Main Engine Cut Off - T+221: Psyche Misses Its Launch Window, SIMPLEx Missions Struggle to Find Theirs (with Jake Robins)

Episode Date: July 1, 2022

Our good friend Jake Robins, host of WeMartians and my cohost on Off-Nominal, joins me to talk about Psyche missing its launch window, the state of the SIMPLEx program, its troubles with launch slots, and how NASA might approach this in the future.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 41 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, Matt, The Astrogators at SEE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Hemant, Dawn Aerospace, Andrew, Harrison, Benjamin, and seven anonymous—and 813 other supporters.TopicsWeMartians Podcast124 - The Future of the Mars Program (feat. Scott Hubbard)Jake Robins | PatreonWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) / TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) / TwitterOff-NominalNASA Announces Launch Delay for Psyche Asteroid Mission | NASASoftware testing problem delays Psyche launch - SpaceNewsPsyche launch delay forcing revamp of rideshare mission - SpaceNewsNASA SOMA: SIMPLEx- HomepageNASA Mars smallsat mission passes review - SpaceNewsNASA moves up Lunar Trailblazer launch - SpaceNewsThe 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 NewsletterMusic by Max JustusArtwork photo by ESA/JAXA

Hello and welcome to Managing Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo and we've got our good friend Jake Robbins of the Wee Martians podcast and my co-host on Off Nominal here with us today because we've got some stuff to talk about on the planetary side of NASA. Psyche, the mission to the metallic asteroid, missed its launch window, which is having major downstream effects for it and the rest of the Discovery program overall. And the rideshares that were supposed to go on board with Psyche and rideshares of the Simplex mission at large have been having a lot of problems lately, actually getting to the launch pad, staying with their mission, or even if they are staying with their mission, getting to their final destination. So I wanted to talk with him about the policy around how the simplex program manages rideshares, whether rideshares are a good fit for planetary missions overall, some ways that NASA could manage that in the future, and other scientific organizations

could look at that in the future. So there's no one better but Jake Robbins to talk about all of that with, so I'm excited for that. Before we get into the conversation, I want to say thank you to all of you who support Main Engine Cutoff. There are 854 of you supporting the show

every single month. I'm so thankful for your support. That includes 41 executive producers who made this episode possible. Thanks to Simon, Lauren, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, David Ashtonot, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Matt, the Astrogators at SCE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Heymonth, Fred, Dawn Aerospace, Andrew, Harrison, Benjamin, and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for the support for making this possible if you want to join that crew and get miko headlines every single week where i run through all the stories that happen in space giving my thoughts on them in a separate rss feed that's special for you it's an entire other podcast head over

to mainenginecutoff.com support and join up there thank you so so much. And without further ado, let's give Jake a call here. Oh, Jake Robbins, the old friend of the pod, Jake Robbins. Basically co-host of this show in everything but name, I would say. Okay, I appreciate that. Even if you're not here, you're spiritually the co-host of this podcast.

So welcome up. I love it, yeah. Thanks for the promotion. I've brought you here because we have what is, every now and then we get these topics co-hosts of this podcast so i love it yeah thanks for the promotion i've brought you here because we have what is uh every now and then we get these topics that are like the exact collision of the venn diagram between jake and anthony interests and uh what has been happening to the simplex uh planetary missions with regards to their ride share status on launch vehicles

is i don't know if there's been one that lands more center in the Venn diagram. Yeah, it's pretty tight in the middle there. There are like several different storylines to run down here. So the biggest one is that Psyche, the mission to the metallic asteroid, has been officially delayed till, well, not delayed. It's just missing its launch window. Yeah. Not happening. It's not happening.

And then they're commissioning an, a, an independent assessment team to figure out what to do now. Um, this has been a mission that has been wreaking havoc on two other ride share missions, which we'll talk about later on. Uh, and there's another ride share mission as part of the simplex program that

also has been shifting as launch vehicle. So there's the psyche side of this all, and there's the simplex ride share side. Let's take the psyche one first. They had been originally targeting, let's see the beginning of their launch window or no, they were targeting like august and then it moved to september and then it moved to october uh well yeah so there was

there was uh they have like kind of a big launch window they've got a little bit of flexibility because it's like uh well they're flying on a falcon heavy so they got a lot of a lot of yeet underneath there if you will a lot of delta V available to them, but they're also using like solar electric propulsion. So you don't have to be as like tight with your launch window as you might normally be if you're heading to Mars, right? So I think August 1st was like the was the early part of the window that was the nominal one they wanted to go for. And then they had something called a contingency window, which stretched from September 20th to like october i don't know fourth or fifth or something yeah a little bit further okay so into early october

and that was like the the end of the window i guess in the middle it like wasn't as well like you want is either the beginning or the end were the two kind of areas so they started the beginning they went right to the end and then it got canceled so that's that was the the status of it can we talk about what happened here because it's murky not we don't have a lot of details maxor is building the satellite bus and jpl is managing the mission or operating the mission is that correct how the structure works here yeah yeah so this is it's like he's a discovery class mission right and so this is the the of the three three main programs NASA has in their planetary portfolio, Discovery, New Frontiers, and your what we call flagships, your large strategic missions,

Discovery is like the cheapest of those three, right? It's like the their competed missions, they have a reasonably small cost cap, still a big number, but you know, compared to the other things, it's a little bit smaller. And so all these discovery missions try to try to save a little bit of cash here and there and so one of the things that psyche was doing was buying this maxar ssl bus and so this was a sort of be like a off the shelf kind of like you know your listeners are probably much more familiar with ssl 1300 than mine would be like this is a very common geosat like there's probably dozens hundreds of these in geosynchronous orbit i can't even i don't even know how many there are but i haven't counted but it's a lot yeah so so it's a pretty common bus and they wanted to just say like hey

we can just take this thing that already works slap some bigger solar panels and some instruments on it and go to an asteroid so yeah but the problems came at some testing phase here and uh i should pull up the exact quote because it's like very murky but it was like legacy testing or legacy simulation infrastructure met wait which one was legacy ssl 1300 was legacy but the testing infrastructure was new uh yeah maybe they're both a little bit legacy i don't know what the situation is but like basically for these planetary missions what they will often do is they'll make like a replica of the of the vehicle that is like absent the structure so it's just like imagine like a big like a big circuit board almost like just a big table where

all the component copies of the components are laid out and they wire them up in the same way so you can like plug in software to this and it still thinks it's a spacecraft even though there's no like structure or propulsion or anything like that and this is what you can use to test software on it and so um i guess in this case what they were doing is jpl does this for all their missions and they had something kind of set up ready to go but the software would have to be mixed a little bit so you'd have some like standard jpl like whatever they use for all their testing all their spacecraft they had that ready to go and then maxar had to bring in some ssl 1300 specific stuff and there had to be some sort of

melding of the mind this software had to come together and then i guess that was where the friction ended up happening so you probably have a little bit of old jpl stuff and a little bit of old maxar stuff and i i don't know where the the disconnect was but they realized as far back as november last year that there was something uh wrong with this and it was going to be uh behind schedule and they've been busting their butts all year to try and make up for it and then ran out of time it's been the spider-man meme yeah so this is the part that's interesting right because um let's just look at jpl missions that have happened historically right uh a lot of them fly on on hardware that has you always bring up the the mars landers and the heritage of lander platforms that i think lockheed built you know a platform that was used for i'm gonna screw this up phoenix insight yep mars polar

lander yeah uh the life explorer one that they're thinking about now would be the same thing yeah so it's the same bus that they use time and time again and i guess that one was built specifically for the use case of planetary missions whereas this this is trying to use, like you said, a commercial satellite bus that has different constraints. So does it feel like their mismatch might be in using something that was like not having the first version of this hardware be custom built for planetary missions and the testing that you would need to do for that but having it come in from this other kind of commercial side of the industry or do you feel like this is just straight up something else that's going on internally well i i'm sure there are like design things that would have been different that they would have had to account for like because it's it's not a planetary vehicle and it's not really designed you know it wasn't designed to operate in deep space right but you could argue that like that wasn't a surprise no one like was like wow

really it doesn't just you know so this should have been part of the the whole design requirements and it should have been accounted for and and when they when they presented their plan you know when the when the psyche team came to nasa and said this is our bid this is our idea they would have had all that figured out they should have had a roadmap to say like hey we can we can save some money on this ssl 1300 bus it comes with a couple caveats we have to do this this isn't this so here's how we're going to accommodate that that should have been part of the plan i'm sure it was so that where the disconnect is is the big question right did did nasa like did the psyche team like not adequately realize how much work it was going to be or did the maxar team drop the ball and like deliver a substandard product that was late that

maybe it's a little bit of both i don't know all right let's talk about the downstream effects um so you mentioned discovery program has is that cost cap still a billion dollars i don't know it's been yeah 900 a billion somewhere in there yeah however it adjusts for inflation i think is yeah dry or math and we don't have and like you know we haven't had one so i guess lucy was one uh lucy came under budget i think which was good but uh insight like blew right through the cap so the cap is like kind of when we will talk about this but the cap is it's a little loosey-goosey sometimes yeah that's what we'd call guidelines well that's that's what i want to talk about because um i think in in past i mean we can use jwst as an example of this that just kept blowing through

cost caps um there's there's always things blowing through cost caps but this is a weird one when they go into these reviews right they always go into this period of review and say, okay, well, we missed that cost cap, but to get to the finish line, we're going to need this amount of money and it's going to take this long. And then there's a whole renegotiation phase to see if they will get authorized for that. But it's always seems to be happening when there's still a very sizable chunk of work left and, and not like we just couldn't we fixed our issues because that's the thing we left out there was that they say that they've worked out these issues on the testbed

simulators but they don't have enough time to complete the testing program before the launch window closes so they're in this review it's not even that they have work remaining other than like just you know doing the work they don't have development work remaining um and every statement i saw about this left the option open that this would just be canceled per this review the two options are figure out how to make this still fly or cancel the program at all we're 900 and i haven't written down here somewhere 985 million dollars in on this mission and it's all but ready to go. And, you know, there's nothing left to develop, but cancellation is still an option. It seems extreme in this case. It does, yeah.

But you're thinking, we talked about this the other day, and you were like, well, it's a cost cap. So... Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of opinions on how you should handle that, right? So one would be, like you said, so we're $985 million in, you don't want to, you don't want to may have a sunk cost fallacy. But if the thinking ahead, like, how much extra money does it take now to get a planetary mission, if your decision is cancel it, and spend $0, starting from today, or, or spend the extra whatever 40 million dollars to get a discovery class mission that you choose the 40 million dollars it's the it's the best deal by far right but that being said so there's these competed missions these cost cap missions both discovery and new frontiers um you have to you have to go into this competition and you go against other science teams that have their own missions and nasa puts them all on the table and decides the best one so that you can

deliver the best science for the best amount of money and if every one of them blows through their cap and overspends and doesn't deliver what they promised nasa it's a kind of disingenuous to nasa but also like really not fair to the other teams who may have had a good proposal right like if you had known that psyche didn't have their stuff together then you should have picked me instead because i do right that's kind of the logic you would have um and this is supposed to go back to you know this cost cap culture is supposed to go back all the way to was like faster better cheaper that was the idea it's like you come up against that dollar value go one dollar over you're done out of the way next person let's go

we're moving quick here you know like it's very very uh quick succession to get these missions going so if you if you know if nasa wants to play like the the strict parent here this is yeah this could be what they wanted to do um that being said strict i was gonna say good parent and that might be the difference in the fact that i have a two-year-old and you don't the tough parent the tough lesson right like you know no allowance for you this uh this week you didn't do your chores so i don't know they might do that but it also matters like there's not i don't want to be flipping about it because there's huge effects on you know it's not like NASA is going to go to Congress and say,

we need an extra $40 million line item totally separate from all the other science programs. Like they have to still grapple with what that would do to the next discovery program. And the next, you know, the next, um,

planetary missions in line that are at the moment, you know, fighting for funding or trying to get that funding sent their way so they can actually build what is it veritas and da vinci exactly the discovery program is a line item right and so if if the old if the older mission eats some extra budget then the newer missions get pushed a little bit or you know constrained otherwise yeah and that's always the trade-off you know i think we we saw before Opportunity went goodbye, there was a lot of talk of like,

is this, what was it, $39 million a year or something like that to operate it? Is that holding us up from putting that money to other Mars missions? So it's not like this is a unique scenario in the planetary budget, but it is certainly weird to have, if they blew through the cost cap and they weren't even close to launching it there would be no question of like okay we should just

cancel this one yeah the fact that it's like we ran out the clock but we didn't run out the budget it's it's super weird yeah yeah and you know what maybe maybe this is just this is all just tough talk right like maybe this is nasa just being like you could get canceled all right get it together everybody what is it disney and sony uh negotiating in public for spider-man just to bring up spider-man twice in this show i don't know why yeah it could be that right so maybe while they have this independent review going on maybe nasa doesn't want to be like it doesn't matter what the review is going to be like we're going to pay we're going to buy the nation come on you know that may not be what they want to say.

So it could just be talked to. It's tough to parse that at this point. All right. So the launch side of this all is what I want to dig into now. Maybe we can do a primer on the Simplex missions, because you didn't mention that, right? Flagship, Discovery, New Frontiers were the three of the planetary you know missions of scale what the hell is simplex where did it come from how new is it is it a good idea yeah so that's it's a great point that you know that i didn't you mentioned that i didn't mention it um because it's still a new program right so i think 2018

2019 is what kind of when it was getting it's kind of you know getting the ball rolling here and the first selections were made i think 2019 was the first one that they picked they kind of been slowly onboarding but there's been three missions selected so far these are are like sub small so if you had if discovery new frontiers and flagship are like small medium large this is extra small it's like a a tiny little you know cubesat style uh spacecraft mission i think the cap's like 55 million so it's very small like this is maybe it's extra extra small because if you have discovery at a billion and this at 55 million there's nothing in the middle there there's no like 300 or 300 million dollar class planetary missions right now um and so these are just little tiny things. And 55 million bucks means you don't

really get to buy your own rocket, you don't get to do a lot of stuff on your own, there's a lot of extra constraints on here. And so all these three so far have been have procured, you know, at some point rideshare rockets on some other mission to go to their destination. And they've had very, very bad luck. All three of them have run into problems. And, you know, some multiple problems in some cases. And so, yeah, it's been an interesting thing to watch because it's a new idea. And I think in principle, I love the idea of like a cheap planetary mission. But the questions I'm asking myself right now are whether we're executing this in the right way or not and

yeah i don't know where you want to start with that but well i do want to mention i think i maybe this is bad info i think there were two two of the artemis one cube sets are technically simplex missions is that true uh it was like lunar h map or something like that i don't know there may be there'll be two other ones or something there may be i don't know jake's the expert but the three that you're talking about are the ones i want to talk about because it's a weird case for ride share in many of these um almost none of them were heading to the same destination as their primary payload they were all taking advantage of a close enough trajectory yeah right which is typical for ride, but that's not really typical for ride shares at the same time.

Right. Because when you ride share in low earth orbit, you're heading up to something close enough and, and you can make up the difference within your margins to go from, you know, maybe you need a degree different of inclination or you need another a hundred kilometers of apogee. Yeah.

The differences are very small um and the timing doesn't really matter and the timing might even be the bigger aspect here because um if a mission to sun synchronous orbit gets delayed six months well sun synchronous orbit is still in the same spot but if a planetary mission gets delayed a launch window all of the other bodies in the solar system are in a different spot yes right so it's kind of akin to like taking a bus downtown and being within walking distance of your destination if like you had to detour you're still three blocks away versus like missing a connecting flight and then you have to figure out what to do in dallas for three hours like it just feels totally different on where you get left off in the bad scenarios. So in the example of Janus,

which was the last rideshare left on Psyche, they were originally trying to fly by two binary asteroids with two different spacecrafts. And then they got... This is where I want to ask you about the scientific management of these missions, because if they were to launch early in the window, they could still pull that off. If they launched later in the window, they couldn't get to their primary destinations. And they were late in the game looking for other destinations to fly by. And was the point of Janice just to fly by any asteroid

that they could get to? Or was there specific scientific stuff that they decided early on, on what they needed out of those two binary asteroids? Yeah, it's a great question. And, you know, Janice is the interesting one, I think, because, like you said, yeah, they so they had the early window was like, you know, the August 1 launch was enough for them to satisfy their requirements. That was like the ideal that met the requirements and i don't know how i haven't dug too deeply into like the individual requirements i don't know if it was tied to an individual body i don't think so i think they were just like we need to go to an asteroid we want to learn this this and this here are some asteroids that satisfy those requirements and they work great and we can

hit everything it's awesome and then when they got bumped it was like it was already bad bad news for janice because the the September 20th, which was the second date they picked, they could not get to anything. It was bad. There was an opportunity a few days later. I think if you went into the October part of that, if it slipped another week or two weeks or whatever into the back half of that contingency window, then they were able to hit what's called a threshold goal.

of that contingency window then they were able to hit what's called like a threshold goal this would be like it gets to some asteroid and it's like it's kind of okay and we can hit you know if they have 10 science objectives they say like if we hit seven of them that's our threshold requirement that's like the minimum to make this mission worth it 10 is what we want 13 would be amazing or something like that right so this hit like this the threshold requirements so it was like not ideal and it still depended on psyche slipping another two weeks from the window they they wanted and so like it was bad news right away as soon as they they switch and now it's just it's just gone so who knows what they're what they're going to do next now they're they're basically without a ride

they have to rethink the whole mission now because yeah like how many how many vehicles fly out to asteroids like it's just it's a it's not a big market for rideshare, for rides going to the asteroid belt. Yeah, and then even in that case, right, Escapade was originally supposed to fly on Psyche because Psyche was originally supposed to do a Mars flyby. It eventually went from Falcon 9 to Falcon Heavy, so that was no longer the mission plan.

So Escapade got dumped off the mission. at that point not even dumped off the mission but completely replanned like it's a different it's a different thing now yeah and it's and it still doesn't have a ride actually so they they they made it was really weird they made this partnership with rocket lab so escapade is two vehicles it's going to go to mars they made this partnership with rocket lab where now they're building the vehicle into a rocket lab photon stage and then that's all we know like there was no launch agreement with there so i don't know if they're going to be launching on rocket lab vehicles or if they're going to stick photon something else they have not said a word about that so the only statements i saw was that they'll try to find another ride share in the 2024 time period and it's like i'm looking at my watch

and like those mars missions would be on the books right now if we knew about them you know yeah yeah it's the thing so you don't just happen upon deep space missions this is the thing right so like it even just like try and do an inventory of your head like between now and the next like 10 years how many things are are leaving out in that direction? There's like a handful, you know, like it's, it's,

it's not much to choose from there. So yeah. So that's dose. Both those missions now are both in limbo. We don't know what's going on with those two simplex. So two out of three don't have rides right now. And they should have been flying already. It's.

And this is also a situation that might be like a victim of where we are in the timeline of the industry because when the simplex program was first theorized right the economics of the industry were different than they are today um you mentioned a cost cap of 55 million dollars and you mentioned you're not going to just go fly your own small sat mission for that but there's a 30 million dollar mission right now working its way to lunar orbit yeah right and that was a the capstone that flew on a rocket lab electron on a photon for 30 million dollars all privately funded nasa threw in some funding their direction but it was a privately led mission i should say um and it's it didn't depend on anyone but

themselves to do and of course rocket lab much in the way that spacex always is an outlier in the industry is currently an outlier in the industry um because small launch companies are not doing so hot at the moment there's not a lot that are flying reliably so you know outstander outlier status notwithstanding, is this the model that Simplex should be in the future? Yeah. And is the industry reliable enough in your eye for scientists to plan on that, though? That's tough, right?

So the two things that I've been kind of like noodling is, A, yeah, do you try and get away from rideshare and see if you can get a dedicated launch because the Rocket lab things seem to work really well for capstone. And it would work really well for lunar trailblazer. You know, that could probably get to the moon on a electron.

I don't know about the deep space ones. I don't know if I haven't done the Delta V math, but I feels like that's quite a lift for, for electron to get, you know, put Janice at the asteroid belt. I don't know if that's the right thing for it. But regardless of the specific rocket, you know, could you get a dedicated launch to do that?

And that seems like one path you could do. The other thing I could think of is maybe NASA needs to just, like, choose their science a little differently. Like, maybe for simplex missions, you need to propose something that is not time or destination specific like maybe it should be more focused on heliophysics missions where like you just blast it off into some distance from the sun and it's measuring you know and the sun's everywhere so it's like fine wherever it is and you just measure that or maybe it's like interstellar dust you want to measure that at different so you just need to go out to an altitude and back down again maybe that's what you want to do i don't know it's like maybe you stick to those things to at the moon where you

have much more flexibility and many more riots going out there so you could pick your science in a way that is a little more conducive to that so those are the two things i've been kind of noodling and but yeah like you said the rockets yeah i don't know like do you do build a program around rocket lab i don't think so Do you build a program around Rocket Lab? I don't think so. It's not a really smart thing for NASA to do. Same reason you don't build it around Starship yet, right? It's still on its own and different and weird, right?

I feel like a good policy for the next five years is to only rely on rideshares if you're heading to the same destination generally. I even think about the Marco marco cubesats on insight right that was insight yeah um they were like tech demos to see what we could do with these kind of cubesats on that mission super valuable way to do one of those missions for not a lot of money lunar trailblazer is now gonna fly uh on the it was originally going to fly on an imap that not the email thing but the interstellar yes mapping and something else um which i think was going to a similar

trajectory that capstone just did with this ballistic transfer um to get out to sun earth l1 i couldn't find a lot of detail on exactly where they were heading but effectively they were going to sun earth L one. So it was close enough to be able to get something to the moon because of the way that you got to fly. They're going to pass the moon at some point. Um, but now it's going to fly on an intuitive machines launch.

So it'll ride share with that going to the moon. It's great. You know, the only risk is that one of the payloads is delayed. Um, but if it's, which one's more likely to be delayed at the moment? Intuitive machines.

So if you're waiting on the primary payload, you're fine. So that makes sense. Other than that, like, I don't think, I don't think you can rely on the small launch industry's schedule, pricing. I don't think you can rely on pricing for the next couple of years. But five years down the line maybe these missions have a lot more flexibility because they can do their own launch for you know cost cap 55 million dollars peel off five or ten of that for a dedicated launch and you know that

that mission is going to be successful or at least successfully launched to its destination versus bet 55 million dollars that you might end up on a launch vehicle that might head in the direction that you might hit your threshold scientific goal. That is a weird, weird balance at the moment. Yeah, yeah. That's what I mean about picking the science, right? So like, I don't know if maybe this program was too ambitious, like maybe they just got ahead of themselves and they were not ready to do this. That happens sometimes you want to try these things out. And maybe they just got ahead of themselves and they were were not ready to do this that happens sometimes you want to try these things out and maybe maybe they need to increase the cost gap maybe that would make it better like maybe if they made this a 200 million dollar

program and you could you could maybe get your own a little bigger rocket in there maybe that would make more sense i don't know there's there's i don't know to give them credit like 55 million dollars for if it works great yeah it's like i don't know that's kind of cool and it's not like it's not like if you don't launch on a ride share that somebody comes in and throws your satellite in the trash like you still have it it didn't leave earth yet so i mean even psyche for that matter right if it gets canceled here like you know somebody could say, I want to pay $40 million

to launch my own spacecraft to an asteroid. Like, that's a plausible thing. Yeah, yeah. Or honestly, even, I guess, I don't know what the rules are. Could they re-compete it in the next round or something?

Yeah, they could. There's lots of things you could do with that. Oh, hell, they could fit it under the $55 million Simplex cost cap. There you go. We figured it out. Yeah, yeah.

I don't know. There's lots of options. And maybe, so maybe you're right. Maybe a Simplex, like maybe the right solution is, yeah, this is like a bumpy program. It's a cheap little demonstrator. We try some wacky experimental stuff here. And it's not as smooth as getting your own mission and that's just how it goes and deal with it like maybe that's the right answer too but i don't

know i do have a slight um spidey sense that this ride share uh interest kind of grew out of the same side of nasa that typically gets attached to these industry trends like five years too early um yeah yeah okay i'm gonna a couple other examples i have like hosted payloads they made this whole big noise for the last couple years about how hosted payloads are going to be so great they're going to put these nasa sensors on commercial geosats and we don't even have to pay any money to get up to geo it'll just be this little sensor that sits there that has not really been a good success um there's other ones i mean honestly the the space force and air force might be more a victim of like talking about how much they're going to have um those secondary payloads on like espa rings like the adapter that

they use to put their stuff on a launch vehicle that hasn't really gone well yet and so there's ideas that tend to work well in the commercial industry of like how do you do things economically when but but the trade-offs are totally different from the commercial industry to scientific programs like this that have such a long process you know because the the process that lead up to a commercial mission is can we we do a certain goal for, you know, and be solvent? Regardless of like, you have to keep it in budget, but your budget is only as much as your solvency is. So like, go write a budget at Relativity Space who's raising a billion dollars every other week. You could probably write whatever budget you want in there and plausibly get it approved.

Versus the whole competition phase where there's you know asu is competing with apl and jpl and there's so much uh committee process in the beginning not not in a bad way but just like to make sure that they're choosing the right thing and they're beholden to that decision that also trying to pair that with like innovative strategies that are a little bit fast and loose doesn't doesn't go nicely together yeah there's like you know there's always a little bit fast and loose doesn't doesn't go nicely together yeah there's like you know there's always a little bit of culture clash there right which is where the you know the science community has uh bless their hearts they have like a very kind of standard thing they've always done and it's always been this way and because a lot of that's rooted in

just the scientific method this is just how you do science and so you have to have these kind of like big big processes to to compete it out and and choose who's got the better idea um and it's it's always yeah it's very interesting when those those streams collide right and it's like you how do you do that and there's lots of scientists that are that are all into that they're really excited about the opportunity to do weird stuff and try stuff and not worry about you know because because the flip side is like you get exactly what you want but it comes every 25 years and you know you get one mission in your lifetime and like that sucks so yeah um it'd be way better if you could have more of these things even if a bunch of them fail um but it does come with some compromises that they're not normally accustomed to you know just even just thinking about these um

like these clips missions are very interesting to me in terms of this is like the quintessential example of the collision of those streams right because clips is just like we got a bunch of spots they're really cheap i don't know when they're flying i don't know where we're landing i don't know how much power you're gonna have like it's just but there's gonna be a spot for you and then we're just like you know these scientists are just dumping these, these instrument ideas into a big pool and NASA's going like, Oh, we got a ride. Uh,

you, you and you can go. And then they just like slap it on a lander and go. And it's, it's crazy, right. To try and design. Um,

if you're used to the old way, if you're trying to design a science, uh, plan for that, it's just like, okay, I'm going to go study the moon. What are you going to study?

Well, this kind of rocks, where are you going to land? I don't know yet, but hopefully when we get there, some kind of rock will meet what I want to do. And, and how it's going to go like this it's it's crazy so um it's interesting just to see how that's going to settle out because you know at some point they're going to have to come up with a good sort of operational model for doing science in that environment and i don't know if

anyone has any good ideas on that yet like there's there's lots of stuff they're trying but it's it's still a little chaotic yeah yeah yeah i think i'm also thinking that rideshare is a bad name for what they're trying to do with simplex and it's it's almost more of like a dual launch in the aryan five kind of way whereas a little bit yeah i would attribute rideshare more to clips missions like there's all these payloads going to the moon and it's a it's enough of an aggregation of enough people going to the same destination yeah same destination would be key in ride sharing a ride lift line or uber whatever uber pool nobody likes doing that yeah the bus yeah yeah well no but it's not even like

the bus that's what i'm saying it's like a small number of people going to that many destinations versus a large number of people going to some destinations. Like, it just doesn't make sense. You don't have a good time. It's, yeah, all right. Well, I came out more staunchly opposed to the current Simplex plan than I thought I would going in. So you've radicalized me in the inflex sorry about that yeah um what are

you working on lately we should plug off nominal i always forget to plug it enough and uh if you like the hijinks of jake and i off nominal has been amazing lately i will give us credit for yeah yeah we've had some quite the series of shows yeah good for us so we've done really well what are you doing on the we martians side of things uh well so we martians so i i just had an interview with um scott hubbard so this was uh this is el ron's brother el ron's no not his brother um but good joke uh so this is uh uh so scott hubbard is like the guy that basically invented the mars program that we have today. So he came in in like 1999, 2000, and redid the whole program after those twin failures in 1999. So there was Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter. These were like those really embarrassing

failures from NASA. One of them was the one where they mixed up, you know, like SI units and non SI units and sent the orbiter into the atmosphere. So it was not a good time for NASA. And he came in and rebuilt the whole thing. And so the, you know, the atmosphere so uh it was not a good time for nasa and he came in and rebuilt the whole thing and so the you know the cadence of stuff that we have today if you think about the the whole pattern of mars odyssey spirit opportunity mars reconnaissance orbiter phoenix maven curiosity insight perseverance like this whole like program of mars missions we've had is is uh we have a lot to thank him for on that and i wanted to ask him that you know kind of a similar vein of the conversation we're having today where things

are changing in the mars program um we have this mars sample return program coming up this this four mission uh mega uh project you know basically it's it's a very large planetary mission one of the biggest ones that nasa will do um i think think Viking might give it a run for its money. But you know, that was one that made five spacecraft basically. So obviously, it was very expensive. So this whole thing's coming up. And it's just very different from how we've done Mars before, because all of a sudden, we're not going to have this cadence anymore. We're going to spend all this money and do all these missions and the science payload comes at the end, instead of like trickling into the whole time. So we're going to stop missions now so that 10 years from now we get a cache of rocks delivered home. And that's tough.

That's a really hard thing because you have a huge workforce of scientists, of engineers, you know, JPL, NASA, people who are good at Mars they're experts at Mars they've been doing it every 26 months they get to send something there and they have a lot of practice and now they're not going to get any more practice and that's a very challenging thing to manage from a workforce perspective and I wanted to ask his opinion on it because he's got a lot of you know thoughts on how that goes so it was a cool conversation he made me feel a little better about it which is good so yeah you should definitely check that out it's especially wild when you consider like the people that you're

talking about that we're practicing every 26 months that it's like they're kids that will be doing the science on the sample you know it's like another generation away you know if you're going to be the old guy at lpsc when the people are talking about the results from the mars sample yeah i was there i remember when we yeah, it's not going to be very much fun. All right, buddy. Thanks for doing this. Awesome as always.

Yeah, no problem. Thank you. Thanks again to Jake for coming on the show. If he does not spend enough time with me during the week, I once in a while convince him to come on and share

his planetary knowledge with us because as you can tell, he's an expert in the field. So if you don't listen to Wee Martians, you got to get that in your podcast feed. If you don't listen to Off Nominal, you got to get that in your podcast feed. But otherwise, that's all I've got for you today. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks again to all those who support over at MainEngineCutoff.com slash support. If you've got any questions or thoughts, hit me up via email, Anthony at MainEngineCutoff.com or on Twitter at WeHaveMiko. And until next time, I'll talk to you soon.