yeah, I mean, they're sort of named their, you know, companies and vehicles are these nods to science fiction. And Jeff's whole idea comes of not going to the surface of another planet, but just going into space and building colonies in space comes from Isaac Asimov and science fiction writers. It's right out of that. And this idea, too, is inspired by Gerard O'Neill, who's a physicist at Princeton University.

And like Elon's a Falcon 9, is named for the Millennium Falcon. and they want to inspire. And like Elon's building this spaceport in South Texas that he wants to call Starbase, which sounds science fictiony. And I mean, if you look at science fiction, like even the modern science fiction and its ability to inspire, you know, I think at least most recently, the book I can think of is The Martian by Andy Weir, which took off. And the great thing about that, it's fiction.

But if you know anything about that book, you based it in reality. And like he did the math of the calculations and the chemistry and all of that. that is rooted in reality. And I don't know, at least I found that. Yeah, that's the story of an astronaut who gets left on Mars and then manages to survive and eventually escape by growing potatoes in his own poop. I mean, that's one thing that really a lot of people have mentioned. And I believe he was Matt Damon in the movie. So changing tax to the great power competition for space. Does that exist? And is it only China that would be that competition? And they're pretty secretive anyway. Yeah. So another thing that's really interesting about this transfer of the Trump

administration to the Biden administration is, I guess not surprisingly, the Trump administration and Vice President Pence, who was really into space and was chair of the National Space Council. And he cast it as sort of a Cold War like rivalry between the United States and China and said, why we have to get back to the moon by 2024 because China is going to beat us there. And we need to have American leadership and American values in space. And he tried to reprise the Cold War space race between the United States and the Soviet Union in order to kickstart it. And I think a lot of people were like dismissing it as that sort of hawkish talk.

But now, under the Biden administration, the new NASA administrator, former Florida Senator Bill Nelson, is also casting it in those terms. I think part of it is genuine because China has big ambitions in space. They landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon, which had never been done before. They recently landed a rover on Mars, joining the United States is the only governments to do so. They're in the middle of a program to build their own space station, and they're partnering with Russia to do that. And they don't have these changes of administration that point them from one goal to another every four days. eight years. And so Bill Nelson has come out and has said, we're in a space race with China.

So I do think it's partially genuine. I also think it's designed to drum up support, particularly from Republicans in Congress, to increase his budget to get there. And that's an easy drum for him to hit is to talk up big, scary China that will resonate with conservatives in the House of representatives to fund a space program that otherwise everyone's like, we're focused on infrastructure and transportation. And by doing that, it's a political move. But then again, he's a former politician. So he knows how to play come. What do we know about China's space program? I mean, obviously they're very secretive, but they do have big ambitions. And they have laid out a timeline of in some ways looking at what we want to do, building a space station in low earth orbit,

and maintaining a presence around not too far from Earth's surface. They want to get to the moon, like the United States, they want to get to the South Pole of the Moon. South Pole of the Moon is really important because we know there's water there in the permanently shadowed craters. Water is vitally important, not just for drinking water to sustain life, but hydrogen and oxygen can be used as rocket fuel, rocket propellant. And so you could see the Moon as a gas, station in space. And so instead of hauling all of this propellant up to get out of Earth's gravity, you could refuel at the moon to get into deep space and to get into Mars. And we've seen they have also, you know, shown the ability to get to Mars. So they're moving along at a fast clip themselves.

And of course, part of the rivalry is played up because NASA is effectively prohibited by law from partnering with China. So even though while we are married to Russia in terms of the international space station, and we relied on Russia for nearly a decade to fly our astronauts to the station, and on the ground, things are obviously very tense, but we don't even have that kind of diplomatic relationship with China at all. Which leads really nicely into military applications in space. I assume the China issue is largely sharing technology, but I know has been a fear from science fiction and science fact for a while. So what do you think of space force and how is space overall being used militarily now? Yeah. So, I mean, the space force

got wrapped up and we're associated with Trump. And he just wrapped himself in the flag of space force. But the concept of space force was well before Trump came along. And I remember being a thing tank in Washington, D.C. and hearing a top Air Force official say, talk about it. He said, when Sputnik happened in the 50s, I mean, there was paranoia. That was chaos. People were freaking out because they had the high ground. Sputnik was like a beach ball, you know, going around beeping and there was that level of pandemonium. If the American public today had a true sense of what was going on in space, even if they paid attention to the declassified stuff of what was going on space, I mean, it's far worse than so.

Sputnik and far more danger. And so what we know, for example, I mean, China has shown that they can blow up a satellite, not just in low Earth orbit, but in what's called geostationary orbit, that orbits the Earth at the same speed of Earth's rotation. So you can have a satellite there that stays over a fixed spot. So that's where you put, you know, a satellite if you want to keep eyes on, say, North Korea. And so we've got all these satellites that we use for missile warning and missile defense, GPS, that little dot on your iPhone comes from an Air Force satellite that they also use on a military grade for a precision guided missile that hopefully hits the bad guy in their convoy and not the school bus. And yet Russia and China and North Korea and to some extent,

some other countries like Iran have demonstrated that they're sitting ducks. Those satellites can be taken out in a moment's notice. And that could have an enormous. consequences for the way we fight war and the way we live everyday lives. And China, again, blew up this satellite and created this massive amount of debris in 2013 that created all the space junk that's out there now hurtling around at 17,500 miles an hour that threatens other satellites. So, I mean, it's a significant issue. And it's finally sort of, again, coming to the public consciousness and to Congress's attention, that there are some serious issues out there in space. And you could see the next war, the first salvo being a missile warning satellite being blown up before the missiles are

fired. Thank you for that little piece of encouragement. We prefer to be somewhat depressing on this show anyway. It's all right. The guardians are on the case. It's fine. So one other question. Do you think, and you have a lot more expertise than most people, can humanity ever get to the stars. I guess you're talking deep space? Interstellar? Yeah. I mean, I've read things on every side, and including some group of scientists, I think recently said it just can't be done. There's no way for humanity to actually leave this solar system. Are there optimists still out there who have a scientific background? Yeah, I mean, I think that's, I think that is bordering on the limits of current technology for sure. We're using methane or kerosene or hydrogen and liquid oxygen to fly. I mean,

that's only going to get you so far. But who knows? In a few hundred years, we may be looking at today's rocket technology is the horse and buggy stage. And if you think about where we've been in the International Space Station is 240 miles up. That's like from New York to Washington, D.C. I mean, that's barely sticking your toe in the Atlantic Ocean. I mean, that's how far we've been. The moon is 240,000 miles away. It's still, it's a three-day, three-day, two, three-day journey. We haven't gone very far, and just because it takes so long and it's so dangerous with the radiation.

So we'll need new forms of propulsion. People are working on nuclear-powered engines to get there. We're going to need, you know, way life support, protection against radiation. It's clear that we know. from people like Scott Kelly, who spent nearly a year on the International Space Station. That's space, you know, we've evolved to live in gravity and to live on Earth. And it messes with your body to be in space for a long time. So you'd have to create spacecraft that have simulated gravity.

So now the technology is not there, but, you know, you think, too, with people like Elon and Jeff and at some extent, Richard, that, and who knows what futurists and future. future generations, they will inspire. You know, for example, there's this company called Relativity Space that's CEO as this, I'm going to call him a kid. I mean, it's like, I don't know if he's 30 yet, but he grew up out of blue origin, and he has got a company that's building the rocket entirely using 3D printers. So instead of hundreds of thousands of parts that you have to manufacture by hand and put together,

you have this machine build the rockets. And if you can get to the moon, you have a big 3D printer, and the moon's a gas station, and you can build a rocket there. So you're starting to see it. So I guess there's a long way of saying, I don't know, but I'm watching the industry and seeing it evolve pretty quickly. And I'm going to say that Moore's law, that's something for a reason. Well, I think you have the best job in journalism. I do. I totally agree.

All right. Kristen Davenport, thank you so much for coming on the show. His book is The Space Barons. You absolutely must read it. And hopefully we'll speak to you again. Anytime. Thanks so much. Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Nodell. Thank you, as always, for listening. If you like the show, we do have a substack. Two bonus episodes every month for mere $9.9.com or angryplanet.substack.com is where you can sign up. We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.