Main Engine Cut Off - T+269: IM-1 and Beyond (with Tim Crain, Co-Founder and CTO of Intuitive Machines)

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

Tim Crain, Co-Founder and CTO of Intuitive Machines, joins me to talk about their recent IM-1 mission to land Odysseus on the Moon as part of NASA’s CLPS program.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 36 executive producers—Russell, Chris, Josh from Impulse Space, Will and Lars from Agile Space, Warren, Ryan, Matt, Harrison, Lee Hopkins, Bob, Brandon, Stealth Julian, Frank, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, Benjamin, Steve, The Astrogators at SEE, Craig from SpaceHappyHour.com, Donald, Theo and Violet, Pat, SmallSpark Space Systems, Jan, Kris, Pat from KC, Fred, David, Tyler, Joel, Joonas, Better Every Day Studios, and four anonymous—and 823 other supporters.TopicsTim (@CrainTim) / XIntuitive MachinesIM-1 | Intuitive MachinesThe 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 Intuitive MachinesWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo and I'm very excited today to talk with Tim Crane who is the Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder at Intuitive Machines who obviously we talked last week a lot about their mission. They just landed IAM-1 on the moon through a fairly amazing mission in terms of all the things that happened to it the twists and turns that it took the things that worked the things that didn't the way they recovered how they landed on the moon in a somewhat chaotic fashion and yet it's still there on the lunar surface so a lot of details that i wanted to throw tim's way to get more info on now that they've had some time to look at the data and do a little bit of a post-mortem on the mission. They're still working on some of that, but he was

certainly game to hang out with me for an hour and chat about all these different things. So if you followed the mission live, you were hearing from Tim in press conferences that were happening about the mission. He was tweeting updates. He was also the voice on the loops that you were listening to if you were watching any of the live streams. So he was deeply involved with the mission from way back when he was on the show, a couple years back, to all the way through when they landed on the moon. So this will be awesome to get to dive in this deep with him. So without further ado, let's give Tim a call. Well, Tim, welcome back after a gap of, as we just calculated, 140 episodes.

But it's good to have you back. Hey, it's glad to be back. First of all, congratulations. It's been a huge couple of weeks, I'm sure. Seems like maybe everyone's kind of finishing up work and then you'll be able to take some time off in the coming days, hopefully. Yeah, you know, it's spring break in Texas and that's kind of a big deal, especially those of us with kids. So a lot of folks are going to take some time off next week. But by and large, we celebrated the landing and got back to work on Monday with IM2 coming up at the end of the year.

So we have a lot of work in front of us, just part of our nominal, getting that mission ready to go. nominal, you know, getting that, that mission ready to go. Um, and then making sure we fold all the lessons learned, um, all the things from IM1 that we, you know, paid so dearly for after two hectic weeks to make sure that they go into this next mission and make it even more successful. I was actually going to start right there of like, what's been up since, uh, Odysseus is hopefully taking a nap, not fully asleep. Um, yeah. So can you give us a sense of like what's been up since uh odysseus is hopefully taking a nap not fully asleep um yeah so can you give us a sense of like what the post mission mission work is like and then um i know at least previously the the gap between im1 and 2 was supposed to be pretty short um so maybe you can give us some insight on like what the workflow is from here to there

yeah for sure so we wanted to give people time both to recharge their batteries and kind of recover psychically from a very monumentous event. But we also want to give them time to look at the data and to really analyze what we pulled down from the vehicle, understand what it meant. Cause we have impressions during operations of, hey, we're looking at the telemetry, the vehicle's doing this. But sometimes as you get into the data,

a different story reveals itself that what you thought was causality was in fact a response to maybe something else that happened. And so we want to give the team enough time to really go through their data to cross-check. You want the GNC team to be able to cross-check with the prop team. You want the prop team to be able to cross-check with the avionics team. And so this week and next week, the teams have time to put their data packages together. And then we're going to do a post-mission review the week of the 18th, which is what we colloquially call a hot wash. And everybody's going to present what was the performance of your system?

What was different? What anomalies or curiosities, as I call them? You know, some things aren't necessarily an anomaly, but you didn't expect a behavior. So what were the anomalies and curiosities? And then what are the recommendations going forward for IM2, for IM3, for beyond? And then we'll have a panel that will adjudicate what category do those recommendations come into or new recommendations that we make as we go

through the hot wash. So we may say, yeah, absolutely. This is something that should go into IM2. And the perfect example of that that we know already today is we're going to change our procedure for checking the flight cable for our laser altimeters. So that's an easy one. That's going to happen. Definitely do that for IM2. Here's something maybe, though, that we want to improve. But we may judge that the incremental improvement to the mission is not worth the risk of destabilizing the configuration for IM2.

So we'll go, yeah, it's important, but that one will go on to IM3. On balance, better to wait and put that in when we have more time. Some things may be more strategic where we'll go, you know what, when we build the bigger lander, the Nova D lander. I heard you talking with Eric Berger about Latin numbers. Roman numerals, man. It's the Super Bowl I'm most mad at, and then you second. I'm sorry about that. You know, but there might be something where, yeah, we want to

do that. We'll do that on Nova D where we have a little bit more dry mass allocation to manipulate for our systems. And then the fourth category is the one I affectionately call, nah, it's just that we're not going to do those. That's not really going to help. And so we'll put those on the shelf. And, you know, maybe someday we'll come back to them and see. But that process is very important. It's a process I have been through before with Morpheus.

So we had the Morpheus Alpha vehicle. And we had a hardware failure on the first free flight of it. We lost the vehicle. We had the Bravo vehicle about 60% complete on that project because we were pushing on that project so fast that we had decided and got the agency to agree that loss of the first vehicle was not a mishap. It was the price, the risk, the risk and the price was acceptable for moving as fast as we did with Morpheus. But after we lost the Alpha vehicle, before we finished the Bravo vehicle, we did exactly the same process. And I think we had close to 180 recommendations on the Bravo vehicle for Morpheus. And we only implemented maybe 70 of them.

So, you know, it was in that process, it really helped. maybe 70 of them. So, you know, it was in that process, it really helped. One, it was cathartic for all the engineers who'd had built up design changes that they wanted to make to be able to get those exposed to the light of day. But it also allowed us to exercise some programmatic control and not change so many things so fast that you lost the heritage to the system you just won. Right. Or something happens to the next mission, then you have to figure out which change was it that caused it right if you change too many variables at once then it's effectively flying a whole new vehicle that's exactly right are more yeah if you're more uh discerning in terms of which things are worth the squeeze effectively and that part of that might be where the hardware and software side is in the flow, right? So are there things that,

I don't know where you're at in the process of, and sorry, there's drilling in my house, or not my house, next to my house today that might make it on this podcast. We can't hear it online at all. Not yet, but it's loud. Okay. Is there, I am too,

wherever it is at in the hardware flow, are there things that you might say we're too far down the hardware path to make that change, even though it would be worth it and you would be more accepting of risk because it would put the timeline at stake? Or is schedule not as much of a concern in this process? Well, it is a concern for IM2 because the lighting at the South Pole, and we're landing on the Shackleton Connecting Ridge, we're much more sensitive to lighting on this mission. If you land at the mid latitudes, the equatorial latitudes,

any time of the year, any season of the moon, you get basically 14 days of sunlight, 14 days a night. And then the timing of that is really just the epic of when it starts relative to your arrival. But the South Pole is different.

You definitely have seasons at the South and North Pole of the moon. And so we are sensitive to lighting. And in the fourth quarter of this year, which is where we're targeting IM2, we're just coming into a really good lighting period for a South Pole mission. So we have some flexibility to move that into maybe early 25 if we had to, but it's not infinite. And then you move into a season of the southern winter, which to sit here and talk in a non-science fiction sense about the southern polar winter at the moon just gives me goosebumps. But you move into the solar winter and then that's not a good time for IM2. So there is some pressure. But you move into the solar winter, and then that's not a good time for IM2.

So there is some pressure. I wouldn't say it's like launch fever or go fever. If we came up with a risk that was significant for mission success, we would absolutely sit down with our NASA customers, our commercial customers, and say, hey, we've got something we need to talk about. But I don't think that's really the driver. I think the bigger driver is exercising some discipline and some configuration management and making sure that we're moving the needle of mission success in the right direction. stacked today to launch. Physically, the only thing I would change in that vehicle would be the laser safety disabled and making sure that was in place. Everything else, I would fly as it was. There are some things we could do better that we know now, but all the lessons learned,

how to fly the vehicle, some software mods, some configuration management, lessons learned we had with our ground stations. With that knowledge now, I'm confident that if we reflue IM1 today, it would be smooth, right? So while there is some timing pressure and schedule pressure, I don't think we have a number of critical elements from IM1 that if we don't address them for IM2, that mission won't be a success. In fact, quite the opposite. Nearly all of our systems worked. Well, all of the systems did work. They nearly all worked within expectations.

Some worked a little bit differently than we expected. Those curiosities I mentioned were like, oh, I didn't expect it to do that. And then we learned how to adjust and move around it. So I think we're in a really good position that there's a moderate level of number of things that we'll put into IM2 and we'll be able to work them into our workflow. We have all the material for IM2. We'd already stacked the tanks. The structural components are done. The avionics, we have those. So really we're in a mode where it's mostly assembly right now. And there are a few things here and there that we can, you know,

hey, I'd like another pressure transducer here or make me make this heater on RCS pod three a little bit bigger because it was getting cold. But those are relatively small changes. And on the payload side, is that, um, have those all come in and they're, they're waiting to get attached. So they already attached the payload decks. What's that process like? Yeah, they are. We've, we've, uh, we've tested and, uh, uh, put in the flat sat the Nokia rover, uh, the lunar outpost rover with the Nokia 4G LTE experiment on it. So we brought that in through flat test, flat set testing. We've already built the garage and deployers.

We have our own rover deploy mechanism. If you see in the videos, it's kind of cool. It's a garage that kind of comes down and pivots as it lands. We've got the hopper is, is ready for flight with just a couple of mods. It's been through thermal vac testing and vibe testing. And then we have the the prime one drill mounted on a panel and, uh, that one will move off and put on a different panel when we, when we put the whole vehicle together,

but all the pieces are here. Um, and then we have some commercial and some other payloads. They're all here, ready to go. So, uh, we're in really good shape for this mission. And, They're all here ready to go. So we're in really good shape for this mission. And, you know, I liken what we're doing to water skiing. If you've ever been water skiing, when you're in the water and you're waiting for the boat to start pulling you, that was the anticipation leading up to IM1. And then the boat starts pulling real hard and you're wondering, am I going to get up and plane up on top of the water? Is this thing just going to pull me over my skis? We're starting to plane up, right? So we've got production processes in place. We've got operations in place. We have validated the operations and performance

of our systems. So now that we're starting to plane up, it's looking more for those incremental deltas to really dial in the performance than it is a major overhaul, at least for the Nova C vehicle. When we evolve to Nova D, we'll look closely at, okay, what are some more structural things we might do? I want to go through some parts of the mission that I had questions about. I think I know from your tweet, you were uncomfortable with how many times I said your name in the last show that I did with Eric Berger. I can't avoid it this time because but in all those instances, there were like things that you shed some light on in a press conference or two that I just am curious about. So I want to talk some flow of the mission stuff, but then there's some maybe bigger picture stuff that we can get to at the end of,

of, you know, what you're talking about there, fleet management and the program overall. But I'm curious to dig into something that was probably in like the very first press conference that you talked about during the cruise phase of the mission. And I misremember some of these details. So you can fill me in again on what was going on. Maybe I misheard this. But you were talking about a scenario where during that cruise out to the moon, there were times when you were trying to point the antennas at earth but the solar panels at the sun and that was making some challenges maybe spent some helium dealing with uh different orientation issues i'd love to dig dig into that a little bit and if that's something that um it's sort of how you ended up in that situation because to my uninformed brain

that feels like the piece that is easiest to test of of the mission because like landing on the moon there are 8 000 variables and everybody's crashed in the moon a couple times if they've tried to land on the moon before but the cruise portion i'm curious like is it a design thing that because you're going to these more extreme environments you you were 80 degrees south, I think, on this mission and next one even farther. So do those impose constraints that make that cruise phase tougher? Or is this something that you would look at for IM2, 3, or whatever it is? Sure. That's a great question. So let me address specifically the comm configuration and pointing on the way out.

You know, we had trained, we had hundreds of hours training operationally on the vehicle. But once you actually get into flight, there are eventualities that you didn't quite see in that training. For example, you're transitioning from one tracking station, communications station to another one, and there's a parameter in their configuration set that's not

quite right. And so instead of a smooth handover, maybe there's a 45 minute gap coming up on the next station. Well, you know, in a seven day cruise out to the moon, a 45 minute gap in communications when you're basically just pointing at the sun with your solar panels, that's not necessarily a big deal. However, we also had a fault detection, isolation and recovery logic in our comm system, which said like, hey, if you lose communications with the earth, wait for 15 minutes and then, you know, maybe power cycle one of the radios and see if it was, it was something with the radio. And if you don't reestablish calm, wait another 15 minutes and then switch to the other Hemi antennas. And so we had this, I called it a beat frequency and I wish I probably shouldn't have said it again.

Um, it was really a period. Cause when I said beat frequency, all the radio probably shouldn't have said it again. It was really a period because when I said beat frequency, all the radio astronomy. Yeah, you're triggering some portion of my audience, but not me, so don't worry. Exactly. What I really meant was, is there was a period of response on the vehicle when it would say, hey, I'm going to try to reestablish communications by moving through the options I have. And as it was doing that, that had not necessarily settled deep into our understanding of what would happen. And we'd bring comm back up. You know, we had a little bit of a delay, for example.

Now comm's back up, but the vehicle has moved into its alternate antenna configuration. And so we chased that a little bit as we went before we realized, okay, no, we, we fundamentally understand those kinds of things and we're able to, you know, prepare for them, make sure we were in a good, but in the, in the first couple of days of the mission, we may have over-responded as an ops team, you know, and said, oh my gosh, change to get these antennas torn to earth or, or, you know, move to get this piece of the vehicle in the sunlight to warm it up. And as we went through the days getting to the moon, we became much more comfortable with the reality of how the vehicle performed. And we were able to not use as much helium. We're able to, you know, mitigate calm dropouts. And those transitions became smoother because we'd

worked through those issues. But, you know, the first three days there was a learning curve of you can study the flight manual for a general aviation aircraft all you want. And you can. But the first time you go up and fly it, you know, there's some things that become more real to you. So those are the kind of things that we hit there. Now, with respect to extreme environments like the South Pole, one of the things we were worried about, definitely for IM2, is multipath. And when you're very close to the South Pole, as we will be on IM2 at 84 degrees, you're basically transmitting to the Earth on the horizon. So your transmissions and your receipt are going to interact with the lunar surface some. We had not done as much preparation with IM-1 for that because originally IM-1 was going to be a mid-latitude mission. And then NASA had expressed an interest on, hey, can somebody modify their landing site to the South Pole? We looked at it, realized we could.

But, you know, even- I think both you and Peregrine both switched landing sites like within the last couple years on the home stretch to the mission which is an interesting aspect of this and that was actually a um we had designed im1 for mid-latitude we designed im2 for a south pole um landing so we had experience with what changes those would require, but we were pleased with when we really looked at IM1 and ODI and said, what do we need to change on ODI to operate in the South Pole? They were not extensive changes. We had to tilt our top deck solar array so that it would face the sun more on the horizon. We had to change some of our thermal coatings a bit

because the day side and the night side of the vehicle were a little bit different than they had been. But they weren't gross systematic changes. And so we were pleased with that. But the unexpected benefit of the way we landed on our side on that slope, all of our transmissions were bouncing off the moon. And that's why after we landed, it took us a couple of days to kind of dial in. At times we had to move from right-hand polarization to left-hand polarization to get data. We could get signal either way, but we had to get data because it was actually bouncing off the surface of the moon.

So we actually feel fairly confident that between the equipment changes, we have a phased array high gain antenna on IM2 that's going to help us and it's got some articulation that will help us to manage multipath physically. But the experience we had with addressing that with this kind of off nominal antenna configuration on IM1 is really going to serve us well. Because even though our antenna when we land on IM2 won't be exactly on the surface like they were with IM1 is really going to serve us well because even though our antenna when we land on IM2 won't be exactly on the surface like they were with IM1 you're at the south pole and and your line of sight is going right over the surface yeah that's right so you said that on IM2 the the high gain antenna will have pointing where this one was fixed I think on this one was fixed and and um uh got a lot of help from the internet with recommendations for not having a fixed high-gain antenna.

But really, IOM1 was- You never considered things that moved, Tim. Yeah, that's right. You know what? And let me make a comment about that. I really liked the engineering discussion that our mission engendered. And even though a lot know, a lot of the recommendations were, hey, you know, you should have done this, those things we talked

about and thought about by and large. But the fact that the community was energized and saying, hey, let's think about how to design a lunar lander. I think that's a good thing, right? And so I didn't take it personally at all. And I really appreciate that people got excited about that. But what we're doing on the next mission, you know, I really appreciate that people got excited about that, but what we're doing on the, on the next mission, you know, I am one was as stripped down as we could make it. It was lean, lean, lean. Let's just try to make it work to get to the surface. Um, there are some more features, better cameras. Um, the, uh, the fixed high gain antenna that was on I am one is going to be replaced with a kind of a linear phased array

that can actuate and it will point more towards the earth. When you look at the earth from the surface of the moon, it kind of moves in an ellipse in the sky. It just kind of goes up and down. And that's the precession and nutation of the lunar orbit. But that being able to move that linear phased array is going to allow us to actually not only point at the earth better, but we'll be able to experiment a bit with the multipath and move that up and down and see if, you know, maybe pointing directly at the earth isn't going to be the best answer all the time. We might want to point a little bit above the earth and get that side lobe, you know, off of as much of the surface. So, um,

there's some, some capabilities that we'll have on IMT that, that'll absolutely improve our ability to communicate. All right. So let's get to the part that I have questions about and probably speculated on too much on the previous show. So now you can, and I think you guys were still trying to understand what happened on this situation. So let me try to lay out what I have heard as best as possible, and then we can paint in some of the corners that I missed. So on the arrival to the moon, the intention was to go directly to a 100-kilometer circular orbit. That's right. That's the part. It's directly the correct word there.

I don't know if you were going to capture with an elliptical orbit and then circularize down. No, no. It was going to capture with a elliptical orbit and then circularize down. No, no. With our sprint mission mindset, it was the whole time outbound, all of our trajectory correction maneuvers were targeting the B plane for a 100-kilometer flyby. And then when we were at the 100-kilometer minimum radius, lunar orbit insertion would circularize us and put us into a 100 by 100

gotcha so you were targeting effectively a 100 kilometer flyby of the moon and then capturing directly into that circular orbit there that's correct um and if i remember correctly did two trajectory correction maneuvers on the way out to the moon but canceled a third that's right on the way there so at that point like, all right, we got a good beat on where we're at. Orbit determination side of things looks like we're lined up well, or was it more that you didn't necessarily need it, so you wanted to conserve a bit? There's several factors that go into that.

One is, as you get closer to the moon, you start playing this game of, as you get closer to the moon, you start playing this game of, um, if I wait till I get closer, the maneuvers to correct get larger, but my propagation errors also get larger. Those are minuses. Um, but, um, my, uh, uh, opportunity to do additional orbit determination goes down. So you don't want to push that last maneuver too close to the moon. Otherwise you, you really run into problems executing LOI.

On the other hand, if you do it too far out, you're, you're, I may have misspoken. If you do it too far out, your propagation errors build up and your, your correction is not as effective. do it too far out your propagation errors build up and your correction is not as effective so um when we got done with uh tcm what we called three so we basically waived tcm2 and we just did that because we knew we were only going to do one more and mentally tcm3 was the tcm before that was the setup maneuver for it was exactly and so when we came out of that... You got a real space shuttle mindset here. You just assign some numbers and fly them whatever makes sense. I know, I know. It was TCMX for a while. And then finally, I pounded the table and said,

no, it's TCM3. Why is it TCM3? We've only done TCM1. I said, because TCM3 is the one I do before LOI. Where we ended up was, you know, we did the commissioning maneuver early and the commission maneuver was about 20 meters per second. That was dialed in to be that maneuver, regardless of what corrections we needed. Cause we wanted to exercise the engine across its profile. Well, that moved us from like a 2000 meter, 2000 kilometer flyby rather on one side of the moon to like a 3,000 kilometer flyby

on the other side of the B-plane. Because we really didn't need that much energy for correction. This was energy we were putting into the orbit just so we could exercise our engine in space and know what we were dealing with, you know, heading forward. So when we exercised TCM1, that brought us from that 3000 kilometer kind of altitude down to somewhere between 350 and 400 kilometers. So we really had corrected back in the direction we wanted to. We basically taken that CM energy back out and targeted closer to where we wanted to be. We felt like when we got out of TCM3 that we were somewhere between a hundred and maybe 130 kilometers on our flyby altitude at the end of that burn. Right. And

as the OD came in, it looked like we were, we were up a little bit high, maybe 120 kilometers. Now, orbit determination is a fantastical piece of art that really people shouldn't use the word determination. six elements of position and velocity and predicting them forward in time based on matching dynamics to basically range and Doppler data from one station at a time. So it's very different than GPS. We felt like we were in the corridor we needed. And then, so you get to a point where if you do an additional correction after TCM3, you get to a point where if you do an additional correction after TCM3,

the magnitude of your burn error itself could be on the same order as the correction. So we felt good. And as we came in and we executed LOI, our onboard indications, we did that on my shift or onboard indications where we were in about, you know, a 95 by 85 kilometer orbit, which is close enough to 100 by 100 that operationally, we didn't have any changes. It did change the landing time a little bit, but we felt good about that. And so really, you know, when you stack all of those considerations about how close in can you push to the moon to get good OD to set up LOI?

How far out can you come? What's the minimum granularity of your correction maneuver? And then what difference does it make being in a 110 versus a 100 versus a 90? We actually had a lot of robustness to that in our mission timeline. We felt that a third maneuver was not necessary. So when the, this is the part where I'm getting a little crossed up because there's two, two or three things going on that are curious.

So you end up in lunar orbit and then at some point during the process, you fire up the lasers to get a, maybe you can talk us through the thinking here on what the intention was with that part. Because this became the critical moment, right? You obviously were working something and discovered this other issue. Yeah, for sure. But maybe we can start on the, what were you working the first time? And like, why did it lead to you firing up the lasers?

So we're still going to get all of the data in and do the hot wash in a couple of weeks. And so my understanding of this may change. This is one of those, here's what I know now. And as we dig into the data, you know, it may alter my perspective. But there's three things at work that ended up having our lunar orbit lower than we had anticipated. One was, you know, in the orbit determination process, there's always an error ellipse. And you could end know, in the orbit determination process, there's always an error ellipse and you could end up being in that error ellipse a little bit high, a little bit low. Statistically, you kind of know what it is. So we felt like we were in a good position with our mean orbit. And we're going to look at more, more tracking around the moon to really

dial that in. Turns out we were a little bit on the lower side, um, or a little bit, we were on the lower side of the error ellipse that, that we had at LOI. Um, we also, that means it turns out you were lower than the like 85, 90 kilometer, or was that, is that the figure that you're saying is lower than the intended 100? You know, so our flyby altitude was, we felt like we were coming in at about 120 kilometers. But there's an error ellipse, there's an uncertainty ellipse around that where it could have been 140. It could have been 90. And as we came out of that, it turns out we were on the lower side. Oh, gotcha. Okay. Right. The actual real universe, not our prediction and mean, was lower. We also had an overburn a bit. And so one of the things we learned in the mission was the main engine cutoff, if you will.

There's a tail off in there that's still significant. And that's something that we'll put into our maneuver planning for I'm two, but you know, we're doing about an 850 meter per second LOI and we overburned by two and a half meters per second, maybe something like that, which on a percentage level, that's,

that's pretty good. We're happy with that performance, but you have to consider that our deorbit insertion maneuver that nominally would lower us from 100 by 100 to 100 by 10, you know, that maneuver itself is on the order of maybe 15 meters per second. And so, you know, an overburn of two to three meters per second in a braking maneuver, that's a significant amount of altitude there as well. So you take those two things and you couple that with the fact that there are mass concentrations, not only at the South Pole of the moon, but in our particular azimuth, as we came around, that the moon is kind of nasty when you're in low lunar

orbit and it will move your apolloon and periloon around. Those three things combined. And our teams were looking at the data coming out. You know, we had one team who was looking at the burn performance on board. They felt comfortable that we were in a good orbit. We had another team that was looking at imagery coming down from our nav cam, and they were kind of going, hmm, these images look a little bit closer than we anticipated. Then we had another team doing the OD, and those returns started coming and saying, yeah, you're closer to your landing orbit than you probably wanted to be. So we were looking at all those things.

And one of the thoughts we had was, well, the TRN laser range finder. So we have two nav pods on board. There's the terrain relative navigation. That nav pod faces the moon when we're at high altitude. And then after we pitch over, we have the HRN or the hazard relative navigation nav pod faces the moon when we're at high altitude. And then after we pitch over, we have the HRN or the hazard relative navigation, um, nav pod, the TRN nav pod laser is functional out to up to 80 kilometers. So the thinking was, well, let's turn that laser on a little bit early. And if it gets returns, then we know we're less than 80 kilometers. And that's

a confirmation of, of we need to do something. And, you know, it'd be a good bit of data to have. Unfortunately, when we brought those lasers up, we weren't getting any returns. Okay. So what do you draw from that? Do you draw from that? Well, no, our altitude's fine because the laser's not returning any measurements. Or do you draw from it, the laser didn't fire.

And so we kind of put that information to the side and had our backroom say, hey, you need to look at this and figure out what's going on. Did we procedurally not bring the lasers up in the right order? Is there something we missed? Figure out what went wrong there. At the same time, we got some more data come in from our images and from OD to say, yeah, you're a little bit lower than you want to be. And those mass cons may continue to push us around. We had some information as we look at, you know, we have some very detailed gravity models in our Copernicus trajectory tool.

Some of the data said that we were going to start moving back into a higher parallel. We just didn't want to take the chance. And we had built in a contingency lunar correction maneuver capability into the vehicle, really planning for what would happen if we ended LOI early and we're in an elliptical orbit that we didn't intend to be in and we wanted to reshape that back down. But in this case, we were a little bit lower, just didn't want to take the chance that with additional uncertainty, maybe we were even lower.

And so we raised the orbit back up. And so where did you end up post-raise? I'll have to look at the data. I think we were someplace close to, you know, maybe 180 by 20, something like that. So we're a little bit higher on the high side. Higher than the intended departure. And that's another neat thing about orbital mechanics. Neat in quotes. You know, when we first got to the moon, the first few revs, we're looking at our orbit period and it's a two hour period, exactly what we wanted to be in. The eclipse would come around every two hours. We'd have 40 minutes of eclipse.

And so you're taking some assurances from the fact that your orbital period and your loss of signal, because we were mostly edge on with the moon and we didn't have a whole lot of LOS in this, in this trajectory. We took some assurances as well from the fact that we're in the right period. Our comms are coming in and out from the interaction with the moon, the way we expect. However, the period of an orbit is related to the size of the semi-major axis. And it turns out that a 100 by

100 orbit has the same period as a 150 by 50 orbit, which has the same period as a 200 by zero, right? So in that range, you can have a more elliptical orbit and still have the same period. And so, yeah, but it all worked out. The procedure for executing that LCM, the tools we had, we're able to put it together and with great confidence execute that maneuver. One of the things I'm particularly proud of is our maneuver execution proficiency on this mission went from we tried to do the first the configuration, sorry, the commissioning maneuver the first time. the configuration, sorry, the commissioning maneuver the first time and our oxygen feed line didn't chill in the way we expected. So we aborted that ignition and had to reconfigure. Then we executed the CM. We tried to do our TCM and our methane feed line didn't chill in the way we'd expected. So we changed some parameters, changed some timings and some valve settings. we had expected. So we changed some parameters, changed some timings and some valve settings.

But after that, so we had a kind of a misfire, a burn and a misfire. After that, we executed TCM1, TCM3, LOI, the LCM and power descendant initiation, PDI, the next five, all executed exactly on time. So it really only took us three attempts to dial in the vacuum space performance of our feed system and how to get that engine because we're cryogenic. We really want the engine to be cold when their propellants reach the injection manifolds. So that LCM went off without a hitch. We put it in, the vehicle turned, it burned, it shut down, and it was like clockwork. And then we saw the same thing when we did PDI. So a little bit of a scary moment. A lot of exercise.

But it was a lot of exercise. And that was another thing that we'd put in. And our operations team, our flight dynamics team, had the foresight to say, we need some preloaded flexibility to do some things a little bit different than the mission plan in the event we have a contingency. And those are things we were able to do and exercise without having to do any kind of a software reload or anything like that. The one piece that I think might complete my storyline here, just to understand, like, I think, what's the quote about luck is like preparation opportunity

something like that right that's certainly a quote right there's other things that are definitely luck and i can't figure out this one piece of this orbit situation so when you were say you know say everything worked out you were in the 100 kilometer circular and then you were going to set up for that um you were going to do i don't know what the burn name would have been to put you down to the yeah we call that we call that doi so it's d orbit insertion okay so which again i like i hate roman numerals and this the name of this burn i would like to come in and consult on changing it because it was neither a d orbit nor an insertion and i would just like to flag a complaint with you personally on that okay noted yeah so when you were going to do that burn you were going to be targeting burn you were going to be

targeting the the periloon over over your landing site effectively or maybe like a little up or down range of it i don't know the exact location but it should have been roughly where you're going to depart from right right so did it just happen that and it sounds like you were even if you raised to 20 on that correction maneuver you were either at 10 or somewhere around there hopefully not lower than 10 but i don't know how what know, maybe you were picking up a little moon dust off some of the mountaintops down there, but was it a fact of where you started the lunar orbit insertion that you just happened to be on the other side of the moon from your landing site to capture? Like how did, how did that low point end up close enough to where you actually needed it?

Yeah. So there were a couple of things that worked in our favor there. LOI was very much over the North Pole. So I wish I had a good graphic to show you. But basically the way our trajectory worked is we went out to lunar radius and the moon is catching up to us. Right. So we kind of went out in front of the moon. So if you'd been sitting on Odie and it turned around, look behind you, the moon's coming

straight at you, you know, like the death star. And we actually, then if you shift your perspective to the lunar coordinate system, we're actually dropping in over the North pole. And so we actually did LOI over the North Pole. So it did work out that if we're a little bit low there and we did a little bit of an overburn, the low point will be more southerly. It wasn't exactly where we wanted it, but because of our trajectory design tools, and these are still relatively circular orbits, they're not perfectly circular, but if you're in a 110 by 80, that's still pretty circular to the eye, right? When you look at it that way. So our team was able to basically do a

non-Hohmann kind of maneuver that reshaped it. It wasn't necessarily optimal and it made our Appaloon a little bit higher than maybe we wanted, but we were able to manage that. And so the combination of the fact that LOI had been over the North pole and that, um, uh, we had really great tools. Uh, we were able to adjust it and get it,

get it where we want it to be for landing. Yeah. So you basically did that burn, not exactly on, on axis or whatever it would be like a little bit off timing wise so that it did both things to like reposition it a bit, raise it to where you want it and set up yeah that was the one that i was like this has to be the explanation because i've played plenty of kerbal space program and

the only way that this could definitely work but that also feels like a really i don't know if that um there's two two things here right like looking forward to future missions um if if this is a scenario that you want to continue adding some level of contingency to, right, you have two options. You can either capture much higher and work your way down, or you could honestly like use this as a learning and say, we should always do our insertion, uh, on the opposite side of where we're landing. So that, you know, if there, at least we're kind of generally lined up and we can save

a little performance. Yeah, for sure. Both of those feel like valid approaches. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Again, Kerbal Space Program degree. Well, no, and Kerbal or Apollo, right? They're equally valid if the physics works. And in Apollo, I was not alive during Apollo,

but I had the great fortune to be mentored by a gentleman by the name of Emil Shischer, who was instrumental in the Apollo program. And he relayed to me that they, like what we had thought, had a very simplistic approach to some of their orbits early, but they began biasing their orbits as those missions went on to come in more elliptical over the landing site. And so they got more sophisticated as they became comfortable and as they had more proficiency with what the command service module and the LIMB could do. And some of the performance savings they got from injecting into more of an elliptical pre-landing

orbit is where they got the mass savings to put the lunar rovers on those vehicles. So you're absolutely right. We're going to look at that and we're going to see, you know, hey, when I factor in the uncertainties we're going to get from OD and having some mission robustness and timing, you know, do we go into a higher orbit? Do we go into more elliptical're going to have papers that we're going to present in conferences and journals. There's probably 20 or 30 papers that I want our team to write so they can tell their story and you can get the detailed numbers. Those are going to come out over the next year. So if I'm approximate in some of the numbers, it's just part of one, we're still going through the data. And I want to be on that fine line between being very transparent and getting some information out that somebody later goes, well, it changed.

What changed? Well, we're still looking at the data. We kept working on stuff. Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, a lot of this are my impressions as a mission director and with familiar system, but we're going to have publications come out over the next year or two.

And I like, I like for my team to get enriched with those conference experiences and being able to be among their peers and talk about the great work they've done too. So this information will come out in more detail, but probably not in a podcast form. Yeah, totally. I'll do a paper on the naming of various components of your mission. I'll do a full complete review from launch to landing. I will co-author it or i will write a letter to the journal i have an argument over the the uh the doi um so one other aspect here um sorry i'm looking at my notes oh i don't know if this has ever been people ask you these questions during the press

conference of like what would happen if, but I'm not sure anyone specifically asked, what is your assessment on what would have happened if you didn't overburn on the, on the LOI, right? Cause the overburn situation led to you firing up the lasers to better understand where you were. So like,

have you, I'm sure you've thought about that path. Like what if, what if we landed there and we wouldn't have fired up these lasers? Would the system have taken over the way that it ended up working anyway? Or would it have been more problematic than that? as we looked coming around the face of the moon. And once we reached, you know, 15 kilometers, not seeing the lasers come online, there would have been an adrenaline spike going, oh my gosh, what's happening? But then the OpNav system would have performed

exactly as it did. And we would have had the same, we would have had the same result. So, you know, the fact that we were able to identify that our lasers were inhibited, gave us a chance to do this hot wire of the NDL. It probably was more an emotional spike for us to hustle and delay one rev to have time to put that patch in. But I think in the end, we would have been where we were because the op-nav system performed beyond expectations and landed the vehicle in a survivable way,

although not exactly the way we wanted to. So yeah, I don't think the result would have been much difference if we'd come into a perfect 100 and hadn't discovered the lasers weren't firing until we were very close to the surface yeah yeah that's it's just interesting to consider like the i don't know yeah the scenario of this mission is still incredible to me in terms of like all these different things that we're working and we're going wrong and we're changing and yeah how it ended up it's i so the other podcasts i do off nominal every year we we award the off nominees for the things that went the most hilariously wrong. It can't be anything bad, right?

It's got to be. There's a spirit of whimsy to the off nominees. And I thought Slim had this locked up, landing up on its nose. Right. It's going to be a major dispute on which of the lunar landing attempts. And hopefully there's more this year, but hopefully they do not become competitors for the off nominees. Yeah, I hope not. I definitely don't want to do that with IMTU.

Hopefully it's your one and only uh contribution to that right um a couple other things that that maybe we can dig into on the the ground station side of things i'm curious to pick your brain on a little bit you mentioned that you know those were a source of your orbit determination for sure but also the comms you had all along um you have your own system in comparison to using something like the DSN. Right. And I just want to understand from a mission planning perspective, I always see it mentioned.

Even today, there's an article in Space News of a startup doing X, Y, or Z because they want to avoid DSN because of the costs and the load of DSN. Right. Is that something you can give us insight on and on how that works? Like, if you're going to go use DSN time, is there a pricing list out there? I don't know if I've ever seen it. I've seen the pricing list for being an astronaut on the ISS. I don't know if I've seen the DSN one, but maybe you can give us some rough ideas around like what the process even is for signing up for that. What would it be in terms of cost? And how does that compare to what you're

all putting together for the homegrown system? So, you know, when the CLIPS program first came out, and we were a company of about 30 people growing into building our lunar program, the way the program read is it said, do not count on the DSN as your radiometric asset. on the DSN as your radiometric asset. And we maybe read a little bit more into that. What the program really meant was you need to engage with NASA and get a Space Act agreement and go through the wickets to check availability and to do those things. It wasn't a mandate that you shouldn't use it. And we maybe read a little bit more into that.

The other thing they said was, you'll also be balanced against other priorities. And if there's a spacecraft emergency, you know, you may get redirected from that. So we took those two pieces and said, okay, add to that. We know that DSN is oversubscribed. And even though it's a wonderful facility around the world, they're busy. All right? And they're busy with flagship class science missions that have important data that needs to come down. So we said, let's go out and look and see what we can put together that wouldn't rely on the DSN. We had a great partner with KSAT that does commercial tracking, and they had good capability out, we felt, to about half lunar distance. And I know they're trying to build up

and do more. But at the time, we said, we need something that'll get us all the way to the moon. And that's where we started going and talking to some of the big radio astronomy sites. And we have our own baseband units that we've actually deployed internationally at those sites. So if you go to the parks dish in Australia, there's an intuitive machines avionics radio box there plugged into their dish. And we pre-worked all of that capability. We did have a space act agreement with NASA to basically do tracking of LRO. They would let us send a signal up and bring it back down. So we confirmed that our dishes and our baseband units could reach to lunar distance. We did one-way tracking of Artemis

when they went out past lunar distance with a number of our dishes as well. So we were able to put this together. And I really can't say enough about the international team, people around the world. It really, you know, we tout, this is the first time that the U.S. has been on the surface of the moon in 52 years, but it really was an international effort. And when you're up at three in the morning and you're talking to folks in Australia, you're talking to folks in Okinawa or in Heart of Beatstock or, you know, Cornwall, you really felt global. It's like we're all in this.

Humanity is all in this together, all around the world, working to make this mission a success. And that was really a magical thing, especially in those long, dark hours where you're coasting out, just waiting for the moon to catch up with it. It got to the point where you look forward to hearing the same voices on the loops from around the world. The one aspect that is interesting to that, too, is the well, you mentioned the competition of resources on DSN. And but there's the other other aspect that you've talked about of of the difference between using something like relay networks to then get that data back to earth versus you know

direct communication so in the future when when there's the relay network situation set up um does that change the the configuration of what ground assets you would be using would you be using much the same network would there be expansions or contractions of what you would need in terms of that? Yeah, it's interesting, right? Because even when you have the relay network around the moon, you still need a trunk line basically to bring that data back. So the goal is we would like for our customers, for our relay network, to be able to use the same kind of geo-distance radios

that are ubiquitous for earth use right now. And for them not to have, you know, two meter dishes to transmit all the way back to earth, because that takes away from the mass that they can deploy. There's only so many you can carry. That's right. And so if we can, you know, with your IM and ESA's putting satellites up, and if we can have this interoperable network, which is this warm kind of blanket of local telecommunications and tracking, that makes it much easier for people to operate in the vicinity of the moon.

But you still have to talk to those assets. And in the first phases, that's still going to be connecting to ground sites back at Earth. So there will still be a need for those things. And those dishes will still be very important for transit, excuse me, to the moon. You can cast your vision forward though, and you can begin to see systems where we have laser comm back to earth. And we begin to change the paradigm where you're moving now to gigabits a second, you know, coming back. And I know other

people wanted real-time video of our landing. You know, once you get that kind of infrastructure in place, those things become much easier to do. So there's the current state, which is very much going to rely on the ground. And then there's kind of an intermediate state where we'll have more assets in orbit around the moon. Those will still require some earth-based ground tracking. But then beyond that, it really, some earth-based ground tracking. But then beyond that, it really starts to get speculative to not only the laser transmissions down to the ground, but there've been some architectures talking about laser transmission to MEO orbits where those satellites would pick up the, you know, kind of the photonic messages and then they would use RF to go to the ground. So you get away

from cloud cover and weather effects, but you're doing that last leg, you know, in a much easier mode than what you're doing. So that's the end state we all want to get to is to have kind of a ubiquitous, almost cell phone tower type service, where if you're operating at the moon, you just plug in, go, what satellites can I see? You negotiate your handshake with your comms. The billing all takes care of itself, you know, and you get your roaming charges or not. But there's a pretty good model there for where

telecommunications started with cell phones to that interoperability and ability to use those assets is where we want to go with the moon too. I'd love to see the, yeah, the faux coverage chart of like, well, if you're ever in that crater, we're going to charge you a little bit more because we know what's going on over there yeah and it probably will be less position based and more at this time the constellation of satellites that are in view the one i can reach isn't necessarily the one that i have a subscription for but they're going to take my service you know anyway a little interop and then there'll be a little bit of a surcharge because because they interrupt know, so that's where we want to head.

The last piece I wanted to talk about, um, is, you know, we talked a lot about the technical learnings and the operational learnings. I wanted to dig in for a couple minutes on the business learnings of I am one. It's an interesting program. You know, I've talked about it a million times in the show, so I don't need to bore the listeners with my take on the difference between clips and commercial cargo and crew, which everyone equates it, and it's vastly different. There's the other aspect that these task orders were,

maybe you'll remember the dates more specifically on when task orders one, two, and three, when you actually sign those with NASA. There's milestone payments within that. So the money flow, I think the only insight i have to that is from when mastin unfortunately went out of business and when we knew how much had been sent their way from from clips and it was the majority of the payments that they had worn done or gotten from their task order that they've already completed milestones on so the whole like

business side of this is very interesting when you look at just the task orders not not the commercial side as well but then you factor in what the past four years have been like on Earth, and now inflation is absolutely wild compared to when you sign these task orders. So I'm sure there's churn and things that you wish you had put in the initial contracts. The process for incorporating them into the next mission is like, wait for the next task order. So maybe that's problematic. But I'm curious if that is a discussion that you've had all along, that's something that's, you know, after the technical side gets sorted out. Well, we are a business and we have to cover our costs and we have to make profit. Businesses that don't make profit do not stay businesses for long. And it

doesn't matter if you're a one person business, or if you're, you know, a 10,000 person business, that's, that's just the way businesses work. So we are conscious of our costs. And, you know, the most important thing is a cadence of missions. What we found is there's a big difference between going in and saying, hey, would you like to fly a payload? I'm talking about for the non-CLPS side, because we firmly believe that CLPS is an anchor. They're the main customer on a lot of these missions. But we have to have non-CLPS customers to make this work.

And NASA wants that, right? NASA wants to say, hey, we're investing to not be the only customer. We want you to go out and find other people and help develop the lunar economy. It is very important for us to have a cadence of missions so that you can go out and talk to someone and go, hey, you have a payload you want to fly. When do you want to fly it? And whatever date they give you, you can have a manifesting discussion where you can go, great, that'll go on IM3, right? Or that'll go on IM4 or IMC1 is the commercial mission that we're working on. And that is such a game changer as opposed to trying to build a single mission and execute a single mission and do all the NRE and

recoup all that cost in one fell swoop is very difficult. And so being able now on our subsequent missions, I don't have to develop the main engine again. I don't have to develop my flight software again. So we're moving into a mode where with repeat missions, retiring that NRE makes it more affordable for us to continue going forward. makes it more affordable for us to continue going forward. I think the other thing that's important is, you know, if you look at the Eclipse Awards, the going rate for payload on the surface of the moon is somewhere around $800,000 a kilogram to a million dollars a kilogram. And it kind of depends, you know, the more you buy, the better deal you get. So NASA, in a competitive environment, gets that. If you come to me and say, hey, I got a single brick I want to fly, you won't get as good a deal for a one kilogram brick as if you wanted to fly a 30 kilogram Rover. I'm more eager to say, I got to get that 30

kilogram Rover. That's good business. So you're going to get a price break. So that's just, you know, everybody's used to doing those kinds of economics. What we really want to do is we want to migrate from Nova C to Nova D. Because our baseline Nova D can land 500 kilograms on the lunar surface and still launch on a Falcon 9. And so when we move to that, I'm moving to a mode where it's not going from 130 kilograms, which is what we have on Nova C, to 500 kilograms. It's about a factor of three and a half. Nova D is not three and a half times more expensive than Nova C. And then we can come in and we can begin talking about dropping the price.

And now we open up the market to more customers and bringing things in. So those are the kind of discussions we have is how do we keep a regular cadence of missions so that we can go out and have room for all of our customers, even, and especially the non-NASA customers. And then how do we grow from this initial offering? You know, Nova C, we really did, we really did peel the onion skin. How much can we cut and get down to the bare minimum and deliver about 100 kilograms to the moon? And we don't think we could have done it for much less. And we don't think we could have built a much smaller lander for that matter. If you look at the rocket equation, it kind of tells you things. And so we ended up with Nova C, but we would love to grow out of that. And we think that makes the economy economics better, not just for NASA, but for our international customers,

academic customers, customers, and then our commercial interests, you know, who want to go do things at the moon too. The other aspects of the business is that you're a publicly traded company and I don't have too many questions about it. I just wanted to know like what that affected in terms of communications real time in the mission, right? Like when, when you were holding your breath and telling us that, I think we got a little bit of a signal here. Like, is there, are there things that you, it's tough because a lot of times, like a lot of the publicly traded space companies will save announcements for the earnings report time. And there's a little bit of tension there. So when you're running a very visible operation, what are the impacts? It's a learning experience. I'll tell you that because normally when I think of

up until a year ago where we went public, normally when I think of a publicly traded space company, I think of big aerospace. And they have whole legal departments and have whole legal departments and, you know, staffs of 10, 20, 30 public affairs people. We've got Josh here online, our public affairs lead. He's got a staff of three, right? So we do, we are careful because the Security Exchange Commission has rules about releasing material non-public information because you don't want to destabilize the market. You don't want to lead your investors and shareholders astray. So you have some responsibilities with that. But what was made clear to us was giving a mission update is different than a material public release of something like, hey, you were developing this

system and it failed. That's a piece of material information. Or you want a contract and it hasn't been announced yet. That's a piece of material. So those are in a different category than this is an ongoing mission and we can give mission updates about that. But I will say, and I feel like we learned a little bit, that fine line between how can I be as open as possible with what we know at the time about the mission and then how much do we wait to get new information in, that was tense. And we worked that quite a bit.

And I think we ended up doing a pretty good job of balancing, but we live in a, in a, an age where people are looking for more frequent updates. So the post on my ex account went from, wow, we really love how transparent you are to why haven't you updated us real fast. Yeah. It's a weird scenario, but I mean, it's a cool scenario because you're landing because of the moon. So yeah, can't complain too much. Um, well that's, that's the time we got. So I really, really, really appreciate you being willing to dive in so deep into these details. It's, it's awesome to just get the chat about this and hopefully we can keep doing it as, as the missions come. Thanks, Anthony. I really appreciate you having me on and, uh,

I love the work you do on, on the podcast. Uh, anytime you want us to talk, uh, we're happy to come aboard and we'd love to have you do on on the podcast anytime you want us to talk we're happy to come aboard and we'd love to have you down at the lunar production operation center sometime that would be awesome yeah that'd be really really cool to yeah i didn't visit you the last time i was down in houston unfortunately so i need to yeah just don't come in the summer yeah well it's fine i like the warm all right it's been a cold winter up here so good deal all right thanks anthony all right tim thanks so much you bet thanks again to tim for coming on the show and uh diving in so deep with me even though i relentlessly talked about uh roman numerals with him so i appreciate him willing to uh deal with that but it was a great conversation i hope you enjoyed getting

the insights direct from him and hopefully like i said we can have him and other members of the team back on as they continue to fly these missions. I could not do this without all of your support. This is a 100% listener-supported show, so if you like what I'm doing here, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support and join the crew over there. There are 859 supporters supporting the show every single month, and that includes a set of 36 executive producers who produced this episode of Main Engine Cutoff. Thanks to Russell, Chris, Josh from Impulse Space, Will and Lars from Agile Space, Warren, Ryan, Matt, Harrison, Lee Hopkins,

Bob, Brandon, Stealth, Julian, Frank, Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut, Benjamin, Steve, The Astrogators at SCE, Craig from SpaceHappyHour.com, Donald, Theo and Violet, Pat, SmallSpark Space Systems, Jan, Chris, Pat from KC, Fred, David, Tyler, Joel, Eunice, Better Everyday Studios, and four anonymous executive

producers thank you all so much for the support for making this episode possible if you join the crew over there three dollars a month or more gets the access to miko headlines a show that i do it's a separate rss feed that you get shows come out every seven to ten days based on how much news is going on i run through every single story that is worth your time i filter through all the space news for you and keep you up to date with the things that really matter. All the launches that are happening, uh,

the developments that, that you should care about and keep track of what's going on in the ISS. It's a great way to stay up on space news and also support the show. So if you like what I'm doing, check it out. I would very much appreciate that. But for now, that's all I've got for you.

Thank you all so much for listening. Thanks again to Tim for coming on and I will talk to you soon.