Main Engine Cut Off - T+246: Starship’s First Test Flight (with Jake Robins)

Episode Date: April 24, 2023

Starship finally(?) flew its first test flight! Jake Robins of Off-Nominal joins me to sort through our thoughts on how it went (it was janky), what’s next for Starship, and to try and figure out if SpaceX wasted more steel or time this week.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 36 executive producers—Tyler, Pat from KC, Brad, Theo and Violet, Matt, Fred, Robb, Simon, Dawn Aerospace, SmallSpark Space Systems, Moritz, Donald, Frank, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut), Kris, Harrison, Chris, Joel, Jan, Russell, Pat, Benjamin, David, Lee, Bob, Joonas, Lars from Agile Space, Stealth Julian, Steve, The Astrogators at SEE, Warren, Ryan—and 843 other supporters.TopicsJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) / TwitterStarship Flight Test - YouTubeSpaceX on Twitter: “Liftoff from Starbase”Starship lifts off on first integrated test flight, breaks apart minutes later - SpaceNewsOff-NominalOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 104 - Ricky Bobby Goes to the Moon (Live from Space Symposium 2023) - Off-NominalEpisode 95 - Horsesh - Off-NominalEpisode 89 - The Final Year - Off-NominalEpisode 88 - But, Nonetheless - Off-NominalEpisode 76 - Walter Cronkite was Faking It - Off-NominalThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen 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 John Kraus for Relativity

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo. I am back home once again after my trip to Colorado Springs last week for Space Symposium. An awesome time. Did a ton of live shows that you'll be hearing in the feed soon. I'll talk about that in a second. Met a bunch of great people, a lot of good connections, many of which we're lining up to get on the show here or over on the other show that I do, Off Nominal. If you don't listen to Off Nominal, we'll talk about it today because my co-host, Jake Robbins, is here with me now. But it's a really fun show. We have interesting guests. We have a great time with them.

We make jokes. We talk about spaceflight stuff. Sometimes we get into serious conversations, but a lot of times we're having a good time talking about space. So you'll be hearing the people that I met at Space Symposium on both shows over the coming months. An amazing time just getting to meet a bunch of people that I either know online or follow in the industry. Met a lot of people that listen out there. So if you're one of the people that I got to talk to, it was a pleasure meeting you. It's always cool to go to those events and find out who's listening a lot of times. You know, there's some people that definitely came up to me and said that they listened

and I would have no way of getting in touch with them because of the nature of their job or the kinds of agencies or organizations they work with that we just wouldn't run into each other. So awesome time to get a chance to put a lot of faces to the names that I see online or the messages that we sent back and forth. So super thankful to be out there and had a great time with the Redwire crew as well,

hosting me at their stage at their booth. So as far as the shows, they all were streamed live on the Redwire YouTube channel. So I will put a link in the show notes. You can go there and watch all of the shows if you want, but they will also be coming straight into your podcast feed over the next week or so. I will put those five episodes of Miko that I did live. I'll put those out.

So you'll get to hear that all right here in the podcast feed as well. But before I got into all of those shows, what I wanted to do was talk about the Starship test flight that happened last week as well. Thought it was right to jump in and give some thoughts on the situation. So I'm doing that with none other than Jake Robbins, my co-host of Off Nominal. He used to do the We Martians podcast, and you've heard him on the show before. So he and I caught up and shared a bunch of thoughts about the starship test flights so without further ado let's dive in i have no agenda for this and i

have not prepared my thoughts in any way nor have i so this is exactly we're already rolling this is part of the show uh we started talking about starship during our weekly catch-up and we haven't talked in like a month yeah so and then we started getting into content and i said hold on i was gonna do a show about this today and this would be better if we do this live so let's see we've got we've got a little under 30 minutes uh to unpack what the hell happened with starship uh yeah would you like to start having been on a boat at sea the day that this flew? And I should note for the record, I was in a rental car driving to the Denver airport after a flight cancellation

out of Colorado Springs. We both were in ideal circumstances for this test flight. Yeah, I had what I'm basically surmising has been the absolutely worst timed vacation I've ever taken in my life. Just all the things that I did not want to miss happened exactly during my vacation, including all the stuff you did at space symposium. So yeah, I'm still struggling with, with my disappointment on that,

but my FOMO was very strong, very strong. Yeah. So I, I don't know, man, I, I have been like just teetering back and forth on this.

Like I just, there are parts about this Starship flight, which are great. So I don't know, man, I have been like just teetering back and forth on this. Like I just there are parts about this Starship flight, which are great. And there are parts about it that are just like so disappointing to me. And I don't know what the net the net results of those feelings are. I don't know where I come at the end of that. I'm just like turbulating. Is that a word? Turbulating?

I have no idea what that is. That is a word. I'm experiencing turbulence in my thoughts. yeah so this is good I'm glad that we can we can talk about this even though we have not prepared anything for this was it was it SN 10 Starship SN 10 that landed and then blew up and we got that's the one yeah yeah years if it landed or not well that has now been supplanted by did this test flight put them back more than they would have been back if they did not fly this for like two months or three months or whatever because that's really i saw you talking the discord at the off nominal discord uh which if you're not aware off nom.com slash discord you should get in there or you can get there via the miko patreon but that's going away soon so don't worry about it too much um because that's been your kind of thing of like did they know that there was going to be a result like this and could this have been averted to put them further ahead schedule wise uh yeah like i guess we did skip over everything that

happened uh for people that i feel like it broke out into the mainstream press so this you probably understand what happened and if you're not gonna go on in a limb and assume that miko listeners had watched the starship yeah i think so because given the fact that i was at a wedding this weekend and uh multiple people came up and were like all right what happened and they're like not space people at all yeah i needed your take on this yeah my my uncles were tweeting me so you know it's yeah yeah okay so everyone's good We're all caught up. But that's your primary holdup of like, was it foreseeable that they would have put themselves back a certain distance to then rework

up to the point at which they could do another launch rather than having fixed a couple things that were known to be janky? Is that your holdup? Yeah, so I mean, okay, so they like leveled the launch pad right and then that's kind of like the big well i mean there's more to that but but i think there's there's still this sort of like sentiment with the starship program like it's oh like spacex is some flashy

new startup that's doing things differently and they blow stuff up and and they do all this stuff and like that was obviously the way like, you know, we watched Falcon landings come to be like, that's definitely, or, you know, even going back to the initial Falcon stuff.

And even just, even the start of the Starship program was pretty scrappy, but I think we're not, I don't think we're there anymore. I don't know. I don't think we should be treating SpaceX. Like it's some like brand new thing. That's like trying to get to the next funding round.

And they're just like, we got it. We got to fly something like, you know, we're thinking about all the histories of these other rocket startups and Astra and, and ABL and Firefly doing all these like kind of weird stuff in their first launches. I don't I don't think we should think of SpaceX in that category. And that's where I'm kind of struggling, right? Because, like when you when you want to fly something to get the data, I definitely like understand that mentality. And I think that's the correct mentality. Like I'm all on board the SpaceX idea of like, you know, fail fast and fly the thing. But this should be that should be like

a strategy that you take to reveal a bunch of unknowns, because like that's that's the whole point of it, right? You fly the thing and you find out what you weren't thinking of that's that was that in my brain is the whole benefit to the strategy and why it's worked so well for spacex but i don't think they had a bunch of like mysterious things that didn't work with this rock like i think they all knew like the launch pad won't work uh the engines are a little flaky like there was all these different things that they probably knew about and could have just itself was known known janky booster yeah like so so like the thing took off and like just stuff was exploding there's pieces flying off it's doing backflips

the launch pad is destroyed like i i don't know i just like i'm just sort of surprised by this because i feel like they could have just done a little more work like it's not it's not striving for perfection it's just like getting the thing to work and no one can tell me that spacex is not a competent engineering firm that didn't know about these things and couldn't solve them in a pretty quick time frame so like this is where i'm struggling with it right that's kind of where where i ended up landing on it and so yeah and how much is this going to set them back now everyone's like oh they'll just fix the launch pad in six weeks they'll be back like no that's not the way it's going to be and so that's my big question I don't know where you land on that but this went way worse than I thought it was going to go I knew something would go wrong

I didn't expect everything to go wrong the entire time. Like it was absolutely chaotically wrong at every moment and in a somewhat hilarious fashion. Like honestly, this is the most comedic four minutes of rocket flight I have ever watched in my life. Like from the start, we knew it was going to be a long hold down time, right? That there was going to be six seconds or whatever where the rocket was held down.

Immediately the graphic was like, engines are out already and it's like all right and then we're going oh we're going all right then it was doing a little bit of the astra power slide okay that's not great this is clearly a low thrust to weight ratio at the moment not good and then you start to see the debris hitting and this we didn't see this on the live stream but we did see later, shortly after it cleared the tower, the concrete propelled into the ocean, into the flats around it. So you've got what clearly was a launch pad explosion. Then the hydraulic power units start blowing up on the sides of the vehicle.

They're losing engines. At no point in this flight was I ever thinking anything close to, wow, this is going great. Like, I never felt good about this flight at any moment right it was going and i think even on the broadcast uh in sprucker was like he switched from things are going nominal to it's flying was a statement that he had during it which is like trajectory it's going up was like the thing that you could say. So it was not anywhere close to good in terms of like, how did this perform? And the,

the after effects, right. Talking to, I've talked to a bunch of the people that we know that work at SpaceX, either at, at Boca or elsewhere. And the damage to the launch site is way more than was expected. And,

and just to start there the the like ground laying the groundwork behind this test flight was elon musk and spacex generally that like we need to clear the tower everything else is great like as long as we clear the tower and don't completely level the build site or the launch site everything's cool like and i guess the only thing i can assume is like they were worried about having to rebuild the actual tower structure yeah and and refit that because that would be a significant amount of work so yeah that has been spared but everything else is almost total loss or or it needs complete rework so that's the thing that there's a lot of

like really like trying to like wash over that like like, oh, that the launch, like it didn't blow the tower up, but like the launch pad, the ground below it, the, the, the mount, the tank farm, all that stuff's been damaged or destroyed. And I was like, okay, well that doesn't seem like it's met the core minimum requirement that everybody was talking about. Exactly. So this is, you're in my process of working through this. Cause then I'm like, okay, well let's look at all that stuff and in many of those cases like they built those vertical tanks that they ended up not being able to store methane in because they'd like i don't know there was speculation about them not meeting the requirements or the regulations around methane storage so they had to store methane in those horizontal tanks so clearly that plan didn't quite work out as

initially envisioned the launch pad itself the concrete that they blew up effectively at ignition um i've talked to a couple people that told me and i think eric burger's been tweeting this that that he's heard it as well that there was an old design for a flame diverter it didn't work so they didn't install it there is a new design for the flame diverter whoever's running that is a very competent individual there will be a new one ready i've diverter. Whoever's running that is a very competent individual. There will be a new one ready. I've heard there's some testing that's going to go on of it pretty soon as well.

So like that's going in the right direction. There's the 4D chess of like, did they need to do some excavation work around the launch pad anyway? So blowing it up wasn't the worst. I don't buy that for a second. Yeah, that sounds like it might be a nice to have. But like that definitely was not the intended result of that. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Um, so overall, like, I don't know, none of this stuff though, seems to be the item that is going to take the longest of this flight campaign. And this is where I start to turn the corner.

Like they built a launch site down there faster than anyone could ever have imagined building a launch site in that environment, right? Between everything, site down there faster than anyone could ever have imagined building a launch site in that environment right between everything between the environmental reviews and the existing people that lived there and having to actually do like repair of the ground to make this stuff possible they built out all of that way quicker so rebuilding it is not a thing that i'm worried about uh in terms of the timeline so like why not fly something because some of that stuff might have gone fine they might have found out that some of those assumptions were actually fine and it will save them two months when they build out the kennedy space center site for launching starship that was a risk worth taking because you had a vehicle that needed to fly at some point. There is some pressure.

I'm sure to, once they got that FAA clearance to fly, to fly, since they've been calling their shot for so long that the paperwork is going to hold them up. That is a legitimate thing that they want to show. Like we are ready to fly as soon as we can. And you can debate the theory behind that,

but like, I don't know. That's not, it's not for a company like spacex that positions themselves like they do it's not not valuable to do that so i don't know that and i guess some other things that they had decided were confirmed to be good ideas like moving away from hydraulics for the engine control the next flight like that seems good having both of them having blown up on the way up yeah so did they find stuff that they knew was wrong yeah did it confirm those ideas sure

um i don't i don't know i'm less worried about it than i was after the initial five minutes i watched the launch yeah i don't think that you know worry about the future of spacex is where i'm at like i'm not'm not, you're right. They're just going to rebuild it. Like SpaceX, they're going to rebuild the launch pad. They're going to do it really fast. They're going to have a new rocket. Like it's already like two or three lined up, ready to go.

Like this, you know, there's not really like a concern that it won't move forward or that they didn't gain something from this. I just, I don't know. I just like, it just felt really sloppy. And I just like, I have questions about- But this is what Boca's for. Boca's meant to be sloppy. I guess. They're only ever going to fly out a handful of times a year. Like they literally put in the paperwork, I have five flights a year for now. sloppy and i just like i have but this is what bokeh is for bokeh is meant to be sloppy they're

only ever gonna fly out a handful of times a year like they literally put in the paperwork i have five flights a year for now and maybe that'll go up in the future but clearly their future is kennedy space center so it's true if like this is where the jank happens you know they should put that on the sign on the way in this is where the jank happens yeah the point is do the janky stuff here figure out the bad ideas here build the right ones at kennedy and fly to the moon that's yeah so i'm fine with it like because then the other aspect is everyone's like oh they have to rebuild the launch site it's like well they don't have to tear down everything that's there now they could just like add some tanks that also work and you don't have to like completely reset

back to nothing built at boca chica and build a whole new set you could just move some stuff out of the way who's gonna get mad at them yeah themselves you know they're the only ones there yeah maybe you know and maybe the the other thing i've been thinking about is the every time they fly you get sort of a a level set on expectations and and you know reality like it's data for us it's data right like this flight is data as to the progress of the whole program and i think going into this flight the common uh uh sort of um you know observation of where starship was was like really really really far It was like, they're ready to fly, like, this thing is going to go into space soon. And then we're off to the moon, like, you know, right away. And I think, you know, you and I, especially we talked

about that, we know that that's really optimistic. And we're, we're maybe 612 months behind that or something, some number, I don't know, we're, you know, we're behind that we're like, no, it's not that far ahead. And I think once this flight happened it it shot back past even what we were thinking like i think now you know i think about this artemis 3 landing now or even the uncrewed landing i'm like there's not a chance in hell it's going to be even like two years late it's gonna be more than that like we're not 2025 is not even like a fantasy anymore it is just completely false and we're looking at 26 27 28 to start seeing these landings happen and maybe that's my disappointment is that like wow even my cynicism was too optimistic as to where where this uh

schedule was i know because you know they got to take six months to rebuild it cool and then they got to finally get go up in flight again like 2024 is realistically now when the starship will like be in orbit you know like when it's going to be like having a first second third flight to to figure stuff out so i mean when's the lander coming like you know it's it's a ways out and i think that's kind of weird for me and that i feel like was uh there was a statement about that which was the existence of the starlink v2 mini bus yeah yeah we should have taken that for a bigger sign than what it was i did like clearly they weren't they thought it was worth the engineering time to build a like somewhere halfway between v1 and v2 satellite that has more capacity

but fits on falcon 9 because they're not going to be flying on Starship in the near future and yeah the other aspect to the to all the most interesting Starship missions is that they require Starship flying so regularly that uh the pace is kind of unbelievable like it's going to be for the architecture to work out it needs to fly like more frequently than Falcon nine, which nothing else ever is going to sniff at for the near future. Like there's no, there's no rocket in works right now. And Starship is the only one with their sites set on it to even re I guess electron like hypothetically could reach that cadence of, of how frequently Falcon nine flies like once a week

yeah around once a week starship needs to fly more than that to fully fully fuel fuel depots and then transfer to lander and then lander's gonna go to the moon like there's so much involved in a starship architecture for a sufficiently complex mission like that not just a one-off to orbit or something um yeah and so that frequency is a ways out and not just that but if you have if you want an operational frequency of that much like if you want starship to be at a point where it's launching every five days the amount of flights you have to have before that to like prove out the system to reach the like yeah like how long did it take to get pretty long every six days like It's been flying for 10 years now.

How long has that taken? I'm assuming Starship will go faster because it's SpaceX. And now they know how to do it with Falcon. So it's not going to take another 10 years to get this thing humming. But it's not going to be one year. And so I don't know. That's maybe a little little interesting for me is that like this really highlighted that like the artemis schedule is definitely going to be changing

significantly compared to what we think of now like you know what nasa is publicly saying like it's i'm not past artemis 2 everything is made up to me now like completely made up it was like only like 70 made up before now it's 100 the cool thing though is that um like i don't want to just set the goal posts for the full and rapid reusability line that that starship is set at where like that is where spacex is heading and that is the ultimate goal with starship but a bunch of the cool effects of starship happen way before that once they're reliably getting to orbit even if they're still working out re-entry and reusability and if they're flying a

new starship every time like yeah just being an orbital rocket is a huge impact to the industry from the contracts that the wind to the industry from the contracts that the wind to the effects it has in a commercial market. And there's a huge gap between that with like being a viable satellite launcher to being this super reusable thing with fuel depots. That's landing on the moon. There's a, there's a big gap there,

but it's not like it's not useful until it gets to the end of that gap. Correct. You know, there's still a huge i mean even even when they do initial moon landings will be this uncrewed version and we've heard heard of some missions that have like astrolab i was talking about uh on the shows at space symposium that people will hear soon like they've booked you know the flights to the moon this uncrewed moon lander when they're working that process out even if some of those work and there's a huge amount of cargo delivered to the moon even if they haven't gotten to the fully rapidly reusable thing yet it's still we're in a great

spot overall so i don't want to like hinge all the optimism on we have to wait until they are flying every three days because the time before them is going to be similarly paradigm shifting even if they're heading generally in that direction yeah yeah that's fair that's fair um i think i guess maybe my big excitement with starship is obviously you know stuff past leo right like i i don't really like okay starlink that's great you know it's great for i don't you know and i use it i'm a customer you're literally paying for it so i'm that's great but i mean that's just that's just like boring business stuff to me though like what starship can do at the moon and mars and all the other interesting new missions that's where i'm really excited about and that that's further towards the rapid reusability than it

is to the first orbital flight right you know on that spectrum it's a lot further towards the rapid reusability than it is to the first orbital flight, right. You know, on that spectrum, it's a lot further down the road. And so maybe that's why I'm, I'm sad, but yeah.

Um, Oh, it's tough, man. Like, yeah. Um, I mean,

it was annoying to watch this catch a certain amount of steam in media of like oh rocket rocket blows up like let me write a long thing about how everyone's been duped by this yeah vehicle like there is a lot of that I didn't I didn't read almost any of the coverage yeah I was like there's a little I didn't want to

there was too much work to do that I was like I'm gonna have to read like a hundred articles to find the one that's good and I'm like I'll probably just get 90 of the way there if i just watch the youtube stream myself so i didn't bother that's totally true i there was um a few things that i'm really bummed they didn't get to on this like i think i think they should have, their baseline should have been stage separation. Yeah. Yeah. Like if that,

if that part hit, I would have been like full success, unqualified success. I don't care if it left the entire strip of beach, like needing, you know, sand backfilling. And that sort of gets back to,

to what I was thinking, right? It's like, did, could they have ultimately gone faster if they had waited a bit? Right. no sand backfilling and that sort of gets back to to what i was thinking right it's like did could they have ultimately gone faster if they had waited a bit right because if you think about what unknown unknowns are out there you can't test stage separation and vacuum ignition on the ground like like zero g vacuum ignition on the ground you can't like you have to do that in space and so

yeah that was absolutely like a thing that this flight would have would have been so much better if they had separated and lit the Starship program there were varying confidence confidence levels that they would reach stage separation but i don't think it was like who knows we'll never make it but maybe we will it was like oh i think we'll make it so yeah yeah if that's true like if they're at some you can't first of all you can't calculate chances of something making it to stage separation until you've flown them a ton right it's just not a thing you can, you can make up math, you can do Artemis math and make it up, but you can't realistically have that. So how are you to then say,

well, we're at a 40% confidence level, but if we put one month of work in this particular subsystem, we will reach an 80% confidence level. You're still making it up. Yeah, so like, to me, this is where I've like softened my initial harsh vibes on this i was like i don't know they they had a shot at getting to that point if they weren't so low and slow uh because of all the engine failures that seem to be because they

knocked them all out with with exploding concrete uh yeah i heard that concrete hit one of the grid fins on the booster so like this stuff is really whipping around um if they weren't so low and slow maybe that they would have gotten to the part of stage separation but yeah they had clearly lost control of the booster you know the the thing that confused a lot of people was the call outs on the live stream that in spark was like they're going for the flip for stage separation they had lost control of the booster. Both hydraulic units have exploded at that point. He called Miko.

Engines were still running. The whole thing was just out of control. I think they're... I don't know if there's like... I know there's an investigation into the launch pad situation from the FAA side. I'm curious if they were still... I guess they were still down the middle on their flight termination system lane that they didn't have to blow the vehicle up until it deviated from that

um having lost full control that's a little weird but stage separation i would feel so much better about than where it ended which was never having a chance to get to that yeah because now the next one you're going in you have a long list of things to see going well before you get to stage separation let alone testing out heat shields and whatnot yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean and it's hard and we can't we're all just playing armchair engineers here so like i don't know what they were thinking and and i don't know where they were the the collective spacex feeling was like where what is the success and how far should it go and what you know what data we need so i should i should caveat all my hot takes with that

because i have no idea right i'm just like some dude um but uh i don't know i just i think when i think about a lot we've had a lot of first flights lately, right? We've had Taron one, we had ABL, we had, uh, uh, I don't know, a bunch of other,

but not too distant in the rear view mirror, right? Not too distant. You're, you're in a half or so. And like this, this flight made it roughly the same distance as kind of like all those, like the median of,

of where those things are. And so I just i i think i would have expected spacex to be better because that there are they are better right like 100 that's where i i was taken aback and so yeah i'm i'm trying to get myself to the end there too but that's where i where i uh initially fell so it's been it's been weird. I know why this situation is bugging you. Uh, because you were bought in on a thing that I don't remember if I stole this or made it up. People have told me both and I'm not sure which is true of way back in the day when I said waste steel, not time.

Yeah. And this is the first time that you have a situation where it's arguable of which one they've wasted more of in this past week. That's what's bugging you. I am on the steel side that they wasted more steel than time this week. But it is an argument that we will for sure have over the next year. It's like it's 60-40 or so. It's not a for sure steel. or so like that it's not it's not for sure steel steel but uh yeah i mean i'll be delighted if a year from now i'm proven completely wrong like that that's gonna be great like i i i hope i'm

wrong i don't want to be i don't want to be anywhere close to right about this so um but uh yeah no it's people should know that we were uh i'm pulling up our predictions here, Jake. Oh, yeah, yeah. From Off Nominal that we did with Lauren Grush. Yeah, I have a funny take about that, too. I said August. Lauren said July. You said September.

Yeah. So what's your take about this? So I think this highlights what I was saying, but where the expectations got level set to even way past our cynicism. But I will defend myself in one way here, is that while I did say September, and that has been proven wrong,

they've launched much sooner than September. I think the core feeling behind my prediction was that they won't be ready by september and i don't think they were ready so i'm gonna stand behind my prediction no unreal this is an unreal development we just lost all your listeners and uh yeah everyone is now no longer my friend but yeah so your your prediction was the i know it when i'll see it threshold yeah exactly yeah yeah it's funny in our in our discord i think i marked down that it won't reach orbit by september so i think i'm still standing that's still a legitimate prediction this other one you're not gonna win but no no no um jake before you get out

of here uh there's still some number of people that listen to Main Engine Cutoff that don't listen to Off Nominal. And that's honestly an outrage. And I'm personally offended by that. Very strange. So I would love you to give them the pitch on Off Nominal. Well, listen, if you want to hear me say really weird, bad, hot takes that are going to make you angry at me like I did just now, you should come listen to us on Off Nominal because we

do that, but we add alcohol. So it's a little bit wilder sometimes. YouTube streamed every Thursday, 4 p.m. Eastern. We have lots of great guests, journalists, experts. We have lots of, I mean, the people we've had on Off Nominal still surprise me. I'm always a little bit shocked by who agrees to come hang out with us.

We've had some really good stuff. So you should check it out for sure. I'll put some good episode links in the show notes for people that haven't listened yet. Offnom.com. You've got to check it out. Thanks, Jake, for dealing with the surprise podcast here. No problem.

Did I move you at all? Did you move your needle on where you land on this? You moved me a little bit. Okay, that's good. I don't think I moved, but I feel more in touch with why I feel the way I feel. So that's good. I talked it out at least.

We lowered the error bars on your feelings. Yeah, we were narrowing. So all right, buddy. See you later. Cheers. Thanks again to Jake for coming on the show. And as always, being my co-host on Off Nominal, you got to go check out the show if you have not yet.

We've got some great ones coming up. We've got some great ones behind us on the schedule. And as I mentioned, into the near future, you'll be hearing my shows live from Space Symposium, the conversations that I had with a really interesting set of guests over the course of five shows. So lots of Miko coming your way over the next chunk of time here. But before we get out of here today, I want to say thank you to all of you who made this kind of thing possible.

The trip that I took to Space Symposium is only possible because of everyone who supports Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are 879 of you. It's an entirely listener supportedsupported show. So if you like what I'm doing, if you like sending me to events like that, you can be my boss over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. And there are 36 executive producers of this episode of Main Engine Cutoff.

Thanks to Tyler, Pat from KC, Brad, Theo and Violet, Matt, Fred, Rob, Simon, Don Aerospace, SmallSpark Space Systems, Moritz, Donald, Frank, Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut, Chris Harrison, Chris, Thank you all so much for the support, as always. Like I said, I could not do these kinds of things without the direct support that y'all provide me. So thanks again for being there, for listening, for supporting. And until next time, thanks so much for listening. I will talk to you soon. Bye.