Main Engine Cut Off - T+172: Lunar Politics

Episode Date: October 20, 2020

Last week, IAC 2020 brought a flurry of announcements and statements to digest. It’s a good time to check in on current and future lunar politics, with some statements by the ever-antagonistic Rogozin, seven countries signing onto the Artemis Accords, a handful of lunar development contracts announced, and the US election within sight.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 38 executive producers—Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Ryan, Nadim, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, and seven anonymous—and 414 other supporters.TopicsRogozin Wants ISS Extension, Gateway Too U.S.-Centric - SpacePolicyOnline.comShared Standards are a Vital Part of Future Space Exploration - Administrator Jim BridenstineNASA Artemis AccordsEpisode T+158: Doug Loverro Resigns, and a Bit About the Artemis Accords - Main Engine Cut OffNASA, International Partners Advance Cooperation with Artemis Accords | NASAEight Countries Sign Artemis Accords - SpacePolicyOnline.comESA awards contracts for moon and Mars exploration - SpaceNewsChina’s Statement on Artemis Accords, via Andrew Jones on Twitter (@AJ_FI)NASA Announces Industry Partnerships to Advance Moon, Mars Technology | NASANASA Announces Partners to Advance 2020 ‘Tipping Point’ Technologies | NASANASA Selects Partner to Land Water-Measuring Payload on the Moon | NASADemocratic platform calls for continuity in NASA programs - SpaceNewsCurrent and former NASA leadership share credit for commercial crew - SpaceNewsThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email 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 ShopMusic by Max Justus

Hello and welcome back to Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo. As always, I wanted to check in on the state of lunar politics. This seems like a good week to do it. Last week was IAC. This is the huge conference of the year last year was in DC Jake and I went down to it this year virtual obviously considering the state of the world but there were a couple of I mean there was a ton of announcements if you're a member of the headlines level over on mainenginecutoff.com support last week's headline show was like 25 minutes or something there was a ton of news announced at IAC, and a lot of it did surround the focus on humans to the moon right now, and under the guise of the Artemis program, and other nations' contributions to that

project, participation in it, and it did kind of shape a lot of the conversation, especially the first two days. IAC always starts out with this panel with all the heads of all the different space agencies, or not all of them, but a lot of them. And that always is kind of what you expect, right? Everyone talks for a couple minutes about the things they're doing, and then a couple of questions that are a little bit more general. And everybody talks about how collaboration is good, and competition is also good also good but collaboration is better and a lot of that kind of stuff but there's always like one or two things you can draw out of it or things that are interesting to note from it um so i want to talk about some of that i also want to talk about the news that happened the day after with the first couple of countries signing on to those artemis accords that we talked about. I guess I should look up when I did that

show about the Artemis Accords. That was episode 100, and I thought I did one just about the Artemis Accords. 158, maybe, about Doug Lavero, and then there's a little bit about the end, or about the Artemis Accords at the end of that. Everything I said there still holds up about what I think about the Artemis Accords, but now we have some people signed on to that. So I want to talk about the effects of that. And then I want to check in, we're just a couple of weeks away from the election here in the US. And that's always a volatile time for NASA in politics. Whenever there's a change of administration, NASA seems to get tossed about. And I want to talk about some of the possibilities we might see there, especially regarding what we hear from the international political community here in the

space world. I think all this ties together neatly in a way that's a nice political check-in, the state of the lunar exploration and everything else that we might see in the next 10 years. So let's start off with that IAC panel. Really the one thing that came out of this, again, nothing new if you've been following along, but Dmitry Rogozin, who's the head of Roscosmos, was there,

and he was talking some smack about the fact that he sees Gateway as too U.S.-centric, and that is why they are not going to be participating in a large scale. And he said,

for that to change, the program would have to be based on the principles of international cooperation that were used for ISS, where all decisions are being taken collectively this one caused a little bit of a stir he went on to say he wants to see things like docking port standardization and interoperability and things like that to which NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine did a blog post which I love when he posts on his blog because it's always

sort of like a long subtweet and he's talking about the fact that shared standards are already part of the plans for this, and specifically to the whole US-centric thing and how it should be based on the ISS. The Gateway, which is the plan to build out a small space station around the moon with NASA contributing some, ESA contributing some, JAXA, and all of the partners that are currently in existence on the ISS contributing a piece or some sort of functionality or some contribution to that project, where we would then stage landings to the moon, and it would be sort of a staging location for some lunar activities generally. That project is going to be guided under the international or the intergovernmental agreement.

I always get this one wrong. It's called the IGA. And that is the thing that guides the way the ISS is built out. And they're going to be using that for the Gateway Project. That was established pretty early on. It was all the same players. They've already done the paperwork. So it seemed easy enough to take that and take what they've done in the ISS and do it at the Gateway. So that is already the case for the Gateway itself. Where it differs is going down to the surface. When you go down to the surface, in NASA's mind, that's kind of their thing they've been championing for the past couple years, the Artemis project, that is to land humans on the moon.

And to do that, NASA is sort of requiring that you sign on to the Artemis Accords, which are a set of principles that fall under the guise of the Outer Space Treaty, fits within that, and it clarifies a couple of things we'll talk about in a bit. But that is the extra agreement needed for surface activity. So in this case, Rogozin, it doesn't really line up with what we know about the Gateway Project at this point. And that's where I think you can start to untangle where this is coming from, from Rogozin's. space industry, and apparently they don't want to contribute to the gateway. And this makes a lot of sense when you think about the state of the Russian space industry. I am not going to be the kindest person you'll hear talk about the Russian space industry. It is total stagnation at this point. In other cases, failure. We've had a lot of reliability issues

with Russian hardware over the past couple of years. But what they do best is flying things that have long heritage, making incremental improvements, continuing to fly that hardware. And they don't do great at new development. There's been a couple of modules making their way to the ISS for years now. They've had things like Angara, which is this launch vehicle they've been working on for, I don't know, decades at this point. I think it's about an entire SLS behind schedule. And then they've obviously been talking up new crew vehicles. They've been talking up a lot of new launch vehicles. And none of these things, sounds like the ISS modules might actually make

it up soon. But, you know, the stuff that is newly developed has a very hard time getting to the launch pad and getting off of Earth over in Russia. And when you look at the Gateway, Gateway is entirely new development. If they're going to contribute anything, it's something that their current hardware cannot really fly out and be operable at. It does require new things, especially that new crew vehicle they're talking up, bigger launch vehicles. And that is not whereussia shines at all in the current state of things so partially it sounds like to me uh some maybe some you know cya from dimitri rogozin trying to uh be a little bit conservative there and cover up what is a weakness of the russian

space industry and doing it under a guise of it's too u.s centric we don't want to be part of that anyway uh we'll just kind of threaten you with some collaboration with the Chinese space programs and whatever else, any other upstarts that we might find interesting. That's kind of the game they're playing there. Because like I said, it doesn't really line up with the way that things are already laying out. I think where NASA's really turning the screws to the Russian space program is the fact that the Artemis Accords are what's required to get down to the surface. And there might be some things in there that Russia does not agree with, just because maybe, I don't know why they wouldn't necessarily, because I think there's a lot in there that even China would agree with, who is the most opposed

to some things that the US holds dear right now, specifically the openness of data, the sharing scientific data and data about your vehicles in orbit. Sometimes China is launching without any notifications at all. Aerospace closures are the like. Certainly they have stages crashing down onto villages in China. So there's certain things that just wouldn't fly here and don't fly with the mental model of NASA specifically. But Russia is sort of being antagonistic in some ways like this,

not only going back a couple years to when Dmitry Rogozin is saying, well, maybe the NASA astronauts drilled the hole in the Soyuz on orbit. Stuff like that is just really antagonistic, and it's kind of been a style lately. And this seems like yet another one, but maybe a little bit of protecting himself as well from something that he knows is not the shining point of Roscosmos these days. Now, on the flip side, the next day, it was announced that seven countries have signed on to the Artemis Accords with NASA. So there are now eight Artemis Accords countries, and these were signed. It looks like these are signed between NASA and the space agencies of these other countries. It's interesting in that it's not the European

space agency, but as you'll see, a couple of member countries are actually signed on, but from their own national space agencies. I'm not exactly sure why that is the case. I'm sure there's some backroom stuff, some behind closed doors stuff that makes it easier to interact with these state level agencies rather than the cooperative European space agency, considering the fact they've got like 22 member states. So maybe it's hard to coordinate all of that. Maybe they don't have, you know, maybe that would take a very long time to get all of those member states to approve of the signing. I'm not exactly sure where that breaks down. But nonetheless, I'm going to read

a list of countries that have signed on in alphabetical order as listed on the announcement of this. Australia, Canada, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, UAE, United Kingdom, and the United States of America. There are a couple big ones missing here. Obviously, you heard Italy and the UK, so that's two of the big four of the European Space Agency member states. France and Germany are missing. I would be shocked if those were not like the first two that got announced after this. As part of this announcement, it was said there's going to be a couple more countries announced in the near future as signatories, but these are the eight that I guess were ready to make this announcement. And over the past year, we've heard NASA and other agencies signing these memorandum of understandings, signing these agreements, where there weren't a lot of details really sketched out other than

this is an agreement that says we kind of know exactly what we're going to do in the future to work together on the Artemis program. And it sort of sounded like NASA was trying to line up a group of countries that would be ready to announce this at IAC. I'm sure the plans were to have a big unveiling in person as they're all signing the paper together, a great photo op. Instead, it was over Zoom, but that is the 2020 world we live in. But it seemed like all of those things we've been talking about the last couple of months were lining up for this big unveiling moment.

Now, a lot of these countries are people you would expect to be in here with NASA. A lot are not surprising, but like, oh, cool, they're in this group. But first, what are the Artemis Cords? Generally, there are, I believe it was like 10 or maybe 11 principles as defined in their PDF that you can, well, I guess it's like eight actual principles. I have to get through the two intro sections there. And these are things that can apply under the Outer Space Treaty, but actually clarify some of the things that NASA would like to see in terms of operating on the surface and doing some more extensive operations where there might be multiple parties on the lunar surface or in lunar orbit, and really just kind of a principal guideline that you would

like the international community generally to move forward with to become maybe to become the de facto law of space in the future reading the titles of each of those sections number one peaceful purposes number two transparency which is being open about their data and their uh you know what their plans are generally number three interoperability to make sure that exploration systems can interact, maybe fuels or landing systems, communication systems, power systems, all that kind of stuff should be interoperable to some level so that they can work together in the future. Emergency assistance. So that's helping each other out if you need it when you're, you know, very far away from home. Registration of space objects. Pretty plain and simple there. Release of scientific data. Preserving outer space heritage. This is basically keep off of the Apollo landing sites. Space resources. This is

basically clarifying that in NASA's view, utilizing resources in space does fall under. It can comply with the Outer Space Treaty, and it's not a thing that goes against that, as is a common argument. Deconfliction of space activities, which essentially boils down to safe areas or keep out zones around landers or bases, and making sure that those don't interact in a poor way. Like maybe you're landing on the moon, and if you land too close, you're going to pelt the other person with regolith at, you know, a billion miles an hour or whatever it is.

So there's some principles around that. That's actually the longest section of this whole thing. The last one is orbital debris. So that's, you know, taking care to make sure that you clean up under a certain amount of time. We have some guidelines for that here in the US.

Other countries have different provisions for that, but this would kind of aim to establish a baseline. So those are the general areas. And essentially, you could read this a couple ways. These are the things that here in the US, there is strong agreement that these are the things we need to be established to do the kind of things that we want to do on the lunar surface, on the Martian surface, anywhere in space. And these things are not necessarily partisan. This isn't something that could only happen under the Trump administration. I think these things are generally agreed upon by both parties in the US for sure, and a lot of people in the space industry generally. So it does seem, you know, there's some maybe some arguments

about space resources, and exactly how to handle heritage sites and even active, you know, landers and things like that. But generally, there's a lot of agreement on the way these things should be shaped. So in that, you know, that's the first real statement there is that NASA says these are the things that are important to us if we're going to be stepping up our game on the lunar surface. And then the other way to read it is these are the things that we would be okay with China agreeing to, because right now we have very little insight into their plans. They are somewhat unpredictable, and we don't really know which way they're going to go. So if they followed these guidelines,

we would be okay with it. Those are kind of the two extremes, and it's probably somewhere in the middle there. But then when you look at the countries that signed on to this, let's talk a little bit about why each one are here and what may be surprising and what's not. First up, there's some like Canada, Italy, Japan, UK, that are not surprising at all here. You know, Canada has already committed to building Canadarm3 for the Gateway. Italy is where Talis Alenia is headquartered, who has built the pressurized vessels for half of ISS. They built all the Cygnus modules, the MPLMs that were up on the station or still are up on the station. They are going to be building big portions of the Gateway. They obviously, like I said,

they build Cygnus. So the first habitation module is going to be built by Talia Zelenya, at least the pressure vessel. And then they just won an award to build the pressure vessels for the two modules that the European Space Agency is going to be contributing to Gateway. That's the International Habitation Module and the Refueling Module that has a little bit of pressurized volume. So if you want any kind of pressurized space, you're probably going to be working with Talis Alenia, and you're going to be having a close relationship with them and the Italian Space Agency, so not surprising that they're on the list. Japan, JAXA has been a close collaborator on the ISS program and a lot of other things like different missions out into deep space. And then they've also been

talking up building rovers and things like that for the lunar surface itself as part of the Artemis program. So not a big surprise there. The UK, obviously very close relationship there. The three that are interesting is Luxembourg. They're a member state of ESA, but you don't often hear them except for when it comes to space resources. They were one of the first countries to get out there and really make it clear that if you set up shop in Luxembourg, you're going to be able to go out and harvest space resources and make use of them. So they pushed very heavily into that area. And I would not be surprised to see, or not be surprised to learn that they're signing on specifically for the space resources side of this, considering it's something they've been so intent on in the past. And then there's the two upstarts, Australia and the UAE. They are both pretty new space agencies. The UAE has been

looking for some grand missions to start off with. They've got Mars Hope on its way out to Mars right now. They sent up an astronaut pretty recently, and they've got some more in the pipeline. So they're looking to come out of the gate and really get going, kind of revitalize what they're known for and make themselves a name in space. So they've been getting cozier and cozier. They weren't super open about Mars Hope, so hopefully as they get a little bit more integrated into this list of partners, that's one of the things that you would hope to see is them open up a little bit. And then Australia, they're very new,

but one of the first things they said was we're going to be contributing to the Artemis program. So they're looking to jump in and become partners. They have close relationships with a lot of the countries on this list, not only in terms of historically, but also intelligence community, the Five Eyes countries, New Zealand's missing from here, but wouldn't be shocked to see them as a future addition. So all in all, the real big surprise is that France and Germany aren't on the list. But other than that, I could reason about why these countries were included. But other than that, I could reason about why these countries were included. There was a statement from a Chinese official on this afterwards, and it was surprising that it sounded much more open to this kind of thing than you might have imagined, because that has

been the kind of political angling, at least here in the US, is we got to set standards out there before China does. And their statement was basically like, we support the peaceful use of outer space. We believe that it is important to be able to utilize resources in space under the Outer Space Treaty. We're ready to keep talking with international partners and cooperate with them as needed. Right now, NASA can't talk to any Chinese officials about space. It is barred by what's called the Wolf Amendment. But they do kind of have these public communication channels where someone will make a statement and somebody will respond to that statement in an article or through some interview, and it's a way to sort of balance information back and forth between the two parties. back and forth between the two parties. But generally, they do seem, you know, down with the same kind of stuff that's listed out in the Artemis Accords. And I believe I even said that back in that show that I referenced. There's stuff in here that I think given China's roadmap, generally, as they've laid out as much as they do lay out that sort of thing.

There's a lot in the Artemis Accords that would make perfect sense for them to jump in on and solidify as the way that things are. There's a lot of commonality in what NASA wants to do and what whatever arm of the Chinese space industry would be taking this on would want to do once they get to the lunar surface. So it's much more open to this kind of thing than you might imagine. And we'll see how far this goes. NASA made a statement that they're doing this as bilateral agreements because they wanted it to be a quick moving process to get all of these signatories to meet the deadlines.

And if they went through the UN again, it would be a thing that would take a very long time to line up. But I think also what the hope is, is that in a couple of years, NASA could say, look at all these people that signed on to the Artemis Accords.

It's obviously the way that we all want space to be developed. It is the best framework that we have. It's the most developed. It's the most robust. Let's adopt this as the policy for the future in space for all countries. I could certainly see this being part of the idea is to shape it with the Artemis Accords and the way they're rolled out over, you know, this announcement, but then the following announcements as we see countries being added on to this. So I think this is notable, not only because it doesn't necessarily say that all these countries are dedicated to landing on the moon, but it certainly does have all these

countries signing their name on a thing that has Artemis on top. And when you think Artemis, you think landing people on the moon. So it's a good way to kind of get that in the back door that all these countries are now signed on to the Artemis program. It's not quite true. It's just the Artemis Accords. But certainly this is a much bigger statement for things that are named Artemis than we ever saw with the previous plans at NASA, which was to go to Mars. There was very little international support for that program generally. And when we started tacking back towards the moon, you saw people coming out of the woodwork to jump on and sign some agreements with this project, because for a lot of countries out there that have much smaller budgets, especially in the human space

flight realm, the moon is a much more achievable target, both budgetarily and timeline wise. So you're seeing much more momentum with the global space policy on this lunar program. And that's kind of where I want to go next to talk about the precipice we're on here in the US as we're waiting for this election and what we might see in the future in either direction of this election, where this might be headed. So before we dive into that, let's say thank you to everyone out there who made this episode of Main Engine Cutoff possible. There are 452 of you supporting Main Engine Cutoff every single month. Saw a bunch of you jumping on in the last couple of days or weeks. So hopefully my pitches for headlines have been working out because it is like you're

getting an entire new podcast in your feed every week. I told you last week's was 25 minutes. So if you want to stay up on all the headlines, got to head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support and jump in there. $3 or more a month. You're in the club. But this episode was produced by 38 executive producers. Thanks to Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Nadeem, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, TheEverDashNight, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for making this possible.

Once again, could not do it without your support. This is totally listener funded. So if you want to join the club, head over to MainEng mainenginecutoff.com slash support. And thank you once again. All right, so we got a big election coming up. Obviously, everything in the world here in the US is about it. I'm in a swing state. So if you watch any football games or any sports, you are inundated with election ads. So I'm ready for that to be done. But we do need to talk about where space policy might go in the near future here and I also want to circle back to something that I've talked about on the show before which is can a NASA administrator really make a difference in the direction of space policy and I before a couple years ago when Jim Bridenstine was nominated I was very supportive

of his nomination I thought he would be a great person for that role, and I certainly think that's been the case. He was a very contentious nomination because of earth science and climate change views that eventually, I think not even that long of an eventually, but basically once he got confirmed into the job, he completely flipped his previous positions on. I'll leave it to you to determine which one is the real Jim Brinstein. Is it this one that is the political stance Jim Brinstein or was the last one? My bet is it was the last one because that's when he was winning elections. And now he is a guy with a job that was appointed. Obviously, still shaky ground, but certainly seemed like once he got in the job, the real Jim Brinstein came out.

but certainly seemed like once he got into the job, the real Jim Bridenstine came out. And at the time, I was saying, yeah, I'm really supportive of this guy being the head of NASA, but can administrators really do anything? And this was more of a debate we had over on offnominal.space, if you're not listening to that show that I do with Jake Robbins. We debated this at length. Can administrators really make a difference, or are they kind of at the whim of a much bigger piece of machinery that is in motion for where NASA's heading? And I was pretty firmly on the side of they don't make a difference at all. They are beholden to a gigantic structure, and there's very little wiggle room within that structure. I will amend my statement now a couple years down the line and say that they can't change the trajectory in major ways, but they can certainly accelerate or

decelerate pieces of the program that they either like or don't like. So if there's something that they really hate that's in the plans, they can decelerate it to some extent. And in the case of what we've seen more often with the Jim Bridenstine era NASA, I've seen a lot more of these small decisions that can accelerate a plan that you might be supportive of. And specifically, I'm thinking about these smaller programs that kind of fly under the radar, not kind of, they totally fly under the radar, but they tend to create more momentum over a couple of years than the big top level, crazy, you know, multi-billion dollar budget line items. These are things like Commercial Lunar Payload Services

Program, which are these small lunar landers that are bid out to commercial companies. We've now got four landers on the manifest. Just this past week, Intuitive Machines won another payload, a drill to go to the South Pole and find some ice. So that's the fourth manifested CLPS flight right now. So we're going into this election instead of debating Moon or Mars like we always do, and then flip-flopping and destroying all momentum. We're going in with four flights manifested that are going to happen within the first two or three years of whoever the next president's administration is. And then you see all these other partnerships, like NASA last week announced a bunch of tipping point contracts, specifically some big ones. SpaceX won $53

million to transfer 10 tons of liquid oxygen between tanks and Starship. They're working on cryogenic refueling and technologies needed for that. ULA, $186 million for a very similar thing using Centaur and Vulcan. Lockheed Martin, $189 million for liquid hydrogen, long-term storage. They're going to be doing that on a small satellite kind of bus from Momentus on a Viggo ride that'll launch on a Relativity Terran 1, so very cool mission there. Etta Space, $127 million a similar project, but with liquid oxygen, and that'll be flying on Rocket Lab's Photon. Masten won a couple of awards for lunar surface payloads.

Intuitive Machines again won an award for a small hopper lander that would be able to fly a mile and a half away from the original landing site. So there's all these kind of awards that are, you know, tens of millions of dollars at most. Previous to this, we've seen Starship win a couple of awards, Blue Moon win a couple of awards, even before they were selected for that top-level human landing system contract. And it's these kind of things that are these smaller projects that no one would ever bring up in a congressional hearing. You're going to bring up the crazy multi-billion dollar budget items, like why does a human landing system cost so much money when Jim Bridenstine goes to Congress and says we need 28 billion dollars and gets laughed

out of the room. Nobody's going to bring up the 53 million dollars that SpaceX got for a Starship test. I have yet to hear anyone bring up a commercial lunar payload services program in Congress, and those are four missions that are going to be flying to the moon in a handful of years. And that's stuff that is, like I said, it's not a trajectory-altering move,

but it certainly builds momentum and it builds a technology base to be able to actually achieve something when those all come due in a couple of years' time. And it's that kind of stuff that I think, you know, you've seen this wiggle room, even with like the Next Step program that NASA has, it's kind of been, it's actually a little bit wishy-washy sometimes. I feel like, I'm like, is this, is this how loud, how the Next Step program can work? But there's some things that were in the Next Step program that were working on long-term

solutions for some more habitation on ISS, and then that got extended to habitation at the Gateway, and they've been building on that over the years. And it's these smaller pieces of the portfolio that you see this kind of momentum building activity that I do think actually plays off in a big time way, whether it's Jim Brinstein in four years or whether it's somebody else at the helm. So I will amend my statement to say that these kind of decisions can really alter the momentum and the trajectory in the future, not the trajectory now. It can't change. If Jim Brinstein came in and said, no, I really want to go to Mars, I don't think he was going to change that trajectory. Maybe he wouldn't have gotten the job if he was going to do that, and

that's part of the thing. But I do think he can accelerate the future trajectory, if that makes any sense. Now, when it comes to the election, it's an interesting one this time around. The last, like, four or five of these, every time there's a new president, NASA gets tossed around, the plans change, momentum is killed, and we sort of start back at square one, yet with the same launch vehicle and crew capsule. This time around, it was, for a while, looking like it was just going to be another incumbent victory. Right now, it looks very much like Joe Biden is going to win this election, and there will be a new head of NASA, a new administration in charge. I don't think Jim Bridenstine has any shot of sticking around in a

Joe Biden administration. Who that will be in that position, I am not sure. But what I do take some stock in is a couple of months ago, around the Crew-1 or the Demo-2 launch, it is, there were some campaign events that Joe Biden held with former NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, former Senator Nelson, some of the old players in space policy. And they were actually given some props to Jim Bridenstine, and he was given them right back in different interviews for the things they've done in the past. And Charlie Bolden even said, I think he's working out to be a great administrator. I give him kudos for everything that's happened. So there was very kind words in a way that's not all too familiar to these kind of politics and this level of politics.

And the Democratic platform actually calls for continuity in the NASA programs. Now, they don't have the 2024 deadline in the law or in their platform right now. And that's been kind of the main point of detraction in these congressional hearings is 2024 is a politically motivated date. That is a thing that you've heard very frequently. Well, number one, I think that's a really bad line of logic because for years before that, all we ever heard was these presidents are setting deadlines 10 years out. That's beyond their purview. So this is a useless date. They're just throwing it out there. And then all of a sudden, somebody does give a date that's within their term.

And the line of attack became that's a politically motivated date. Yeah, that was the point that we made all along. So I do think that was a little bit of nonsense. But I'll get over that point for one minute to mention the fact that if it does turn out that Joe Biden wins this election, 2024 becomes a politically motivated date exactly for the people who are criticizing it for being a politically motivated date. So there's a not inconceivable chance that 2024 does stick around in a NASA under a Joe Biden administration. And I look forward to all the Republicans in Congress saying

2024 is a politically motivated date and we should not adhere to that because look at these crazy budgets. That will annoy the living hell out of us. I expect it to happen in just a few years time. But I do think there's a lot more continuity going in to this cycle. And not only that, I think what I just got done saying, the momentum that has been built up by things like clips, by these tipping points contracts, by even some human landing system studies, and certainly by things that we're seeing, private efforts like Starship and all the momentum that they have going, there is a lot more momentum this time around than there has been

in previous rounds. So it still obviously could play out in a variety of ways. There could be some major drama. There could be some major shakeups. You never know who's going to be nominated. And this is all assuming that Joe Biden does win. If Trump wins, then yeah, we're going to keep on keeping on here. Although there are some sources out there, Eric Berger has a couple that say that Jim Bridenstine might be out even in a second term of the Trump administration. So he doesn't seem long for NASA. I'm interested to see where he goes. I'm sure it will be somewhere in the space world. And we'll see who gets in as the new administrator in the future. But I do think there's a lot more momentum this time around and a lot more reason to have hope

that all of this, including the fact that there's international support, it's much harder to cancel something that has massive levels of international support than something that doesn't. So this time around, if somebody was going to say, let's go to Mars, not the moon, they're going to have to explain to a lot of people why all these countries that signed on to this thing that sounds like they're going to the moon, even though, like I said, it's just the Artemis Accords, it's not that they're signed on to Artemis, but they are certainly committing money and funds and all sorts of resources to going to the moon. You're going to have to explain why it's a good idea to bail out on all those obligations with the international space community at large. So the combination of all this, the kind of signal to stability from

the Biden campaign, the momentum that has been built up by some really good decisions under Jim Bridenstine's NASA, and then this international support that is burgeoning here, gives me a lot more hope for the future of this kind of stuff than we might have had in the past. So I thought this was a good time to check in on all that. Thank you all for listening. Once again, if you want to help support the show, head over to mainenginecutoff.com support. If you want to send me any questions or comments, hit me up on the email, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. If you want to send me any questions or comments, hit me up on the email, anthonyatmainenginecutoff.com or on Twitter at wehavemiko. And until next time, thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.