Main Engine Cut Off - T+103: Commercial Lunar Payload Services

Episode Date: December 4, 2018

NASA announced the nine companies that will be competing for Commercial Lunar Payload Services missions. I share some thoughts on the program overall, and discuss what we know about each company. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 34 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Jamison, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, Robb, and seven anonymous—and 200 other supporters on Patreon. NASA Announces New Partnerships for Commercial Lunar Payload Delivery | NASA Draft Concepts for Commercial Lunar Landers | NASA Deep Space Systems Aerospace Engineering NASA Homepage | Draper Firefly Aerospace Moon Express | Redefining Possible ORBITBeyond Home | Astrobotic intuitivemachines Masten Space Systems Lockheed Martin Corporation | Lockheed Martin Email your thoughts and comments to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Listen to MECO Headlines Join the Off-Nominal Discord Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhere Subscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off Newsletter Buy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off Shop Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

commercial lunar payload services that's what we're going to be breaking down here on main engine cutoff today i am anthony colangelo and this is a very exciting story for me this is something what we've been hearing about for quite a while now, really the entire Bridenstine era of NASA. This was something that even predated him, I guess. We've been hearing rumors of this for quite a while. And at the beginning of the Bridenstine era, when I think it was the same week that he was getting confirmed as the NASA

administrator, there was a cancellation of the resource prospector mission, which caused quite a bit of a controversy because this was a mission that was going to be a rover that we would send to the moon that had been worked on for quite a while, even though it wasn't really that close to launching. There had been a lot of work going on. And the goal of it was to go to the moon, find water on the moon and other resources that could be harvested, and demonstrate some sort of resource processing on the moon. And this was cancelled, and the line from Bridenstine and NASA was that the payloads that were going to be on that would be broken up and flown on smaller landers that are developed by commercial companies and that NASA would say, we need this payload to fly to the moon on this day

in this area. And then they would fly what was supposed to be the resource prospector mission in many different styles of landers and different missions around different parts of the moon and accomplish that same goal. So that was the way that NASA saw this going, in that they would encourage commercial companies to develop this kind of capability to the moon, and that it would be more responsibly funded by NASA instead of developing the entire program. They would just develop payloads and assign them to companies to fly. And that way, you kind of build up this commercial infrastructure at the moon. You're able to fly payloads to different spots on the moon in a way that lets you spend more money and time on payloads and less on overall infrastructure. So that's the idea behind

this. And it's something that I'm particularly interested in because given the political nature, the political environment right now that we're in here in the US, but also everywhere else in the world, I think the moon is much more attainable on the political timelines that we see, the budgets that we see. We're going to be in a really weird budget spot here in the US in a couple of years. In the early 2020s, debt maintenance alone is going to be, I think I heard, more than even the defense budget here in the US. So there's going to be some budget issues in the next two, three years that would impact large spending on space. So I do see this lunar work that's going on now as something that's more politically attainable, both from a budget perspective, but timeline perspective as well.

And in the same way that NASA and the other ISS partners have used the ISS to kind of develop a commercial infrastructure in low Earth orbit, I could see that extending very easily to the moon as well. And this is the first step in that regard. So it's something that I think could be a really good move here, could be a really good legacy, this program, in the same way that commercial cargo is a legacy of the Bolden era NASA. I think this could be the legacy of the Bridenstine era NASA and really set us up for interesting things in the 2020s. So the basics of the program is that NASA has kind of greenlit $2.4 billion of funding over the next 10 years. And that funding is not committed all up front. That funding is spent through awarding task orders to to fly one mission to the moon. And $2.4 billion is the maximum amount of contract value that they can award over the next decade. And it will be split

up among the companies, depending on how those companies compete for these different task orders. I'm very interested to see how those task orders are competed if it's in public. If NASA is going to post an RFP publicly, it says we need this amount of payload to the moon on this timeline. And then we would see, you know, a response date in there and companies would respond to that RFP and eventually be awarded. Or if it's going to be something where, you know, just all of a sudden we're going to hear NASA has contracted with Lockheed Martin for a mission in 2021 to this location with this payload. I'm interested to see how that goes, but either way, it's really the same effect in the end. It's just whether we

get to talk about it before or after the award. Up front, all of these nine companies that have been selected for this program, I should mention there are nine companies that have been selected for this program, they all receive a small initial award amount of funding. We don't know what those amounts are, but that initial award amount is supposed to go towards that company developing a payload user's guide for whatever vehicle or spacecraft or services that they are developing. So that should happen fairly quickly. I think in some of these cases, we're going to break down all these nine companies and what they're thinking about. In some of these cases, I think these companies already have those either in the works or could be developed very quickly. So I would assume that, you know,

over the next couple of months, maybe even quicker than that, we'll see some of these payload users guides start to come out. And the idea here is that NASA doesn't want to be the only customer that are flying on these vehicles, maybe even on these missions. They want to be one customer of many. So that sort of helps the fact that NASA doesn't want to be the only one funding these spacecraft. So if they can be one customer of several, that puts the companies that are building these landers a little more invested in spending their own money to develop these landers, and that NASA can just buy the missions from them in the same way that they've done that with specifically SpaceX and the commercial cargo program, where they

have funded SpaceX to do commercial cargo to the ISS. And through that, SpaceX developed the Falcon 9 rocket that is now a huge hit on the commercial market. And that gives SpaceX some additional funding that they can make everything better overall. They want to do that same sort of thing here with lunar payloads. And the fact that these nine companies can now say to potential investors, we have NASA looking at our services to fly to the moon, that will help them raise money from investors, help them sign additional customers, and really contribute to the success of any one of these programs.

So for a very small investment of NASA's actual funding, but a big investment in reputation, the hope is that these companies can develop their spacecraft to a more successful level with that sort of backing and confidence from NASA, even though in some of these cases, these companies have very little to show, at least publicly. So I'm very hopeful about this program in general. I think, like I said, I think based on political and space development timelines, this will be the test of the Bridenstine era NASA and potentially even the legacy defining element of that era of NASA, at least as far as

the exploration program is concerned. I think the Bolden era NASA, their legacy is commercial cargo. And I think this could be Bridenstine era NASA. I think SLS Orion and commercial crew, the way it's going, I'm not sure anyone wants to be attached to those specifically. They've both had major issues and are majorly behind schedule. So I think commercial cargo and potentially this could be the two things that those different administrations would point to and say, this is our success. This is the thing that we're contributing to the future. I also think through the selection of these specific nine companies, NASA has done a good job of setting themselves up for early success and some later

on development of different companies. You know, 10 years is an interesting timeline because you have companies in this that are ready to go now. You have companies that have been talking about going in 2019, 2020. You also have some companies that are still very early on in their development and would be a more forward-looking kind of company in that, you know, they would come online midway through the program and add to the competitive nature. So you've got a couple of companies that I, as we get into, I'll tell you which ones I think these are, but a couple of companies that are going to be really strong competitors in the next three to four years. And then you have some companies that probably will take another three to four years to really come into their own as a strong competitor. So in that way, I think NASA has done a good job setting themselves up for that short and long

term success, especially with this program, you know, 2.4 billion over the next 10 years. That's an interesting timeline, not only because of how long development cycles are, but also think about the political environment in 10 years years, unless whoever's the president, 2020, 2024, unless they keep appointing Bridenstine, that's a new administrator. So that does bring with it some potential cancellation prospects. But I think setting that 10-year goal is a really interesting way of positioning this as not just a short-term development program, but a long-term, you know, flying a lot of payloads of the moon over 10 years. It's a really interesting framing for this,

especially with the companies that are selected. And one last thing to mention before I dive into breaking down what these companies are working on, NASA has left open the possibility of on-ramping other competitors. So right now they've selected nine companies that can compete on these missions, but they have left open the ability for if somebody else out there comes online, starts developing capabilities that fit into this program, that they could be on-ramped and added as a competitor in this program. So nine competitors right now, as I said, their timelines might vary. Certainly their capabilities vary, what they can fly to the moon, what kind of missions they can carry out, where they can fly to the moon, what kind of missions they can carry out, where they can land.

So I think this is going to be a very competitive program. I'm very interested to see how NASA uses the different capabilities of these different companies, because some have larger landers, some have smaller landers. But all in all, I think this is a good setup for success for NASA. So I want to break down these companies, what we do and don't know. That's going to be very varying. Some we know a lot about, some we know very little about. But I want to break them down just to give us a framework to think about these companies over the next 10 years.

Because this is something that we're going to be talking about all the time if this goes the way that NASA foresees it. And it could be something that's very, very exciting to watch and follow along with. But before we do that, I want to say a very special thank you to all of you out there supporting Main Engine Cutoff over at patreon.com slash Miko. There are 234 of you supporting this show every single month. And this episode of Main Engine Cutoff is produced by 34 executive producers. Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Jameson, Nadeem, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mintz, Eunice, Rob,

and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you so much for making this episode possible and thank you so much to everybody else over at patreon.com slash Miko for your support. As always, head over there if you want to check out the headlines show, $3 a month or more. And you get a show every single weekend from me

breaking down all the headlines of the week. It's really helpful when there's a lot going on. This week alone has been crazy already with stories. So we'll have a lot to talk about in headlines coming up this weekend. So head over there if you want to check it out. And I should mention as well on, if you want to support the show in another way, shop.mainenginecutoff.com. I've got some great shirts up there, some great rocket socks up there that people have been loving.

We've got some new designs for the off-nominal listeners out there. So head over to shop.mainenginecutoff.com. That's another great way to support the show and also support some space nerd gear. So check it out. All right, so let's break down each and every one of these nine companies. As I said, some of these are longer term. Some of these are shorter term. Some of these we know a lot about. Some of these we know a little about. So my idea here is to kind of go from what we know the least about to the most about, I guess, roughly. Because some of these I don't have too much to say about. We just don't know a lot about the companies themselves.

One of them is extraordinarily new. Some of them don't have a lot of public-facing work. So we really can only assume some things about them. And as these payload users guides come out, we can circle back and see if we're right or wrong here. But this is kind of the way I want to go about it. So first up, I want to talk about Deep Space Systems. This is a company out of Colorado, the Denver area. They have done a lot of subcontracting with Lockheed Martin, it seems like over the years. They do a lot of visualization work as well. I've talked to at least one person there that's kind of interesting. The visualization that they've released as part of this commercial lunar payload services announcement is sort of this lander rover thing with another little micro rover and a robotic arm coming off of it.

Hard to really glean a lot from this size and all that. Really hard to tell. So this is one of those ones that we're not going to know a lot about what they're specifically offering in this program until they release that payload users guides. But based on the programs they've worked with, with Lockheed Martin, if you head over to their website, they've got a long list of missions that they've contributed to a lot of Mars missions. We kind of get a sense that they do have some experience in this area and could be a valuable entrant. But I think it's going to be a couple of years before they have anything that can really fly. So this is probably one of those ones that comes online in four years and starts being a competitor at that point. Next up is Draper, which is sort of in a similar

situation. They have the idea to develop the Artemis 7 lunar lander. Draper is a company that rolled out of MIT years ago. They're going to be working with General Atomics and Spaceflight, who would organize their payloads here. Historically, they did work on the Apollo guidance program. So the Artemis 7, they're supposed to say that this is the seventh lunar lander we've worked on after the six Apollo lunar landers. That's maybe a little facetious given the history there. But again, this is another one that is tough to tell where they're at in timeline. We've only started hearing about this recently. We only see mock-ups, not any real hardware yet, at least publicly. And we also don't really know what they're aiming for in

terms of payload or anything like that. So there's really not too much to break down here, other than the fact that Draper has a long history in space and is shown to be competent over the years. So I think, again, think of this one as you're not really going to be hearing for them. I would be shocked, I should say, if I would hear from them before three, four years from now with something that they can offer to this program. But again, good history to them. And I think, you know, there's some hope there as well. Next up, we had Firefly Aerospace enter this program, which was a real head scratcher for me. They're developing a couple of launch vehicles firefly alpha right now firefly beta in the future um they're kind of ramping up to be

ready to launch next year as is what they say the end of next year they're ready to have firefly alpha head up to orbit so um this is a really interesting one because like i want them to be focused on their launch vehicle i think they have a really interesting one because I want them to be focused on their launch vehicle. I think they have a really interesting launch vehicle to offer to the market, and I don't want them to get distracted too early on. They've also had this whole weird thing where Firefly went away, then they got acquired or their assets got acquired, and they've been birthed from the ashes again and are now entering this kind of program. They show one mock-up of a Lunar Lander inside of

the payload fairing of Firefly Beta, which is their, think of it like the Falcon Heavy version of their launch vehicle. This is a whole lot of new hardware that we have yet to see fly or anything. We've seen engine hot fires from them. If they do get a launch off the end of next year, I think we can put a little more hope in this. But I would not expect this to be a player until halfway through the program, just because they have so much to work out here before they get to this point where they can start developing a lander. They've got a lot of launch vehicle work to do. They've got to develop a launch site out of Vandenberg. They're taking over the old Delta II pad out at Vandenberg. So they've got that that they're going to develop. Then they're

probably going to develop an East Coast one as well. So they have a ton of work to do. And I'm not sure that with all that, you know, in order to make this successful, they have to have a successful launch vehicle. So in any circumstances, the launch vehicle is going to take precedence when they get to a point where they need to prioritize things. So if they do encounter delays with their launch vehicle, I think that's going to impact their lunar lander schedule. So that's kind of where I'm saying they've got a lot of work to do before they get to this point. I like that they're thinking long term like this, like offering services beyond launch and offering a more end to end transportation service. But I don't see this

being a real competitor until the 2024 timeframe. And maybe even that's a little generous. Next up, we've got everyone's favorite, Moon Express. A very controversial company, I think. I do not look too kindly on them after the way that they've handled things in the last year. They kept saying, we're ready to go on our Google Lunar XPRIZE. It's going to be next month, three months from now, a year from now. But they've never shown hardware. They've never shown the readiness to fly. They've shown a couple of mock-ups. They've shown a lot of interesting diagrams. I don't know that we've ever seen their engine even fire. And they're saying like, we're ready to launch next year.

It's a really weird situation. Sounded for a while like they were running out of money. Then they got a bunch of funding just a couple of weeks back. So maybe related to this NASA situation. Really hard to get a handle on, but I don't put a lot of stake in them. Now, they do have this NASA Lunar Catalyst inclusion in their history. So a couple of years ago, NASA started this Lunar Catalyst program where they were working with three companies that are in this announcement here, Moon Express, Mastin Space, and Astrobotic

to develop small landers. Back then, it was even a little differently positioned. And Moon Express was part of that. That's where a lot of their work came from. Then they latched onto the Google Lunar XPRIZE. But we really have seen very little from them in way of actual hardware and flight-ready hardware and really anything but fancy graphics. Bob Richards, the head of Moon Express, likes to do a lot of interviews and talk very philosophically about space and how close they are to doing this. But I think if they were that close to launching a mission, we'd see videos of engine firings and videos of hardware being tested. We'd see photos of this making its way through the process of doing tests here on the ground. But we see very

little, if any, of that at all. So it's hard to know where they're at, realistically. I know they've had funding issues. I know they have team issues. They had this whole patent litigation or not patent litigation. It was was it patent litigation? It was some sort of intellectual property lawsuit with another person in this announcement, intuitive machines. if they're really real. You know, now they've got additional funding. They've got inclusion in this program. But until we start to see actual hardware, until we start to see actual testing, I'm incredibly skeptical.

And there's a lot of weirdness coming out of Moon Express. So I don't know where to rank that. But I'm keeping my distance for now and watching. Now, they do have listed here on this announcement that they're going to be working with Sierra Nevada Corporation,

Paragon Space Development, NanoRacks, and Odyssey Space Research. So they have good partners. I don't know specifically what they're doing. NanoRacks, obviously organizing small sat payloads and different payloads like they do on the ISS. So good team makeup, but overall, just a lot of skepticism from me on Moon Express. Next up, Orbit Beyond. This is a weird situation. So the Commercial Lunar Payload Services, the stipulation was that these had to be U.S. companies.

So Orbit Beyond was created just a couple of weeks ago as sort of a, I don't want to call it a shell corporation because that sounds seedier than it is, but essentially it's a shell corporation based here in the US. I think the founder was an old United Launch Alliance employee and founded a company here in the US partnering with Team Indus, who is a company that was in the Google Lunar XPRIZE. They're based out of India and they have this lander that they're working on that has reportedly been ready to go to the moon by 2019, 2020. They didn't make the Google Lunar X Prize.

There was a little more upfront about not being ready for it than Moon Express was. So they do seem like at some point in the next couple of years, they'll have a lander ready to go to the moon. So the idea with Orbit Beyond is to create a company that is based here in the US that can work with them and bring that lander into this program to give that Team Indus lander a customer. They're also going to be working with a couple of different companies, Honeybee Robotics, one of them, which is a very well-known robotics company that's developing a lot of interesting technology, especially for things like sample return and planetary exploration in general. So a good makeup there. But it's one of those situations where we have very little insight into Team Indus, just not speaking the same language

and being an ocean away. So we'll see if this really comes together in any way or if this is maybe a bit of a stretch to have this kind of weird uh you know cross-planetary uh alliance to bring a lander into a u.s uh program here but nonetheless i think we've have seen photos of hardware so that's a leg up on on moon express certainly and others in this. So that's a good thing from Team Indus. So we'll see how that develops overall. All right, now we're getting into the real meat of this. Astrobotic. We have talked to members of Astrobotic and their spinoff Cube Rover on Main Engine Cutoff before.

They were part of the Lunar Catalyst program from NASA. They're developing this Peregrine Lander that currently they have committed to a 2020 flight on an Atlas V. Apparently, they've signed about, I think, last I saw was like 16 customers or something like that, 12 or 16 customers to that initial mission. And they've been showing a lot over the last couple of years. So I think this is one that's still in development. So there's still a lot of risk to say, like, this is for sure going to work out. But I would put more stake in this than a Moon Express, just to give you an idea where

I'm at. Payload-wise, I think that they're in, they've always said, like, 35 kilograms of customer payload. I don't know if that means, you know, on their site, they listed as 35 kilograms of non-NASA payload. So I don't know if that means they already have committed a bunch of payload area to NASA on every flight. And this is the leftover stuff. Not sure how that works out. I haven't seen any clarification on what their total amount of payload would be, but maybe it's in the 50

kilogram range or something like that. So not huge, but not tiny. And obviously they have that cube rover spin out. So in the future, you could see them offering different capabilities by, you know, putting a lander down and then rolling out a cube rover off the side and things like that for a little mobility. So, you know, the fact that they've, they had previously years ago committed to a Falcon 9 launch, then they've committed to an Atlas 5 launch. So a little bit of that kind of jumping around, pushing schedules, delay, delay, delay, but nothing alarming in terms of space development in general. So something that we haven't seen a ton of hardware coming out of them yet, but we have

seen a lot of work going on there and not a lot of sketchy stuff like we've seen out of Moon Express. So still reserved, but I think this is one that we could see win a mission, you know, in 2021, I would say, could see an astrobotic mission getting off the ground as part of this program. Next up is Intuitive Machines. This I mentioned during the Moon Express segment because they were in a lawsuit with Moon Express. They won the lawsuit. Not sure of the specific details, but it was pretty messy. And Intuitive Machines is interesting to me because they were founded by a group of team members from NASA Johnson who were working on a Project Morpheus lander back then. This was a

lander that used methane and liquid oxygen, and they did a bunch of test flights on the Earth, tethered and free flights. It was a really cool program that was following along. That got canceled just a couple of years back, or at least funding wasn't renewed. And at that point, the team members left and some of them founded Intuitive Machines. So a lot of the heritage, both in experience and probably even some hardware heritage, is from that Project Morpheus day. And I think that gives me a lot of confidence that they've flown that sort of vehicle before. They have experience operating that. They have experience with what it takes to build something like that. So whether or not

they're able to lift certain intellectual property from that, that's one thing. But the fact that they have done that in the past, that they have that experience, they've learned those lessons, that to me, gives me a lot of confidence in this lander. This is not a tiny lander. It's not a giant lander. 85 kilograms is the payload capacity. So on the upper end of what's included in this program, it's an interesting looking lander. It's a little bit taller proportionally than the other landers that are in this program, the other mock-ups that are in this program. And it looks like they've got some good stuff going on here. So again, their history gives me confidence. This is called the

Nova C Lunar Lander. And I'm digging it. I'm definitely interested. And I think this is one that maybe could be a little ahead of Astrobotic just because they do have that raw experience of doing all that Project Morpheus free-flying, so that is pretty awesome to see. Next up is Mastin Space Systems. This is the one that I'm most excited about in this program. I've got a soft spot in my heart for Mastin and what they're working on. Again, similar to what I was saying with Project Morpheus, Mastin has a ton of flight experience here on Earth. They fly all the time with their landing systems here on Earth. They do a lot of low altitude to a little higher altitude testing here on Earth, and they have

incredibly precise landing with reusable vehicles, and that's pretty amazing. For a while, they were developing the Zeus lander, which was taking a centaur upper stage and making it kind of be able to land on its side. They would attach a landing kit that was, think of it like landing on its belly, if you would, and that was going to be a very heavy lander. They've kind of shelved that for now,

and they're working on this smaller lander called the XL-1. Again, they were part of the Lunar Catalyst program with NASA, so they were developing this technology alongside NASA with their insight and input. And that Masten experience of flying so much, having that avionics worked out, having a lot of the software built, having experience with hardware so much, having that avionics worked out, having a lot of the software built, having experience with hardware like that, that is all really encouraging for their future on

the space. And XL1 would be a 100 kilogram payload to the lunar surface lander. It would be kind of similarly shaped as Zeus, where it's kind of a long and short vehicle. You can check out the photos on your pod player. I'm putting them in the chapter markers there. So this is really exciting to me because I've wanted Mastin to be flying some of these missions for a long time now. I've wanted them to have a shot at flying this sort of mission. And given how much experience they have flying other vehicles here on Earth, and given how much experience they have developing engines and things like that, I put a lot of confidence in their ability to pull off this XL-1 and pull it off soon. So I think this would be one of the first companies to be committed to a flight as part of Commercial Lunar Payload Services, and I would be very excited for that day. Lunar Payload Services, and I will be very excited for that day. Last but not least is Lockheed Martin,

the biggest company in this competition. And the idea here is to take the lander heritage that they have through InSight and Phoenix and Mars Polar Lander and all of these different Mars landers that they've done that have been based roughly on the same spacecraft and lander bus. And they're going to take that and convert it into the McCandless Lunar Lander, named after Bruce McCandless, the astronaut that, if you have ever seen that photo of an astronaut flying away on his own out past the reach of any tethers, that was Bruce McCandless. Named after him, he passed away not too long ago. And this is probably the most reliable entrant in this because they've done these landings on Mars before. They would take that same lander bus and they would convert it to a lunar lander.

So I think if you're looking for a quick contract, this will probably be the first one to go. I wouldn't be surprised to see them commit to a contract to land in like 2020 or something like that. I don't know how quick they can build and turn around one of these lander buses. I don't know if they have any other extra spare parts from Insight laying around that they can strap together and get a lander pretty quick. But I would bet that this is the first one that we see as part of this commercial lunar payload services. I would bet that we see this very quickly awarded to

Lockheed Martin. They have so much experience, so much heritage in these kind of landers that it's really not too much of a stretch. I don't know how much payload they can do to the moon as part of this. I know the InSight payload mass was about 50 kilograms. I think the landed mass of InSight and Phoenix were about 350 kilograms. So it kind of gives you an idea of what they'd be able to do to the moon. I'm sure they could do a little bit more than that just because of the difference in environments and difference in gravity and everything else that goes into it. But I don't know the 100% specifics on this. But I do know that they have a massive amount of experience, a massive amount of heritage, and a massive amount of confidence from NASA that they can

pull this off. So I would bet that we see this awarded, if not by the end of the year, very early next year, and that we get some sort of commitment to flight from NASA for Lockheed Martin. I know it's not that inspiring, but this would be very quick to get a lander, you know, maybe even be able to pull it off before the next election so that whatever happens in the election, they can at least say, hey, we did a lander on the moon. So that's it for the companies. I don't have too much else to say on this program. I think as we see these payload users guides come out, we'll circle back and talk about what we missed talking about here.

And maybe just this initial impression episode can be just that. And we can update it as we go and adjust our thinking as we see some progress made here. I would expect that now that this is public, some of these companies will start sharing a lot more about what they're working on and opening up the vest a little,

maybe showing some more hardware. So keep an eye out for any updates from these companies. And again, like I said up front, NASA has left open the ability for other companies to be on-ramped into this. So if we start seeing somebody work on small landers, small engines, and something that could contribute to this program, we might see that get wedged in here. So that is it for now. If you have any thoughts on any of these companies, anyone you're particularly excited about, I would love to hear from you.

Anthony at managingcutoff.com is the email or on Twitter at wehavemiko. And as always, keep sending your questions in. We'll do that question and answer episode at the end of the month again. So send your questions in now and I'll get you on early so that your question can be answered

in the next Q&A episode. Once again, thank you all for supporting the show over at patreon.com slash Miko. And thanks for listening this week and I will talk to you next week.