Main Engine Cut Off - T+283: Starliner, Fram2, VIPER, Blue Moon (with Jeff Foust)

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

Jeff Foust of Space News joins me to talk about Starliner, Fram2, VIPER, Blue Moon, and everything else going on in space.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 31 executive producers—Jan, Warren, Pat from KC, David, Frank, Lee, Joonas, Josh from Impulse, Steve, Harrison, Russell, Joel, Bob, The Astrogators at SEE, Stealth Julian, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Kris, Fred, Theo and Violet, Matt, Donald, Will and Lars from Agile, Ryan, Pat, Better Every Day Studios, and four anonymous—and 823 other supporters.TopicsJeff Foust (@jeff_foust) / XJeff Foust, Author at SpaceNewsNASA pushes Starliner return decision to late August - SpaceNewsCrypto entrepreneur buys Crew Dragon flight - SpaceNewsfram2: First Human Spaceflight To Earth’s Polar RegionsNASA requests details on potential VIPER partnerships - SpaceNewsNASA payload to fly on first Blue Origin lunar lander mission - SpaceNewsLockheed Martin to acquire Terran Orbital - SpaceNewsThe ShowLike the show? Support the show on Patreon or Substack!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 ESAWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I'm Anthony Colangelo and I'm excited today to correct a long running issue which is that I've never had Jeff Faust on this podcast somehow. So we're going to correct that today. I caught him at a great time. podcast somehow. So we're going to correct that today. I caught him at a great time. There's a ton going on between Starliner, Fram 2, this new mission to go to polar orbit, first for a crewed spaceflight, and as well as a whole bunch of other stuff. Viper, I think we're going to get into Blue Origin and some Blue Moon talk. Tons to catch up on. A great person who just

has absolutely encyclopedic knowledge of the space industry so without further ado let's give jeff a call jeff faust uh in what is just horrifically your first appearance on managing cutoff thanks for uh thanks for finally joining me on the show you know what took you so long is my question hey uh i guess the i guess all the previous invitations got uh directed into my spam bucket it man. Well, so we did tell the story on Off Nominal about my latent imposter syndrome surrounding you with my bizarre fever dreams. I don't know how far back to the root we took it. I was thinking about this. I was like, why did it take me so many episodes to invite Jeff Faust?

And I remember my first foray into, hey, I should do something regarding space. I was one of them dirty NASA social types at EFT1 back in the day. And I remember standing on the NASA causeway on the first attempt morning, and somebody shouted out to the crew, the launch is scrubbed, reportedly. And that's from Jeff Faust. And he knows his shit. And I think from that point forward, I was intimidated. I was like, I can't waste this guy's time with my thing over here.

So I feel like maybe I finally got over that. So here we are, 284 episodes in. We finally did it. Never late than never. Yeah. We should start with Starliner because uh it's starliner and it's dominating everyone's thoughts these days uh what did what did you make of the updates over the last week because i i don't know maybe we could quantify the difference between updates last

week and the updates this week but what's your what's your general vibe right now on the mission where it's going and how it's, I think, importantly by the comms side of things? Yeah, I think what you're seeing right now is you're seeing NASA sort of work through what's arguably its biggest human spaceflight safety challenge since Columbia. of all of the mechanisms and procedures and processes it put in place after Columbia to the test right now in terms of determining, is it safe enough for Butch and Sonny to come back on Starliner? How do you determine what safe enough is? How do you make sure that everyone's opinions are heard on this issue? And you're sort of seeing this playing

out now over the course, particularly the last two briefings earlier this week and last week, as they talk about that process that they're working through. And the fact that, you know, there is no consensus right now. And arguably, that is a sign that the safety culture, as they call it, is working, that people's differing viewpoints are being heard. No one is rushing to make a decision. There is no equivalent of launch fever taking place, that they have to make a decision now, one way or another, that they have the time. And so they're going to take that time to try and get as much data as they can. But sooner or later, they're going to have to make a decision. And that decision is coming in the next week, week and a half or so about whether they can return on Starliner or whether they're going to have to stay on the station until next year. From the early days of the mission, I was probably the sole podcast defender of just wait it out on the station.

Because exactly what you're saying, this is an instance where they actually had time to sort things out and could take their time and not rush home. I think my problem has been all along the communication around that decision. That the mission was communicated as an eight-day mission, not minimum eight-day mission. And then the communication had been not wanting to say that we have backup options when that was the whole point of commercial crew was to have backup options. So there were definitely times where there were easy wins to be had on a communications front that were avoided because nobody wanted to say the wrong thing. And unfortunately, through the questioning, them wanting to hide the ball on certain answers makes it more of a thing that people talk about. It's like the Streisand effect of NASA comps, right? Where like, they don't want to say the word dragon.

So we're all on the call tantrically trying to get them to say the word dragon. And the avoidance of it makes it more of an issue so that that's i feel like that has been the problem with this mission all along right obviously the thrusters are the problem and the helium leaps are the problem but once you're in that situation everybody knows about it the communication has not been you could say it's open because they have calls about it or whatever, and you could try to say, as many on Twitter do, that other companies aren't open, they don't tell you anything about what's going on. But I think there's a difference between openness and guarded statements on the matter.

And I still feel like they're in that, because they've sketched out, like you're saying, all these instances where there are people bringing up concerns about not wanting to fly astronauts back on Starliner. But they have done very little to explain what else there is that might convince those people to change their mind. And they haven't laid out like, I think you asked yesterday, what is the piece of data that we're waiting on? And I, it didn't feel like they're leaving much room open there to say like, oh, we've convinced these other people that Starliner is actually safe enough to come back on. Do you feel like there's

still like, where would you rank the probability that that is actually an outcome here? Yeah, you know, I've been trying to stay away from sort of the probability guessing game of how likely it is that they'll return on Starliner or not. I think the important thing is that there is a non-zero chance they won't. And that's a big deal. I mean, that was not something that was really openly being discussed until recently. That the idea that, you know, they may have to stay on the station and come back on a future Crew Dragon. The fact that it is, you know, that that possibility exists is a big deal. And the fact

that it's being openly acknowledged at last is a big deal. But, you know, for a long time, you know, you got sort of the story that, you know, they're working through these technical issues, we want to do some more tests, and then we'll be all set. We weren't really hearing much about the uncertainties about the risk and the safety. And you make a very good point about the eight day thing, you know, in they're now saying now it's like, Oh, well, we always intended that this was going to be at least eight days, and probably was going to be longer than that. But they weren't really communicating that. In fact, they were, when they launched, they were talking about, well, we'll be up there doc for eight days, and we'll come back. And if you remember, they started moving the date out, like four days at a time. Yeah, right.

And because that was linked to sort of the cadences of when they could land at White Sands, that the opportunities only opened up every four days. And so they've moved four days at a time, another four days, they move out a little bit longer and then it sort of became indefinite. And then it became, well, we're not even sure they're going to come back on Starliner.

So there is definitely a communications issue that dates back to, you know, the beginning of the mission about the fact that this is a test flight. There are risks associated with it. They're now openly embracing that, but you never really heard that early on about that. And I think in retrospect, they should have done both NASA and Boeing a greater job of talking about those potential issues and those potential alternatives should something go wrong that they're only now really starting to openly discuss. How do you take the concept that I think was last week's call that, you know, looking ahead, however Starliner gets back, they've said that Starliner 1 is now no earlier than the year from now flight. So crew 11 at that point, right? But they're double booking that slot with SpaceX crew 11. I wanted, I didn't get a question yesterday because I was down the end. I was in the independent podcaster section of the list, which is like right around the hour mark. So if they are so gracious as to go longer than an hour, I might make it but most often do not. I wanted to ask

like what that actually entails from the SpaceX side. Are they going to how far into flight processing is SpaceX planning on taking that right now? Is it all the way to the end and they are hoping Starliner comes through? Or, you know, is there? I just don't really understand the tick tock of how that actually works. And it doesn't seem altogether likely to me that that Starliner will fly next year. I think there's going to be I mean, if it's not coming back until late this year, you're gonna have to look into finding root cause which they don't have now. coming back until late this year you're gonna have to look into finding root cause which they don't have now um my guess would be likely testing some sort of hardware changes uh before we can even get into recertifying it to to fly it doesn't seem likely to me that it's flying until 2026 at the absolute earliest but if you're spacex i guess you just kind of keep doing your thing and assume

that you're going to fly every mission until Starliner proves otherwise. I don't know. I feel a little bit funky about the whole double booking thing. Yeah, I think, you know, I think at this point, NASA is basically telling SpaceX, just continue the cadence you've been doing the last few years. Just keeping that rhythm of two flights a year, you know, and we'll let you know that, oh, we don't need you for crew X because Starliner 1 will be ready, whether that's crew 11 or crew 12 or whenever remains to be seen. You know, I think what's more interesting is what is both NASA and perhaps the broader community, including Congress, going to ask of, of Boeing, uh, what Starliner returns, if Starliner returns without a crew, do they have to do a CFT2? Do they have to do another crewed mission? And they have been, you know, have not embraced one way or another that option.

They've suggested it might be possible to, to certify Starliner, umify Starliner if CFT returns without the crew, but has sort of a nominal return and landing. I suspect there would be a lot of people who would like to see Boeing to do another test flight to confirm that's the case with people on board. Make sure that you, for example, fully test the life support system through undocking re-entry, which you'll not be able to do if CFT comes back uncrewed before committing to a long duration mission. So maybe we see a CFT2, maybe that happens at some point next year, and then the crew rotation mission start in 2026. But a lot is going to depend on what happens in the coming weeks in terms of, do they come back? Um, what does the investigations that are going to continue for months to come reveal about what they need to do in terms of thruster system redesigns? I mean,

do they, are they able to do, are they able to swap out the seals that are extruding with, with some other seal that, um, is less, uh, sensitive to temperatures or do they able to swap out the the seals that are extruding with with some other seal that um is less uh sensitive to temperatures or do they have to like completely redesign the dog houses yeah that contain the thrusters to you know better handle the the thermal conditions um the latter presumably would be a much bigger deal um and take much longer so there are a lot of uncertainties there but you know the idea that if if starliner does not come back with a crew they could immediately jump to a operational flight seems like a big leap at this point yeah and then the other issue is like are the seals actually the root cause of this right they suspect that's that's a thing they've recreated some of it

on the ground one thing that i did find interesting is that they so they did all this testing at white sands where they were able to recreate some of the heating environment and show this extrusion situation with the teflon seals a poppet there's a bunch of words that like i have to wikipedia to understand exactly what i don't know they promised a really cool 3d diagram that we've not seen yet and i'm excited for that whenever that does come but But then they scheduled that test for the end of July, where they did the hot fires on orbit. They were surprised at how much thrust they had. So they think that a lot of it recovered. I was interested in

why they did that test, and maybe that is just plain the explanation. But the, so the issue that was happening with thrusters only occurs under the extensive load and long duration of thruster use that they had on the way up and to the station. But then they waited a bunch of, you know, they,

they spent all this time just hanging out on orbit and then did short test firings, which to me has like no connection to the issue they saw and approach the station so it read like we are purely checking do these still work and in their statement that's to me what they kind of drew the outline of was that we wanted to just verify if they were still working and they were able to test i guess when they were telling us like how much they recovered that was in in thrust right that they were back to like 98 percent of thrust versus the 80 that they saw previous but i don't know i i guess i was a little bit at first confused as to like how does this even relate and then also kind of shocked that they

felt the need to ensure that they still did fire and that you know i guess i understand the concept of confirming some assumptions but it does i don't know it didn't that didn't make me feel great that they were still like you know had out there the possibility of like i don't know what happens when we turn these back on you know what struck me last week's briefing is that they are talking several times is that they are still trying to understand the physics of the thrusters. And they're trying to understand all of these factors that go into it. And so it's clear that they still, you know, and it was clear, I think even at Wednesday's briefing, they still don't fully understand what is going on with the thrusters. And that leads to the uncertainty of, well, we don't understand what's going on with the thrusters. How do we know that this problem won't happen again when we undock and try to return to Earth? And if it does

happen, does this lead to sort of a cascading series of other problems that could really jeopardize the ability to reenter safely? And so it was very clear that they're talking about wanting to understand the physics of this and develop this model of the thruster and understand what's going on with the seals, what's going on with the propellant. You know, is the propellant flow being restricted? Is the propellant vaporizing? Is that causing the reduced thrust? You know, what factors lead into that that they are still still grappling with and you know it's not clear that you know that they can get to sort of like a conclusive answer um by the end of august when when they said that they they need to make the decision because they need uh they need starliner to come

back one way or another nobody asked yesterday on the call about the work that boeing was doing on this configuration change that has to go up to make an uncrewed undocking possible. I emailed them after NASA and they've told me that the four week timeline is still accurate, but they're still in the planning and scoping phase of that work. So we've ran a week off the clock as we knew it last time. So I don't know how long the planning and scoping phase goes for the configuration change, but we're somewhere in there. So I don't know how long the planning and scoping phase goes for the configuration change, but we're somewhere in there. So hypothetically, we should be hearing that work starting soon. It's, I don't know, man, this is a really, it's a scenario that is more interesting than I thought it would be at first brush. Like, all right, there's an issue, they'll work through it,

they'll figure out what's going on. It's taken a lot of twisted turns so uh who knows what's gonna happen it's anyone's ballgame at this point yeah uh let's talk about a cool space flight mission that i'm particularly excited about fram two is that how i even say it is it just fram like a tram car but fram i've been calling it fram two so you know until until someone corrects me otherwise. I didn't know about this old ship. It's Ram 2 now. We're stuck with that. It is. Yeah.

You can go F2. I guess that's the website. I'm excited about this polar orbit human spaceflight mission because I had a, we do these predictions in the off nominal discord. And I think I have one in there that the second Polaris program mission was intended to be the first polar. I don't even think I said first. I think I just said a polar human spaceflight.

Because I think it's a really cool idea. And there's also the fact that this is, I think it's easy to say like, oh, it's just flying to a different inclination. But with human spaceflight, there are so many other considerations with it from communications aspect but one of the most important things and the limiting factor that has happened to this point is launch abort recovery zones that those are all defined for like the 50 degree inclination corridor the up to the iss trajectory you know come coming from the shuttle days and retained for the commercial crew days um but when you look at the route that you fly out of Cape Canaveral to polar orbit, it actually lines up really nice to establish recovery zones down through the Caribbean. And then you kind of cross over and you're then in the western side of South America,

cruising somewhat close to the coast as well. So the Canaveral corridor makes a polar flight way more interesting and possible than if you remember the shuttle out of Vandenberg, like go look up those abort scenarios. It was pretty bleak. It was like, hope you make it to Easter Island. It was effectively the, uh, the shuttle's plan if they had any issues on the way up. So I find it a, this, this Canaveral corridor to polar orbit, uh, unlocks a lot of interesting stuff like this. So, I don't know.

Maybe I'm overly excited about a polar orbit. What's your vibe on this? Well, you know, this was interesting because it sort of seemed to have come out of nowhere, that there hadn't been really any rumblings about it. Although, in retrospect, when you went back and looked at Wang's Twitter account, you know, he had posted something in like in March about, you know,

endurance, the Crew Dragon spacecraft. And like, wouldn't it be great if we put a cupola on it? And which, you know, in retrospect now it's like, oh, that's what they were talking about. But at the time, if you were looking at it at the time. Did anyone see that tweet at that time? No, because no one's following Chinese crypto entrepreneurs that are now multi-citizens.

It's not our beat. Yeah, which is definitely not odd at all that you would go do that. So yeah, so this sort of came out of there and there's a lot of details that we don't really know in terms of how did this crew sort of come together you know what are they going to be doing what have they done for training what are they going to be doing for training because there could be launching as soon as late this year they're talking about so they have to be pretty far along in the training process already um you know they've talked about you know doing like space science looking at this you know, doing like space science, looking at this, you know, auroral phenomenon called STEVE, which is an acronym that I don't remember the expansion of, but it's sort of like plasma ribbons in the upper atmosphere around the altitude that they'll be flying and doing some, you know, human spaceflight studies as well.

X-rays or something, the first X-rays in orbit. Yeah, talking about doing the first um x-ray yeah um it's pretty sweet so so you know sort of like a grab bag of experiments you know i i talked to to one um space scientists sort of like they're only going to be up there three to five days they may not see anything so in terms of you know in terms of steve you know so it's like you know they could have spent that money they could have flown like an explorer class mission that could have been up there for several years to do studies if they were really interested in that so it seems like something that's like sort of like thrown in there they wanted to fly around the poles so what do you do if you're going

around the poles well we could look at the aurora maybe we could look at some some phenomenon like that something that was sort of grafted on to to the plan rather than you know put together and said oh we could do this if we flew in a polar orbit i think the idea is let's fly the polar orbit and then see what we can do in that orbit yeah and you always have to wrap it in some sort of like we're doing these experiments we're doing this where i'm like i don't know man you can it's okay to be like it's just really cool and the crypto market did great and flying to polar orbit would be really cool the collection of people were are like polar explorers generally uh so there's i don't i appreciate the the branding and the uh the like outfits they've been wearing for the mission so far at least it breaks

out of of like the uh new age right stuff mold they've got like a very south pole inspired you know visual appeal to them so i don't know i'm pumped to watch it i'm i'm uh it should be kind of cool the one thing i did wonder was if if they have slips uh in the mission they keep talking about how oh antarctica will be fully illuminated at this time of the year like that's a pretty specific time of the year that you're that you're going for so was that always the plan that they were going to fly in you know southern summer uh and if it if they if something happens are they slipping a year or do they just go whatever we'll take half illumination right i don't know or they say hey we'll we'll go in the summer and look at the the north pole when it's fully illuminated instead i

do not fram three you go you gotta go north if you go you flip it in six months later 18 months later you're going up there right well maybe Well, maybe if the crypto markets continue to do really well, he could afford some follow-on missions. I think he'll need a little bounce. So we'll see. If he's buying the dip, then maybe FRAM 3 will come. All right. Viper. I've got to pick your brain about Viper because this story continues to get more intriguing by the detail that I learn about it.

story continues to get more intriguing by the detail that i learned about it um i covered the initial cancellation news so we don't have to do too far back in the backstory what i did not know at the time and i'm not sure any of us knew at the time was that viper was already through acoustic and vibration testing and was going to complete the thermal vac testing and is scheduled to complete it still by what end of October or beginning of October yeah sometime in October I felt like when they announced cancellation they were not going to do all the testing but they are still doing all the testing what do you make of that was that did you expect that yeah that was interesting because when they did the the briefing to announce the the, one of the points that they made was, well, it's going into environmental testing. And typically when spacecraft go into environmental testing, you find things that go wrong and you need to fix.

And that's going to create maybe additional costs and schedule delays. And on top of the $84 million that they said they would be saving by, by canceling it. But then like a week later, um, uh, at this exploration science conference, the, the project scientists for Viper said, no, actually we just completed, you know, thermal, you know, we just completed vibration and acoustic testing today. And it's, and it's all well and well, and all, by the way, all the components have already completed thermal vac.

So we don't expect any problems when we put the entire rover through thermal vac so that was a an interesting comment and then when you went back and you looked at the rfi they added that that detail in there that yes it's completed the the vibration and acoustics thermal vibration test will continue until october so so that much is continuing i would not surprise that they would continue testing because there's always a possibility that Congress would step in and say, no, we won't cancel VIPER. We'll explicitly put language in the appropriations bill

directing you to continue VIPER. That felt like the play off the bat, right? It was announced in such a way. to continue viper right um so that felt like the play off the bat right was that that it was announced in such a way and even honestly like saying well we're open to hear proposals on what you would do by august 1st was like adding a little bit of time to the clock that this wasn't an immediate cancellation it felt like the play was try to draw some attention and 100 million dollars of funding or whatever they need um it doesn't seem to have played out that way. Yeah.

I mean, the danger in doing that is that Congress could come in and say, NASA, fly Viper, but not add the money to do it, and therefore that they would have to take the money from elsewhere in a science program that's already being strained by budget cuts and issues with much larger missions. That's why they'd said that, well, we might have to cancel or curtail other clips missions to,

to cover Viper. So there, you know, there's always a danger of, of, of trying to put out that plea for, for money when Congress can simply say, go fly it with the money that we're giving you.

Not, we're not giving you any extra. So good luck. Yeah, that would, I probably would have ranked that a higher likelihood. Uh, I have, I have some weird, I don't know, tingles about this whole storyline though. Um, I, number one, Vipers had grown massively expensive based on where the initial estimates were. Um, and then it kind of of maybe i'm just cranky

about clips generally right now but it definitely feels like it had grown too expensive and too important in the way that it's been communicated to allow it to be risked on the first griffin flight and and some of the concern was like you, if the concern that's always there for NASA programs, crude particularly, right? If this thing goes wrong, what are the downstream effects and how catastrophic is that to this entire portion of NASA's portfolio? This felt like one that, you know, if something went, face it, we've had three funny moon landers this year, right? In the calendar year 2024, we've had three funny moonlanders this year. In the calendar year 2024, we've had three funny moonlanders. So in the event in which something were to happen on the first flight of Griffin, which is not a shocking thing to suggest,

how many congressional hearings are there about this billion-dollar program that we stuck on the shots-on-goal advertised clips program where we've stated, most of these aren't going to work, but we're going to keep taking shots at it. And I think that got riskier and riskier the closer they got and the more and more testing that griffin needs and that nasa demands griffin had um so it felt like almost an intractable situation where nasa does not have any way to get money to do like a nasa funded nasa built nasa design nasa guided landing system for this very expensive rover. So they worked themselves into a corner with it, is my view. And then I guess the Hail Mary of like, does anyone want to fund our way out of this?

And but also on the low key side, like, you know, take this over, do it to the specifications that we've written in this RFI, which is basically fly it exactly like we would. And we will transfer all the responsibility of a failure onto you and the decisions that you make from this point forward. That, that feels like the, if it is, if you want to be charitable, the 40 chest that NASA is playing with this of maybe having this mission

happen, but not risking their own name on it. I don't know. Something's funny. I can't, I can't understand exactly how this comes together well you know that you know this is odd in a number of ways you know and you know part of it is you know you're right that putting a you know what's now a 600 million dollar rover on onto

eclipse mission you know is is risky especially if it's going to be the first flight of that lander it would have been different back when Viper started five years ago, when this was a $250 million rover. That was really sort of the rebirth of, of another program that had been lingering around for, for many years to fly a small rover, you know, there, you know, some, if something happened, that would be, you know, more acceptable. If you have a failure of the would be, you know, more acceptable if you have a failure of the smaller mission.

You know, we don't see too many people complaining about, oh, NASA wasted all this money on the Peregrine lander that didn't land or the IM-1 lander that sort of tipped over on its side. You know, they're able to at least, you know, salvage some data from both of those missions and say, hey, these were the first tries. These will get better as they go along. When you're flying what's effectively a billion-dollar mission between Viper and the lander, the stakes are a lot higher. And typically, the insight and the rigor that goes into the mission is higher than what we've typically seen on CLPS missions. So how that works with Viper, well, you know, NASA sort of backed themselves into this corner here by making Viper a much bigger, more robust, certainly more capable, but also much more expensive mission while still keeping it part of the CLPS program

with that shots on goal philosophy. So there, there's a mismatch there and they're, they're either stuck with it or they hand off the Viper to somebody else and say, you know, good luck. Um, you know, have fun landing on the moon. Um, if you make it, be sure to send back lots of data. Yeah. And, and, uh, what did they say? data yeah and and uh what did they say they got a i was reading the the uh summary blurb that said like you have to release this as widely as possible or something like that that they are pushing them to to treat it just like nasa would treat the mission in its results which is cool and i think that's right and you also can't disassemble it if we give this to you you cannot take the parts off and fly it separately you just got to fly it as is yeah uh i'm not sure we've seen anything like this before at least in my space nerd memory i don't

i don't remember a situation like this uh yeah not not for a mission that has not yet launched there have been missions that have launched they've gone into their extended phases and you know they've tried handing them over to to organizations um like universities to run um once they're in their extended mission phase but that's long after they've completed their primary mission right here we've got a rover that you know has not yet launched yet has not you know you know done anything and they're like here who wants it yeah it's built to match griffin uh in both the way it's deployed and the way it hooks up to the lander so be sure to adapt that and then uh let us know when you get there it'll

be great so um another cool lunar lander news in the last week was that this blue moon mark one pathfinder mission is going to have a nasa on it. And the most surprising was that it is actually targeting March 2025. And six months ago, I probably would have chuckled at that. The amount of hardware that we've seen in and around the Blue Origin site, the amount of BE-4s that we see making their way to Vulcan, I'm starting to buy it a little more. What about you? Yeah, I mean, you know, we haven't seen a lot of details about the lander itself

in terms of how far along it is in its development and testing, whether the lander itself would be ready. You know, New Glenn, you know, it seems like they're making good progress on it. This is obviously going to be one of the first launches of New Glenn, the Cary Blue Moon. But the idea that, yeah, they're going to send this lander to the moon as the first launches of, of, of new Glenn, the carry blue moon, but the idea that, yeah, they're going to send this, this, this lander to the moon as soon as, as next spring, um, not out of the realm of possibilities. And, you know, NASA saw an opportunity to, um, basically hitch a ride and put a, put a payload on there that they wanted to fly on a larger lander, um, to better understand how the, the the the landers larger engines interact with

the the surface kick up uh kick up the regolith um so they can then transfer that information on for the the the starship and the blue moon mark two landers and this was the same same one or the same kind or not obviously not the same exact, but the same scale and everything of the one that flew on IM one. Right. Yeah. It's, it's, it's called scalps is, is it's a, it's a camera system. It's apparently a pretty small camera system. It's only a handful of kilograms, but it was on IM one. It's also going to be on a blue ghost, the firefly aerospace lander mission flying later this year.

Those are both smaller landers and and NASA in this procurement filing said we really wanted to fly this on a larger lander by the end of 2025, and the only opportunity that we saw was the Blue Moon Pathfinder mission. I mean, checks out. If you're buying everyone's timeline, that is the only one that's going to be flying by then. So we'll see. I don't know. I've been through the phases with Blue Origin,

and I'm finally starting to see the amount of hardware that we need to see to start believing some of the stuff out of the Cape. So I don't know. I'm excited about that. I don't know how Escapade will turn out. That seems, last I heard, they're targeting the last day of the launch window for Escapade. So make of that what you will.

But it does seem like I might even take a bet they fly in 2024. Well, I think as we're talking right now, the Escapade spacecraft are on their way. They shipped out from Rocket Lab's facility in Long Beach on their way to Florida for pre-launch processing. Is that via FedEx? I saw FedEx has a space division. Did you know this? Yeah, yeah, that they have a space division. So it's for specialized handling of space hardware. Unfortunately, not for hardware in space. So I keep waiting for the FedEx delivery to space. Not yet. But yeah, they do have a specialized unit for space hardware. And so it's getting apparently trucked across the country to Florida

and go through a few weeks of pre-launch processing there. And we'll see if the spacecraft will be ready. We'll see if the rocket's ready. Let's see. What else did you have that you want to talk about? Oh, you like the Lockheed Martin Terranran orbital news yeah this is the the the breaking news um it's happening right now that this is sort of a deal that probably in retrospect is inevitable but took a while to get there that uh lockheed which already owned a third of terran orbital is basically going to buy the company for a discount for 25 cents a share.

Funny, back in March, they put in an offer to buy Terran Orbital for a dollar a share, plus assumption of debt and such. And so, yeah, so they cut that. They're still buying the debt, but they're cutting the stock price down to 25 cents, which is actually a tough deal for the shareholders because the shares closed yesterday at 40 cents. So they're taking a discount on that, which I think shows sort of this condition that Terran Orbital was in, that they were running low on cash. They had revealed in an SEC filing earlier this week that they were down to around $16 million of cash on hand as at the

end of July. Um, they had done some, they'd done something unusual that they filed with the SEC, but they never issued a press release about their quarterly earnings or hold an earnings call. They just did the SEC file, which is sort of an odd thing to do. Um, you know, now looking back at it, it's like, Oh, okay, something's going on. But they had only hinted in there that the usual boilerplate about we're looking at strategic options that could involve additional financing or a sale of the company. And that's what they turned out to do. definitely in need of some resources. And they were also struggling because of the fact that this deal that they had with Rivada space networks, this $2.4 billion contract to build 300 satellites was not materializing. Yeah.

That they had only recorded in the order of like $15 million of revenue on this. So far they'd gone so far as taking that contract out of their backlog, which is fairly unusual. I didn't know that. I knew it kept kicking it down the road but i didn't know it was that that yeah they did that in the sec filing that they had um decided to take it out of the the backlog and so my colleague jason and that was all of their non-locky backlog right pretty much i mean they're they're right now their their backlog is 91 percent lockheed so yeah uh but they had taken uh that 2.4 billion dollar contract out of it so my colleague jason

rainbow had contacted mark bell the ceo of terran orbital and mark bell said oh this was just sort of an accounting measure based on on the way that they're doing accounting and that you know they were waiting to for the the next round of funding to come in to continue to work on it. But Robata had not given any sign that they had the $2.4 billion to pay for this. So it will be interesting to see if this deal continues. Because Lockheed said in the announcement that they would continue to keep Terran Orbital as a, they call it a merchant supplier to industry.

So they would be able to sell satellites to customers other than Lockheed Martin. But you can certainly see a scenario where at some point, if those customers don't materialize, they sort of just get absorbed into Lockheed and become just sort of the small satellite part of Lockheed. into Lockheed and become just sort of the small satellite part of, of, of Lockheed. But it is, it's an interesting development, sort of like this broader market for small satellites,

where a lot of the big companies are vertically integrated. I mean, SpaceX builds their own Starlink satellites, Amazon's building their own Kuiper satellites, you know, even like planet builds their satellites, Spire builds theirs. Um, so the demand for a lot of the big constellations is not necessarily materializing as, as people thought you still have new entrants coming in, um, offering low cost satellites, uh, just did a

story about apex, the small satellite maker in LA that is now offering a geo version of its, of a small sat bus, because they were getting interest from, um, unnamed government organizations the small satellite maker in LA that is now offering a geo version of its, of a small sat bus, because they were getting interest from unnamed government organizations as well as some commercial providers. Their first customer is that, that, the infamous unnamed government organization buying a geo satellite. So, so there's a lot of supply for small sats out there, but the demand is, is demand is not matching up. And

so you're going to see, I think, more of these companies that are trying to be pure play smallsat manufacturers really starting to struggle in terms of finding business. And do they try to become satellite operators themselves? Do they try and find acquisition deals? Do they try to diversify out of satellites entirely? You know, a lot of options that they're going to be looking at because the, you know, again, there's thousands of small satellites being built, but they're not necessarily being bought from small sat manufacturers. Is this kind of structure of a deal something that you think we might see in the launch world?

You know, there's Lockheed in particular is these deals where they block by like you know 40 or 50 launches that they never give you any details on from abl or uh now i'm blanking on what the most recent combo was uh firefly right yeah and then uh you look over at north of grumman and their uh partnership with firefly as well where they're kind of building this Antares thing that is also the medium launch vehicle from Firefly. That feels like it's heading towards Northrop saying we do need a new launch division and this would be a nice fit. And I look at the way that Lockheed, you know, had been close to Terran Orbiter all these years and how it was a very tight relationship

in terms of the missions they were working on together and the significance of the revenue. And we haven't heard any noise out of ABL. So what we know is that Blockbuy is like the biggest thing going on there. And I'm just wondering if you feel like, is this a Lockheed kind of strategy where they get close to suppliers like this and then buy the ones they like the most, or the ones that are not working out as an external company, but they see value internally? Or do you feel like this is a unique aspect because of where small satellites are at as a market? It's possible that that some of the big aerospace primes might try and do a an acquisition of a small launch company. You haven't seen that happen yet, though, really. So the question is how much they value small launch. Clearly, they see demand's doing for SDA and other U.S. government customers.

They didn't want to run the risk of Terran Orbital perhaps going out of business, which would certainly be one case if it was struggling to raise money. And so the idea of coming in and basically buying it at um is is preferable to losing that supplier entirely yeah on on launch that's that's a different story because you know they're a lot of times they're not buying the launches sda is buying the launches separately um you know a lot of times they're going on on larger vehicles like falcon 9 so it's not necessarily, the parallels aren't necessarily that parallel. But you could see a case where if a prime decided that, yes, we need to vertically integrate to the point where we have a small launch capability as well,

because the government in particular wants, say, responsive launch for some of these small satellites, then coming in and buying a small launch provider is certainly an option. The question is, which, you know, a lot of the small launch companies aren't doing real well in general, both technically and financially. So who do you come in and buy? You assume sort of Rocket Lab is off the table. It's too big and diversified. Is Firefly an option? Is ABL an option? Well, well you know abl's got to get its rocket flying and yeah that's the work first firefly's got uh various other things going on and on as well

uh so that makes an option you know do you you know there's not necessarily a lot of great options in the small launch sector if you wanted to buy buy a vehicle that actually is working and could and fill fill a niche that uh that you really need nor nor is launch generally a great option like it's not a good market you know the spacex magic is that they have a huge internal need for it that is it makes each half of the company better and so unless you're somebody who's going to have this big homegrown constellation that has significant revenue potential, you look at launch as a market, it's not that exciting, especially for big primes that are like, that's peanuts on the, you know, on our revenue sheet. So it is, it is a funny situation. And I don't know if that's the most healthy spot to be in as a as a market for

launch that um you know look at what happened the two weeks or whatever that spacex was down uh there was a lot of worry of of how dependent the entire and there's a larger thing that i shouldn't bring up one minute before i'm about to close out the show but um you know i'm reading uh eric berger's re-entry um and uh one thing keep thinking is just, you know, there's a world in which in 20 years, the SpaceX dominance of this era could be a thing that leads to a lot of momentum being lost because they are so

giant and dominant in so many different ways. You know, on the other side, it's like they are driving so much of the space industry, but the converse side of that is like, is there a space industry if they're driving so much of it these days so respond to that in 30 seconds i know those are all really good points in that you know we're we're in this situation right now where the industry is very dependent on SpaceX for launch. Um, and, and pretty much

the whole Western world at this point is, is almost, um, dependent on, on SpaceX. Um, you know, you have, you have ESA and the European union coming in and buying Falcon nine launches because their rockets are behind schedule. Um, you have competitors to, to Starlink buying launches on Falcon nine because there's nothing else available in In a few years, maybe that'll be different once New Glenn and Vulcan and some of these other vehicles, maybe Neutron and MLV or so on, start flying and building up their launch rate

and providing some more capacity in the market that can really provide some options. But right now, like you said, when, when they had the, the upper stage anomaly, everyone sort of held their breath because we didn't know what that meant. We didn't know how long they were going to be offline and what that would mean for all sorts of, of programs. You know, fortunately they're, they're, they're fine, like they didn't miss a beat. But I think that gave a recognition that that's not necessarily a healthy case for the space industry to be in, to be so dependent on a single provider, even one as efficient and

as effective as SpaceX has been. You don't want to rely on one company that if they have a problem or simply decide that they don't want to do business with you, puts you in a world of hurt. Yeah. Nice space flight shout out there. That's a, that's a nice one. So, uh, what else should people be following if they're not somehow not following you, even though I linked you all the damn time? Well, I mean, you know, this is, there, there's no summer doldrums in the, in the space industry right now. As much as I would like for everyone to sort of like take a week off and relax, you know, things are going at a hectic pace still. And so, you know, we're trying to keep up with things at Space News, my colleagues and I, on everything that is going on around the world but uh you know like i said you know in terms of your term things coming up um polaris dawn coming up towards the end of the month that's

going to be a fascinating mission um you know seeing them try and do a spacewalk from a crew dragon using these new spacesuits um you know if it works that is going to be remarkable are you going down for the launch i may be going down for the launch. I'm curious to see what sort of like prelaunch opportunities there are going to be, for example, any sort of prelaunch press conferences or things like that. The launch itself apparently is going to be like at three 30 in the morning, which is a terrible time, but no, that's not a good time.

You know, at least it's not three 30 in the afternoon where you'd be dodging thunderstorms. Yeah. That's a good point. This time of year, the next hurricane, but we'll,

we'll, we'll see. But that, that certainly sort of like in the near term horizon that, and sort of like the, the climax of the, the Starliner saga, you know,

do, do, do Bush and Sonny come back on Starliner or, or are they part of the, the long-term crew? And then what does that mean for crew nine who gets dropped from that mission? Do you, do you still fly a Russian cosmonaut up there? And if you don't, does that mean that Don Pettit gets dropped from the Soyuz flight

because we're going to not do mixed crews for a while because the Russians want three cosmonauts up there? Those are some of the interesting questions that are, they are going to come up in a couple of weeks. So yeah, as much as I said, as much as like for folks to take a summer vacation, that's just not happening. Not at all. You're still a Twitter guy these days, Jeff underscore Faust.

I'm still on Twitter because that is for better or for worse where the conversation is still taking place. Even as you know, some people move off to, to LinkedIn or, or, or threads or, or elsewhere.

The, the, the center of gravity of discussion is, is, is still on Twitter. Space Twitter never left, even though they all said they were. So yeah,

some people, some people did leave, but blue sky, big for the planetary scientist community. So if you want science, scientist sciences. But the industry folks, with a few exceptions, still around on Twitter. Well, thanks so much for hanging out and spending so much time. You are, as always, encyclopedic and amazing.

So thanks for hanging out, Jeff. Hey, thanks to be here. Maybe we won't have to wait eight years for the next invite. Absolutely. Thanks, man. All right. Take care. Thanks again to Jeff for coming on the show and hanging out and going through all that. There's a lot to break down with him. And like I said, that guy knows his stuff, man. He's got every detail on immediate recall. He had no notes from what I could tell. So as always, awesome to talk with him and get through so many different storylines. There was a lot in my head that I wanted to talk about, but I feel like I

needed help sorting through some of that. So thanks again for coming on. This episode of Managing Cutoff was brought to you by 850 some, almost 900 people across Patreon and Substack. We're on both now. So check out whichever platform you like better to support the show. It is 100% listener supported. So if you like what I'm doing here, if you like the kind of stuff I'm putting out and you want more of it, check out managingcutoff.com support. I haven't yet put the Substack link up there. I need to put the Substack link up on a page, but that's managingcutoff.substack.com. This episode is produced by 31 executive producers. Thanks to Jan, Warren,

Pat from KC, David, Frank, Lee, Eunice, Josh from Impulse, Steve, Harrison, Russell, Joel, Bob, The Astrogators at SCE, Stealth Julian, Tim Dodd, David Ashtonaut, Chris, Fred, Theo and Violet, Matt, Donald, Will and Lars from Agile Space, Ryan, Pat, Better Everyday Studios, and four anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support for making this episode possible. I could not do it without you. If you've got any questions or thoughts, hit me up on Twitter at wehavemiko or on email anthony at managingcutoff.com. And I'm sure I'll be talking to you soon because we've got a lot going on. There's still a couple storylines I haven't gotten to yet. So I'm sure you'll be hearing from me soon unless my child

arrives in the next like two days, which seems unlikely but is always always possible so i'll keep mentioning it until he does arrive but until then talk to you soon