Main Engine Cut Off - T+268: IM-1, CLPS, NASA Budget (with Eric Berger)

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

Eric Berger of Ars Technica joins me to talk about Intuitive Machine’s successful landing despite so many issues on the mission, the future of CLPS, and the tough questions facing NASA and its budget.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 823 other supporters.TopicsEric Berger (@SciGuySpace) / XEric Berger | Ars TechnicaThat moment when you land on the Moon, break a leg, and are about to topple over | Ars TechnicaIt turns out that Odysseus landed on the Moon without any altimetry data | Ars TechnicaNASA faces a quandary with its audacious lunar cargo program | Ars TechnicaBefore Ingenuity ever landed on Mars, scientists almost managed to kill it | Ars TechnicaThe 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 ULAWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo, and we've got one of our old favorites back today, Eric Berger, joining me to talk about Intuitive Machines landing on the moon successfully, some related clips storylines some nasa budget stuff that we wander into as well uh a nice little rundown of things on our radar lately so i'm sure you will enjoy that so without further ado let's give eric a call eric welcome back it's been a little bit since you've been on this show so sorry for that absence i'll try not to take it personally yeah all of the audience does who's like largely you're their favorite guest so um i wanted to have you on because you have had the inside line on two of

the machines all along being however many miles away from their headquarters and mission control and you got to drop in there this week uh so this mission has had i feel like it's a microcosm of the space industry because it had everything that could possibly happen to a mission it had successes and failures and luck and chaos and like it's the more time goes on the more it seems like an amazing bout of luck that they landed on the moon because like nothing worked and yet they stuck the landing uh so yeah i mean we could just start with like high level takeaways on the mission i guess yeah i mean i think i think it was really a resounding success you know given that this is a company that had a couple hundred people and got a hundred million dollar contract to land on the moon which is really hard to do um as i think most people listening

understand and overcame all these different challenges to actually make a soft landing on the moon is pretty remarkable um and and some of it was luck but you know you have to you know i talked to a bunch of the nasc people yesterday and they were like really impressed with the stick-to-itiveness of intuitive machines really you know they they have a good team they work through a ton of issues um you know i don't think it's deeply appreciated how close they came to losing the spacecraft you know within an hour or two of separating from the falcon 9 rocket the star trackers wouldn't come on. The vehicle was tumbling through space. It had three hours of battery life left and they were able to manage to

save it. And I think really underappreciated too is the fact that this was a LOX methane engine, right? This wasn't hypergols. This was the first deep space operations of LOX methane. And firing that engine over seven days. And after some initial kinks, they got to work perfectly. They were very happy with the performance of the propulsion system. And I think that's maybe underappreciated, like how that all worked. So the deeper you go into this mission, I think the more impressed you are with the fact that they actually made it down to the moon. The engine's funny, too, because going in, that was the thing that I and others were the most worried about.

Like, will this thing work? It's a new engine. They developed it themselves, yada, yada. And that was like the least. I felt this way about, I talked about this on Off Nominal. I went to one of the Virgin Islands over holiday time period. And I was renting a car there. And I was really worried about driving on the left. And then I got to St. John where

everything is driving up a sheer cliff. And it became the thing I was the least worried about because I was like, is this Jeep gonna fall apart? Will I make this turn until I have enough engine power? This is how I feel about intuitive machines. Like, I forgot about the engine. After they finally tweeted, we fired the engine and it worked and then it was this whole series of of what's actually happening to this mission and uh now that we know this series of like technical hurdles that they had to overcome there's still some mystery to me about some of these and maybe we can unpack the progression of the mission and which parts we know the details on and which things we still need to get filled in on yeah i mean i'm happy to do it i don't have all of the all of the details and i am not an orbital dynamics guy so you know some of this stuff kind of flies over my head a little

bit but but we can happy to help as best i can well you were the one with the story before the press conference so you had a little inside line. When you got there, can you describe like what part of the mission they were at and what the vibe was while you were probably amongst chaos of trying to pull data down off the moon? Yes, they're actually, we're working the mission out of the third floor of the old Boeing building in Houston, where they originally had some of their offices um it's always a treat for me then to walk into the boeing building um here in houston because they they just love me over there um i joked with the im guys like i'm you know i may need to bring two different ids to

get in but um i walk on a wall by the entrance you know i walked in and they had like a conference room with like three or four nasa people working and they had like a conference room with like three or four NASA people working. And then they had another conference room with IM people. And then you walk off to the right and they had their mission control where there were about a dozen people sitting around consoles. And they were just trying to bring the visual processing unit on up on the lander to basically. And this was this was Tuesday morning morning they were trying to initialize that so that they could deploy eagle cam and get images and they continued working that for another 24 hours and never able to really get it to work they deployed it but they were trying to do that

and a couple other things and so the big issue was they really only had great comms for about eight hours out of a 24-hour period and they were in one of those periods where they were just coming up on good comms and so they were kind of all scr-hour period. And they were in one of those periods where they were just coming up on good comms, and so they were kind of all scrambling to make sure that they had everything they wanted to send up to the spacecraft and all the data they wanted to get down in a, you know. And I think they ended up getting about 350 megabytes of data back ultimately from the lander, which is quite a bit considering like they were getting like kilobytes that first 24 to 48 hours that's why we didn't really get any pictures um so they were able to work some some pretty good

magic i mean it's it's pretty phenomenal because the main antenna they couldn't get they couldn't use it because of its orientation lunar surface it was you know tipped over so they were operating on these four antennas that were about the size of a Coke can or smaller. And they were essentially pointed down to the lunar surface. So they were getting signal off the moon and bouncing back to Earth and having to, these were not directed, they were sort of unidirectional. So they were just of singing sending out a signal everywhere and bouncing off the moon if they had to sort of sort through all of that to to pin it down i think again that's like a really pretty snazzy piece of engineering to figure that all out and it's like you know

they knew they had a limited amount of time they had about six days and and so it's like you had the time pressure to sort of tacked on top of that yeah well and that was not necessarily clear because the first press conference after landing the way they described the orientation of the vehicle was turns out 180 degrees flipped from what it ended up being so there if you watch the first briefing they had like a day or two after landing or whatever it was day after um yeah steve ultimus showed with hands like where they expected the sun to hit and they thought that it would illuminate the panel on top of the vehicle but it turns out it was heading towards the engines.

So is that the reason for the drastic shortening of the expected timeline on the surface? I think shortened a couple of days. But yeah, I mean, that's just indicative of the fact that they didn't know anything. Like those first 24 to 48 hours, they were getting a trickle of data back. They didn't even know where it really was on the moon, how it was oriented. But yeah, they had hoped that the top of the spacecraft where there's a solar panel would actually be pointed toward the horizon where the sun was. And it turns out it was 180 degrees opposite of that. So I talked to Scott Tilley this morning, who does amazing tracking. I don't know if you follow him on Twitter. You probably see people retweeting him. Does incredible tracking we found him on this show to talk about luna 25 which is still a thing

that mystifies me that something something happened there that we'll never know um i had him on off nominal to talk about how he does all this tracking and if you have not experienced scott like he's definitely a a wonder uh because he's doing all of this intelligence by just like snooping off signals that the missions that's phenomenal sending out already um and he was talking a little bit about the antenna pattern so i was trying to get a better understanding for what that means and you know the way you described how they're omnidirectional they're bouncing off the lunar surface that you know is not it's kind of expected because they tipped over on the lunar surface but i found it interesting in your article and then they talked about this in the press conference as well that they had

issues on the way out to the moon as well where they sort of had to find a happy medium between enough solar power getting generated by the panels that are fixed position on this lander but also needing the antennas to point towards earth and that that was a trickier challenge than they anticipated and that it might be trickier challenge than they anticipated, and that it might be an area that they redesigned for future landers. How deep did you dive in with that with them? Because that feels like a weird thing that was sort of like a knowable portion of the mission, and it felt like a miss to me that there wasn't a better like cruise setup for

this mission. Well, you know, again, this is a commercial mission. So they're flying kind of see the pants type stuff. They're like testing some, but they're, they can't test forever. And I think that they were also breaking in their, their own deep space network, so to speak, because they were trying to not buy time off of NASA and create an opportunity to sell this capability to other companies as well. And so I think all of those challenges kind of folded into it. And I suspect they had some ideas for how the antennas would work, and they may have not worked as well.

So as you said, they used a lot of their helium in the RCS system to point back to Earth intermittently, and then to get maximum charge on their solar panels from time to time. They ended up landing on the moon with a lot more methane and LOX left than helium. It's kind of funny considering how astrobotic went. They were losing a lot of helium on the way out to the moon as well. It was definitely not a good start of the year for helium in lunar landers. So the other thing that Scott had, and this is the mystery that i have

yet to understand um so he was tracking the orbit on the way out to the moon and then the actual orbit when they were at the moon and it and he showed that the the timelines that he was picking up was significantly off from the timelines that were published by like the jpl horizons predictions um just indicating that like either i don't have the right data or something weird's going on off from the timelines that were published by like the JPL Horizons predictions. Just indicating that like, either I don't have the right data or something weird is going on here. And then we get into the portion of this mission where they were going for lunar orbit insertion. And they haven't given us specific numbers on this yet, which is I think concerning to me. But effectively, they can Tim Crane talked about this on the most recent press, that they captured into an orbit that was a lot lower than they intended.

They intended to end up 100 kilometers circular. They captured lower than that to the point at which they needed to do a lunar correction maneuver. And in his words, that raised their periloon, or whatever the right word is. I think that's the right word. I don't know. Apolloon? Apolloon? No, because the low point. Some people call it something else. Periloon, I think, yeah. I think that's the right word. I don't know. Apolloon? Apolloon? No, because the low point, some people call it something else.

Paralloon, I think, yeah. I think it's right, but some people use a different word, whatever. So they raised that up so that the orbit almost matched their departure orbit for all intents and purposes, this kind of like just-before-powered-descent orbit they were going to be in. Yeah. That was actually where they effectively captured into in lunar orbit which to me is alarming because i'm putting together all the statements that were made tim said that tim crane being co-founder cto i think is the right title that the engine burn for lunar orbit capture was exactly the right duration within a very precise margin, but they ended up so

significantly off of what their intention was, indicating that they didn't actually know with enough certainty where they were heading into lunar orbit capture. They avoided doing a third trajectory correction maneuver on the way out because they were in such a good spot, and yet they ended up at such a significantly different location than they intended, in such a good spot and yet they ended up at such a significantly different location than they intended low enough that they had to raise the lowest point of their orbit which is flying around the moon alarming because there's uh land that can come out of nowhere when you're flying around the moon because it's so lumpy um you factor that in with what i don't feel like was a sufficient description of why they fired up the laser altimeters in the first place when they were in orbit kind of leans towards this idea that they didn't have a strong enough understanding of where they were in lunar orbit.

And they wanted to get another data point out of these laser altimeters. You also have to be low enough to the surface that those would work. So I have a strong feeling, and I'm hoping that I can talk to Tim Green and understand this better, but that they were really freaking low to the lunar surface on that capture orbit. Like knock a zero off their intended altitude kind of levels. I mean, maybe. You'll have to ask Tim. You know, that's a very interesting idea, and I think that they were pretty low. idea and i think that they were pretty low um but it it kind of underscores the fact that flying the moon is sort of the wild wild west um because we don't have great capability there to to tell you where a spacecraft is we don't have persistent communications there's no relay

spacecraft u.s relay spacecraft there's a chinese one, obviously. So it's, it's, it's pretty remarkable that, you know, you can, you can, I mean, you got to take everything with you, you got to take your power, you got to take your communications, you got to take your GPS, you got to take your range finders. And again, I mean, they obviously had some, they obviously had some issues that they had to overcome. And I think, again, it speaks to their capabilities, that they were able to salvage the mission. And get what is undoubtedly the coolest imagery out of space for a while, actively thrusting into the lunar surface

while your one leg is flying and hitting into your other legs on the surface. It's total chaos, but it's absolutely fantastic it is fantastic i mean if you step back and nasa was thrilled like all of their scientific payloads got valuable data um the scalps payload which was supposed to get the plume ejecta at touchdown did not was not active at that time so it didn't get the data they needed but they were able later to activate it and get some information most of the commercial payloads got what they wanted the eagle cam we did not get the image that we wanted from that um but they were able to deploy that um and so i just you know when you consider the alternatives, like what happened with Beresheet, what happened with the Japan lander, what happened with Astropodic, you know, I am super impressed with what they pulled off.

You know, one thing I wanted to ask you, if you're done asking me these difficult orbital dynamics questions that I have no capability to answer. My orbital mechanic savant over here. Yes. Yes. Do you think, I was thinking about this the other day, do you think what they did with this first mission

is more complicated than what SpaceX was trying to do with Falcon 1? Because SpaceX had a similar amount of money and it was about the same time frame, about four years, where they built the Falcon 1 and launched it for the first time. Same size company, different leadership styles, obviously. But I'm just wondering, do you think what Astro, excuse me, what Intuitive Machines did was more challenging or less challenging obviously um but i'm just wondering do you think what what astro excuse me what intuitive machines did was more challenging or less challenging or about the same as trying to put a small rocket into orbit in the environment of early 2000s i would say way harder on the intuitive machine side

the i think so yeah yeah the sheer amount of human experience that has went into both of those sections of spaceflight is drastically different, right? There were a lot more people, not that there were these people necessarily working on Falcon 1, there were a lot more people around them that had worked on rockets, that had went to orbit, than there are people still alive today that have built lunar landers. Like, that's just the fact, right? That there haven't been a lot of these, especially in this model. alive today that have built lunar landers like that's just the fact right that there's there haven't been a lot of these especially in this model yeah i don't think anybody in the control room i asked the of ultimates this anybody in the control room had ever flown a spacecraft like

beyond low earth orbit before like they there was no experience of like operating a spacecraft in deep space in that control room they also had to build an engine like the most difficult part of the falcon one was the merlin engine and these guys had an engine wasn't nearly as powerful but they had to operate it you know and the thing is a rocket like it has to work for about eight minutes right and this you had to work for two weeks yeah um i just think it's if we're stepping if we if if you have a deep appreciation for what spacex did with the falcon one 15 20 years and i certainly do then this is this was a at least as difficult a challenge if not more difficult and they did it with the same amount of people in the same amount of time with

less money with less resources i anyway i just just think it's one of the... And the first one worked. And the first one worked, right? Yeah, that's different. The first Falcon 1 obviously flew for 30 seconds and its engine was on fire. Yeah, this is, I think, way, way above that. So if you put that context around it, it's a remarkable achievement, I think.

Totally. Yeah, and then also knowing, the whole landing phase of this mission is probably your fourth book uh because the laser altimeters didn't work turns out they weren't using the NASA lidar payload that they flipped over to they were just going off of an IMU and optical navigation I still don't understand how the timing of the engine burn was fed in like was it just operating on what they thought was best so funny so funny story about that so i i ultimus didn't really want to tell me that because he didn't want to like you know it was a it was a good story like the ndl nasa saved the day right with the lander it's like he's like well you know i don't really want to talk down you customer. We didn't use that data.

We didn't have it. Basically, the flight computer, they had screwed something up. They couldn't process it. The flight computer wasn't actually ingesting and using that altimetry data from the NDL telescopes. And so I wrote that. I wrote that in the story on Tuesday and got massive pushback from um uh like people saying you're down playing nasa you know you don't like nasa you're trying to say they didn't help blah blah and like and then like space launch system voice yes yeah and then like and then like nelson at the press

conference on wednesday morning the administrator bill nelson says ndl save the day of the intuitive machines mission. I'm thinking, you know, I don't think I got that wrong. And then it came up at the news conference yesterday where I forget who, Jeff Faust asked, and Tim Cranor said, no, we didn't use that data. So I felt a little vindicated at that point. No, I'm not NASA hating. I was just trying to report what actually happened. So my understanding is that they ignited the engine power descent.

They kind of knew where they were up until that point, just from the orbital parameters that they'd been able to figure out. But then once they sort of started the power descent, all they were relying on was a camera that was basically comparing imagery data that was collected to known images and then the um and then they had the imu the internet the imu data which sort of if the spacecraft knew where it was and could measure the acceleration that it had undergone since then it could extrapolate kind of where it was from that. That's crazy. It is crazy.

It's a wild, a wild descent. Yeah. It is a wild descent. And you can only imagine what it must've been like in that, in that control room. Cause I think at the time they believed that the NDL data was being fed into the flight computers. They didn't, they only realized afterward that, you know, they came in blind. They came in blind. They said that they were supposed to flip a data is valid flag yeah uh

and they didn't so it was just for it was saying that's not valid data i'm just gonna ignore it and keep doing my thing it's amazing that any of this worked uh so yeah i'm excited to go visit the i am one landing site museum one day that'll be a yeah a great place to go um yeah so that that picture that they they released um the one that shows the lander kind of leaning over that was taken from the top of the stack is super cool because you can see that crater about half a kilometer away and you can see beyond it where i mean yeah it would be pretty badass to see that one day the last clips related thing i want to talk about is some overall clips program vibes at the moment right i think it's amazing that out of these first two missions they got one that was

even this much success how much you want to qualify it is up to you you and i are both like this was a success other people quarrel about that but um worst case scenario was like how many shots on goal need to miss before we get one of these. And the fact that they're over that is huge. What is interesting, though, about this program is that it isn't a typical commercial crew cargo style program where they funded two competitors with development contracts and a series of missions. The Intuit Machines is the only competitor that has multiple missions on a common lander and out of all the task orders right now.

So they're the only ones that you can say this lesson feeds directly into the second, the third mission. All the others, you know, Astrobotics moving to a new lander on its next mission. And then the whole slew of others are also going to have their first mission out. So how do you feel like the appetite is internally to NASA to deal with like this situation six times in the next couple of years? Like there's always going to be these press conferences where, you know, we put these payloads on this lander, but most of them are tech demos or engineering demos or getting the TRL level up. And, you know, this was a very successful thing. We got most of the data we wanted. We didn't get all of it because this is just going to keep happening over and over again.

And where do you feel like they're at on that? I think there's a lot of support within NASA for Eclipse just because they like the fact that it takes some risks. And there's a general belief that buying the services is a good way for the agency to go. is a good way for the agency to go. And I think that now that they've got one lander, Nova C, which is pretty reliable, will make them all feel good because they'll be like, if we have small stuff, we got to get to the moon. We can feel pretty confident putting it on this spacecraft. The big decision, the big important question, and I think which is going to really tell us a lot about what NASA really thinks about CLPS is the Viper mission right which is this 400 million dollar rover that's supposed to go to the south pole of the moon on astrobotics next generation lander griffin

um you know that that was scheduled to launch later this year next year still is this year apparently yeah okay now i saw the post earlier today that said all the science payloads are installed and 80% of Viper is complete, which is further along than I would have imagined it is at the moment. You mean it's not on the lander, it's just assembled, like the Viper? No, just the rover part. Yeah, yeah. So the question then is what— Good note, though. Viper the rover is approaching a $1 billion, damn near flagship level mission yeah that was sort of

funded in through this backdoor yeah i mean this is a major issue major mission it's super cool it's like going to go down and actually look for water ice at the poles i mean this is going to answer the question we all have so you really want to get that rover down to the lunar surface in working order and so it's scheduled to fly in an astrobotic lander an astrobotic hasn't demonstrated the ability to land on the moon. They've got no flight experience of operating a spacecraft down to the moon. They did some cool things with Peregrine, but, I mean, they didn't get really close to the moon. So they didn't take that big step.

So do you put Viper on the first flight of Griffin as it's scheduled to be? I don't think so. And I think NASA will find other stuff to put on griffin and then they're gonna have to figure out how to get a half billion dollar land of the moon on eclipse mission or what um i think it's too big for for nova c right isn't it i think so yeah it would be the next nova d or yeah no no the d because they're m no i use the roman numerals for how much payload it can take to the surface it's asking how i feel about roman numerals i'm not going to yeah i refuse to indulge you um uh so i think i think that's that's a big question because nasa could go to india and say

you guys have a lunar land could we use that um or they could go to lockheed and say well you know you guys are back. Here's half a billion dollars. Figure out how to land this on the moon. Or do they say... Go to SpaceX and say, you have to test that big elevator that you have to use to land the people on the moon. Right, yeah. I think maybe you could put this thing on instead.

I mean, SpaceX is a Eclipse vendor. So that's not out of the realm of possibility. The moon has an uncrewed demo to do. I mean, yeah, they probably want to get Viper to the moon this decade, though. No, I don't mean to crap on Blue Orchard. I think they're actually doing some cool stuff with their lander technology. They're in a jam, is your point. They're in a jam.

They're in a jam, and their confidence in the Eclipse program will get a good idea of what they ultimately decide to do with Viper. They're going to have to make that decision fairly quickly. we'll get a good idea of what they ultimately decided to do with Viper. They're going to have to make that decision fairly quickly. But it's, you know, Firefly seems to be making good progress with its lander. I think there's a little bit of friction with the Draper-Icebase collaboration on their spacecraft, but they're coming along. It's going to come down to money, right? Because these first missions missions the companies bid low

and then their expenses were higher than they thought covet hit which you know extended the timelines extended the cost it's they're losing money on these first missions and so nasa is going to have to really decide do they want to continue to support this commercial pipeline in the moon or not and they're going to have to step up and probably you know do a block buy or or like we'll you know do like a crs thing where they commit to like six or eight missions from a couple providers um i'd like to see them maybe wait to see if firefly is successful or or draper successful to before you really start to pick winners um but i wouldn't it wouldn't surprise me if we get in a couple years and you've got like IM and one other company sort of as your official small to medium cargo delivery service and then

Blue Origin, SpaceX are the big stuff. Yeah. It feels like the direction they want to go. And I've talked to some people within Eclipse that have said exactly that. They're like, yeah, listen, we wanted to be structured like a commercial cargo program, but there's just not, we can't get the budget or political support or whatever it is that would make that happen because nasa's budget overall is in a horrible jam uh yeah so there really isn't room to carve out like and have a program that would have its own line item in the budget yeah i do think um

i do think the success of this mission ultimately will embolden or strengthen the case of those who would like to see a commercial um pipeline to the moon yeah i mean it certainly would be you know of nasa's interest to to take advantage of a situation in front of them to shape their budget but they have yet to show that they're able to do that on the commercial space station front so i mean i i don't have confidence that they will see like this is a political win waiting for us to take advantage of and jumping on and realigning a budget around that so you you mentioned budget let's let's can we step back for a couple minutes and just sort of look at big picture

on this because let's look at the artemis program in aggregate right um you got to have sls block one you got to have starship you got to have um orion right that's what you've got to have to put humans on the moon and so everything else on top of that is sort of super superfluous right the pieces around that are like clips right on one hand the small stuff is nice but you don't have to have, but you don't have to have it. Gateway, you don't have to have it. And then SLS Block 2, even Exploration Upper Stage, you don't really have to have that either. There's other ways. You can use Starships or Blue Origin vehicles to get other stuff to the moon. You don't need to co-manifest on a bigger SLS rocket.

You don't really need it. manifest on a bigger SLS rocket. You don't really need it. And so it's going to be interesting as budget challenges continue to present themselves, I think, for NASA. Everyone expects the budget to remain flat or maybe even go down over time. Which of those fungible pieces, and maybe there are other pieces I'm missing or that you disagree, but do you sort of defund clips? Do you defund Gateway? Do you defund Exploration Upper Stage and Block 2? What do you think about that? It's interesting because NASA's like the last 10 years, NASA has had the defense to say, well, we only have so much power because Congress keeps telling us, here's this money you spend it on this. And this is the opposite scenario where Congress is like, you can't spend more than X and NASA has to make it fit. So does it give them a chance to be more, to use their own intuition of like which things they should follow up on and which things they should emphasize or de-emphasize? You know, for instance, if they get this budget line item from

Congress or budget line from Congress and they say, well, to make it if, if they get this budget line item from Congress or budget line from Congress and they say, well, to make it fit, we have to take block one B or I guess not block one B at this point is kind of like too far gone, but you know, whatever you want to do, if it's block two or like some mobile launcher stuff, I don't even know. Like I actually don't even know if block one B is too far gone at this point, but I let's just use it as an example because it's probably the most politically fiery thing they could do. What if they said, to do all this, to keep the ISS flying, to keep Artemis going, to fund all these priorities that we have, and because China, we have to get rid of Block 1B and make Block 1 SLS fly out its lifespan and do all the missions like Artemis 3. fly out its lifespan and do all the missions like Artemis 3.

What would the congressional response be to that? Because that previously would be the worry that NASA would do something like that, or Jim Bridenstine would go in front of Congress and say, if our current contractors can't get it done, we're going to ask around and have Mike Pence say that in a press conference or something. There was always a major allergic reaction to that by Congress. But if they've already started by saying, well, there's no money to go around, then what do they do? If NASA threatens block one B,

do they write that into law and screw NASA on the rest of their budget priorities? Or do they have to say, ah, we got bigger fish to fry because it's an election year. So I guess we'll just seed the ground on that one. I mean, I don't know.

I mean, obviously, uh, Senator Shelby has retired. So that diminishes some of the clout. And Block 1B is really Boeing and the contractor for the mobile launch tower, whose name I'm not, it escapes me. Bechtel. Bechtel, yeah. Boeing and Bechtel would be the big lobbyists for that because Northrop is still happy if you tell them they can continue building solid rocket boosters.

Lockheed's continuing to build Orions. So it's really Boeing, which has the sole contract for the exploration upper stage, and Aerojet, which has, you know. But they can continue to build RL-10 engines for ULA or slash Blue Origin for that. for that and and then you know it's so like most of the rest of the space universe would probably be okay with that um so i i don't know i mean it would be a political shit storm right i i have no doubt about that but it seems like

what you need block one b for for the artemis program for the next 20 years that you're not already funding to the HLS program? It's just gateway co-manifested payloads at this point. That's the only thing that's on there. But can you get that stuff without Block 1B? Oh, yeah, good, for sure. I mean, well, it's tricky because on most of those payloads orion is the thing that would then do all the proximity operations and docking yeah right it would pull it out of the of the uh universal stage adapter i think is the name of the little but could you launch that stuff

on a falcon heavy and then rendezvous it you just got to figure out what you can send along with it to have control you know to be able to tug that along on its way because most of them are pure habitat modules so they don't have power generation or any or any of the you know control that they would need to make their way out one thing you could do is just say well let's just bail on gateway and go right to the surface with block one and eliminate a huge wedge of budget that That's the obvious solution. If you and I were in charge of NASA, that's what we would do tomorrow. Yes, with all due respect to some people who I like a lot who are running the Gateway program, the simplest budget.

But they would do great things on the surface too. Yes, they would. You know, they would be great, and they would love that. Yeah, and so, well, I'm in Houston, so I'd probably get lynched for suggesting canceling the Gateway. You're never allowed in that Boeing building again. Well, not only that, the center itself. I mean, they have options to reduce the Artemis budget.

The question is, do they have the fortitude to do that? I think that's going to be one of the really fascinating things to watch. Like I said, the things you could conceivably cut if you're still committed to going to the moon is because you if you cut hls so what you're not saving much money right the the big savings would be in gateway upgrades to sls or just you know killing clips um but you also have to decide what to do with low earth orbit do you bail on commercial space stations well again that's not much money right now that's what i was going to say they don't even really have embraced that so

and the decision point is do you just continue down this ios is but but but commercial space stations theoretically are going to save you money because right now it costs you about three billion dollars a year to have a presence in low earth orbit. NASA's goal would be to spend about a billion dollars a year on commercial space stations. So, like, the transition to low-Earth... And yet they want to continue. There's been talk in Congress of, hey, you know, we should go past 2030 with the ISS,

as it's, like, actively leaking two pounds of air a day. I'm going to write a story about this next week because one of the panel... I sat on a panel here in Houston discussion last week, and the representative from Boeing, whose name I cannot remember, said, we've done the analysis. We can fly the space station until 2040. And, of course, Boeing has the contract to operate stations,

so that's kind of a self-serving comment, of course. But it was funny to watch the the the people from vast and uh and nanoracks and other places commercial space stations on stage sort of looking at this guy making that claim and thinking yeah but if you fly until 2040 you completely kill our business models um so yeah i mean that's that's a debate too a lot of people in congress would like to fly past 2030 like this is these are hard decisions decisions that NASA's kind of been putting off for a while, but we're coming to the point now

if the budget does contract, you're going to have to make hard decisions on Artemis budget, you're going to have to crap or get off the pot on commercial space stations. As usual, interesting times, but we've kind of been in this for a couple years now, there's this kind of period where we've waited to see who's what's worked and what hasn't.

So I will once again, lay out my 40 chess theory, Eric, that the, we should leave it to the Europeans to figure out how to get a commercial space station on orbit. And we will offer them as many feet on the lunar surfaces as it takes them to sort that out. I'm sorry, we're relying on Europe to build a commercial space station? All I'm saying is, I don't think the NASA situation right now can support both the budget peaks that would be to fly commercial space stations and make use of them, while at the same time extending ISS indefinitely, and also doing anything interesting on the lunar surface in the next 10 years and we will either muddle along or we will do one of these things yeah I mean I'm kind of with Phil McAllister that like if we have a gap in low

earth orbit for a couple years that's okay I don't think that's the end of the world especially if we're starting to fly missions to the moon. The only space programs that are worried about having a gap in LEO are those that are doing nothing else interesting in space. Yeah, yeah, that's right. So it's going to, as I said, it's interesting times and we'll have to see if NASA makes some hard decisions or congressional leaders make some hard decisions. I don't think anything happens this year. Things may change next year when we get a new, you know, Bill Nelson presumably will retire at the end of President Biden's first term.

If he's reelected, we'll have most likely Pam Melroy. And then if Trump is elected, then who knows? It won't be Bridenstine. Oh, who's your bet? Because I had a fun bet on off nominal. I had a name that I pulled out of nowhere that i was like i wonder why this person would come i have a name what's your name okay you're gonna crack up because it's hilarious but what if what if john culberson made a return to the space scene i've been talking to john i think he's enjoying retirement he's doing stuff with deep sea um with jim cameron he's hanging out with him a lot and i think he's he's in his late 60s i mean hey that's young for an administrator these days with Deep Sea, with Jim Cameron. He's hanging out with him a lot. I think he's in his late 60s.

I mean, hey, that's young for an administrator these days, but I think he's enjoying retirement. And I tell you, he really enjoyed being on the other side of that where you can, he told me I would step on their airpipe in terms of budget until he got what he wanted. I don't think he would appreciate, enjoy being on the other side of that. Could be wrong. I bet he would be really good at it. I think he's very much in the Brinestein mold

where he's somebody whose space interests were outside of his own parochial interests in a way. And politicians have been very good NASA administrators. Yeah. I'd be fine with another politician. He's got the right makeup. I'd be fine with another politician. I don't think it'd be John.

My name, my prediction a couple years ago would have been Janet Kavandi. I don't see any reason to move off of that, but I have no idea who would in a Trump administration. I don't think they've thought that through. And unfortunately, I don't think a space program during a second Trump administration would be nearly as coherent as it was during the first administration. Thanks to Vice President Mike Pence and Scott Pace program during a second Trump administration would be nearly as coherent as it was during the first administration. Thanks to Vice President Mike Pence and Scott Pace, they ran a really great program. I suspect we would not be blessed with that again.

Well, it's a bummer. The only thing that came to my mind while you were talking about a gap in Leo, I just want to mention this i think it's the the terminology i feel like is conflated with the gap between shuttle and everything else that came after it yeah and the weird part is like yeah if we have a permanent leo gap like a permanent habitation in leo gap we wouldn't have a human spaceflight gap so i feel like the worry is is too much i do too i mean you could be able to put people up in dragon anytime you want to do dragon lab. They would still be doing it. Yeah. It'd be going somewhere.

It might be 18 Jared Isaacman flights, but it'd be happening. Right. I mean, and so you would not, you would not have a gap dragon still going to be flying. I agree with that. Um,

you know, and I'm just thinking like, what if we knew low earth orbit with the Russian spacecraft, and none of this matters anyway. So I feel like we've reached the logical conclusion of this episode. Eric, what have you been working on lately? What should people check out? Oh, man, I've been doing a lot of work on the eclipse missions. You know, I had a story a couple weeks ago on ingenuity, and sort of political fight to keep that helicopter going that I think was really interesting. People can go look that up.

But basically, it was a lot of the scientists and Perseverance mission managers did not want the helicopter to fly to Mars. And so the story behind how it actually got there, I think is really fascinating from a political standpoint. Um, and just, uh, just, you know, pushing ahead.

As I say, next week, I'm going to do something on commercial space stations. I think that's another sort of fascinating 2020s saga to follow in space. Awesome. Well, everyone go read about Bill Nelson's favorite little helicopter. You should do a whole story about why bill nelson's favorite little helicopter you should do a whole story about why he started calling it that little helicopter

i have no idea why did why did he start calling it that little i don't know he always calls it it uh even though the send-off video he said it like two or three times in a two-minute video it cracks me up every time wasn't speaking of bill nelson who's been a fine who's been a fine administrator wasn't that video he did on the for were watching the Intuitive Machines webcast just jarring? Like they had this – they had obviously shot two videos. One of it had been lost and one of it was success. And someone decided it was a success even though we really didn't know. And they popped up that video and it was just so bizarre.

Out of nowhere. Yeah. know um and they popped up that video and it was just so out of nowhere bizarre yeah as we're all sitting there mystified i'm getting texts from people like i don't care what bill nelson says i don't feel like we know enough to run this he's like what no what happened you got a little data and then it's like this is a great day for america your bill nelson voice is killing me it's terrible so good all right eric thanks for hanging out as always my pleasure thanks again to eric for joining me on the show as always it's always great fun to have him on to chat if you like this content if you want more of this kind of show you've got to head over to mainenginecutoff.com support to join the crew of 859

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