Main Engine Cut Off - T+113: Q&A

Episode Date: March 1, 2019

This month, we talk the GEO slowdown, the LEO boom, and as always, take on some fun launch vehicle questions. 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 223 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

Hello and happy March everybody. It is that time of the month where we take on some questions from you and cover some topics that we might not get to otherwise. So let's start. We've got some questions about satellites this month. We've got a lot about different kinds of satellites, small sats, geosats. Let's get into it with a question from Johnny. I've been hearing recently that the demand for geosatellites is on the decline, while the demand for smaller LEO satellites is on the rise. Do you believe that this is true, or is it exaggerated?

Also, if it is true, what is driving the transition to LEO? Has there been some technology development that enables more LEO satellites, or perhaps a shift in the market? It is driven by a couple of things, that narrative. And I do think it's true. And I think all of your assessments were right, that it is technology development and also a shift in the market. So there has been a slowdown of orders for new geostationary satellites in the past couple of years. It's something that the people that focus on the satellite market have been talking about, that there aren't as many geosatellites that have been on order in the past couple of years that there traditionally has been. So they're in like the single digits now per year rather than double digits.

The main driver of that narrative, aside from that slowdown of geosatellites, is the new constellations that we're hearing about. So this is things like OneWeb and SpaceX's Starlink, all of those new internet satellite constellations that typically happen in lower Earth orbits. There are some like O3b that exist at a kind of medium Earth orbit, so not quite geo, but not quite Leo either. And then OneWeb and SpaceX are much lower than that even. So there's many other closer to Earth alternatives now that are kind of the new hotness in the industry, if you will. So the GEO satellite for a long time was kind of the king of the industry, where you could put up this satellite and serve an entire market. But there's a couple problems with that.

Like one, you put up one satellite and you only have access to one section of Earth because you're staying above it. That's the essence of geostationary orbit. You can't get great coverage at the polar extremes of the planet. And also your latency between the ground and the satellite and back is very long. So when you're doing anything like internet communication or communication in general, that latency tends to be a problem. It's not as much of a problem with something like a TV broadcast that is traditionally

coming from a geo satellite because you don't really notice the latency aside from that startup period. Once the video is streaming to you and you got that connection, you're fine, but you don't necessarily notice if there's a couple of seconds of lag there because you don't really have a reference point. But when you're trying to talk to somebody in real time, the latency is very odd. So these lower constellations are going to have significant benefits that are more interesting in the world today, given the way that we're using the internet today and the way that real-time communication is almost ubiquitous in some markets.

So if you want to serve a market that isn't served by traditional broadband or even mobile carriers, if you want to serve a market but provide similar types of experiences, that real-time communication, very low latency, your option is lower satellites because geo just doesn't give you what you need so the fact that we the way that we use technology here on the ground is changing and driving us closer to something like a leo constellation that's part of the the movement from geo to leo but also you know even before that was the case even before these things were kind of imminent there was this slowdown of geo orders and And you can kind of say, well, maybe that was, you know, market saturation on a certain front for people

that need satellite TV broadcasts or communications in that way. Maybe there's some market saturation because of that, but also TV's on decline. There's all these different forces, but, you know, we were seeing this trend before the Leo constellations really jumped to the forefront of our minds. So I do think it's a shift in the way that we're using things here on the ground. While also the fact that geo is pretty, pretty busy at this point, and there's a lot of providers up there already. So there's not a ton of room for growth in that section of the market where there is a ton of room for growth in this Leo constellation market. But you know, all that said, there's not a one of these orbits is not better than the other, they each have their own uses, they each have unique things that they bring to satellites that are there. There are capabilities that exist in either that are different and distinct.

satellites up into a stationary orbit that give us a nice view of the east coast of the US and the west coast of the US. And they're sitting there in one spot and they're providing this imagery. But there's also a lot of weather satellites that are in lower Earth orbits that are doing 24-hour revisits of parts of the Earth or seven-day revisits of parts of the Earth and doing imagery like that that doesn't need to be stable in one part of Earth at any given moment, but it's helpful to have a mix of both. So there's definitely still room for both satellites. There's still purposes for both satellites. But there is, in communication space especially, there is a trend away from geo towards LEO satellites for future growth. That's not to say that tomorrow all the satellites in geo are useless and not going to be used anymore.

Not to say that tomorrow all of the satellites in GEO are useless and not going to be used anymore. They still have a good customer base, though it may be shrinking a little, and some of these constellations will eat into certain portions of that. That's not going away tomorrow, so they will still exist. We got a similar question, or similarly pointed question, from an anonymous person this week. Two questions, actually. Number one, does the pullout of Maxar from the RSGS DARPA program mean bad news for Northrop Grumman's mission extension vehicle or other servicing companies? So a little background here. DARPA had this program called RSGS, which was the remote

servicing of a geostationary satellite. I think that's close enough for our purposes here. And the idea was that a commercial company would provide a bus for this DARPA program, a satellite bus, so the base of the spacecraft. And then DARPA and some other partners would work on this robotic arm that would be applied to that bus and would be able to do robotic servicing of another satellite, fixing broken components, adding new batteries, swapping out whatever other components that they would need to swap out. And this was a very advanced project for robotic servicing. Most of the stuff that we're seeing now in the servicing realm is

going to be closer to Northrop Grumman's vehicles, which we'll talk about in one sec. So this was an advanced program with a robotic arm, and Maxar recently pulled out of that contract. It was a cost-sharing agreement, and Maxar recently pulled out of that contract. It was a cost-sharing agreement, so Maxar was putting in some money in the way of SSL. That's their wing that works on satellite buses. So they were putting up a little of their own money. DARPA was investing some of their money, and it was supposed to be this public-private partnership where once they've done the RSGS demo, DARPA would transfer ownership back to SSL Maxar, and they would be

able to use that spacecraft for their own commercial purposes. So I don't think them pulling out of that program is bad news for Northrop Grumman. I think it's actually really good news because RSGS was going to be a competitor to what Northrop Grumman was providing. And there was a lot of, there was even a lawsuit between Orbital ATK at the time and SSL and DARPA because of this program, because Orbital ATK felt like DARPA was competing with something that was going to be commercially available. So it was a big lawsuit. And that kind of got sorted out. But Northrop Grumman, they have these mission extension vehicles that the idea is instead of a robotic arm, this entire vehicle would go up, latch onto a satellite

that's in geostationary orbit or anywhere else for that matter, and then take over certain responsibilities. So specifically, it would take over maybe navigation and pointing. Maybe it would take over propulsion to do orbit raising burns or orbital management, you know, making sure that it's in its correct geo slot, station keeping on the geo belt or anywhere else for that matter. So it takes over certain responsibilities. It doesn't necessarily repair a satellite. It takes over portions of the satellite's responsibilities. Northrop Grumman already has a couple of customers on contract for these missions. So Intelsat has,

I think, two different missions for this. And there's a couple other companies doing what Northrop Grumman is also going to be doing. There's like Space Drones, and I'm forgetting some of the names at this point, but there's like two or three companies that have this idea of a satellite bus that attaches to another one and takes over responsibilities.

And that does seem to be something that there is a market for, at least right now. How big is the market? That's the question. But there does seem to be something that there is a market for, at least right now. How big is the market? That's the question. But there does seem to be a market for that. So eliminating a player that was going to have significantly more advanced capabilities, if that was going to be the case, that is a good thing for Northrop Grumman. Now, in terms of why Maxar pulled out of RSGS, I think it might be related to the fact that they're having some really hard financial times at Maxar right now. They've got a couple of different companies in their portfolio, and almost all of them are having some sort of problem. SSL, the satellite arm that we're talking about here, they've been trying to sell that off to somebody. They recently have

announced through a Space News interview that they're not going to be selling SSL off. So they're going to be repositioning it in the market, maybe streamlining a little bit, focusing it differently to turn things around. So I think the pullout is probably more to do with their own financial situation than them seeing that market as something that isn't viable. It's something that does require a lot of upfront investment that they just maybe don't have the money for right now and something that is a longer term return for maxar so if they don't have the money to invest right now if they don't have the time to wait for that long-term return then they're going to get out while they can and northup grumman on the other hand sees this as something that is a longer term play that could be profitable for them eventually, if not even in the short term. So they're going to continue to pursue it. Second question here from Anonymous. Do you

think people are overlooking Northrop Grumman's potential to offer package deals for space assets, where in one contract you could have a satellite-built, large or small, launch contract on Omega, and servicing contract with the mission extension vehicle? To me, that is the niche that Northrop Grumman can offer over its competitors, especially in the launch extension vehicle. To me, that is the niche that Northrop Grumman can offer its competitors, over its competitors, especially in the launch vehicle domain. I totally agree, and I feel like I did some big show about this at some point, but I can't remember which show it was that I've done about that. But that is definitely something that I see Northrop Grumman pursuing, where you kind of buy an end-to-end deal with them. They will produce your satellite, they will launch your satellite, and they will service it later. It is such a nice end-to-end solution. And more and more, we're seeing companies spring up

with these offers to go to customers and say, contract with us. We will do all of these parts to make sure that we get you from satellite production through launch. We see satellite producers partnering with launch vehicle companies. We see people like Spaceflight who arrange rideshares partnering with space launch companies. So there are a lot of options in the market right now where if you're a customer, you can go and say, hey, I need this kind of satellite. I need to launch this kind of orbit. Can you just handle all of that for me? And I will do what I do. You will do what you do and we'll be in good business. So I do think this is a valuable thing for Northrop Grumman.

Now, on the Omega front, I have major questions about that commercially, but I do think if they are able to launch their own mission extension vehicles with Omega, and maybe even sometimes as a rideshare with a contracted launch that they do have with Omega, that becomes maybe more enticing, that they have a launch vehicle that can get these vehicles straight up to geostationary orbit all by themselves, and then offer it from there. That's probably something that we'll see as well. So either doing their own launch with three or four mission extension vehicles on it under single Omega fairing, or attaching a mission extension vehicle to some other kind of rideshare. I could see them bundling that in somehow with what they'll already be doing with Omega if it does come to pass that

Omega is something that will exist in all reality. So they definitely have a lot of options there. I do think they could offer something compelling in that way, and I would love to see that from Northrop Grumman. We got a question from Chris. I'm very curious about the business demand for small launch vehicles. Is there any reason for a company launching a fleet of spacecraft such as Iridium-Nex to launch on several small sat launchers compared to one medium launcher? Are there enough unique non-fleet satellites to provide enough demand for the small sat industry to be sustainable? So to the first question there, most of the fleet companies that are out there, the constellation companies,

are looking at small launch vehicles as kind of replenishment providers as they need it. So even OneWeb, who we just saw launch a couple of satellites on Soyuz, and they have 20 other Soyuz flights booked for a group of their satellites, they have a bunch of contracts with Virgin Orbit, and they're even positioning some of those, if not most of those, as replenishment launches. So if they launch 10 satellites on a Soyuz and one of them dies, well, we can call up Virgin Orbit and get another replacement up there to fill that spot in the plane pretty quickly. So that does seem like a viable market for small launchers. Are there enough of those to provide demand? I don't know. This is the part that's going to get really tricky.

And I do think that when you're looking at the small launch industry right now, to provide demand? I don't know. This is the part that's going to get really tricky. And I do think that when you're looking at the small launch industry right now, in this way, I sort of am starting to think that Rocket Lab is going to end up too small. Like they're going to be too small of a payload range because they are only a few hundred kilograms to orbit. And even that's generous. They're like sub 200 kilograms to orbit. And we have a lot of these launch vehicles that are coming up that are about 1000 kilograms to orbit. It's different orbits, you know, 600 to 1000 kilograms to sun synchronous to low, low inclination orbits. So I think that the comfortable range we're going to find is maybe closer to that 1000 kilogram mark, I think Rocket

Lab is going to be too small. Because small sats are a trend for sure, but not all smallsats are cubesats. I think the popular spot that we're seeing people move to is in the 200 to 400 kilogram payload mass range where that satellites are shrinking, but 200 kilograms, 300 kilograms seems to be some sort of sweet spot that there's a lot of talk about in the industry right now. That's just a little too big for Rocket Lab to do. And it fits much more comfortably on something like Firefly, on something like Relativity, or ABL that we've talked about recently. I think that range is going to be a little bit more comfortable. And in that case, if you could launch one or two of those 200 kilogram satellites, and then a couple of CubeSats, I think you've got yourself a market there versus

something that is too small for a one-off small satellite, but maybe too big to, you know, completely fill with CubeSats. So that's something I'm going to see how it's working out. But that's, you know, Chris, if you can answer this question, I would suggest going into small launch because that you've got a lot of money that can be made if you get that answer right. Question from Espen. Do you think SpaceX is losing some launch business because of Starlink? I'm especially thinking of constellations like the Telesat one, although I know one of the reasons they went for Blue Origin was the big fairing, but I can't help thinking that Starlink is another reason. Launching with SpaceX would automatically mean giving money to a near future competitor. An interesting question that I always think about,

but in a lot of these cases, I think the road to success for Telesat, for Starlink, these are long roads. It's going to take a lot of good decisions, a lot of right moves to get from where we are now to a successful constellation like this. So for someone like Telesat, I really don't think that's a big enough reason to not go for SpaceX. I think what you need to do is look at what is your best option, what fits your constellation best. Because in the end, I don't think Telesat buying 10 launches from SpaceX means that Starlink is going to be successful and kill Telesat. But if Telesat sees SpaceX as a viable partner that could get them up on orbit, you know, efficiently and cost effectively and quickly, then that's the way that they should

have went. But in, you know, they did think that blue origin was the better competitor they said it was because of the big fairing they can put more satellites under that big fairing of new glen and that's the way they went and you know maybe the fact that they can get more vehicles on a new glen launch than they could on a falcon 9 launch means they could launch less overall missions for a similar price we don't know what they paid for new glen but effectively it could be around the same range so if they can you know spend less overall missions for a similar price. We don't know what they paid for New Glenn, but effectively it could be around the same range. So if they can spend less overall on launch on New Glenn than they could on Falcon 9, then that's the way they went to have a less capital-intensive acquisition of vehicles. But all in all, all that's to say that I just think that equation for Telesat saying, well, they're a competitor with us, so we can't go that way because our four or five

launches is going to make or break Starlink in general, an investment that is coming from a different side of SpaceX and for all intents and purposes is coming from investment in SpaceX. That seems like maybe a little bit far-fetched to be a driving motivator. And then also, who's to say that Blue Origin doesn't have some plans like this we've obviously not seen any specific filings in that way but you're talking about Jeff Bezos who is ruthless when he decides to get into a particular line of business he will crush

the people that are also working in that line of business so you know you want to partner with that person but not the reliable launch partner that might also compete with you that seems like I don't know I'm not quite sure that that's their thinking. And if it is, I would worry about Telesat. I've got a bunch of questions about launch vehicle stuff as always to get to.

But before we do that, I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who makes this show possible over at patreon.com slash Miko. There are 258 of you supporting this show, and i could not be more thankful for your support this episode of main engine cutoff was produced by 35 executive producers chris pat matt george brad ryan jameson nadeem peter donald lee jasper chris warren bob russell john moritz joel yan david grant mike david mince eunice rob tim dodd the everyday ash not frank and six anonymous executive producers thank you so much for making this episode possible. This podcast is entirely supported by you, the listeners. So if you like what you're hearing here, if you like what I'm

doing here, head over to patreon.com slash Miko and help support the show there. Thank you all very much. Dave wrote in with a question about the hot topic on social media from last week or two weeks ago or something like that. In your February 21st show, you discussed the Air Force award to ULA and SpaceX. Musk and Bruno had a quick Twitter exchange about the ELC subsidy. Bruno, of course, said there is no subsidy. Yada, yada. Musk said there did.

He did. He did get one. Tory Bruno linked to his op-ed in Space News, and he, Dave said he found the op-ed impossible to understand. If he doesn't want to call it a subsidy, fine, but to compare costs between ULA and SpaceX, wouldn't you have to take the yearly ELC amount and divide it by the number of launches to get a true cost comparison? So yes, Dave, the cost would get weird, and in fact, um, you sound like one of ULA's lawyers because a couple of years ago, maybe this is what, a year or two years ago, ULA did not submit a bid for one of the first GPS 3 launches because they said they didn't have the accounting means to give an appropriate apples to apples comparison between their vehicle and Falcon 9. This was one of the first awards that were competed between SpaceX and ULA and that caused the whole dust up. The DoD was not very happy about that and it was quite a bit of

hot drama. If we had the alarm back then, we would have been playing it. So the ELC is this payment to ULA that everyone often calls a subsidy. And subsidy, I think, to everybody means the people that I don't like are paying the other people I don't like instead of paying the people that I do like. Therefore, it's a subsidy. You could talk about that from ULA, from SpaceX, from Arianespace. Talk about who you want, or even Boeing, Lockheed, and Northrop Grumman for SLS. Whoever you're a fan of, they're the ones not getting the subsidy, and the other guy is getting a subsidy. That's kind of the way everyone approaches it. But the long and the short of it is that came out of the era where there was this monopoly in Space Launch, and the DoD was contracting with ULA. And you can kind of

think of the ELC as a retainer contract. They were saying, hey, you're our launch provider, we need to pay you to do launches, but we don't always know what launch is going to be in any given year. So here's some money to keep the lights on to keep things running. And this will pay for the mission related costs of a launch, but then they will buy the launch vehicles themselves in a separate contract. So it was splitting launch vehicle production from the people that fly the launch vehicles. Now, it's a lot more complex than that. I'm going to get about a thousand emails from this segment of the show. But what I want to touch on is not necessarily the ELC and if you're for it or against it, but I don't think that talking about the ELC is a productive or worthwhile conversation

anymore because the ELC deals with launches that happened in the block buy. The ELC runs out this year because this year is the last of the launches that were acquired under the block buy. All of the awards that we're talking about recently, like a couple weeks back, we were talking about ULA winning three launches and SpaceX winning three launches. Those are in EELV phase 1A, which is the competitively awarded section of EELV. So those launches are for launches that happen in 2021, in 2022, and everything that gets awarded from here on out will happen after 2022. Those are years in which there is no more ELC payment. So we can talk historically about how things were managed or how we think it could have been done better. But when you're looking

ahead to the future, talking about ELC is no longer a productive conversation because it doesn't matter anymore. We are way beyond that. We are talking about launches that are happening two, three years or more down the line. And in those cases, just go ahead and look at the contract price for those Atlas 5s, for those Falcon 9s, because those are the prices that DoD is paying from there on out, and there is no more ELC payment that will be effective the year that those launch. So if you're interested in space history, then the ELC is something worth getting worked up about and talking about. If you're not interested in space history

for this particular conversation, don't need to worry about it too much anymore, because going forward, it doesn't affect launches. Question from John. Hi, Anthony. Do you think the change of SpaceX's from composite to steel and subsequent rapid rockets is just them cutting off an approach that they were only going to do if they won EELV round two funding, and that the stainless was something i had been working on the whole time in case the government didn't pony up cash um quick note this sounded a lot like my rant about when you think something's a subsidy and when you think it's not the way that john put it i really appreciated uh talking about the government pony up cash for starlink that's something that would cause all sorts of internet wars um but more realistically john i think that you know we

heard a lot of these rumors like a couple months back about a bunch of people being fired from SpaceX and let go over disagreements in this Starlink and other future projects section. And nobody was quite sure what to make of that. that from the outside looking in, the pace of the change from going from Starlink from composites to stainless steel, and then all of a sudden making this tons of progress, it feels like something that was maybe some sort of argument internally, or maybe not even an argument, but something that had been talked about a lot as an increasingly attractive alternative. And finally, somebody convinced somebody else to flip that switch and let's run with the stainless steel idea for a while and see what all this progress because they finally convinced whoever they needed to convince that that was the right direction. It feels a lot closer to that than something that was tied up in the funding from the government.

I think this is made weirder by the fact that a lot of the composite work that was going on within SpaceX was behind closed doors and hidden under tents and in facilities in Washington State and all that kind of stuff. So I think there's a lot less evidence of progress on the composite side of things that might have been there and might exist internally than we've seen on the stainless steel side because of the nature of the way they've been working on that down out in the open at Boca Chica. So there might be a difference in the way that we're perceiving it. But my senses say that there was something going on internally in SpaceX that finally somebody won the conversation to switch over to the stainless steel direction, and things really started clicking for the team in area, you know, in the day-to-day stuff that we're seeing of these pictures flowing in from Boca Chica. They used to work overnight every single night. We haven't seen as much of that lately. They've obviously been testing these

new Raptors, and it sounded like they had an issue with one of them on the stand of some sort, and they're waiting for others to come into the test stand. So there is some sort of change in the last, like, week or two on the pace here, but I still think they're making good progress on Starlink. And my sense is just say that this was something that was a decision internally that triggered a massive influx of productive work. All right, we're getting down to the end of our list here. We've got one about SLS and then one about commercial crew to keep it topical for today. So this question from Marcos, do you foresee changes in SLS's future that would include some partial reusability?

My thoughts, boost back is not feasible with the current core stage design for various reasons, but perhaps a smart reuse scheme might work to recover the engine section? Question mark there. That's why I'm making that intonation with my voice. Also, perhaps EUS, the exploration upper stage, can be evolved into something more aces like, which is the reusable upper stage that ULA is theorizing. Replacing SRBs with flyback boosters or even going back to parachutes, the Orion command module is already envisioned to be partially reusable, so seems like something the agency

is not totally against. Also have to consider the politics of reuse. Politicians may see it as a threat to jobs in certain districts. Really interesting question that I feel like nobody ever brings up because we get caught in the SLS is or is not worth it argument a lot. Apparently, this show is all about arguments that people have that I don't know are worth having anymore. But I did like this line of questioning from Marcos. And there's a couple of things here that I think really doom SLS in terms of the partial reusability or even full reusability direction as a program. Certainly, the politics that he mentioned there at the end are a thing to consider, that there's a lot of support for SLS for jobs and districts, and that kind of limits

you to certain things that you can and can't do. Even a little bit of that Aryan space thinking that, well, if we did reuse, then less people would have jobs, so we can't do that. Arian space thinking that like, well, if we did reuse, then less people would have jobs, so we can't do that. But I think there's actually some more technical reasons that make SLS not a candidate for something like this. Specifically for anything involving core stage reuse, or anything above core stage reuse, the flight profile of SLS really doesn't lend itself to any sort of reusability whatsoever, because the core stage itself makes it pretty much to orbit. You know, just much like the space shuttle external tank did, it makes it just below

orbit. You know, that core stage is firing for eight and a half minutes, and I think it's nearly circularized orbit at that point, and then the upper stage just does a little extra push to put it into orbit. So it's really, you know, that core stage will be coming down super far downrange. It'll be coming back from near orbital velocity speed, which makes things significantly harder. So that's not really a candidate, even for something like smart reuse. If they were going to do some partial reuse, it would be in the boosters. And guess what? They've made those not reusable now in the SLS era instead of how they were partially reusable in the shuttle era.

Because this is the second part of my answer, the flight rate of SLS, it's maybe a little bit of a chicken and egg problem, but the flight rate's so low that it actually costs more to have the recovery teams on salary for the whole year to gather two boosters at sea. It actually costs more to do that recovery than to make new ones every single flight, especially when you're just recovering the casings of a solid rocket booster since the internal fuel is all spent. casings of a solid rocket booster since the internal fuel is all spent. So I think a lot of the reuse kind of mentality really kicks into high gear when you have a high flight rate and you're able to be flying nearly all the time. And the way the SLS program is structured, that is never going to be realistic. I would be shocked if we've ever in history, some people would be shocked if SLS ever flew. I would be shocked if we ever saw SLS fly more than once a year, maybe even once every two years, given the roadmap we're looking at. It seems incredibly unlikely that we'll ever get to that world. And even if we did, again,

the flight profile of SLS does not lend its hand to reusability. It's almost like two approaches to launch vehicles is this kind of long sustainer type engine that doesn't lend itself to reusability or the closer to SpaceX model where you have a first stage that makes it up to the edge of space and comes back down and you know it's boost phase is like two three minutes or something like that and you're you're significantly closer to the launch site than you are in an SLS style burn to near orbit core stage setup. So that's my rambly answer about how I don't think SLS is set up for success in any sense of reusability. And you know, which problem triggered all the others, you can make that

decision. But I think they all are more interrelated than we would like to even consider when we look at this problem from like a 10,000 foot view. Last question from Bill. After listening to your podcast this week, I was reminded of a question that often pops up when Soyuz is discussed. Aren't NASA astronauts going to be flying on Soyuz missions even after commercial crew is flying? Do you know if the plan is to alternate which country flies crew missions so that when it's our turn, we fly two to three astronauts and a cosmonaut, and when it's Russia turn, they fly one to two cosmonauts and an astronaut. Even when we get closer to commercial crew flying, it doesn't seem like the plan is any closer to being finalized.

And Bill, I think you totally nailed it on that last sentence there. This is something that I don't really think anyone's been able to get out of NASA yet, probably because they're all still very undecided. I don't even know if they've worked out the terms of the agreement between Roscosmos and NASA. That part might not even be solidified. But yes, the plan is to always fly a U.S. partner astronaut. So that's U.S., ESA, JAXA, the Canadian Space Agency, to fly a U.S. orbital segment astronaut on the Russian vehicles

and a Russian segment astronaut on the U.S. vehicles. That way, if there's ever an issue, you know, we've got astronauts up on orbit that can be in both sections of the ISS. I don't think this will really be touched on until maybe even after both of the crew demo missions fly, because I don't know, we don't have those schedules yet for what the expeditions look like or how those change or how they all function. And I think that will probably be clear. I would hope by the end of this year we have a crew demo mission or something like that. But my guess would be that this is something that we will hear about a year from now, the long-term plan for this kind of thing. I will be very interested to hear that, and that will be an endlessly fun topic of discussion.

So those are the questions that I've got this month. Remember, we're doing this every month, so if you've got questions that come up, even in relation to this episode or any time between now and the end of March, send them my way. I will compile them in my list, and I will do this kind of show in about a month's time. But for now, that is it. That's all I've got for you this week. We've got a really fun week coming up following DM1 for SpaceX. And we're going to be talking about that a lot this week. So once again, thank you so much. Head over to patreon.com slash Miko if you want to help support the show. Send me an email anthony at managingcutoff.com. And thanks for listening.

I will talk to you next week.