Main Engine Cut Off - T+213: Amazon’s Project Kuiper Launch Contract Blockbuster

Episode Date: April 14, 2022

Amazon is purchasing up to 83 launches from Arianespace, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance—in addition to the 9 Atlas V launches they bought last year—to deploy their Project Kuiper constellation. This is a huge deal that changes the game for heavy lift launch providers, and has major implications for the small launch providers in the industry.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 766 other supporters.TopicsAmazon signs multibillion-dollar Project Kuiper launch contracts - SpaceNewsArianespace, ULA, Blue Origin discuss executing ambitious Kuiper constellation missions for Amazon - NASASpaceFlight.comAmazon launch contracts drive changes to launch vehicle production - SpaceNewsAndrew Parsonson on Twitter: “Interesting details from @Arianespace regarding the @amazon deal. 16 of the 18 missions will be launched aboard the Ariane 64 with the upgraded P120C+ boosters. The new boosters are set to be introduced in 2025 and only if they are approved by @esa Member States in November.”Episode 55 - I’ve Slept on a Torpedo - Off-NominalThe 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/Ben Smegelsky

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo and we have a gigantic launch contract to break down today. Amazon is working on a satellite internet constellation, like most of the space industry is either working on a launch vehicle or a satellite internet constellation, like most of the space industry is either working on a launch vehicle or a satellite internet constellation. Theirs is called Project Kuiper. It is a 3,236 satellite constellation. They are already approved from, importantly, the FCC on that. And just to give you some context on the way they need to roll this constellation out, they have until July 30th, 2026 to launch 1,618 satellites. And then they have another three years till July 30th, 2029 to launch the other half, another 1,618.

And those rules are set by the FCC for the approved constellation that they have. The rules are so that you can't just get a constellation approved and then sit on that approval and kind of take up space that somebody else could be using. And it incentivizes you to actually launch the constellation. And the rule is if you don't launch half your constellation by that first date, the six year mark, then you get stuck at the number of satellites that you have on orbit. I believe that's the way the rules are currently written. There were a lot of amendments over the time, over the years, but whatever, the pressure is there to get these things launching. So Amazon last year announced this big deal where they bought the final nine Atlas V vehicles that were remaining from United

Launch Alliance, and those are going to serve as some of the earliest launches for Project Kuiper satellites. They do have a demo mission coming up on the small satellite launcher ABL on their RS-1 vehicle that's going to launch two satellites from Project Kuiper, and those will be kind of the Pathfinder demo satellites that we see these constellations typically start with, and then they would roll into those Atlas V flights. So now they've announced this deal for 83 launches, up to 83 launches, from Arianespace, Blue Origin, and United Launch Alliance on the Arian-6, the New Glenn, and Vulcan Centaur, respectively. Now, notably, SpaceX is not in that list which is a been a major source of talk over the last couple of weeks since this announcement had hit and I do think there are some legitimate reasons for them

being left off that it's going to be the bulk of the show breaking down exactly how all these vehicles compete but you know obviously when you have a constellation this big you really require heavy lift and that's one of the earliest things that I want to talk about. The idea that small satellite launch providers would be good for mega constellations. That was a talking point over the past couple of years. Originally, Virgin Orbit had a launch contract with the OneWeb, the other satellite internet constellation player other than SpaceX, Project Kuiper, the major players there. And that launch deal eventually fell apart through a variety of means. OneWeb's bankruptcy, Virgin Orbit's early struggles. I don't know exactly what the

breakdown was there, but I think they had something like 37 launches booked. But you're only getting one or two satellites up on each launch there. It's not a lot of satellites that you can put up with a small satellite launcher. And when you've got to launch full planes of satellites to get 1,600 satellites on orbit in four years, they're just not a good fit. So then the small satellite launch players start saying, okay, well, what we're good for is replenishing constellations, right? You have 40, 50, 60 satellites in a single orbital plane. If you lose one, you're going to have to replace the satellite in that plane. So that's the thing that we're going to be good for. That might be true for a constellation of, for something like, let's say, spy satellites, where you have 10 on orbit. That might be a good fit, where you just need to launch

one, they're kind of exquisite satellites. When you have 3,200 or 4,000 or 10,000 satellites on orbit, then they are not exquisite satellites because you have to make 10,000 of them. That doesn't really map either. What you would do is launch a whole set of orbital spares and let orbital drift, orbital mechanics do the work for you to eventually drift that satellite into the plane that's needed and insert it into an orbital slot. You know, in the meantime, you can kind of space out those satellites on the plane that lost the satellite and space them out a little bit more just to improve coverage and kind of bide your time until that one drifts over your way. So I'm not convinced that small satellites, small satellite launchers are really going to have a

play in the mega constellation market at all. I think they might have a play in the constellation market, the micro constellation market where you've got, I mean, even like Black Sky, we're seeing the commercial imaging company Black Sky, they're launching two at a time on Rocket Lab. And that's because they have a constellation of a handful of satellites. It's not going to be thousands of satellites. It's not, you know, a planet that has thousands or hundreds and one day thousands of satellites on orbit. They're very tiny. Black Skies are a little bigger, they can fit two of them on a Rocket Lab Electron, and they're building out this constellation of tens of satellites. And that seems like a good fit. But these other bigger mega constellations, I don't think they're ever going to fit on a small

satellite launch provider. And honestly, that's why you see Rocket Lab, when we had Peter Beck on talking about Rocket Lab's positioning, Neutron is specifically their larger vehicle that is going to be kind of in the Falcon 9 zone. That's sized for deploying a plane of a constellation. So, you know, right there is even the current, you know, ruler of the small launch industry saying, yeah, we may be a little too small for these kind of things. So I just wanted to get that out there to start. But let's dive into the heavy lift market here and break down exactly what's going on with this launch deal. So we'll go one by one through the vehicles that Amazon purchased here. Let's start with ULA and Vulcan. They bought 38 launches

from ULA. They will carry 45 Kuiper satellites per launch. And the agreement here, interestingly, includes a lot of additional investment from the ULA side in the launch infrastructure around Vulcan to support a higher flight rate than they were planning originally. So they're going to be trying to launch about 20 to 25 times per year with Vulcan under this new deal. They were probably going to be significantly less than that because as of right now, Vulcan had a lot of DoD missions come in their way by way of the National Security Space Launch Program. They have a couple of flights booked with Sierra Space flying their Dream Chaser vehicle to the ISS, but there's not a lot on the payload manifest otherwise. So this is the big commercial contract that is the anchor tenant of Vulcan.

38 launches is even higher than what the DoD was buying as part of that National Security Space Launch Program. They're going to be buying something in the 20s, depending on exactly how the numbers shake out. So 38 launches here is now the biggest customer of Vulcan. So 38 launches here is now the biggest customer of Vulcan. ULA is also going to be building out a new mobile launch platform to host Vulcan so that they can support two vehicles side by side, which is going to be helpful because a lot of times when they are launching those Department of Defense payloads, those things can sit on the rocket for a month as they do checkouts and testing and wait for the launch opportunity. So to be able to do a parallel process is really big.

So new mobile launch platform, new vertical integration facility where they assemble the vehicles. They only have one of those at Cape Canaveral right now. So they're going to be building a second and they're also going to be buying a second ship to transport stages of the Vulcan vehicle from the factory in Alabama over to the launch site. So this is a huge investment from ULA in upping the flight rate of Vulcan, which if you do the math of like what fixed costs are there per year and how does that impact the launch pricing, this could have a huge effect on Vulcan's price and bringing that down to be even more competitive than they've already targeted to be against the Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy family of vehicles,

and ultimately these other vehicles that are in the program as well. Ariane 6 from Ariane Space, they bought 18 launches of this vehicle. They will all fly on the Ariane 64 variant. That is the variant with four solid rocket boosters. That is not due to fly for a couple of years. The initial Ariane 6 launches that are coming up towards hopefully the end of this year, maybe next year, are going to fly with just two solid rocket boosters to start. I should have mentioned in that Vulcan section that they are hoping to have their first launch off this year, but, you know, probably next year because they haven't gotten the BE-4 engines from Blue Origin yet that power Vulcan. They've also mentioned, I'm just doing some Vulcan cleanup here because I had my notes out of order, but they also mentioned that they're going to be looking to pull up the schedule on reusing those

BE-4 engines by having them detached from the stage and then be captured and be reused down the line, which is obviously important when they're going to be flying so much. They're going to need a lot of engines to fly that frequently. So that is a big part of the Vulcan development schedule here as well. Anyway, back to Ariane 6. So the initial flight is going to need a lot of engines to fly that frequently. So that is a big part of the Vulcan development schedule here as well. Anyway, back to Ariane 6. So the initial flight is going to be that Ariane 62 variant. And Ariane 64 is going to be needed for these Kuiper launches. They can carry 35 to 40 satellites per mission. There's also a longer fairing that comes with the Ariane 64 variants. And 16 of these 18 missions are not only going to be on that Ariane 64 variant, they're going to have upgraded solid rocket boosters on the sides

as well. Andrew Parsonson on Twitter has said that those are currently set to be introduced in 2025. So, you know, you start looking at the schedule that I mentioned, they've got four years until July 2026 to get 1600 satellites up. And the Ariane 64 variant with the upgraded boosters is not coming until 2025 at best looks a little schedule crunchy, which is what I want to talk about next. Blue Origin, this one, not a lot of details on exactly how this shook out, but they sold 12 new glens as part of this launch contract, and then they have an option for 15 more. I'm not exactly sure why they're the only ones that have like this weird optional situation as part of their launch deal. But overall, that is, you know, a gigantic vehicle that is still at this point, two years away at best, based on what I'm looking at. So

schedule pressure again, applies here. But the benefit is when they do get New Glenn online, they can carry 61 satellites per launch on top of that vehicle. Now, one update on Blue Origin's plans that I saw in a NASA Spaceflight article, and this was something that I've been curious about myself, but Chris Gebhardt over at NASA Spaceflight had this article about the big launch contract here and mentioned that Blue Origin, you know, gave them a response to a question. And they said, we have extensive redundancy in our fleet and operations, and we are planning on having four first stages very early in our flight program. Now, this is an update because I had previously heard that Blue Origin's plans included,

or they were limited to only building two first stages. That is it, two first stages, and they would reuse them over and over again. Having four as their target now seems more realistic to me. Having two seemed, especially with a vehicle that you're trying to land on a boat, a moving boat from very early on in the program, that seemed questionable to my ears. So the fact that they're aiming for four makes me a little more comfortable in what those early flight rates would be like for New Glenn. So those are the details of the launch providers individually. So now let me talk about why they might have selected these providers, some of the details that went into the negotiations

here, as my best guess would be applied to those, and some other considerations about exactly how this heavy lift market shakes out. But before I do that, I want to say thank you to all of you out there supporting Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. A show or two ago, I asked to have over 800 bosses, and we are now at 806 people supporting Miko every single month. 806 bosses is a lot of bosses for somebody that quit their full-time job. But I love it because you're my favorite bosses. So if you want to be my boss, mainenginecutoff.com slash support, join the crew there. 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, The Astrogators at SCE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Heymonth, Don Aerospace, Andrew, and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for the support. And if you want to listen to Miko Headlines, which is a special paid-only show that I do for $3 a month or more, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support and jump in. You get an entire other podcast in your feed every single week, and it's a great way to stay up on the news, support the

show. I really think it's a good addition to your space news diet, so get that in your life and help support the show, and I thank you for it. Okay, so why did Amazon land on Ariane 6, New Glenn, and Vulcan Centaur? Well, a lot of people think that they stayed away from SpaceX because they don't want to work with SpaceX, they don't want to give money to a competitor, and SpaceX doesn't want to give good launch services to a competitor. And I'm going to call BS on these arguments altogether. Let me illuminate why. Number one, SpaceX launches a ton of competitors to Starlink, right? Because that's what the implication is. You don't want to launch a satellite internet constellation because Starlink,

and you don't want to give them a better leg up because Starlink. Well, SpaceX is launching a bunch of one-web satellites over the next year or two. Now, you could say that's because Elon Musk personally wants to prove a point to the Russians after they spurned him early in his career, and that could definitely be the case. But when you think about Starlink as a communications platform, go ahead and list off how many communications satellites have been launched on Falcon 9 in the last 10 years. It is a lot, a lot of communication satellites. The Iridium constellation, one-offs up to GEO. They've got some Viasat things coming up. There are plenty of competitors that fly on Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavies. And honestly, if somebody rolled up to SpaceX and said,

we want to spend between $6 and $10 billion to launch satellites, why would SpaceX turn down $6 to $10 billion? That is kind of a ridiculous idea. Now, from the Amazon side, I think there is a lot more to it. A thing that has been overlooked in a lot of the coverage that I've read over the last week, and honestly even slipped my mind in my initial take, if you did listen to Miko Headlines after this award was announced, I kind of forgot about this part entirely, but let's talk about the fairing specifics here. SpaceX fits 60 Starlink satellites under a Falcon 9 fairing, and they do so by having them all, you know, basically packed as if Ikea designed these satellites. They're all flat packed, they're really jammed in there, and they're basically maxing out the volume and mass of Falcon 9, they are designed that way

as essentially as a design goal. That does not appear to be the case if under a New Glenn fairing, which is seven meters wide instead of five, and it is, you know, as tall as my house instead of, you know, as tall as two stories of my house, you can only fit 61 Kuiper satellites under a New Glenn fairing. That means these things are significantly bigger in volume. You know, the mass, maybe it shakes out differently, but the volume of a Kuiper satellite is much bigger than a Starlink satellite if these are the numbers that we're dealing with on something as big and heavy as New Glenn can lift, but with a fairing that is absolutely gigantic. And I think that starts to make things click as to why

the other vehicles started to look much more reasonable, because Vulcan Centaur and Ariane 6 have a significantly longer fairing than Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy do today. SpaceX is working on a longer fairing for Falcon Heavy, but it would only fly on Falcon Heavy. So you can't compare these launch contracts straight up to a Falcon 9 because to match how many they could lift on an Ariane 64 or Vulcan Centaur, the fully loaded version with all the solid rocket boosters or New Glenn, you might need to buy either a Falcon Heavy with a long fairing or two Falcon 9s.

So launch price wise, you know, two Falcon 9s, you're looking at $100 million. A Falcon Heavy, you're looking at $100 million. A Falcon Heavy, you're looking at $100 million. And you're looking at them being in a development program for a long fairing that might not fly for a couple of years. And honestly, if you're looking at flight rate concerns, I don't know how many Falcon Heavies SpaceX could launch per year, or honestly, or even incentivize to launch per year. Falcon Heavy launches out of pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center. Not sure if you noticed, it's a little bit busy lately because there's a lot of humans flying to

space out of Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center. They are trying to potentially launch Starship out of 39A at Kennedy Space Center, and they still do the occasional, you know, other Falcon Heavy missions on their manifest, like all the Department of Defense ones. So how much room is there for 10 Falcon Heavy flights a year? I don't even know if SpaceX would be able to fly 10 Falcon Heavy flights per year. Now, not talking about skills. I'm talking about, can they fit in their manifest because of all their other priorities? SpaceX is not really incentivized to delay Starship testing, to delay crewed flights, to delay the DoD Falcon Heavy missions. They're not incentivized to delay that stuff in order to launch 10 Falcon Heavies per year for Kuiper satellites for, you know, essentially $100

million. And I think that incentive part might play into this more heavily than we might be thinking, because Amazon goes to these other three competitors who, with the exception of New Glenn, because Blue Origin has a lot of its own plans internally that require the vehicle, they've already announced a handful of commercial deals. Vulcan and Ariane 6, and honestly, even New Glenn to some extent, they really need commercial deals of this size and scale to make the numbers work for them overall. In the case of Ariane 6, I often complain, you've probably heard it before, that people get the Ariane 5 and 6 motivations backwards. They think that it is designed to be a commercial launcher that also

does the institutional launches for European governmental programs or scientific programs or whatever it is. That is backwards. Europe has a vested interest in having a homegrown launch capability, and they subsidize that by selling commercial missions on the market, right? So they're going to have this vehicle exist regardless if anyone wants to fly on it commercially. The numbers work out a lot better if they can sell commercial vehicles and make a couple billion a year that they apply to the program and help pay for it. But it's much more akin to an SLS program that is a national effort, right? The equivalent of a national effort. It's kind of like if SLS was able to be commercially competitive and those commercial launch deals

helped make SLS cheaper for the taxpayers to fund. That would be a great thing. We would all be thrilled if that was the case, if SLS was a commercially competitive vehicle. And that's the case that Ariane 6 is in. Now, they've had trouble selling commercial deals on Ariane 6. They've had a couple of commercial deals here or there, but nothing of significant scale. And this, 18 launches, that basically guarantees their commercial deals through you know mid to late 2020s um that is a huge deal for arian 6 and and on the vulcan side i don't know if you count the sierra space dream chaser missions as commercial they are commercial cargo missions

so you know hypothetically that is a commercial launch for ula but it's a nasa launch it's a little different than you know a commercial private company um, or public company in this case, but this is a huge commercial sale for Vulcan. It changes the game for the math that they can do on how, what their flight rate looks like. Obviously the infrastructure investments that we talked about, um, the fixed costs being divided over a larger number of flights per year makes a huge difference for ULA's operations. This is a game changer for ULA. And honestly, um, if this is a thing that Tori Bruno, recent guest of Off Nominal, if you have not watched that show, you should, this is a thing that he should get huge credit for because ULA has put in a lot of work over

the last couple of years to, um, you know, they saw the writing on the wall. And in that off nominal interview that Tory Bruno did recently with me and Jake, he was really honest about when he took over as CEO saying, you know, this company might not make it and it's not going to make it on this current vehicle list. So we've got to change things. They went through some hard times with a lot of layoffs. They have completely turned around operations internally. They still do things the ULA way. And quite honestly, we've seen the effects of a lot of those layoffs in there being more scrubs and schedule slips and issues on ULA's current vehicles. But they're undergoing a huge change. And they've positioned themselves to not only win

the majority of launches in the National Security Space Launch Program, right, they won the 60% of the launches where SpaceX won 40%, but they put themselves in position to actually pull this kind of launch contract off and really change the game for themselves over the next couple of years. So these three launch providers really needed these commercial deals. And Amazon, I think, rightly saw that going into negotiations with this, they have, if not all, they have the majority of the leverage in these negotiations. Whereas with SpaceX, as we just talked about, they have so much going on already. They have so many programs, both internal and external, that Kyber was never going to be a priority for them. It was a nice to have for the amount of launches that they've got on the manifest, but it was never going to be a priority for them.

Whereas in Arian 6, Vulcan, and to some extent, Nuclen, this is an anchor customer coming in and Amazon can use that to get really aggressive in negotiations. That could mean aggressive with pricing by saying, look, we're going to go over there and buy a Falcon Heavy for $100 million. What can you do for us? I know you're all targeting around $100 million, but I'm about to buy 38 Vulcan Centaurs. Can you give me a good deal on that? Or could you make these investments on your side to up the flight rate? Because by the way, we've got a flight rate problem that we're going to talk about in a second to get all these satellites up in the next four years. On the Ariane 6 size, it's, hey, you

don't have a lot of commercial launches on that manifest. Can you give us a little bit of a bulk discount here and beat them on price, and we'll make sure that your commercial manifest is filled for the next 10 years. Maybe it's being aggressive with that schedule priority. So, you know, maybe with Blue Origin, it was, we're going to buy the first 12 new Glenn launches. You're not going to fly another customer until you've done 12 launches for us. I don't know that's the case, but that's something they could say. They could come into ULA and say, you've got no commercial customers on this, so do whatever you need to do to fly those

Department of Defense missions, but we want all of your capacity until we get our 38 launches done. They can be very aggressive like that because they have so much of the leverage here. And they were never going to have that over SpaceX. SpaceX could say, no, not interesting. Doesn't work with our plans. We've got Starship going on. We've got Falcon Heavy flights already booked. And that's just not the flight rate we're looking at with Falcon Heavy. Now, Starship is obviously the thing I left out talking about yet. For Amazon that has this schedule, and maybe we should get into talking about their schedule here, Starship wasn't really going to fit. Yes, all these vehicles that I'm talking about, Ariane 6, Vulcan Centaur, New Glenn, they're still in development program, but they're not in their

design and development program. Starship is undergoing design changes, launch site changes, regulation changes. It's undergoing a lot because SpaceX is being agile and aggressive with it, and they've got their own plans for it. And honestly, SpaceX is going to be launching Starlink V2 with it. So would Amazon have been able to even get on Starship's manifest if and when the schedule was predictable enough for Amazon? Unlikely. And I just don't think that schedule was predictable enough for Amazon, nor rapid enough for them to do what they need here. Because honestly, even as it is, it's going to be tight. They've got four years to launch 1600 satellites.

They're going to need something around 40 launches over the next four years, right? 10 launches a year. They've got nine booked on an Atlas 5. Now you're looking at when do these other launch vehicles make their first flight? Vulcan maybe towards the end of the year, Ariane 6 maybe towards the end of the year. I'm going to say Ariane 6 could make it because they certainly have a lot of pressure to make it internally. We didn't even talk about that, but the war in Ukraine changes the game here for Ariane 6 too, because there are a lot of launches that were supposed to be on Soyuz that now have to fly on either Vega C or Ariane 6. So there's going to be some part of the manifest for Ariane 6 in the early days that's going to be taken up by those

institutional launches that needed the shift from Soyuz. So you've got Ariane 6 towards the end of the year, Falcon Centaur probably a year from now, New Glenn probably two years from now. the end of the year, Falcon Centaur probably a year from now, New Glenn probably two years from now. How quickly can these get up to flight rate? That's a huge question mark, right? Because not only does it depend on nothing really going wrong in those early flights and needing to redesign anything, which is a typical thing that happens when you're flying a new vehicle, but it also depends on having production lines that can scale up quick enough to produce enough stages, enough engines, enough solid rocket boosters. That's a lot of stuff to get going over the next year to be able to immediately start launching 10 commercial launches a year for these vehicles. Now, this is a huge dependence on Blue Origin's

BE-4 engine. They've got to make two of those for every Vulcan Centaur, and they've got to make, you know, seven or eight of those for, or nine of those, I guess, for New Glenn, because they've got two in the upper stage. And that's the BE-3U, but, you know, it's a certain amount of engines coming out of Blue Origin's factory to get these launches off. Now, can they start producing hundreds of engines a year, based on what we're looking at now? Uh, I guess it's plausible, but it certainly doesn't seem to be fitting with the current trajectory of that company. You've also got on the upper stage of ULA, they've got an RL-10 engine from Aerojet Rocketdyne. They just signed a deal for 116 engines from them to cover all these launches. How quick can they make those?

Can they make enough of them to get these all built to actually be able to fly 10 times a year over the next four years? That seems completely unlikely. And I just can't do the math. You know, maybe those nine Atlas 5s, right? There's not a lot going on in the Atlas 5 manifest these days. They could plausibly start launching those monthly once Kuiper has their satellites ready to go. That's my expectation. Whenever they're able to get full batches of Kuiper satellites, those Atlas Vs will be launching monthly. Beyond that, I don't know what math it is to get 40 launches by July 30th, 2026. And even, honestly, the next three years after that, that seems a

little easier because theoretically, two or three of these are up to flight rate, and you can launch that much. But it certainly seems likely that Amazon's going to have to file for a schedule extension here. And, you know, maybe say something, something pandemic, something, something war, and you get it approved. Inflation, throw that in there for good measure. But showing that you have put out, you know, billions of dollars here on launches, that should put a little confidence in FCC to be, you know, okay, we'll give you an extension. We understand this is pressing circumstances. I think they're going to have to do that because otherwise I'm not sure how this money works out or that the timing works out, honestly. So all in all, this really isn't that surprising,

right? It was an eye-popping number, 83't that surprising, right? It was an eye-popping number, 83 launches from these launch providers. That was an eye-popping number when this was announced, but as I think through this, it's not really that unexpected. They need a long fairing. They only get that from Falcon Heavy. Falcon Heavy puts it at price competitive with these other vehicles if these other vehicles are delivering on the cost savings that they have mentioned. New Glenn, who knows what that's going to cost. I've heard ridiculously low numbers. I've heard ridiculously high numbers. I'm not taking any guesses. That's what that one's going to cost. But Vulcan Centaur was always aiming to be 100 million. You know, this version has six solid rocket boosters. So that pushes it

another couple million above that. Ariane 6, same deal. But you know, it's more competitive than it would be if you could fit all these satellites on a Falcon 9. So if you're comparing two Falcon 9s or Falcon Heavy to these other vehicles, that shakes out a lot closer. And you factor in all this other stuff of what gets priority on these companies' roadmaps, it starts to make a lot of sense. And I think this is going to be a really interesting move for the heavy lift industry to have such a big patron to, you know, spur the development and the schedule pressure, really, to get these vehicles flying. It's a really exciting time for these big old rockets that we're going to get to launch over the next 10 years. So I'm very excited.

And, you know, boy, it's fun to see some rocket competition really coming into full swing here so if you've got any questions or thoughts on the stuff i'm talking about here hit me up on twitter at we have miko or on email anthony at mainenginecutoff.com once again thanks to all you supporting over at mainenginecutoff.com support uh be my boss get yourself some miko headlines in your life and until next time for listening. I will talk to you soon.