Main Engine Cut Off - T+211: Political and Industrial Fallout of the War

Episode Date: March 17, 2022

A follow-up on my last show with Debra Werner about the war in Ukraine and all the fallout from it, both political and industrial. Everything from the NASA budgets for 2022 and 2023, NASA telling astronauts to stop tweeting, the increased importance of European human spaceflight, and how the launch industry might shift in the future.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 738 other supporters.TopicsT+210: Ukraine, Russia, and the Space Industry (with Debra Werner) - Main Engine Cut OffNASA To Get $24 Billion for FY2022, More than Last Year But Less Than Biden Wanted – SpacePolicyOnline.comScott Kelly: Former NASA astronaut to back off Twitter war with head of Russian space agency - CNNESA - Luca Parmitano presents the European Astronauts’ ManifestoESA - ExoMars suspendedThe 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 JustusArtwork photo by NASA Wallops/Patrick Black

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo. I wanted to share some more thoughts on the political and industrial fallouts of the war in Ukraine. Since the last show that I did with Deborah Werner about two weeks ago, a lot of things have changed. A lot of things have stayed the same or stayed on the same course. The war continues to be horrific and awful in every single way that you could even imagine. There has been more space fallout. There's been some confirmations of things that we assumed back then. And I thought, you know, at the time that Deborah and I talked, there was a couple of things that didn't quite fit into the conversation time-wise that I was hoping to get to, some stuff that's still been pinging around my head that I wanted to put out there. You know, it's, as much

as I've been watching all the other space news going on, there's just been hard to give any of that other attention than what's going on in Ukraine and the fallout associated to that, because it is so massive for so many parts of the world. The last show that I did, if you have not listened to that, go back and listen. I thought Debra and I talked pretty good about commercial imaging companies and what they're doing right now about the idea of proliferated space constellations that the Department of Defense has been looking into for their future satellite needs and how that relates to the now totally different looking Russian anti-satellite operation that they carried out a couple months ago. But there's a few things that we didn't get to and some stuff that's changed since then.

So let's dive in. I'm going to start off with the ISS and the precarious position that it finds itself in as, you know, the partnerships between Russia and NASA and ESA break down in every other way except the ISS and what that might hold for the future. U.S. has passed Congress and there's not a ton in the budget that is worth breaking down, but there is some implications for the commercial LEO side of things. Commercial LEO is the program that NASA has been undertaking to transition off of the ISS onto commercial space stations. That's inclusive of things like Axiom adding modules onto the space station, but also the free-flying commercial space stations that are currently competing against each other for future use. That, budget-wise, was maybe the biggest

thing to look at there. The past two years before this, the White House requested $150 million for commercial LEO, and we're only given about $15 million from Congress, less than one-tenth of the request, which is almost so little that it's laughable. This year, $101 million from Congress, less than one-tenth of the request, which is almost so little that it's laughable. This year, $101 million was requested, and they received that full amount of funding. Now, that's great. The interesting thing is how that full funding came to be. The Senate bill that made up, you know, made its way through Congress and made up part of this funding deal. The Senate bill provided full funding, $101 million. The House version, however, provided

less than half that amount. And I believe those numbers were written in there. I don't know for sure, but I think those numbers were in that budget before the war started, before we saw all the ISS-related fallout. And when this budget deal came time to be made, the full funding was there for Commercial Leo. So presumably the house was influenced by something to provide double the budget they originally set aside for Commercial Leo in this deal that passed both houses. That is an interesting note because I think it indicates that there is more willpower to fund this program in its full amount. There's more importance on this program in the future, transitioning off of ISS and onto commercial

platforms, or even having those commercial platforms available to extend ISS if and when Russia decides to take their segment and go home. That's going to be really important. And it is something that NASA now has more power behind their words when they say how important this program is. And specifically what I want to watch is how that is dealt with in the soon to becoming fiscal year 2023 budget request. Usually budget requests are due in February. Um, but if they, we didn't have a full on, uh, budget until just a couple of days ago for fiscal year

2022, the budget request for 2023 was delayed as well. So we should be getting pretty close to when that is going to be public. And I really want to see what kind of request there is for the commercial LEO program, you know, given the situation in the world. I really would like to see them put, you know, $500 million or more into that budget line as a request, because it is very important to really juice the funding level there if you want to kind of hedge your bets against what's going to happen to the ISS. I think, you know, anyone that tells you they know for sure what's going to happen with the ISS is lying to you. There is a

whole section of NASA right now that is looking into, you know, what would happen if Russia decides to pull out of the ISS, or if this can be if this, you know, turns out to be completely unworkable with them, what would we do in response to that? How could we save the ISS in that situation? But, you know, if the administration is committed to the ISS, I think it would be foolish to not put more money in that budget request line item, because that is going to be such an important part to the future of the ISS, whatever it is, whether Russia's there or not. I think now that we see what's going on in the ISS partnership, we see the ISS hardware starting to fail in many ways, and we see the momentum of the commercial industry, you got to put some more

money in the budget for that program. Congress now at least shows the willpower to fully fund this up from $15 million to $101 million. That's not an increase to sneeze at. You got to put some more money in the request for that program if you're really committed to the ISS long term. So the other thing to look at here is, you know, you're going to say, where does NASA get that money from? Why do they think they can request so much more on top of their standard budget? Well, if you look a couple of years ago, how NASA was thinking about what their requests would be for in these years, they were expecting to be requesting a lot more money because of the Artemis program than they are right now.

And that's because a couple of years ago, when they were going to start the process of finding the lander for the Artemis program to land people on the moon, they put in a bunch of money into the request to be able to pick two or three contractors for that human landing system program. They only got 25% of the budget that they requested that year, which left them selecting only one contractor, and that is SpaceX with Starship. So they only got 25% of the budget request. That meant that they only could pick one contractor. And now what that means is they're only requesting enough money to cover that one contractor. So they've requested this year $1.2 billion, and they got all of that funding from Congress. That is only enough for one

contractor, but they did get full funding on that. But they weren't requesting $4 or $5 billion like they would have been if they selected two or three contractors. So there's a whole segment of money there that they were expecting to request that they're no longer requesting. And in fact, NASA was offered from the House and Senate $150 million more than that $1.2 billion for the lander. That's from the Senate or from the House. The Senate requested $100 million more, but the budget deal came in right at their $1.2 billion. So there was willingness to spend more money on Artemis than was actually spent in this budget, which means there is more money for NASA than NASA is currently taking advantage of. Now, why the budget deal worked out that way is murky to me.

But I think, you know, given that landscape where NASA was expecting to be requesting significantly higher numbers than they are now, and the geopolitical situation has changed so dramatically, and NASA is in a really awkward spot with the ISS at the moment, you know, I really hope to see an increase in budget there for the ISS. Now, if you're NASA, the Artemis Accords are looking really good right now as well as a geopolitical move, because you're getting a lot of countries to sign on to your future plans and they're countries that you see eye to eye ish with uh on on world matters and um you know you're not right now nasa is stuck in this iss partnership with russia and and if you look at the way europe has been severing all their ties with russia in terms of space

and the way that you know all the sanctions have been hitting Russia. It is, you know, only explainable by being stuck with Russia on the ISS that that hasn't been severed either. And, you know, they're in a very awkward spot right now where they have Mark Vande Hei due to come back on a Soyuz in just a couple of days. They want to make sure they get him back safely. I don't think anything will happen with him or his flight, especially landing in Kazakhstan. But, you know, again, anyone who tells you they know what's going to happen for sure right now is lying to you. It is a incredibly bizarre and unpredictable scenario. And that led to them being in this awkward spot this last week when they had to send an email to all current and former astronauts saying, you know, cool out, stop fighting with Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos on Twitter. And that was specifically aimed at Scott Kelly, who was,

you know, partaking in Twitter battles with the head of the Russian Space Agency, which is bizarre for many reasons. But, you know, it's a terrible look for NASA. It is an absolutely horrible look for NASA to say to people like, we all have freedom of speech, but please be nice to the people committing horrible acts of war right now. But they're doing that because they're stuck. They're stuck in a situation that is very awkward. They want to make sure they get their astronaut back safe. They want to make sure the ISS does not crumble completely right now. They want to make sure they don't have to abandon it entirely if everything breaks down. It is an incredibly awkward situation. But you know, if they were listening to me a couple years ago, they would have started

hedging their bets about Russia being a honest partner on the ISS. You know, that's water under the bridge now between me and NASA, I guess. But it's just like, you don't want to get in the future in these situations where you're wrapped up in long term arrangements with countries or other geopolitical forces that you have clear, you know, differences in the way that you see the world and the way that you interact with the world. And it makes for these weird situations that they're in. And you know, that's is what it is at this point. But it does make NASA look pretty horrible when they have to tell Scott Kelly to stop tweeting, just to make sure that they can keep the astronauts and the ISS safe. Now in terms of future partnerships, you know, the Artemis Accords and the countries that signed on to that,

things are looking pretty good right now. As I speak to you, there's a fully stacked starship in Boca Chica. SLS is about to roll out the door of the VAB to go to the pad for the first time. So the Artemis program is looking pretty good. And if you're looking at where the momentum is in space, you've got one country that's being cut off entirely from the global system and whose space industry is going to be wrecked by this. And you have another whole group of partner countries that are working on the future of space. And so if you're someone out there that's starting a space agency, or you're looking to engage more with space, it's pretty clear which end of the partnership you want to go to right now. And you know, the biggest the biggest counterweight to

that would be China and what they're going to do with this situation. We don't really know there yet. But you know, the Artemis Accords really look pretty good right now in terms of geopolitical positioning and space partnerships in the future. So, you know, while the ISS is putting NASA in a really awkward spot, the Artemis Accords, something that's been embraced by the Biden White House, much as the Trump White House, that's looking like such a good geopolitical win that is something that they're going to want to build on in the future, specifically around the Artemis program. But, you know, if the ISS doesn't work out, there might be something there that is part of that program as well that would continue human spaceflight in low Earth orbit. And that's something that, you know, it would be based off of from there out.

Now, speaking of human spaceflight, Europe is also in an interesting spot. Now, speaking of human spaceflight, Europe is also in an interesting spot. A couple of months ago, there started to be an increasing amount of noise around human spaceflight out of Europe, because there is no human spaceflight program within Europe right now. They're looking around, and the U.S. has their own vehicles, Russia's been flying their own, China's got their own, India's developing their own. There are so many countries diving into this that they feel like they should be part of it as well. So much as in the space summit back in February in Toulouse, Luca Parmitano got up and read the European astronaut manifesto that was talking about how they want independent access to space and how important that is for the future of space. And that was gaining steam before the war.

Now that you're seeing the way that Europe is galvanized by this threat and the way that they're increasing funding, and Germany's increasing defense spending, it's bringing them together in a way that we haven't seen for quite a while. And it's renewing the importance of those homegrown capabilities. And it's playing right into that. So if you're Luca Parmitano, you're looking pretty good right now about what you said a couple of months ago.

And if you're somebody who cares about the development of space, you should be pumped about this. You should be pumped that ESA is going to embrace a human spaceflight program. I'm going to say they're going to embrace it because it seems pretty silly to not at this point. It's not a done deal yet.

They're going to have a couple of more meetings in 2022 and a couple of more meetings in 2023 to officially decide. There are some studies that are going on to lead into that on what they would do and what the shape of the program would be. But that seems like a pretty sure bet that they're going to embrace that in some way and make that a full-blown program. And that's awesome. More ways to space is great. More waysays to Space with countries that want to partner with a lot of other countries out there and want to have a full-on, you know, burgeoning industry, that's great news. Especially when we're in the realm of these commercial space stations, more industry going on in low-Earth orbit, especially as we look out to

the Artemis program. If there are more ways to get to space and there are more people out there working on human spaceflight, that is a great thing for the industry. And for the expansion of, you know, the development of space, that is a huge deal. And yes, it's going to be an institutional program. Yes, it's going to be a little slow, just like, you know, SLS and Orion, but it's a great thing that could happen. Now, the launch side of Europe is not in as good a position. You know, they've lost access to Soyuz out of French Guiana. Roscosmos stopped launching one-web satellites out of Baikonur, and they are kind of holding those satellites hostage. I don't really know the status of those satellites still, but they've pulled their staff out of French Guiana, so there

are five Soyuz missions that were supposed to fly European satellites that cannot fly anymore. They have been canceled entirely. Um, so that increases the importance on Ariane six and Vegas C, but those don't really fill the niche that Soyuz was for the European launch sector. Um, and, and there's this whole burgeoning industry of commercial launchers out of Europe, but most of them are very small and they kind of max out at the one ton range to orbit. So they're not competitive with the Soyuz range. And that's, you know, in terms of what you need for human spaceflight, you're going to need

something that is Soyuz or greater. Ariane 6 is the only thing right now on the horizon. So will we see one of these commercial companies bump their size up a little bit and start to embrace that hole in the market? Maybe so. Will Arianespace start to look at what they can do with these current launch projects to either speed them up or change their capabilities? Or Arian6 is kind of a weird spot for that because it's so based around, you know, the reference model of two satellites to geostationary orbit, even one satellite to geostationary orbit, if you look at the two solid rocker booster versions. So that's a real quagmire for Europe that they were relying on something like Soyuz, they don't have access to it anymore. You know, as we talked about in the last episode, it's it's a horrible loss for one

web who there we'll talk about them in a bit. but European, you know, human spaceflight looking up, European launch looking questionable. And that's something that they're going to have to figure out here on what to do. They have some scientific programs that are getting completely upended. ExoMars, we heard just this morning, has been officially suspended. That depended on a Russian launch, a Russian landing platform, many Russian instruments. They say they're looking for some new partners. Is this going to be something that, again, they find it so important that they look inward and they develop these capabilities internally? Are they going to look for partners out there like NASA, JAXA, someone else on the international stage? Yet to be seen. But they

sound committed to launching that sometime in the 2020s, depending on which partners they line up and what the timeline is. We'll determine if that's 2026 or 2028, but they seem pretty committed to that. So I think the launch thing is the biggest question mark. Excited about the aspect that they're going to embrace the human spaceflight program. I think that's, if you're someone like me who's got my interests in the world, that is great news. The launch side is really something to watch in the near future. All right, I want to break down what's happening with some commercial

companies related to this fallout as well. But before we do that, I want to say thank you to everyone out there supporting Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are 778 of you supporting this show every single month, and that includes 40 executive producers. Thank you to Simon, Lauren, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Leon, David, Yunus, Rob, Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, The Astrogators at SCE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Heymonth, Dawn Aerospace, Andrew, and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support for making this show possible. If you have not joined that crew yet, I highly recommend it. Number one, this is my full time job now. So if you like what I'm doing, please support me because this is how

I'm paying the bills. You can be my boss if you would like. And also if you are going to join at the $3 a month or more level, you get an entire other podcast that I do just for people at that level. I do every single weekend a show called Miko Headlines, where I run through all the stories of the week, giving my thoughts on them. Some stuff that doesn't make its way to the main show just because it doesn't seem that important to require a full show or I don't have that many thoughts on, but it is important to stay up on the news. So it's a great way to support me and stay up on all the space news. I think it's probably one of the best things that I do and that I put out there into the world. So if you're not listening to it and you like this show a lot, please check it out. That would be awesome. And I think you'll really love it. It'll

be a great spot, a great thing to fill a spot in your lineup every week. So check that out over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. All right, so OneWeb, I mentioned them a little while ago, they lost all the remaining launches that they had they were going to have something like five launches between now and summer to complete their constellation they are now in a total total quagmire to figure out how to how to get these satellites to space um it is a huge loss of momentum for them they do have some operational spots in the world that they can service with their current constellation, but they really need that whole thing up and running to fulfill their commercial and, you know, business-to-business needs that they were looking to do. And where they're going to find those launches is very tough. A lot of people say they don't want to fly on SpaceX because SpaceX

has Starlink. I think that's kind of BS. I think SpaceX would be happy to launch them. OneWeb would be more reluctant, but it's the cheapest launch available. So if you want to, you know, hold your nose and launch with SpaceX, go ahead. But fighting it, I think would be kind of silly and a waste of money. If you know, if you're looking around at the market. Now, there are some other spots for those launches to go. Because I honestly don't know how much SpaceX could help them out. SpaceX has a pretty full manifest this year. They're aiming to launch something like 50 times this year. And so pretty much anytime they're not launching an already signed up customer or NASA flight or something like that, they're launching Starlink satellites. And I don't

think they're going to want to slow down their own Starlink satellites to open up a slot for OneWeb, even if OneWeb, you know, paid them $100 million for a slot rather than 50. So I don't know that SpaceX is going to have the room on their manifest. And that might have them looking to other providers. OneWeb has an ownership structure that includes a big company out of India, so they could certainly look to Indian launch vehicles to fulfill the launch needs. I'm not quite sure if they have the capacity in terms of they might need to break these satellite stacks down into smaller stacks and launch more of them. But the other thing that they could do is look to ULA here in the US. ULA is in a situation right now, they sold nine Atlas 5s to Amazon to launch Kuiper satellites. Vulcan has no commercial launches on their manifest right now outside of the Sierra Nevada or Sierra Space Dream Chaser commercial cargo launches to the space station.

Other than that, they have their demo mission where they're going to be launching the astrobotic lander to the moon. They have a couple of Department of Defense satellites on the manifest, but they don't have other commercial missions on that manifest right now. So this could be something, you know, it's not going to be as quick as OneWeb would like, but it's going to be 2023, 2024 timeframe to get all those satellites up. And, you know, if OneWeb can make it from here to there, that might be the most expedient version of getting these things to space. Maybe they can figure out with Arianespace on getting priority in the Arian-6 manifest. That might be a real big slog through some, you know, I don't

know, maybe there's somebody in Europe that wants more ownership of them that's able to, you know, offer that deal that bumps them up the Arian-6 priority, and that would be a route for them to go. But I think ULA might get some more commercial launch deals here generally, because the other big effect in the launch market is that Cygnus, the commercial cargo vehicle that Northrop Grumman flies, they have two Antares left before they're out of stock of the first stages that are built in Ukraine and the Russian engines that are no longer going to be supplied to them for Antares' first stage. So Cygnus is going to be looking for a ride to the ISS, and I think ULA might be a good spot for

them because, you know, looking at the flight rate of Cygnus, they've got, you know, they don't fly that frequently on Antares. They have in the past flown on Atlas V when Antares had their issues. So by the time they run out of those two Antares flights, given the ISS manifest, Vulcan might be up and running and able to offer some commercial slots for Cygnus. SpaceX itself, you know, everyone keeps saying SpaceX is the way out here. Do you think that they have the capacity for all of the launches they've already signed up, all of the Starlink launches, all of the OneWeb launches, all of the European launches that are needed because Soyuz is not an option anymore, and all of the Cygnus flights. There's no way SpaceX has the capability to do all of that. So

others are going to benefit from this as well. And I think ULA is kind of primed schedule-wise right now to be the ones that are able to sign those commercial deals and get them off the soonest with enough capacity to actually launch some of these heavier satellites, or, you know, in the case of OneWeb, stacks of satellites. One other commercial company that's going to be affected by this would be Boeing, specifically with their Starliner. I probably should have put this in my list near the ISS, but Starliner is an interesting spot because the importance of having Starliner is now significantly greater than it was before this situation. The risk appetite to get it flying is going to be a

bit higher now because its importance is higher as well. It would have been easier a couple months ago to keep punting this down the road because it didn't quite fit into the ISS schedule. That's kind of what was happening over the last years. Every time Starliner got close to being ready to launch and they'd look for a slot on the manifest, the ISS would look at everything they have coming up for the next three or four months, and then they'd find the next open slot and put Starliner there. And then Starliner would bump again and they would do it again. And it would just kind of fall to wherever in the schedule it would fit, rather than moving other missions out of the way for when Starliner is ready.

I think that's the spot that we're into now, though. When Starliner's ready, it's going to bump something, and they're going to get that up to space as soon as they can. The ISS typically keeps enough cargo on station to run for many months, and the cargo missions that come up backfill that stock. So if they're able to do some manifest management to clear out a cargo mission and get starliner up to space sooner that's going to be a big deal because starliner can boost the iss it can take crew to the space station it can take some cargo it would be a huge huge asset for nasa and the international partners if that was flying and online so you know the the risk benefit payoff is is you know much more in the direction of benefits right now than it was previously in the direction of risk.

And, you know, the shifting tides here make that something that I think we'll see get priority of other things on the manifest in the near future. That will also lead to questions about what they're going to do after they exhaust their Atlas V flights. Is ULA going to get paid to human rate Vulcan? Is that something that they're going to do on their own? Will they be able to get more flights for Vulcan out of that? A lot of questions, and I think Vulcan is strangely going to benefit a lot from this situation, just looking at, you know, what's out there, what needs to launch, and what

the priorities are of all these different missions that are going on. So that's where I'll leave it. I think that's the full rundown on everything else that's been bouncing around my head with this situation going on. If you've got any questions or thoughts, hit me up on email, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com or on Twitter at wehavemiko. Thanks as always for your support at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. Join up there if you want Miko headlines in your life. But otherwise, I will talk to you soon.