Main Engine Cut Off - T+186: NASA Selects Starship as Artemis Lander

Episode Date: April 20, 2021

NASA selected SpaceX’s Starship as its ride for crew to the lunar surface as part of the Artemis program. As the Source Selection Statement outlines, Starship was selected as the sole winner because of the constrained lander budget. It’s an aggressive, interesting, and exciting move from NASA, so I have a lot of thoughts.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 40 executive producers—Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, The Astrogators at SEE, Chris, Jack, and seven anonymous—and 543 other supporters.TopicsAs Artemis Moves Forward, NASA Picks SpaceX to Land Next Americans on MoonSource Selection Statement - Human Landing System, Option A Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships-2Biden Requests 6.3 Percent Increase for NASA – SpacePolicyOnline.comChairwoman Johnson Statement on NASA’s Artemis Human Landing System Award | House Committee on Science, Space and TechnologyAmazon contracts nine Atlas 5 missions for Kuiper broadband satellites - 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 to Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo. And, uh, I took a little bit of time off, as you might have noticed on the feed. If you're a member of the Patreon and listen to headlines, you would have heard my talk about that. I needed a little bit of time off to recollect myself. But boy, did I come back to some crazy news. We're going to be diving into it today. I don't know if five years ago, if you're listening to this on the day of release, five years ago I started this podcast.

I don't know if I would have believed you if you gave me the rundown of what my show was going to be today. Because what a wild week we've had here. So it seems like this stuff was supposed to come out later in the month started getting leaked and NASA scrambled to make this announcement last Friday. So Friday at 4pm. There was a call in which NASA went on to announce that Starship from SpaceX has been selected as the sole winner of the Artemis Human Landing System Award. They won a $2.9 billion contract, a little bit under $2.9 billion. That is a firm fixed price contract to develop Starship for lunar landings with humans in the next couple of years. That includes one test flight down to the surface before NASA would proceed with the crewed flight down to the lunar surface with Starship.

So a wild announcement for a variety of reasons. I'm going to unpack it all. I've been, you can hear the paper. I've been reading the source selection statement here. Really good document that Kathy leaders, her name's on the bottom of it as the person in charge of this decision. This document is only 20 some pages long.

It is very readable. I would highly recommend if you are interested in this kind of thing, reading the document because it gives a lot of thinking behind the selection, which I will dive into here. But there's stuff that, you know, obviously, I'm not gonna read every word of this. And it's quite interesting. If you're listening to this,

you're probably interested in reading it. It's not heavy, it's not super technical, it just really plainly written in a very communicable way. So definitely check that out. You know, if you want, pause this, go read it, come back, maybe it'll make my analysis better. Pause this, go read it, come back. Maybe it'll make my analysis better. So I want to talk about the decision. Then I want to go through some thoughts on NASA's decision point and why I think it's an aggressive maneuver from them. Very interesting, very non-NASA in a lot of ways, at least in my mind.

So I want to get into that, but we'll start with the details first. So I mentioned up front, it's just under $2.9 million for billion dollars, sorry, for SpaceX firm fixed price. So much in the same model as commercial cargo and crew has been over the last 10 years or so with ISS. This is the price for the development. So any overruns are going to be on SpaceX's dime. And to that extent, one of the things that's impressed upon this is that they're looking for companies that they're partnering with to put a lot of their own money into this program. vehicles, a ton of development down in Boca Chica. Starship itself, you know, it has its roots in a vehicle called BFR, BFS, ITS, MCT, there was all these different acronyms. You know, just about five years ago, this fall, I believe is the initial unveiling that Elon Musk did. So it's taken on a lot of forms over the years, but they've been investing in it heavily.

And this document even says, you know, they were funding something like over half of the development and test activities as the investment in this architecture. And SpaceX sees Starship as its primary vehicle for the future. So that includes the crewed versions like this. It includes payload versions that are launching satellites or spacecraft. And the fully reusable architecture that Starship relies upon makes it all affordable. So this is their kind of one big program that all of their future ambitions are wrapped up in, eventually culminating in landing on Mars.

But they're going to be building this lunar variant of Starship. So it's going to be this reusable vehicle specialized for the lunar surface. So it's going to be this reusable vehicle specialized for the lunar surface. So it's not going to have the wings that you see on the Starships flying here at Earth. It's not going to have the heat shielding. It doesn't need that stuff to land on the moon. They're going to be doing a demonstration mission without any crew before they would go on to do the crewed flights. The first mission for landing crew on the surface would meet up with Orion in lunar orbit. So instead of going to Gateway, which would be built out in lunar orbit by NASA and its international partners, that was originally going to be the

spot where everything would meet up. That's going to be the case later on in the architecture as currently written. But for this first mission, Orion and Starship would be meeting up in lunar orbit. An interesting thing about the architecture here was something that there is a large portion of this document that I mentioned that goes into the architecture that SpaceX has for refueling Starship and filling it all the way up with fuel before it goes on to the moon. That was something that if you remember my thoughts on this program, you know, in the past months, I guess an additional bit of context for everyone out there as a reminder, about a year ago, three different teams were given some base period contracts to do their concepts, their design studies, and to push their concepts

further, culminating in this final round where the landers would be awarded. So a year ago, SpaceX won $135 million. A company called Dynetics won $253 million. Their lander was the very low lander with the drop tanks on the side. And then Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' company, led a team including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Draper. They won $579 million to develop their concept. So all of that base period work culminated in these companies submitting their final proposal a couple of months ago. And, you know, over the past couple of months, as we talked about this, one of the things I mentioned with Starship is that it's significant risk is that the concept of operations for Starship getting to the moon involves so many Starship launches that it boggles your mind because they have to launch the Starship that's

going to go and land on the moon. So the lunar starship or the moonship as people are calling it. And then they have to launch all of the fueling vehicles, which every time you're launching a starship, you're launching a super heavy and a starship. And then in some cases, you're coming back with that starship and launching it again. It is a lot of launches. It's a lot of vehicles. It is a ton of logistics to work out to pull off one of these missions. And that is mentioned in this document by Kathy Leaders. I am just searching it now. You know, I'm not a barbarian. I do have a digital copy that I searched through. So I'm going to read a little bit of this document to get you in the same headspace as I and apparently Kathy Leaders were in when writing this thing.

SpaceX's mission depends upon an operations approach of unprecedented pace, scale, and synchronized movement of the vehicles in its architecture. This includes a significant number of vehicle launches in rapid succession, the refurbishment and reuse of those vehicles, and numerous in-space cryogenic propellant transfer events. I acknowledge the immense complexity and heightened risk associated with the very high number of events necessary to execute the front end of SpaceX's mission, and this complexity largely translates into increased risk of operational schedule delays. However, these concerns are tempered because they entail operational risks in Earth orbit that can be overcome more easily than in lunar orbit where unexpected event might create higher chances, higher risk to the loss of mission. It goes on to talk about the operations for this mission itself. It's actually very thoughtful, and it does

go, you know, speak to that risk that I was talking about and Catholic leaders are talking about here. And that would be that they launch the tankers into orbit before the lander starship. And then all of those tankers that are in orbit would go and meet up with that lander, refuel it, fully top up its tanks, and then that would go on to the moon where it could linger for up to 100 days before the crew arrives. They would do this series of launches that starts with the tanker vehicles, get them all into orbit, then launch the lander, refuel the lander, head out to the moon. Once they are there and fully checked out, the crew would launch from Earth. So it is still a

very complex operation, but they're managing it in a way that makes it much more approachable for the mission planning overall. That doesn't really address my main concern, which is the fact that to be able to do that many launches with that many vehicles and that much fuel and that kind of turnaround time of your launch site requires a scaling up of operations that is crazy. Not crazy impossible, just amazing. You know, like if that is actually in the crazy impossible, just amazing. If that is actually in the cards in the next couple of years, there's going to be more starships than you can count. And that scale is something that is not a nice-to-have of their architecture.

It is a requirement of their architecture that they need so many tankers to be able to fill up one of these starships that it is a very impressive feat of engineering. Now, if any team can pull that off, SpaceX has shown that they have what it takes to do that. But that is marked in this document as one of the risks of the SpaceX architecture. Now, that said, none of these architectures are specifically not complex. You know, each of them have multiple elements that need to come together at some point in time. Dynetics relies on in-space refueling just as much, and maybe not just as much, but to some extent, and to some extensive extent.

And then Blue Origin has, you know, four different, three different elements that need to come together. The ascent, descent, and the tug element. So all of them have their own complexity, and it's the details that matter, and then it's beyond even the details. It's just the actual execution of those details that matters. A couple other things on SpaceX's bid before we get into the others. They got glowing reviews for the management of how they would actually manage this program. A lot of that could be sourced from the cargo and crew programs. You know, it's talking about reusing a lot of the systems in place that they have for programs that are similar and the similar programs there would be cargo and crew to the ISS, which are,

you know, NASA projects that NASA knows what they're going to get out of SpaceX. In this case, Kathy Leaders, she was the commercial crew program manager for a long time. So she has a lot of experience with SpaceX in that environment, and they got glowing reviews for that in this. Blue Origin got strong technical marks across the board. They had a lot of talk about their off-nominal and abort scenario planning that NASA particularly liked. They had issues with their development timelines for the ascent engines, several components that would be sourced from third parties that they have not yet identified. That was a risk that NASA identified.

And then they had this line in there about some other propulsion systems. Numerous mission-critical integrated propulsion systems will not be flight tested until Blue Origin's scheduled 2024 crewed mission. That was a big risk that they identified. The other one that was particularly damning was this about their communications architecture. Four of its six proposed communications links, including critical links such as that between HLS, the lander, and Orion, as well as direct-to-Earth communications, will not close as currently designed. Moreover, it is questionable whether Blue Origin's fifth link will close. These problematic links result in Blue Origin's proposal failing to meet key HLS requirements during the surface operations phase of the mission. So there were some of these pretty big

risks in Blue Origin's proposal which led them to not be selected. Well, there was a bigger issue that led them to not be selected, which is the pricing. We're all going to talk about that in a second. But they did have a couple of technical issues and fundamental issues that NASA could not get around. Dynetics had... You got to read this Dynetics section because they get... Eviscerated might be a little bit too strong, but the technical section this Dynetics section because they get... Eviscerated might be a little bit too strong, but the technical section about Dynetics was as close to an evisceration as you could possibly get, I guess. Their lander is already over its mass allocation.

And based on what is in this document, they show no signs of being able to close the mission architecture as it currently exists. So you can look at that Dynetics lander and it is basically really cool fan fiction of what it would be like to land on the moon, but it would not work in the physical universe that we currently inhabit. There's a lengthy portion, I mentioned the refueling architecture, a lengthy portion about how that lacks detail, is technically immature, has severe development risks. I just took this one quote that I think

sums up a lot of what is in this Dynetics portion. In particular, I agree that Dynetics' mass closure issue has substantial ramifications for the feasibility of its proposed architecture. I also acknowledge that Dynetics' proposal contains inconsistencies and lacks key substantiating details in numerous areas, resulting in several thematic weaknesses which cast considerable doubt in my mind as to the proposal's overall credibility. Therefore, I find the SCP properly rated Dynetics technical proposal as marginal. So, pretty rough review of Dynetics' overall mission there. So that's kind of the high-level breakdown of these three proposals. There is a lot of thinking that went into arriving at this decision of a sole-sourced award to Starship. So I want to get into that and some of the knock-on effects,

what we might see in the future. It's going to be an interesting week in that regard because Bill Nelson has his hearing for NASA Administrator confirmation coming up on, I believe it's Wednesday this week. So if you're listening to this the day it releases tomorrow, if you're listening to this after that, then catch my follow-up show apparently that I might do because my list got very long this week of shows that I want to do. But before I dive into the decision process itself, I want to say thank you to everyone out there who makes this show possible. There are 583 supporters of Main Engine Cutoff. That number has been growing a lot recently. I'm so thankful for all of you that have joined on. Welcome to the club. I hope you're enjoying it. If you have joined in and are getting headlines at $3 a month or more,

I hope you're enjoying that. I do an extra show every week where I run through all the stories of the week, talk about everything that's happening in space, some stuff that doesn't come up here on the main show because it just doesn't quite fit, but I still have thoughts on. So if you want to stay up on news and help support the show, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support and join up there. This episode was produced by 40 executive producers. Thanks to Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee,

Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian, and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, The Astrogators at SCE, Chris, Jack, and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support for making this episode possible. And once again, if you want to head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support, you can join up there, help support the show, and get an extra

podcast in your feed every single week. Thank you all once again for the support. podcast, in your feed every single week. Thank you all once again for the support. So this decision from NASA, this is an aggressive decision. I don't know if I can find a better adjective for it, because the baseline thinking for what would come out of this Human Landing System Award is that NASA would pick two options to go forward with. Between commercial cargo and commercial crew to the ISS, NASA has been talking up this idea of having two commercially sourced competitors that play off each other. They keep each other honest on pricing. They keep each other honest on schedule. At least that is the line and the marketing mantra of this two-competitor approach. is the line and the marketing mantra of, you know, this two competitor approach. It is arguable at this moment in time, if you were to hypothetically use commercial crew as an example, that two is not

always better than one. And I think there is a narrative issue with, you know, talking up how good it is to have two competitors when one is flailing so badly. Of course, that is also the strength of having two, is that when one of your competitors is doing poorly or is having an issue, or in the case of commercial cargo, you know, both of those launch vehicles had issues at one point or another that put NASA in an interesting spot where they had to figure out how to get cargo to the ISS, and it eventually ended up with Cygnus flying on Atlas V until Falcon 9 and Dragon were back flying. So there have been moments in time in which that strength is really good of having that two-competitor program. Right now, you've got Dragon 2 flying

crew to the ISS regularly at this point, Starliner still not yet even getting a port assignment until, you know, late summer. So there is some stuff there that could be brought up if somebody wanted to be, you know, negative about that approach or honestly even argue from a position of bad faith. But generally, that has been the take from NASA is that it would be good to have two options, lean on that commercial competition, and go that way, because then you've got dissimilar redundancy, you've got a lot of benefits from that. Now, obviously, you need budget to do that, right? So NASA requested $3.4 billion last year, they ended up with $850 million. So not even a quarter of the budget that they

requested they ended up with. That's clearly not enough to do the same program that they were envisioning, where you have two fully funded competitors going forward with landers that are competing for that 2024 deadline. Now what they would do with that $850 million, my expectation, I think most everyone's expectation was that they would do what NASA has done historically, which is, you know, say, okay, we didn't exactly get the full budget we need, so we're going to stretch the budget a little bit. We're going to stretch the timeline out over more years. We're going to slow roll this program. We're still going to pick two options, but we're going to do it in a smaller format first. You know, you're not both going to be greenlit to fully developing these launch or these landers. You're going to have to do some more design phase. You're going to push the technology forward. We're going to slow roll the program, but we're still going to do it with two competitors

working towards these landers. We'll just push the timeline out to 2028. It'll be fine. We'll get the money later. That is what I expected. That is what a lot of people expected, because that is the way that NASA has done it in the past several years to decades. Instead, they went forward with an aggressive decision to say, you know what? We can do it with the budget we have. We got $850 million this year. We have a funding curve projected out over the next four or five

years, and SpaceX's bid fit within that. A lot of the document from Cathy Leaders is saying, based on the initial proposal sent in, I could not even fit a single contract award in the budget that we received. And specifically with SpaceX, that wasn't about the total amount, but the milestones and the timing of those amounts. So the first piece of contact they had was with SpaceX to refine those milestones and make sure that the payments could fit within the annual budget that NASA expects to have here for the human landing system. So they went with, no, we're committed to this landing. We want to pick the lander that can fit in this budget in a realistic manner. And if it's just one competitor, it's just one competitor, but we have a fully funded

lander on the books. Now, that's an aggressive move for a couple of reasons. Number one, they really want to land on the moon in the next couple of years. That is a hard commitment from them if they're putting their money where their mouth is. The other thing is that it puts pressure back on Congress to allocate additional funding if they want to see more competitors. And that is said repeatedly throughout this document, both straight up, it says it, and also a little bit oblique in other areas. But that is pushing the pressure on those that hold the purse strings to put more money in NASA's pocket if they want to see more competitors in this program. But given the current budget,

this is the one they can fit. And it helps when that one that fits is one that has seen such massive investment from the company. You know, it's impossible to deny the amount of money that SpaceX has been raising and putting into Starship over the last couple of years. You can see it on a daily basis in Boca Chica. So NASA can go to Congress and say, look, you gave us a certain amount of budget. This other company is putting in more than that to their lander. So what we have effectively done is double the amount of money on this lander that you would give us. We didn't pick the company that said,

I'll put a little bit more into the budget. We picked the company that said, no, I'm going to actually invest more than you're giving me in this architecture. In a lot of ways, it feels like they're calling the bluff of Congress. Like, oh, you didn't think that we could fit a lander in that budget, but we actually have an option that can do that. Now, on the Congress side of things, you know, a lot of people, it's almost become a meme at this point that Congress won't like this decision. It's kind of a meme that I see going around. I don't necessarily know that that's true. You know, and a lot of this is the last show that I did about Bill Nelson is like, I don't know what's true about Bill Nelson when he isn't in Congress. We're in a new Congress right now. There's new members, there's new chairs of committees and subcommittees, there's new allegiances. There's a lot of changes

on the congressional side right now. And also the other thing is if Congress doesn't like this, what's the worst that could happen? The worst that could happen is that Congress doesn't fund a lander. Guess where we were at five minutes ago? Congress didn't fund a lander. You know, they sent $850 million and the program that we thought would happen, that was never going to be enough for it. So the worst that can happen is we roll the clock back a year and we don't have a lander budgeted for in the NASA budget. But on the whole meme about, well, Congress not like this. like I said, it's a different Congress. It's a different makeup. It's a different SpaceX. They are not the same SpaceX that they were 10 years ago when they were perennially the underdog that Congress

didn't like when they would win. They're not the same SpaceX. They are the establishment now. They are the premier space company right now, maybe ever. They've got a couple of achievements to be inarguably the greatest space company that has existed on this earth. Right now, it's arguable. They have redefined and currently own the commercial launch market. They have won just about every NASA science mission that has been up for bid in the last two years. They have a huge role in the National Security Space Launch Program from the US Space Force. They're providing cargo and crew to the ISS regularly. They're the only US provider of crew to space, to orbit, I should say, right now. They're the largest satellite operator by a factor of six or seven.

They are a huge company. They do a lot, and they do it well. And then you look at the lobbying budget. There's maybe a thought out there that SpaceX doesn't lobby. That is not true. If you go look at the lobbying budgets, you know, the big aerospace companies are up north of $10 million. SpaceX is in the $2 to $3 million a year range. That's not nothing. And they're also heavily invested in California and Texas and Florida and Washington State. They are a different SpaceX today. They are at the top of their game. They're the premier company. They're winning everything. Politicians like their parochial interests. So if they have a company in their backyard, they're going to like that company. But what politicians like

more than anything is attaching themselves to a winner. If there's a winner out there and you're a politician, what you want is your face next to that winner whenever they're winning anything. So at a certain point, this kind of thing is unstoppable. This will gain momentum. This will gain support. There's a lot of people in Congress and on these committees that are from states that have no tie to space. But you know what everyone in the social media sphere really loves right now? Cool SpaceX videos.

Do you know what people in school learning about science really like? Really cool space achievements. Do you know who has a lot of them? SpaceX. This kind of stuff does matter. It's not always the people from Alabama on the committees. There's not that many representatives and senators from Alabama. Now, the biggest pushback came from the chairwoman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Eddie Bernice Johnson. She has been a regular over the past several years in the space policy world. When you watch House committees, you're going to see her. She represents a lot of the area of Dallas, so she's in Texas. Different part of Texas than SpaceX is in, but she's in Texas. But this is what she said about this award.

I am disappointed that the acting NASA leadership decided to make such a consequential award prior to the arrival of a new permanent NASA administrator and deputy administrator. The decision to make the award today also comes despite the obvious need for a re-baselining of NASA's Lunar Exploration Program, which has no realistic chance of returning U.S. astronauts to the moon by 2024. While work continues on the upcoming Artemis I mission, it will be critically important for the new NASA leadership team to carry out its own review of all elements of NASA's Moon-Mars Initiative to ensure that this major national undertaking is put on a sound footing. Now, number one, that talks about the incoming NASA administrator. Let's see what happens this

week with this Bill Nelson hearing. He's going to be in front of a Senate committee. They're going to ask questions about this. I'm very curious to see what his response will be. If he gives a response right out in the open, or if he says, you know, that's something I got to look at when I get in there. We're going to do this whole review team. It's going to be great. I kind of think it's going to be something like that, but he could come out and say, you know, this is a great decision, or this is a terrible decision. We'll get an inkling on where he's at on that. But for all you SpaceXers out there, I know there's a lot of you that listen to the show. Just hear me right now. What I want you to do, I'm going to have a link in the show notes to where you can get to Eddie Bernice Johnson's statement. When you get into work, after you hear this, I want you to go to that website. I want you to print out this statement. And I want you

to highlight the portion that says, which has no realistic chance of returning US astronauts to the moon by 2024. I want you to print that out, circle that line. I want you to put it on every wall in whatever facility that you're in. I would make wallpaper out of it and put it everywhere. Plaster the walls with that statement that says you can't do it because you just bid a lander that has with sufficient funding curves, a full funding available for it, and she's saying you can't do it. 2024 is tight. Probably won't happen. But this is a statement that needs to be on every wall of every SpaceX facility, and I'm committed to it. It is a personal project of mine, even though I have never been to a SpaceX facility. Print this out, tape it on the wall somewhere, send me a photo when you put it up. There have been no statements yet as of recording this from the Senate

counterparts. It's going to be interesting to see how this all plays out. I would not be shocked to see Congress not like this decision. I am also not going to be shocked to see them kind of go, whatever, like SLS still funded. There's still plenty of funding going to the things we like. SLS and Orion are still flying part of this mission. We'll get them next time. Like, I don't know exactly what the result of Congress won't like this is. I'm waiting to see what that is. But I guess we can circle back once this starts to make its way into different hearings. We don't exactly know what the path forward is going to be for future funding. The NASA budget, or the top line NASA budget, I should say, was released from the Biden White House a couple of days or weeks ago. No specific line item details yet. There was an increase overall of about 6%, up to just $24.7 billion. This is just their budget request. This is basically thrown

out tomorrow once it gets to Congress and they rewrite it entirely. There was a $325 million increase for Artemis in there. Again, no real line item details here to see what was raised and what was cut. But there has been some general support of Artemis and NASA generally from the White House. So once we get the full budget document, and we'll start to see that, you know, later in the year, and then make its way through Congress in the fall, we'll get a sense for exactly what's going to happen. But for right now, $850 million is in the NASA budget for this year, and it's heading SpaceX's way. So the one other part of this is that NASA said as early as next week, meaning this week when they said it, that they're

going to kick off some sort of new program for future landings on the moon. So this first contract is just for that uncrewed demo and that first human landing on the surface of the moon, right now scheduled for 2024, probably slipping to 2026 or something. Beyond that, they say they want to do a full and open competition for future landers, and they hope that the landers that didn't win this part would continue on development to maybe throw their hat in the ring on that one. Or other companies out there that might not have competed a lander in this round or might have missed out could do that as well. Sort of sounds like they're going to model it, I don't know, maybe after commercial lunar payload services program, which is the smaller cargo landers,

but more towards human landing systems. I want to see how that's architected. But that was said to kind of indicate that, you know, they did pick SpaceX here, but SpaceX is not the end all be all when it comes to landing on the moon. They would like other competitors. They would like Congress to give them the money to do that. So I want to see what form that takes, but that's something that we should look out for in the next couple of weeks to get some indications of how that's going to be structured. Blue Origin, I would hope, keeps themselves in the running for that. They've made it this far with Blue Moon. And I think the architecture, though, per this document needs to be refined a little bit. There's, I don't know what they're going to do. You know, this is probably a thing that I should

do a whole nother show on. But Blue Origin, I think needs to do some soul searching here. They have had a really rough year when it comes to their different projects. You know, New Shepard flew last week, and it looks like they've got, you know, people going up on the next one or something like that. But New Glenn is super behind. BE-4 is super behind. They missed out on the U.S. Space Force contracts. They missed out on the Blue Moon winning this Artemis human landing system. Just this morning, as I record this on Monday night,

landing system. Just this morning, as I record this on Monday night, it was announced that Amazon bought nine Atlas V launches from United Launch Alliance, which is a good indication that New Glan is way behind schedule. It has been a rough time for Blue Origin, and I don't know what's going on internally, but I would like to hear what the response is to this series of events this year, and if it's going to change anything internally at Blue Origin. My kind of top line gut level instinct is that they have been a little bit late to attach to some trends in the industry and to jump on projects that were in motion and say, oh yeah, we could do that thing in motion and say, oh, yeah, we could do that thing. You know, it started with, oh, we could do the commercial crew program. Now,

OK, we missed out on that one. Let's make the launch vehicle. All right, we're going to get in. We're going to do launch vehicle, big launch vehicle. We're going to win the SpaceX or the Space Force Award. And shit, we didn't win the Space Force Awards. We're going to do this human landing system. This is what we got. We got to unlock. We got this whole national team. We've got a ton of money. Nope. Missed out on that one. I think what they're going to do this human landing system this is what we got we got to unlock we got this whole national team we've got a ton of money nope missed out on that one i think what they're going to land on next is going really heavily into the commercial leo stations these commercial space stations in low earth orbit i think they could take that and run with it i think they could own it because they have a lot of funding and the one huge competitor there would be axiom space who who is, they have the

lock on the ISS port right now, they're going to be building out some modules to add to the ISS, so that's a real big impediment to anyone making way into that space, but Axiom needs a ton of money. You know, they raised 100 million dollars, something like that, they're going to need a lot of funding to build out these space station modules, and I'm not exactly sure where they're going to get it. Now, the Blue Origin model has not been working out to win these big programs. The Blue Origin model is also not one for acquisitions, but if the model has not been working out, and there's an acquisition available that needs a lot of cash and already has access to an ISS port, could you put these things together in an interesting way and come out the other end with a successful program? From what I've heard

on both ends of that, that doesn't seem entirely likely to me, but I'm just saying as a company out there that might need to do some soul searching, open your mind to ideas that seem like they wouldn't necessarily work right off the bat, but, you know, there is a market there that currently has one competitor who needs a lot of cash, has access to an ISS port, and a competitor there that, right now, seems to be striking out across the board, and I'm concerned about it. So anyway, that probably deserves an entire show of its own right. I think I'm tapped out of my list here on thoughts on the Artemis Lander, but this is just kind of crazy news. I'm sure we'll be talking about it a lot.

I've got some people in mind to bring on to talk about this more. There's going to be a lot of fallout over the next week or two as we see some of the congressional statements. I'm sure we'll hear a lot out of the Nelson session that I keep bringing up. So I am sure I'll be back with you. I've got a backlog of shows to get through since I took that week off. So expect to be hearing from me a lot in the next couple of weeks. And until next time, thanks for listening. If you've got any questions or thoughts, hit me up on Twitter at WeHaveMiko or an email, anthonyatmainenginecutoff.com.

And send me those photos from the SpaceX facilities with Eddie Bernice Johnson's statement taped somewhere on the walls. And until then, thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon.