Main Engine Cut Off - T+212: NASA’s Budget, Commercial LEO, and the Sustaining Lunar Development Contract

Episode Date: March 29, 2022

The White House has finally submitted its fiscal year 2023 budget request, which has big implications for NASA’s Commercial LEO program, and their newest announcement, the upcoming Sustaining Lunar Development contract to support the Artemis program’s lunar landings through the 2020s.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 748 other supporters.TopicsNASA Provides Update to Astronaut Moon Lander Plans Under Artemis | NASANASA Lays Out Revised Approach for Future Human Lunar Landing Systems – SpacePolicyOnline.comNASA to support development of second Artemis lunar lander - SpaceNewsBudget Documents, Strategic Plans and Performance Reports | NASAPrevious Years' Budget Requests | NASANASA Administrator Statement on President’s FY 2023 Budget Request | NASANASA Asking for Another Steep Increase in FY2023 – SpacePolicyOnline.comThe 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 Managing Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo, and we've got a lot to break down today. A trio of things, really. We've got the fiscal year 2023 budget request from the White House, finally, which has some big implications for two programs that we've been tracking pretty closely on the program over the past couple of years. Number one, the commercial LEO program, which is focused on building out some modules on the ISS, by the way, of Axiom space and then free flying commercial space stations in the future. And NASA's newest announcement, the Sustaining Lunar Development Contract, which is going to support the Artemis program's lunar landings through the 2020s. So I want to talk about both those things and the effects that this budget request and

specifically the implications of what that budget request means for the future is for these programs. So to start with, let's just do a little overview of the budget itself. It's a pretty big increase for NASA across the board, something like 8% of the overall budget. There are certain areas that got a bigger percentage increase in their budget request, and other areas that did a little worse. And these are budget request numbers that we're going to compare to past budget requests, future budget requests, the actual enacted budget that came in just a couple of weeks ago, very late from the usual schedule. There's also a lot of realignment this year in the way that NASA displays the budget

request, and that doesn't necessarily track to the way that Congress funds the budget request. So it's tough to track some of these numbers across years. But the biggest things are these two programs that I mentioned, you know, there's pretty typical increases across the board, there's a couple of programs that the budget request cancels, like Mars Ice Mapper, SOFIA, the flying telescope. And, you know, there's some unanswered questions about how those things will be dealt with. But to also give you an idea of how this plays in, you know, I usually most years kind of ignore the budget request, to be honest, because so much of what actually matters here is the congressional reaction to the budget request, what Congress actually wants to do. There's a lot of times when the budget request barely maps to what the actual budget is.

And specifically, the congressional timeline of that reaction is key as well. And this year, because it's a midterm election year, you know, we've got elections coming up in November that are going to be pretty massively reshaping of the Congress, I would say. You can debate exactly the extent of that, but we've got a split Senate right now, and there's likely going to be some shifts in both sides of Congress. So there's a lot of ambiguity about what's going to happen in the future. And those are the years when the budget request timeline really gets screwy. Obviously,

we just passed last year's budget a couple of weeks ago, which is way late of its usual schedule, and it's not going to be made better this next year because of those midterms. So the fiscal year typically starts on October 1st. Well, it starts on October 1st. Whether the budget is done by that is another story. So either Congress has to pass a budget by October 1st or do the continuing resolutions that we've seen over the past couple of years, which funds all the programs at the currently enacted level until Congress can pass a new budget. So what that means is the past couple months have been funded by the fiscal year that started, you know, like a year and a half ago, until Congress got around to passing the budget a couple of weeks ago. And that will be the funding levels for these programs until they

get around to passing another budget. The midterm elections are going to kick that budget beyond the midterm elections by quite a bit. I would be shocked if there is a passed budget in calendar year 2022. It'll likely be into 2023 before the budget that we're talking about here makes its way through Congress. And the makeup of the new Congress matters a lot as well. If the House or the Senate changes party control, the chairs of the committees that handle the budget are going to shift as well. It could be the fact that it depends who wins, who loses. There could be major personalities and influencers of the way the budget gets done that change out. So there's a lot that's going to get scrambled towards the end of the year. And we will watch exactly how Congress wants to deal with those things.

heavily determined by the intent that NASA has behind its request and what NASA is going to implement, kind of regardless of what Congress gives it by way of a budget. So just to provide a little more context, I know I'm doing a lot of context today, but let's think about the way that the Artemis program selected SpaceX Starship as its lander last year. They were originally hoping to select two or three companies that would work on landers for the Artemis program, but Congress gave NASA a very tiny budget compared to what they requested for landers for the Artemis program, and NASA had a choice. They could either stretch that schedule out, still select two providers, but say we're going to do it on a much longer timeline so that we make up how much money we need over time. Or we can just select a single provider because that is something that we can

fund with the current budget scope that we have. And that's what they decided to do. They went with SpaceX who had a $2.9 billion proposal. NASA thinks that they can fund that fully. This was at the time I'm speaking. they think they can fund that fully by the time they would need the lander. So they decide to do make what, in my estimation, is a very aggressive maneuver to select a single provider, say that we're going to do it on the budget that Congress gave us, not the hopeful one that we submit every year, and we'll charge forward in that direction. So that was a case of NASA being pretty fixed on where it was going long term. We're going to get a lander for the moon in the 2025-26 time frame, and Congress only gave us this much budget to work with, so the way to do that is to select a single one and make sure we

can fully fund it. So there are those kinds of responses that NASA has a certain intent, a certain direction it's heading, they need to do that with the budget they're given from Congress, and they're going to make it work. Rather than kind of wish casting, which has been the way, you know, the previous 10 or 20 years of NASA of saying, well, we want to do this program, but we need all of this money from Congress in order to implement that sort of thing. And if they don't give us that money, we just stretch the timeline with the same plan. The tact that we've seen from NASA in the last year has been distinctly different from that. So I do think that context helps look at this budget request a little differently. All right, so let's start with a quick update on the commercial LEO development program.

Because the future of the ISS has been so topical lately, the past couple of shows have been about that because of the implications of the war in Ukraine at the moment. So the past couple of shows or the past couple of episodes of Headlines, if you are someone who subscribes to that podcast as well, over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. You really should be these days because there's a lot of breaking news where I've talked a lot about this stuff. But the thing we were watching for this budget request is what kind of support for the commercial LEO development program is there compared to previous years? There are two tracks of this program right now. We have Axiom building out modules that will be attached to the

space station starting in 2024, and they will build out a station at the ISS. And then there's this free flyer program where there are a couple of companies competing right now to build commercial space stations for the later part of the 2020s, you know, 2028 timeframe. Blue Origin's in the mix there. You know, the whole host of characters we've talked about in the past. NanoRacks, we've talked about with Starlab. We had them on the show to talk about their program. There's a Cygnus-derived Northrop Grumman pitch in there as well. So those are the two tracks of the commercial LEO development program. And the ISS partnership is very shaky. So I wanted to see significant increase in the commitment to that program because it's

going to take a lot of money, a lot of resources to build out these programs. Maybe not even quicker because I don't know if you can speed up these kind of programs. You can't pull the schedules forward. But there's going to be problems that crop up that need more money, that additional funding would help with, that not having to claw for every dollar would help NASA maybe pick two free flyers rather than a single one, the way that we were just talking about the Artemis lander. So the commitment here from NASA did show that significant step up in the funding. NASA did show that significant step up in the funding. And, you know, specifically,

not only this year is the budget request quite a lot bigger for that commercial lead development program. But when they submit this budget request, they show the next four years a hypothetical request for the next four years to show the funding curves of these programs. So this year, they requested $224 million for the Commercial Leo program. Last year, they requested about $100 million. And this is the first time that Congress gave them all of that funding. So the enacted 2022 budget for Commercial Leo is that full funding of $100 million that they've requested. The previous years, they had only requested a couple million dollars here and there, or they requested something in the realm of $100 million. They were only receiving $15, $17 million in those budgets,

which is really almost nothing. So this year, they requested $100 million, they got $100 million. Next year, fiscal year 2023, they have now requested $224 million. So more than double what they requested last year, more than double what Congress applied this year to the budget. But Congress was perceptive to that this year. There's increased importance in this program. So I don't think NASA is out of hand to say that they're going to be able to get $224 million to support commercial Leo this year. Now, what is interesting is if you look back, last year's budget request, when they requested that $100 million, the out years, the 2023, 24, 25, 26 that were in that budget request,

each year was requesting $186 million into the future. This year's budget request, starting with the $224 million, which is already about $40 million above what they expected to request last year. So last year when they submitted their budget, I know this is getting confusing, last year when they submitted their budget request and they asked for $100 million, they said that this year we'll ask for about $186 million. What they actually asked for was $224 million. So already they're quite a bit higher than what they were expecting. And that $186 million number was what they expected to request for 23, 24, 25, 26. If we look at the budget requests this year, they are expecting

for 2024 and on to request $228 million, $229 million, $302 million, and then $435 million in 2027, presumably leading into launching some of those free flyer modules. So not only is this year a lot bigger in this budget request department, but the funding curve is a significant ramp up over the next couple of years, whereas previously it was flat right across the board. So I think that intention, years, whereas previously it was flat right across the board. So I think that intention, showing that intention is really important, you know, because the ISS budget lines are pretty much exactly what they were showing over the past couple years, you know, just over $100 billion for the ISS itself, just under $2 billion for transportation to and from the ISS, just under $1 billion for space and flight support of

all that program. The only thing significantly ramping up over the next couple years is commercial LEO. And so that is notable that they are putting that amount of weight behind a commercial LEO program. So now it's going to depend a lot on on how the schedules go for the contractors. How does axiom perform uh getting to the actual launch i believe this is putting them on the right track for fully funding that axiom contract that they signed a couple years ago for something on the order of 150 million dollars um so that seems like a good track there we're going to see over the next year how they handle the free flyer development contracts.

But if Congress responds well and gives them that full funding for $224 million, this puts commercial Leo in a much better spot this year than it was the trajectory that it was on over the past couple of years and obviously increased importance. So I really hope to see that. This isn't quite the gargantuan request that I might have expected. You know, I kind of think if you're NASA and you have an opportunity to show why this kind of program is important, you know, I mean, doubling a budget is pretty significant, but this is not the biggest line item on this budget. It's one of the smallest.

So, you know, if this was the opportunity to get even a little more greedy with that commercial Leo line, probably wouldn't have been the worst strategy. But, you know, I'm not a pro in this department. So I would have expected to see the funding curve be even a little more aggressive. You know, it only approaches half a billion dollars in 2027. And then obviously factor in inflation and whatnot. That's not as impressive looking as it might have been. The next two years being somewhat flat for this budget request is interesting. It might be that NASA kind of has a sense that this is what they could get from Congress. So let's just get that and try to hold that line. But I'm very interested to see exactly how, you know, the next Congress

deals with this. All right, before we dive into the Lander side of this all, I want to say thank you to everyone out there supporting Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com support. There are 788 of you out there supporting the show. That is a huge number, but I know there's 12 of you out there that want to be my boss to get us above 800 supporters. But you can be my boss. This is my full-time job now. This is my day job, and it's all because of support from all of you. And that includes 40 executive producers who made this episode of Main Engine 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 Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, rob tim dodd the everyday astronaut frank julian and lars from agile space tommy matt the astrogators at see chris he just trade law fred haymonth dawn aerospace andrew and seven anonymous executive producers thank you all so much for your support for making this possible and if you want to get i mentioned it earlier in this show here if you want to get miko headlines in your podcast feed every single week head over to mainenginecutoff.com support, sign up at the $3 a month or more level, and you will get, I'm not kidding you, an entire other podcast in your feed every week. It is a really good show to have this time of the year because there's a ton of breaking news that I typically get to first. For instance, you would have heard some of my thoughts on my next segment a couple of days early because it broke on Thursday or

something like that and I did the show Friday. So there were some early thoughts, some hot takes there. And there's some stories that just don't come up on the main feed that I'm covering over on headlines because they are important stories to track, but they are not something that I have a huge lengthy analysis for to make it onto the main feed. So if you want thoughts on every story that's worth knowing about in space, it's a great way to stay up on Space News to support the show. MainEngineCutoff.com slash support. Sign up and be my boss, and I thank you for it. The Artemis lander programs have been a very interesting topic over the years because there's been some marbly-mouthed explanations of exactly how this is all going to go.

marbly-mouthed explanations of exactly how this is all going to go. I've laid out the context at the beginning of how we got to where we are now with NASA selecting SpaceX's Starship as the sole lander for the Artemis program so far, and that includes specifically an uncrewed demonstration and then a crewed landing on Artemis 3, currently slated for 2025. That was a $2.9 billion contract that SpaceX is also putting in about that much money on as part of the partnership. And now with this budget request, NASA says that they're able to fully fund that at the levels that they are projecting over the next couple of years. And that is helped by the fact that last year, NASA got the full funding for what they requested for the lander. That was about $1.2 billion. Now, that is not all going to SpaceX. That is going to

support the NASA side of that work. It is also going to support the SpaceX contract. So it's not just, you know, $1.2 billion in the budget, and that's all going to SpaceX. There's some breakdown there where there is some NASA overhead that they have to pay for the people that are actually working on the NASA side of that program to facilitate it, to write the requirements, to work with SpaceX, to partner with them. There's a lot that goes on to it. So I don't know the exact mix. Is it half that money that can go to the actual contractors and the other half is on the NASA side? Is it 60-40? We don't know the exact breakdown, but what's important is that NASA has, with last year's budget, this budget request, and the projections, they are confident that they can fully fund SpaceX's contract, $2.9 billion

by 2025. Now, at the time when SpaceX was selected originally, NASA was hoping to have some competition in this program, hoping to be able to select two or three providers to build these landers out to kind of match what's happened with commercial cargo and commercial crew over the past years where they had two providers. And that provides benefits because you're getting redundancy, you're getting differential redundancy, I think is the term they use a little bit that there's two different options that are doing things in different ways so that you try to limit how many single points of failure you have. And then if one of the providers has an issue, a schedule issue or a functional issue, you have the other to back

them up. You know, we're seeing that strength, the strength in that strategy right now with commercial crew. SpaceX is flying to the ISS. Boeing is not yet. We've seen that with commercial cargo when SpaceX and Northrop Grumman both had issues with their launch vehicles at different times, and they were able to still get cargo to the ISS. So it's a good strategy, but they just didn't have the budget to be able to pull that off there. In the wake of that, Congress was not happy about it. There were certain parties within NASA that was not happy about having a single source for the lander. So there's a lot of talk about how do we get competition injected into the Artemis program and its landers. And at the time, there was this program called

LETS, the Lunar Exploration Transportation Services. I don't know, I got three or four of those words right. And it was sort of this thing that was like, okay, we're going to set up this program that we will figure out in the future. We're going to punt this decision to the future. But what we're telling you is that the competition to on-ramp more landers is a problem for future us. In the late 2020s, we will have this program that we will issue task orders for landings. And there may or may not be another commercial company out there that can bid on this. And then we'll say, look, the option is there for competition to have other commercial lunar landers. SpaceX just happens to have a fully working Starship that we've already flown on once. So they're going to be the favorite for those, but we're not going to completely give them sole source for the next 10 years. There is going to

be an on-ramp option for those that want to build a lunar lander and want to get a contract from NASA. Now, to many people that always read, either a little bit disingenuous because there isn't a market for that large of commercial lunar landers that can take humans to the moon right now. So you're just hoping that, in all honesty, you're hoping that Jeff Bezos personally wants to build a moon lander so much that he will personally fund a moon lander that will happen to exist in the late 2020s for NASA to take advantage of. This isn't something that has been commoditized like the launch industry. You know, right now we see both NASA, the Department of Defense, others out there that are leaning on the commercial industry to get their payloads to space because there is a commercial

industry to support rockets taking things to space. there is a commercial industry to support rockets taking things to space. That doesn't happen yet for lunar landers at the size and scale that you need to land humans on the moon, especially with NASA requirements involved. So that was always very hand-wavy. They gave the other competitors in the Artemis lander contracts, they gave them some design studies, so a couple million dollars here and there to keep their designs moving along to work on what they would need to bid on the next program, essentially. Well, now NASA has decided to add an additional contract to the Artemis program. This is called the Sustaining Lunar Development Contract. And what it is, is a way to get a second lander funded, get its development funded, so that they will eventually have two landers to compete for that future LETS contract, the Lunar Exploration Transportation Services contract.

So this does get around the biggest criticism was the LETS program is just wishcasting, that you're hoping for this lander to exist in the late 2020s without actually supporting it in the meantime. And it gets around the other issue, which is how do you get a second lander on ramped without doing something destructive to the contract you've already given to SpaceX? as a new thing in the Artemis program, where SpaceX is going to be accepted from this contract because they are also going to be funding the option B of SpaceX's original contract, which is a couple of additional requirements for their lander to be able to do things that they don't need to do on that initial Artemis 3 landing. So the Artemis 3 landing for Starship is going to go to lunar orbit. It is going to dock with Orion. It is going to take the astronauts down to the lunar surface for a short stay and then come back up and dock with Orion again for their trip home. The future lunar landings are

going to have to stage out of the Gateway, which is that space station in lunar orbit that NASA is working on building as well. So there are additional requirements that you need to go to Gateway. And then there are additional requirements for being able to take more than two people to the lunar surface, to be able to take more than the cargo they outlined for Artemis 3 to the lunar surface. There's going to be a whole host of other requirements for those future missions. And there was always this second option in the SpaceX contract, that original contract, to extend the development contract to include the work that needs to happen on SpaceX's side to actually be able to match those requirements

from NASA. So NASA, through this announcement, has enacted option B of SpaceX's contract. We don't know the full value of that, but on the order of a billion dollars, something like that sounds right, given the initial contract from SpaceX at 2.9 billion. So let's say 4 billion all in from NASA side on SpaceX contract. And then they're adding this sustaining lunar development contract alongside that, that is sort of very similar to SpaceX's original contract. It's going to include a single award winner. They will get two missions out of this. They'll get an uncrewed demo, just like SpaceX is doing, and then they will get a crewed mission on Artemis 5 or 6 under the current schedule to take humans down to the lunar surface. Now, the main difference here is that from the outset,

this new contract will be focused on those future lander missions, which means flying to the gateway, taking people down from the gateway, more people, more cargo, longer stays, all of those requirements are baked into this new program. So what NASA has done is taken that very hypothetical, you know, future competitive, you know, competition on the commercial market, lunar landers thing, they've punted that out to Artemis 7 or 8. And they've inserted two new human landers, human lander missions into the Artemis program, Artemis 5 and 6, one from SpaceX and one from the second human landing company that they're going to be funding development for, and not just hoping that they will one day build themselves a human lunar lander that can take NASA astronauts down to the surface, but actually

funding their development, just like they're doing with Starship. Now let's enter analysis mode, because I think this is a brilliant strategy from NASA. I'm honestly having trouble finding the flaws in this strategy, because it does this combo of things. It solidifies NASA's work with SpaceX on that original contract for Artemis 3. It makes that pretty much untouchable from people that would have criticized it previously. It gets around the hand-wavy requirements of this future commercial model by way of actually funding a second lander so that when we get to that commercial competition model, there are two landers that exist

that have both been funded by NASA, that both meet NASA requirements, that they can actually compete head-to-head for task orders in the future. And it adds some clarity to the Artemis roadmap by way of putting two additional human landings into the roadmap that were previously just notional. So now we have five landing missions of human class landers, two of them

uncrewed, three of them crude, on the books for even right now the notional schedule of the 2020s. There are five human class lunar lander missions on the books right now. Now, all of that requires Congress being accepting of this new contract type, being able to fund the human landing system program overall. Now, it's a program. It's not just one contract. They need to be able to fund that at the levels that NASA requires to actually pull this off. But if you're looking at what Congress has said in the past, and what NASA wants, and what Congress wants, and all the volleys of argumentation that has happened in Senate hearings and House hearings and everything else that has been put out, this is kind of a put your money where your mouth is moment. You know, Congress has been complaining, different

parts of Congress have been complaining that there wasn't enough competition in the Artemis lunar lander department, that it was annoying, that it was just SpaceX picked and that they didn't allow competition. And NASA has now said, okay, great. Well, we already got that one contract solid, solidified. So let's get a second one going and we'll, you know, enter competition. So if you're Congress, you know, pay up, Like, you've got to put the money out there. If this is something that you said you wanted, we are giving you that option. We have this very specifically delineated program that is basically just called the Congress Competition Lander Program, CCLP.

Please fund it. And even better than that is that NASA has to go to Congress and say that, but they don't have to risk getting the entire human lander program completely off axis by Congress coming back with a different response because they've already got a contract with SpaceX. They've already got funding heading SpaceX's way. Even if they get piddling amounts of funding over the next couple of years, they can fully fund it because SpaceX's proposal was so low. It's only $3 billion. You can find that in the couch cushions if you try hard enough at NASA. For Christ's sake, the SLS is getting $2.5 billion this year. We can probably figure that out. We've already signed that contract. Unless there's some

incredible act of hubris from Congress to specifically line item cancel a SpaceX contract, which is like, in a lot of people's fan fiction, not that far-fetched, NASA has that one locked down, and now they're putting the pressure on Congress to enable them to do more. So they don't have to go to Congress and say, we need $10 billion tomorrow because we want two lunar landers. They're getting it in little fits and starts. We've already got one lander, we just need a couple billion more for this next lander. Now, what's really interesting about the way that this is all going to work. So NASA is going to have an RFP for this second lander program sometime this summer, a couple months away. There's still some work to go to finalize that request for proposals. And then they're expecting

to select the winner sometime in early calendar year 2023. So that'll be, you know, January, February timeframe, maybe, let's say, March or April timeframe. So about two years from the date that SpaceX was selected. Are there going to be protests? Are there going to be, you know, the same sort of hijinks that we saw the first time around? Yeah, probably. These are how those programs go. So, you know, let's say it's a year from now, the selection's made, it's another couple of months of protests, probably not as bad as they were the first round. So you're pushing up to fiscal year 2024 before you're even able to send money the direction of this new entrant. So when you're looking at the budget requests, you know, yeah, hypothetically,

you'd want that money in there for the fiscal year 2023 to be able to pay this new entrant. But realistically, you're probably not going to be paying that money out until 2024 or so. Now, NASA will not break out the exact funding levels for how much money in this fiscal year 2023 budget request is going to SpaceX's lander, how much is going to the new program, how much money in this fiscal year 2023 budget request is going to SpaceX's lander, how much is going to the new program, how much is going to NASA internal costs. They are saying that that would affect the actual round of proposals coming up, because they would have a specific line item or specific monetary figure attached. That must be some regulation I don't know about, or NASA is relying on us not knowing about that

to just say, no, we don't want to tell you that information. So I'm curious, I'm sure there's journalists, capital J journalists digging into that and FOIA-ing it if they can or whatever, because that sounded a little, that didn't sound right, that NASA's not allowed to tell us that monetary figure. But what's really interesting is, again, let's go back to the way that you look at not only this year's budget requests, but the out years that they have in there, 2024, 25, 26, 27. The funding curve does ramp up for this section of the budget. About $1.5 of that is for the human landing system. Also included in there is $780 million for the Gateway, $276 million for the EVA suits that we would need for the lunar surface. Side note, this is a really good line item because until this point, we've had very little money in for the actual space suits that we need to go

walk around on the moon. And now NASA is requesting just under $300 million for that program to get them suits ready for 2025. But all of that is in the same line item. So Artemis campaign development includes human landing system, gateway and spacesuits, plus some other stuff, smaller amounts. But the funding ramp for this is $2.6 billion this year, just under $3 billion for 2024, $3.5 billion for 2025, $3.8 billion for 2026, and $4.4 billion for 2027. So it goes up quite a bit, you know, it almost doubles in the next five years, but it is not an unbelievable amount of money like the initial human landing system program was expecting to

be able to spend. You know, it was initially going to be a ramp that included like seven or eight billion dollars a year at some point in the peak funding years. Now it is significantly lower than that. And you can probably credit a lot of that to not only Congress's unwillingness to spend that amount of money, but SpaceX's willingness to put in so much of their own money means that the actual money that NASA needs to request from Congress is very low. $3 billion gets them their Starship mission by 2025, and that's supported by this funding curve. Unfortunately, we don't know in those future years exactly how NASA sees the budgets breaking down between human landing system, Gateway, and the spacesuits. But I think when you look at these amounts on here, what it doesn't include room for is a proposal for the sustaining lunar development

contract from Blue Origin or from Northrop Grumman or from Boeing or Lockheed. It does not include the option for them to propose a $10 billion lunar lander. The other contracts that were competing with SpaceX were in the realm of $7 to $10 billion that NASA would be out to fund those lunar landers. This budget request and the out years projection does not include the capability to fund a lander in that much. I think it probably can fit a lander similar-ish to SpaceX's Starship funding levels, right? It can probably fit a three, four, maybe $5 billion lander on the projected funding requests over the next five years. So if you're these other competitors that are looking to get into the Sustaining Lunar

Development Contract, you got to look at these funding levels and say, you know, NASA is going to throw us out immediately if we put a $10 billion price tag on this lander. You got to be closer to $5 billion and hopefully south of that to be in the mix for this. And that is just the reality of how much money is going to be available for these landing systems from Congress. So that's going to be a big storyline is which of the competitors that are going for this contract are willing to put a significant internal investment towards this to be included in this program. Blue Origin is the odds on favorite for that. Not only do they

have the resources to do so by way of Jeff Bezos, he wrote an open letter last year that was like, hey, President Biden, I will personally fund another $2 billion on top of what I put in my paperwork the last time around. So I think I did a show at the time of that open letter that if that's true, if that's what he was willing to put into it, that would have brought the Blue Origin national team lander pretty much, you know, in the wash with SpaceX's Starship at three, four million dollars. So that's true. If that's going to happen, you know, not only is Congress ready to put its money where its mouth is, Jeff Bezos should be as well with this contract,

because that's the kind of thing that's going to require to win this contract. Are the others out there willing to do that? Is Boeing willing to do that? Are they willing to personally put three billion dollars out in the line? I don't really think so, given where that company's at at the moment. Is Lockheed Martin going to do that? Hell no. Is Northrop Grumman going to do that? Plausible. I said this on headlines last week. They want to make anything that you want that can be made out of a Cygnus, they will make you. If you want a Cygnus tiny home, they would probably make you one. If you want a Cygnus recording studio, they would probably make you one. If you want a Cygnus, you know, recording studio, they'd probably make you one. And I really hope to get one of those in my near future. So they've seemed more willing for this kind of thing. The others that are out there,

Sierra Space, who's got Dream Chaser, they're working with Blue Origin on Orbital Reef, their free flying space station. They've been showing willingness to put a lot of money out there. They do have additional funding coming in by way of new ownership or new investment rounds. It's plausible that they would be able to put in enough to make waves in this competition. I think the biggest storyline here would be, does Blue Origin and the national team, right, that was Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Draper. Does that alignment stay together or are they breaking up?

Are they going to break up and Blue Origin is going to go it alone and do their own lander that is built around the new requirements? If so, does that free Northrop Grumman to do a Cygnus-inspired lander and put some of the commercial side of Northrop Grumman

that we've seen with Cygnus and Antares, sadly, is it give them additional firepower to go in and pitch something really interesting and unique that has shared heritage with Gateway, with Cygnus going to the ISS today? They've been in the mix in a lot of these programs. So if they're going alone, what does their bid look like? You had Dynetics in that initial round that was partnered with ULA and about a thousand other companies, and their bid was a hot mess. So what do they do to clean that bid up? And are they willing to, you know, get a broad enough net from all these companies that are willing to put their own contributions in to be included in a program like this? Does that, you know, does the sum of all that add up to something that NASA

would be able to fit into the budget? There are a lot of storylines going in there. Those are the people that I see in the mix. But I'm really curious to see if Blue Origin breaks up the national team or if Lockheed Martin breaks up the national team. If somebody in there just says, this wasn't working last time, let's go at our own ways and see what kind of ruthless competition comes out of that for this new program. Now, what's extra good for NASA in the way that this timing lands is that,

you know, the midterms will be behind us by the time they get around to selecting a lander for the Sustaining Lunar Development Contract. We should have an indication of what congressional reaction is like to this program to see if they're going to get that funding that they requested this year, you know, $1.5 million for the human landing system program, and get some indications on what the next couple years could look like for them. That could play into who they choose for the sustaining lunar development contract in the same way that that interaction, you know, played into them selecting just Starship in the past. So there's good timing there from NASA's perspective. And I think that the signals have been good from Congress this year, um, for both commercial Leo and for human landing system.

And, uh, I think this is a really excellent strategy from NASA to, uh, it gives them, it checks off a lot of boxes that they need to check off both for themselves, for Congress, for industry. And, um, and boy, howdy, there are a lot of lunar landers on the schedule. Even the notional schedule is looking very interesting right now for NASA's perspective. So if you've got any thoughts or questions on all of that, hit me up on Twitter at WeHaveMiko or email me anthony at mainenginecutoff.com. Don't forget to head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support and sign up if you want access to Miko Headlines, if you want to help support the show,

if you want to be my 800th boss. We're going to need 12 of you to hop on board there. So head over there and do that. But that is all I've got for you for now. Thank you all so much for listening, and I will talk to you soon. I'm sorry, I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry