Main Engine Cut Off - T+210: Ukraine, Russia, and the Space Industry (with Debra Werner)

Episode Date: March 3, 2022

Debra Werner of SpaceNews joins me to talk about Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, the ways that it is affecting the space industry, how their last invasion had similar effects, and how the situ...ation solidifies several arguments that have been made over the past decade or more.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 40 executive producers—Simon, Lauren, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, 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, Fred, Hemant, Dawn Aerospace, Andrew, and seven anonymous—and 730 other supporters.TopicsDebra Werner, Author at SpaceNewsDebra Werner (@spacereportr) / TwitterPrevious invasion of Ukraine had serious repercussions for the space sector - SpaceNewsEOS Data Analytics issues urgent plea for imagery of Ukraine - SpaceNewsRussian military convoy north of Kyiv stretches for 40 miles -Maxar | ReutersSmall satellite constellations promise resilient communications and Earth observation - SpaceNewsStatement on the status of the eROSITA instrument aboard Spektr-RG (SRG) | Max Planck Institute for extraterrestrial PhysicsRussia says it will no longer sell rocket engines to the United States - The VergeOneWeb leaves Baikonur Cosmodrome after Roscosmos ultimatum - SpaceNewsUkraine engineer talks testing SpaceX’s new Starlink service - The VergeThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to anthony@mainenginecutoff.comFollow @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 JustusArtwork photo by NASA Wallops/Patrick Black

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo. I've got a guest with me today, Debra Werner of Space News. She's been on my list for a long time, so I'm glad that this is finally happening. I was struck by an article that she wrote on Space News just a couple of days ago that was talking about the previous invasion of Ukraine and the repercussions for the space industry at large, specifically around the RD-180 engine, commercial crew funding, and how interrelated all of that was at the time. I feel like some of that was lost to time, in my memory at least. And there's a lot of similar effects that are going to come out of this one.
Starting point is 00:00:45 The situation in Ukraine continues to deteriorate in the worst way possible. It is absolutely horrible what is going on there. And specifically, Dmitry Rogozin continues to be a terrible human being who single-handedly looks like he wants to unravel the entire space industry in Russia.
Starting point is 00:01:02 And there are so many areas of fallout there that I want to dissect with Debra Werner. If you did not listen to the last show that I put up on the feed, it was a rebroadcast of last week's Off Nominal episode that I did with Eric Berger and Michael Sheets. Really suggest going back and listen to that, not only because there's a lot of good talk about Virgin Galactic, but there's also talk, you know, that was on Thursday. So this was very fresh that the invasion happened, and we were already kind on Thursday. So this was very fresh that the invasion happened. And we were already kind of dissecting some of this fallout that might happen.
Starting point is 00:01:29 I was more pessimistic than the other two. And unfortunately, pessimism seems to be the right track here for this storyline. So I wanted to dissect some more of the fallout that has happened over the last week with Debra. I'll probably honestly do another show in the next couple of days because I have some thoughts that I'm not sure we'll get to in this topic list about what we may see in the future and some of the projects that NASA, ESA, and others are working on. And I have some thoughts that I'm not finished, you know, putting together there yet. So I'll probably do another short episode
Starting point is 00:01:57 somewhere down the line with this stuff as well. But there's just been a lot happening this week that I want to dissect. So without further ado, let's give Debra a call. All right, well, I am here give Debra a call. All right. Well, I am here with Debra Werner. Welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. You've picked a really chill week to join the show here. Yes, not much going on. So I reached out to you earlier this week because I was reading an article that you
Starting point is 00:02:18 had in Space News about the previous invasion of Ukraine and the fallout that came out of that back at the time in 2014. And it must have just been because that was so many years ago that I totally had unlinked a lot of the effects that we saw out of those sanctions from the things that actually happened at the time, which specifically were the RD-180 sale was then banned to the US. Kind of had some fits and starts through Congress over the next couple of years with people trying to take that language out. But, you know, we know where we're at now with that. And then the other was actually getting full funding of commercial crew.
Starting point is 00:02:58 And yeah, I totally unlinked those things. But now it's like pretty clear from this far away that that was, you know, 2014. That was the storyline right there. Yes, we had no other way to get astronauts to the space station except in Soyuz. And do you recall at the time when Rogozin, who was then the Deputy Prime Minister said, maybe the U S would like to use a trampoline to get people to the space station if we don't take them. Um, his bluster is perfect for getting Congress to, um, realize the straits we were in. Yeah. Especially after, you know, that, that was a time where people were still fighting to prove the utility of commercial crew. Cargo was underway. We had a couple of good flights there. So you kind of had a sense that there was support building for it. But crew was still drastically underfunded. I think by the time, you know, by 2017 or 2018, the program was about a billion dollars short of the requests that were made compared to what was actually funded. So it's interesting to consider the alternative history
Starting point is 00:04:12 here where that didn't kickstart funding into commercial crew, where we would be today if that didn't happen. Because 2014, we didn't fly until 2020. So there's a pretty big gap in that delay there. And there was tremendous skepticism that we would ever trust commercial companies to fly these national heroes. It just didn't seem possible to many people. And we had a system that was easy to rely on in times of peace that was a Soyuz that flown, you know, so the Soyuz family has flown thousands of flights at this point. So, you know, in recent years, not the case that it is a reliable system that we don't have to worry at all about. There's been a series of issues over
Starting point is 00:04:55 the last couple of years that I think were maybe tip of the iceberg type stuff with what's going on at Roscosmos that leadership is, you know, neglecting their duties to actually maintain a good program there. Do you kind of look at the last couple years in a different light at this point with where Roscosmos is at? It really sounds bad. It is not what we were used to in the earlier decades of extremely reliable engineering. The one thing that I'm wondering from the previous round of sanctions and those discussions in Congress following it was like, it's almost, it takes like an external influence to reassess like the risk posture really around some of these programs, because whether or not any members of Congress were telling the truth that this is why they were concerned about commercial crew,
Starting point is 00:05:44 they were concerned about safety of commercial companies doing this, whether or not any members of Congress were telling the truth that this is why they were concerned about commercial crude, they were concerned about safety of commercial companies doing this. Whether or not that was true, maybe it was, you know, something that sounded nice, but actually was hiding their real interests in it. It does force the issue in a way if you run into these kind of situations where, you know, let's just take today's example. Starliner has been delayed by issues. Let's just take today's example. Starliner has been delayed by issues. And in an environment where none of this stuff was happening, you could see that continue to delay and kind of just fall into the schedule wherever it makes sense. Like once there's some time available and Starliner's got its stuff together, we'll
Starting point is 00:06:15 get the flight up. We could be in an area now where like we would delay cargo flights to get Starliner on online earlier, because the risk of flying if you don't have every single issue dotted down and figured out, you know, every root cause here and there, it's worth that risk at a certain point to make sure that you have another way to get to the space station. So, you know, not that that's what's going to happen with the ISS program, but I just feel like these external influence moments like present you a different calculation than you would have done two months ago. If you're, you know, somebody doing the flight planning over at NASA. Well, I was thinking that this might really build support for the commercial space stations.
Starting point is 00:07:00 Because we knew ISS was coming to an end, but that was easy to not pay as much attention to until this week when this partnership looks very fragile. So I wonder if Congress will provide a lot more support for the commercial space stations that NASA wants to serve as a customer for. Yeah, and I should timestamp when we're recording this because everything's moving so quickly these days, but we're recording this Thursday afternoon. At this point, Dimitri Rogozin himself has been tweeting and canceling things that Roscosmos is working on. And it's hard to find anything remaining except the existence of the ISS partnership that is no
Starting point is 00:07:51 longer canceled. They've now halted engine sales to the US. They've held one web satellites hostage from the UK government. They're not going to be launching those. They've canceled scientific investigations with Germany on the space station, which I think was a retaliation to Germany turning off an instrument on their joint telescope that they launched a couple of months ago. There's just like, you look at the list, and there's very few things left on that list until you get to the ISS partnership and whatever that means, right? That gets pretty messy pretty quick where you're like, all right, we've got an astronaut up there who needs to fly back on Soyuz. I would hope NASA's doing some different planning around that just because the unpredictability of the situation. But you're
Starting point is 00:08:34 right. In the same way that Commercial Crew had that forcing element of, you know, being threatened with trampolines in 2014, this is an existential crisis for the space station that, you know, being threatened with trampolines in 2014. This is an existential crisis for the space station that, you know, I would hope that NASA is playing that angle to get the funding that they've been asking for all along from Congress. But do you think that, I mean, that also brings up like the budgetary situation that we find ourselves in at the moment where like there has not been a budget for last year, we don't even have the request for next year. Might be good that we don't have the request for next year. We can ask for some extra, but like, how does that play out strategically just here in the U S I, I can't wait to see. I was wondering what this would do to military budgets and to military space, because there were a lot of, um,
Starting point is 00:09:28 space because there were a lot of generals complaining in the last month that without a new budget, they can't get some military space. New programs started. They can't start under a continuing resolution unless they get permission specifically for a program. And from the State of the Union, it looked like Congress might work together to get military funding. So we'll see. It is moving quickly. Yeah, I'm wondering because the worry was, okay, it's an election year. We don't have a budget for last year. They're just going to continuing resolution this right on through to the midterms.
Starting point is 00:10:03 But boy, does a budget request also look like a good spot to jam some political messaging uh if you if there's low low risk to putting stuff in the request at this moment with the state of things that like you could see people trying to get extra money through that request whether it actually makes its way into the the budget for this year next year uh aside and honestly that's kind of how I'm looking at the space station side of this that I think a lot of people would say okay even if you gave axiom space another couple hundred million dollars they wouldn't have that ready in time for you know whatever technical considerations there would be if we're closing some hatches on the ISS but the way I'm looking
Starting point is 00:10:40 at is like well that doesn't necessarily matter to get political funding for a program. You can point to many examples in the U.S. government right now where the timeline of hardware is not tethered to the amount of money being appropriated for those programs. Easy ones, SLS and Orion. But those things are not tethered in the same way that space nerds like us, you know, try to slice and dice this stuff. Yeah, you're right. You're right. Fortunately, there's still SpaceX who can transport astronauts to ISS and back. It's just such an uncertain time.
Starting point is 00:11:28 it's just such an uncertain time um because you mentioned starliner and um whether they would take more risk there sure if it was cargo but um risking astronauts is a whole different thing well that's what i mean is that they've got the uncrewed flight still so yes exactly where it looks like they were going to kind of just punt that until it was an open schedule. Like I, I think they might prioritize that differently. Now, if they have plenty of cargo reserves on the station, if they've got plenty of, you know, food and water, then like, we can probably wait a month or two for the next cargo flight considering how they're always, you know, months ahead of time on cargo for that. So, you know, maybe that jumps up on the prioritization list, uh, just merely to make sure that, you know, maybe that jumps up on the prioritization list just merely to make sure that, you know, we can get some get ahead work done for when we do need it down the line. Because that's also another way to reboost the station, which would be a major concern if Russia is pulling out.
Starting point is 00:12:15 So there's just like so many angles to that calculation at this point. Yeah, it's a really good time to show that we can boost the station um on our own yeah with the the cygnus that flew up on a ukrainian first stage with russian engines and a pressure vessel built in europe i feel like that was a very uh a lot of weird like significance to all where all those parts came from for this mission well i know and i i had somebody ask me yesterday what I knew about Antares, the rocket and the engines it needs that are built in Ukraine. And I don't know. I imagine with all the Earth imagery that people are capturing right now, somebody is looking very closely at those facilities to see if they have been damaged or destroyed. Yeah. Yeah, that would be.
Starting point is 00:13:08 I mean, they said they have parts for two more. Right. But that's not that many Cygnus flights, you know, and we know that Cygnus can go on other vehicles as well, which is the saving grace. But it's it's pretty bleak for especially because, you know, Northrop Grumman did the math for this program factoring in Antares. When they had the issue previously, they flew on Atlas 5 for a couple of flights and they changed around how many flights they needed overall to make the money work. But this was a fixed price contract that was baking in this launch vehicle. you know, can they actually pull it off by paying for flights on another vehicle? Or, you know, was the fact that Antares is so closely tied to their organizational structure, is that like a real key issue there for even the existence of the Cygnus flights as they are in
Starting point is 00:13:57 the manifest right now? Are they going to have to ask for more money? Is that even a thing they can do? Who knows with that, you know, and is that a thing that we'd even be wanting to pay if we've got some money available i'd rather you know get axiom some additional funding to speed them along as best as possible it's quite messy it is it is quite messy and and i was it's been since 2014 that people have been trying to extricate the U.S. from these Russian manufacturing programs. And it all takes a long time. You don't just switch to a new rocket engine. Yeah, and they've got, you know, Aerojet was trying to sell them the AR-1 back in the day for this kind of class.
Starting point is 00:14:40 I don't know where those plans currently stand, given it's gone so many years with no customer. Presumably they could, you know, look at that direction. But if they don't have anyone to make a first stage or if it's not going to be cost effective for them to actually bring up a whole production line for a vehicle that has, other than Cygnus, no commercial flights, nobody's buying Antares. So if I'm Northrop, you know, that's not really worth the squeeze there. So, you know, that's probably gonna be the biggest casualty on the actual space hardware side of things coming out of this. Yeah. You mentioned imagery a second ago, I'd like to talk about the commercial companies that are providing imagery of Ukraine and also communications, because I feel like that's been a storyline to track. What do you make of the imagery companies?
Starting point is 00:15:25 I've seen stuff on the news from Maxar, from Black Sky. I think I saw Planet Image or two floating around. How do you think that they're able to actually kind of show their stuff in this scenario? Well, it's been so interesting because we've heard for at least the last decade, if not longer, that we would have transparency, that we would be able to see what was going on all over the globe. Because before that, countries knew when a US spy satellite was passing over and would take steps to make sure we didn't see what they didn't want us to see. Now there are so many satellites by so many companies around the world. I don't know how you hide anything.
Starting point is 00:16:10 And I feel like that's what we're seeing. We've seen, we have seen planet Maxar. I've seen that satellite logic, Capella imagery. Spire has been showing us ship movements in the area. And I talked to Robert Cardillo, who used to run the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. And we had an interesting conversation about the pros and cons of all of this. It's great that the world can see what's happening.
Starting point is 00:16:39 And it may be an important reason there's been so much support for Ukraine. And it may be an important reason there's been so much support for Ukraine. But there's also a danger that Putin is that Putin knows that we are seeing his troubles right now to that convoy that appeared to be stalled. That didn't look great. And you've got this powerful military feeling cornered. So he says, I'm going to put the nuclear weapons on alert. I didn't really consider that. Them knowing everything we know and then playing that their own way or just having that influence their emotions going into this kind of thing
Starting point is 00:17:23 would be such a big deal. But it's also been interesting that we would not have you know if this happened seven eight years ago um from the national reconnaissance office the u.s government would have plenty of spy satellite imagery we would not see any of it we would just have to take their word uh that this kind of stuff was happening i mean they spent how many months telling us this is this is what's going to happen they're going to invade and almost nobody believed them because not a super great track record on on like wartime intelligence you know when it was just a take us on our word you know trust us we know this stuff
Starting point is 00:18:01 but all those warnings with commercial satellite imagery of everyone amassed on the border and then convoys that you're talking about like it's backing up with publicly available imagery uh the fact that we do know this stuff and that's that they got it right this time i think is important so it's almost like the existence of commercial companies is is helping them actually be more trustworthy because we can actually use our own admittedly lower resolution than they have on the keyhole satellites. But we're able to actually compare publicly available energy with what they're actually telling us.
Starting point is 00:18:36 And that's been an interesting aspect to this. It has been. I'm noticing the delay. I think many of the contracts, these companies are all selling government imagery and in many cases can't show it publicly for 72 hours. But it still is showing us, just like you said, that what they say is happening is happening. We can see it with our own eyes. And I think that feels different than any invasion I've ever seen. Do you think that one of the things I've been tracking with these companies is
Starting point is 00:19:12 where they're actually able to get customers from that aren't government? You know, they've been talking a lot about how this could be helpful for land management or farming or resources or anything like that. But still a huge portion of their revenue, if not the vast majority of it is coming from contracts that they have with governments around the world. And that might be a good thing in that it is helping them establish these constellations, bring the cost down on the per image basis that eventually can be used more commercially. Do you think this, this helps that at all? Where like, maybe they get more funding because we're seeing how useful this is. And they're actually able to go to Congress and say like, look how
Starting point is 00:19:53 useful this was to the defense industry, you know, give us some more money for these programs where we're trying to buy imagery. Um, I'm just wondering of how it boosts these companies to actually become more commercially viable, or if, if we're finding out that this is the real strength and maybe it's not so much commercial mission, but it's just, you know, like you said, try to hide your spy planes from planet satellites. Like, I dare you. Dare you to find a slot where you can uncover one of those things to get it off the ground. Well, and even if you can hide them from planet satellites, what about Capella and Icy and
Starting point is 00:20:23 Umbra watching them at night and through the clouds um it's it's impossible to hide large objects right now in a good way but also in a bad way because like you're saying that does then play on the psyche that like you know nothing is beyond our reach was that famous nro patch and that's even more true in the age of commercial and another thing that um when there were just the spy satellites people would complain in the intelligence agencies they couldn't share even with their allies and now it's very easy to share. I mean, you can share it with the press, even if it's delayed, but you can certainly share it with your allies immediately under many of these contracts. And you asked about whether it helps these companies. I can't think of a better
Starting point is 00:21:21 advertisement for what they can do. So right now, the U.S. government is the world's biggest customer for earth imagery by a long shot. But there it seems like there would be people around the world who might realize that for their multinational corporation. Hey, I could see every facility. multinational corporation, hey, I could see every facility. And there's always talk about insurance companies. Somebody says that their roof is tar and gravel. Is it really? Well, we can look.
Starting point is 00:21:58 We'll see. We'll see how quickly that market develops. The agriculture market is growing it's it is that those markets are developing but not as quickly as the government use yeah it's also been you know you look at the past year they had the uh ever given situation that there was all this commercial imagery over the volcano in tonga so there was a lot of these other news stories that you could see the same thing going on, right? But it just didn't have the, you know, worldwide prestige as a potential world war, like that, that's a totally different ballgame where you things get a lot more serious than,
Starting point is 00:22:34 you know, oh, look at that, you know, cargo ships stuck in the Suez, like, or the, you know, it's kind of weird situation. That's great. Like, look at this image of it. It became a meme. But the seriousness of which these images are being used now is a totally different angle to it all and then you know the other thing i was thinking about was uh russia used an anti-satellite weapon a couple of months ago um in a scenario where we don't have hundreds of commercial imagery satellites. Three or four of those anti-satellite weapons well placed into the U.S. keyhole satellites would obviously spark a huge aspect of war,
Starting point is 00:23:11 but we would be blind. And, you know, maybe we don't have 10 centimeter imagery or whatever it would be from those higher resolutions, but is Maxar's good enough? Is Black Sky's good enough to get what we need? So all the talk from the Department of Defense about how they need to have constellations for more survivability, it's actually a commercial side that gave them that. It is, it is. And it seems like it would, it should help those programs
Starting point is 00:23:36 like the Space Development Agency's effort to have a proliferated constellation, have hundreds of satellites. Here is a great example of why those may be useful. We'll see if it builds support for that. Yeah. It's just sad how all this bleak scenario had reinforced the arguments that space nerds have been making for the last 10 years about having your own way to space, having your own space stations. The European astronauts got together two weeks ago and said we want our own way to orbit um like all these things and then you know this fireability argument about constellations commercial imaging all of these trends that we're heading in this direction have been completely
Starting point is 00:24:17 verified by the bleakest timeline um which is like very sad but also you know it tells us that we were on the right track which i think is a good thing yes in a week it is really revealed um that many of the things people were saying were true you could easily take out the spy satellites or gps then the whole world stops can you imagine losing GPS? That was definitely the threat that one of the Russian officers said, like the week after that spy satellite, or the anti-satellite demonstration. So, I don't know, that whole thing just totally has a new feeling to it. We knew it was bad at the time, but having that be a foreshadowing for such a weird string of events from then to now totally changes how that should be viewed, I think.
Starting point is 00:25:13 Yes, you're right. internet constellations uh kind of a dueling scenario here where one web satellites were being held hostage uh at baikun or cosmos drone and then starlink was able to ship a bunch of antennas into ukraine to help out um were you kind of paying attention to that storyline at all how do you think that's going to play out um the one web story was crazy because of rugozin once again great character if you're writing this novel saying you have to assure us we'll launch them for you but you have to promise they will never be used for military purposes and the uk government has to sell its share which obviously none of those things were going to happen. If you were having a serious negotiation, those would not be on the table. So in other words, yes, we will not launch them for
Starting point is 00:26:12 you. And I don't know how that gets resolved. Yeah, do they get them back? Are they gone? Are they stolen? Is there going to be a heist to get them back? What's the situation there? I know. And then as he mentioned, the whole Starlink scenario where the Ukrainian Minister for Digital Transformation, which is a great title, says, hey, Elon, can you help me on Twitter? And Elon says, yes. And great follow-up on Twitter and by reporters that those terminals arrived in the Ukraine and they are working. There was a great, did you see Lauren Grush's article in The Verge about a Ukrainian engineer who had one of those Starlink antennas already, and it suddenly began to work. It's a pretty incredible storyline, especially considering, you know, a couple of, maybe
Starting point is 00:27:19 a year ago or something, somebody asked Elon Musk, what would they do if somebody wanted to use Starlink in a country that did not actually approve it and he said shake their fists at the sky and you know that was kind of a you know kind of a flippant comment about this but you get into a scenario where that's not flippant anymore and that's a serious consideration that you know whether it's citizens trying to get connectivity or or governments or militaries like that becomes a thing that is that could make or break a scenario for a country um absolutely you know there's the whole aspect there of like a private company kind of being able to provide that support is a pretty interesting aspect to this all that that it's like something only governments could have taken on you know a couple decades ago that are now at everyone's fingertips uh it's pretty encouraging yeah i
Starting point is 00:28:11 think there was something in one of elon's tweets something like isn't it crazy that i can do this or um that he can respond to ukraine's request for satellite communications one web is also in a tough spot though that you know they're at 400 and some satellites out of their 648 constellation are up there in orbit right now they were looking at six launches or something like that between now and august to complete the constellation. This changes their timeline by two years. Like what's, what's the realistic estimate on how long it's going to take to get those other 200 satellites up there? I have no idea. That is a really good thing to dig into now. And because obviously, some people are scrambling to try to come up with answers. But just like you said, it's changing.
Starting point is 00:29:07 Things are changing day by day. I don't know. Maybe they're getting a lot of calls from other launch vehicle providers saying, hey, I can help. Yeah, doubling my price, but I can definitely, definitely can help. I don't know. Everyone always makes a big deal of like,
Starting point is 00:29:24 would SpaceX launch a competitor's satellites? And it's like, yes, of course they would. Of course they would take the money to launch satellites. They are not in the business of saying no to people for payloads at this point. So I think that kind of talk is a little overheated. I think the satellite company probably would hate it worse than SpaceX would. So that would be a serious consideration. But, you know, OneWeb in the past has had a launch agreement with Virgin Orbit that was the source of a lawsuit a couple years ago where they
Starting point is 00:29:51 somebody canceled it. I don't remember that storyline exactly, but they had other arrangements with launch vehicles out there. But you start looking at what's available, it doesn't look super great for getting that many satellites to orbit in a timeline that is you know gonna impact their competitiveness really yes yeah and and you know corporations
Starting point is 00:30:14 have to write about all the risks that they face was this even contemplated is this anything anybody could have imagined yeah yeah i saw some people wondering if this is even in like insurance is launch insurance cover hostage satellites from a you know hostile government takeover of your launch site that's actually a great idea for a story you can thank i forgot who somebody who put that in our uh discord so thank the off nominal discord for that one but that's a great question yeah i guess presumably it depends on the the fate of the satellites if they are gone off the face of the earth or stolen or destroyed i guess we'll have to have the commercial imagery companies keep an eye on bikenor where does that soyuz go when it's
Starting point is 00:30:58 coming off the launch pad yeah and i'm sure they are. Assuming there's a customer that wants to see it, or like Planet, just the whole world every day. Yeah. It's huge. Well, that was all I had on my list here. I don't know if there's anything else you had in mind that you wanted to talk about with this whole scenario. No, that was fun.
Starting point is 00:31:22 Thanks for coming on. I'm sure everything's different by the time this is actually hitting people's ears. So please read Deborah's writing in Space News. Anything else that you'd want to plug there? And my colleagues. It's a team effort, but we're doing our best to keep up with what's going on. It's always the number one spot for me. So everyone knows that if you're looking at the show notes, there's like a thousand Space News links
Starting point is 00:31:48 in my show notes, I'm sure. So it's been a pleasure talking with you. You've been on the list for a long time. So I'm glad that we finally made it happen. Thank you. Nice talking to you. Thanks again to Debra for coming on the show. It's a pleasure having her on here.
Starting point is 00:32:02 And as she mentioned, Space News is a fantastic organization. We've had a lot of people on here and off nominal from Space News over the years. So you know my affection for that organization. So definitely check out her writing and everyone else over at spacenews.com. And I want to say thank you to everyone out there who supports Main Engine Cutoff. There are 770 of you supporting the show every single month, and I'm so thankful for your support. That includes 40 executive producers who made this episode of Managed Cutoff possible. Thanks to Simon, Lauren, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, The Everett Astronaut, Frank,
Starting point is 00:32:38 Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, The Astrogators at SCE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Haymonth, Dawn Aerospace, Andrew, and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for the support and for making this show possible. If you want to join that crew and if you want to get MECO headlines in your life, it's an entire other podcast I do every single week. I run through all the stories that have happened, everything that you need to know about in the space industry, give you my thoughts on those. Some things that don't bubble their way up to the main show because they're just not worth a whole episode, but they are worth keeping track of. So it's a great way to stay on top of space news and to support the show. So check that
Starting point is 00:33:11 out if you have not at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. For now, that's all I've got for you. Like I mentioned, I'll probably be back pretty soon with some more thoughts on the situation in Ukraine because there's just a lot of fallout from it that I've been stewing on. So until then, thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon.

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