Main Engine Cut Off - T+267: Vulcan, New Glenn, Peregrine, Artemis

Episode Date: January 26, 2024

I catch up with a round up of stories from January: ULA’s first Vulcan launch, Blue Origin’s success with its BE-4 engines and what it means for their year, Astrobotic’s Peregrine mission, JAXA���s SLIM mission, and NASA’s announcement of Artemis delays.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 36 executive producers—Tyler, Lee Hopkins, Better Every Day Studios, Joel, Jan, Will and Lars from Agile Space, Matt, Russell, Craig from SpaceHappyHour.com, Ryan, Donald, Brandon, Joonas, Fred, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, Pat, SmallSpark Space Systems, Frank, Kris, Stealth Julian, The Astrogators at SEE, Warren, Benjamin, Steve, Chris, Theo and Violet, David, Pat from KC, Dawn Aerospace, Bob, Harrison, and four anonymous—and 828 other supporters.TopicsVulcan Centaur launches Peregrine lunar lander on inaugural mission - SpaceNewsBlue Origin gets U.S. Space Force funding for New Glenn ‘integration studies’ - SpaceNewsNASA urged Astrobotic not to send its hamstrung spacecraft toward the Moon | Ars TechnicaUpdate #17 for Peregrine Mission One | AstroboticUpdate #20 for Peregrine Mission One | AstroboticJapan’s SLIM achieved pinpoint moon landing with just one working engine - SpaceNewsDawoon Jung on X: “One of #SLIM main engines fell off during landing”NASA Shares Progress Toward Early Artemis Moon Missions with Crew - NASANASA delays Artemis 2 and 3 missions - SpaceNewsThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen to MECO HeadlinesListen to Off-NominalJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterArtwork photo by NASAWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo. Long delay, so I apologize for my radio silence. Usually that's because there's either nothing going on or something else life-wise is going on. Lately it's just been, I've been working on something and i think it'll be worth the wait um but that's distracted me a little bit in the time that i've got uh from thinking about other things so um there's been a lot that's happened this january i want to catch up on it from the first flight of vulcan to some follow-on uh things that we should talk about with new glenn that blue Origin's been working on. Obviously, Astrobotic flew Peregrine, didn't quite make it to the moon, but was an interesting mission nonetheless. And then NASA actually updated the Artemis plans overall with some

things that I was surprised by, some things I wasn't surprised by, and feels like this little package is a good thing to catch up on as we go forward. So let's dig in on Vulcan because they had a, what I would refer to as a spectacular debut of that launch vehicle. January 8th, they launched for the first time and it went almost completely flawlessly. I haven't really heard anyone say that there was anything in there that they would classify as a flaw, which, you know, for the first time, launching a launch vehicle with brand new engines and new tankage, the fact that there wasn't even really that many scrubs, you know, there were some delays to the schedule, but far out from the launch, it wasn't like they got down

into the countdown and then scrubbed. That was very impressive, especially after the recent history with ULA. They've had a lot of scrubs on Atlas 5s and Delta 4 launches over the past several years as they've restructured the business, as the workforce has changed out. Interestingly, I have very few ULA contacts anymore, and many of my friends in media feel the same way. So I think the turnover is probably higher than we realize from the outside, just based on that completely admittedly anecdotal data. But I did find that interesting, as I've been asking around to find some people that I can talk to. They're hard to come by right now. And that just might be the segment that I'm tapped into or whatever. But if you're out there

listening, you know, hit me up on some platform, because I really would like to have some ULA people to talk to from time to time. But anyway, the mission itself went really, really well. Very smooth countdown, very smooth launch. The BE-4s look great from Blue Origin. They're supplying the two main engines on Vulcan. In terms of what I expected for this launch, I expected there to be something. There's just a lot of new stuff getting integrated together for the first time. But maybe the line that ULA has had all along is that they've flown a lot of the either hardware or software for this vehicle on other iterations of hardware that they fly, and that they're taking a lot of those programs and rolling it into Vulcan or vice versa. And that always sounded like marketing fluff to me, or just, you know, the kind of thing that you say when you're a company that's working on a lot of different projects, because there is, you know, natural

crossover between people or teams or the hardware and software that you have access to, there is natural crossover. So it's like, you know, just kind of makes sense to say that. But I, you know, maybe that is straight up legit. And that's what they would credit with the success here. But, you know, I didn't expect it to blow up on the launch pad, or like even very shortly after launch, I sort of just expected an early engine shutdown or some sort of underperformance um it just went so so well which i found quite impressive so you know from here they've got a bit of a road ahead of them still i think there's schedule things that i'm curious to see how they shake out this year so first flight of vulcan is under their belt um They did, I should mention, you know, they did two burns of the Centaur upper

stage to then deploy Astrobotics Peregrine. And beyond that, they did a third firing of the RL-10 engine to test extended duration missions. And they flung out to heliocentric orbit after that. So a really, you know, great end-to-end test of the Vulcan Centaur. So from here, they've got to fly another flight to then proceed with their certification for the US Space Force missions that they have. The next one up is the Dream Chaser flight to the ISS. This is the Sierra Space cargo vehicle going to the ISS. That is scheduled for April still. I thought that was going to slip quite a ways, but Dream Chaser seems to be making its way through testing pretty well at this point. I think next week there's a media event with Sierra Space Dream Chaser out at, is it Plum Brook that it's at

doing some testing? But that certainly seems like it's actually heading down to the Cape pretty soon. So unless they discover something large in this most recent round, which with them scheduling a media availability, you know, about a week out from when that is, I feel like that indicates that things are going well with the testing there. So it very well could be that Sierra is ready to fly this spring with Dream Chaser, which would be quite amazing that, you know, all that really clicked into place. Without that, if that is something that starts to slip, I think at a certain point, ULA is going to say, all right, Dream Chaser, you're going to get, you know, bumped to a later flight for Vulcan because we've got to get these two flights done. So

whenever they've got sign off from the data review of the first mission, they would go to fly their second mission. So I still would find that somewhat likely. Just because not only does Dream Chaser have to make it through its testing, it's got to make it into the ISS scheduling flow in terms of availability. We have a Starliner flight coming up to the ISS soon, as well as all the normal flights that go up to the ISS with the crew rotation flights and the other cargo flights. So getting on the ISS schedule manifest can be very tricky in terms of just, you know, pure time people hatch availability. So if that does start to slip, I think ULA will jump something into that second slot.

What is that launch, right? Is that Amazon having a full slate of Kuiper satellites ready to roll? Is that ULA flying, you know, an empty mission to make sure that they can do the certification? Because there is schedule pressure for them to begin flying the US Space Force flights. They are behind already on that on where they wanted to be. And they've got some that are slated for the end of this year. And they need to not only fly the second flight, but then get you know, the certification sign off that they can go ahead and do that third launch, or whatever number it becomes by the time that they fly it. Now, alongside all of this, the other thing they have to figure out is the Amazon Kuiper schedule.

Amazon has a bunch of Atlas 5 launches that they bought. They flew one already, so they've got eight left, if I remember the numbers correctly. And each time that they have to convert the launch pad from Atlas 5 to Vulcan and back, there is some time delay there. And they use the same launchpad right now. So if those start to become more frequent, Amazon is kind of taking a weird approach. In my eye, they launched two satellites, and then they, at that time, were ready to go into the full production of these other satellites. So what's the time delay between them making that decision and having a full slate of satellites ready for a launch on either an Atlas or Vulcan. I'm real curious about that. But that could, you know, as we get later

into the year, and those pallets of Kuiper satellites are coming in, and there's contractual agreements that they have in place, there is going to be a little bit of a launchpad battle between Atlas 5 and Vulcan. And certainly, you know, I think ULA would love to fly out those Atlas 5s as quick as they can so they can really get into the meat of Vulcan. And that's just all, you know, scheduled they have to manage. So does that start to impact prioritization? Which of these things gets prioritized higher? You know, is it, well, let's get this second flight of Vulcan done as soon as we can so we can get going on the, you know, the paperwork and certification end of that. And while we do that, we'll fly a couple Atlas V flights for Amazon. It's a little bit of a

schedule problem to figure out, a good one, admittedly, that there's, you know, rockets flying and there's payloads coming their way. But it does start to be something that is going to be not quite a logjam, but it's,jam, but there's going to be prioritization conversations within ULA about how this all shakes out. And as things slip or as things get prioritized, that will shake up the manifest a little bit. Now, on the Blue Origin side of all this, I mentioned the BE-4s went really well on this first flight of Vulcan. It sounded like they have the next two for the next flight of Vulcan, the next two BE-4s in acceptance testing right now. So those are going to be heading out for

integration fairly soon. But what does this indicate for the Blue Origin storyline in terms of New Glenn? Well, we started to see a lot of New Glenn hardware lately. There's been people seeing this first stage, certainly seems like the flight vehicle the first stage uh floating around cape canaveral being driven around taken out to the launch pad just this past week there's a picture posted of them mating the stage one and two inside one of their hangars as a test of the the mating hardware that they've got no be4s on this first stage yet but it's got you know pretty much everything else and it's it's looking nice and shiny there. Now, the BE-4s is, you know, we have very little insight into what's going on with the production line or the scheduling of these things. But years ago,

I had heard that it wasn't necessarily true that ULA was just getting the first however many off the production line, that there were some of the early production run BE-4s being slated for New Glenn, and that, you know, at the time I had heard there were at least a couple engines out in Florida ready to be mated onto the vehicle. I don't know if that's true, if that's still true, if that's been reworked since they've had issues to rework and qualification and whatnot, but, but that was my understanding was that, you know, for a while, I think we all thought ULA was just going to get, you know, the first 14 engines off the production line so they can fly the Vulcans they need to fly. Doesn't seem like that was necessarily true that there's a little bit of, um, you know, uh, little bit of engines

here, a little bit of engines going there so that they build up a little bit of a stockpile for new glenn as well because they need seven b4s to actually start flying this thing um now if the first two flight engines for vulcan are they went up and now they're in the ocean and the next set was in qualification or acceptance firing i should say it doesn't really give me a lot of confidence in what i heard before to be honest like the fact that there's still like, I don't know, was it that ULA wanted them to acceptance test them closer to their launch? And maybe they said, you know, just hold on to those engines and make sure that you deliver them when we're actually ready to go do all this. Or was this as quick as Blue Origin could work through that?

And they just now got to acceptance testing. And then does what I've've heard you know i'm just kind of working this out loud with you you know does what i heard kind of start now where from here on out the production run is a little bit to ula a little bit to blue origin a little bit to ula a little bit to blue origin that's the stuff that is a little murky and we haven't definitely haven't caught sight of b4s in these pictures from cape but they are posting a lot more so you know maybe we start to see it uh make their way into these images over the next couple weeks, because right now they're looking later this year to get ready and launch this thing for New Glenn.

I think we still have a few things we need to watch for before we really feel confident in that. Rolling this vehicle out to the pad, doing some test fuelings, test firings. There's a lot to go. So I feel good about them making their way to launch later this year, but it's certainly not a done deal that that's going to happen. Now, alongside all this, Blue Origin this past week did sign an agreement with the U.S. Space Force for an additional $17 million to a study contract that they had signed last year, I believe it was, for integration studies of Nuclein with payloads for the National Security Space Launch Program.

So the United States Space Force has the National Security Space Launch Program. We're flying Phase 1 and 2 vehicles right now actively. Phase three is what's in the contracting round. We talked a lot about this on the show when this stuff was kicking around. Contracting land, as a little reminder, there's two lanes of this phase three. And these are payloads that the US Space Force and the United States government flies. They're kind of the highest level Department of Defense for national security payloads. There's other ones that fly, that get contracted elsewhere, but these are the highest priority. GPS satellites, spy satellites, reconnaissance satellites of all

sorts, missile warning satellites, communication satellites, really expensive, exquisite satellites that the US military prioritizes very highly. So there's lane one and two. Lane one are lower risk missions. That's open to smaller launch vehicles, not quite small launch vehicles, but smaller launch vehicles. And that'll be awarded as they go, basically, competitively. Lane two is the one where, very traditionally, how it worked with the U.S. Air and Space Forces, where they select a couple of providers and then they divide task orders out amongst them at a certain split. Previously, it's just been two providers, United Launch Alliance and SpaceX. Phase three has the idea that there will be a third provider and that they will have access to seven launches of this whole block. Five of those are GPS

satellites, two others are some other kind of satellite. And the US Space Force had done an integration study contract with Blue Origin, just under a million dollars, to make sure that their payloads and the Nucleon launch vehicle fit together, basically. They've added an additional $17 million onto that for early integration work. They're looking at specifically some launch vehicles and satellites that are going to be due to fly in 2025 and 2026, fiscal year, that is. So that's October 1st this year is when that starts. And so they say they want to do this study so that they can get ahead of that schedule

and make sure that everything looks good. Now, I don't really know what that means. They said that the satellites would have to be modified if they don't fly with this third competitor. So what kind of incompatibility is there between these spacecraft and New Glenn and these other launch vehicles? I'm very interested to find out what that means. It doesn't really make sense to my brain, but I'm not on the up and up, I guess, of what the language is internally there. But this does seem like a good sign for New Glenn. Clearly, that lane of phase three, where it's,

you know, two providers plus this third provider that gets seven missions, that was pretty blatantly written as like, the third provider must have a feather on their launch vehicle and have one shade of blue somewhere on their vehicle. It definitely, on their launch vehicle and have one shade of blue somewhere on their vehicle. It definitely, it read like, you know, that's obviously an exaggeration, but only just. It was pretty transparent in that way. And I don't think that's, you know, if it's legally defensible, then cool. I don't think it's a bad idea to, for the U.S. military to try to lock up parts of the market that exist now because, you know, it doesn't, if not for some of the U.S. military contracts that SpaceX had with Falcon 9, there was some sort of effort internally that maybe they should,

or sorry, Falcon Heavy, that maybe they should rethink Falcon Heavy's existence. And, you know, there's been reporting that Gwen Shotwell herself was like, no, no, no, no, we are selling these to, you know, the U.S. government and they need it, we need to keep this around. At least that's what's been out there. And so, you know, responding to that, I think it's prudent if there's a capability like New Glenn that's coming in the market to try to lock up its existence. You know, this is a very different launch vehicle than the ones that currently fly. Payload range is competitive, obviously, but the fairing is a couple meters bigger, a lot more volume internally opens up a lot of different options for what you can fit under there

especially the ones that apply to very large antenna that would be good for reconnaissance so there is a unique aspect to this that i think changes the the conversation around a little bit so that's the rundown of where things stand. I feel good about Blue Origin making their way to the launch pad this year. I'm really excited if they do that. Hopefully I can go down to see this thing because the view from Port Canaveral of the Blue Origin launch pad is unreal and it doesn't even feel like a place you should be able to stand when that launch vehicle lifts off. I know it's far enough away, like based on the map, but it certainly doesn't feel like it when you're standing there on the beach. And that's in part with just how large the tower is at Launch Complex 36 for Blue Origin. It is enormous.

And that vehicle itself is enormous. So that's going to be an awesome experience that I'm excited for, as well as just having new launch vehicles. You know, that's the one really cool thing about Vulcan being on the market now. Um, obviously it's in, it's on the market and that they've sold a bunch of them slash maybe all of them already for several years, but at least we have another new vehicle flying now. Um, and we're finally getting to this era that we've been waiting for all these years where there are new launch vehicles on the market and and it just shakes things up a little, because it's been a little stagnant with, you know, SpaceX being the only game in town,

which is hilarious that I say that. If you roll this clock back 10 years and told me that sentence or told anyone that sentence, I think they would be, you know, chuckling a little bit, but it is where we are. So anyway, I'm excited, really thrilled that Vulcan went off as well as it did, and congratulations to the team down there

that was working on that. All right, we've also had a bunch of Lunar Lander stuff going on. I'm going to talk about Artemis missions. But before I do that, I need to say thank you to all of you supporting Main Engine Cutoff out there. There are 864 of you supporting every single month, and I'm so thankful for your support, including the support of 36 executive producers who made this episode of Main Engine Cutoff possible. Thanks to Tyler, Lee, Better Everyday Studios, Joel, Jan, Will, and Lars from Agile Space, Matt, Russell, Craig from SpaceHappyHour.com, Ryan, Donald, Brandon, Eunice, Fred, Tim Dodd, The Everett Astronaut, Pat, SmallSpark Space Systems, Frank, Chris, Stealth Julian, The Astrogators at SEE, Warren, Benjamin, Steve, Chris, Theo and Violet, David, Pat from KC,

Don Aerospace, bob harrison and four anonymous executive producers thank you all so much for making this episode possible uh and if you want to join that crew head over to mainenginecutoff.com support if you join up at three dollars a month or more you get access to a special rss feed where miko headlines drops for you you can put it right in the podcast player you're listening to right now. And actually, right after I finish recording this, I'm going to be recording a new episode of Headlines as well. So you'll hear me run through a bunch of the other stories

that happened over the last little bit of time. It keeps you up to date on all the stories going on in space. It's a great way to stay up on the news, help support the show, and keep me doing what I'm doing here. So thank you all so much for listening, for supporting. I could not do it without you. All right, I want to talk about a couple lunar all so much for listening, for supporting. I could not do it without you. All right, I want to talk about a couple lunar landers that we've had so far,

some that are coming up. Obviously, on top of Vulcan was the Peregrine lander for Astrobotic, the first of the NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program missions to happen. did not go uh as intended they had shortly after separation from the launch vehicle they had an issue with the oxidizer tank where they uh they had a rupture from over pressurization and that started a propellant leak which started a series of other things right they were the spacecraft was spinning a bit they needed to get control of that make sure that it could stay pointed at the sun to charge its batteries. They eventually got control of that, characterized what was happening, and were able to maintain attitude control. Over the next couple days, they put out a lot of updates, culminating in the fact that the leak was actually significantly lessened,

and it was, you know, almost not an issue anymore in terms of uh how much was coming out this leak issue prevented them from going for a lunar landing they couldn't burn the engine for full duration for lunar landing but they could still maneuver it a bit um which was interesting that they were able to do this work to uh characterize the issue and still maintain some capability with the vehicle. Unfortunately, this was January 13th that they posted this update to the website a couple days after launch. Eventually, the vehicle trajectory, because of the propellant leak and the stuff that they were doing to mitigate, you know, spin and attitude control and all that uh the trajectory was back on a path towards earth rather than uh

missing earth and going back up uh they were then coming back into the atmosphere and uh so that's the trajectory they were on at the moment the nominal plan was that the vehicle is going to launch fly to apogee come back down swing by earth again and on the second apogee they would be out towards the moon to start maneuvering in to go for their landing attempt about a month after that um but uh you know this whole situation led to them being on a trajectory back towards earth and uh ultimately in the next day january 14th they posted that uh they were actually going to let the spacecraft re-enter into a spot in the pacific ocean and i'm trying to pull up their update real quick. Yeah, this was the part of the update I wanted to read to you.

And this was talking about the fact that they're coming back in to burn up in the atmosphere. And they had turned on a lot of the science payloads or communicating with things, and things seemed to be going really well with the spacecraft. They had good communications connectivity with it. They obviously eventually established good control of the spacecraft. But this is the part I want to read maybe a couple of segments from this update.

This is update 17 that they posted on January 14th, which was almost a week after launch. Despite the propulsion system issue, the astrobotic mission team has worked tirelessly to stabilize the vehicle, turn on all active payloads, and enable the collection of payload data. Spacecraft has been operating in space for six days and 16 hours, and Peregrine continues to leak propellant, but now at a very slow rate. Yesterday afternoon, we test-fired one of the main engines for the first time. We achieved a 200 millisecond burn and acquired data that indicated Peregrine could have main engine propulsive capability. However, due to the anomaly, the fuel-to-oxidizer ratio is well

outside the normal operating range of the main engines, making long controlled burns impossible. The team projects that the spacecraft has enough remaining propellant to maintain sun pointing and perform small maneuvers. Um, and so this was on the way back in, like I said, to the atmosphere. A couple of days later, update 20, they talked about where they're actually going to re-enter. This was an area of the South Pacific. It was a bit of an ellipse that they were showing as the likely zone for re-entry. They did have to do a series of maneuvers to move the impact point to a safe location to avoid land. So with this propulsion situation, they mentioned in this update that they conducted a test burn of all five main engines on the

spacecraft. They pulsed the engines 23 times, spaced out over a long period of time to avoid overheating or any other issues with the general system and the health status of the vehicle. But they performed 23 small burns to adjust this into a spot in the South Pacific away from land. And eventually that is where they left it. It re-entered after a certain point in time, and that brought the mission to a close. So quite a ride. And there's a lot more to the story to be told. But, you know, all in all, clips getting underway with this mission.

It was disappointing, obviously, that this happened. They weren't able to go for an attempt at the moon or even go to the moon in any regard. But the fact that they did, you know, all this other stuff on the mission was, I think, really cool. You know, they could enable payloads, communicate with the spacecraft, work with retrieving payload data, got a lot of experience working with not only the vehicle itself, but all the ground systems they needed to support this kind of mission. They flew for almost a week way out to basically lunar distance, if not a little farther, I forget exactly what their highest point was. And then, you know, obviously came back in, which is sad, but everything else went really well. And I got flack from Jake and Eric Berger over on Off Nominal saying that, but, you know,

the fact that everything else went as well as it did, I thought was really encouraging. We obviously know that space missions to the moon are really hard and often result in crashing to the moon. We've had a ton of them in the last couple of years and not a lot of successful ones. So there's always something that's going, you know, chaotically wrong in these missions. And there obviously was in this, but also everything else about the mission went really well. And they proved out a lot of their systems that they can carry forward to missions with griffin their larger lander that's coming up uh next so yeah i mean i don't want to go on too long about it at the moment but thought it was very cool to to watch that mission overall and and uh hope the astrobotic team is taking some

rest after what was a crazy week or two uh dealing with that and we'll see when they get back to it with griffin in the near future um we do have an intuitive machines flight coming up on the clips front in a couple of weeks so we will see how this other clips provider does with their first mission uh that's a very different kind of vehicle this is sort of the descendant of project morpheus at jsc and a little bit of a riff on that using you know methane as their propellant and launch it on top of a falcon 9 so you know totally different stack altogether and we'll see how they do with that and we did have you know another lunar landing attempt in the past week uh jaxa made history

with a very comedic landing on the moon i would would say. So this was the SLIM lander, the SMART lander for investigating moon, I believe is the acronym, which is just a crazy one. But they went down for their lunar landing, and it was tense for sure as they were coming in for landing. Really cool design of a lander. They have these two main engines that they actually come in more like a lander that you would expect with the engine down but then at the final touchdown point they tip over and they land on

their side so that everything is closer to the surface and more stable ironically but i do really like that design there's a small engine that tips them into the correct orientation that they want at landing. Now, what happened with this lander is, like I said, somewhat comedic. They had, we didn't know at the time, right? Like, they didn't lose contact. It seemed like they landed successfully. The graphics for mission control, though, certainly seemed like the vehicle rolled. And then the commentator on the live stream just kept saying, we're checking the status for like 30 minutes.

They kept saying this. It felt like a couple hours after landing, there was confirmation that they did land successfully. They were in contact with the vehicle, but they were not generating electricity with the solar panels. So they had battery power for a little bit. They deployed the two rovers that were on this vehicle, um, and those were operating, but they did not have power generation capabilities indicating that the solar arrays weren't lined up with where the sun was at the time. Eventually, one of the rovers did send back an image of the spacecraft, uh, on the surface

of the moon in a tipped orientation, kind of up on its nose. And one of the two main engines was totally missing later they also showed an image um where one of the main engines fell off during descent they have a picture of it from their nav cam falling to the lunar surface which is absolutely wild but that was actually the source of the tip essentially that they had two engines right next to each other so the fact that they were only down to one was producing thrust in a different direction than planned which added a little roll to the vehicle so when it touched down it rolled up onto its nose again really qualified success right it landed safely but not successfully or it landed successfully but it

didn't operate successfully i don't know how you classify it. They're still trying to get back in touch with it and check on the power generation status as the lighting changes on the moon. The rovers themselves are operating and communicating back to Earth. They sent back an image of the lander. So a really cool mission and a memorable one for sure. And with that, Japan becomes the fifth country to land on the moon successfully. for sure. And with that, Japan becomes the fifth country to land on the moon successfully.

So, you know, the era of lunar landers, we are, you know, how would you count it? One for two? What's your vibe? One for two, 0.5 for two, 0.75 for two. I'm going to give it a full one for two. This was a genuinely wonderful mission and, you know, certainly is going to win the off nominees for this year over on off nominal the last bit that i just want to catch up on is this update that nasa did for artemis um they announced essentially a one-year delay across the board um so artemis 2 was supposed to fly the end of this year that's been delayed to no earlier than september 2025 artemis 3 was still scheduled for late 2025. They kicked that out to September 2026. No one was surprised by that. They talked about how they still need time to work on the landers, the spacesuits. Artemis three, I've been assuming it's 2028. There was some funny comments on the

call where Eric Berger asked, how can we trust a September, 2026 date? And Jim free said, well, we have signed contracts that say 2026, which is, I get the line, but also like, come on, you know, you had a lot of signed contracts over the last many years for dates. Um, the date of Artemis three is honestly the least interesting part to me. Um, but I'll get to that. The thing I was really surprised by was how long the slip of Artemis 2 was. I was expecting it to slide into 2025. I didn't expect, you know, a 10-month delay right off the bat. I guess that's better than what's happened in the past where NASA's delayed, you know, two months, two months, two months, two months, and all of a sudden you're added up to a year later and there's always headlines about this mission being delayed. Maybe it's better to bite off a

bunch at one time, because they're understandable delays, and then story kind of dies down for a full year before you have to do it again, or a year and a half before you have to do it again. The issues that they talked about for Artemis 2, there was unexpected erosion of material on the heat shield of Orion during re-entry that they want to characterize and fix. They had concerns with the launch abort system, that it would trigger issues in the electrical system of Orion, not necessarily that the abort system wouldn't be able to get Orion away, but that it would shake batteries too hard and shut down some electrical systems, which is also very bad. But the one that I'm really interested to dig in a little bit on is they had some failures in circuitry that drive valves in the capsule's life support systems.

And this is the one that's concerning to me because I don't even think the full life support system is flying until Artemis 2 anyway. So when you look at the rest of the Artemis manifest, if you've got issues here and you haven't even flown the full thing yet, that's pretty concerning. And, and you're expecting there to be more gremlins, you know, from Artemis two and beyond things they need to fix or optimize, or, you know, hopefully the mission goes off and they can fly out of the moon without issues. And they don't, you know, they're doing these couple of phasing orbits around earth so that they can work out any issues before they fly off to the moon and they're days away then,

at least they're hours away while they, you know, test the whole system. But, you know, what happens if they do come across an issue or they don't fully fix this issue and they have to go, you know, once around, they're in orbit and then they abort back to Earth. And then hardware wise, we're in a really tough spot on the Artemis program. And that's the part that gives me a little bit of intrigue, right? Because Artemis 3 right now, the first landing attempt, is the last one to fly on the current version of SLS. Then we're moving to SLS 1B, which is the new exploration upper stage, which is still years away at this point. I think that when you look at the hardware schedule,

it's very brittle to anything like this. And if there were these three issues coming off Artemis 1, which granted was the test flight of SLS Orion, the integrated stack, but then it starts making you think about like, well, could we have fit more in Artemis I than we did? Because Orion was, for all intents and purposes, ready to fly much longer before SLS was. Could they have fit more into that Artemis I vehicle knowing that these schedules were so out of whack and bought down some more risk for Artemis II? and bought down some more risk for Artemis II. Because otherwise, we're in this kind of TikTok thing that is not very healthy, where Orion was kind of tied up and ready for SLS, was waiting on SLS. And in this flight, it feels like SLS is going to be ready while Orion works out their issues. And, you know, is that going to TikTok back the other way, back and forth on a program that has almost no hardware to go around? SLS Block 1B is still a ways off. So if we end up needing to re-manifest and fly some other test

mission in Artemis 3, or if the lander is super delayed and we still want to fly an Artemis mission to keep the crews operating this vehicle and to shake out some more stuff, so Artemis 3 becomes like an Apollo 8 style, go out and orbit the moon for a week and then come home kind of mission. What does that do to the rest of the manifest? Because then we're waiting on SLS Block 1B. Maybe that's not the worst thing in the world because we're waiting on spacesuits and lunar landers anyway, but it certainly feels to me like that's what's going to happen eventually. There were reporting from Joey Roulette and others, I think Eric Berger had this as well, that the landing was going to be pushed from Artemis 3 to 4. That didn't get announced in this press call that they did, but certainly feels true to

me, or at least feels likely. But it's just, you know, these are troubling to me because of how hardware poor the program is, and it makes it very brittle to these sort of issues, either adding time between flights, or if you want to delay certain portions of a flight to the next flight, well, now you've got a whole new launch vehicle to fly and, you know, characterize and classify. And what if something's taken way longer with that piece? It's just such a brittle architecture when it's not something that has the capability to fly very frequently.

And this teething process is going to be really strange. And in an era where budgets are really going to be tough to come by, and NASA's trying to figure out what to do with the budget this year, Congress is barely doing budgets this year, it's troubling. And is barely doing budgets this year. It's troubling and, you know, it's not a healthy situation. So, we'll obviously keep an eye on that and talk about it as we make way to the next launch. But we're now, you know, a year and a half away from the next, or more than that, right? A year and nine months away from the next Artemis flight. That's a long way. That feels so far away when we're almost that far away from the last one, you know, and that's, that's a big gap.

So, and again, these are the, this is a big gap between two flights of the same hardware from SLS block one and Orion, SLS block one and Orion. What happens when we get to that new, you know, new launch vehicle hardware? There's just, it's so much, it's hard to comprehend exactly what the best route is. So anyway, this was my very long, rambly catch up. I hope you enjoyed working through some of that stuff with me. Thank you all for listening. As always, I know I've been a little bit quiet lately, but I promise, I promise, I promise it'll be worth it when I wrap up what I'm working on. So more comment on some of those stories. And again, if you want to support what I'm doing here,

mainenginecutoff.com slash support, hit me up on email, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com, especially if you work for ULA, so that once again, I know people at ULA. Hit me up on Twitter at wehavemiko, on Mastodon at miko at spacey.space, if you're still doing that kind of thing. And otherwise, thanks again.

I will talk to you soon.