Main Engine Cut Off - T+187: Eric Berger on Artemis, Starship, Amazon’s Atlas V Rides, and the State of Blue Origin

Episode Date: April 23, 2021

Eric Berger of Ars Technica returns to the show to talk about NASA selecting SpaceX’s Starship for its Artemis landings, Bill Nelson’s nomination hearing, Amazon buying 9 Atlas V launches for Kuiper, and the state of Blue Origin.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, Aegis Trade Law, and seven anonymous—and 547 other supporters.TopicsEric BergerEric Berger | Ars TechnicaLiftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceXNASA’s bold bet on Starship for the Moon may change spaceflight forever | Ars TechnicaBill Nelson backs NASA decision on lunar lander in confirmation hearing | Ars TechnicaABL Space has never launched a rocket, but it just landed a huge contract | Ars TechnicaAmazon’s first Internet satellites will not launch on Blue Origin rockets | Ars TechnicaBlue Origin’s massive New Glenn rocket is delayed for years. What went wrong? | Ars TechnicaAxiom secures $130M in additional funding — Axiom SpaceThe 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 Managing Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo as always and I've got our good friend Eric Berger of Ars Technica back with us today to talk about Artemis and Starship winning the Lander contract and Amazon flying on nine Atlas Vs. And then we get into a little bit of the state of Blue Origin. It's a really great conversation. I'm excited for you to hear it. But before we do that, I want to say thank you to everyone out there. There are 587 of you supporting the show every single month.

That is an amazing number. So thankful for your support. And 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 Everdash Anon, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, The Astrogators at SEE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support for making this show possible. If you want to join that crew, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support and join up there. If you are at

the $3 a month or more level, you get an episode of MECO Headlines in your feed every single week. It's an entire other podcast where I keep you up to date on all the space news. It's a really great way to stay up to date, to help support the show and keep things like this happening. So without further ado, let's get into the conversation with Eric. Eric, welcome back to the show for the, I don't know, fourth time, third time? Yeah, something like that. It's been a while. Thanks very much. I realized that we were planning on doing a show the week my son was born. And I was like, oh, we'll talk next week.

And then he was born like the next night. And I was like, oh, sorry, Eric. We are not going to talk. Yeah, life has a way of establishing your priorities, especially when it comes to kids. So I completely understand. Well, we definitely have a long list of things to get into. We were talking earlier this week and I was like, oh, wow, we've got stuff to unpack together.

I figured we'd start on Artemis and Starship and HLS stuff generally. I went at length on the show this week, so I'm going to let you start, because I don't really know where you'd like to dig in on this decision first. I think it's just the most shocking thing to me

is that NASA clearly embraced Starship with all of its risks. And let's be clear, I mean, their design was certainly the most technically demanding. I mean, you know, orbital refueling is a huge one. And it just, it seems to me like NASA has decided, or at least some officials at NASA have decided that this is the way, right? In the Mandalorian speak.

You know, I remember talking to Bridenstine about this stuff because we would have conversations, you know, off the record about how the fact that, look, I mean, if Starship works, SLS is not long for this world. And he would freely admit that, you know, one day probably SpaceX is going to be launching astronauts to the moon and back. And this clearly is a step in that direction. And it's surprising to me because, okay, on one hand,

NASA did take really the only option they had with the funding available. They really only had money for one project. And there was clearly one bid that was much lower than the other bids, although the numbers aren't in the NASA documents. But even so, going to Congress and saying, yeah, we're going to give SpaceX all of the Lunar Lander money and bet the farm on them. lander money and bet the farm on them no by the way this also just happens to fund an architecture that directly competes with your big rocket and spacecraft that you spent you know 30 billion dollars over the last decade developing um sorry i mean it's it's truly it's truly a bold play by nasa i was super impressed the i want to pick apart the first thing you said that starship is the complex architecture uh none of these lander options were like not complex they

were all the dynetics one as much fan fiction as it was apparently they couldn't fit it in the mass margins that had refueling with drop tanks and all this stuff the blue origin team was going to put three parts together in the first time that they've ever met is in space launching on who knows what rockets the so the starship you know as far as what happens in space is just as complex as those it's the fact that it relies on um returning to earth several tankers, several tankers, launching several tankers in quick succession, having enough methane and liquid oxygen to do that. Like, that's a thing that they have to figure out is how to get enough fuel to do this.

So that side of the thing is definitely more complex. But the in-space operations part is kind of equal among them. And I guess by complex, I really mean that, you know, Starship, first of all, do you know how tall the lunar module was? I think I read your article this morning,

so it was seven meters, and I would not have remembered that off the top of my head. I would have said, well, I've stood next to it at air and space, and it was pretty tall, but... Seven meters. Starship is 50 meters. And so that's not quite an order of magnitude but it's

much pretty much it pretty much is and and so the scope of what spacex is trying to do i think really you know in pushing for that vehicle to be fully reusable they are absolutely pushing all the margins on all the systems to squeeze that vehicle and make it fully reusable. And so from that standpoint, it is just utterly non-conventional to try to make a fully reusable – it's a fully reusable orbital launch system, and it's also a moon lander. So I just think from that standpoint, it's biting off a lot. And the fact that NASA was willing to take on that risk. And you're right. I do agree with you.

I was going to write an article and I just ran out of time before the awards were announced with the basic conclusion that NASA had no easy choice here because the national team's lander was integrating three parts. And Blue Origin had no experience whatsoever leading a big team like that. And there were some real management issues, I think, with that project. And then Dynetics, again, had no experience playing in this domain of human spaceflight. And their lander was pretty complex. And it was ambitious. It was interesting.

And SpaceX obviously was trying to land a 50-meter tall spacecraft on the surface of the moon and had some big crane to put astronauts on the surface. So they did not have a straightforward choice. And it's interesting because, you know, a year ago, I would have said that the national team had a pretty straightforward option. They did not seem to execute particularly well during the, during the last year. Yeah. I mean, that's all we were talking about it. I see when they announced it was like, well, they just, they just, you know, checkmate to everyone else. They've done like the Voltron

of new and old space and lots of money to throw behind it. So I think they were definitely surprised. I talked to someone who told me that they had this big Zoom call with all of the employees who were working on the HLS program at Lockheed Mart this past week. And basically, they were gobsmacked and just sort of shocked that they hadn't won this award. But I had a pretty good source telling me for a while now that he felt that NASA was pretty uncomfortable with Blue Origin leading the team. The other partners aside from Blue Origin, Lockheed Northrup and Draper kind of felt somewhat marginalized

by Blue Origin. And it just seemed like there were going to be issues during that development problem. And that at some point, this person thought that Lockheed would have been sort of stepped up and become the program leader for that. It makes sense. But also you read the source selection document and a lot of the technical technical issues that were called out um were things that were with the ascent stage it was either ascent engines which more or less is their problem but then communications was the one that i was like what that so much of the ascent portion of that vehicle as well this is orion but in an ascent version and then to have five out of six communication links called out as like a weakness a significant weakness and things that might not actually work in reality is pretty it's

almost like the sls this is heritage but it's all new and it's what we've done before but we have to test it all again and that was the storyline with orion but that didn't pan out that way that was kind of one of the weird things too because what's the most difficult part kind of one of the weird things too because what's the most difficult part of the lunar lander it's not really the descent stage it's the ascent stage and blue origin was doing the descent stage and and lockheed was doing the ascent stage and but they weren't you know the they weren't integrating the whole thing um so again you know just just kind of in retrospect, a weird thing when, you know, a year ago, it looked like the odds-on, bang-on favorite. Now, you said NASA took their only option in terms of funding. That is assuming that they didn't do the NASA thing, which they always do, which is, all right, we didn't get all the money.

We're going to punt a couple of years, do some design contracts. That's a thing that is crazy to me because that's the most NASA decision ever is. We'll stretch it out. We'll give everyone another year. We'll split the $850 million three ways and then see who comes out on the other side. So that's a great point.

Do you have a sense of who drove that? Like, nope, we're going all in on this thing. I take your point very well on that. Do I have a sense of who ultimately drove the decision? I think I would give a lot of the credit to Kathy Leaders, who has had a front row seat for the evolution of commercial space over the last decade. She's dealt with a lot of these companies in the commercial crew program. And she's seen who has executed and who has not. But you're right. The easiest thing would have been, especially with an acting administrator,

you know, four months into the – three months into the presidency of Joe Biden, would have been, okay, 2024 isn't possible. We're going to take some more time to try to refine our plans and get buy-in from Congress and sort of get everyone on board. Instead, they sort of rushed ahead. And I don't entirely know what drove that decision. I think it's possible they wanted to get it done before the nomination hearing of Bill Nelson. But I don't know that for a fact. hearing of Bill Nelson. But I don't know that for a fact. The leader's aspect is like, you know, you can't avoid that, right? Her name's on the paperwork.

Her name's been on the paperwork for SpaceX's crew program for the last couple of years. It's on this paperwork. It's interesting to think if Gers had not been forced out a year or two, however many years ago was that? Two, three years ago? I was in Paris. It was July almost two years ago. Interesting to think about what the future would have unfolded like if he had still been around, but then he's on the other side of the table now.

He's over at SpaceX. I think Gerst was more pro-SpaceX than he gets credit for. I didn't mean that as an anti-thing, but he seems much less bold than this decision. Would he have been this bold? I don't know. I don't know.

It was, I think it comes to from a recognition, I think, from the incoming administration and people who are sort of guiding the thinking of the politicos at the White House and at NASA that sort of say, look, what we've done over the last decade in terms of SLS and Orion has not been working. And while we're saddled with those programs, we really need to try something new. And this was clearly a push to try something new. Because you're right, you could have been stuck in paralysis by analysis for another year, year and a half waiting for the next budget. And we all would have been like, okay, well, you know, they did what they had to do. But instead, they've made this really bold decision. And it's going to make space policy fascinating for the next while. But I will tell you, I had a thought this morning as I was watching the press conference with Elon Musk and Steve Jurczyk. And as Musk was talking about 2024 being doable, it's interesting to me that on that goal

now, he and Congress and NASA administration are all aligned. Like on how many things have Elon Musk and the US Congress when it comes to human spaceflight been aligned in the last decade? The answer is about zero. So the idea that now, you know, the juxtaposition of this congressional hearing for Nelson on Wednesday, where you had senators left and right saying, well, we're going to hold you to 2024, because that's an important date. And then three days later, you've got Elon saying, yeah, I think we can do 2024. Sure. I mean, let's do it faster. So I think that's another sort of spicy dimension in this space politics,

because you've got Congress saying they want to get there by 2024, NASA administration clearly making the decision that the only chance we'd have at 2024 is if we want this company that moves as fast as possible. And Elon Musk saying, yeah, let's do it. So pretty interesting, I think. Hey man, I said six months ago this company that moves as fast as possible. And Elon Musk saying, yeah, let's do it. So pretty interesting, I think. Hey man, I said six months ago that everyone was given 2024

flack for being politically motivated deadline. And I said, yep, sure is. But now guess what? It could be a politically motivated deadline for someone else. The year's the same year, this election's the same election. Doesn't matter who gets to take credit for what. If 2024 is the date and you think it's important for an election now it's important for election again and like that that whole storyline didn't seem to make sense that oh 2024 get thrown out because that was a trump thing and we're not trump so we're going to move the date for it's like well not not if you can get a landing under your under your name steve jurczyk basically did throw it out like that's true he did well it's kind of

soft back in february i had an interview with him and like i said i said come on steve you're not going to do 20 you can't do 2024 and he's like well yeah you know we're reevaluating we didn't get the funding we needed and then like about 30 minutes after the interview i got sort of a frantic email from the press secretary saying we'd like to give you a better quote. And the quote was basically like, you know, Gateway sucks, landing rules. not really possible. But now they're back to, you know, in response to Congress saying, well, we're going to give it a shot. And again, that's sort of like that alignment of Congress and NASA administration and SpaceX might be enough to sort of not overthrow the award that NASA just gave SpaceX. I mean, it might sort of, I don't know what's going to happen in Congress with this HLS stuff because clearly they're pissed off. You've got the Senator from Washington, she was representing blue. Cantwell.

Yeah, Cantwell was representing blue origin interests. You've got the House representative from Texas, Eddie Bernice Johnson, who is actively working against SpaceX for some reason. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that as a native Texan yourself. What is going on there? Well, if you look at her political donations, for a long time, she's gotten money from Lockheed. She's from the Dallas-Fort Worth area. They've got a big facility there. Yeah, that's where they make the F-35s, right?

Yeah. I think she's clearly got some Lockheed support and they're no fans of SpaceX. And now Lockheed, of course, has not just Orion, but an interest in the engines in SLS. So, yeah. The Congress dimension, I'm very unsure about because it is a new Congress. There are different people in charge of different committees. But also, I don't know, the failure scenario, if Congress hates this decision, is that they don't fund the lander. And that's where we were 10 minutes before this award. They didn't fund the lander. So what is the failure scenario now that NASA has went all in with Starship?

Well, I was thinking about that. I mean, let's be honest, $2.9 billion over four years is like, what, $750 million a year? Yeah, you probably got to bump it up a little for NASA overhead. I mean, if you're given, yeah, if you're given, okay, SpaceX can do the lander for that money. This is not the Lockheed lander, which is $20 billion, right? SpaceX has already put in, I don't know, I would guess what? What do you think they've self-invested in Starship? $5 billion? Something like that? I don't know if it's that high, but it's got to be on it. It's a lot. The hiring that they've done in South Texas is pretty remarkable. Money is no longer an option for SpaceX, which is really interesting to see them move at that velocity. But anyway, they don't need $20 billion for human landing system. They just put it down. They said, we need three. And now they need money for spacesuits. But Congress could provide zero funding, I guess, for a human landing system. But I don't think the Democrats are going to do that to the Biden administration. Are they? I don't think so.

And my recommendation to SpaceX would be get an Amtrak logo on Starship as soon as you can. And then just dial it up. Amtrak Joe, go into the moon, baby. We're building Amtrak to the moon. That's my proposal. Not bad. I mean, it is building the railroads to space. So I like that. So, you know, it's an interesting play because like we said, NASA all of a sudden does not need that much more money because SpaceX is going to be investing in Starship. And so their move was interesting. They're going to placate Congress with this. And Nelson talked about this too, but they're going to have this follow-on competition for recurring missions. And my guess is that they'll sort of throw some money into that pot for these other ideas.

The problem is if you give Blue Origin, Lockheed, or Dynetics 300 million or 500 million a year to continue studying, they're not going to be doing much of anything. I mean, I know for a fact the employees at Lockheed already had the expectation that if they were working on HLS, they're not anymore, right? And I know someone else who was given a stop work order who is doing work on Dynetics Lander. So the fanciful notion that these companies, Jeff Bezos was going to self-fund his lander? No way. I don't even think they self-funded the base period 10-month grant. Yeah, the contribution part is not good luck.

I heard their contribution was zero during that. I can't substantiate that. I don't want to get sued. But I mean, my understanding is that their self-contribution levels for that was low. Dynetics was the same thing. I was talking to the program manager for Dynetics and I said, you know, if you don't get a grant for the second phase, would you continue funding, you know, the lander? And he was sort of hemmed and hawed. It's going, I mean, so Starship is going to continue roaring ahead. And this NASA funding will only sort of embolden that effort, I think. And imagine like if SpaceX needs to fundraise now, you've got NASA backing the lander.

I mean, come on. I mean, money is not a problem for them at all. And so, you know, you get to this recurring missions competition. I'm not sure what they're calling it and specifically at NASA. But if they throw, they're going to, but if they throw a few hundred million at the other guys, it's, they're just not going to be going anywhere. You know, it's just, so, I mean, how, how do those companies ultimately win operational missions to the lunar surface? Yeah. It's not clear to me. Like it's, it's glorified clips at that point, right. With the payload as humans, instead of small science. I don't know. know clips is actually flying

missions i don't see these guys i mean nasa at some point would have to step up and provide what 10 billion dollars at least to both the other bids to make to make landers honestly it could be a thing that so the the way i read the source election document is like what do they say about each competitor that they leave out of the other ones? Because there's some statements that they call out as specific notes. SpaceX was called out specifically as providing more than half the funding for Starship. Blue Origin's contribution was not even mentioned. And that's the part that I'm like, man, that's not a lot of money that they're putting into this lander on their own dime.

So saying we'll do this other competition might be like, we'll give you a couple hundred million, but if you're not putting in any of your own, then sorry, we can't do that. You know? And on the other hand, they just instantly doubled their budget with SpaceX that they could get from

Congress. Cause whatever Congress wants to give us, SpaceX is going to put that in as well. So that, that matters a lot. And if they're trying to force the hand of Congress to give them more money for the lander, that's cool. If they're trying to force the hand of these other competitors to say, you weren't putting enough in and the next round you're going to need to, because that's the

way that we're architecting this agreement. I wonder how much of a factor that is. And I wonder if the other competitors play ball with this recurring missions round, or if they just say, protest and say, look, we're taking our ball and going home until Congress fixes this. Which is what SpaceX did with the Space Force, right? Well, we didn't get a dev contract. We'll just keep flying our vehicles, and then we'll charge you triple the amount in our first win of the next round so that we can build our vertical integration for Falcon Heavy, and we can build our big payload fairing. our vertical integration for Falcon Heavy and we can build our big payload fairing. It's going to be fascinating to see what happens because the staffers on Congress are not stupid.

They realized that this is one step toward an all SpaceX moon program, which is not good for anyone but SpaceX and arguably NASA and fans and people who just want to see them, let's go back to the moon. I mean, let's be honest, you know, betting on SpaceX is probably the smart bet. But where is the political support for Artemis at that point? You lose all of your industry in the United States. You lose your international partners who are already sort of, you know, having to talk nice about SpaceX because Thomas Pesquet is launching on there and Japanese astronauts are launching on Falcon 9. But I mean, they're not particularly happy about that, supporting a competitor. So, you know, it just, politically, it's very,

it's going to be very interesting to see how NASA finesses this. And that's why, honestly, it was really nice to see Bill Nelson when he was able to put his head up because he was getting all these softballs thrown at him. It was really a murderer's row of questions at the Senate Commerce Committee hearing. But seriously, he was pressed a little bit on this single selection of SpaceX for the lander. And his response was basically to uphold Kathy Leder's decision. He said, we selected one for now, but he sort of went back to this party line of we're going to open up the competition down the line.

But realistically, without government funding and a lot of it, there is no competition. I did like how he would use this moment to do some revisionism and say, well, hey, my name were on the bills that funded Commercial Crew and severely underfunded them. I will leave that part out. But it's great what we did 10 years ago and now look at us. but you know, it's great what we did 10 years ago. And now look at us. It was, it was on one hand, it was difficult to watch the revisionist history from K Bailey Hutchinson, who introduced him and Bill Nelson.

They were literally the architects of the space launch system. Yeah. I called them too. And Shelby, the Holy triumvirate of SLS. But, but even those two did it before Shelby got involved. They were the,

they were the true progenitors of that deal. So, yeah, to sit there and take... But hey, if he wants to take credit for commercial space and if that means he's going to support a fast-track SpaceX lander trying to do 2024, whatever.

That's the game. You're a politician. That's the game. Go for it. Do you want to talk about this Atlas V thing? Yes, let's do it. Okay for it. Do you want to talk about this Atlas 5 thing? Yes, let's do it. Can I tell you a quick anecdote? Please. So I do this headlines show every week for people that are paying on Patreon. And I recorded an episode Sunday night in which I talked about the Lockheed Martin and

ABL space deal where they block bought all these ABL launches. And in the headline show i had a quote that i said i don't think the best salesperson in the world could sell an atlas 5 commercially today and then like 10 hours later i talked to you and then i saw the news come out and i was like well there goes that statement so amazon bought nine at 5s, which is crazy for a variety of reasons that I would like to unpack. Yes, let's do it. So first of all, why didn't they go on New Glenn? I think you and I both agree that New Glenn is just not going to be ready.

And certainly not at an operational cadence if so the bottom line here is amazon has to get about 1500 satellites into low earth orbit by july of 2026 to meet its obligations to the fcc we don't know how big they are or how many they're going to be able to fit on atlas well let's just assume it's 60 it's like starlink because one web is 36 um so i mean 60 is probably a reason would you agree a reasonably good i would i would just be like conservative and say like 40 something just because 60 is pretty intense the flat pack thing seems like something that's hard to match but you know i mean so so that's to get 1500 of those in up there is what is like 30 launches 25 to 20 to 40 launches. I mean, it's a lot of launches.

And so New Glenn is not going to approach that kind of cadence. I mean, I think they'll be lucky to launch in 2023 and maybe they'll land one in 2024. I don't know. I mean, it's really hard what they're trying to do. I applaud their ambitions, but it's difficult. Well, and the high end of New Glenn, as stated so far, is like 12 launches a year. Yeah.

And how long is it going to take to get to that? Because the SpaceX votes Falcon 9 first in 2010, and they finally reached sort of an operational tempo in 2016, right? Yeah. And they actually had experience with orbital rockets before the Falcon 9. So why not Vulcan? And I think the answer to that for me is that, again, Vulcan is not going to have a super high operational cadence.

And they're already sold the bulk of their availability to the military in that time frame. And for a lot more than Amazon would pay. Just talking the hard facts, right? You could sell a launch in the national security launch program for a lot more than, you know, commercial launch. Yes. So, so what does that leave in the domestic market that leaves the Falcon nine?

Ha ha ha. And, and, uh, the Atlas five. And I think those are good enough reasons, but someone else told me another reason was that this probably was Bezos sort of rubbing the back, so to speak, of to say it, but the first Vulcan launch is not going to happen this year, despite what Tori Bruno is saying on Twitter. It's going to slip into 2022. And if I'm wrong about that, I'll come on and I'll eat a hat for you. Because I'm not sure the rocket will be ready and I'm convinced the astrobotic payload is not going to be ready. Oh, I'm convinced of that part as well. One or both of those is going to miss.

But anyway, I mean, one of the limiting factors, certainly for Vulcan, the limiting factor has been the BE-4 engine. We'll see if they get their flight engines this summer or not. But I think that's sort of like also like we're buying Atlas Vs to sort of pay back that. 5s to sort of pay back that. And finally, ULA has, as I think you rightly said, Anthony, ULA has a bunch of Atlas 5s, commercial Atlas 5s left to sell and who's going to buy them aside from Boeing for the Starliner spacecraft?

I don't know. Yeah. And so you told me they had 16 launches left of engines. And then I... I think 16 to 20 commercial launches. No, your 16 was right, because then I sourced the math. And I tweeted the math somewhere. But it worked out that there are 16 before this announcement, as of yet, unaccounted for Atlas Vs to be flown,

or Atlas Vs worth of engines to be flown. They had 15 scheduled. They had 16 engines beyond that in their stockpile so six of those are starliner seven oh seven because you've got oft2 i think the i think my math included three starliner missions already accounted for in that 15 yet to fly okay and then you've got so they've got like yes six or seven depending on what they used for testing. So they have a bunch left. And yeah, if they're counting on Starliner eventually switching to Vulcan, if and when it hits its sixth flight. Are they going to switch to Vulcan?

I don't know what it's going to do. Is it going to fly to space soon? I don't know. It's going to be a while. It's going to be a while. Tori Bruno, the only data point we have on that is Bruno said we would human rate Vulcan at the request of our customer, which said to me the customer hadn't requested it yet. Well, I think they've got some family issues to sort out is what I am hearing. They have some family issues to sort out.

It's a good way to put it. The aspect here of Blue Origin having a really shitty week, I would like to unpack for a couple of minutes we have left. It's been a weird couple years, man, for Blue Origin, because if you look back to the early Commercial Crew days, they were involved in some of the early Commercial Crew dev rounds. And then through today, where they've had swing and a miss on the human landing system with NASA, the Space Force contract with New Glenn, and you could probably throw a couple other programs in there as well. It feels like they always latch on to a big initiative late, miss on the landing, and then go, okay, we'll try a different thing. Now we're going to go all in on the lander system because we missed on the New Glenn thing, or we missed on actually being expeditious with our flights to space. It feels

like they keep moving the ball a little bit because they keep missing on some of these programs. The only theory I have left is that they could go all in on commercial stations. And the one oddball theory that I don't think is accurate, but I would lend credence to because whatever Blue Origin is doing today is not working. so maybe they need to think of a new model there's a company named axiom space who has access to an iss port and needs a shit ton of cash and they blue origin is interested in commercial stations it's got a it just added added a certain rob myerson to its board oh it certainly did i didn't even think about that although i don't know what that how he left blue origin he left on pretty good terms okay i didn't know that um i was just going to say well first of all what i would say is the last thing

die in my mind the last thing blue origin needs right now is yet another big program because first you've got to start executing on your existing programs. You've got to get the BE-4 engine production up and running. You've got to get humans on New Shepard and sell that program. And that's huge. I mean, that's a big, big ask. You've got to get New Glenn up and flying, which is years away and it's extremely difficult. And if they just have some mock-up tanks or whatever they're showing us in those videos, they are a long way away from flight. And then you've got to figure out what you're doing with the human landing system and the Blue Moon lander and the BE-7 engine.

So to look at kind of their level of execution over the last five years, to add another program to that and expect them to sort of jump in and be wizards, I don't know, maybe that's where acquiring Axiom would make some sense. That would be a lot of money and I don't know. It would be interesting to see. They don't seem very internally committed to any particular goal. I would say a couple of things about that. First of all, let's go back to 2015, December 2015. The future sure seems bright for Blue Origin because they just put up New Shepard, landed it, SpaceX flies and Bezos says, welcome to the club. At that time, it looked like we were starting to see this incredible race between these two billionaires. Since then, let's talk about what has happened.

Okay. Blue Origin has launched New Shepard about a dozen more times. Okay. That's what they've actually done in space. SpaceX has launched about 95 rockets, I think, since then. They have reflown a rocket nine times. They've developed Falcon Heavy. They've gotten, they've launched, I mean, they've launched, what, 1,200 satellites? I think it's like 1,300 satellites in the Earth orbit. SpaceX has launched more cars into space than Blue Origin has launched satellites. They've done all this work on Starship. And just look at the contracts they've gotten.

They've got second round of cargo. They've gotten a Gateway launch contract. They've gotten Gateway supply. They've gotten a gateway launch contract they've gotten gateway supply they've gotten um uh hls every nasa science mission that has been bid for the last two or three years every nasa science oh oh yeah and by the way blue origin didn't get the the lss the the national security space launch contract phase two um They got shut out of that by, by so new origin,

blue origin effectively has done almost nothing in space compared to what SpaceX has done over the last five years. I mean, it is not meaning to throw shade on blue origin at all. It's just like, you cannot compare the two because there's no comparison. I, shade on Blue Origin at all. It's just like, you cannot compare the two because there's no comparison. I know that Bezos is very jealous of the contracts that SpaceX has gotten, but SpaceX has earned those contracts through execution. One of the problems that they've had is that they underwent a pretty radical transition when, you know, in the early 2010s, when Bezos decided he was ready to get serious about space and not sort of have this kind of

development shop, but actually, or sort of, you know, think tank, but really get going. And, you know, that ultimately led to Meyerson leaving the company and Bob Smith came in, I think, in 2017. But they've really lost their way. They've lost kind of the founder's mentality that Bezos gave them, I think. And they're just really trying to do all these things and they don't seem to be doing anything really well. Although I'm hopeful that New Shepard is going to get flying pretty on a pretty good cadence i mean it looks like they're they're close on that but but man i mean they they have had not just a bad week they've had a pretty bad five years to me they the issue feels similar to like the the nasa mission to

mars for 20 years where it was such a long-term goal with such ill-defined short-term goals that the progress was immeasurable. And if Blue Origin was more focused on some short-term goals, that they would be more effective. But instead, the only vision that we know from them is millions of people living, working in space, which is forever away.

And the path from here to there they they leave murky which lets them kind of flap in the drift a little bit well that's one of the things is too is disappointing it it seems to me based upon all evidence available that that jeff basis's plan for a lunar land it was to to provide the engine the be7 engine which seems like a great engine but you know if that's the entirety of your contribution that's not going to get you anywhere close to the moon um so you know i say what you will about spacex and their crazy plans to settle Mars. There's at least a transportation system that they're building that

accomplishes that, you know, blue, you know, new Glenn gets an uncrewed, you know, a blue moon lander to the moon, but,

but it doesn't get us close to orbital habitats. So it's, it's, I've been disappointed, certainly by Blue Origin. And I look at what they've done and I think, well, how the hell was Bezos so successful at Amazon? Because his other company over here is really struggling. Disappointed is the only word I can use as well. Because I saw that, you know, there's a lot of things that SpaceX does that are amazing achievements on their own. And the effects they have on the industry are great,

but they are not as great as they could be if there was a second competitor putting pressure on them. You know, cutting a launch cost in half is cool, but SpaceX isn't going to drop a zero until they need to. That's right. I mean, imagine if New Glenn was flying now but SpaceX isn't going to drop a zero until they need to. So that's right. You know, I mean, imagine, yeah.

Imagine if new Glenn was flying now, like it was supposed to be flying in 2020 and, and sort of, you started to see a price race, um, for these commercial satellites and for NASA launch contracts. And I mean, the beneficiary,

the big beneficiary of the last five years has not been SpaceX. It's been United Launch Alliance. Because all of a sudden, every year that Blue Origin fails to fly New Glenn or really deliver on its promises, another year that ULA sort of looks pretty good and remains viable in a country where you need two big launch systems. This was an excellent spot to end, I feel like. Can you tell everyone about your book? I don't think you've talked about your book on this podcast. country where you need two big launch systems. This was an excellent spot to end. I feel like, uh, can you tell everyone about your book? I don't think you've talked about your book on this podcast.

Yeah. So, um, uh, about six weeks ago, I, uh, William Morrow published a liftoff,

which is the book about, um, SpaceX's origins. And, uh, yeah. And it's, it's really good.

Like it's, it's, it's fun. And, uh, and it's really good. Like, it's fun. And I talked to everybody who was involved, Elon, but, you know, just as importantly, all the early vice presidents and the people who worked for them to really get a sort of a holistic picture of what they did, how they did it, and why it really mattered with the Falcon 1 rocket. It's really, really good. And everybody needs to read it. And there's a stack of books on Eric's shelf behind them. So maybe if you ask nice, I'll send you one.

Those are, those are props. Come on. Um, but it was, it was, it was just a real privilege to, to tell that story because I don't think most people in space realize how

close they came to failure and how gritty and to some extent slapdash their efforts were to make it to space. And it's a fascinating origin story. And it's not so much about Elon Musk. It's really about the company and the people who work there. Well, I hope when you recover from the burnout of writing that, you are getting working on the Falcon 9 version and you can work your way through the history.

Yeah, I mean, they're still making history. I do think that they reached a nice inflection point this week with the Crew-2 launch on a reused rocket. I think that's kind of a nice bookend of their second phase of maturity, which is really mastering reuse. Well, then we look forward to the book number two from Eric Berger. Thank you so much.

Twitter is at SciGuySpace and Ars Technica, or if you're a NASA press person, ARS Technica is the way that you say it. Perfect. Thank you, Anthony. Thanks again way that you say it. Perfect. Thank you, Anthony. Thanks again to Eric for coming on the show. I told you all it was a good conversation. I always love talking to Eric about this kind of stuff.

And this conversation was no exception to that rule. It's always a fun time to have him on. So I'm sure he'll be back in the future. If you liked him appearing on the show, head over to Twitter and hit him up at SciGuySpace. Let him know that you liked him coming on the show again. He's a Miko favorite for sure. So I'm sure there'll be a lot of you hitting him up there. But until next time, thank you all so much for the support. Once again, at MainEngineCutoff.com slash support. Any questions

or thoughts, email me, Anthony at MainEngineCutoff.com or hit me up on Twitter at WeHaveMiko. And until next time, I'll talk to you soon.