Main Engine Cut Off - T+29: Commercializing the NASA Exploration Roadmap

Episode Date: November 16, 2016

Following up on last show’s topic, there are signs that NASA may be moving away from Orion in the future. I discuss how I see NASA modernizing their exploration roadmap, politically, in the next administration. As Trump takes over, NASA considers alternatives to its Orion spacecraft | Ars Technica Alternative NASA Exploration Crew Vehicles - Main Engine Cut Off Issue #4 - Main Engine Cut Off Email feedback to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Subscribe on iTunes, Overcast, or elsewhere Subcribe to Main Engine Cut Off Weekly Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

🎵 Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo, back again this week after a short hiatus last week. I was fighting off a little bit of a lost voice and a cold, and then all of a sudden, the US presidential election kind of was this big black hole in the week that was swallowing all the attention, and everyone was kind of focused on different things last week. So, I kind of got the feeling that it wasn't the best week for a show. I hate missing weeks, so thank you for sticking it out through the short hiatus and coming back to listen this week. I obviously don't try to do that often. I haven't missed a week since I started this back in April. And it'll be special cases if that ever happens again.

I know towards the end of this year, in the end of December, I'll probably miss a week or two. I'm getting married mid-December, so the end of December might be a little weird. But otherwise, I'm not trying to miss weeks very often. So I apologize for missing last week, and thank you for coming back to listen this week. The story that's been dominating recent shows here and what I've been writing about on

the blog and in the newsletter over at mainenginecutoff.com has been the idea that NASA may be pivoting from Mars back towards the moon in terms of its exploration plan. And it seems that every day we're getting more information on that front that kind of corroborate that feeling that we are seeing a shift from Mars back to the moon, at least in the short to midterm. And certainly with the NASA administrator job that's up with the new administration coming in, there's a lot of talk about who that administrator is going to be, whether it be someone that's very friendly to moon journeys or whatever it is. That's still all up in the air, but we are getting these bits of info that say we are pivoting back to the moon.

And this week again was something from Eric Berger from Ars Technica, who I've talked about a lot recently because he has some very interesting sources that seem to be placed very well with a lot of interesting info headed his way. that seemed to be placed very well with a lot of interesting info headed his way. And this time he wrote an article about an RFI that was released surrounding the Orion spacecraft. Now, over in the show notes at mainenginecutoff.com, I have a link to this article. I highly recommend checking that article out before you listen to this show.

If you haven't read it yet, hit pause, go read that, and come back later on afterwards because you might enjoy the kind of projecting that I'll be doing here about what this could mean for NASA long term. I just want to read the start of the article real quick to give you a little background on what that is. Either refresh your memory from reading it last week, or if you haven't read it yet, just give you a little idea what I'm talking about here. So from the piece. NASA has initiated a process that raises questions about the future of its Orion spacecraft. So far, this procedural effort has flown largely under the

radar because it came in the form of a subtle request for information that nominally seeks to extend NASA's contract to acquire future Orion vehicles after EM-2, which likely will fly sometime between 2021 and 2023. Nevertheless, three sources familiar with the RFI, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, told Ars there is more to the request than a simple extension for Orion's primary contractor, Lockheed Martin. Perhaps most radically, the RFI may even open the way for a competitor, such as Boeing or SpaceX, to substitute its own upgraded capsule for Orion in the mid-2020s. to substitute its own upgraded capsule for Orion in the mid-2020s.

So that kind of gives you the sense of what this RFI was about. It's about Orion vehicles after EM-2, because they do have the contract at Lockheed Martin to supply Orion for NASA's missions up to EM-2. So that includes the 2018 flight, and then the 2021 or 2023 flight that's coming up after that. Beyond that, there is no contract for the vehicles for those missions. It's interesting because the contract was set up so that NASA owns the design work of Orion. It owns the designs behind Orion. So hypothetically,

if they wanted to keep flying Orion, they could go over to Boeing or SpaceX or whoever they wanted to build Orion and give them the plans and have them produce the Orion capsules for missions past EM-2. It's not something that Lockheed Martin owns, which is kind of the key difference here between the commercial crew and cargo side of NASA and this exploration side. On the commercial side, anything that's produced for those contracts is owned by the company itself. So thinking in terms of Dragon or Cygnus, SpaceX and Orbital ATK respectively own those designs. They own those spacecraft. They can use them for anything outside of the NASA contract or their own wishes or any other contract.

They wanted to fly missions with ESA or anything like that. And you obviously see this with SpaceX's own plans with Dragon. Haven't seen too much like this with Cygnus yet. But farther out for the CRS-2 contracts, thinking about Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser, you've seen them try to sell that to anyone who's remotely interested. Notably, they're going to be flying some Dream Chaser flights for the UN and some nations that don't actually have access to space, that want access to space, whatever it is. Sierra Nevada is selling Dream Chaser to anyone who will listen. So that's just kind of an example of a company that designs and builds their own product,

supplies it to NASA, but can use it for their own needs as well or their own markets as well. That isn't the case with Orion. Orion is owned by NASA. Lockheed Martin does not have the rights to Orion to produce outside of a NASA contract. They are just producing the thing that they helped design in a lot of ways. So that's just kind of a breakdown of the difference here that we're talking about. So when you're thinking about this RFI, try to break that mentality of the contractor itself owning the spacecraft. Because in this case, that is not true. Now before I get into talking about the second half of what I read from Eric about potentially moving away from Orion to commercially sourced crew vehicles,

I want to bring up one other thing that he said in the piece itself. He said that any contract that would come after the RFI, and this was from his sources directly, any contract that would come after the RFI would be a fixed price contract, not a cost plus contract. And that's a pretty huge deal, even if what comes out of this is Lockheed Martin producing more Orions for a cheaper price. That is a big deal that they're moving away from cost plus to fixed price for this program. Traditionally, the NASA exploration program has been run on cost plus contracts, which means that the parts and the components, those prices are passed right on through to NASA,

and the contractor's labor and everything else is kind of put on top of that. So it doesn't necessarily incentivize the contractors to be watchful of prices and to try to keep prices down and costs down. It doesn't necessarily lend its hand to that as much as a fixed price contract does, like we've seen with commercial crew and commercial cargo. So in those cases, NASA says SpaceX or Orbital ATK or whoever, we need this many pounds of cargo to the space station or this many people to the space station. And we will give you this sum of money signed and agreed upon up front. So they say this amount of money for that amount of cargo. And that is it. There is no potential growth in that contract unless they sign an additional extension.

The other way, you know way, if parts get more expensive, the price that NASA's paying goes up. So it doesn't necessarily lead to very sustainable budgets. Now, there are other problems with fixed price, but in general, that is the way that NASA has been moving over the past couple of years. Commercial crew is like that. Commercial cargo is like that. The Deep Space Habitat Initiative that we've talked about in the past with the uh you know we had mike johnson on the show to talk about what nano racks is doing with a centaur wet workshop all of those concepts for deep space habitats to support em2 and beyond those are going to be fixed price contracts they're very much following in the footsteps of what commercial cargo and crew did where they have the initial

development phase to find out who would be likely partners, and they kind of keep paring it down and down-selecting as they get further into the program, ultimately leading to a fixed price contract. So regardless of what comes out of this RFI, whether it's Lockheed Martin continuing their work on Orion, or whether it's moving in a different direction entirely and using a different crew vehicle altogether, the fact that this piece of the NASA exploration roadmap is going from cost plus to fixed price contracting, that is a huge deal that should not be overlooked in this case. You know, it's a little bit of the sub headline, but I think that it might be the bigger indication in this article about where NASA is headed. Now let's get down into the meat

of this that we all are really excited about. The fact that, you know, they may be moving away from Orion to commercially sourced vehicles, because that is the implication that this RFI was hinting at. And certainly from the sources that Eric Berger talked to, that is the indication that that is on the table. And this is a signal to the next administration, to the next group of leadership at NASA, that they are willing to consider going in the direction of something that's commercial off the shelf for their crew needs, rather than building their own Orion vehicle themselves and flying it and operating it. Rather than doing that, they would commercially source their crew vehicle needs.

So what we need to do when we talk about this is consider the thing that I've been harping on endlessly for a month. And I'm sorry for bringing this up every single week, but I've been talking about political capital, political support, and how that contends with financial capital or financial support or other motivations, you know, because these are government programs. They are sustained on the support from politicians and decision makers and policymakers. That is how a government program is run. That is how it is implemented. So when you're talking about this, it's easy to say, well, it would obviously be cheaper or more affordable to go with a commercial vehicle or something like that. But that's not what makes the decisions here. You know, the financial needs,

certainly they need to fit into the program at whole, but the motivation is not solely on what would make economic sense, what would make financial sense, what would make sense technologically. None of that really factors in. It's a mesh of those things that, you know, it's all these interests within Congress, within the administration, within the NASA leadership. There's all these things that, you know, it's all these interests within Congress, within the administration,

within the NASA leadership. There's all these things that come together that build a very complex web of motivations. So you can't necessarily just say, well, that's the way we should go because it makes so much more sense financially or technologically or whatever it is. You can't boil it down that simply. But what we can look at is the political support that surrounds Orion and see how that's shifted over the years. And we can look at the political support around the commercial programs and how that's shifted over the years. And we can look at the way that any president, whether it be the one we just selected or the main opponents in that election, any of them were drifting in a certain direction with NASA's budget, with the programs that they're willing to fund. There's a general trend in the industry right now, and we can look at how all of those things affect the political support for Orion, for the commercial program, and for the future of the crew vehicle needs of the exploration roadmap. First off on that front is the fact that Orion itself, it's never had as much political support

as SLS has, if you want to compare these two components of the program. The launch vehicle has always had a more complex string of stakeholders, if you will. The work for that has spread much more evenly throughout the US. We have solid rocket boosters sourced from Orbital ATK out in Utah is where they are, you know, testing those and doing all that stuff that we've seen lately. Then you have some of the core stage manufacturing down in the Gulf states. You have testing down in the Gulf states, integration in Florida, design work done elsewhere. There's so many different components of this that, you know, because of that, the political support is stretched over a wider area.

With Orion, a lot of the work happens at Lockheed Martin and is integrated in Florida. So two places that already have a lot of political support outside of this program. The other piece of this is that they outsource the service module to Europe. And that was, you know, seen as kind of extending an olive branch to Europe and saying, we want you involved in this program. Obviously, they are not shooting for Mars as hard as NASA has been to this point. So it was sort of seen like that was throwing Europe a bone to have them involved in the program. But we were never really serious about that, you know, that we really wanted them involved in a NASA program, or else we would have picked something that caters to them a little bit more. Thinking about the pivot here, just pulling off that one piece for a second, the service

module, because that's a segment of the political support of Orion. If we wanted to bring Europe in, and they are not necessarily going out towards Mars, and we pivot to the moon, somewhere that they are very focused, somewhere they've talked about heavily about doing a moon village or something like that, ESA has a lot of interest in the moon. So if we're pivoting from a place where they have no interest to a place where they have some interest, maybe there's a different place to get the political support of Europe than the Orion service module. So if you see what I'm saying, we went from using the service module as the place to get the European political support, and we're pivoting that to an entire destination that

would have political support from Europe, we don't necessarily need to outsource that service module anymore to a European partner. So when we're looking at the grand scheme of political support of Orion, that one sort of goes out the window if we take into consideration the pivot from Mars to the moon. The other interesting thing to consider is that, you know, because of the fact that Orion is largely sourced to one contractor, and they're obviously a network of subcontractors, but that will always be the case, whether you're building Orion capsules or Dragon capsules. Maybe that Dragon's a bad example because they have so much vertically integrated.

But let's say Starliner, you know, the other wing of the old contracting, the Boeing wing, they obviously, you know, kind of have a similar structure where they're building it at Boeing, but they subcontract out. Other than that, Orion itself has sort of been losing political support over the years. It's very expensive. In this article, Eric Berger even says that there are congressmen and women asking NASA why they are funding three crew vehicles that seem largely, you know, overlapping areas of interest. Starliner and Orion a lot of times get confused by people. If you see a picture of, you know, the structure of the two, you could easily get confused. It's something that there seems to be a lot of overlap. Politicians see a lot of overlap. They see a huge line item for Orion,

a huge amount of fixed costs over the years. They're going to spend $10 billion already, and we've got one flight out of it. And it's going to be another five years or more before a human can actually get aboard one. So the costs are pretty staggering when we see so many other spacecraft flying. When we see dragons flying, when we see Cygnus going, we're going to start to see Dragon 2 and Starliner fly. We're going to start to see tests from Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser. There are so many different crew vehicles or cargo vehicles that are flying that it begins to look very weird how expensive Orion is and how low its flight rate is. And I'm not saying that technologically, right? You know, if we look at a technical level,

there are certainly great things about Orion that are well considered and very big, strong areas of it compared to other spacecraft. But from a political perspective, you start to see all this overlap and you see this one just lagging behind that's very expensive, the most expensive by far. And for that reason, you start to ask some questions and already you've lost political support for that program.

When you factor all of that in to the fact that the commercial partners are doing well, and a lot of the same congressmen and women that are asking questions about Orion have someone related to a commercial crew or cargo program in their district, because that's why they have interest in this. They start to see how well these commercial partners are doing. They start to see them flying so much. It's a tough environment for Orion to survive in, quite honestly. So consider that and factor that into the past when I've said that the programs of record at NASA will not cede to a SpaceX plan or a Blue Origin plan or any of these other plans until that plan itself overtakes the program of record in terms of political support, political capital, all of

those things you need to sustain a government program. We're seeing a moment when Orion just got overtaken by those other things. The other things are starting to gain more political support, political capital. They're starting to outpace Orion in that realm. So this is the turning point when a program itself kind of gets overtaken by those things. And that is the point at which these questions start to be raised. So there are still a large chunk of people that are saying, well, let's talk about SLS and say Falcon Heavy can lift so many more tons of cargo for the same amount of money. Or, you know, look at what Blue Origin's working on. Look at what SpaceX is working on in the long term. Look at what ULA is working on with the Vulcan and distributed lift. All these different things.

But until we get to a point when those itself can overtake SLS in political support, we won't see any action on the SLS front. But in this article that Berger wrote, there are indications that this might be something we see with the SLS as well. We might see an RFI done in the same way for SLS. We might see the same questions asked and say, if all these other people are working on these fronts, why do we need this big government albatross of sorts? So we just saw this happen with Orion. We just saw the fact that other programs could overtake this program of record in political support and capital. And eventually when that happens, legitimate questions start to

be called and legitimate concern is put into canceling this program and shifting it elsewhere. We saw that happen with Orion. So if we look into our crystal ball, SLS has the same trappings of this, where it's something that is very expensive, takes a lot longer than some of these other vehicles we're seeing develop now. There are all the same hallmarks that we just talked about with Orion that are present in SLS right now. The difference is that SLS still has an advantage over the currently flying rockets out there. The lift capacity of SLS is still a huge margin better than anything else flying today. And we're seeing metal bent for SLS right now. We're, you know, a year or two out from its maiden journey. So, you know, in the same way that

Orion is happening, there's a little bit more of political support for SLS because its capabilities are still so unique. So three, four, five years down the line, when we see Falcon Heavy fly, hopefully, hopefully it flies in six months, right? When we see Falcon Heavy fly, when we see New Glenn start to fly, when we see these heavy lift things come online, Vulcan, whatever else is out there, then we can start having these same questions about Orion. But if, you know, if Orion's going through this, it's very, you know, it's very smart of NASA and Congress itself to have these same questions about Orion and about SLS. It's very smart to ask these

questions about both programs because, you know, if we saw this happen with one of the wings of the program of record at NASA, you know, extract out a little bit, it'll probably happen to the other side as well. So let's just consider for a fact, if NASA went this direction and said, we're not going to be building our own vehicles anymore, launch vehicles or crew vehicles. We're going to work with commercial partners to fill these needs, but we're going to keep the same roadmap because that's what it sounds like. It sounds like they looked at the roadmap and said, the roadmap is strong. What we need to revolutionize is the way that we build these components. So what if we take this same roadmap and modernize it? And what that means is take advantage of the industry that

you've built. And then when you think about that and think about how that could be supported politically, you start to wonder, well, how would that affect the jobs that people are always concerned about in markets like the SLS caters to? Or how does that affect the contractors like Lockheed Martin and all those things. Those are the things that built the political support of Orion and SLS. How does that get affected if you have an entire industry working towards a NASA roadmap? Maybe there are congressmen and women that are looking at SLS and saying, we don't want to lose that because we don't want to lose those jobs in our district. But if NASA went the direction to say, well, we want the whole industry working with us

on this, maybe in this case, a rising tide lifts all boats and there are more contractors supporting NASA. There are more jobs surrounding the NASA roadmap. And if the government money can be spent more efficiently and smarter, it can be spread around to more contractors. So in aggregate, maybe there is a way to get rid of SLS and still have that same economic support that the congressmen and women in those districts love so much. So if NASA is saying, let's modernize this roadmap, maybe that does lift all boats. Maybe that is a high tide that's going to lift boats all across the country. And when you start factoring in all of that math, these congressmen and women

in those districts start to say, that sounds appealing, that sounds like something I can get into. And it's certainly, you know, budgetary wise, when you're looking at a government budget, could be much better of a way to spend money. Similarly, if this were to come about, and they were to say, keep the same roadmap, but use commercial partners for these different pieces both heavy lift and crew vehicles and even cargo vehicles for that matter maybe there's a you know commercial cargo contract heading to the moon to the moon base that they set up or anything like that that instantly brings the SpaceX plans the Blue Origin plans the NASA plans that instantly brings them all together in a very, very interesting way. Because right now, the way that the programs are set up, it looks like it's going to be some sort of a death match between SLS, ITS, and New Glenn or Armstrong from Blue Origin. It looks like,

you know, one of these can survive and the others can't or something like that, because it's spreading a split market so thin and NASA's pretty committed to the SLS and SpaceX and Blue Origin have other ideas. So it starts to look hazy when you're looking at them as this one's officially ordained by NASA, but the others have to fight for their market share. If NASA goes this way and uses their same roadmap, but outsources their lift capacity and their crew capacity

to commercial partners like SpaceX and Blue Origin, both with the Falcon Heavy and SpaceX's new rocket, and with New Glenn and with New Armstrong. If all of those things start flying cargo and crew to LEO or to lunar orbit or to the station on the lunar surface, all of these things come together in a really, really interesting way. You know, we have all of these disparate motivations from SpaceX and Blue Origin and NASA, and all of a sudden, they're able to use each other's hardware. They're able to share technological developments. They're able to bring their roadmaps in tandem and work together towards them, which is just going to help the goals of these things. We saw how fortuitous

the commercial cargo programs and crew programs have been for private industry. You know, we've kind of salvaged SpaceX from the jaws of disaster because of these programs. And out of it, we got an incredible company that is working on amazing hardware, amazing technology, and really pushing the boundaries of the industry. If we do that at a larger scale, larger than the ISS budget, if we do it on the NASA exploration side, imagine the kind of stuff that you can get out of that, the companies you would get out of that, all of the different things that would spring up around that in terms of industry, the way that they have sprung up around

the ISS. That is a huge untapped market. And when you start talking in that realm, you know, you start seeing members of Congress from SpaceX's district be so happy with the way those programs went. And other people in Congress start to say, you know, I would like a little of that too, instead of this rocket or the spacecraft we're building now. That starts to generate a lot of political support. And, you know, the farther we go into the ISS program, and the more success that we can attribute to the commercial crew and cargo programs, the better it looks for something like this in the future. So all in all, I could see this garnering the political support necessary. And, you know, then the next couple years here

is going to be an interesting transition as they try to modernize this roadmap. But it's good signs if this is what we're seeing with Orion. If you're hopeful in this direction to say commercial partners should have a part of the NASA exploration roadmap, it's a good sign to see things moving in this direction. And I'm very encouraged by this because it's starting to make the roadmaps of all these different companies and organizations make a lot of sense. Whether you're a Mars first person or a moon first, all of this stuff is very encouraging for the industry at large. And I'm just, I'm, I'm incredibly encouraged to see this develop. Uh, so I'll be keeping an eye on this as I do all of these developments. I would love to hear from you. What do you think about this idea? Email anthonyatmanagingcutoff.com. Let me know what you think about the idea of bringing these

commercial partners into the NASA exploration roadmap. Let me know how you see the political support of each of these sides playing out. Do you think the political support of SLS is still too strong to be overcome by what looks like an early warning sign from the Orion side of things? Do you think that it's better late than Orion side of things? Do you think that it's, you know, better late than never kind of thing? Are you encouraged by it like I am? Let me know. Anthony at MainEngineCutoff.com. Before I dive into email for this week, some email follow up on the moon pivot in general. Just want to say thank you so much to all those out there supporting Main Engine Cutoff over on Patreon. This is an entirely listener-supported show.

I don't do any ads. I never am going to do any ads because I believe that that will eventually compromise some sort of message. So I believe in the listener-supported model, and that's what I'm doing here. And I am hugely thankful for those of you out there already supporting Main Engine Cutoff. So head over to patreon.com slash Miko if you want to support main engine cutoff and help me make this show and help me keep the show independent and running. If you like what I'm doing here or on the blog over at mainenginecutoff.com, head over to Patreon and kick

in at as little as $1 a month. All of your support really, really helps. Now on the email front, last show, I guess it wasn't last week I was going to say, last show I was talking about the potential pivot back towards the moon, and I asked for some of your feedback. Are you excited by that idea? Are you encouraged by that idea? Do you hate the idea? Do you wish they stuck it out for the Mars front? And we got two emails I want to read bits and pieces of. The first one from Jared. He had two things that he's been thinking about a lot in terms of whether

or not this would be a good thing, how it could work out in the future. And he's mostly focused on what we would do at the moon. That's his overarching thesis here. He doesn't sound dismayed by the idea of heading back to the moon, but he does have some questions about what we would do there. The first is, you know, just generally, what kind of research and scientific research would we do by the scientists and engineers that we put down on the surface of the moon, whether it be for exploration missions or a longer stay in a base of some sort? Obviously, the first things that come to mind are human habitability experiments and research. We don't know a lot about living long term on a body that isn't Earth.

We know a lot about living in zero G on the space station and the long duration space flights we've done so far. But we've had very, very little, if any time in a limited G environment like the moon. So it would be great to see how some of these health issues that we've experienced on the ISS, to see how some of these health issues that we've experienced on the ISS, it would be great to see how those play out differently when you are in a lower gravity field. The other big stuff to consider is power generation. You know, there's a 14 day long night that you have to contend with on the moon. So that'll put some constraints on power generation. There's a lot of issues with breathing the dust from the moon a lot of the apollo astronauts experience this coming back into lunar module after they went out on the surface so there's a

lot of research to be done about how humans could live on the lunar surface the other thing he had is what kind of parallels or technology could we develop on the lunar surface that would be applicable to mars and i think in this case, he's talking about using these missions to the moon to establish the groundwork for moving out into the solar system. So trying to have the research that's done on the moon and the things that we develop for the lunar surface be applicable to Mars or to anywhere else that we would like to extend human presence into the solar system. This kind of gets back to what I was just saying, that there's a lot of research to be done about how humans can live in places other than the Earth, and I think all of that's applicable to living at Mars. Power generation, resource harvesting,

these things that are constants between the Moon and Mars, there are things that you can work on there. There's things you can work on here at Earth as well, but, you know, any experience in this case is going to be a good thing for our future. So there are definitely things that could be carried over. If you have any thoughts on what Jared said, send them in to me as well, and I'll read them out on the show. Again, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com. Another email from Dave here on the same topic. He says that he's a Mars first person, but it makes a lot of sense for work to be going on at the moon and Mars because he's in that same camp that a rising tide lifts all boats. And, you know, going out anywhere is a good thing at this point.

So he's not going to fight too hard, I guess, if the idea is go to the moon versus Mars. He does say that he would want a clear roadmap and for it to include commercial partners with fixed price contracting wherever possible. So good news, Dave. It seems like we're heading in that direction overall. So you should be pleasantly surprised. Now, he wrote this email in before that article from Eric Berger. So, you know, pretty, pretty good timing for Dave here. The other thing he brought up that I found interesting was that, you know, he's a Mars first person, as I said. And he says the argument against a government led cislunar effort is that it takes money away from Mars, but that he thinks that's a fallacy because without political capital for Mars, political support for Mars, there wouldn't be funding anyway. And that's a huge thing to remember is that, you know, we like to think of it as something that's a zero sum game or money's either going to go to the moon or Mars. But to Dave's point, maybe this money wouldn't come in at all to NASA. Maybe that's something that if political support is lost for the Mars effort,

at least it is being directed somewhere else. And, you know, it's not just going to dry up entirely, but vice versa. If there's political support for the moon and money's going there, that doesn't necessarily mean that if there wasn't political support, money would flow somewhere else to Mars. It might go absolutely nowhere. So good to keep that perspective that, you know, it's not a given that there would be money spent on space exploration at this point. So, you know, always good perspective to keep when you're considering these things. And I guess Dave's message here is be thankful for the missions that are going to be funded and are going to be worked on into the future. So thanks, Dave and Jared, for the email.

I would love to hear from you again. So email anthony at managingcutoff.com with your thoughts in general about the pivot from Mars to the moon, or if you have any thoughts on what I've talked about here today, send those in as well. We'll read them out on the show. As always, you can follow on Twitter at WeHaveMiko, and that's where I'm doing all of the tweeting about spaceflight and exploration and everything that we talk about here. Subscribe to the show on iTunes or Overcast. There's links in the show notes for that. And check out Main Engine Cutoff Weekly. It's a weekly newsletter that I'm sending out that's a column of sorts, a bit longer form than the writing I do over on the blog. And it kind of is a nice little wrap up of things I probably

didn't talk about on the show because there wasn't enough time. So if you want that in your inbox every Friday, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash weekly and sign up there. Thanks again to those of you supporting Main Engine Cutoff over on Patreon. Thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you next week.