Main Engine Cut Off - T+135: Jake Robins on Starship

Episode Date: October 8, 2019

Jake Robins, host of WeMartians and my co-host on Off-Nominal, joins me for Part 2 of our conversation about SpaceX’s 2019 Starship update. Part 1 can be found over on WeMartians.Meetup alert! Sunday, October 20, 2019 in Washington, DC. Hang out with me, Jake, and a ton of amazing people of space the night before IAC 2019 kicks off. Details at events.offnominal.space.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 39 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Rui, Julian, Lars, Tommy, Adam, Sam, and six anonymous—and 276 other supporters.65 - Starship on Course (feat. Anthony Colangelo) - WeMartians Podcast — Part 1 of our Starship conversationJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterHome - WeMartians PodcastOff-NominalStarship | SpaceXStarship Update - YouTubeJim Bridenstine on Twitter: “My statement on @SpaceX’s announcement tomorrow”Jim Bridenstine on Twitter: “I had a great phone call with @elonmusk this week, and I’m looking forward to visiting @SpaceX in Hawthorne next Thursday. More to come soon!”Off-Nominal EventsEmail your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopLike the show? Support the show!Music by Max Justus

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo with special guest Mr. Jay Robbins of the Wee Martians podcast, my co-host on Off Nominal. How's it going, Jake? Hey, how you doing? Long time no talk. It's been about five minutes since you and I just stopped recording, because this week we're doing a crossover edition of Wee Martians and Managing Cutoff. So if you are just hearing this first, please go over to Wee Martians. I was just on Jake's show, and you should start there, because we're talking about Starship on both.

But Jake, for people that don't know Wee Martians, please give us the pitch on what it is. Yeah, so I like to do interviews. Most of my episodes are interviews with all kinds of people, scientists, engineers, communicators. But it's all about Mars. So it's, you know, the technology to get to Mars, the technology we're using on Mars to do science, the science results from Mars, and, you know, a little bit of a dipping into human spaceflight outside of low Earth orbit, which tends to include a little bit of moon stuff, but with the focus on, you know, trying to get long term goal to other planets. So that's what we do. And we just started talking for 20-30 minutes about Starship the presentation we saw last weekend I guess it was at this point and mostly

talked about I don't remember what we talked about at this point what did we talk about well we talked about the architecture and what's changed about it what hasn't a little bit about some moon stuff and what's changing with that and you know some of our initial thoughts I think so it was

kind of fun it was a good conversation yes so I wanted to continue here with a couple of the more Miko-y bits of things that I've been thinking about Starship in the past week. So the biggest thing to take away is that we've only had stainless steel Starship for just about a year at this point. And the event itself, I thought, wasn't too surprising for certainly people that listen to Main Engine Cutoff. We've talked about Starship stuff over the last year. So if you've been listening, you probably weren't surprised by any of the announcements. There's updates to numbers and there's a lot of other stuff going on there. But I think the biggest thing that's throwing me off that I want to get your take on is what has happened over the last year for Starship. Because there was a day about a year ago this time that everyone at work, they came into work,

it was a carbon fiber Starship, and then they left work and it was a stainless steel Starship. What happened? What was that day like? Yeah, that must have been a weird day for sure. Sure. But I mean, it's both like a really crazy sudden shift and also very what SpaceX does, in my opinion. Right. So we talked a little bit about this on my show already, but it sounds like it's it's the carbon fiber structure of this launch system was holding it back. structure of this launch system was holding it back. The schedule was falling behind, the technical challenges were becoming so challenging that the return was not worth it anymore. And I think that much like SpaceX does in a lot of their engineering pursuits, they said, you know, screw it, we're going to go a different direction because we need to get something flying faster. Otherwise, this is dead in the water. We don't want to be a PowerPoint rocket forever, right? So that's kind of where I think it started from. And it's clearly

paying off, I guess, so far. Yeah, it definitely is. And I'm wondering why, you know, friends that are listening that have a chance to talk to Elon Musk about this stuff, please ask about this pivotal week. And I imagine it wasn't a day, right? I imagine that it was, here's if I was going to write some fanfic about Starship. What I imagined was that they had all of these different options on the table in the Starship architecture. What was carbon fiber, that was the primary path. But they had these other concepts for what it could be like with stainless steel, maybe even other materials. And, you know, there was probably an increasing sense of frustration among the team that carbon fiber wasn't the right choice for a whole host of list of reasons that kept getting longer by the minute. And then finally, you know,

there was some moment there that they all came together, said, we got to go stainless steel, because it unleashed like a year of the most productive work from the outside it looks incredibly productive over the last year if they've been welding things together they've been building launch sites uh the the pace difference there is something i've been enamored by um and you know it's just it's hard to get my mind around when i'm looking at the past year of work that, like, where did all this momentum come from? And, you know, they were working in a tent before. Do you remember the tent with the carbon fiber thing in the Port of LA? Man, it's a weird year. It's probably like, like many of these kind of software companies would operate where there

was probably like a team stainless steel that was like, you know, had the proposal on the back burner and they were, they had presented when they first kind of came up with the ideas and then musk had said no i think i want to go with carbon fiber and then that slowed down and they kind of kept it going and you know the influence of that idea probably slowly started to pick up steam and as frustration grew with the timeline on carbon one day someone went and tapped him on the shoulder and said you're up you got a presentation make a count and and that was that that was yeah there's gonna be a great book written about that yeah totally so you're writing that book please please ask this question um there is a market difference though because you're saying how there was team carbon fiber

team stainless steel uh the carbon fiber era of starship was a very secretive era right they had this uh up in your neck of the woods, there was this carbon fiber tank that existed. They eventually blew that up or something. Remember when they blew that up? Yeah, they blew it. It was like out in some harbor near you, right? Yeah, it was in Seattle, like in Puget Sound or whatever. Yeah, and they just blew this thing up on a barge. But there was that, that tank came out of nowhere. And then even there was like, you know, they got the tooling for carbon fiber.

They put it in this tent that nobody could see into in the port of LA. They made some piece because last year when we heard the, the, the dear moon announcement, there was like the piece that they showed of a full wrap of that carbon fiber. It was a very secretive endeavor, much more traditional aerospacey where you don't hear a lot from them as they work on stuff. And then stainless steel has just been out in the open. Is there anything that you, have you noted the openness in the stainless steel era? And is there anything that you think that that would be a good benefit, a bad benefit? Is there anything like any impacts

about working in the open that you see for SpaceX here? Yeah, that's an interesting question because you'd think that the, you know, that the secrecy difference is not, it could be related to the engineering, but I don't see necessarily how, like, I don't know about, what about carbon fiber from a technical standpoint is something you want to hide other than maybe it's like if they were working on some sort of proprietary, you know, way to put this stuff together that they didn't want to share. But I almost wonder if it has something to do with like a more political

aspect, right? Coming out of 20, when was it? Today's 2019 coming out of 2018 is kind of when we started to see this stuff really take off right um this is when stuff is really picking up for uh for moon stuff with nasa you know artemis is about to be born and we didn't really find out about artemis until you know march or whatever but i'm sure that insiders in the industry probably saw this coming in some shape or form around when this really picked off. So I really kind of wonder if this is all about keeping SpaceX more in the public eye and ensuring that they're visible and remain top of mind for legislators, for industry, all those kinds of, you know, for media,

especially, all those kinds of things. So that's something that stands out to me. But other than that, I mean, that's kind of a wild ask. No, I actually think that that makes a lot of sense to me as you're saying it, because I'm running the clock back a year before that. And there was the whole situation where the very beginning of the Trump administration, there was this research into could we fly EM-1 with two people around the moon. And then that was the first moment we heard what we know now is the Dear Moon announcement. Elon Musk called a random press conference and said, we have two people that are going to fly around the moon on Dragon 2 next year.

That was going to be 2018. So there was definitely this, even the year before that, the effort to show, you know, if we show momentum, can we attract the attention that we want for our own purposes, be it political or, you know, like you were saying with the media that surrounds it, they want that. They want that momentum. They want to attract investors. They want to attract, you know, government money if they can. if they can. So, you know, if you track a couple of those instances of that, that's a really good point that there is, you know, momentum, showing momentum and showing your work in the public is a good sign if you are trying to show what you're working on and get people excited for it. That's a good strategy. Yeah, because I've always gone back and forth with like the, you know, the popularity part of SpaceX, like they're just so popular. But, you know, part popularity part of SpaceX, like, they're, they're, they're just so popular. But I, you know, part of me is like, who cares? Like, regular people don't buy rockets. So like,

how does that help them? Right? Like, you know, I can love SpaceX as much as I want, but they're not going to subside on my t shirt sales. So but the, the clout of the SpaceX fandom, you know, it drives clicks to websites. So websites will ask questions about SpaceX all the time. So the media is like all over NASA for like, when is this going to happen with SpaceX? When is like, they just they always want to know what NASA is doing with SpaceX. And eventually that, you know, can translate to the people that are writing the budgets. And so it's, it's, it's possible. I don't know,. I kind of made that up, but we'll see if it's... Well, I compare it to, you know, we talked about this in your show a bit that

there's this sense of, wow, SpaceX really rewrites everything year to year. And it's a whole new starship this year. And things are so different now. Where if you had the access that we've had over the last year, and even three years, you know, by presentations in the last year in actual work, if you had that kind of access or insight into someone else working on a project, I think you would be left with a very similar feeling. I think you would have that feeling around some of the launch vehicles in development now, but you have companies like Blue Origin who are very closed. They will not show you anything until they're absolutely ready. And there's a difference in perspective there. Now, I think where this

turns is if when Blue Origin starts showing hardware and starts flying missions with New Glenn, if they're nailing it from day one, they instantly get credit for that and say, wow, they really only showed us when they have something that's amazing. I attribute this a lot to the same thing that we see with Apple and every other tech company. Apple will not show any concepts. They did it once, they got burnt, they didn't ship a product called AirPower in the last year, and it was a major F up for Apple. Other than that, they don't show you a product until they're ready for you to buy it and until it's perfect. And every other tech company shows concepts, they show proposals, and they get credit for proposals the entire length of time. But Apple only gets credit for what they ship. And this is where SpaceX is almost in both sides of these scenarios because they get credit for concepts and they've also been doing amazing

things in the last five years that they get credit for as well so they're playing like both sides of this fence here um but it turns out to be that kind of fandom cycle that that you get ranty about yeah yeah yeah it makes me kind of wonder and now i'm kind of on a tangent but like what what amazing things are on the cutting room floor at blue origin or at you know wherever like all kinds of companies. I really wonder what we could have written fan fiction about and then, you know, lamented its loss like Red Dragon or something, right? Well, go to ULA for that. You've got so many concepts that they've kind of been, you know, Tori Bruno and ULA in general have been pushing all these concepts the last three years. And they seem to get

continually shut down by the company or the parent companies. They've had all these concepts for the Aces upper stage that would include refueling, reusing engines. There's not a lot of active work that we can see on those projects at this point. So there's, it's just so many different ways of working. But I do feel like you're kind of right on something that the momentum in itself is a good thing for SpaceX and does play well for them politically. Yeah, it's kind of like how I talk a lot about how I'm a credit for hardware kind of guy. The PowerPoint's great, but show me the flight hardware is when I get excited. But SpaceX kind of gets a little bit of that because they're delivering, even if it's half done, like if it's like some sort of MVP or something, they're putting things out there. And so you get that rolling goodwill, right? So now here's a couple of things that they, you know, SpaceX doesn't mind canceling stuff.

They love to cancel things that aren't working out. So there's been a couple things that they you know spacex doesn't mind canceling stuff they uh they love to cancel things that aren't working out so there's been a couple of them and yeah when we want to talk about why has the pace increased on starship to me one of the things that is kind of left unsaid is that dragon 2 has been all but deprecated at this point to everything but ISS crew flights and very traditional returns. There's no more propulsive landing. For a guy like you, there's no more Red Dragon. We can pour one out for Red Dragon. Because that would have been a pretty big mission for Mars people.

You were getting pretty pumped about that. I was. I was pretty excited about it. And it's a big part of this architecture if you go back to 2016. They've got slides and slides about all the things it's a big part of this architecture if you go back to 2016. They've got slides and slides about all the things it's going to do, you know, teach them how to send stuff to Mars, teach them how to, you know, characterize landing sites, landing hazards, all that kind of stuff, right? So there was a lot of focus for SpaceX in the next five years. You know, if we roll the clock to 2016, let's say five to eight years from that date, there was a good portion of a roadmap that was focused on pushing Red Dragon, pushing Dragon 2,

and really focusing on that early on in those years, and then shift to Starship from there. At this point, that's been ditched. Dragon 2 is going to fly cargo and crew missions to the ISS till whenever the ISS stops flying pretty much. But, you know, in terms of future development, is that where all of this extra energy is coming from? That there's these people that were within SpaceX working on these Dragon 2 architectures, even Falcon architectures that can now, you know, be transitioned without disrupting SpaceX's current situation. So you're saying all the R&d budget that was that was spread between getting falcon heavy flying getting crew dragon flying getting um well you know even getting

raptor developed all those kinds of things now that's shifted can all be on starship now all on the ship now right because even before once they were going to have crew flying they were going to build out propulsive landing on dragon 2 and then that was going to feed into red dragon they were going to fly crew on dragon 2 around the moon on falcon heavy none of that's happening anymore that's all been ditched they've moved to starship um and it was all we looked up red dragon when it got canceled it was like did you write it down july 2017 there you go so that's i thought it was going to be a lot closer to the stainless steel switch uh when it got canceled but it was actually kind of far off there and it was maybe

more tied to when uh propulsive landing for dragon 2 was shown the door uh by my nasa by spacex by whoever it just seems like in the last two years there's been a lot of uh deprecation of the back end of the falcon and dragon you know roadmap and saying you know that future stuff we're gonna go all in on starship it's kind of interesting to me do you still think that uh uh the business idea business plan of of starship you know eliminating all these other systems and becoming sort of the unified architecture that's still sound do you still feel good about that well i have i have trouble with the the cargo starship idea i i don't yet have a clear vision for the way that that will work um and i i don't yet have confidence that not that spacex hasn't figured it out or hasn't you know more more

realistically i don't think spacex has really worked it up yet because they don't need to right now. It's not the primary thing they're worried about with Starship at this point. They want to knock down the first couple of technical steps before they get too mired in details about how to fly cargo missions to space. But I mean, you know, we hear rumors that they're talking to customers about flying on Starship, flying commercial payloads on Starship. So there is some thought in that department. But New Glenn is winning launch contracts for the early 20s at this point, and Starship is not. And that's a notable thing. I'm still a fan of go all in on Starship as a human launch vehicle and ignore the cargo market for all intents and purposes for now. Wait to see how that big cargo pans out because you can always build a one-off cargo vehicle, you know, once you

figure it out. But keep the eyes on the prize if you're SpaceX. That's what I wish they would do. Yeah. Can I throw a conspiracy theory at you? Please do. I love it. I love when you do that. So Starship's cargo capacity is large. Extremely. Extremely large. And if you're not sending people on it, it's probably actually a difficult space to fill. With today's, you know, all the production lines and all the architectures and all the instrumentation

for any kind of spacecraft today is all kind of optimized around smaller mass constrained systems so it's not that they we couldn't have ideas on what to put in that but it's it's putting into practice would probably be expensive and require some time and engineering so do you think that maybe spacex could wait on robotic stuff wait on you know uncrewed missions and let some of the launch vehicles that fill the middle gap come online, like say Blue Origin. Let the market adapt to that big fairing size and a little bit bigger payload. Falcon Heavy is kind of part of that. Vulcan will kind of be a part of that.

And then that can be a stepping stone for cargo size. like it could be a stepping stone for, you know, cargo size. It makes sense, especially given if we talk about the U.S. Air Force launch funding that's been, you know, the hot political drama that we talked about a lot here on the show. SpaceX pitched Starship as a piece of that puzzle that would fly missions on the back half of the 2020s. So it would be flying missions approximately eight to 10 years from now. So maybe that is exactly what they had in mind. It was like, we can fill the first six years of this Air Force contract with Falcon Heavy. The back half will need Starship. We'll figure it out when we get

there. And maybe that's why the Air Force said that's too risky for us. If you don't have the plans now, we kind of don't want to deal with that potential churn at a later date. It seems like a good strategy for me because SpaceX is vision-driven. They want to get people to Mars. They're going to need some cargo there, but are they going to need a giant, you know, chomper, as we're calling it, to do that? I don't know. Or are they better off figuring out how to fly these things around the solar system and doing it with people and some stuff in small boxes rather than a James Webb or the new telescope, LUVOIR, as we are calling it, this new next generation telescope. You know, I don't think those big one-off payloads move the needle for Starship in the same way as focusing on people to Mars does.

Yeah, that makes sense. Should we talk about it? what are we talking about everybody wants me to talk about the jb thing jim brian stein uh yeah it's up to you man it's your show all right i talk about politics here we got to talk about it. So, the night before, was it the night before? Yeah, I think so. The night before. It was the night before. Morning of, something like that. Yeah. Jim Bridenstine, NASA administrator, tweeted my statement. And he put out this statement about SpaceX's presentation the next day. You can read the tweet. I'll put it in the album art if you want to look at it. Essentially saying love the enthusiasm commercial crew is late we expect similar levels of enthusiasm for nasa missions as well uh basically the same line of attack that

we've heard in politics before about spacex being distracted by starship not focusing on commercial crew and that's why commercial crew is late this led to a whole round of hoopla because everyone loves to talk about hot drama i'm not gonna hit the alarm because i don't think it qualifies for hot drama no it just feels like straight up politics to me yeah and i'm i'm not worried about it yeah are you worried about it no i'm not um i mean it's like to be clear it's a it's a bad take very bad uh like you know we just talked about what what spacex is doing with their r&d and you know i think elon even kind of said like listen if i could make crew dragon go faster i would it's it's it's not at the point where you can throw extra money at it and it goes faster

and i kind of agree with this probably like the design's locked they're they're just kind of getting through i don't, I don't know. I don't know what it is, red tape maybe. But it's in the system now, right? I mean, hardware's showing up at the Cape literally this week. There was an in-flight abort booster and the vehicle that's going to be used there. That was the vehicle that was supposed to fly people until the other one blew up. So there's hardware flowing at this point.

And, you know, that's really not what the argument's about at this point. No, no. So totally a political move. You know, we've kind of speculated about this a little bit. And to me, all it possibly can be is that there is, you know, there's been a lot of scrutiny on the SLS system and sort of all the pieces that go with sort of the establishment space system. Gateway could be part of that, all that kind of stuff. And they have a stake in their not having a successful SpaceX, right? And so if the administration is kind of going after Boeing and just the general military industrial complex for SLS being delayed

and not being on time. You know, there's been a lot of talk about keep the contractors accountable to the timelines, they say. If, you know, NASA is going after those people a lot, and they're feeling threatened, they're going to want to see the flip side of the coin, right? And they want to see SpaceX get a little bit of that heat too and they write the budget so that's uh that's kind of how that goes to me that's that's it's pretty plainly what it is yeah yeah yeah and it's not it doesn't apparently elon musk and jim bryanstein have since talked and bryanstein's gonna visit spacex sometime this week or something a lot of it to me is the fact that politics is not real life and you know, I am very confident to say

that when you and I settled in on Saturday night to watch SpaceX's announcement, that Jim Bridenstine was doing the same thing. And the rest of his family was like, why you got to watch that, dad? Like, what are you doing? And he's just sitting there. He's like, I got to watch. I'm excited about this, right? I am fully confident that Bridenstine was doing exactly the same thing that you and I were doing on that Saturday night. You don't think he was sitting in Richard Shelby's office watching it on his TV? They were like, yeah, in like one of the smoke filled rooms back in DC. With some root beers or something? Yeah. I don't think so. I have a sense that he was probably blocking out his schedule and watching it the same way that you and I do. And it's purely a politics game. And it also doesn't matter.

It literally affects nothing for Starship. And this is where I'm going to get on my little soapbox, Jake. I am very confused sometimes by cognitive dissonance in the world. There are people in the world that will tell you that NASA should throw out SLS funding and give it all to Starship and then five seconds later tell you how much of a mess SLS funding and give it all to Starship, and then five seconds later tell you how much of a mess SLS is because it's a government program. Do you want Starship to be a mess?

Yeah, get the government involved. Is that where we're going about this? Do you want Starship to be developed by companies throughout all 20 states on the southern border of the U.S.? Or, you know, you're going to let SpaceX do its thing? I, for one, appreciate the fact that there are a multitude of ways of doing things in the world, and the fact that SpaceX is making its own way, having no problem getting funding right now. They're getting plenty of funding for Starlink, for Starship, for their future projects. It

doesn't seem like a thing that they are particularly worried about. They seem to have plenty of momentum. They're building launch pads in florida they're building launch pads in boca chica they're they're doing all right yeah well and you're bang on right because if you think about all the programs spacex has run falcon falcon heavy starship crew dragon you know first dragon which ones have gone the slowest? And it's been the ones that NASA have been closest to, right? Absolutely. Yeah. So I'm feeling confident that they're on the right track here. And I just really want to know the story about the switch to stainless steel, because I do feel like there's a week in SpaceX's history that is so crucial that no one has talked

about yet. Do you want to hear another conspiracy theory yeah oh yeah let's i should have a sounder for conspiracy hour well so you said that jim brianstein is probably watching it excited at home do you want to know how i think i can prove that oh yes so the statement was on twitter but it wasn't free text it was a picture right of text which means it's harder to find and search on the internet because he didn't want it to get found as much. You can cut this out. No, I like this. Wait.

Right? If you're doing search engine optimization, you've got to put it in. They've got to put his text. You don't put pictures of text. That's a terrible way to do it. So if you want this tweet to be found, you should have written it. Did he use the alt text feature of Twitter, though?

Yeah, he should have done some proper markup on it and really made sure that it was searchable. My problem with this theory is that everyone covered it. That's true. So it was immediately in text everywhere. I admire your effort. It was a try. Listeners, send us your best conspiracy theories about Jim Bridenstine's My Statement tweet. Please.

Yeah, we want to hear it. I think that's all I've got on Starship, honestly. I feel like people expect me to have more to say about Starship, but I am sitting back enjoying the momentum and basking in its glory at this point i just there's no hot take on starship no there's not really a hot take i just wish that other companies would be as open uh or not even as open because i think i i do think being as open as they are could present them with some situations in the future that they wouldn't like um but i do wish that most companies would be a little more open. Just let us see a little more of that workflow. Yeah, I agree.

Last order of business, Jake. We are weeks away at this point from the IAC conference. Is that redundant? International Astronautics Congress? Astronaut Congress. Congress, right? Congress conference Yeah That is on The October 21st 25th The week of October 21st 25th

October 20th It's a Sunday In Washington D.C. You and I are going to be at IAC So we're doing a meet up On Sunday Sunday morning Udvar-Hazy Center

It's the Air and Space Wing Out by Dulles It's going to be a blast We're going to get there At 10 a.m. Walk around the museum I think Jake you've never been to this area of the country so this will be your first visit i did once touch down in dulles and then immediately take off it doesn't count yeah yeah so this is going to be this is going to be rad you're going to love this museum there's so much

good space stuff there there's a lot of good aeronautics stuff there if you're a plane fan like i am. So I'm going to take a walk through the whole thing. So come hang out. See Spatial Discovery. All sorts of other good stuff at Udvar Hazi. And then later on in the evening, 7 p.m., we're going to be at the Dhaka Beer Garden. It's about a 10-minute walk north of the convention center for IAC.

So if you are going to be at IAC, you're going to be in town for the convention. Come hang out Sunday night, 7 p.m., DACA Beer Garden. Hang out with us. Get ready for the show. The Eagles are playing the Cowboys that night, so I'm going to be watching the Eagles at the Beer Garden. I do know, I will unconfirm rumors, there's going to be at least one other Eagles fan

at the meetup. So come hassle me at the meetup, and we'll talk space. I'm not going to be watching the game the whole time. We'll talk space. That sounds great. Yeah, I think there's probably a lot of listeners that are probably attending this conference. So I expect that you will all be there.

We're going to have a lot of fun. It's going to be a great turnout. Jake, thanks for doing this little double crossover. Can you tell everyone where to find you? Yeah, so Twitter at we underscore Martians. That's really the big thing. And then you can just go to the website, wemartians.com. And then maybe I'll plug one more time.

We also do a podcast together, besides our, quote, main feed, Off Nominal, which is space and beer all mixed together in a delightful cocktail. So offnominal.space, check that one out. It's fun, too. Yeah, it's once a month. It's a little more laid back. This was a pretty laid back episode of Main Engine Cutoff, and I appreciate that. But it's a little more laid back once a month. We talk about, we have some good guests on, we talk about whatever other space topics come on our

mind. So it's a good show. So check them all out and wherever you're listening to this right now. Huge thanks again to Jake for joining me this week. It was really fun to work with him on both shows. So make sure you listen to both because it's really worth listening in its entirety to the conversation. Before we get out of here for today, I want to say thank you so much to everyone who makes Main Engine Cutoff possible. If you want to help support this show, it is entirely listener supported. So head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support and join the 315 of you supporting this show every single month this episode of main engine cutoff is produced by 39

executive producers chris pat matt george brad ryan nadeem peter donald lee chris warren bob russell john moritz joel jan david grant mike david mince eunice rob tim dodd the everyday astronaut frank ruey julian lars to Adam, Sam, and six anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support at this level, for making it possible to do this show every single month. Thank you so much for your support and everyone else that is supporting the show. If you have any other questions or thoughts that you want to throw my way about Starship or any other topic, anthonyatmanagingcutoff.com is the email or on Twitter at WeHaveMiko.

Thank you all for listening, and I will talk to you next week.