Main Engine Cut Off - T+109: Q&A

Episode Date: February 2, 2019

We cover a lot of ground in this round of questions, nearly all focused on the future—ISS crew scheduling, ISS facilities, ISRO human spaceflight, science missions, and launch vehicles. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 35 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, Tim Dodd the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, and six anonymous—and 221 other supporters on Patreon. Email your thoughts, comments, and questions 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 Music by Max Justus

Welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. It is question time once again. We've got some questions about ISS, commercial crew, human space flight, science missions. We've got a whole bunch of stuff to get to. So let's start with the ISS and commercial crew questions. We'll start off with an easy one from Mark. Why is Starliner so much more squished vertically than Crew Dragon? This is really just the difference between, I don't know, heritage and the route that both of these spacecraft got to where they're at today. So Dragon 2 was evolved from the original Dragon,

and the original Dragon was made to match the diameter of Falcon 9, which is 3.7 meters. So Dragon 2 continued that trend and is really the same shape overall. There were some differences that came about with the differences of the abort system and all the other stuff that goes into Dragon 2, but both are 3.7 meter diameters. They both have about 10 cubic meters of internal volume. Starliner, on the other hand, had a different heritage itself. The design, it was loosely based on stuff that was going on with Orion and some other spacecraft at the time. That's diameter is four and a half meters. So it's significantly wider than Dragon 2 is, and it has 11 cubic meters of internal volume. So roughly the same volume, one is a lot skinnier

and one is a lot wider. So that makes the height difference the thing that is the variation between them. The weird bit about Starliner is that it is a four and a half meter capsule sitting on top of a three meter upper stage in Centaur. So you get weird things like that new aerodynamic skirt that's going to attach to the bottom of Starliner's trunk and will extend down Centaur, about halfway down Centaur, which helps with aerodynamic loads and some instability that was going to happen in flight. Moving on to a question from Robert. What do you think about India's recently announced human spaceflight program? How would a low-cost capsule built by relatively US-friendly democracy impact programs like

Soyuz and Commercial Crew? And a second somewhat related question. What do you think about Sierra Nevada? So the question on India, it's really interesting. It's always fun to see somebody else get into the human spaceflight game. And India recently announced a longer-term project that they're starting to invest in now, where they're going to fly their own astronauts on their own vehicles. The question about how would a relatively US-friendly democracy impact

programs like Soyuz Commercial Crew, it's interesting. There's definitely this geopolitical alignment that's happening where even stuff like production that typically happens in China or U.S. companies are starting to open up production in India. So there is some shifting geopolitical alignments there, and that could happen in space as well. Of course, this is happening at the same time that US-Russian relations are just falling apart quicker than we can keep track of. A lot of people try to say that it's not that big of a deal, but it seems really, really tenuous this past year or two. And of course, you have China's uptick in launches and their goals that they've stated to fly humans to their own space station and to the moon eventually. So if we were going to back any one of them, it would be India. Now on that front, it's going to take a while before we're ready to fly a US astronaut on an Indian vehicle, purely because we want to see them get experience. They don't have a ton of really good experience in space yet, so it's going to take a little while to build up to that. But that's not to say that the US won't look to help them out,

up their game quicker. Now, I think conversely, India might want to try to latch on to whatever's going on on the U.S., Canadian, European missions. You know, if they're all looking to go to one spot in space, India might look to, you know, join that partnership so that they have some destinations, they have some collaboration, they can get that knowledge from the other partners. So I think, you know, over the next five, 10 years, if they do well with this, we could see them become a big part of the partnership that's happening internationally in space. Whereas Russia kind of seems on the decline, China is on the upswing, but still kind of a murky future because we don't know exactly know what's going on internally with budgeting and roadmap and they're just generally closed off. So we don't know that much about China. So of the three, you know, India definitely looks to have the best future potential when you consider the US-Canadian-European partnerships in space, and Japan I should include there as well. So that'll be very curious to see. On the Sierra Nevada side, they're a company that

has a ton of history. They are an old spacey type company that is working on some new spacey type ideas, Dream Chaser being one of them. Dream Chaser was actually started externally to Sierra Nevada or under this thing called Space Dev. And that rolled into Sierra Nevada in full and they seem to be doing really well with it so far. It's an interesting vehicle. It has a lot of upmass to the ISS. The cargo version has an upmass around five metric tons. Of course, Dragon is listed at six metric tons, but they typically only do three. So we'll see if Sierra Nevada and Dream Chaser are similar in that they state their capabilities much higher than they actually get tasked with. But I think that vehicle itself is a really cool idea to be able to bring down mass from the station and land very close to either a Johnson Space Center or wherever else you want to get the, you know, experiments coming down off the space station to land them close in proximity and instantly recoverable rather than splashing down like Dragon and having to recover it on a boat and then, you know, fly it to wherever it needs to go. You can land very close to its final destination. So I think that opens up some interesting ideas. Sierra Nevada in general, they have, you know,

they work on so many different lines of work for not only NASA, but the Defense Department as well. So they're an expansive company. And I think when you're looking at that kind of thing, you have to take it piece by piece because you could say like, what do you think about Boeing as a whole? But do you mean 737s or do you mean SLS or do you mean Starliner? There's all these different departments. So I mostly look at the space ones and they seem to be doing some interesting things there. I'm a little skeptical about their whole idea into the future of having this inflatable habitat that's attached to the trunk of like the the reusable trunk of um dream chaser that seems kind of odd um but we'll see as as they go forward on that next

step program that they're working on nasa uh with nasa that could be interesting to see as well what they're able to build out there it just seems like a weird a weird fit that they're kind of wedging in what they're working on dream chaser into that Next Step program from NASA. And I'm not sure how that's going to play out. But in general, I'm curious about Dream Chaser. I'm excited to see it fly. And it'll be really cool to see it land. Question from Jerry about the ISS crewing and the schedules and all that. After the launch mishap of Soyuz MS-10 last year, there was a lot of talk about ISS potentially being de-staffed, at least temporarily. After the successful success of MS-11, the whole discussion has disappeared, but we still only have three people in space instead of the customary six.

And he's got a couple of questions. I'll take them one at a time. What is the plan to return ISS to a permanent crew of six? Will that only happen when Dragon or Starliner come online? So to address this, you kind of got to look at the schedule of the Soyuz flights of the ISS expeditions that have happened over the past couple of years. MS-10, that was the one that had the issue on ascent, never actually made it to orbit. That was a weird launch anyway, because it only had two people on it. It had one Russian and one American. So the expedition that they were going to be joining was already slightly less staff than is typical. And this just happened due to scheduling of the various Soyuz flights. And I think maybe the alignment

of they were hoping to have somebody else in that flight, but couldn't get it. So that was going to be a crew of five on the space station, three on the U.S. side, two on the Russian side. Now, in the wake of that incident, when everything got shifted around, they've adjusted the flight schedules for the next couple of Soyuzes to adjust accordingly. So right now, there are only three crew members in space, but the next flight is due to go up at the end of February or very beginning of March. So they will get up there in March. The crew that's up in the space right now has been there since December. So they've got December to March with three crew members and then March to June with six crew members. In June, the crew that is up in space currently will come back down and another crew will launch up to the ISS within that same week or two week

period of time and get back to that six crew member slot. So once this next crew flies, we'll be on a six crew member rotation from there on out and we wouldn't have missed a beat. We just missed this one segment of flight, but it was already a weird segment with already less crew members. So it didn't seem to, if you could pick any Soyuz flight to go horribly wrong, this was the one, because it was just a really odd alignment of things. And the crew members from MS-10 are actually going to be the ones flying that flight in March on MS-12. And once they get up there, we'll be back to what you've known the ISS crew schedule to be like, where you've got three crew members flying every

three months and descending every three months. That's how that's going to typically go. Now, there was one report from Sputnik, so take it with a grain of salt, because that's a kind of a Russian, I don't know, government source or whatever. There was a single report that has yet to be confirmed by anybody else that Nick Hague will do a one-year flight, and that's to accommodate the United Arab Emirates astronaut. He was originally slated to be on MS-12, and once MS-10 happened and they've re-slated those people for MS-12, it bumped that UAE astronaut off of that flight. So the idea is to, or at least the idea that someone in Russia is floating, is to have Nick Hague do a one-year mission, since that's something that NASA wants to do more of.

And so he would fly up on MS-12, not come back down, and come back down later on a different flight, MS-15, I think the article said, and that would accommodate different flight schedules. So we'll see if that pans out. I don't know. It would be surprising to me at this point that we're a month out from launch and NASA hasn't said a word about that. And of course, this is all complicated by the commercial crew bit that's coming online soon. So there's a lot in play with the ISS schedule right now. The second of Jerry's three questions, how is the reduced staffing affecting science on station? As Chris said in your last podcast,

that's Chris Gabehart he's talking about, station is in really good health, but maintenance work is still intensive. Half of the time, I guess there'll be two Russians on board and only one Western astronaut. Will that lone astronaut be able to do any science at all? So again, we're not only going to have three crew members on station. Right now, we have three crew members. We have one Russian, one Canadian, one American, but we're going to be back to six very shortly. So the science definitely was impacted a bit. There's some missions that were a little delayed because of this, but we were already going to be at a reduced crew for that flight. So that made it a little different, and it probably didn't impact it as much as another mission failing would have done.

Jerry's third question, is NASA still planning to increase crew to seven once Starliner and Dragon are ready? So this is maybe a bit of a misnomer here, but for a while, the U.S. segment and Russian segments both had three crew members. Two years ago, the Russians dropped their crew member assignments to two crews, two crew members at the same time. And the U.S. segment took the opportunity to raise their crew members to four. So for the past two years, we've had four U.S. segment crew members

and two Russian segment crew members. Russia doesn't do as much on their side of the station. They had some delays with this module that they want to fly to the space station to up that again, but that looks like that's never going to fly, personally. So we've been at this 4-2 split for a while. I've yet to see any schedules or plans for when commercial crew does start flying and is operational,

how they're going to handle that. I would assume that they're kind of just waiting until the first couple of uncrewed and crewed demo flights go up for Dragon and Starliner, and then we'll start to see the schedules. Because right now, if you look at the ISS schedule, we only have the expeditions listed out for Soyuz flights. We don't yet know how the commercial crew stuff is going to come into play there. I don't know what the maximum they could support at any, you know, they obviously at any one time they could support more people because when shuttle was there, there was a lot of people up on station, but they also had shuttle.

So I don't know exactly how this shifts in the new era when commercial crew is flying. But we have been at four crew, which was the original stated intention was to raise to four crew on the US side of the station. But at the same time, we thought Russia would have three people in space. So, you know, there's definitely some shifting that's going to happen here. But I expect that we'll hear about it in the summer, maybe in the fall, once those first couple of flights are off. Now, keep what I just said in mind, because it comes into play here from a question from Grant. You said the International Space Station will probably remain in use for several years to come.

What does the future look like for it? Are we done building, remodeling? What are some ideas that have been proposed? Thinking outside the box, what could we do with the station? In theory, how long could the station stay in service? So, future of ISS. A couple of things here. As I said, the Russians have this one module that they want to fly, but it's continually delayed forever. It was supposed to fly every year for the last five years or something like that. I assume that will never fly. On the US side of things, there's been a lot of talk about adding a module to the station that is built by a commercial company. So there's a couple of companies vying for this. We obviously have nanoracks that is going to add their airlock to the station and they've got a port that they're going to use for that and that'll be really cool we've talked about that on the podcast quite extensively so go back and

listen to some of the shows where i've talked to people from nanoracks about the airlock and i also did a visit to nanoracks uh last november like two novembers ago um where i got to see some airlock hardware. So that's one of the ports of the ISS that is going to be utilized by a commercial company. The other one, there's companies like Bigelow, companies like Axiom, that are looking to use one of the ports in the ISS to expand the station significantly. So when you start thinking about that, you start thinking about increased habitation space, then you can start thinking about commercial crew flights significantly increasing the crew on the ISS from three or four up quite a bit more depending on how much habitation space there is in whatever that new module is. If they add a couple of sleep

compartments, they add some habitation space, we might be able to add another crew member to maybe a tourist or two in there as well because that commercial module would be up to that commercial company to utilize. So if that happens, if that pans out and we get a Bigelow module up there, an Axiom module up there, I think we could see another significant realignment of schedules. The question about how long the station could stay in service, right now they're looking to extend it to 2030, so obviously the engineers seem fine with that amount of time. I would expect at that point that there would be a significantly different space industry that we're looking at, just given the change that's happened in the last five years

is astronomical. You think about that old Bill Gates line that we, what is it? We overestimate the amount of change that will happen in two years and underestimate the amount of change that will happen in five or 10. I think that goes for space here as well. So, you know, at that point, I think we might reassess, but maybe I wouldn't be surprised when we hit 2024, if somebody's like, oh, we should extend to 2034, and we'll fly the ISS forever. We got a couple of questions about science missions this time around. So first up, Dave from New Jersey said, you recently mentioned Marco and how it opens up possibility for CubeSats in future deep space missions.

From reading about Marco, I know it rode along with Centaur's TransMars injection burn before releasing to fly solo, so it only needed eight cold gas thrusters for course correction. What I'd love to see in a future test mission is some type of rocket that can be added to a CubeSat with enough delta-v to insert into Mars orbit. Then science missions such as Mars 2020 rover could help the issue with aging assets orbiting Mars. So yes, CubeSats and smallsats are going to definitely play a big role in future science missions because Marco went so swimmingly well.

Those things just really did a great job relaying signals back to Earth. So those sort of ride-along CubeSats are something that I think we'll see a lot more of. The question about inserting into Mars orbit, that takes a lot of delta-v, especially when you talk about a mission like Mars 2020, which is a direct entry mission. So the trajectory puts Mars 2020 on a direct collision course with Mars, at which point it lands. It's not something that breaks into orbit first. a CubeSat, unless we have some crazy breakthrough, we'll never be able to do feasibly. So what I think instead, well, there's two ways here to think about this. We could have some sort of mission that is going to Mars orbit that also includes CubeSats, and it injects into orbit with some other propulsion system and then releases some CubeSats, whether those are a collection of CubeSats to kind of phase into a constellation around Mars, or are simply some other kind of relay mechanism or some other auxiliary

functionality. But I think more importantly, when we look at what's happening in Earth orbit right now, we see a lot of CubeSats going up for academic reasons, for things like planets, constellation of imaging satellites that are cheap to fly and all that kind of stuff. But we also see an increase in the amount of satellites that are flying in the couple hundred kilogram range rather than the couple thousand kilogram range. So the size of satellites is shifting, but it's not going all the way to CubeSats. It's to smallsats in general. And that could maybe kind of be that same sort of vibe where we're shrinking satellites, but maybe not all the way down to CubeSat level, because it just doesn't scale that well for something like a Mars orbiter down to that level.

But to a couple hundred kilograms, I think we could pull that off. So I wouldn't be surprised to see maybe a mission in the near future, either to the moon or Mars for communication satellites that are a few hundred kilograms in mass. We got a question from Law about Neptune and Uranus. Was doing some reading the other day and was surprised to see that Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to visit Uranus and Neptune. I know NASA and others have considered future missions of those planets and their moons, but so far none have gotten off the ground, literally or figuratively. What do you think the odds are of sending a mission that way during the 2020s? So this is a cool one. We've talked

about this a lot on Off Nominal, the podcast I do with Jake from Wee Martians. We've talked about missions to the outer planets. And right now, you know, it's not one of the highest decadal survey priorities. We've got a lot of work to do at Mars. We've got a lot of work to do at the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. So I think that's going to keep us busy for the next couple of years, next couple of decades, maybe. The moons of Jupiter and Saturn seem incredibly enticing. things out towards Uranus and Neptune. I'm thinking of Triton that are also incredibly interesting. And I think teams like New Horizons that got some experience with those deep outer planet missions, I think they're going to start proposing some of these ideas to do a mission to the outer ice giants. But the timeline on that is just incredibly, incredibly long. The timeline on the missions to Jupiter and Saturn are already long. So when you extend even beyond that, it gets even longer.

Not only the timeline of mission from launch to arrival, but the run-up to the mission, to get it approved, to get it into development, to get it launched. That is a very long timeline. So I don't think we'd see any missions launch until, I don't know, the 2030s at a minimum. But even then, that seems like a stretch given the current process. Now, that's a big caveat. The current process of planetary missions like this is a very slow moving beast. If we continue to see investment from benevolent billionaires and they start wanting to fund science missions, we've heard a little bit of this about sending a mission to Enceladus or similar. If you have some big funder come along

that isn't a government and says, I want to fly a mission out to Neptune tomorrow, would it happen in the 2020s? Maybe. It's plausible because that just breaks the mold of what we're typically used to. But when you're thinking in the traditional method mechanism, I think our to-do list is pretty full for the 2020s and even the early 2030s. So I wouldn't expect it to happen any time before then. Question from Dave, a quick one. In your own opinion, do you expect the James Webb Space Telescope to make its 2021 liftoff? Dave, I'm going out on a limb and I'm guessing that the James Webb Space Telescope will be the final Ariane 5 launch that ever was. It's just hard to bet on it making its launch date at this point. It's similar to the SLS thing where you're like, okay, this has to be the last delay, right? We've got to be at the last delay. And then there's always something that happens. So I would not

be surprised to see it slip. And I am just, if I were a betting man, I would just see if somebody would take my bet that it's the last area of five launch. Um, just because I think that would be so, um, that would be a, a right ending to the end of the James Webb story, or at least the beginning of the next phase of the James Webb story.

Question from Chase. He said, uh, yeah, kind of a question. He said, uh, space IL is planning to launch to the

moon next month, meaning this month, and it doesn't seem to be getting much coverage. Do you think it will be successful? So I think the reason that it hasn't got a lot of coverage is that there is a, because of the nature of the mission, the way that they're flying to the moon, there's about two months between launch and landing on the surface. So they might, you know, they might not want to overhype up front and then have everybody wait two months to land. They'll kind of lose the thread on the media there. So I would expect once it does launch,

you'll see a couple headlines about it. But once we get closer to April, when they're going to be closer to landing, you'll start seeing a big wave of media at that point. Do I think it will be successful? I'm hopeful, Cautiously hopeful because number one, this is a really cool mission because I think the total cost is less than $100 million. And it's funded by Space IL and investors. But it's a nonprofit organization out of Israel.

So it's not like a Moon Express or somebody who has stated intentions to sell missions commercially. They do now have a hand in the NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services through a partnership. But, you know, this mission is purely a nonprofit mission, research-focused, inspiration-focused, and more of a can-we-do-it kind of thing. And it was part of the google lunar x prize um but they are pushing on to fly themselves so it's really cool to see a mission with that low of cost doing this sort of thing so i'm hopeful but i'm maybe not confident that will it will land successfully before we get into the rest of the questions i need to say a very special thank you to everyone supporting main engine cutoff over at patreon.com slash miko. There are 256 of you supporting the show every single month over there. And this episode of Main Engine Cutoff was produced by

35 executive producers. Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Jameson, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mintz, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut, Frank, and six anonymous executive producers. Thank you so much for making this episode possible. And thank you to everybody else over at patreon.com slash Miko for your support. As always, don't forget, if you are a $3 a month or more Patreon supporter, you get a special RSS feed where I go through the headlines every single week.

Every weekend, I send you a show of running through all the stories that week of Space News. It's a great way to stay up on what's happening in the industry. It lets me do the work of reading all that stuff so you don't have to. So go check that out if you want to help support the show and if you want to hear the headlines show, patreon.com slash Miko. And thank you all again. One random question from Matt about Maxar before we get into some future launcher stuff. He said, Not sure if this falls within Miko's wheelhouse, but I feel like the latest stuff with Maxar is notable.

A big parent company for a bunch of space companies has had their stock price go from $65 to $5 in the past year, even though their core company hasn't lessened their profit margin by much. A lot of that stock price drop is because they bought SSL. SSL was in the red last year. More than the rest of Maxar combined was in the green. So they reported a net loss. They're already trying to sell what's left of SSL or liquidate it. But there's a lot of other strange stuff going on. CEO resigned, Worldview 4 died in orbit. There's some bits to pick apart that might look like they are undervalued and pretty well set up to succeed in the next 10

years, despite shareholder freak out about them? Really, really good question and really good summation of what happened with Maxar past couple of months. There's a couple of good posts over at Space News that Caleb Henry's been writing about Maxar. So I would go check that out if you're curious. One of the things here, though, is that when you're looking at something like stock price, that is an indication of future potential, not current success. So even this is an example of Apple. They're making more money than anyone can even think of every quarter, but their stock price goes through ups and downs because stocks are about future potential. And when you look at Maxar's line of products, a lot of the big name stuff is in question for the future. SSL is somebody who has focused on geostationary satellites, and there's a lot of reports in the media about geosatellites not being a strong market anymore.

There's not as many orders anymore. Satellites are getting smaller. So if that's a company that's not well positioned for the future of that market, the stock price is going to drop. Similarly, Digital Globe is one of Maxar's companies. They have a couple of high-resolution imaging satellites in orbit. And at the same time, we're seeing the rise of Planet, we're seeing the rise of Spire, a lot of these small satellite constellations that bring back imaging data and radar data and stuff like that. And they're getting all the hype, they're getting all the growth, because they've significantly

changed the market. Now, Digital Globe was still making good money, and is probably still making good money. But when you're looking at the future of what imaging satellites are in Earth orbit, and even the future roadmaps of these companies, I think you tend to have more hope in a planet or a spire or a capella who's doing synthetic aperture radar satellites than you do in an old model, big expensive satellites launched on Atlas 5 digital globe model. So again, there's another example of looking to the future and saying, oh, maybe this isn't the best situation. So I think if Maxar is going to pull out of this, they need to start showing some major future roadmaps that are exciting and that incentivize people to invest in them because they see the potential for growth.

But as where we're at right now, when you look at Maxar's portfolio, you don't see a lot of growth areas. And that's what tends to make the stock price drop. Now, from 65 to 5 is quite extreme, and I'm not sure if that's, you know, is there something else going on internally that we don't know about, that some people know about, that most people don't know about? I don't know. That's a crazy, crazy drop-off, and I'm yet to explain fully what has happened there, but I'm just thinking when you look at that future earning potential kind of thing, Maxar doesn't seem to be as enticing as other space investments at the current moment. Question from Brad. We're getting into our future launcher segment here.

It strikes me now that between Starship's newest iteration and New Glenn, we've got two very big, very expensive launch vehicles that are going to be doing flight tests within the next year or two, both of which are doing their own thing for re-entry, purely aerodynamic for New Glenn and with no entry burn, and transpiration cooling or whatever else develops for Starship. Any guesses what the chances are both work out properly from day one? I've always been incredibly curious to see what Blue's flight test program will look like, specifically for how they'll test re-entry conditions, and now Starship is going and piquing my interest in the same way. This is a question about what is maybe the most exciting thing from an aerospace nerd in the next couple of years are these two vehicles that are going to be doing these flights and testing with like, we have no idea what their regime is going to be, their

flight test campaign is going to be. I have to use a term I've heard from a couple of different people. There's going to be a high pucker factor with these initial tests. term I've heard from a couple of different people, there's going to be a high pucker factor with these initial tests. On the Starship case, it's going to be interesting to see exactly how SpaceX plays this. They're obviously going to do grasshopper style flights of Starship. They're building this hopper down in Texas right now, and that will do kind of low level flight testing to work out aerodynamics and control mechanisms and software and all of that. But once it gets to that orbital level, what are they going to do at that point?

Because with Falcon 9, they had the benefit of that part of flight when they do the re-entry tests. That part of flight was just the extracurricular activity. The main mission of that booster was over at that point. They could do whatever they want. They could try whatever they want with very limited repercussions. You know, if they lose that vehicle, it's not a problem because they were planning on losing it anyway. With Starship, you know, if they lose that vehicle, there goes an extraordinarily big investment in, and, you know, it's a huge vehicle. So I'm really hoping that they do fly some sort of smaller aerodynamic test article where they can work out some of the entry elements, some of the

entry interface elements, some of the atmospheric flight elements, some of the bigger question marks there. If they can find that on a smaller scale before they go out and fully do a huge starship to orbit, I would hope to see that. Now, on New Glenn's front, I think things are a little differently because obviously, they don't have the same ability to do a smaller aerodynamic thing. I mean, to some extent they do, but on that first flight of New Glenn, they've got to stick that landing on that booster. I think if they're going about it in the way that I think they would, they probably are not expecting 100% success from day one. And I think it would

be ridiculous to expect that. So if you remember when they originally started sending BE-4s down to Texas for their tests, they had an issue with one and they blew up a power pack on the test stand and one of the quotes that that was going around was uh i think it was like a bezos tweet or something was that they went into the test campaign hardware rich meaning that they sent two engines down because they figured one would have a problem i'm sort of thinking that's how they're going to start new glen out where they go in with a high confidence that they'll be able to recover it but they'll go in with a couple of boosters built. That way, if they lose a couple of the first ones, it's not a big deal,

because they have other ones in the barn ready to go, and by the eighth, ninth flight, they've got things worked out and pretty reliable to the point when they can start relying on it. So I would expect that they build out a small fleet up front and get the first couple of flights under their belt, but not be too worried if they do have an issue with one, that they do have other hardware waiting for them. Now, keep all this in mind, because it's going to come into play on my next little mini monologue

here that is in response to Chase's question. And maybe not so much of a question, but Chase is a member of the Off-Nominal Discord. That is a place where you can hang out and chat you can get access to it over at patreon.com slash miko and we were having a discussion in there the other day about blue origin and their schedule their pace their general uh the way that they're going about new glenn development and new shepherd development in that regard so he's he's wondering if i can explain some of my thoughts i had some different thoughts than most people in the chat about Blue Origin's pace and schedule and stuff. So he was asking for me to explain my outlook on Blue Origin's schedule, pace, vision, etc. And I think the main thing that we were talking about was a good description of the Starship New Glenn thing,

where SpaceX has always tended to be a much scrappier company that would build a quick iteration and then get there eventually through smaller iterations. And that they were flying quickly, whereas Blue Origin took a couple of years to even know what they were going to do. So the common thing you'll hear is that Blue Origin has been around 14 years and hasn't even flown to orbit yet. SpaceX has been around 10 and has flown Falcon Heavy. That's a typical line of thinking. But, you know, the first response to that is that Blue Origin's early years were very different than they are now.

They didn't really get to this point of vision until a few years ago. You know, the initial years of Blue Origin were more think tanky almost. They were originally going to start as an engine developer. They had kind of a wandering vision or roadmap until a couple of years ago when it really started to solidify. SpaceX, on the other hand, from day one, they had a mission. They could clearly state it. And they were going to get there to that mission, flying people to Mars, by being a space transportation company. that mission, flying people to Mars, by being a space transportation company.

So given the fact that Blue Origin is now funded by the richest person in the world who can spend a billion dollars a year today on Blue Origin, they're not under the same pressure that SpaceX was at the start, where they had very little money. They needed to be flying customers. They needed to be making money to carry out their vision. So they are getting to their vision by way of commercial flights. And I think Blue Origin is the exact opposite. They have a bigger, grander vision where they're headed in space is different than the things that will help them get there. So they have this big vision for millions of people living and working in space is something they always say.

And something that will help that is flying commercial flights. That is not their primary goal. It is a thing that helps them do their primary goal. And this is my big grand theory, is that Blue Origin has not yet fully unveiled the roadmap internally for their own plans, their own things that they're going to do with New Glenn, with New Armstrong in the future, with a crewed spaceflight vehicle. There are bigger plans internally than we know about. And I think if we had all of those pieces together, the roadmap would make a lot more sense. So let me just harp on this a little more. SpaceX itself needs to make money to get to Mars. So they started out as a space transportation company. They landed commercial flights for Falcon 9s.

They landed commercial flights for Dragon to the ISS. They need all these things to make money to carry out their vision, whereas Blue Origin has money to carry out their vision, and these other things enable them to do it better. So commercial flights for Blue Origin, whether it's on New Glenn or something like Blue Moon, the lander that they're going to build to the lunar surface, commercial flights on those gives them flight experience, gives them extra money as income. It gives them customers to be able to fly more often and maybe offset some of the flights that they're doing for their own reasons. But I think we're still missing that final piece of info to be able to fully categorize Blue Origin. So I agree, Chase, that it's

frustrating to see some what looks like slow progress because Blue Origin is not that open. But I think we don't know the full story yet. And that makes me kind of hold off on the frustration element because I know that there's something else coming down the pike. And I just think, you know, everybody likes to compare SpaceX and Blue Origin and say, look at how similar these two are. They're founded by internet billionaires. They do these kind of things. They have rockets with landing legs. But when you think about that primary difference, they look almost polar opposites. Now, the other aspect here is that I've heard from people that have interacted with Blue Origin, they've used the word meticulous to describe the way that they go about their work.

They want to make sure they get everything right from day one. They want to test a lot. They want to make sure that they're confident in their vehicles. And the people that I've talked to have interacted with SpaceX in similar manners. They don't necessarily have the same things to say about them. Now, that's not to say SpaceX is sloppy, but they fly quicker and they don't test as much. So sometimes that causes problems, but sometimes it gets them there way, way faster than the other route. And they are constantly flying and getting flight experience. So when we reply this back to the question from

Brad a second ago, how is this going to work out with Starship? Are they going to be okay losing a bunch of hardware and just flying and iterating? Or are they going to be a little bit more meticulous, a little bit more Blue Origin-y to make sure that when they first launch one to orbit that they're pretty confident they're getting it back? I think that is the key difference here between SpaceX and Blue Origin. The founding and the kind of path that they need to get to their vision is completely different. And that level of, you know, fly first and test later or test first and fly later, those are kind of opposites for SpaceX and Blue Origin, at least from where I'm standing. I'm sure internally different teams within SpaceX or Blue Origin are a little different. But I think from what

we're looking at here, the meticulous versus not outlook seems pretty accurate from the outside. So anyway, with that Blue Origin rant over, that brings us to the end of the question list for this month. So as always, I'm going to keep doing this every month. It's been a lot of fun, and we get a lot of great questions. And I get into some topics that I don't otherwise. So if you want to get your questions in for next month, send them over to me, Anthony at ManagingCutoff.com, or Twitter at WeHaveMiko. And you can send me the questions, and I'll include it on the next month's show. But for now, thank you all so much for your support on Patreon.com slash Miko. Thanks for listening.

Thank you all for sending questions in. And thanks to Max Justice for our awesome new theme music. Maxjustice.com. That's maxjustus.com. Go check him out. He's a buddy of mine and he is an amazing musician. But anyway, for now, thank you all so much for listening and I will talk to you pretty soon.